Lessons from the Past?

Memory, Narrativity and Subjectivity

Bernhard Forchtner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137483225
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

This book reconstructs how claims to know 'the lessons' from past wrongdoings are made useful in the present. These claims are powerful tools in contemporary debates over who we are, who we want to be and what we should do. Drawing on a wide range of spoken and written texts from Austria, Denmark, Germany and the United States, this book proposes an abstract framework through which such claims can be understood. It does so by conceptualising four rhetorics of learning and how each of them links memories of past wrongdoings to opposition to present and future wrongdoings. Drawing extensively on narrative theory, Lessons from the Past? reconstructs how links between past, present and future can be narrativised, thus helping to understand the subjectivities and feelings that these stories facilitate. The book closes by considering if and how such rhetorics might live up to their promise to know 'the lessons' and to enable learning, offering a revised theory of collective learning processes.

© The Author(s) 2016

Bernhard ForchtnerLessons from the Past?Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies10.1057/978-1-137-48322-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Lessons from the Past? Introducing the Rhetorics of Learning

Bernhard Forchtner¹

(1)

School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

End Abstract

Once upon a time, the idea of progress, the promise of utopian projects and bright futures, guided (Western) actors. It might still do so—but this tale or, to put it more sociologically, the classical narrative of modernity, has arguably exhausted itself to an ever greater extent. Instead of ‘progressive narratives’ (Alexander, 2002), it has been ‘present pasts’ (Huyssen, 2000) which have increasingly been put on centre stage, a development illustrated by the memory wave building up since the 1980s. Against this background, looking back has become more important for the formation of collective and individual subjectivities. This is not to say that it has ever been irrelevant; but is has become a less legitimate option not to remember, especially concerning suffering and ‘trauma’. In fact, such memory work oriented towards recognition of past wrongdoings, for example concerning the Holocaust and Latin American dictatorships, has been increasingly future-oriented, aiming for preventing evil.¹

As this development has sparked calls for and processes of ‘coming to terms with’ (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) and securing past wrongdoings (Vergangenheitsbewahrung, see Assmann, 2010, p. 105), it is deeply interwoven with implicit and explicit claims to know the lessons and, sometimes even, claims to have successfully learnt from what happened. Such claims, which offer orientation in a complex world by insisting on the exemplary nature of past events, draw on the classic topos of historia magistra vitae (in the following simply ‘history as a teacher’) which Cicero (1959, II, pp. 9, 36) famously summarised by saying that history ‘sheds light upon reality, gives life to recollection and guidance to human existence’. While Koselleck (2004) spoke of the decline of this understanding of time in historiography due to the rise of Neuzeit and the emergence of progress, the memory boom of recent decades has offered a backdrop against which claims to know the lessons become a promising rhetorical option in public and private debates, be it in discourses on military interventions or the banking crisis of the early twenty-first century.

However, while numerous speeches, pamphlets and policy proposals have claimed to know the lessons from past wrongdoing—texts which have fed the field of memory studies—there still appears to be no systematic framework for understanding these claims, no taxonomy of claims for knowing. That is, while many studies have included analyses of claims for knowing (see, for example, works published in this book series), there is a lack of studies concerning abstract, conceptual questions (and how these questions are connected) along the following lines: ‘From what past wrongdoing are we supposed to learn? (Is wrongdoing attributed to the in-group or an out-group?)’ ‘To what present-day wrongdoing are lessons from this past linked? (Is wrongdoing attributed to the in-group or an out-group?)’ And, finally, ‘What subject positions emerge through these narrative connections of past, present and future?’ After all, as memories of the past are selective products of contemporary meaning making, they are deeply interwoven with projects of identity building and legitimation (Halbwachs, 1992). Memories and subjectivities are thus linked in complex ways and pasts, presents and futures imagined and mobilised in narrating lessons, in narratives about what to learn from the past, contribute to fix subjects in certain positionalities of meaning. The ambition of this book is, therefore, to provide an abstract model of types of claims for knowing the past and its lessons, and the consequences these claims have for identities—a model conceptualising what I call rhetorics of learning.

Before elaborating on these rhetorics, let me indicate the relevance of these questions by turning briefly to two quotes taken from the European Parliament, sitting on 29 January 2003, which debated a possible attack on Iraq (EP, 2003). In this (as well as the wider) debate over an attack by the USA under President George W. Bush against the Iraq of Saddam Hussein who allegedly harboured weapons of mass destruction, both supporters as well as opponents of military action frequently claimed to know the lessons from the past—though these were very different ones.

Example (E) 1/1:

Political torment plagued Europe in the last century. The ideologically ‘legitimised’ obsession with power on the part of dictators created millions of victims. They certainly did not spare their own citizens. Is the parallel with the loathsome regime of Saddam Hussein not obvious here? […] Recent European history should show government leaders their responsibility in this regard.

E1/2:

America should listen to old Europe, this wise old lady, covered in blood and tears […] Let America listen to her! This old lady would say: choose security through international law, bow to the decisions of the UN, agree to another UN meeting, which we must demand, for another resolution.

On the one hand, these two examples—the first quote is taken from a speech by Bastiaan Belder, Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and of the Eurosceptic Group for a Europe of Democracies and Diversities, while the second comment was made by Bernard Poignant, a MEP from the social democratic Group of the Party of European Socialists—illustrate conflicting uses of the topos of history as a teacher, one favouring military intervention, the other making the case against it. On the other hand, however, I am not primarily interested in the particular content, the political position put forward in specific claims but rather in diverging structures underlying narrating lessons. Looking at these two examples, the former appears to draw lessons from a wrong committed by others (‘dictators’ driven by extremist ideologies) and directs them towards others who do wrong in the present (those ‘government leaders’ who have not yet realised their ‘responsibility’). In contrast, the latter narrates an in-group (‘old Europe’; at one point in his speech, Poignant explicitly speaks of ‘our Europe’) which has failed and is polluted by past wrongdoings while calling on a present-day other to learn from it (‘America should listen to old Europe’).² Whatever readers make of these particular performances, they indicate a structural difference in how knowing the lessons from the past can be claimed. It is exactly this kind of difference which will occupy me for the rest of this book. Instead of analysing particular case studies, I introduce a typology of four structurally different types of claims to know the lessons from the past by conceptualising four rhetorics of learning (Fig. 1.1). This will attempt to clarify how their respective uses of the topos of history as a teacher affect subjects and their identities, events and their significance, objects and their mobilisation, and processes and their outcomes, in distinct ways.

Fig. 1.1

Rhetorics of learning

I use the term rhetoric in a broad sense, referring to ‘the possible means of persuasion’ (Aristotle, 1982, I, pp. 2, 1), while dismissing its widespread, negative connotations. I am, however, not interested in whether these attempts to persuade are consciously applied or not (see Bruner, 2011, pp. 404f.), but rather in the ways in which they mobilise cultural structures in their attempts to offer objects of desire and subject positions. Rhetorics of learning are thus persuasive uses of language—here, in particular, due to the narrative form through which experiences and demarcations are created and actors and actions become symbolically polluted or purified (Douglas, 2002).

But what does this mean in relation to rhetorics of learning? Looking at Fig. 1.1, and starting in the top-right corner, the rhetoric of judging narrativises past wrongdoing as committed by an out-group; a background against which the subject of this rhetoric claims to know the lessons and constructs a present-day out-group as being not ‘in the know’. The rhetoric of failing also narrates past wrongdoing as committed by an out-group. This past is, however, self-critically directed towards the present-day in-group, as the claim to know gives rise to a warning that, this time, the in-group might fall. The rhetoric of penitence differs to the extent that the in-group’s past is narrated as wrong. This admission prepares the ground for claims to know the lessons which are self-critically directed towards the present-day in-group, thus facilitating a continuous process of more or less severe self-questioning. Finally, via the rhetoric of judge-penitence, past in-group wrongdoing is narrated as having been successfully ‘worked through’. The confessing subject has allegedly learnt the lessons, is reformed—while the out-group supposedly has not and is thus in need of our guidance.

Let me add to this that, first, while I will mostly talk about collective subjects, about nations and political groups, of us versus them, the four rhetorics are understood to be both relevant for the construction of collective subjects as well as individual ones. Second and equally important, while I will usually speak of past and present wrongdoing, the present I refer to includes our or their potential future wrongdoing, i.e. warnings and predictions. Third and most importantly, the four rhetorics are conceived as types. In consequence, the numerous examples employed in the following will illustrate a wide range of possible realisations, some closer to ‘the ideal’ of the respective rhetoric, while others will be borderline cases. Looking at Fig. 1.1, a speech might, broadly speaking, realise a rhetoric of penitence, though it might include either unambiguous acknowledgements of our past and present-day failures (being thus located in the bottom left and constituting a rather ‘pure’ example) or hedging and mitigation which would place it close to the centre.

Despite such differences, all four rhetorics of learning deal with wrong pasts in the present; and in arranging events, they are presented to the audience in narrative form. The latter has long been recognised as a form that is not culture-specific, but shared by humanity across time and space; a form through which meaning is created by selectively arranging events in a causal sequence. This implies that lessons are not ‘out there’, waiting to be found if only one would look hard enough. Not only is the past far too complex to serve as a blueprint for the present and future (Gumbrecht, 1997, p. 411)—at least if going beyond commonplaces such as ‘preventing evil is important’. But, more fundamentally, memory always comes in narrative form and is meaningful exactly because of this form. Memories, i.e. stories about the past, are thus never complete but selective, present-day arrangements which play a key role in discursive struggles. While things have undoubtedly happened in the past, and while individual events are certainly verifiable, the assembling of events as in particular stories about what the past teaches in the present, is characterised by a co...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Lessons from the Past? Introducing the Rhetorics of Learning
• 2. On Plot Grammars and Modes of Emplotment
• 3. The Rhetoric of Judging
• 4. The Rhetoric of Failing
• 5. The Rhetoric of Penitence
• 6. The Rhetoric of Judge-Penitence
• 7. Narrating Lessons and Collective Learning Processes
• 8. Concluding Remarks
• Backmatter