‘WHEN I CRITICIZE DENMARK, IT IS NOT THE WHITE NIGHTS OR THE NEW POTATOES I HAVE IN MIND’: DOXA, DISSENT, AND CHALLENGES OF RHETORICAL CITIZENSHIP
“The dissonance of disruption requires a reassuring embrace of that which is recognizable, understandable, and sanctioned by social convention.” Robert L. Ivie (2015)
By Lisa S. Villadsen
Abstract:
The essay explores an instance of citizen dissent being combatted by elite politicians and the dissenting citizen’s resistance to these attacks. Proceeding from Ivie’s and Thimsen’s understandings of dissent as intimately linked to mainstream discourse and of dissent’s potential for democratic participation and rhetorical invention realized by means of rhetorical troping, the essay also invokes Phillips’ work on spaces of dissension. The essay concludes with a discussion of the difficulties in realizing ideals of deliberative democracy as conceived within the conceptual frame of rhetorical citizenship and potential avenues for theory development followed by a discussion of the potential of rhetorical troping to establish consubstantiality in a gridlocked debate.
Spoken just days before summer solstice, the statement[1] cited in this essay’s title evoked the quintessence of the Scandinavian summer to readers immersed in just that: daylight for more than 17 hours, nights that never really get dark, locally grown strawberries and vegetables in season, weather conducive to outdoor activities, the Midsummer’s celebration parties approaching. This kairotic quality, however, is only partly the reason why the statement opens this essay. Its reference to criticism is also significant. In this essay I suggest that the statement with its poetic yet unequivocal critical angle exemplifies Ivie’s and Thimsen’s understandings of dissent as intimately linked to mainstream discourse and of dissent’s potential for democratic participation and rhetorical invention realized by means of rhetorical troping. I also invoke Phillips’ work on dissensus although his primary interest is in “radical dissent” that is “irregular and often inappropriate” neither of which is characteristic of the case in this essay. However, his theorizing of the study of the “complex prior conditions” for dissent is relevant for the critical purpose of this essay. Following Phillips’ claims that dissent’s ability to momentarily open the coherence of dominant discourses for contestation is best understood on the basis of inquiry into prior conditions (60), I thus suggest that the events leading up to the comment can be construed as a “space of dissension,” i.e. a set of events “that is rife with points of disjuncture and contradiction” and “open[s] up the possibility for the emergence of dissenting voices.” (62)
To make these claims, the essay explores how a dissenting citizen was attacked and intimidated for her public utterances by powerful politicians to the point where an article in an online magazine asked whether the country was witnessing a new sport for politicians: “citizen bashing” (Gejl), and how she resisted this marginalization by way of rhetorical critique. Rather than trying to either confirm or disprove that “citizen bashing” is a phenomenon on the rise, this essay seeks to point to the democratic anxieties that the case brought out regarding rhetorical citizenship and the role of dissent from both government and opposition sides and to examine the prospects for dissensual democracy in the responses to them.
Proceeding from a contrapuntal collage of fragments from a Danish debate between a novelist-cum-activist and two top politicians combined with passages from speeches by the Prime Minister during the first six months of 2016,[2] the essay performs a conceptually oriented (Jasinski) rhetorical analysis focused on dissent as resistance and resistance to dissent. Following a brief introduction to the notion of dissent informing this essay, I present an overview of the political situation forming the backdrop of the controversy, namely the arrival in large numbers of refugees in Denmark in 2015 and early 2016. The essay then proceeds to offer a reading of the controversy drawing on scholarly contributions by Ivie, Butler, Kock and Villadsen, Thimsen, and Phillips, and Rand?. The essay concludes with a discussion of the difficulties in realizing ideals of deliberative democracy as conceived within the conceptual frame of rhetorical citizenship and potential avenues for theory development followed by a discussion of the potential of rhetorical troping to establish consubstantiality in a gridlocked debate.
Dissent and dissension
Robert Ivie has theorized dissent and argued for its crucial place in a healthy democracy along two strands: one pointing to the precarious conditions for dissent under war or warlike circumstances, and one pointing to rhetoric’s particular role in dissent. In several articles, Ivie has shown how dissent has been regarded with distrust and stifled in various ways, including accusing dissenters of being unpatriotic (2005, 277). Writing about the US “war on terror” following the events of 9/11 2001, Ivie saw threats to open democratic debate emerging from the political and administrative authorities and described the dangers to the polity springing from the country’s leadership’s framing of dissent as being “on a continuum in which protest was perceived as disloyal, as the unpatriotic act of the enemy within.” (2004, 20) A tenor in Ivie’s work on dissent concerns its crucial role in democratic societies. “Democracy,” he says, “cannot be true to the principle of self-governance when dissent is stifled, and public opinion is manipulated by the ruling elites.” (2015, 46) Yet bullying from political elites toward those who would question them or their policies seems to be a phenomenon on the rise in Western democracies, e.g. in the US, where Donald Trump during his 2016 presidential election campaign on numerous occasions, even after his accession, mocked and attacked named journalists and other citizens on Twitter and in other ways (Diamond, Chavez). While less egregious than the recent examples in the US, the Danish case has its share of “stifling of dissent” and “manipulation by the ruling elites” in the form of verbal attacks on a citizen by a member of Cabinet, an MP, and, indirectly, by the Prime Minister.
The term dissent is often used to signify strident or spectacular forms of disagreement such as resistance, protest, demonstrations, and other kinds of confrontational opposition. In Ivie’s conception, however, dissent is seen less as a polar opposite to consensus, and more as an integral, albeit often misunderstood, aspect of public debate characterized by “loyal opposition.” (2005, 286) The dissenting rhetoric under consideration here makes it well suited for an Ivie-esque analysis given that it is not a spectacular, but rather an implicit critique in the rather conventional formats of articles and carefully argued discussion posts. In this it is thus allows us to explore Ivie’s claim that, “[t]he dissonance of disruption requires a reassuring embrace of that which is recognizable, understandable, and sanctioned by social convention.” (2015, 51)
Following an overview of the political situation in Denmark in 2015 and 2016 this essay will continue with an exploration of the Danish case guided by two overall questions: how is dissent tackled in a debate culture that expressly acknowledges political disagreement as legitimate, and how can the dissenter meet her key inventional challenge: to find the words and arguments that can express the problems in the ruling policy in ways that keep the democratic conversation going. In my approach to these questions, I invoke Phillips’ work on dissension. Phillips calls on critics to pay attention to the prior conditions through which dissent emerges (rather than on the “individual tricks and cleverness” of particular dissenters as, e.g., Ivie’s work on the “trickster” would have them do). With Foucault he calls these conditions ”spaces of dissension” and defines them as “points of contradiction that threaten to disrupt the regularized formations of habitual discourse.” (62) In this essay, I pursue both Ivie’s and Phillips’ research agendas by considering the prior conditions and examining a rhetorical trickster’s concrete wording, because the rhetorical power of Anne Lise Marstrand-Jørgensen’s (ALMJ) statement opening this essay is best revealed through a reading of the month-long controversy around her person preceding the statement. A second, but related, reason to invoke Phillips’ “dissension” perspective is for it to function as a check against creating an oversimplified narrative of cause and effect and acknowledging the “complex interplay between diverse and divergent bodies, meanings, subjectivities, relations of power.” (67) As I offer a chronologically ordered account I thus want to emphasize that the ALMJ case with its mix of official political statements, grass roots movement discourse, social media posts and comments, massive mainstream media coverage, celebrity commentary, etc., does not represent a clear linear process but rather an interplay of factors. In spite of their fragmentation and tenuous interconnection, I suggest that cumulatively, they can be read as a “space” affording Danes the opportunity to “question the intelligibility provided by dominant social consensus” and “push back against the identity into which they have been placed and to think differently.” (Phillips, 67) Moreover, while I shall argue that ALMJ’s comment on white nights and new potatoes was a rich response to a stalemated situation of antagonism, my analysis does not aim to suggest that it had an effect on subsequent public policy debate. Indeed, it is likely that ALMJ’s attempt at creating a new language for dissent will be, as Phillips suggests, “foreclosed and […] erased by the [subsequent, LSV] articulation of dissent.” (63) I see this as all the more reason to dwell on an illustrative case as we as rhetorical scholars try to understand the conditions and creative power of dissent.
The political situation concerning the arrival of refugees in Denmark in 2015
2015 saw a drastic increase in the number of people fleeing the war in Syria, as well as violence and difficult living conditions in countries like Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Somalia. Most of them headed for Europe. In 2015 more than 800,000 refugees were registered by Frontex, the EU agency for border control, a 400% increase over the year before. Many perished in the attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea. Among survivors many sought northward, to Germany and the Scandinavian countries, to seek asylum there. In the Danish general election in June 2015, a liberalist government came to power on a narrow majority. The new Minister of Immigration and Refugees, Ms. Inger Støjberg, immediately announced initiatives to reduce the number of refugees seeking asylum in Denmark as soon as possible. Among these initiatives was a cut in the monthly social benefits paid to asylum seekers and placing an advertisement aimed at potential refugees in Middle-Eastern newspapers about the new restrictions in Danish immigration laws. It explained that refugees would receive up to 50 % less money than previously, and if granted permission to stay as asylum seekers, they would have to wait for over a year before their family might be allowed to join them. Yet throughout the fall, the number of refugees coming to Denmark (population 5.6 mio.) increased from about 200 per week to more than 1,000 per week by November (refugees.dk). Over the winter, the government introduced L87, a legal act soon labeled “the jewelry law” giving the police the right to seize valuables such as money and personal belongings from refugees exceeding a value of 3,000 DKK (app. 450 USD).[3] The act was widely criticized for its alleged resemblance to WWII Nazi procedures of stripping Jews of all personal belongings before sending them to concentration camps. The Wall Street Journal, BBC, CNN and The Telegraph were among international media covering the initiative. In January Denmark’s Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Kristian Jensen, received international criticism of the act at the UN’s hearing on Human Rights, and in February, he and Secretary Støjberg were asked to defend the act to the European Parliament’s committee on citizen rights. (Ritzau) In Danish media, criticism from a number of artists drew massive attention. For example, Danish film director Thomas Vinterberg stated at a press conference at the Berlin Film Festival that he was “ashamed” about Denmark’s reputation abroad, about the “scare campaign” via-vis refugees, and “the political life in Denmark.” (Enggaard)
At the same time tent camps with a capacity of up to 2,000 persons each were set up around the country to house refugees. This initiative was, along with the other government initiatives to cap the influx of refugees, seen by some as a brutal policy ostensibly intended to scare off refugees but really only serving politically symbolic purposes by assuaging the government’s voters that action against refugees was being taken. The General Secretary of the Danish Red Cross, Anders Ladekarl, was among the critics asking why refugees had to be put up in tents during the Danish winter when there were plenty of asylum centers with free capacity. (Olsen)
Two strands in Danish public debate 2016: Managing and debating dissent
During the first six months of 2016, the Danish public witnessed some of the best and the worst impulses in public debate and some unresolved tensions in leading opinion makers’ approach to how to engage in public debate. It began promising. Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen started the year by calling for an improvement of the national debate culture, both in terms of higher tolerance of different viewpoints and in terms of a more polite ‘tone.’ Toward the end of his televised New Year’s speech, he spoke of a “crisis of trust” between large parts of the population and the politicians in Parliament, saying,