Neoliberal Epideictic: Rhetorical Form and Commemorative Politics on September 11, 2002

Abstract

Public memorial services held in New York City on September 11, 2002, marked the most important U.S. civic commemoration of the present era. Numerous popular and academic critics excoriated speakers on that day for commemorating the occasion with commemorative declamations instead of offering original speeches. This essay contends that assessing these unusual public eulogies according to post-Romantic conceptions of rhetorical practice overlooks the often powerful role of formulaic speech in shaping the politics of civic commemoration. The essay accordingly argues that state eulogies on the first anniversary of September 11 exemplify the emergence of neoliberal epideictic. Ritualized public praise of neoliberal ideals increasingly constitutes the normative speech of our most important civic ceremonies. The essay concludes that neoliberal epideictic defines citizens’ involvement in partisan affairs and recognition of sociopolitical difference or inequity as irreverent means of sustaining civic memory, tradition, and virtue.

Keywords:

• Epideictic
• Neoliberalism
• Commemoration
• Rhetorical Form
• September 11

Notes

1. Thucydides, “Funeral Speech,” in The Speeches of Pericles, trans. H. G. Edinger (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1979), 2.35.

2. Demosthenes, “The Funeral Speech,” in Demosthenes VII, trans. Norman W. DeWitt and Norman J. DeWitt, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 1.

3. Gerard Hauser, “Aristotle on Epideictic: The Formation of Public Morality,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 29 (1999): 17–18.

4. Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), 48.

5. An introductory list of sources pertaining to the artistic form or civic functions of epideictic includes Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 1.9; Walter H. Beale, “Rhetorical Performative Discourse: A New Theory of Epideictic,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 11 (1978): 221–46; Theodore C. Burgess, Epideictic Literature (New York: Garland Publishing, 1987); Richard Chase, “The Classical Conception of Epideictic,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 47 (1961): 293–300; Celeste M. Condit, “The Function of Epideictic: The Boston Massacre Orations as Exemplar,” Communication Quarterly 33 (1985): 284–98; Scott Consigny, “Gorgias's Use of the Epideictic,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 25 (1992): 281–97; A. Leigh DeNeef, “Epideictic Rhetoric and the Renaissance Lyric,” The Journal of Medieval Studies 3 (1973): 203–31; Bernard K. Duffy, “The Platonic Function of Epideictic Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 16 (1983): 79–93; Hauser, “Aristotle on Epideictic”; Nicole Loraux, The Invention of Athens: The Funeral Oration in the Classical City, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986); Josiah Ober and Barry Strauss, “Drama, Political Rhetoric, and the Discourse of Athenian Democracy,” in Nothing to Do with Dionysos: Athenian Drama in Its Social Context, ed. John J. Winkler and Froma I. Zeitlin (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 237–70; John W. O'Malley, Praise and Blame in Renaissance Rome: Rhetoric, Doctrine, and Reform in the Sacred Orators of the Papal Court, c. 1450-1521 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979); Christine Oravec, “‘Observation’ in Aristotle's Theory of Epideictic,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 9 (1976): 162–74; John Poulakos, “Gorgias’ and Isocrates’ Use of the Encomium,” The Southern Speech Communication Journal 51 (1986): 300–307; Takis Poulakos, “Isocrates's Use of Narrative in the Evagoras: Epideictic, Rhetoric and Moral Action,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73 (1987): 317–28; “Historiographies of the Tradition of Rhetoric: A Brief History of Classical Funeral Orations,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 172–88; Lawrence W. Rosenfield, “The Practical Celebration of Epideictic,” Rhetoric in Transition, ed. Eugene E. White (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980), 131–56; Rosenfield, “Central Park and the Celebration of Virtue,” in American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 221–66; Dale L. Sullivan, “The Ethos of Epideictic Encounter,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 26 (1993): 113–33; Jeffrey Walker, “Aristotle's Lyric: Re-Imagining the Rhetoric of Epideictic Song,” College English 51 (1989): 5–28.

6. See especially Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Casey, Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp and Lori A. Lanzilotti, “Public Memory and Private Grief: The Construction of Shrines at the Sites of Public Tragedy,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84 (1998): 150–70; Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). See also John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).

7. Randal C. Archibold, “Political Ad and 9/11 Speech May Be an Unwelcome Mix,” New York Times, August 15, 2002, B4. See also “‘We Owe It to Those That We Lost to Expand Our Quest’: Perspectives,” New York Times, September 11, 2002, A15; Rick Hampson, “NYC Unveils Plans for Sept. 11 Events,” USA Today, August 7, 2002, 3A; Karen Matthews, “Former Mayor Giuliani to Read Victims’ Names at WTC Ceremony,” The Associated Press State and Local Wire, August 6, 2002; Janny Scott, “Sept. 11 Leaves Speakers at a Loss for Their Own Words,” New York Times, August 11, 2002, A29; Joel Stashenko, “Pataki Will Read Cherished Speech on Sept. 11,” The Associated Press State and Local Wire, September 8, 2002.

8. Thanks to David Depew for his interpretation of these addresses as politically neoliberal.

9. Clyde Haberman quoting Sorenson “Speechless in the Face of History,” New York Times, August 30, 2002, B1.

10. Scott quoting Hart, “Sept. 11 Leaves Speakers at a Loss,” A29.

11. Scott quoting Wills, “Sept. 11 Leaves Speakers at a Loss,” A29.

12. Loraux, The Invention of Athens, 2.

13. Loraux, The Invention of Athens, 2, 3, 4, 5-10.

14. Casey, Remembering: A Phenomenological Study, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 216–57.

15. See Stephen H. Browne, “Remembering Crispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Commemoration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 169–87; Condit, “The Function of Epideictic.”

16. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 43.

17. Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 10.

18. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 58.

19. James Jasinski, “Instrumentalism, Contextualism, and Interpretation in Rhetorical Criticism,” in Rhetorical Hermeneutics: Invention and Interpretation in the Age of Science, ed. Alan G. Gross and William M. Keith (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 197.

20. Jasinski, “Instrumentalism, Contextualism, and Interpretation,” 214.

21. Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 6. See also David Baldwin, ed., Neorealism and Neoliberalism: The Contemporary Debate (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); John L. Campbell and Ove K. Pedersen, eds., The Rise of Neoliberalism and Institutional Analysis (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, eds., Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Randall Rothenberg, The Neo-Liberals: Creating the New American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984).

22. The Editors, “Finding a Way to Remember,” U.S. News and World Report 133 (August 2002): 10; Joyce Purnick, “A Modern Rite of Mourning: Must-See TV,” New York Times, September 12, 2002, A22.

23. Haberman, “Speechless in the Face of History,” B1.

24. Scott, “Sept. 11 Leaves Speakers at a Loss,” A29.

25. Denise M. Bostdorff and Steven L. Vibbert, “Values Advocacy: Enhancing Organizational Images, Deflecting Public Criticism, and Grounding Future Arguments,” Public Relations Review 20 (1994): 141–58.

26. Mortimer J. Adler and William Gorman, The American Testament (New York: Praeger, 1975), 9–13.

27. Rhetorical scholarship on allegory includes Robert Hariman, “Allegory and Democratic Public Culture in the Postmodern Era,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 35 (2002): 267–96; Martin Irvine, “Interpretation and the Semiotics of Allegory in Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine,” Semiotica 63 (1987): 33–71; Robert C. Rowland, “On Limiting the Narrative Paradigm: Three Case Studies,” Communication Monographs 56 (March 1989): 39–54; V. Tejera, “Irony and Allegory in the Phaedrus,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 8 (Spring 1975): 71–87; Phillip Walker, “Arthur Miller's The Crucible: Tragedy or Allegory?,” Western Speech 20 (Fall 1956): 222–24.

28. On the democratic or postmodern qualities of allegory, see Hariman, “Allegory and Democratic Public Culture”; E. D. Hirsch, Jr., “Transhistorical Intentions and the Persistence of Allegory,” New Literary History 25 (1994): 549–67; and Zhang Longxi, “Historicizing the Postmodern Allegory,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 36 (1994): 212–31.

29. See Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977); Barthes, “From Work to Text,” in Image Music Text; Michael Calvin McGee, “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture,” Western Journal of Communication 54 (1990): 274–89.

30. Abraham Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” in Great Speeches: Abraham Lincoln (New York: Dover, 1991), 103.

31. Gary Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster), 146–47. See also Adler and Gorman, The American Testament, 121, 127, 132; Edward Dumbauld, The Declaration of Independence And What It Means Today (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), 58.

32. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Springfield, Illinois, June 26, 1857,” in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press), 406.

33. Lincoln, “Gettysburg Address,” 104. See Philip F. Detweiler, “The Changing Reputation of the Declaration of Independence: The First Fifty Years,” William and Mary Quarterly 19 (October 1962): 557–74; Stephen E. Lucas, “Justifying America: The Declaration of Independence as a Rhetorical Document,” in American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), 67–130; Henry V. Jaffa, “Abraham Lincoln and the Universal Meaning of the Declaration of Independence,” in The Declaration of Independence: Origins and Impact, ed. Scott Douglas Gerber (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2002), 29–44; Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997); Merrill D. Peterson, Jefferson and the New Nation: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 92; Charles Warren, “Fourth of July Myths,” William and Mary Quarterly 2 (1945): 237–45.

34. Thomas Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence,” in The Essential Thomas Jefferson, ed. John Gabriel Hunt (New York: Random House, 1994), 24.

35. Jefferson, “The Declaration of Independence,” 44.

36. Jennifer Steinhauer quoting Zarefsky, “New York to Observe Sept. 11 With Dawn-to-Dusk Tributes,” New York Times, August 7, 2002, A1.

37. Franklin D. Roosevelt quoting Roosevelt, “‘Four Freedoms’ Speech,” in Nothing to Fear: The Selected Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1932–1945, ed. B. D. Zevin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946), 274–75.

38. Roosevelt, “‘Four Freedoms’ Speech,” 274–75.

39. See Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Progressive Government,” in American Rhetorical Discourse, 3rd ed., ed. Ronald F. Reid and James F. Klumpp (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2005), 734–46; Roosevelt, “Annual Message to Congress—the Economic ‘Bill of Rights,’” in Nothing to Fear: The Selected Addresses of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1932–1945, ed. B. D. Zevin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946), 387–97.

40. Roosevelt, “‘Four Freedoms’ Speech,” 274.

41. See Adler and Gorman, The American Testament, 107; Charles A. Kromkowski, “The Declaration of Independence, Congress, and Presidents of the United States,” in Gerber, ed., The Declaration of Independence: Origins and Impact, 136.

42. Roosevelt, “‘Four Freedoms’ Speech,” 274.

43. Representative examples of this trend include Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Band of Brothers, 600 min., HBO Video, 2002; Tom Brokaw, The Greatest Generation (New York: Random House, 1998); Saving Private Ryan, dir. Stephen Spielberg, 2 hr. 49 min., Dreamworks Home Entertainment, 1999, videocassette. For commentary, see Barbara A. Biesecker, “Remembering World War II: The Rhetoric and Politics of National Commemoration at the Turn of the 21st Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (November 2002): 393–409; Denise M. Bostdorff, “George W. Bush's Post-September 11 Rhetoric of Covenant Renewal: Upholding the Faith of the Greatest Generation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 4 (2003): 293–319; Richard Goldstein, “World War II Chic,” Village Voice, January 19, 1999, 47.

44. On the militarism and xenophobia of eulogies in the classical tradition, see Loraux, The Invention of Athens, 45, 80, 221–62.

45. John M. Murphy, “‘Our Mission and Our Moment’: George W. Bush and September 11th,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4 (2003): 607–32; Bostdorff, “George W. Bush's Post-September 11 Rhetoric.”

46. George W. Bush, “We Will Prevail”: President George W. Bush on War, Terrorism, and Freedom, sel. and ed. by National Review (New York: Continuum, 2003), 182.

47. Bush, “We Will Prevail”, 183.

48. Murphy, “‘Our Mission and Our Moment.’”

49. Haberman, “Speechless in the Face of History,” B1.

50. See, for example, F. G. Bailey, The Tactical Uses of Passion: An Essay on Power, Reason, and Reality (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983); Catherine A. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds., Language and the Politics of Emotion (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Jorgensen-Earp and Lanzilotti, “Public Memory and Private Grief”; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Dissent and Emotional Management in a Liberal-Democratic Society: The Kent State Iconic Photograph,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 31 (Summer 2001): 4–31; Michel Maffesoli, The Contemplation of the World: Figures of Community Style, trans. Susan Emanuel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

51. Murray Edelman's Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) represents a classic study of political spectacles in this vein. For a rhetorical analysis of contemporary ceremonial spectacles, see David Procter, “The Dynamic Spectacle: Transforming Experience into Social Forms of Community,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (May 1990): 117–33.

52. Maffesoli, The Contemplation of the World, 57, 62.

53. Dan Barry, “Vigilance and Memory,” New York Times, September 12, 2002, A1.

54. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press), viii.

55. Bonnie J. Dow, “The Function of Epideictic and Deliberative Strategies in Presidential Crisis Rhetoric,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 53 (1989): 294–310; John M. Murphy, “‘A Time of Shame and Sorrow’: Robert F. Kennedy and the American Jeremiad,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 76 (1990): 401–14.

56. See Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment and Politics, Language and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (New York: Atheneum, 1971).

57. The origins of this tendency are suggestively explored in Sacvan Bercovitch's The Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993). See Bostdorff, “George W. Bush's Post-September 11 Rhetoric,” for a rhetorical analysis of President Bush's messianic themes in the wake of the terrorist attacks.

58. Harry Truman, “The Truman Doctrine,” in American Rhetorical Discourse, 2nd ed., ed. Ronald F. Reid and James F. Klumpp (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1995), 751.

59. Joseph McCarthy, “Speech at Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9, 1950,” in In Our Own Words: Extraordinary Speeches of the American Century, ed. Andrew Carroll, Robert Torricelli, and Doris Kearns Goodwin (New York: Washington Square Press, 2000), 173.

60. Ronald Reagan, “The ‘Evil Empire’ Speech,” in American Rhetorical Discourse, 3rd ed., ed. Ronald F. Reid and James F. Klumpp (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 2005), 802.

61. Bush, “We Will Prevail”, 183.

62. Hannah Arendt, “What is Freedom?,” in The Portable Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 458.

63. Haberman, “Speechless in the Face of History,” B1.

64. James E. Young, At Memory's Edge: After-Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 199; Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 13.

65. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 49.

66. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1998) and “What is Freedom?”

67. Susan Sontag, “Real Battles and Empty Metaphors,” New York Times, September 10, 2002, A25.

68. Loraux, The Invention of Athens, 16, 19.

69. James Jasinski reminds us that epideictic is potentially subversive, despite its frequent invocation by privileged subjects; see “Rearticulating History in Epideictic Discourse: Frederick Douglass's ‘The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro,’” in Rhetoric and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Thomas W. Benson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1997), 71–89. See also Browne, “Remembering Crispus Attucks.”

70. This echoes Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's claim that global capitalism has privatized public goods, services, and exchanges; see Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 300–303.