Public relations scholars study how organizations co-create meaning with engaged stakeholders. Not well understood is how and why such co-creation modifies shared meaning, amplifies change, and even “erases” some piece of memory from the public record with the purpose of redirecting and redefining societal narratives. To help establish erasure as a concept for studying public relations, we draw from Freud’s theory of memory to establish a foundation upon which to critique strategic erasure. We adapt Freud’s theory of memory into the intersecting critique of visual rhetoric as public relations by analyzing, via narrative inquiry, remnants of Imperial Rome that have been modified, amplified, but even erased to present Rome’s modern identity. For centuries, even during Imperial Rome, leaders practiced damnatio memoriae —a modern Latin phrase that means “condemnation of memory.” We use this concept to interrogate the public relations identity process Rome’s leaders have used to modify for emphasis and even obliterate Roman elites’ names and images from the texts of public records by destroying, mutilating and modifying statues and monuments as a means for co-creating new public memory. Such analysis reveals how damnatio memoriae helps elites to redefine the “memory” of the Eternal City.

Introduction

As theorists and researchers work to define the character of public relations, especially its role in creating meaning, new concepts continue to be added to the list that defines the phenomena. To that end, this article examines how organizational elites use public relations to (re)create public memory; in doing so, they seek to correct or merely alter such memory as a means for shaping how communities and societies co-create their future. A narrative interpretation of public relations argues that it plays a major role in defining the characters, plots, themes, acts, and purposes of discourse as means for guiding collective relationships by co-creating a coherent and orderly society, one based on shared sensemaking and aligned interests. Such analysis can begin by identifying examples of how public relations reshapes the past to provide foundation for current and future enactments. For instance, Bill Cosby, an iconic entertainer, televised father-figure, and famous US actor, producer, and comedian experienced “one of the most thunderous falls from grace in American cultural history” when he was convicted of sexual assault charges (Roig-Franzia, 2018, para 1). Consequently, the Television Academy Hall of Fame erased Cosby’s name from its website and removed a bust of his likeness from the Hall of Fame Plaza (Brown, 2018). Similarly, on May 8, 2003, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA)—the governing body that organizes collegiate sports programs and regulates college athletics for more than 1,200 institutions and conferences in the USA and Canada—forced the University of Michigan men’s basketball team to vacate/forfeit more than 100 regular season and post-season tournament wins.