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The Experience of Rhetoric and Public Memory

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The Experience of Rhetoric and Public Memory The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of Communication Arts and Sciences JUST REMEMBERING: THE EXPERIENCE OF RHETORIC AND PUBLIC MEMORY A Dissertation in Communication Arts and Sciences by Michael Warren Tumolo 2008 Michael Warren Tumolo Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2008 The dissertation of Michael Warren Tumolo was reviewed and approved* by the following: Stephen H. Browne Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Thomas W. Benson Professor of Speech Communication Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric Rosa A. Eberly Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Associate Professor of English J. Michael Hogan Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Christopher P. Long Associate Professor of Philosophy James P. Dillard Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Head of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT In Just Remembering: The Experience of Rhetoric and Public Memory, I analyze how the rhetoric of public memory texts is experienced, how such experience informs the character and practices of ethics, politics, and justice in the United States, and how we might re-experience public memory in a way that does it justice. The chapters focus on the memorial function of Plato‘s Republic, Hannah Arendt‘s Eichmann in Jerusalem, and The President’s Commission on the Holocaust: Report to the President. My primary concern in this dissertation is to analyze how fundamental predispositions limiting human judgment, knowledge, and agency are forged through the experience of the rhetoric of public memorial texts. Although the valence of ―limiting‖ might suggest that this is an undesirable condition, I contend that this limiting is both necessary, and that accounts of human judgment, knowledge, and agency failing to take the role of the experience of rhetoric seriously do more to alienate than enlighten their audiences from themselves and each other. The critical task of rendering the limits of human judgment, knowledge, and agency explicit allows self-conscious reflection on what is guiding our choices.‖ Human agency (including the capacities of thinking and judging) can be invigorated by coming to a better understanding of how the rhetoric of public memory works. Thus, the primary significance of my dissertation on the experience of rhetoric and public memory is that it offers a way of reclaiming and augmenting ethical, juridical, and political action. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1: Introduction: Just Remembering: The Experience of 1 Rhetoric and Public Memory Chapter 2: The Sublime Experience of Reason 45 Chapter 3: The Politics of Public Memory: Remembering Justice 103 In Narrative Trials of Adolf Eichmann Chapter 4: Such that Never Again? Remembering Man‘s Inhumanity 165 Towards Man: Lessons on Consciousness from the 1979 President‘s Commission on the Holocaust Chapter 5: Epilogue: The Secret Power of the Hidden Archive 233 Appendix: President’s Commission on the Holocaust: Report to 248 the President Bibliography 308 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Rock Ethics Institute and the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at The Pennsylvania State University provided me with generous fellowships to make this research possible. Jennifer Mensch, Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Assistant Director of the Rock Institute, helped me to clarify the direction of this manuscript and to strengthen substantial portions of the introduction and first two chapters. Fortune has allowed me to learn from many of the brightest minds in the discipline of rhetoric at the University of Pittsburgh, Indiana University, The Pennsylvania State University, and Northwestern University. To properly thank all of those who have influenced the thought leading to this manuscript would require another dissertation. People that have directly or indirectly supported me for this manuscript include Jim Andrews, Patricia Hayes-Andrews, Kevin Ayotte, John Christman, Jeremy Engels, Kit Hume, Bob Ivie, Chris Johnstone, John Lucaites, Brett Lunceford, John Poulakos, Robert Terrell, and Julie Thompson. My doctoral committee remained supportive of my teaching and scholarship throughout my stay at Penn State. They have pushed me to excel as a scholar by asking complex questions and expecting complex answers. Rosa Eberly in particular pushed me to examine how the most important questions require a multiplicity of competing answers. I owe a special debt of gratitude to J. Michael Hogan for drawing me to the rhetoric program at Penn State. Professor Hogan is one of the most helpful, attentive, and critical (in the best sense of the word) reviewers of scholarship that I have come across. vi Had I not followed him to Penn State, I may never have had the chance to meet and work with Thomas W. Benson, the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric. Professor Benson inspires his students to become critics. He teaches students, by example, to adopt a critical attitude that is at once calm, pensive, methodical, compassionate, playful, and forceful. The philosophers Charles Scott and Daniel Conway both served on my committee before leaving Penn State for other positions. They influenced how I conceptualize ethics and how I interpret the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Without their guidance, I may not have rekindled my relationship with Nietzsche‘s Genealogy of Morals, which provides one of the questions driving my research program, that of the value of truth. Christopher Long did not hesitate to step onto my committee. I have much to learn from Professor Long‘s readings of Plato. Stephen H. Browne served as the chair for my doctoral committee. From day one, Professor Browne treated me as an independent scholar, giving me the freedom to develop this manuscript as the manuscript developed me. Professor Browne never ceased to have time to discuss ideas or offer suggestions to deepen my focus. A discussion with Professor Browne is an opportunity for contemplation—the vita contemplativa in action. He promised that I would grow to dislike him during revisions because the process requires him to take on a more aggressive role. His promise has been broken, as I appreciate all the time he spent on this manuscript and look forward to the next opportunity to grab a coffee and contemplate with him. vii It seems too obvious to say that what stands outside the academy supports that which happens in it. With this graduation, my parents have watched their five children earn eight university degrees. They should be proud. I am also lucky enough to be supported outside of the academy by a brilliant scholar and teacher—Jennifer Biedendorf. She deserves better than a trite but true gesture where I announce that gratitude is not enough. She reads all of my work, even at stages when no other human should be subjected to it. In both life and scholarship, she helps me think through, around, into, and beyond the perplexing difficulties that I encounter. Although my writing attests to my belief that fixed meaning lacks integrity, I feel as if my life and writing has meaning with her. Thank you Jenny. To Penelope. For her there are no wounded attachments. 1 Chapter 1 Introduction: Just Remembering: The Experience of Rhetoric and Public Memory We are unknown to ourselves, we [knowers and judges]—and with good reason. We have never sought ourselves—how could it happen that we should ever find ourselves? Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals1 You can‘t build a house without nails and wood. If you don‘t want a house built, hide the nails and wood. If you don‘t want a man unhappy politically, don‘t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ―facts‖ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ―brilliant‖ with information. Then they‘ll feel they‘re thinking. They‘ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they‘ll be happy because facts of that sort don‘t change. Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 4512 2 Prologue In The Life of Reason (1905), George Santayana warned that ―those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.‖ While this may be taken as a warning against cyclical history or as an endorsement for an overdetermined progress narrative, it is generally taken as support for the study of history. The warning has also become a truism as advocates have used it to encourage people to remember cataclysmic events of the past such as the Holocaust and the attacks of September 11, 2001.3 These points of articulation implore attentiveness to the forces involved in the production of the past in the present, for there is no necessary correspondence between remembering the past and a the creation of a future worth repeating. Take for instance the phrase ―remember Dresden,‖ which is as easily articulated to a critique of Nazism as it is to Germany‘s right-wing National Democratic Party that draws its support from neo-Nazis.4 Stephen Browne‘s work on the politics of commemoration shows how public memorials play a central role in the creation and circulation of historical knowledge.5 He draws critical attention to the central work of public memorials of teaching people not to forget a past they had neither experienced, known, nor remembered in the first place.6 Public memorials tell a story of the past for present audiences who did not physically experience and/or cannot conjure the past as it actually happened.
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