The Future of Forgetting: Rhetoric, Memory, Affect

Abstract

This article argues for a rethinking of the rhetorical canon of memory as a productive tool for understanding and effectively responding to recent changes in culture, economics, and politics. After reviewing historical conceptions of rhetorical memory both before and after its “canonization,” we identify two processes at the heart of the contemporary relationships between persuasion and memory: an “externalization” of memory and commonplace rhetorical structures through information networks and technologies, and an “internalization” of memory and dispositions that takes place in human affective systems. We conclude by arguing for the value of such an expanded notion of rhetorical memory for addressing two of the more pervasive and significant registers of contemporary persuasion: advertising and populist politics.

Notes

¹See Rossi (97–129) for a detailed history of the influence of Ramus's approach to rhetorical memory.

²Of course, analyses of the intersection of rhetoric and memory through specific objects or texts often entail or imply analysis of how rhetoric and memory come together in general. For instance, Haskins's reading of the U.S. Post Office's Celebrate the Century, discussed below, uses that particular campaign to make broader judgments about the potential use and misuse of collective memory (particularly the reduction of memory texts to the status of commodities or propaganda). Our approach here might be read as performing something of a similar process in reverse: identifying the overall structures of rhetorical memory as vectors of subjective experience and rhetorical performance, to claim that something of these structures circulates in all instances of rhetorical memory.

³As Vernant emphasizes, although there were many gods associated with human capacities or skills, “Mnemosyne seems to be a special case. Memory is a very complicated function related to important psychological categories, such as time and identity. It brings into play a whole collection of complex mental operations that can be mastered only with effort, training, and exercise” (Myth 116).

⁴For instance, in “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” Sedgwick and Frank emphasize the context of mid-twentieth century cybernetics—and the interest in thinking of the brain and/or body as structured like a machine—on the affective theories of Silvan Tomkins. In N. Katherine Hayles's How We Became Posthuman, affect is leveraged as her primary example for human singularity during a time when machines and information technology have made claims on other human capacities (245–246). Finally, as George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael MacKuen write in their Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment, their influential work on the role of affect in political decision making was inspired by Herbert Simon's early work on how affect divides “human” and “machine” thinking (6–7).

⁵See Wells for a journalistic account of this trend and Lindstrom for an overview by a practitioner.

⁶We might read this shift as an intensification of the trend Richard Lanham identified in as the “fundamental figure/ground reversal” between “fluff” and “stuff” in the early days of the information economy (6). For Lanham, the commoditization of immaterial phenomena (information, the ethereal “aura” of consumer products) seemed to be giving it many of the qualities that we would traditionally only associate with material goods. Whereas for Lanham, increased focus on branding mechanisms and the importance of aesthetics in marketing emphasized rhetoric's historical positioning as the creation of manipulation of “style,” the ubiquity of niche-marketing strategies in both commerce and political electioneering seems to take us back even further in the rhetorical tradition and its emphasis on generic persuasion “itself” as the flexible manipulation of the existing interests and investments of an audience.

⁷For a recent survey of work on affect in political science and psychology, see the anthology The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior (the source of the Schnur piece cited above and below).