No More Learning

S. executive branch wanted to "construct a history that would be useful to Cold War Ide- ology. "38 Kathryn M. Olson notes that Reagan "seemed motivated by grati- tude to Kohl for being the European point player in favor of deploying Pershing 2 and cruise missiles," and he was also seeking support for his space- based missile defense plan and for involvement in Nicaragua. 39 "According to Allied decree in 1945," notes Brockmann, "the German Reich had ceased to exist, and as it was decreed so it came to pass. Suddenly there was no more German Reich, and there were no more Nazis, and the United States began to use the services of those who had ceased to be Nazis in the continued fight against communism, the new Nazism. "40 No doubt the Soviet Union had its "back story" as well.
But perhaps it is just "as well. " After all is said and done, the German state continues to pay reparations, it is diplomatically deferential to Israel, and from all accounts the Germans have become one of the most "democratic" peoples in the West. Not only have most traces of National Socialism been suppressed in that state, but the country is now a leading member of the New World Order of market democracies. The country is actively participating in the on- going construction of the European Union (though perhaps from too neo- liberal a bias), which is helping to temper the forces of ethnic and cultural nationalism with constitutional patriotism (though neoliberal influences con- tinue to stand in the way of a reasonable European constitution). The outcome on the whole, however, has hardly been negative for world politics, given that a peaceful, social democracy based on republican principles and the rule of law has come to replace two authoritarian regimes.
But what of the costs of these erasures, and of equating the German peo- ple with the victims of National Socialism? Who, today, is publicly discussing the historical roots of National Socialism and the potential relationship between Fascism and capitalism? What are the requisite conditions for Fascism to reemerge? What would those conditions look like, and how might we antici- pate them? How might we protect ourselves from another outbreak of ethnic nationalism in Europe? What, in sum, does it mean for the human political community to have the causes and perpetrators of National Socialism "off limits" for public discussion, save for in a highly mythologized way?
These are questions for the future, perhaps, but the political consequences of collective identity construction are continuously emerging around the world. Even as I write, "Georgia" and "Russia" are fighting viciously over "Ossetia. " What does "Ossetian," "Georgian," and "Russian" identity mean in the conflict, and how are those identities being "mobilized"? Collective
68 M. Lane Bruner
identity construction can disrupt even normally peaceful and prosperous states, like Canada. Just over a decade ago, an ethnic-nationalist separatist movement erupted in Quebec that almost tore the state in two, though the movement ideologically claimed it was multicultural. 41 Why should Quebec secede from Canada? How do those who identify themselves as "Que? be? cois" imagine their historical relationship with Great Britain? Why would an ethnic-nationalist movement insist on its multicultural status?
And just where does the logic of sovereignty stop? In the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was a "parade of sovereignties," as "peo- ples" rose up to claim their independence. Not only large territories known as Lithuania, Armenia, Ukraine, and Georgia, but even many of the territorial units within the Russian Federation declared their sovereignty. Even some cities declared their sovereignty! 42 Since national identity construction is still going strong all across the world, and wars between "sovereign" states seem to erupt on a monthly basis, one way we can do the public work of rhetoric is by mapping the distance between history and memory, understanding how far those imaginaries are from historical fact, and with what consequence.
Concluding Thoughts
The previous three examples of the public work of rhetoric as critical politi- cal communication are not meant to delimit the objects of such study, or to claim that this is the only way to responsibly engage in "public work. " Lan- guage works to create identities in all sorts of ways: in ways that increase and decrease human suffering. There are numbers of suitable subjects for such work, from the intrapersonal to the transnational, and we need not limit our focus to broad collective identities such as race, gender, ethnicity, class, or na- tionality. All discourses, or all embodied ways of interpreting the world, are "disciplinary. " No matter what the discourse, some statements are simply un- acceptable, others are unwelcome. How might we map these "unspeakable" zones in order to determine their effects?
What of the pressing questions of our own day? Is the skyrocketing federal debt a problem or not? Is global warming a real threat? What is the world's oil supply today, really, and what does that suggest for our long-term eco- nomic and political future? Do the "evildoers" have weapons of mass destruc- tion, and who, really, are the evildoers? Why is it "OK" for Pakistan to possess nuclear weapons, but not Iran? Do Iran, Iraq, and North Korea truly constitute an "axis of evil"? What should be done about illegal immigration? Should we have built the prisons in Guantanamo Bay and in other secret locations? Are our state or local school boards corrupt, and what, after all, constitutes respon- sible education in an age that would become postessentialist? There are so many questions about our world that there is really no time, or will, to learn the answers. So what to do? Must so-called elites manage information for us? How can we trust that they themselves are not misguided or misinformed, or,
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worse yet, self-interested and deceptive? Can we reform our educational sys- tem to reinforce the average citizen's ability to weigh public argument? 43
What role can communication scholars play in alleviating this world-his- torical problem of the persistent distance between fact and opinion, between knowledge and belief, and between the unfolding of history and its complex causes and the way that history is characterized and interpreted? If rhetorical critics could even begin to unravel the mysteries that are these distances, what realistic chance do they have of actually impacting the trajectory of political events? 44
It seems prudent, therefore, to consider how we might transform our peda- gogical and research practices in order to make a world-historical impact on the process of identity construction. Recognizing the seemingly innumerable anti-enlightenment forces that stand in our way--from metaphysically com- forting essentialisms to cynical and unenlightened self-interest--there is much to be done. As Carolyn Miller notes elsewhere in this volume, it may well be that "dissimulation and concealment are indeed necessary for rhetorical suc- cess. " That said, however, different types of "concealment" lead to different types of consequences. While we may indeed need to mask our arts of critique in order to make them more effective, let us hope Miller is incorrect when she claims that "such a project cannot be a global or a programmatic one. " If that is the case, then the un-enlightened forces of identity construction will undoubtedly defeat the forces of enlightenment.
Notes
1. Critical philosophy differs from analytic philosophy. See Todd May, Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1-25. Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek recently engaged in an interesting debate on the nature of the real and the political. See Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek, "Against the Populist Temptation," Critical Inquiry 32 (Spring 2006): 551-74; Ernesto Laclau, "Why Constructing a People Is the Main Task of Radical Politics," Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006): 646-80; and Slavoj Z ? iz ? ek, "Schagend, aber nicht Treffend! " Critical Inquiry 33 (Autumn 2006): 185-211. See also Kant, Political Writ- ings; Mouffe, Democratic Paradox; and Laclau, On Populist Reason, for a sampling of criti- cal political theory.
2. Arthur Schopenhauer neatly characterized Kant's fundamental argument: "Kant's greatest merit is the distinction of the phenomenon from the thing-in-itself, based on the proof that between things and us there always stands the intellect, and that on this account they cannot be known according to what they may be in themselves. . . . The complete diversity of the ideal from the real, is the fundamental characteristic of Kant- ian philosophy" (World as Will, 417-18). If Kant is correct, this means that the public work of rhetoric must deal directly with the nature of this "intellect," or the discursive ways in which we come to negotiate and understand our world.
3. Semiotic theory can be traced to the rather different work of Ferdinand de Saus- sure and Charles S. Peirce. The main difference between their two semiotic theories is that Saussure, a linguist, did not feature the referent (or the material object), as did Peirce, with, in my opinion, serious consequences for practical thinking about the relationship between systems of signification and the material world. For a succinct discussion of
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these two theorists and their impact on studies of subjectivity, see Silverman, Subject of Semiotics.
4. For a representative interpretation of Jacques Lacan's theory of the Real, see Z ? iz ? ek, "Schagend, aber nicht Treffend," 195-97.
5. For an introduction to the political dimensions of Lacan, see Stavrakakis, Lacan. See also McConnell and Gillett, "Lacan"; Biesecker, "Rhetorical Studies. "
6. On how the discursive construction of madness has itself been historically mad, see Foucault, History of Madness; see also Foucault, Fearless Speech.
7. The term "common sense" is fraught with conceptual complications that cannot be explored adequately here. For those interested in the range of such complications, see Schaeffer, Sensus Communis; Holton, "Bourdieu"; Lyotard, "Sensus Communis"; Bor- mann, "Some 'Common Sense. '"
8. One lives within a personal state (both a material state and a "state of mind"), a web of interpersonal and professional "states" (and states of mind), and within a web of collective states (political, religious, racial, gendered, and so forth) with their mate- rial and imagined dimensions. All of these states are interwoven with the ultimately unknowable and ever-emerging reality of nature. The public work of rhetoric, concep- tualized as the construction of the healthy state, therefore, has multiple dimensions and can take place at many levels. My focus here will only be on the rhetorical construction of collective (national) identities.
9. Once one is aware of the discursive dimensions of subjectivity, however, one still may engage in "strategic essentialism" when combating essentialist problems. See Mar- tin, "Methodological Essentialism. " See Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, for other types of "differential consciousness. "
10. The literature on identity and politics is vast and ranges from the political dimen- sions of personal identity, to debates in aesthetics, to collective identity construction. For a mere sampling, see Goffman, Presentation of Self; Morgan, Inventing the People; Ander- son, Imagined Communities; Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power; Sennett, Fall of Pub- lic Man; Rajchman, Identity in Question. Such texts, obviously, only scratch the surface of what is available on the broad topic of language and identity.
11. I defend this claim in detail in my most recent book, Democracy's Debt.
12. One well-known attempt to explain the logic of the relationship between the material and ideational economy was made by Karl Marx. Marx, German Ideology. For a critique of the essentialist assumptions in Marxism, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy.
13. See Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance; Bruner, "Rhetorics of the State.
14. Bruner, Democracy's Debt, esp. chapter 2; Bruner, "Taming 'Wild' Capitalism"; Bruner, "Global Constitutionalism"; Bruner, "Global Governance. "
15. Bruner, "Carnivalesque Protest"; Bruner, "Norm Revolutions"; Bruner and Marin, "'Democracies' in Transition. "
16. Bruner and Morozov, Market Democracy.
17. Weintraub, "Theory and Politics. "
18. See Dewey, Public and Its Problems.
19. For histories and theories related to the construction of "peoples," see Morgan,
Inventing the People; Bruner, "Rhetorical Theory"; McGee, "In Search of 'the People. '" 20. For Laclau's theory of the public, see On Populist Reason.
21. On the notions of subaltern and counterpublics, see Fraser, "Rethinking the Pub- lic Sphere"; Asen and Brouwer, Counterpublics and the State; Warner, Publics and Counter- publics.
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22. No hegemonic system--and, therefore, no state--can fully meet the demands of everyone, and thus there is always a certain "violence" associated with such systems/ states. Derrida grappled with the violence of justice and its relationship to the limits of rationality and reason in several of his later essays. See Derrida, Rogues. For a much ear- lier essay dealing with similar issues, see Benjamin, "Critique of Violence. "
23. See Bruner, "Rhetorical Criticism. "
24. Deconstructionists are right to point out that "fields of vision" are enabled by a "blind spot," or a necessary and organizing absence. This, then, is the radical gap within subjectivities themselves, and it is not the same as the gap between subjectivity and materiality.
25. For an enlightening look at deceptive public memory and history education in the United States, see Loewen, Lies My Teacher Told Me. For a look at how corporate communication impacts "public" spaces, see Klein, No Logo; Mayhew, New Public.
26. Debord, Society of the Spectacle; Debord, Comments on the Society.
27. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front, 165-67.
28. This is hardly a controversial claim, for the Second World War can be traced in no
small part to debt relations between the United States, Britain, and France, and the ulti- mate impact of U. S. debt policy on German war reparations (though there were many other important reasons, not the least of which was the political/economic history of nationalism). On the role of debt in the world wars, see Hudson, Super Imperialism, 58-161.
29. For a complete transcript of Bush's address, titled "Freedom at War with Fear," see http://www. whitehouse. gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8. html (accessed May 24, 2006). Frighteningly enough, Joseph Goebbels's "New Year's Speech" on December 31, 1939, has an eerily familiar ring: "[Our enemies] hate our people because [they are] decent, brave, industrious, hardworking and intelligent. They hate our views, our social policies, and our accomplishments. They hate us as a Reich and as a community. They have forced us into a struggle for life and death. We will defend ourselves accordingly. " For a transcript of the speech, see http://www. calvin. edu/academic/cas/gpa/goeb21. htm (accessed May 26, 2006).
My point in drawing this comparison is not to equate the Bush administration and National Socialism (although his family's financial dealings are quite "interesting"), but simply to provide examples of how official state discourse tends to create grand and abstract explanations for very real and specific historical causes, and since the general public's understanding of historical facts is so thin, these abstract explanations become the basis for their own understanding, oftentimes with dire consequences. For accounts of Prescott Bush's "interesting" financial activities, see Aris and Campbell, "How Bush's Grandfather"; Phillips, American Dynasty.
30. Bill Mahr and the Dixie Chicks are two of the more well known examples, though content analyses of actual media coverage leading up to the war reveals the almost com- plete absence of voices providing anything in the way of historical or political context. See, for example, Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center, "Independent Media in a Time of War," http://video. google. com/videoplay? docid=-6546453033984487696 (accessed June 8, 2008). Cynics might argue that any account of political context would necessarily be biased, and some psychoanalysts might argue that of course the hege- monic public is incapable of dealing more directly with the terrible Thing (ultimately unknowable Nature), but this, I maintain, is to categorically confuse the necessary dis- tance between language and materiality and the relative distance between accounts of materiality and that which actually occurred.
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31. Z ? iz ? ek, Welcome to the Desert. See also Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 29-40. According to the theoretical perspective presented here, the "stage" is set in both inten- tional and unintentional ways.
32. For a sampling of the literature on public memory, memorialization, and the poli- tics of memory, especially in Germany, Russia, and Canada, see Bruner, Strategies of Re- membrance, 125-35.
33. Bruner, "Rhetorical Criticism. "
34. See Laclau, On Populist Reason. However, Laclau completely ignores the important work on collective identity construction done by rhetoricians in the United States.
35. The memorial stirred considerable controversy.
For a thorough critique of Holo- caust memorials as an exemplary instance of the public work of rhetoric, see Carrier, Holocaust Monuments.
36. Hartmann, Bitburg in Moral, xii.
37. Ibid. , xiv. Kathryn M. Olson also discusses how Reagan attempted to redefine the notion of "victims" prior to and during his Bitburg visit. See Olson, "Controversy. "
38. Brockmann, "Bitburg Deconstruction. " 39. Olson, "Controversy. "
40. Brockmann, "Bitburg Deconstruction," 163.
41. Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance, 68-88; Charland, "Constitutive Rhetoric. "
42. On the parade of sovereignties, see Bruner, Strategies of Remembrance, 40-41.
43. The debate between those supporting elite management of public opinion and
those supporting public education is nicely traced in the work of Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. See Lippmann, Public Opinion; Dewey, Public.
44. Rhetorical critics, who tend to publish their work in obscure academic journals, are, as would be expected, generally ignored when it comes to their political warnings. For example, in 1939 Kenneth Burke penned a critical essay on Hitler's rhetoric, warn- ing that Hitler's dark "magic" was likely to spell doom for Europe. Nobody listened. See Burke, "Rhetoric of Hitler's Battle. "
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