Recursivity: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Mnesis
2012; Routledge; Volume: 99; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00335630.2012.714901
ISSN1479-5779
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
ResumoAbstract This essay proposes the genealogical study of remembering and forgetting as recursive rhetorical capacities that enable discourse to place itself in an ever-changing present. Mnesis is a meta-concept for the arrangements of remembering and forgetting that enable rhetoric to function. Most of the essay defines the materiality of mnesis, first noting the limitations of studying recursivity within dominant approaches remembering and forgetting in rhetorical studies, then describing mnesis as the performative necessity to fold the past into the present so as to provide “now” with a sense of place. After setting a foundation, the essay closes with a sketch of how to produce a genealogy of recursion. Keywords: RememberingForgettingRhetoricGenealogyPlace-Making Acknowledgments The author thanks Dr. McKerrow and the reviewers for their help in improving this essay. He also thanks Jeremy Engels for his support and Megan Foley for her sharp observations on its weaknesses. He especially thanks Naomi Jacobs, whose love and editing (which are the same if done right) are always sustaining. Notes 1. Karl Kerényi, “Mnemosyne—Lesmosyne: On the Spring of ‘Memory’ and ‘Forgetting,’” trans. Magda Kerényi, Spring: An Annual of Psychology and Jungian Thought (1977): 130; Edward S. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 2nd ed. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), 12. 2. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Pimlico, 1992), 17–62. 3. Carole Blair, “Contested Histories of Rhetoric: The Politics of Preservation, Progress, and Change,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 403–28. 4. Nathan Stormer, “Articulation: A Working Paper on Rhetoric and Taxis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 257–84. 5. Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Materialism: The Rhetorical Subject and the General Intellect,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, & Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 60. 6. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald F. Bouchard, trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 152. 7. Foucault, “Nietzsche,” 147, 144. 8. Foucault, “Nietzsche,” 147, 148. 9. Foucault, “Nietzsche,” 148–49, 150. 10. Michael Calvin McGee, “A Materialist's Conception of Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, & Politics, ed. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 38. 11. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 23; Michel Foucault, “The Order of Discourse,” in The Archaeology of Knowledge & The Discourse on Language, trans. Rupert Sawyer (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 216. Also see Greene, “Materialism,” 60. 12. Blair, “Contested,” 419. 13. Ruth Bordin, Women and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873–1900 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981); Nathan Stormer, “To Remember, To Act, To Forget: Tracing Collective Remembrance Through a ‘Jury of Her Peers,’” Communication Studies 54 (2003): 510–29; Michael P. Johnson, A Typology of Domestic Violence: Intimate Terrorism, Violent Resistance, and Situational Couple Violence (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2008), Kindle edition. 14. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power, and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22–40; Bradford Vivian, “The Threshold of the Self,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 33 (2000): 303–18; Ian Hacking, “Making Up People,” London Review of Books, August 17, 2006, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n16/ian-hacking/making-up-people. 15. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 3–27. Also see Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 88–102; Pierre Bourdieu, Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 52–65. 16. Foucault, “Nietzsche,” 153–57; Raymie E. McKerrow, “Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Practice,” Communication Monographs 56 (1989): 100–09. 17. Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 96–120. 18. Edward S. Casey, “Public Memory in Place and Time,” in Framing Public Memory, Kendall R. Phillips, ed. (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 17–44. 19. George Campbell, Philosophy of Rhetoric (FQ Legacy Books, 2010), Kindle Edition, Book 1, Chapter 1. 20. Greene, “Materialism,” 43–65. 21. Connerton, Societies, 6. Also see Michel de Certeau, The Capture of Speech & Other Political Writings, trans. Tom Conley, intro. Luce Giard (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 129–30. 22. I do not use “mneme” because it means “memory,” whereas mnesis means “memory-related.” 23. Bradford Vivian, Public Forgetting: The Rhetoric and Politics of Beginning Again (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 3. 24. Vivian, Forgetting, 9. 25. Vivian, Forgetting, 46, original emphasis. 26. There are too many works to list even partially. In a four-page endnote (n. 105), Blair, Dickinson, and Ott list only examples of memory literature. Carole Blair, Greg Dickinson, and Brian L. Ott, “Introduction: Rhetoric/Memory/Place,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 48–52. 27. Tzvetan Todorov, Memory as a Remedy for Evil, trans. Gila Walker (London: Seagull Books, 2010). 28. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 142, 143. 29. Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 45–77. 30. Vivian, Forgetting, 3–4. 31. Rose, Inventing, 37–38, 173–82. 32. Foucault, Sexuality, 143. 33. Kendall R. Phillips, “The Failure to Remember: Reflections on Rhetoric and Public Remembrance,” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 217–21. 34. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Michel Senellart et al., trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003); Esposito, Bios, 45–77. 35. Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 214–39; Jeffrey K. Olick, The Politics of Regret: On Collective Memory and Historical Responsibility (New York: Routledge, 2007), 89. 36. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 201–15. 37. Blair, Dickinson, and Ott, “Introduction,” 25–30. 38. Marouf Hasian, Jr., Legal Memories and Amnesias in America's Rhetorical Culture (Boulder, CO: Westview, 2000); Marouf Hasian, Jr., In the Name of Necessity: Military Tribunals and the Loss of American Civil Liberties (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 54–78; Marouf Hasian, Jr., Rhetorical Vectors of Memory in National and International Holocaust Trials (Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2006). 39. Todorov, Memory; Vivian, Forgetting, 14, original emphasis. Also see Iwona Irwin-Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1994), 133–60. 40. Connerton, Societies, 13–21; Jacques LeGoff, History and Memory, trans. Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 127–37; Jeffrey K. Olick and Joyce Robbins, “Social Memory Studies: From ‘Collective Memory’ to the Historical Sociology of Mnemonic Practices,” Annual Review of Sociology 24 (1998): 105–40; Casey, Remembering, 37–85, 146–215, 262–87; Riceour, Memory, 24–30, 50–54. 41. Benjamin, Illuminations, 201–03. 42. Carole Blair and Neil Michel, “Reproducing Civil Rights Tactics: The Rhetorical Performances of the Civil Rights Memorial,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 30 (2000): 41. 43. Connerton, Societies, 88–102; Bourdieu, Logic, 52–65. 44. Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 73–77. 45. For example, see Charles E. Morris III, “My Old Kentucky Homo: Lincoln and the Politics of Queer Public Memory,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 89–114; Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, “Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 27–47, particularly 28. 46. Carole Blair, “Reflections on Criticism and Bodies: Parables from Public Places,” Western Journal of Communication 65 (2001): 271–94. 47. For example, see Bernard J. Armada, “Memorial Agon: An Interpretive Tour of the National Civil Rights Museum,” Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998): 235–44; Stephen H. Browne, “Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Commemoration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 169–87; Victoria Gallagher, “Memory and Reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 2 (1999): 303–20; Marouf Hasian, Jr. and Rulon Wood, “Critical Museology, (Post)Colonial Communication, and the Gradual Mastering of Traumatic Pasts at the Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA),” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 128–49; Brian L. Ott, Erik Aoki, and Greg Dickinson, “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8 (2011): 215–39. As of 2009, Phillips found 88 texts identified by “public memory” in NCA journal archives (“Failure,” 208). 48. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, “Spaces,” 29; Theresa Ann Denofrio, “Ground Zero and Place-Making Authority: The Conservative Metaphors in 9/11 Families’ ‘Take Back the Memorial’ Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Communication 74 (2010): 153, 165; Kenneth S. Zagacki and Victoria J. Gallagher, “Rhetoric and Materiality in the Museum Park at the North Carolina Museum of Art,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95 (2009): 171–72; Bryan C. Taylor, “Radioactive History: Rhetoric, Memory, and Place in the Post-Cold War Nuclear Museum,” in Places of Public Memory: The Rhetoric of Museums and Memorials, ed. Greg Dickinson, Carole Blair, and Brian L. Ott (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2010), 64–65. 49. Blair, “Reflections,” 274–76. Also see Gallagher, “Reconciliation,” 305–08. 50. Blair, “Reflections,” 283. 51. Barbara Biesecker, “Renovating the National Imaginary: A Prolegomenon on Contemporary Paregoric Rhetoric,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 212–13, 226. Also see Barbara Biesecker, “Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 393–409; John Bodnar, The “Good War” in American Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 52. Plato, Theaetetus, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Public Domain Books), Kindle edition; Plato, Phaedrus, trans. Alexander Nehemas and Paul Woodruff (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1995), 79–80; Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence (Cybraria LLC), Kindle edition; Gorgias, “Encomium of Helen,” in The Older Sophists, ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague, trans. George Kennedy (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1972), 53–54. Also see Yates, Memory, 42–62; Ricoeur, Memory, 7–21. 53. Connerton, Societies, 36–40; Olick and Robbins, “Social,” 109–12; Ricoeur, Memory, 120–24; Olick, Regret, 5–9; Phillips, “Failure,” 209–17. 54. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 40, 53, 47. Also see Bradford Vivian, “'A Timeless Now’: Memory and Repetition,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 187–211. 55. Connerton, Societies, 36. 56. W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 4–5. 57. Casey, Remembering, 20–36. 58. Peter Wagner, “Ekphrasis, Iconotexts, and Intermediality—the State(s) of the Art(s),” in Icons, Texts, Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality, ed. Peter Wagner (Berlin: Walter de Guyter, 1996), 13. Also see Mitchell, Picture, 151–57. 59. Halbwachs, Collective, 53. 60. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, fore. and trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 6. 61. Michel Foucault, This is Not a Pipe, 2nd ed., trans. James Harkness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 44. 62. Ricoeur, Memory, 44–55. 63. Vivian, “‘Timeless,’” 204–6. 64. Ricoeur, Memory, 55; also see 412. Also see Irwin-Zarecka, Frames, 147. 65. Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Peter Demetz, pref. Leon Wieseltier (New York: Schocken Books, 2007), 30–34. 66. Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. and intro. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981), 63–171. 67. Zelizer, “Reading,” 232. 68. Zelizer, “Reading,” 232–33. 69. Barbie Zelizer, “The Voice of the Visual in Memory,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 158–64; Barbie Zelizer, Covering the Body: The Kennedy Assassination, the Media, and the Shaping of Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Barbie Zelizer, Remembering to Forget: Holocaust Memory Through the Camera's Eye (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 70. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), xiii. 71. Bennett, Vibrant, 1, 3. 72. McGee, “Materialist's,” 23. 73. Bennett, Vibrant, vii. Bennett refers to Jacques Ranciere's concept of the “partition of the sensible.” 74. Bennett, Vibrant, 116–17, original emphasis. 75. Foucault, “Nietzsche,” 139–64. 76. Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 12. 77. Burke, Rhetoric, 23. 78. Doreen Massey, For Space (London: SAGE, 2005), 68. Also see Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 76. 79. Olick, Regret, 89. 80. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in Friedrich Nietzsche on Rhetoric and Language, ed. and trans. Sander L. Gilman, Carole Blair, and David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989 [1873]), 246–57. Also see the discussion of “empty signifiers” in Ernesto Laclau, On Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005), 69–72. 81. Zelizer, Remembering, 3. 82. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 124, original emphasis. 83. Burke, Religion, 128, 126. 84. Burke, Religion, 124; also see 156–57. Also see Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System: Circulating Subjects through Michael Warner's ‘Publics and Counterpublics,’” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 434–43; Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation and Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 43 (2010): 1–25. 85. Burke, Religion, 125. 86. Edwin Black, “Secrecy and Disclosure as Rhetorical Forms,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 139. 87. Page duBois, Torture and Truth: The New Ancient World (New York: Routledge, 1991). 88. Jeremy Gilbert, “Public Secrets: ‘Being-with’ in an Era of Perpetual Disclosure,” Cultural Studies 21 (2007): 26; Jacques Derrida, “‘I Have a Taste for the Secret,’” in A Taste for the Secret, Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, ed. Giacomo Donis and David Webb, trans. Giacomo Donis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 57–59. 89. Burke, Religion, 128. 90. Burke, Religion, 128. 91. I refer only to the immediate context, which is not indicative of all Burke's writings, as Deborah Hawhee eloquently demonstrates. See Deborah Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges of Language (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 114–24, 139–40, 156–67. Also see Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 96–98. 92. See Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Uses and Abuses of History in Life, trans. Ian Johnston (Arlington, VA: Richer Resources Publications, 2010), Kindle edition, pt. 1. 93. Gilles Deleuze, Bergonsim, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 74. I do not take Bergson whole cloth, preferring Bennett's “vital materialism” to Bergson's transcendent vitalism. 94. Yates, Memory, 17–41; Connerton, Societies, 7–13, 32–34. 95. Benjamin, Illuminations, 202. 96. Deleuze, Fold, 23. I borrow liberally from and recombine Deleuze's The Fold with Bergsonism. Also see Benjamin, Illuminations, 263. 97. Casey, Remembering, 39. 98. Casey, Remembering, 38. Casey's types of encapsulation correspond to synecdoche, example, and emblem. The typology could include scores given the available tropological relations. 99. Deleuze, Fold, 35. 100. Deleuze, Fold, 79–80. Deleuze's discussion of Whitehead's “event” resonates with Charles E. Scott's argument about “appearance” in public memory. Charles E. Scott, “The Appearance of Public Memory,” in Framing Public Memory, ed. Kendall R. Phillips (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 147–56. 101. Deleuze, Fold, 10 102. Deleuze, Fold, 26. 103. Friedrich Nietzsche, A Genealogy of Morals, trans. Ian Johnston (Arlington, VA: Richter Resources Publications, 2009), Kindle edition, Second Essay, pt. 1, original emphasis. 104. Deleuze, Fold, 37–38. 105. As an example, I will not provide a lengthy list of references. For a superb discussion of domestic violence—what is it, who does it, who suffers it—see Johnson, Typology. 106. Blair, “Contested,” 420. Additional informationNotes on contributorsNathan StormerNathan Stormer is the Bailey Professor of Speech & Theatre at the University of Maine
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