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Article Excerpt
This essay uses primary source publications from Nazi Germany to explore how anti-Semitism developed and intensified into a genocidal logic. Understanding how this intensification could occur long before the networks of concentration camps or World War II arose could reveal how language paves a path to genocide. Using the concepts of telos and logology garnered from Kenneth Burke enables the rhetorical logic of anti-Semitism to unfold and become subject to disruption.
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The rapidly growing scholarly literature on the Holocaust has been accompanied by a deepening concern about how knowledge of the Holocaust may be conveyed. The watchword of efforts toward Holocaust education has been "Never forget!" with the concomitant stress on factual accuracy and understanding the motives that led to genocide. Even the most thorough treatments of the Holocaust, however, can suffer from a "rhetorical blind spot" (Schwartzman, 1995, p. 2) by devoting insufficient attention to the role language plays in transforming anti-Semitic sentiments into genocidal policies. More generally, further attention should focus on how, borrowing Kenneth Burke's (1966) phrasing, "language as symbolic action" facilitates the construction and support of practices that reinforce the ideals expressed via terminological choices.
Elucidating the links between terminology and policy invites a reconsideration of what Holocaust studies should accomplish. Placed in the context of classical rhetoric, study of the Holocaust could qualify as one of the few modern moves toward restoring the dormant canon of memoria. As recently as 1995, the study of memory in communication was described as "nascent" and "still unfolding" (Zelizer, 1995, p. 215). In her review of memory studies, Zelizer (1995) suggested that memory can actively reconstruct the past. The following discussion explores another active dimension of memory: how close attention to terminological choices can provides resources for response. Returning to classical rhetoric, my task is to rekindle memory about the Holocaust to fuel the inventional capacity to craft ways of avoiding such destructive consequences in the future. Developing memory alone, while encouraging historical accuracy, does little to combat indoctrination. If understanding should be distinguished from acceptance, then inventive capacity should be encouraged as an antidote to overdoses of memory.
Using Kenneth Burke's concepts of telos and logology, this study traces the biologically rooted terminology of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany as it built momentum toward eliminating populations deemed racially inferior. Identification of key metaphors--in this case, biological and medical--can reveal how linguistic resources that foster bigotry and genocide persist before becoming J manifest in overt violence. To reduce such latent facilitators of destruction, I demonstrate how terminological choices might be rendered contingent. Recognition of contingency invites alternatives to the received terminology, thus avoiding the apparently natural, logical, and inevitable progression from inflammatory words to destructive deeds. Recognizing this developmental path may enable swifter, more effective recognition and response when confronted with other types of bigotry.
The Philosophy and Method of Telogology
In his well-known essay "Definition of Man," Kenneth Burke describes humanity as "rotten with perfection." The perfectionist impulse, he claims, "is central to the nature of language as motive" (Burke, 1966, p. 16). At the level of individual terms, the principle of perfection arises as the urge to call things by their "proper" names that capture their essence. Taken as a more historical principle, perfectionism describes the tendency of any terminology to invite and generate implications toward a supposed ideal essence or end result (Burke, 1966, pp. 18-19). The ideal would be the telos, and an "architectonic" could be constructed that investigates "the full (or, if you will, fulsome) terminologies that can be developed in connection with the 'logic of perfection'" (Burke, 1970, p. 300). Telogology, then, traces how terminologies can be woven to facilitate the realization of (or asymptotic approach to) an identifiable ultimate goal.
Although a neologism, telogology has roots in classical Greek thought. Burke configured the logological telos as a linguistic equivalent to the entelechy of Aristotelian physics (Burke, 1970, p. 300). Burke notes the "biological analogy" of the entelechy, with its doctrine of an entity that "'implicitly contains' a future conforming to its nature" if the conditions appropriate for this development are present (Burke, 1970, p. 246). The teleological progression represents more than a metaphysical pronouncement that the final product or outcome somehow lies latent in the nature of the nascent entity. Saying that the acorn implicitly contains the mature oak tree has little cognitive significance even as a metaphor. Instead, Burke remarks that the entelechy does not reside in objects themselves. In this respect, Aristotle mistakenly confused developmental processes with the objects that undergo these transformations. Aristotle also used a spatial metaphor that adds puzzlement by confining the process to the object. Sometimes processes are identified so closely with properties of objects that the entelechy borders on personification. Substances have natural tendencies for movement, according to Aristotle. Objects move to the center of the earth because it is "their goal," and any individual body will obey "the goal of its impulse" (Aristotle, 1941, 296b.12, 297b.7). Aristotle's recurrent discussion of "natural" movement connects physical observations of motion with their metaphysical explanation as necessary entelechial progressions. Burke moves toward correcting these confusions by adding that the entelechy should be sought "in the ground of the process as a whole" (1970, p. 247; emphasis in original).
The concept of telos has been applied specifically to events preceding the Holocaust. Kenneth Kronenberg (1997) defines 'telos' as a "[seemingly] inexorable movement toward a goal that is somehow seen as predetermined. A teleological argument involves a strong sense of predetermination from a First Cause or a final outcome." Kronenberg justifiably chides historians who use such arguments to...
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