What would those
conditions
look like, and how might we antici- pate them?
The Public Work of Rhetoric_nodrm
For example, to engage in essentialism, or to fail to recognize that subjects change as discursive conditions change, is to ignore the rational dimensions of language in use; therefore, individual beliefs and collective identities based on intractable essentialist assumptions are by definition unreasonable.
9 Also, since all forms of consensus necessarily
58 M. Lane Bruner
marginalize some set of discourses, constant vigilance toward the limits of consensus, and the necessary promotion of responsible transgression at those limits, is essential for political justice to prevail over time.
Based upon these and other normative assumptions, based in turn upon the insights of critical philosophy, I shall proceed, then, to offer a translation of the basic tenets of critical political communication, to provide a theoreti- cal defense for what I think is a helpful critical conception of the public, and then to provide three increasingly complex examples of identity criticism that illustrate the public work of rhetoric described here. I begin by briefly characterizing how my own work attempts to move through critical philoso- phy to return to a more theoretically informed conception of the interrela- tionship between discourse and materiality.
Theorizing Critical Political Communication
It does not take great philosophical insight to determine when your car runs out of gas, how many in a community are homeless, where people are starv- ing, or whose daughter was killed in a war. It takes considerably more insight, however, to discern the primary political, economic, and discursive reasons why cars are so fuel inefficient, or why communities fail to provide housing for their more vulnerable members, or why much-needed food is thrown away instead of shipped where it is needed, or what idiocies start wars. We could quibble, of course, over definitions, or over the fact that we can really never fully understand how discursive political economies work, or over the impossibility of completely grasping all of the factors involved in war. Such quibbling would be meaningless, however, to those without energy, shelter, food, health, peace, or opportunity.
Because it is obvious that people have radically uneven access to the condi- tions for a happy subjectivity, it does take philosophical insight to understand why we as a species have proven ourselves utterly incapable of constructing widespread patterns of identification, and political systems based on those patterns, capable of radically ameliorating human misery. Our world is pop- ulated by billions who are poor, unhealthy, underfed, inadequately housed or educated, or at war. Even relatively happy communities are not as happy as they might be, and solutions to the basic problems of subjectivity and com- munity continue to elude us. Why is this so? What can be done?
It is patently true that, on the whole, humankind is still very far from being enlightened about the nature of language in use and its necessary dan- gers, and this unnecessarily compounds human misery. Patterns of collective identity construction that were useful before capitalism (for example, tribal, religious, patriarchal), and at an earlier age of capitalism (the feudal monar- chical state, the totalitarian state, the liberal nation-state), now stand in the way of more enlightened communicative practices, locally and globally. Today what passes for global political reason, at least in the "advanced" parts of the
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 59
world, is a combination of neoliberal capitalism, cultural hybridization, and competitive self-interest. While "market democracy" works to dissolve the reli- gious, ethnic, and cultural prejudices that not so long ago were the engines for world war, who can deny that our political world still teeters on the edge of catastrophe because of various "patriotisms" and essentialist reactions to the present process of cultural and economic globalization? It is crucial, there- fore, to provide a convincing case for post-neoliberal, postnationalist, and postessentialist political visions, and doing the public work of rhetoric can help with this task.
If one is to investigate the relationship between identity and politics, or the relationships among public memory, national identity construction, and statecraft, grappling with critical philosophy is only the beginning. In addi- tion to studying how language works, and how language inevitably leads to politically consequential patterns of identification,10 it also helps to study the history of political theory (including constitutional theory) and the history of republican politics, since history suggests that the healthiest states tend to be republics of a certain type. 11 Close attention to the rhetorical arts and the history of rhetorical theory, with special attention to critical rhetorical the- ory, is also important, since one cannot responsibly critique the political except in light of rhetorical practice. This is not to say that the political can be reduced to rhetoric, for it also has material consequences, but to say instead that matters related to economic and state power can always be traced back to the ways we imagine our world, and the ways we are imagined by others.
Situated by such studies to consider the public work of rhetoric, in my own research I have reasoned as follows. Just because what individuals and groups believe to be true is always some distance from what is actually true, this does not entail that all beliefs are equally distant from the true. It is mani- festly obvious that some people are more taken in by violent collective fan- tasies (for example, of racial superiority, fundamentalist dogmas) than others, that entire populations live in discursive worlds that produce highly destruc- tive collective fantasies, and that other populations manage to live in a rela- tively healthy, happy, and peaceful prosperity. This is not to say there is "a perfect fantasy," or "a discourse that precisely mirrors the real," or any such thing, but to claim that the more we come to collectively understand the rela- tionship between the ways we speak and the kinds of worlds we live in, the more enlightened as a species we become.
I have maintained in my work, therefore, that the public work of rhetoric is to critique the distance between our ideational and material economies as best we can. 12 What, I have asked, are the qualities of the ideational economy, or the economy of ideas in specific political communities? What constitutes healthy interrelationships between what people believe and the trajectory of policies and institutions? What can be done to remedy the political sickness that oftentimes follows when people's beliefs about their political situation
60 M. Lane Bruner
seem to be radically at odds with their actual situation, and when those beliefs make material conditions worse not only for themselves but for others? How can we trace the difference between beliefs and conditions, and agency and structure, given the limits of language and subjectivity?
In an attempt to do this kind of work, I have critiqued, for example, the rhetorical dimensions of national identity construction, where I studied "strategic memory," ideological narratives of belonging, and discourses that challenged those narratives. 13 I have studied the process of economic globali- zation, the rhetoric of free trade that sustains it, and how that process and rhetoric impacts world politics. 14 I have analyzed and critiqued political pro- tests in different states, as well as transnational norm revolutions. 15 I have also studied the global collapse of Communism, the newly hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism, and the political, economic, and discursive consequences of that transformation. 16 Together, this work has attempted to determine what political communication means from a critical theoretical stance and in so doing to engage in the public work of rhetoric at the level of collective iden- tity construction.
Theorizing the Public Work of Rhetoric
But why does the critique of "political communication" constitute doing the public work of rhetoric? Characterizing precisely what "the public" is, and what the "public work" of rhetoric might be, is not so simple. The term "pub- lic" is a complicated concept with a long and interesting history. Just to name three of the many conceptions of the public that hardly overlap, there are feminist, neoliberal, and classical republican theories of the public. 17 Some feminist theories conceptualize the private sphere as the home and the pub- lic sphere as everywhere outside of the home; neoliberals tend to conceptu- alize the private sphere as the market and the public sphere as the state; and classical republican theories conceptualize the public sphere as a realm of criti- cal citizenship outside of both the market and the state. My own theoretical approach at present is based in part on John Dewey's notion that "the pub- lic" is a term referring to concerns that issue indirectly from conjoint action; therefore, the most just political state is composed of institutions artfully constructed to address those ever-emerging concerns. 18 It is also based in part on the work of Ernesto Laclau, who argues that states and dominant cultures can usefully be conceived as "hegemonic" publics, or particular collections of factions or interests within a community who claim to represent the people. 19 In so doing, such "publics" always, according to a political logic based on the language philosophy of Laclau, necessarily create a field of unmet demands. 20 When isolated, those demands can be repressed, ignored, or integrated into the hegemonic system. When those unmet demands come together, how- ever, they can form a "populist" movement, or "counterpublic," with suffi- cient force to transform the hegemonic public. 21 This new hegemonic public,
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 61
however, in turn creates yet another set of unmet demands, and the process continues ad infinitum. 22 Every "people," every "public," every "hegemony," and every "counterpublic" is based on identifiable discourses, and one can trace the outlines of these discourses and determine what they exclude and why via rhetorical critique. 23 By engaging is such a critique, it becomes clear that some discourses, some counterpublics, some hegemonic publics, and some states do a better job of addressing the indirect consequences of conjoint action, and of improving the material conditions of human life, than others.
Based on the rule of law tempered by a reflexive appreciation for the vio- lence of the law, consensus, and so on, healthy publics, and, therefore, healthy states, institutionally guarantee thick public spheres, and in so doing they maximally anticipate the indirect consequences of conjoint action by encour- aging the proliferation of "counterpublics" with sufficient force to ensure the constant critique of laws, institutions, and disciplinary measures. Sick publics, and, therefore, sick states, conversely, suppress critical thought in a wide vari- ety of ways, both intentionally and unintentionally, that cause them to fail to address the problems created by the indirect consequences of conjoint action. 24 Following such reasoning, the public work of rhetoric, conceived as critical political communication, is to better understand the relationship be- tween discourse and the political in order to use the arts, educational systems, scholarly and civic activism, social movements, and revolutionary activity, when necessary, to productively transform sick publics and states into healthy publics and states.
The violence of human history, from the perspective of critical political communication offered here, is primarily the result of both intentional and unintentional forms of miscommunication (cynical and self-interested manip- ulation and ideological blindness); therefore, there is a direct relationship between the quality of human communication and the good state. When the hegemonic public's perception of history dramatically diverges from their actual history, or their actual condition and its causes, political illness is usu- ally the result.
However, and as we know, political illness is all too obviously the norm.
One main reason for the persistence of political illness, and, therefore, an equally important reason for engaging in the public work of rhetoric, is the innumerable intentional "communicative" forces deployed precisely to keep people from realizing historical/material truths (Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook," William Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman," George W. Bush's "They hate us because of our liberty," and so forth). 25 There are public relations agencies, marketers, spin doctors, brand managers, White House press agents, propaganda ministers, and similar forces all designed precisely to keep people informed in a particular way at the expense of other, perhaps more truthful, ways. These agents of self-interest are directly responsible for what Guy Debord defined as the "society of the spectacle," and when coupled
62 M. Lane Bruner
with the "natural" dangers of identification (for example, being raised in idea- tional economies where religious fundamentalism, racism, jingoism, sexism flourish), we can plainly see some of the challenges facing those who would do the public work of rhetoric: revealing how these discourses contribute to the human condition so we can more responsibly reflect on them in order to construct the healthiest possible publics and the healthiest possible states. 26
Three examples--one from the realm of fiction, one from recent world his- tory, and one more concrete and extended example taken from my work on West German national identity construction just prior to the reunification of Germany--will hopefully elaborate my main point that there is indeed a nec- essary distance between what people think and their material conditions, but that some distances are greater than others, that some politically consequen- tial fictions are more healthy than others, and that the public work of rheto- ric is to map and diagnose those distances as accurately as possible in order to help promote the healthy and beautiful state.
Mapping the Unspeakable and Diagnosing Identity
A first and clear example of the distance between what people think is true and what is actually true, and the terrible consequences of that distance, is taken from the experience of Paul Ba? umer in Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, a fictional account of a German soldier's experience of the First World War. As a young and impressionable student, Paul listens to his teacher Kantorek, who convinces him and his fellow students to join the "glorious" war effort. When Paul experiences war firsthand, however, he quickly sees the distance between the illusion of the "glory" of war and its grim reality. Returning home on leave, after seeing most of his comrades killed and with little hope of surviving the horrors of the front upon his return, Paul tries to reason publicly with the jingoistic men from his small hometown. He tells them of the horrors of the war, and of the excellent chance that nothing they desire will be accomplished by it. They angrily and summarily denounce his negative, though firsthand, characterization of the war, however, exclaiming that Paul knows "nothing about it! "27 The narcotic of jingoistic patriotism has blinded them. In truth (albeit it a fictional truth in this case) it is of course the townspeople who know "nothing about it," save for their tragic and dis- torted way of imagining the war, its causes and it consequences.
But who will deny there was a real First World War that included hostili- ties between two political entities that were imagined (really) in politically consequential ways as "Germany" and "France"? Who will deny that careful historical work could, with relatively high precision, inform us about the ideational, economic, and material causes of the war? 28 Remarque provides a fictional example of how public perceptions of the First World War and its actual causes and effects were almost totally unrelated. In reality, however, we know the deadly results of those perceptions for millions of people consumed
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 63
by their imaginary interpretation of the material situations in which they found themselves.
A more difficult but productive way to pursue the kind of mapping that I am calling for here is through a study of the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. The attacks, of course, were very real, and very real peo- ple died and suffered. So much is uncontroversial. But if we attempt to under- stand the historical causes of those attacks, and the ideational and material forces that were at work, things become much more complicated. We are once again dealing with a deep distance between what most people imagined was true and what was actually true, but we are now seeing an example of the very real violence of collective identity construction and public memory at work, as well as the forces of anti-enlightenment.
According to former president George W. Bush, the reason for the attacks was simple: the terrorists hated U. S. citizens because of their democracy and freedom. According to Bush, in his speech to a joint session of Congress in the immediate aftermath of the attacks: "They [the terrorists] hate what they see here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. "29
Whether or not the causes of the "war on terror" are so simple, and they patently are not, this was the way the executive branch of the U. S. govern- ment characterized the attacks to the U. S. Congress and U. S. citizens, who collectively were far from able to think about other key historical factors: the history of U. S. imperialism, particularly in the Middle East; the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and the training of Osama bin Laden; the relationship between the Bush family and other executive branch officials and the Bin Laden family through their investments in the Carlyle Group; the former role of the United States in helping to establish and maintain a pup- pet regime in Iran; the use of Saddam Hussein in "managing" the so-called Kurdish problem; the influence of the oil industry on U. S. policy; not to men- tion long-term planning by the Pentagon for "managing" the Middle East, and so on. We are talking here about historical facts that are radically at odds with the characterization provided by the Bush administration.
Those who dared to question Bush's account, or to raise these real histori- cal factors, were demonized. 30 Those who dared to mention such factors were unwelcome, not just by the Bush administration but by average U. S. citizens. One can hardly wonder about such historical repression, given the present nature of most political power, coupled with the global educational economy. Still, it is arguably the case that a more contextual and open public discus- sion, on a mass scale, about U. S. political history could help citizens to have a more accurate understanding of the historical, economic, and ideational factors involved in the attacks, and thus a better stance from which to judge executive branch policy (and to better understand the radical reactions to it).
64 M. Lane Bruner
One cannot help but wonder, however, if one wants to engage in the public work of rhetoric from a critical political perspective, about the forces that keep such fantasies alive and such historical realities at bay, and about the costs of the distances we see between fantasy and reality.
And who will deny that much of our lives today are passed in a similar way, and that the distance between the fictional experiences of Paul Ba? umer and our own mediated experiences are not similar in historically and politi- cally important ways, with a vast gulf existing between the material condi- tions of our world and our feeble understanding of those conditions? Surely Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek's argument in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real suggests that these distances are costly, connecting as he does the penchant in recent U. S. films for suggesting, a? la The Matrix and The Truman Show, that citizens of the United States sense somehow deep down inside that they really do not have a clear sense about the world they inhabit, but that instead they inhabit a world that is somehow staged for them. 31
But this is all the more reason to tackle more complicated (if less controver- sial) examples of the distance between the ideational and material economies. In this final example, the distance between public memory and historical fact is easy to trace. It is more difficult, however, to judge the consequences of that distance. Here we also see a collective identity that was "staged," in the sense that it was based on the willful erasure of certain historical facts, but it also was an identity that arguably "worked" to help construct a healthier state. National identity construction in West Germany, then, raises a number of issues, perhaps the most important of which is this: just because there is a dis- tance between imagined identity and reality that can be mapped (through the analysis of "transgressive" speech), how can we tell a "good" imagined iden- tity from a "bad" one?
As one can well imagine, among the hardest things to remember in Ger- many are the Holocaust in particular and World War II in general. So how, precisely, was the Holocaust and the Second World War remembered in Ger- many in the years leading up to reunification? What can this retracing of public memory tell us about the public work of rhetoric? I was initially drawn to this topic after viewing Holocaust denial programs on cable television when studying for my doctorate, and I was horrified by the "scientific" tac- tics used to "prove" their point. This led me to study Holocaust remembrance in Germany, and this led on to the study of public memory and national identity construction in East and West Germany.
It must be difficult, I thought, to have "pride" in one's "nation" when it was the "home" of National Socialism, whose adherents were the architects of the Holocaust. How, I wondered, could this history possibly be remem- bered in Germany? 32 To answer this question, I turned to a critical rhetorical method I have referred to elsewhere as a critical-materialist-genealogical approach (or "limit work"). 33 It is an approach to analyzing discourse based
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 65
in part on Foucault's notion of genealogy, or the diachronic transformation of "disciplinary" language over time. Limit work is genealogical because it traces the transformation of "disciplinary" discourses over time. It also draws in part upon the work of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and other politi- cal theorists who in turn draw heavily upon contemporary theories of dis- course. 34 It is materialist inasmuch as it assumes that there is indeed an empirically determinable material reality out there that is somehow distinct from the way it is apprehended through language, that the distribution of resources is part and parcel of the relationship between experienced reality and its transformation via language, and that that relationship is thoroughly political. It is rhetorical criticism inasmuch as it is a procedure by which one analyzes and diagnoses unhealthy differences between the real (for all intents and purposes) and the represented.
Following Foucault's and Laclau's notion that the limits of a hegemonic discourse are only revealed by transgressions, or antagonisms, I looked for dramatically rejected public discourses about the character of the German nation. I found my object of study when Philip Jenninger, the parliamen- tary president of West Germany, gave a speech memorializing the fiftieth "anniversary" of the Kristallnacht, or the night that Nazi intimidation of the Jews in Germany turned violent in November 1938. In his speech, Jenninger attempted to explain why the German people were initially drawn toward National Socialism, and he stressed Germany's responsibility for the crimes against the Jews, as well as the necessity of directly confronting Germany's Nazi past. Just moments into the speech he began to be heckled mercilessly, and eventually over fifty parliamentarians walked out as he spoke. News- papers across West Germany claimed that Jenninger had "distorted German history" and attempted to "justify" Hitler. Within days, Jenninger was forced to resign.
What could Jenninger have possibly said that was so offensive? What "hegemonic limits" did he transgress, and what can that tell us about Ger- man national identity and its function in the late 1980s? To answer this ques- tion required doing some historical work, ensuring that multiple sources from a variety of ideological perspectives based on thorough scholarship con- verged on the same facts. There were two types of historical facts to deter- mine: what actually happened materially, economically, and institutionally in Germany, and what actually was said about what happened. These are two radically different types of archaeological work--uncovering the historical con- ditions in a given period of time and uncovering the dominant and alter- native discourses circulating in that same period of time. This, in short, is the materialist part of the project: determining through thorough historical re- search the actual material conditions and the actual discursive conditions in the period and situation under review. The next step is genealogical: how did relevant discourses and conditions change over time?
66 M. Lane Bruner
Here is what I discovered. First, the division of Germany at the end of World War II had a profound impact on public memory, and if one were to even risk discussing the Holocaust and National Socialism in either East or West Germany, one had to be very careful indeed. One needed to proceed care- fully because the defenders of the National Socialist state, the perpetrators of that state's crimes, and most of the lingering consequences of that state and its crimes had been erased from public memory. Jenninger problematically dared to claim publicly that "the German people" had been perpetrators, making a clear distinction between "we, the German people" and "the vic- tims," which was completely unacceptable ideologically. Here is why. After the war, Communists in East Germany could hardly be called the perpetrators of National Socialism, since it was the Communists themselves who had helped to defeat the Nazis. It was those West German capitalists, under the disguise of democracy, who were the real perpetrators! But how could one blame the West Germans for National Socialism? After all, they were now clearly on the side of the democratic and capitalist West. It was those East Germans who were still totalitarians! Of course the truth was that the real perpetrators were still living out their old age in both East and West Germany, but they had been conveniently erased from public recognition.
Interestingly enough, a few years earlier Germany's president Richard von Weizsa? cker had delivered a speech that was universally praised for "properly" memorializing the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in his speech he also spoke of the victims of National Socialism, including the Jews, but the ultimate victims in his speech were the German people themselves, who had been "tricked" by Hitler and a handful of his henchmen, and who had "suffered" the division of themselves (politically and spiritually, as a people). Summing up his commemoration by observing that the Germans had suffered long enough, he then made a plea to the international community to reunite the divided German state.
As we all know, Weizsa? cker's plea was heard. East and West Germany were reunited not long after Jenninger's departure, and soon a new memorial was built to publicly commemorate the Holocaust in the center of Berlin. 35
We know that the U. S. government actively promoted the image of West Germany as an ally against Communism, and that President Ronald Reagan visited West Germany just before reunification, claiming in advance that "none of [the West German people] who were adults and participated in any way" in World War II were still alive, and "very few . . . even remembered the war. "36 Why would Reagan fictionally erase Germans his own age? And he did more. Reagan also visited a cemetery in Bitburg, where a few SS soldiers were buried, giving a short speech standing beside German chancellor Helmut Kohl. When challenged by reporters in advance of his visit, Reagan replied, "there's nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young [SS] men are victims of Nazism also. . . . They were victims, just as surely as the victims in
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 67
the concentration camps. "37 How are we to judge these erasures and equivo- cations?
We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that all of those who were sympathetic to National Socialism really disappeared; instead, their "disap- pearance" was put to use. According to Steven Brockmann, the U. S. executive branch wanted to "construct a history that would be useful to Cold War Ide- ology. "38 Kathryn M. Olson notes that Reagan "seemed motivated by grati- tude to Kohl for being the European point player in favor of deploying Pershing 2 and cruise missiles," and he was also seeking support for his space- based missile defense plan and for involvement in Nicaragua. 39 "According to Allied decree in 1945," notes Brockmann, "the German Reich had ceased to exist, and as it was decreed so it came to pass. Suddenly there was no more German Reich, and there were no more Nazis, and the United States began to use the services of those who had ceased to be Nazis in the continued fight against communism, the new Nazism. "40 No doubt the Soviet Union had its "back story" as well.
But perhaps it is just "as well. " After all is said and done, the German state continues to pay reparations, it is diplomatically deferential to Israel, and from all accounts the Germans have become one of the most "democratic" peoples in the West. Not only have most traces of National Socialism been suppressed in that state, but the country is now a leading member of the New World Order of market democracies. The country is actively participating in the on- going construction of the European Union (though perhaps from too neo- liberal a bias), which is helping to temper the forces of ethnic and cultural nationalism with constitutional patriotism (though neoliberal influences con- tinue to stand in the way of a reasonable European constitution). The outcome on the whole, however, has hardly been negative for world politics, given that a peaceful, social democracy based on republican principles and the rule of law has come to replace two authoritarian regimes.
But what of the costs of these erasures, and of equating the German peo- ple with the victims of National Socialism? Who, today, is publicly discussing the historical roots of National Socialism and the potential relationship between Fascism and capitalism? What are the requisite conditions for Fascism to reemerge?
What would those conditions look like, and how might we antici- pate them? How might we protect ourselves from another outbreak of ethnic nationalism in Europe? What, in sum, does it mean for the human political community to have the causes and perpetrators of National Socialism "off limits" for public discussion, save for in a highly mythologized way?
These are questions for the future, perhaps, but the political consequences of collective identity construction are continuously emerging around the world. Even as I write, "Georgia" and "Russia" are fighting viciously over "Ossetia. " What does "Ossetian," "Georgian," and "Russian" identity mean in the conflict, and how are those identities being "mobilized"? Collective
68 M. Lane Bruner
identity construction can disrupt even normally peaceful and prosperous states, like Canada. Just over a decade ago, an ethnic-nationalist separatist movement erupted in Quebec that almost tore the state in two, though the movement ideologically claimed it was multicultural. 41 Why should Quebec secede from Canada? How do those who identify themselves as "Que? be? cois" imagine their historical relationship with Great Britain? Why would an ethnic-nationalist movement insist on its multicultural status?
And just where does the logic of sovereignty stop? In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a "parade of sovereignties," as "peo- ples" rose up to claim their independence. Not only large territories known as Lithuania, Armenia, Ukraine, and Georgia, but even many of the territorial units within the Russian Federation declared their sovereignty. Even some cities declared their sovereignty! 42 Since national identity construction is still going strong all across the world, and wars between "sovereign" states seem to erupt on a monthly basis, one way we can do the public work of rhetoric is by mapping the distance between history and memory, understanding how far those imaginaries are from historical fact, and with what consequence.
Concluding Thoughts
The previous three examples of the public work of rhetoric as critical politi- cal communication are not meant to delimit the objects of such study, or to claim that this is the only way to responsibly engage in "public work. " Lan- guage works to create identities in all sorts of ways: in ways that increase and decrease human suffering. There are numbers of suitable subjects for such work, from the intrapersonal to the transnational, and we need not limit our focus to broad collective identities such as race, gender, ethnicity, class, or na- tionality. All discourses, or all embodied ways of interpreting the world, are "disciplinary. " No matter what the discourse, some statements are simply un- acceptable, others are unwelcome. How might we map these "unspeakable" zones in order to determine their effects?
What of the pressing questions of our own day? Is the skyrocketing federal debt a problem or not? Is global warming a real threat? What is the world's oil supply today, really, and what does that suggest for our long-term eco- nomic and political future? Do the "evildoers" have weapons of mass destruc- tion, and who, really, are the evildoers? Why is it "OK" for Pakistan to possess nuclear weapons, but not Iran? Do Iran, Iraq, and North Korea truly constitute an "axis of evil"? What should be done about illegal immigration? Should we have built the prisons in Guantanamo Bay and in other secret locations? Are our state or local school boards corrupt, and what, after all, constitutes respon- sible education in an age that would become postessentialist? There are so many questions about our world that there is really no time, or will, to learn the answers. So what to do? Must so-called elites manage information for us? How can we trust that they themselves are not misguided or misinformed, or,
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 69
worse yet, self-interested and deceptive? Can we reform our educational sys- tem to reinforce the average citizen's ability to weigh public argument? 43
What role can communication scholars play in alleviating this world-his- torical problem of the persistent distance between fact and opinion, between knowledge and belief, and between the unfolding of history and its complex causes and the way that history is characterized and interpreted? If rhetorical critics could even begin to unravel the mysteries that are these distances, what realistic chance do they have of actually impacting the trajectory of political events? 44
It seems prudent, therefore, to consider how we might transform our peda- gogical and research practices in order to make a world-historical impact on the process of identity construction. Recognizing the seemingly innumerable anti-enlightenment forces that stand in our way--from metaphysically com- forting essentialisms to cynical and unenlightened self-interest--there is much to be done. As Carolyn Miller notes elsewhere in this volume, it may well be that "dissimulation and concealment are indeed necessary for rhetorical suc- cess. " That said, however, different types of "concealment" lead to different types of consequences. While we may indeed need to mask our arts of critique in order to make them more effective, let us hope Miller is incorrect when she claims that "such a project cannot be a global or a programmatic one. " If that is the case, then the un-enlightened forces of identity construction will undoubtedly defeat the forces of enlightenment.
Notes
1. Critical philosophy differs from analytic philosophy. See Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1-25. Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek recently engaged in an interesting debate on the nature of the real and the political. See Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek, "Against the Populist Temptation," Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 551-74; Ernesto Laclau, "Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics," Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006): 646-80; and Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek, "Schagend, aber nicht Treffend! " Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006): 185-211. See also Kant, Political Writ- ings; Mouffe, Democratic Paradox; and Laclau, On Populist Reason, for a sampling of criti- cal political theory.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer neatly characterized Kant's fundamental argument: "Kant's greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect, and that on this account they cannot be known according to what they may be in themselves. . . . The complete diversity of the ideal from the real, is the fundamental characteristic of Kant- ian philosophy" (World as Will, 417-18). If Kant is correct, this means that the public work of rhetoric must deal directly with the nature of this "intellect," or the discursive ways in which we come to negotiate and understand our world.
3. Semiotic theory can be traced to the rather different work of Ferdinand de Saus- sure and Charles S. Peirce. The main difference between their two semiotic theories is that Saussure, a linguist, did not feature the referent (or the material object), as did Peirce, with, in my opinion, serious consequences for practical thinking about the relationship between systems of signification and the material world. For a succinct discussion of
70 M. Lane Bruner
these two theorists and their impact on studies of subjectivity, see Silverman, Subject of Semiotics.
4. For a representative interpretation of Jacques Lacan's theory of the Real, see Z ? iz ? ek, "Schagend, aber nicht Treffend," 195-97.
5. For an introduction to the political dimensions of Lacan, see Stavrakakis, Lacan. See also McConnell and Gillett, "Lacan"; Biesecker, "Rhetorical Studies. "
6. On how the discursive construction of madness has itself been historically mad, see Foucault, History of Madness; see also Foucault, Fearless Speech.
7. The term "common sense" is fraught with conceptual complications that cannot be explored adequately here. For those interested in the range of such complications, see Schaeffer, Sensus Communis; Holton, "Bourdieu"; Lyotard, "Sensus Communis"; Bor- mann, "Some 'Common Sense. '"
8. One lives within a personal state (both a material state and a "state of mind"), a web of interpersonal and professional "states" (and states of mind), and within a web of collective states (political, religious, racial, gendered, and so forth) with their mate- rial and imagined dimensions. All of these states are interwoven with the ultimately unknowable and ever-emerging reality of nature. The public work of rhetoric, concep- tualized as the construction of the healthy state, therefore, has multiple dimensions and can take place at many levels. My focus here will only be on the rhetorical construction of collective (national) identities.
9. Once one is aware of the discursive dimensions of subjectivity, however, one still may engage in "strategic essentialism" when combating essentialist problems. See Mar- tin, "Methodological Essentialism. " See Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, for other types of "differential consciousness. "
10. The literature on identity and politics is vast and ranges from the political dimen- sions of personal identity, to debates in aesthetics, to collective identity construction. For a mere sampling, see Goffman, Presentation of Self; Morgan, Inventing the People; Ander- son, Imagined Communities; Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power; Sennett, Fall of Pub- lic Man; Rajchman, Identity in Question. Such texts, obviously, only scratch the surface of what is available on the broad topic of language and identity.
11. I defend this claim in detail in my most recent book, Democracy's Debt.
12. One well-known attempt to explain the logic of the relationship between the material and ideational economy was made by Karl Marx. Marx, German Ideology. For a critique of the essentialist assumptions in Marxism, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
13. See Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance; Bruner, "Rhetorics of the State.
14. Bruner, Democracy's Debt, esp. chapter 2; Bruner, "Taming 'Wild' Capitalism"; Bruner, "Global Constitutionalism"; Bruner, "Global Governance. "
15. Bruner, "Carnivalesque Protest"; Bruner, "Norm Revolutions"; Bruner and Marin, "'Democracies' in Transition. "
16. Bruner and Morozov, Market Democracy.
17. Weintraub, "Theory and Politics. "
18. See Dewey, Public and Its Problems.
19. For histories and theories related to the construction of "peoples," see Morgan,
Inventing the People; Bruner, "Rhetorical Theory"; McGee, "In Search of 'the People. '" 20. For Laclau's theory of the public, see On Populist Reason.
21. On the notions of subaltern and counterpublics, see Fraser, "Rethinking the Pub- lic Sphere"; Asen and Brouwer, Counterpublics and the State; Warner, Publics and Counter- publics.
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 71
22. No hegemonic system--and, therefore, no state--can fully meet the demands of everyone, and thus there is always a certain "violence" associated with such systems/ states. Derrida grappled with the violence of justice and its relationship to the limits of rationality and reason in several of his later essays. See Derrida, Rogues. For a much ear- lier essay dealing with similar issues, see Benjamin, "Critique of Violence. "
23. See Bruner, "Rhetorical Criticism. "
24. Deconstructionists are right to point out that "fields of vision" are enabled by a "blind spot," or a necessary and organizing absence. This, then, is the radical gap within subjectivities themselves, and it is not the same as the gap between subjectivity and materiality.
25. For an enlightening look at deceptive public memory and history education in the United States, see Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me. For a look at how corporate communication impacts "public" spaces, see Klein, No Logo; Mayhew, New Public.
26. Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Debord, Comments on the Society.
27. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 165-67.
28. This is hardly a controversial claim, for the Second World War can be traced in no
small part to debt relations between the United States, Britain, and France, and the ulti- mate impact of U. S. debt policy on German war reparations (though there were many other important reasons, not the least of which was the political/economic history of nationalism). On the role of debt in the world wars, see Hudson, Super Imperialism, 58-161.
29. For a complete transcript of Bush's address, titled "Freedom at War with Fear," see http://www. whitehouse. gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8. html (accessed May 24, 2006). Frighteningly enough, Joseph Goebbels's "New Year's Speech" on December 31, 1939, has an eerily familiar ring: "[Our enemies] hate our people because [they are] decent, brave, industrious, hardworking and intelligent. They hate our views, our social policies, and our accomplishments. They hate us as a Reich and as a community. They have forced us into a struggle for life and death. We will defend ourselves accordingly. " For a transcript of the speech, see http://www. calvin. edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb21. htm (accessed May 26, 2006).
My point in drawing this comparison is not to equate the Bush administration and National Socialism (although his family's financial dealings are quite "interesting"), but simply to provide examples of how official state discourse tends to create grand and abstract explanations for very real and specific historical causes, and since the general public's understanding of historical facts is so thin, these abstract explanations become the basis for their own understanding, oftentimes with dire consequences. For accounts of Prescott Bush's "interesting" financial activities, see Aris and Campbell, "How Bush's Grandfather"; Phillips, American Dynasty.
30. Bill Mahr and the Dixie Chicks are two of the more well known examples, though content analyses of actual media coverage leading up to the war reveals the almost com- plete absence of voices providing anything in the way of historical or political context. See, for example, Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center, "Independent Media in a Time of War," http://video. google. com/videoplay? docid=-6546453033984487696 (accessed June 8, 2008). Cynics might argue that any account of political context would necessarily be biased, and some psychoanalysts might argue that of course the hege- monic public is incapable of dealing more directly with the terrible Thing (ultimately unknowable Nature), but this, I maintain, is to categorically confuse the necessary dis- tance between language and materiality and the relative distance between accounts of materiality and that which actually occurred.
72 M. Lane Bruner
31. Z ? iz ? ek, Welcome to the Desert. See also Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 29-40. According to the theoretical perspective presented here, the "stage" is set in both inten- tional and unintentional ways.
32. For a sampling of the literature on public memory, memorialization, and the poli- tics of memory, especially in Germany, Russia, and Canada, see Bruner, Strategies of Re- membrance, 125-35.
33. Bruner, "Rhetorical Criticism. "
34. See Laclau, On Populist Reason. However, Laclau completely ignores the important work on collective identity construction done by rhetoricians in the United States.
35. The memorial stirred considerable controversy. For a thorough critique of Holo- caust memorials as an exemplary instance of the public work of rhetoric, see Carrier, Holocaust Monuments.
36. Hartmann, Bitburg in Moral, xii.
37. Ibid. , xiv. Kathryn M. Olson also discusses how Reagan attempted to redefine the notion of "victims" prior to and during his Bitburg visit. See Olson, "Controversy. "
38. Brockmann, "Bitburg Deconstruction. " 39. Olson, "Controversy. "
40. Brockmann, "Bitburg Deconstruction," 163.
41.
58 M. Lane Bruner
marginalize some set of discourses, constant vigilance toward the limits of consensus, and the necessary promotion of responsible transgression at those limits, is essential for political justice to prevail over time.
Based upon these and other normative assumptions, based in turn upon the insights of critical philosophy, I shall proceed, then, to offer a translation of the basic tenets of critical political communication, to provide a theoreti- cal defense for what I think is a helpful critical conception of the public, and then to provide three increasingly complex examples of identity criticism that illustrate the public work of rhetoric described here. I begin by briefly characterizing how my own work attempts to move through critical philoso- phy to return to a more theoretically informed conception of the interrela- tionship between discourse and materiality.
Theorizing Critical Political Communication
It does not take great philosophical insight to determine when your car runs out of gas, how many in a community are homeless, where people are starv- ing, or whose daughter was killed in a war. It takes considerably more insight, however, to discern the primary political, economic, and discursive reasons why cars are so fuel inefficient, or why communities fail to provide housing for their more vulnerable members, or why much-needed food is thrown away instead of shipped where it is needed, or what idiocies start wars. We could quibble, of course, over definitions, or over the fact that we can really never fully understand how discursive political economies work, or over the impossibility of completely grasping all of the factors involved in war. Such quibbling would be meaningless, however, to those without energy, shelter, food, health, peace, or opportunity.
Because it is obvious that people have radically uneven access to the condi- tions for a happy subjectivity, it does take philosophical insight to understand why we as a species have proven ourselves utterly incapable of constructing widespread patterns of identification, and political systems based on those patterns, capable of radically ameliorating human misery. Our world is pop- ulated by billions who are poor, unhealthy, underfed, inadequately housed or educated, or at war. Even relatively happy communities are not as happy as they might be, and solutions to the basic problems of subjectivity and com- munity continue to elude us. Why is this so? What can be done?
It is patently true that, on the whole, humankind is still very far from being enlightened about the nature of language in use and its necessary dan- gers, and this unnecessarily compounds human misery. Patterns of collective identity construction that were useful before capitalism (for example, tribal, religious, patriarchal), and at an earlier age of capitalism (the feudal monar- chical state, the totalitarian state, the liberal nation-state), now stand in the way of more enlightened communicative practices, locally and globally. Today what passes for global political reason, at least in the "advanced" parts of the
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 59
world, is a combination of neoliberal capitalism, cultural hybridization, and competitive self-interest. While "market democracy" works to dissolve the reli- gious, ethnic, and cultural prejudices that not so long ago were the engines for world war, who can deny that our political world still teeters on the edge of catastrophe because of various "patriotisms" and essentialist reactions to the present process of cultural and economic globalization? It is crucial, there- fore, to provide a convincing case for post-neoliberal, postnationalist, and postessentialist political visions, and doing the public work of rhetoric can help with this task.
If one is to investigate the relationship between identity and politics, or the relationships among public memory, national identity construction, and statecraft, grappling with critical philosophy is only the beginning. In addi- tion to studying how language works, and how language inevitably leads to politically consequential patterns of identification,10 it also helps to study the history of political theory (including constitutional theory) and the history of republican politics, since history suggests that the healthiest states tend to be republics of a certain type. 11 Close attention to the rhetorical arts and the history of rhetorical theory, with special attention to critical rhetorical the- ory, is also important, since one cannot responsibly critique the political except in light of rhetorical practice. This is not to say that the political can be reduced to rhetoric, for it also has material consequences, but to say instead that matters related to economic and state power can always be traced back to the ways we imagine our world, and the ways we are imagined by others.
Situated by such studies to consider the public work of rhetoric, in my own research I have reasoned as follows. Just because what individuals and groups believe to be true is always some distance from what is actually true, this does not entail that all beliefs are equally distant from the true. It is mani- festly obvious that some people are more taken in by violent collective fan- tasies (for example, of racial superiority, fundamentalist dogmas) than others, that entire populations live in discursive worlds that produce highly destruc- tive collective fantasies, and that other populations manage to live in a rela- tively healthy, happy, and peaceful prosperity. This is not to say there is "a perfect fantasy," or "a discourse that precisely mirrors the real," or any such thing, but to claim that the more we come to collectively understand the rela- tionship between the ways we speak and the kinds of worlds we live in, the more enlightened as a species we become.
I have maintained in my work, therefore, that the public work of rhetoric is to critique the distance between our ideational and material economies as best we can. 12 What, I have asked, are the qualities of the ideational economy, or the economy of ideas in specific political communities? What constitutes healthy interrelationships between what people believe and the trajectory of policies and institutions? What can be done to remedy the political sickness that oftentimes follows when people's beliefs about their political situation
60 M. Lane Bruner
seem to be radically at odds with their actual situation, and when those beliefs make material conditions worse not only for themselves but for others? How can we trace the difference between beliefs and conditions, and agency and structure, given the limits of language and subjectivity?
In an attempt to do this kind of work, I have critiqued, for example, the rhetorical dimensions of national identity construction, where I studied "strategic memory," ideological narratives of belonging, and discourses that challenged those narratives. 13 I have studied the process of economic globali- zation, the rhetoric of free trade that sustains it, and how that process and rhetoric impacts world politics. 14 I have analyzed and critiqued political pro- tests in different states, as well as transnational norm revolutions. 15 I have also studied the global collapse of Communism, the newly hegemonic discourse of neoliberalism, and the political, economic, and discursive consequences of that transformation. 16 Together, this work has attempted to determine what political communication means from a critical theoretical stance and in so doing to engage in the public work of rhetoric at the level of collective iden- tity construction.
Theorizing the Public Work of Rhetoric
But why does the critique of "political communication" constitute doing the public work of rhetoric? Characterizing precisely what "the public" is, and what the "public work" of rhetoric might be, is not so simple. The term "pub- lic" is a complicated concept with a long and interesting history. Just to name three of the many conceptions of the public that hardly overlap, there are feminist, neoliberal, and classical republican theories of the public. 17 Some feminist theories conceptualize the private sphere as the home and the pub- lic sphere as everywhere outside of the home; neoliberals tend to conceptu- alize the private sphere as the market and the public sphere as the state; and classical republican theories conceptualize the public sphere as a realm of criti- cal citizenship outside of both the market and the state. My own theoretical approach at present is based in part on John Dewey's notion that "the pub- lic" is a term referring to concerns that issue indirectly from conjoint action; therefore, the most just political state is composed of institutions artfully constructed to address those ever-emerging concerns. 18 It is also based in part on the work of Ernesto Laclau, who argues that states and dominant cultures can usefully be conceived as "hegemonic" publics, or particular collections of factions or interests within a community who claim to represent the people. 19 In so doing, such "publics" always, according to a political logic based on the language philosophy of Laclau, necessarily create a field of unmet demands. 20 When isolated, those demands can be repressed, ignored, or integrated into the hegemonic system. When those unmet demands come together, how- ever, they can form a "populist" movement, or "counterpublic," with suffi- cient force to transform the hegemonic public. 21 This new hegemonic public,
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 61
however, in turn creates yet another set of unmet demands, and the process continues ad infinitum. 22 Every "people," every "public," every "hegemony," and every "counterpublic" is based on identifiable discourses, and one can trace the outlines of these discourses and determine what they exclude and why via rhetorical critique. 23 By engaging is such a critique, it becomes clear that some discourses, some counterpublics, some hegemonic publics, and some states do a better job of addressing the indirect consequences of conjoint action, and of improving the material conditions of human life, than others.
Based on the rule of law tempered by a reflexive appreciation for the vio- lence of the law, consensus, and so on, healthy publics, and, therefore, healthy states, institutionally guarantee thick public spheres, and in so doing they maximally anticipate the indirect consequences of conjoint action by encour- aging the proliferation of "counterpublics" with sufficient force to ensure the constant critique of laws, institutions, and disciplinary measures. Sick publics, and, therefore, sick states, conversely, suppress critical thought in a wide vari- ety of ways, both intentionally and unintentionally, that cause them to fail to address the problems created by the indirect consequences of conjoint action. 24 Following such reasoning, the public work of rhetoric, conceived as critical political communication, is to better understand the relationship be- tween discourse and the political in order to use the arts, educational systems, scholarly and civic activism, social movements, and revolutionary activity, when necessary, to productively transform sick publics and states into healthy publics and states.
The violence of human history, from the perspective of critical political communication offered here, is primarily the result of both intentional and unintentional forms of miscommunication (cynical and self-interested manip- ulation and ideological blindness); therefore, there is a direct relationship between the quality of human communication and the good state. When the hegemonic public's perception of history dramatically diverges from their actual history, or their actual condition and its causes, political illness is usu- ally the result.
However, and as we know, political illness is all too obviously the norm.
One main reason for the persistence of political illness, and, therefore, an equally important reason for engaging in the public work of rhetoric, is the innumerable intentional "communicative" forces deployed precisely to keep people from realizing historical/material truths (Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook," William Clinton's "I did not have sex with that woman," George W. Bush's "They hate us because of our liberty," and so forth). 25 There are public relations agencies, marketers, spin doctors, brand managers, White House press agents, propaganda ministers, and similar forces all designed precisely to keep people informed in a particular way at the expense of other, perhaps more truthful, ways. These agents of self-interest are directly responsible for what Guy Debord defined as the "society of the spectacle," and when coupled
62 M. Lane Bruner
with the "natural" dangers of identification (for example, being raised in idea- tional economies where religious fundamentalism, racism, jingoism, sexism flourish), we can plainly see some of the challenges facing those who would do the public work of rhetoric: revealing how these discourses contribute to the human condition so we can more responsibly reflect on them in order to construct the healthiest possible publics and the healthiest possible states. 26
Three examples--one from the realm of fiction, one from recent world his- tory, and one more concrete and extended example taken from my work on West German national identity construction just prior to the reunification of Germany--will hopefully elaborate my main point that there is indeed a nec- essary distance between what people think and their material conditions, but that some distances are greater than others, that some politically consequen- tial fictions are more healthy than others, and that the public work of rheto- ric is to map and diagnose those distances as accurately as possible in order to help promote the healthy and beautiful state.
Mapping the Unspeakable and Diagnosing Identity
A first and clear example of the distance between what people think is true and what is actually true, and the terrible consequences of that distance, is taken from the experience of Paul Ba? umer in Erich Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, a fictional account of a German soldier's experience of the First World War. As a young and impressionable student, Paul listens to his teacher Kantorek, who convinces him and his fellow students to join the "glorious" war effort. When Paul experiences war firsthand, however, he quickly sees the distance between the illusion of the "glory" of war and its grim reality. Returning home on leave, after seeing most of his comrades killed and with little hope of surviving the horrors of the front upon his return, Paul tries to reason publicly with the jingoistic men from his small hometown. He tells them of the horrors of the war, and of the excellent chance that nothing they desire will be accomplished by it. They angrily and summarily denounce his negative, though firsthand, characterization of the war, however, exclaiming that Paul knows "nothing about it! "27 The narcotic of jingoistic patriotism has blinded them. In truth (albeit it a fictional truth in this case) it is of course the townspeople who know "nothing about it," save for their tragic and dis- torted way of imagining the war, its causes and it consequences.
But who will deny there was a real First World War that included hostili- ties between two political entities that were imagined (really) in politically consequential ways as "Germany" and "France"? Who will deny that careful historical work could, with relatively high precision, inform us about the ideational, economic, and material causes of the war? 28 Remarque provides a fictional example of how public perceptions of the First World War and its actual causes and effects were almost totally unrelated. In reality, however, we know the deadly results of those perceptions for millions of people consumed
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 63
by their imaginary interpretation of the material situations in which they found themselves.
A more difficult but productive way to pursue the kind of mapping that I am calling for here is through a study of the attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001. The attacks, of course, were very real, and very real peo- ple died and suffered. So much is uncontroversial. But if we attempt to under- stand the historical causes of those attacks, and the ideational and material forces that were at work, things become much more complicated. We are once again dealing with a deep distance between what most people imagined was true and what was actually true, but we are now seeing an example of the very real violence of collective identity construction and public memory at work, as well as the forces of anti-enlightenment.
According to former president George W. Bush, the reason for the attacks was simple: the terrorists hated U. S. citizens because of their democracy and freedom. According to Bush, in his speech to a joint session of Congress in the immediate aftermath of the attacks: "They [the terrorists] hate what they see here in this chamber: a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms: our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other. "29
Whether or not the causes of the "war on terror" are so simple, and they patently are not, this was the way the executive branch of the U. S. govern- ment characterized the attacks to the U. S. Congress and U. S. citizens, who collectively were far from able to think about other key historical factors: the history of U. S. imperialism, particularly in the Middle East; the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and the training of Osama bin Laden; the relationship between the Bush family and other executive branch officials and the Bin Laden family through their investments in the Carlyle Group; the former role of the United States in helping to establish and maintain a pup- pet regime in Iran; the use of Saddam Hussein in "managing" the so-called Kurdish problem; the influence of the oil industry on U. S. policy; not to men- tion long-term planning by the Pentagon for "managing" the Middle East, and so on. We are talking here about historical facts that are radically at odds with the characterization provided by the Bush administration.
Those who dared to question Bush's account, or to raise these real histori- cal factors, were demonized. 30 Those who dared to mention such factors were unwelcome, not just by the Bush administration but by average U. S. citizens. One can hardly wonder about such historical repression, given the present nature of most political power, coupled with the global educational economy. Still, it is arguably the case that a more contextual and open public discus- sion, on a mass scale, about U. S. political history could help citizens to have a more accurate understanding of the historical, economic, and ideational factors involved in the attacks, and thus a better stance from which to judge executive branch policy (and to better understand the radical reactions to it).
64 M. Lane Bruner
One cannot help but wonder, however, if one wants to engage in the public work of rhetoric from a critical political perspective, about the forces that keep such fantasies alive and such historical realities at bay, and about the costs of the distances we see between fantasy and reality.
And who will deny that much of our lives today are passed in a similar way, and that the distance between the fictional experiences of Paul Ba? umer and our own mediated experiences are not similar in historically and politi- cally important ways, with a vast gulf existing between the material condi- tions of our world and our feeble understanding of those conditions? Surely Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek's argument in his Welcome to the Desert of the Real suggests that these distances are costly, connecting as he does the penchant in recent U. S. films for suggesting, a? la The Matrix and The Truman Show, that citizens of the United States sense somehow deep down inside that they really do not have a clear sense about the world they inhabit, but that instead they inhabit a world that is somehow staged for them. 31
But this is all the more reason to tackle more complicated (if less controver- sial) examples of the distance between the ideational and material economies. In this final example, the distance between public memory and historical fact is easy to trace. It is more difficult, however, to judge the consequences of that distance. Here we also see a collective identity that was "staged," in the sense that it was based on the willful erasure of certain historical facts, but it also was an identity that arguably "worked" to help construct a healthier state. National identity construction in West Germany, then, raises a number of issues, perhaps the most important of which is this: just because there is a dis- tance between imagined identity and reality that can be mapped (through the analysis of "transgressive" speech), how can we tell a "good" imagined iden- tity from a "bad" one?
As one can well imagine, among the hardest things to remember in Ger- many are the Holocaust in particular and World War II in general. So how, precisely, was the Holocaust and the Second World War remembered in Ger- many in the years leading up to reunification? What can this retracing of public memory tell us about the public work of rhetoric? I was initially drawn to this topic after viewing Holocaust denial programs on cable television when studying for my doctorate, and I was horrified by the "scientific" tac- tics used to "prove" their point. This led me to study Holocaust remembrance in Germany, and this led on to the study of public memory and national identity construction in East and West Germany.
It must be difficult, I thought, to have "pride" in one's "nation" when it was the "home" of National Socialism, whose adherents were the architects of the Holocaust. How, I wondered, could this history possibly be remem- bered in Germany? 32 To answer this question, I turned to a critical rhetorical method I have referred to elsewhere as a critical-materialist-genealogical approach (or "limit work"). 33 It is an approach to analyzing discourse based
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 65
in part on Foucault's notion of genealogy, or the diachronic transformation of "disciplinary" language over time. Limit work is genealogical because it traces the transformation of "disciplinary" discourses over time. It also draws in part upon the work of Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and other politi- cal theorists who in turn draw heavily upon contemporary theories of dis- course. 34 It is materialist inasmuch as it assumes that there is indeed an empirically determinable material reality out there that is somehow distinct from the way it is apprehended through language, that the distribution of resources is part and parcel of the relationship between experienced reality and its transformation via language, and that that relationship is thoroughly political. It is rhetorical criticism inasmuch as it is a procedure by which one analyzes and diagnoses unhealthy differences between the real (for all intents and purposes) and the represented.
Following Foucault's and Laclau's notion that the limits of a hegemonic discourse are only revealed by transgressions, or antagonisms, I looked for dramatically rejected public discourses about the character of the German nation. I found my object of study when Philip Jenninger, the parliamen- tary president of West Germany, gave a speech memorializing the fiftieth "anniversary" of the Kristallnacht, or the night that Nazi intimidation of the Jews in Germany turned violent in November 1938. In his speech, Jenninger attempted to explain why the German people were initially drawn toward National Socialism, and he stressed Germany's responsibility for the crimes against the Jews, as well as the necessity of directly confronting Germany's Nazi past. Just moments into the speech he began to be heckled mercilessly, and eventually over fifty parliamentarians walked out as he spoke. News- papers across West Germany claimed that Jenninger had "distorted German history" and attempted to "justify" Hitler. Within days, Jenninger was forced to resign.
What could Jenninger have possibly said that was so offensive? What "hegemonic limits" did he transgress, and what can that tell us about Ger- man national identity and its function in the late 1980s? To answer this ques- tion required doing some historical work, ensuring that multiple sources from a variety of ideological perspectives based on thorough scholarship con- verged on the same facts. There were two types of historical facts to deter- mine: what actually happened materially, economically, and institutionally in Germany, and what actually was said about what happened. These are two radically different types of archaeological work--uncovering the historical con- ditions in a given period of time and uncovering the dominant and alter- native discourses circulating in that same period of time. This, in short, is the materialist part of the project: determining through thorough historical re- search the actual material conditions and the actual discursive conditions in the period and situation under review. The next step is genealogical: how did relevant discourses and conditions change over time?
66 M. Lane Bruner
Here is what I discovered. First, the division of Germany at the end of World War II had a profound impact on public memory, and if one were to even risk discussing the Holocaust and National Socialism in either East or West Germany, one had to be very careful indeed. One needed to proceed care- fully because the defenders of the National Socialist state, the perpetrators of that state's crimes, and most of the lingering consequences of that state and its crimes had been erased from public memory. Jenninger problematically dared to claim publicly that "the German people" had been perpetrators, making a clear distinction between "we, the German people" and "the vic- tims," which was completely unacceptable ideologically. Here is why. After the war, Communists in East Germany could hardly be called the perpetrators of National Socialism, since it was the Communists themselves who had helped to defeat the Nazis. It was those West German capitalists, under the disguise of democracy, who were the real perpetrators! But how could one blame the West Germans for National Socialism? After all, they were now clearly on the side of the democratic and capitalist West. It was those East Germans who were still totalitarians! Of course the truth was that the real perpetrators were still living out their old age in both East and West Germany, but they had been conveniently erased from public recognition.
Interestingly enough, a few years earlier Germany's president Richard von Weizsa? cker had delivered a speech that was universally praised for "properly" memorializing the fortieth anniversary of the end of World War II. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that in his speech he also spoke of the victims of National Socialism, including the Jews, but the ultimate victims in his speech were the German people themselves, who had been "tricked" by Hitler and a handful of his henchmen, and who had "suffered" the division of themselves (politically and spiritually, as a people). Summing up his commemoration by observing that the Germans had suffered long enough, he then made a plea to the international community to reunite the divided German state.
As we all know, Weizsa? cker's plea was heard. East and West Germany were reunited not long after Jenninger's departure, and soon a new memorial was built to publicly commemorate the Holocaust in the center of Berlin. 35
We know that the U. S. government actively promoted the image of West Germany as an ally against Communism, and that President Ronald Reagan visited West Germany just before reunification, claiming in advance that "none of [the West German people] who were adults and participated in any way" in World War II were still alive, and "very few . . . even remembered the war. "36 Why would Reagan fictionally erase Germans his own age? And he did more. Reagan also visited a cemetery in Bitburg, where a few SS soldiers were buried, giving a short speech standing beside German chancellor Helmut Kohl. When challenged by reporters in advance of his visit, Reagan replied, "there's nothing wrong with visiting that cemetery where those young [SS] men are victims of Nazism also. . . . They were victims, just as surely as the victims in
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 67
the concentration camps. "37 How are we to judge these erasures and equivo- cations?
We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that all of those who were sympathetic to National Socialism really disappeared; instead, their "disap- pearance" was put to use. According to Steven Brockmann, the U. S. executive branch wanted to "construct a history that would be useful to Cold War Ide- ology. "38 Kathryn M. Olson notes that Reagan "seemed motivated by grati- tude to Kohl for being the European point player in favor of deploying Pershing 2 and cruise missiles," and he was also seeking support for his space- based missile defense plan and for involvement in Nicaragua. 39 "According to Allied decree in 1945," notes Brockmann, "the German Reich had ceased to exist, and as it was decreed so it came to pass. Suddenly there was no more German Reich, and there were no more Nazis, and the United States began to use the services of those who had ceased to be Nazis in the continued fight against communism, the new Nazism. "40 No doubt the Soviet Union had its "back story" as well.
But perhaps it is just "as well. " After all is said and done, the German state continues to pay reparations, it is diplomatically deferential to Israel, and from all accounts the Germans have become one of the most "democratic" peoples in the West. Not only have most traces of National Socialism been suppressed in that state, but the country is now a leading member of the New World Order of market democracies. The country is actively participating in the on- going construction of the European Union (though perhaps from too neo- liberal a bias), which is helping to temper the forces of ethnic and cultural nationalism with constitutional patriotism (though neoliberal influences con- tinue to stand in the way of a reasonable European constitution). The outcome on the whole, however, has hardly been negative for world politics, given that a peaceful, social democracy based on republican principles and the rule of law has come to replace two authoritarian regimes.
But what of the costs of these erasures, and of equating the German peo- ple with the victims of National Socialism? Who, today, is publicly discussing the historical roots of National Socialism and the potential relationship between Fascism and capitalism? What are the requisite conditions for Fascism to reemerge?
What would those conditions look like, and how might we antici- pate them? How might we protect ourselves from another outbreak of ethnic nationalism in Europe? What, in sum, does it mean for the human political community to have the causes and perpetrators of National Socialism "off limits" for public discussion, save for in a highly mythologized way?
These are questions for the future, perhaps, but the political consequences of collective identity construction are continuously emerging around the world. Even as I write, "Georgia" and "Russia" are fighting viciously over "Ossetia. " What does "Ossetian," "Georgian," and "Russian" identity mean in the conflict, and how are those identities being "mobilized"? Collective
68 M. Lane Bruner
identity construction can disrupt even normally peaceful and prosperous states, like Canada. Just over a decade ago, an ethnic-nationalist separatist movement erupted in Quebec that almost tore the state in two, though the movement ideologically claimed it was multicultural. 41 Why should Quebec secede from Canada? How do those who identify themselves as "Que? be? cois" imagine their historical relationship with Great Britain? Why would an ethnic-nationalist movement insist on its multicultural status?
And just where does the logic of sovereignty stop? In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a "parade of sovereignties," as "peo- ples" rose up to claim their independence. Not only large territories known as Lithuania, Armenia, Ukraine, and Georgia, but even many of the territorial units within the Russian Federation declared their sovereignty. Even some cities declared their sovereignty! 42 Since national identity construction is still going strong all across the world, and wars between "sovereign" states seem to erupt on a monthly basis, one way we can do the public work of rhetoric is by mapping the distance between history and memory, understanding how far those imaginaries are from historical fact, and with what consequence.
Concluding Thoughts
The previous three examples of the public work of rhetoric as critical politi- cal communication are not meant to delimit the objects of such study, or to claim that this is the only way to responsibly engage in "public work. " Lan- guage works to create identities in all sorts of ways: in ways that increase and decrease human suffering. There are numbers of suitable subjects for such work, from the intrapersonal to the transnational, and we need not limit our focus to broad collective identities such as race, gender, ethnicity, class, or na- tionality. All discourses, or all embodied ways of interpreting the world, are "disciplinary. " No matter what the discourse, some statements are simply un- acceptable, others are unwelcome. How might we map these "unspeakable" zones in order to determine their effects?
What of the pressing questions of our own day? Is the skyrocketing federal debt a problem or not? Is global warming a real threat? What is the world's oil supply today, really, and what does that suggest for our long-term eco- nomic and political future? Do the "evildoers" have weapons of mass destruc- tion, and who, really, are the evildoers? Why is it "OK" for Pakistan to possess nuclear weapons, but not Iran? Do Iran, Iraq, and North Korea truly constitute an "axis of evil"? What should be done about illegal immigration? Should we have built the prisons in Guantanamo Bay and in other secret locations? Are our state or local school boards corrupt, and what, after all, constitutes respon- sible education in an age that would become postessentialist? There are so many questions about our world that there is really no time, or will, to learn the answers. So what to do? Must so-called elites manage information for us? How can we trust that they themselves are not misguided or misinformed, or,
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 69
worse yet, self-interested and deceptive? Can we reform our educational sys- tem to reinforce the average citizen's ability to weigh public argument? 43
What role can communication scholars play in alleviating this world-his- torical problem of the persistent distance between fact and opinion, between knowledge and belief, and between the unfolding of history and its complex causes and the way that history is characterized and interpreted? If rhetorical critics could even begin to unravel the mysteries that are these distances, what realistic chance do they have of actually impacting the trajectory of political events? 44
It seems prudent, therefore, to consider how we might transform our peda- gogical and research practices in order to make a world-historical impact on the process of identity construction. Recognizing the seemingly innumerable anti-enlightenment forces that stand in our way--from metaphysically com- forting essentialisms to cynical and unenlightened self-interest--there is much to be done. As Carolyn Miller notes elsewhere in this volume, it may well be that "dissimulation and concealment are indeed necessary for rhetorical suc- cess. " That said, however, different types of "concealment" lead to different types of consequences. While we may indeed need to mask our arts of critique in order to make them more effective, let us hope Miller is incorrect when she claims that "such a project cannot be a global or a programmatic one. " If that is the case, then the un-enlightened forces of identity construction will undoubtedly defeat the forces of enlightenment.
Notes
1. Critical philosophy differs from analytic philosophy. See Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1-25. Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek recently engaged in an interesting debate on the nature of the real and the political. See Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek, "Against the Populist Temptation," Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 551-74; Ernesto Laclau, "Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics," Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006): 646-80; and Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek, "Schagend, aber nicht Treffend! " Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006): 185-211. See also Kant, Political Writ- ings; Mouffe, Democratic Paradox; and Laclau, On Populist Reason, for a sampling of criti- cal political theory.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer neatly characterized Kant's fundamental argument: "Kant's greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect, and that on this account they cannot be known according to what they may be in themselves. . . . The complete diversity of the ideal from the real, is the fundamental characteristic of Kant- ian philosophy" (World as Will, 417-18). If Kant is correct, this means that the public work of rhetoric must deal directly with the nature of this "intellect," or the discursive ways in which we come to negotiate and understand our world.
3. Semiotic theory can be traced to the rather different work of Ferdinand de Saus- sure and Charles S. Peirce. The main difference between their two semiotic theories is that Saussure, a linguist, did not feature the referent (or the material object), as did Peirce, with, in my opinion, serious consequences for practical thinking about the relationship between systems of signification and the material world. For a succinct discussion of
70 M. Lane Bruner
these two theorists and their impact on studies of subjectivity, see Silverman, Subject of Semiotics.
4. For a representative interpretation of Jacques Lacan's theory of the Real, see Z ? iz ? ek, "Schagend, aber nicht Treffend," 195-97.
5. For an introduction to the political dimensions of Lacan, see Stavrakakis, Lacan. See also McConnell and Gillett, "Lacan"; Biesecker, "Rhetorical Studies. "
6. On how the discursive construction of madness has itself been historically mad, see Foucault, History of Madness; see also Foucault, Fearless Speech.
7. The term "common sense" is fraught with conceptual complications that cannot be explored adequately here. For those interested in the range of such complications, see Schaeffer, Sensus Communis; Holton, "Bourdieu"; Lyotard, "Sensus Communis"; Bor- mann, "Some 'Common Sense. '"
8. One lives within a personal state (both a material state and a "state of mind"), a web of interpersonal and professional "states" (and states of mind), and within a web of collective states (political, religious, racial, gendered, and so forth) with their mate- rial and imagined dimensions. All of these states are interwoven with the ultimately unknowable and ever-emerging reality of nature. The public work of rhetoric, concep- tualized as the construction of the healthy state, therefore, has multiple dimensions and can take place at many levels. My focus here will only be on the rhetorical construction of collective (national) identities.
9. Once one is aware of the discursive dimensions of subjectivity, however, one still may engage in "strategic essentialism" when combating essentialist problems. See Mar- tin, "Methodological Essentialism. " See Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, for other types of "differential consciousness. "
10. The literature on identity and politics is vast and ranges from the political dimen- sions of personal identity, to debates in aesthetics, to collective identity construction. For a mere sampling, see Goffman, Presentation of Self; Morgan, Inventing the People; Ander- son, Imagined Communities; Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power; Sennett, Fall of Pub- lic Man; Rajchman, Identity in Question. Such texts, obviously, only scratch the surface of what is available on the broad topic of language and identity.
11. I defend this claim in detail in my most recent book, Democracy's Debt.
12. One well-known attempt to explain the logic of the relationship between the material and ideational economy was made by Karl Marx. Marx, German Ideology. For a critique of the essentialist assumptions in Marxism, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
13. See Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance; Bruner, "Rhetorics of the State.
14. Bruner, Democracy's Debt, esp. chapter 2; Bruner, "Taming 'Wild' Capitalism"; Bruner, "Global Constitutionalism"; Bruner, "Global Governance. "
15. Bruner, "Carnivalesque Protest"; Bruner, "Norm Revolutions"; Bruner and Marin, "'Democracies' in Transition. "
16. Bruner and Morozov, Market Democracy.
17. Weintraub, "Theory and Politics. "
18. See Dewey, Public and Its Problems.
19. For histories and theories related to the construction of "peoples," see Morgan,
Inventing the People; Bruner, "Rhetorical Theory"; McGee, "In Search of 'the People. '" 20. For Laclau's theory of the public, see On Populist Reason.
21. On the notions of subaltern and counterpublics, see Fraser, "Rethinking the Pub- lic Sphere"; Asen and Brouwer, Counterpublics and the State; Warner, Publics and Counter- publics.
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 71
22. No hegemonic system--and, therefore, no state--can fully meet the demands of everyone, and thus there is always a certain "violence" associated with such systems/ states. Derrida grappled with the violence of justice and its relationship to the limits of rationality and reason in several of his later essays. See Derrida, Rogues. For a much ear- lier essay dealing with similar issues, see Benjamin, "Critique of Violence. "
23. See Bruner, "Rhetorical Criticism. "
24. Deconstructionists are right to point out that "fields of vision" are enabled by a "blind spot," or a necessary and organizing absence. This, then, is the radical gap within subjectivities themselves, and it is not the same as the gap between subjectivity and materiality.
25. For an enlightening look at deceptive public memory and history education in the United States, see Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me. For a look at how corporate communication impacts "public" spaces, see Klein, No Logo; Mayhew, New Public.
26. Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Debord, Comments on the Society.
27. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 165-67.
28. This is hardly a controversial claim, for the Second World War can be traced in no
small part to debt relations between the United States, Britain, and France, and the ulti- mate impact of U. S. debt policy on German war reparations (though there were many other important reasons, not the least of which was the political/economic history of nationalism). On the role of debt in the world wars, see Hudson, Super Imperialism, 58-161.
29. For a complete transcript of Bush's address, titled "Freedom at War with Fear," see http://www. whitehouse. gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8. html (accessed May 24, 2006). Frighteningly enough, Joseph Goebbels's "New Year's Speech" on December 31, 1939, has an eerily familiar ring: "[Our enemies] hate our people because [they are] decent, brave, industrious, hardworking and intelligent. They hate our views, our social policies, and our accomplishments. They hate us as a Reich and as a community. They have forced us into a struggle for life and death. We will defend ourselves accordingly. " For a transcript of the speech, see http://www. calvin. edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb21. htm (accessed May 26, 2006).
My point in drawing this comparison is not to equate the Bush administration and National Socialism (although his family's financial dealings are quite "interesting"), but simply to provide examples of how official state discourse tends to create grand and abstract explanations for very real and specific historical causes, and since the general public's understanding of historical facts is so thin, these abstract explanations become the basis for their own understanding, oftentimes with dire consequences. For accounts of Prescott Bush's "interesting" financial activities, see Aris and Campbell, "How Bush's Grandfather"; Phillips, American Dynasty.
30. Bill Mahr and the Dixie Chicks are two of the more well known examples, though content analyses of actual media coverage leading up to the war reveals the almost com- plete absence of voices providing anything in the way of historical or political context. See, for example, Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center, "Independent Media in a Time of War," http://video. google. com/videoplay? docid=-6546453033984487696 (accessed June 8, 2008). Cynics might argue that any account of political context would necessarily be biased, and some psychoanalysts might argue that of course the hege- monic public is incapable of dealing more directly with the terrible Thing (ultimately unknowable Nature), but this, I maintain, is to categorically confuse the necessary dis- tance between language and materiality and the relative distance between accounts of materiality and that which actually occurred.
72 M. Lane Bruner
31. Z ? iz ? ek, Welcome to the Desert. See also Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 29-40. According to the theoretical perspective presented here, the "stage" is set in both inten- tional and unintentional ways.
32. For a sampling of the literature on public memory, memorialization, and the poli- tics of memory, especially in Germany, Russia, and Canada, see Bruner, Strategies of Re- membrance, 125-35.
33. Bruner, "Rhetorical Criticism. "
34. See Laclau, On Populist Reason. However, Laclau completely ignores the important work on collective identity construction done by rhetoricians in the United States.
35. The memorial stirred considerable controversy. For a thorough critique of Holo- caust memorials as an exemplary instance of the public work of rhetoric, see Carrier, Holocaust Monuments.
36. Hartmann, Bitburg in Moral, xii.
37. Ibid. , xiv. Kathryn M. Olson also discusses how Reagan attempted to redefine the notion of "victims" prior to and during his Bitburg visit. See Olson, "Controversy. "
38. Brockmann, "Bitburg Deconstruction. " 39. Olson, "Controversy. "
40. Brockmann, "Bitburg Deconstruction," 163.
41.
