Steiner, like Zalaquett and Ignatieff, proposes that truth commissions not engage what rhetoricians recognize as the stases: arguments at the level of value, cause and consequence, and procedure and proposal.
On intellectual grounds, some scholars doubt a truth commission’s ability to negotiate the competing demands of politics and scholarly inquiry. Charles S. Maier lauds a truth commission’s ability to gather the raw material of a dark period of history, but he argues that it is ill equipped to engage in the historian’s craft of “moral sifting” (268): “Historians, I believe, will have to use this material, but integrate it into a different framework” (273). Indeed, historians Mahmood Mamdani, Colin Bundy, and Alexander Neville attribute what they characterize as South Africa’s truth commission’s “compromised historical account” to the compromised nature of the political transition itself. Meanwhile, philosophers tend either to identify the logical fallacies in the ideology of truth commissions, which they attribute to its “public and political purposes” (Holiday 56), or to impose coherence and consistency onto that ideology. For example, Daniel Herwitz attributes a philosophical coherence to the TRC’s “epistemic regime” that glosses over its significant and unresolved contradictions (41). Psychologists are dubious about the healing effects of truth commissions. They observe that truth telling in the context of a truth commission might serve some victims’ desire to share their stories and the nation’s need for a fuller account of the abuses of the past, but does not address the deeper psychological effects of trauma. Whether in praise or blame, these scholars apply academic criteria to the work of truth commissions.
Rhetoricity of Truth Commissions
These varied critiques simultaneously highlight and disavow the inherent and inevitable rhetoricity of truth commissions. Truth commissions are neither the unsullied brainchild of theorists nor the polished machine of technocrats. They are rhetorical experiments, real-world efforts to enact change in the uncertain realm of contingent human affairs via our primary medium of exchange: language. Because truth commissions are mandated to investigate contested narratives, and, in some instances, to promote reconciliation among adversaries, they must negotiate the demands of multiple publics—a rhetorical process that involves fostering complex and ever-changing networks of identification among stakeholders. While a truth commission’s mandate sets it in motion, it does not fully control participants’ inquiries into the meaning of the past and its bearing on the present and future. No matter a truth commission’s ideological imperatives and maxims—“revealing is healing” or “let it out”—individual victims and perpetrators find ways to mold the commission’s process to suit their needs and to tell the stories they feel need to be told. The commission’s rhetoric becomes an inventional resource, not a determinant of participants’ arguments about the past. Truth commissions also provide a window onto the relationship between language and subject-formation. When participants speak before a truth commission, we witness the dynamic exchange between their pretransitional ways of knowing and being and those made available by the truth commission and the new democracy. The tension between these participants’ and the commission’s notions of what aspects of the past should be remembered, and how, makes the public hearing a particularly dynamic site for rhetorical analysis.
Acknowledging that truth commissions are live and motivated rhetorical events that occur at a particular moment in time and place, and that they aim to create both a productive “truth” about the past and democratic subjects, reframes practitioners’ and academics’ critiques. A rhetorician assumes that however narrow a truth commission’s mandate, it will inevitably grapple with arguments occurring at different levels of stasis: What happened in the years covered by the mandate? What caused those events to take place? What value should be assigned to those events and the actors behind them? And what, if anything, should be done in the present to redress identified wrongs and injustices? From a rhetorical perspective, then, attempts to distinguish “facts” (Ignatieff) and “truth-telling” (Steiner) from “social analysis” are untenable. Truth telling, even in a “flat sense” (Steiner), is inevitably an assertion of value and cause because the statement occurs in language. Consider, for example, the differences between two statements that might plausibly appear in a truth commission’s final report: “Activists killed civilians during the armed phase of the anti-apartheid struggle” vs. “Militants murdered civilians during the armed phase of the anti-apartheid struggle.”2 South African poet and journalist Antjie Krog pointed to the inescapable rhetoricity of language and the challenges that rhetoricity poses for a so-called truth commission when the idea of a South African TRC was first proposed. Krog asked, “Must the commission be called a ‘truth commission’? I am not trying to smuggle in confusion here but want to stress the ambiguity of language: it signifies more than a mere dictionary explanation. To examine the question allows one to recognize the complexities of dealing with the world. I feel it would be presumptuous and naïve to set up a commission and claim it could find and tell ‘The Truth’” (in Boraine and Levy 116–17). Even when truth commissions limit their intended goals to fact-finding, they place themselves in the realm of analysis and interpretation. The mandate of a truth commission prioritizes the investigation and acknowledgment of certain “truths” over others. These choices reflect its architects’ “opinions and theories” about ethical and philosophical issues regarding truth, justice, and “the good.” A commission’s chosen focus also calls attention to, or diverts attention from, the “structural phenomena underlying violations.” By exclusion or inclusion, then, a commission necessarily engages in the “play of political ideas and historical debate” (Steiner). More importantly, the commission sets the stage for the participants in its process to do the same.
The architects of the TRC hoped that its work would be invitational, relational, and quite literally world making. In his introduction to the TRC-founding act, Minister of Justice Dullah Omar described the future commission as facilitating the construction of “the historic bridge of which the Constitution speaks.” According to Omar, this metaphorical bridge would help transport South Africans from “the past of a deeply divided society . . . towards a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy, and peaceful co-existence” (Republic of South Africa). The TRC’s highly public process, a feature that distinguished it from prior truth commissions, was to play a crucial role in the construction of this “bridge” (Hayner, “Same Species” 37). As Erik Doxtader explains, “the TRC was envisaged as a public good, a transparent and inclusive body whose work was to be guided by a norm of publicity, an expectation that speech would help open democracy’s commons and build collective interest from old divisions” (With Faith 257).3 The Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act charged the TRC not only with the historical task of depicting the “causes, nature, and extent” of the human rights violations that occurred during a particular time period, but also with gathering the “motives and perspectives” of victims and perpetrators through investigations and hearings. This situation of contingent truth seeking calls to mind the Sophistic emphasis on the role of human perception as the primary source of knowledge, on the significance of speaking before others, and, finally, on the necessity of group deliberation (Jarratt xviii). The architects of the Commission hoped that victims’ and perpetrators’ narratives and their “public acknowledgement” by the Commission would “restore the dignity of victims and afford perpetrators the opportunity to come to terms with their own past” as well as foster an “understanding of our divided pasts” (TRC, Report 1:49). Consciously or not, they operated on the rhetorical faith that the language elicited by the TRC would have material effects; it would transform not only the individual participants in the TRC process but also the South African society that bore witness to them. The TRC’s attempt to create a public for the new nation—one comprising individual citizens engaged in reasoning about the significance of South Africa’s recent past—reveals much about the relationship of language practices and the formation of publics.
From Apartheid to Democracy conceives of the South African TRC as a rhetorical event in three specific senses of the term “rhetorical,” none of which precludes