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.
The Public Work of Rhetoric_nodrm
The sale of single-family homes dropped 15 percent between June 2005 and June
2006. Umberger, "Chicago Feels Housing Chill. " 20. Affordable Housing Conditions, 2-4.
21. Ibid. , 34.
22. Haas et al. , Uptown Housing, 18-19. These agencies include: the city of Chicago's
Department of Housing, the Illinois Development Agency, the Chicago Housing Author- ity, the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Housing Choice Voucher program (Section 8 program).
23. Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, "Greater Chicago Housing. "
24. This fear should be read within the context of CHA's Plan for Transformation, a ten-year, $1. 5 billion overhaul of public housing that called for the demolition of approximately 22,000 of CHA's 39,000 units, the construction of 8,000 units, and the rehabilitation of the remaining 17,000 units. In its final phases in 2006, the plan called for a massive relocation of tens of thousands of public housing residents into mixed- income housing and onto the private rental market through the Housing Choice Voucher program. That Wilson Yard will be solely populated by voucher holders, thus functioning informally as public housing, is a real possibility.
25. Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, "Greater Chicago Housing. "
26. Nyden, Lewis, and Williams, Affordable Housing, 2.
27. Affordable Chicago, 2.
28. Other critiques of the process include that there were no trained facilitators pres-
ent at the charrettes; that the decks were stacked for affordable housing at planning tables by Uptown community organizers and activists; and that the survey was unsci- entific and biased. The survey yielded more community input than is typical, but in terms of the survey's credibility, although "low cost housing" was ranked second behind "movie theater" in response to the question about desired development, "retail" yielded a much higher number of votes overall. Critics argue that this fact was obscured by the survey design, which asked people to check off very specific types of stores, such as Starbucks, Target, and so on, as opposed to one general box for a corporate retail chain.
29. Wilson Yard is partially funded through TIF, which captures incremental property tax growth over twenty-three years, redirecting it toward development projects within a given geographic area. While TIF law requires public hearings for all TIF proposals and a formal municipal approval process, "state law does not require the City to respond to those comments or act on public input regarding TIF districts. " See Neighborhood Cap- ital Budget Group, "TIF Process. " Alderman Shiller, therefore, was not legally required to initiate the extensive community-based process that she did to determine what to build at Wilson Yard.
30. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 49.
54 Candice Rai
31. The criticism that TIF may not promote economic development, and that it might negatively affect property values, is fairly novel in the sense that TIFs are typically criti- cized for prompting economic development without taking into account the social repercussions of gentrification. In this case, the TIF, often considered a neoliberal devel- opment policy, is being used both for prompting economic development and for coun- teracting the social consequences of development by constructing affordable units.
32. Young, City Life and Difference, 227.
33. In 2008 members of the Uptown Neighborhood Council started the Fix Wilson Yard Organization, which, as its Web site claims, "evolved as a grass-roots effort by dedi- cated volunteers in the Uptown community" to stop the project through legal injunc- tion. The organizers wrote in August 2008: "Despite years of trying to work with the public officials to develop a responsible use of taxpayer dollars, they were not willing to listen. This summer, without announcement, they began pre-construction prepara- tion, leaving us no choice but to start the legal battle. " See Fix Wilson Yard, "What Is Wilson. "
34. Fix Wilson Yard, "What Is Wilson. " Works Cited
Affordable Chicago: The Next Five Year Housing Plan, 2004-2008. Chicago: Chicago Rehab Network, June 2003.
Affordable Housing Conditions and Outlook in Chicago: An Early Warning for Intervention.
Nathalle P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement. Chi-
cago: University of Illinois at Chicago, March 2006.
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. "Greater Chicago Housing and Commu-
nity Development Website. " Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, July 20,
2008. http://www. chicagoareahousing. org/List_CCA. asp. Path: Uptown.
City of Chicago, "Maximum Household Income Area Median Chart. " City of Chicago, July 15, 2008. http://www. aldermanshiller. com/content/view/450/169/. Path: 60%
of the Area Median Income.
Cruikshank, Barbara. The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca,
N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1999.
Fix Wilson Yard, "What Is Wilson Yard? ," Fix Wilson Yard, August 18, 2008. http://
www. fixwilsonyard. org/index. html#Update.
Fleming, David. City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America.
Albany: SUNY Press, 2008.
Haas, Peter, Philip Nyden, Thomas Walsh, Nathan Benefield, and Christopher Gian-
greco. The Uptown Housing and Land Use Study. Chicago: Center for Urban Research
and Learning, December 2002.
Habermas, Ju? rgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence.
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1989.
Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. New York: Verso, 2000.
Neighborhood Capital Budget Group. "The TIF Process: Understanding the Process Step-
by-Step. " Neighborhood Capital Budget Group. 2005. August 8, 2006. http://www . ncbg. org/tifs/tif_process. htm.
Power, Publics, and the Rhetorical Uses of Democracy 55
Nyden, Phil, James Lewis, and Kale Williams, eds. Affordable Housing in the Chicago Region: Perspectives and Strategies. Housing Affordability Research Consortium, Chi- cago 2003.
Paley, Julia. "Towards an Anthropology of Democracy. " Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 469-96.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1999. Umberger, Mary. "Chicago Feels Housing Chill. " Chicago Tribune, July 26, 2006. News- Bank Inc. University of Illinois at Chicago, Daley Lib. August 10, 2006. http://www
. uic. edu/depts/lib/.
U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, "Median Income and Income
Limits for Section 8 Program. " U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment, April 5 and September 9, 2006. http://www. huduser. org/datasets/il/il06/ index . html. Path: Illinois; Open the PDF file; Chicago-Naperville-Joliet.
Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1990.
? The Public Work of Critical Political Communication
M. Lane Bruner
Using the term "critical" political communication, I have worked over the last several years to complement mainstream approaches to political commu- nication in a variety of ways: by applying critical philosophy to theories of the public, by considering the relationship between public discourse and public memory, by bringing together identity studies and critical rhetorical theory, and by otherwise seeking to characterize the healthy state. In pursuing this task, the following types of questions have emerged: What are the interrela- tionships among our real and imagined worlds? How does the construction of public memory impact the health of the state? What constitutes political corruption, and what constitutes effective resistance to corruption? What, in sum, is the relationship between identity construction and the healthy state? Working to answer such questions, I argue, is one way of doing the public work of rhetoric.
Few statements are as open to attack, however, as the claim to study the interrelationship between our real and imagined worlds. Critical philoso- phers since Kant have worked to reveal the ineradicable distance between sub- ject and object, the sensory and linguistic limits of our knowledge, and the political consequences of those limits. 1 More recent poststructural and psy- choanalytic philosophers have persuasively argued that humans cannot pos- sibly have complete access to the real, and this is fully in line with Kantian epistemology. 2 Poststructuralist philosophy, based on the insights of semi- otics, provides devastating critiques of objectivity. 3 Some psychoanalytic the- orists suggest that the real constitutes that which cannot be represented; therefore, there is a fundamental and ultimately unbridgeable distance be- tween the natural world and our symbolic and imaginary ways of experienc- ing that world. 4 Since the material/real ultimately escapes signification, and since no system of representation captures materiality in all its impossible
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 57
detail, we are always negotiating our distance from the real in "fictional," "tropological," "imaginary," yet politically consequential, ways. 5
If overly emphasized, however, accounts of the unbridgeable distance be- tween our material existence and our discourses threaten political critique itself. If the real is ultimately unknowable, save through certain politically consequential fictions, then how are we to engage in ideological criticism? How is the enlightenment project of working to constantly test and improve discursive limits to proceed? If no one can stand outside of language or, worse yet, outside of some fictional fantasy (based on repression no less), then on what grounds can we responsibly critique discursive practice? What would constitute an improved human condition and an improved subjective prac- tice? How can we even think about characterizing the relationship between the real and the discursive if the discursive necessarily distorts the real?
To my mind, much of critical philosophy, while rationally based upon the apparent laws of language in use, takes us too far away from the practical communication work being done by people seeking to improve the human condition. Yes, we should keep in mind Michel Foucault's warnings about dis- ciplinary discourses, and how even the best-intentioned people can engage in all kinds of repressive measures, but he never gave up on the power of speak- ing truth to power. 6 Still, some poststructural and psychoanalytic approaches to human subjectivity direct our attention away from "commonsense" con- frontations with human suffering, which is very real, and yet which all too often is caused by "sick" discourses. 7 The question is how to critique "sick" discourses, and upon what normative standard.
One normative standard for assessing and judging the distance between the material and discursive economies can be based, perhaps paradoxically enough, on the insights of critical philosophy, particularly as they relate to the political dimensions of our discursive negotiation with the real. Rather than focusing on the ineradicable gap between subject and object, however, the focus should be on the nature and consequences of that ever-changing gap. Perhaps we will learn that sometimes the gap between our material real- ities and the way we imagine them is ultimately progressive and helpful, while sometimes the gap leads directly to disaster. Critical political communication, therefore, can be usefully conceptualized as an ongoing investigation into the relationships among disciplinary discourses, identity construction, and the healthy state. 8 The critical analysis of communication is a political project related to the public work of rhetoric based on a clear set of guiding maxims taken from critical philosophy. 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?
2006. Umberger, "Chicago Feels Housing Chill. " 20. Affordable Housing Conditions, 2-4.
21. Ibid. , 34.
22. Haas et al. , Uptown Housing, 18-19. These agencies include: the city of Chicago's
Department of Housing, the Illinois Development Agency, the Chicago Housing Author- ity, the U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Housing Choice Voucher program (Section 8 program).
23. Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, "Greater Chicago Housing. "
24. This fear should be read within the context of CHA's Plan for Transformation, a ten-year, $1. 5 billion overhaul of public housing that called for the demolition of approximately 22,000 of CHA's 39,000 units, the construction of 8,000 units, and the rehabilitation of the remaining 17,000 units. In its final phases in 2006, the plan called for a massive relocation of tens of thousands of public housing residents into mixed- income housing and onto the private rental market through the Housing Choice Voucher program. That Wilson Yard will be solely populated by voucher holders, thus functioning informally as public housing, is a real possibility.
25. Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, "Greater Chicago Housing. "
26. Nyden, Lewis, and Williams, Affordable Housing, 2.
27. Affordable Chicago, 2.
28. Other critiques of the process include that there were no trained facilitators pres-
ent at the charrettes; that the decks were stacked for affordable housing at planning tables by Uptown community organizers and activists; and that the survey was unsci- entific and biased. The survey yielded more community input than is typical, but in terms of the survey's credibility, although "low cost housing" was ranked second behind "movie theater" in response to the question about desired development, "retail" yielded a much higher number of votes overall. Critics argue that this fact was obscured by the survey design, which asked people to check off very specific types of stores, such as Starbucks, Target, and so on, as opposed to one general box for a corporate retail chain.
29. Wilson Yard is partially funded through TIF, which captures incremental property tax growth over twenty-three years, redirecting it toward development projects within a given geographic area. While TIF law requires public hearings for all TIF proposals and a formal municipal approval process, "state law does not require the City to respond to those comments or act on public input regarding TIF districts. " See Neighborhood Cap- ital Budget Group, "TIF Process. " Alderman Shiller, therefore, was not legally required to initiate the extensive community-based process that she did to determine what to build at Wilson Yard.
30. Mouffe, Democratic Paradox, 49.
54 Candice Rai
31. The criticism that TIF may not promote economic development, and that it might negatively affect property values, is fairly novel in the sense that TIFs are typically criti- cized for prompting economic development without taking into account the social repercussions of gentrification. In this case, the TIF, often considered a neoliberal devel- opment policy, is being used both for prompting economic development and for coun- teracting the social consequences of development by constructing affordable units.
32. Young, City Life and Difference, 227.
33. In 2008 members of the Uptown Neighborhood Council started the Fix Wilson Yard Organization, which, as its Web site claims, "evolved as a grass-roots effort by dedi- cated volunteers in the Uptown community" to stop the project through legal injunc- tion. The organizers wrote in August 2008: "Despite years of trying to work with the public officials to develop a responsible use of taxpayer dollars, they were not willing to listen. This summer, without announcement, they began pre-construction prepara- tion, leaving us no choice but to start the legal battle. " See Fix Wilson Yard, "What Is Wilson. "
34. Fix Wilson Yard, "What Is Wilson. " Works Cited
Affordable Chicago: The Next Five Year Housing Plan, 2004-2008. Chicago: Chicago Rehab Network, June 2003.
Affordable Housing Conditions and Outlook in Chicago: An Early Warning for Intervention.
Nathalle P. Voorhees Center for Neighborhood and Community Improvement. Chi-
cago: University of Illinois at Chicago, March 2006.
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning. "Greater Chicago Housing and Commu-
nity Development Website. " Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning, July 20,
2008. http://www. chicagoareahousing. org/List_CCA. asp. Path: Uptown.
City of Chicago, "Maximum Household Income Area Median Chart. " City of Chicago, July 15, 2008. http://www. aldermanshiller. com/content/view/450/169/. Path: 60%
of the Area Median Income.
Cruikshank, Barbara. The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. Ithaca,
N. Y. : Cornell University Press, 1999.
Fix Wilson Yard, "What Is Wilson Yard? ," Fix Wilson Yard, August 18, 2008. http://
www. fixwilsonyard. org/index. html#Update.
Fleming, David. City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America.
Albany: SUNY Press, 2008.
Haas, Peter, Philip Nyden, Thomas Walsh, Nathan Benefield, and Christopher Gian-
greco. The Uptown Housing and Land Use Study. Chicago: Center for Urban Research
and Learning, December 2002.
Habermas, Ju? rgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a
Category of Bourgeois Society. Translated by Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence.
Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, 1989.
Hauser, Gerard A. Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres. Columbia:
University of South Carolina Press, 1999.
Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. New York: Verso, 2000.
Neighborhood Capital Budget Group. "The TIF Process: Understanding the Process Step-
by-Step. " Neighborhood Capital Budget Group. 2005. August 8, 2006. http://www . ncbg. org/tifs/tif_process. htm.
Power, Publics, and the Rhetorical Uses of Democracy 55
Nyden, Phil, James Lewis, and Kale Williams, eds. Affordable Housing in the Chicago Region: Perspectives and Strategies. Housing Affordability Research Consortium, Chi- cago 2003.
Paley, Julia. "Towards an Anthropology of Democracy. " Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 469-96.
Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1999. Umberger, Mary. "Chicago Feels Housing Chill. " Chicago Tribune, July 26, 2006. News- Bank Inc. University of Illinois at Chicago, Daley Lib. August 10, 2006. http://www
. uic. edu/depts/lib/.
U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, "Median Income and Income
Limits for Section 8 Program. " U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Develop- ment, April 5 and September 9, 2006. http://www. huduser. org/datasets/il/il06/ index . html. Path: Illinois; Open the PDF file; Chicago-Naperville-Joliet.
Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, N. J. : Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1990.
? The Public Work of Critical Political Communication
M. Lane Bruner
Using the term "critical" political communication, I have worked over the last several years to complement mainstream approaches to political commu- nication in a variety of ways: by applying critical philosophy to theories of the public, by considering the relationship between public discourse and public memory, by bringing together identity studies and critical rhetorical theory, and by otherwise seeking to characterize the healthy state. In pursuing this task, the following types of questions have emerged: What are the interrela- tionships among our real and imagined worlds? How does the construction of public memory impact the health of the state? What constitutes political corruption, and what constitutes effective resistance to corruption? What, in sum, is the relationship between identity construction and the healthy state? Working to answer such questions, I argue, is one way of doing the public work of rhetoric.
Few statements are as open to attack, however, as the claim to study the interrelationship between our real and imagined worlds. Critical philoso- phers since Kant have worked to reveal the ineradicable distance between sub- ject and object, the sensory and linguistic limits of our knowledge, and the political consequences of those limits. 1 More recent poststructural and psy- choanalytic philosophers have persuasively argued that humans cannot pos- sibly have complete access to the real, and this is fully in line with Kantian epistemology. 2 Poststructuralist philosophy, based on the insights of semi- otics, provides devastating critiques of objectivity. 3 Some psychoanalytic the- orists suggest that the real constitutes that which cannot be represented; therefore, there is a fundamental and ultimately unbridgeable distance be- tween the natural world and our symbolic and imaginary ways of experienc- ing that world. 4 Since the material/real ultimately escapes signification, and since no system of representation captures materiality in all its impossible
The Public Work of Critical Political Communication 57
detail, we are always negotiating our distance from the real in "fictional," "tropological," "imaginary," yet politically consequential, ways. 5
If overly emphasized, however, accounts of the unbridgeable distance be- tween our material existence and our discourses threaten political critique itself. If the real is ultimately unknowable, save through certain politically consequential fictions, then how are we to engage in ideological criticism? How is the enlightenment project of working to constantly test and improve discursive limits to proceed? If no one can stand outside of language or, worse yet, outside of some fictional fantasy (based on repression no less), then on what grounds can we responsibly critique discursive practice? What would constitute an improved human condition and an improved subjective prac- tice? How can we even think about characterizing the relationship between the real and the discursive if the discursive necessarily distorts the real?
To my mind, much of critical philosophy, while rationally based upon the apparent laws of language in use, takes us too far away from the practical communication work being done by people seeking to improve the human condition. Yes, we should keep in mind Michel Foucault's warnings about dis- ciplinary discourses, and how even the best-intentioned people can engage in all kinds of repressive measures, but he never gave up on the power of speak- ing truth to power. 6 Still, some poststructural and psychoanalytic approaches to human subjectivity direct our attention away from "commonsense" con- frontations with human suffering, which is very real, and yet which all too often is caused by "sick" discourses. 7 The question is how to critique "sick" discourses, and upon what normative standard.
One normative standard for assessing and judging the distance between the material and discursive economies can be based, perhaps paradoxically enough, on the insights of critical philosophy, particularly as they relate to the political dimensions of our discursive negotiation with the real. Rather than focusing on the ineradicable gap between subject and object, however, the focus should be on the nature and consequences of that ever-changing gap. Perhaps we will learn that sometimes the gap between our material real- ities and the way we imagine them is ultimately progressive and helpful, while sometimes the gap leads directly to disaster. Critical political communication, therefore, can be usefully conceptualized as an ongoing investigation into the relationships among disciplinary discourses, identity construction, and the healthy state. 8 The critical analysis of communication is a political project related to the public work of rhetoric based on a clear set of guiding maxims taken from critical philosophy. 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
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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).
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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
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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?
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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
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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
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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?
