![Sample our Communication Studies journals, sign in here to start your access, 2013 & 2014 volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5927/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Information-Science2.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
This essay situates X González’s oratory and activism for gun legislation within Jacques Lacan’s Discourse of the Analyst to argue for the affirmative role of analytic silence in a body politic riddled with gun death, gridlock, thoughts, and prayers. Psychoanalytic treatment aims at intervention into a patient’s recurring patterns of behavior and speech that uphold their status quo of suffering. My essay argues for the practical and conceptual utility of Lacan’s discourse theory for rhetorical studies by advancing X as analyst against the cultural logic of the Firearm, a logic of domination I model via the Discourse of the Master.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 John Woodrow Cox and others, “There Have Been 380 School Shootings since Columbine,” Washington Post, May 1, 2023, https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/interactive/school-shootings-database/.
2 Melissa Chan, “Mass Shootings: ‘This Is What Normal Has Come to Be Like in America,’” Time, March 24, 2021, https://time.com/5949772/mass-shootings-normal-america/.
3 Ben Mathis-Lilley, “The ‘Politicize My Death’ Pledge Is What Happens When Gun Violence Activists Stop Being Polite,” Slate, February 16, 2018, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/politicize-my-death-pledge-takes-gun-control-activism-to-a-new-level.html.
4 One can evidence this in reverse. Gun violence that is not narrativized as mental illness or networked into a plot is managed and resigned into the metaphor of the lone wolves.
5 Gordon Witkin, “Opinion: Here’s What We Can Do Now about Gun Violence,” New York Times, May 21, 2023, Opinion section, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/21/opinion/guns-fbi-backgound-nics.html.
6 Calum Lister Matheson, “Liberal Tears and the Rogue’s Yarn of Sadistic Conservativism,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 52, no. 4 (2022): 353.
7 Iyengar, Shanto, Yphtach Lelkes, Matthew Levendusky, Neil Malhotra, and Sean J. Westwood. “The Origins and Consequences of Affective Polarization in the United States.” Annual Review of Political Science 22, no. 1 (May 11, 2019): 129–46. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051117-073034.
8 Mladen Dolar,A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 172.
9 Justin Eckstein, “Sensing School Shootings,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 37, no. 2 (2020): 161–73.
10 Brian L. Ott, Eric Aoki, and Greg Dickinson, “Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 8, no. 3 (2011): 215–39.
11 Rishi Chebrolu, “The Racial Lens of Dylann Roof: Racial Anxiety and White Nationalist Rhetoric on New Media,” Review of Communication 20, no. 1 (2020): 47–68.
12 Douglas Kellner,Guys and Guns Amok: Domestic Terrorism and School Shootings from the Oklahoma City Bombing to the Virginia Tech Massacre (New York: Routledge, 2015).
13 Casey Ryan Kelly,Apocalypse Man: The Death Drive and the Rhetoric of White Masculine Victimhood (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2020), 107–9.
14 Sarah Duval, “Understanding the Threat of Gun Violence for Transgender People,” Giffords (blog), March 31, 2021, https://giffords.org/blog/2021/03/understanding-the-threat-of-gun-violence-for-transgender-people/.
15 Jack Healy and others, “In a Nation Armed to the Teeth, These Tiny Missteps Led to Tragedy,” New York Times, April 20, 2023, U.S. section, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/20/us/wrong-house-shootings-guns.html.
16 Brian L. Ott, Hamilton Bean, and Kellie Marin, “On the Aesthetic Production of Atmospheres: The Rhetorical Workings of Biopower at The CELL,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13, no. 4 (2016): 346–62.
17 Matthew Boedy, “Guns and Freedom: The Second Amendment Rhetoric of Turning Point USA,” in Rhetoric and Guns, ed. Ryan Skinnell, Nate Kreuter, and Lydia Wilkes (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2022), 185–98.
18 Statista, “National Rifle Association: Lobbying Expenditure 2022,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/249398/lobbying-expenditures-of-the-national-rifle-associaction-in-the-united-states/.
19 Eric King Watts, “Postracial Fantasies, Blackness, and Zombies,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 317–33.
20 Healy and others, “In a Nation Armed to the Teeth.”
21 The phrase “shoot first, ask questions later” demonstrates the Firearm’s twinned ability—as both symbol and deadly referent—to make over social worlds in its (signifying) power.
22 Noel Randewich, “Two Months after Parkland Shooting, Gun Makers’ Stocks Are Rallying,” Reuters, April 20, 2018, U.S. Markets section, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-guns-stocks-idUSKBN1HR26Y.
23 Sophia Tesfaye, “After Parkland, Everything Is Different: NRA’s in Decline and Gun Control Is Possible,” Salon, February 13, 2019, https://www.salon.com/2019/02/13/after-parkland-everything-is-different-nras-in-decline-and-gun-control-is-possible/.
24 Patricia Mazzei and Eve Edelheit, “Parkland: A Year After the School Shooting That Was Supposed to Change Everything,” New York Times, February 13, 2019, U.S. section, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/us/parkland-anniversary-marjory-stoneman-douglas.html. My emphasis.
25 Phillip Levine and Robin McKnight, “What Happened When People Feared Gun Control Activism after Parkland? More Gun Sales,” CNN, February 13, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/13/opinions/gun-sale-spike-after-parkland-levine-mcknight/index.html.
26 Calum Lister Matheson,Desiring the Bomb: Communication, Psychoanalysis, and the Atomic Age (Tuscaloosa: University Alabama Press, 2018), 18.
27 Stephen M. Llano, “Three Discourses of American Debate (with a Glimpse toward a Fourth),” Argumentation and Advocacy 58, no. 3–4 (2022): 260.
28 Llano, “Three Discourses of American Debate,” 263.
29 Calum Lister Matheson, “The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason since Freud,” in Reading Lacan’s Écrits: From “The Freudian Thing” to “Remarks on Daniel Lagache” (London: Routledge, 2019), 131–62.
30 In calls to securitize schools and arm teachers, in hopeful deference to good guys with guns and, read from its other side, in assertions (like “mental health”) that render a mass shooter’s possession of the firearm retroactively inappropriate.
31 Chris Simkins, “As US Schools Increase Security, Some Arm Teachers,” VOA, August 21, 2022, https://www.voanews.com/a/as-us-schools-increase-security-some-arm-teachers/6707930.html.
32 Emanuella Grinberg, “Parkland Town Hall: Students Call for Ban on Assault-Style Guns, NRA Money,” CNN Politics, February 21, 2018, https://www.cnn.com/2018/02/21/politics/cnn-town-hall-florida-shooting/index.html.
33 Barbara A. Biesecker and William Trapani, “Escaping the Voice of the Mass/Ter: Late Neoliberalism, Object-Voice, and the Prospects for a Radical Democratic Future,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 17, no. 1 (2014): 25–33.
34 Victor J. Vitanza, “‘Some More’ Notes, toward a ‘Third’ Sophistic,” Argumentation 5, no. 2 (1991): 117–39 at 133.
35 Jonathan S. Carter and Caddie Alford, “Adoxastic Publics: Facebook and the Loss of Civic Strangeness,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 109, no. 2 (2023): 176–98.
36 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 122.
37 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 123–4.
38 Mark Bracher, “Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses,” Prose Studies 11, no. 3 (1988): 46.
39 Bracher, “Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses,” 68.
40 Bracher, “Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses,” 69.
41 Biesecker and Trapani, “Escaping the Voice of the Mass/Ter,” 30.
42 Barbara Biesecker, “Prospects of Rhetoric for the Twenty-First Century: Speculations on Evental Rhetoric Ending with a Note on Barack Obama and a Benediction by Jacques Lacan,” in Reengaging the Prospects of Rhetoric: Current Conversations and Contemporary Challenges, ed. Mark J. Porrovecchio (New York: Routledge, 2010), 16–36; Jeremy R. Grossman, “Hurricane Katrina and the Chōric Object of Rhetorical Studies,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 251–76.
43 Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of ‘Différance,’” Philosophy & Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 126. My emphasis.
44 Biesecker and Trapani, “Escaping the Voice of the Mass/Ter,” 30.
45 The idiom “coughing up” is used by conceptual and practicing psychoanalysts alike to describe how a new symbolic coordinate may emerge from hysterics in analysis. To stabilize this discourse’s importance for rhetorical studies is first to insist on “coughing up” as a gross, mostly unproductive process of exorcism. It is neither guaranteed, nor foolproof, nor final, but such are the contingent promises (and promising contingencies) of analysis and rhetoric alike.
46 Ryan Taylor, “Emma Gonzalez March For Our Lives Speech Transcript,” Rev, March 24, 2018, https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/emma-gonzalez-march-for-our-lives-speech-transcript.
47 Chris Tognotti, “Emma Gonzalez’s Powerful Words at March For Our Lives Are Necessary Reading,” Bustle, March 24, 2018, https://www.bustle.com/p/transcript-of-emma-gonzalezs-march-for-our-lives-speech-will-absolutely-crush-you-8596656.
48 David Corn, “Loudest Silence in the History of US Social Protest,” Twitter, Tweet, March 24, 2018, https://twitter.com/DavidCornDC/status/977620341026672640.
49 Patrick Henry, “The ‘March For Our Lives’ Demonstration: Emma Gonzalez’s Silence for the Ages,” Star Tribune, March 26, 2018, http://www.startribune.com/the-march-for-our-lives-demonstration-emma-gonzalez-s-silence-for-the-ages/477980623/.
50 Jenna Amatulli, “Emma González Stands on Stage in Total Silence to Remember Parkland Shooting,” HuffPost, March 24, 2018, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/emma-gonzalez-spends-6-minutes-20-seconds-in-silence-to-remember-shooting_n_5ab69b82e4b0decad04a7a32; Kelli Korducki, “Emma González’s Moment of Silence at March For Our Lives Will Define a Generation,” Brit + Co, March 24, 2018, https://www.brit.co/emma-gonzalez-silence-march-for-our-lives-speech/; Ellen T. Tordesillas, “OPINION: The Most Deafening 6-Minute Silence,” ABS-CBN News, March 28, 2018, https://news.abs-cbn.com/blogs/opinions/03/28/18/opinion-the-most-deafening-6-minute-silence; Caitlin Yilek, “Emma Gonzalez Leads Powerful Moment of Silence at March For Our Lives for Parkland Victims,” Washington Examiner, March 24, 2018, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/emma-gonzalez-leads-powerful-moment-of-silence-at-march-for-our-lives-for-parkland-victims.
51 Erin Anderson, “Toward a Resonant Material Vocality for Digital Composition,” Enculturation, August 18, 2014, https://www.enculturation.net/materialvocality.
52 Hanna Rosin, “How the Parkland Shooting Led to a Generation’s Political Awakening,” New York Times, February 13, 2019, Books section, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/books/review/parkland-dave-cullen.html.
53 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1998), 274.
54 Megan Garber, “The Powerful Silence of the March For Our Lives,” The Atlantic, March 24, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/03/the-powerful-silence-of-the-march-for-our-lives/556469/.
55 Taylor, “Emma Gonzalez March For Our Lives Speech Transcript.”
56 Emma González, “Emma González on Twitter: ‘Real Quick: My Speech Today . . . / Twitter,” Twitter, March 24, 2018, https://twitter.com/emma4change/status/977709613184405504.
57 Mladen Dolar, “Vox,” Umbr(a) Incurable, no. 1 (2006): 138.
58 E.g., Kathryn M. Olson and G. Thomas Goodnight, “Entanglements of Consumption, Cruelty, Privacy, and Fashion: The Social Controversy over Fur,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 80, no. 3 (1994): 249–76.
59 Eckstein, “Sensing School Shootings,” 165.
60 Shoshana Felman,Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight: Psychoanalysis in Contemporary Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 51.
61 X González, “Life after Parkland,” The Cut, January 3, 2023, https://www.thecut.com/article/x-gonzalez-parkland-shooting-activist-essay.html. My emphasis.
62 Lionel Bailly,Lacan: A Beginner’s Guide (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 222–3.
63 Kaja Silverman,The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 79.
64 Incredulous, sardonic reactions to the generation of ideas about preventing child gun death evinces this sort of affect. See Charles Cooke, “Gun Control through Taxation,” National Review Plus (blog), February 23, 2023, https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/gun-controllers-have-it-all-figured-out/.
65 Chris Ingraham, “New Normals, from Talk to Gesture,” Cultural Studies 35, no. 2–3 (2021): 336.
66 Chris Perkins, “‘Call Me X’: Survivor of Parkland Shooting Has Picked out a New Name,” Sun Sentinel, May 11, 2021, https://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/parkland/florida-school-shooting/fl-ne-emma-gonzalez-now-x-gonzalez-20210511-knb4ao4qorczlcczvor5us2jdi-story.html.
67 González, “Life after Parkland.”
68 “March For Our Lives Rally against Gun Violence in Washington DC,” YouTube, June 11, 2022, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mM3lJOaKzgk.
69 “March For Our Lives Rally against Gun Violence in Washington DC,” YouTube.
70 For examples of how absences that exceed language’s capture nevertheless function rhetorically, see Atilla Hallsby “Imagine There’s No President: The Rhetorical Secret and the Exposure of Valerie Plame,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 2 (2015): 354–78; Matheson, Desiring the Bomb.
71 Bracher, “Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses,” 48.
72 Christian Lundberg, “Enjoying God’s Death: The Passion of the Christ and the Practices of an Evangelical Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 95, no. 4 (2009): 387–411; see also Jason D. Myres, “Five Formations of Publicity: Constitutive Rhetoric from Its Other Side,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 104, no. 2 (2018): 189–212.
73 Allen Rostron, “The Dickey Amendment on Federal Funding for Research on Gun Violence: A Legal Dissection,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 7 (2018): 865–7.
74 Rostron, “The Dickey Amendment,” 866.
75 “March For Our Lives Rally against Gun Violence in Washington DC,” YouTube.
76 Bracher, Lacan, Discourse, and Social Change, 66.
77 Mark Bracher, “On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language: Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses,” in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, ed. Mark Bracher and others (New York: NYU Press, 1997), 122.
78 Sam Levin, “‘It’s Deja Vu’: Parkland Parents Were in El Paso to Honor Son on Day of Shooting,” Guardian, August 5, December 16, 2019, U.S. news section, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/05/parkland-shooting-el-paso-manuel-patricia-oliver.
79 Bracher, “On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language,” 126. Emphasis in original.
80 González, “Life after Parkland.”
81 González, “Life after Parkland.”
82 Erin Schumaker, “Congress Agrees on Historic Deal to Fund $25 Million in Gun Violence Research,” ABC News, December 16, 2019, https://abcnews.go.com/Health/congress-approves-unprecedented-25-million-gun-violence-research/story?id=67762555.
83 Dharamjeet Singh, “Lacan: Past and Present—a Dialogue,” South Asian Ensemble 7, no. 3&4 (2015): 142.
84 Jacques Lacan, “‘There Can Be No Crisis of Psychoanalysis,’” Panorama, 1974, blog post, Jordan Skinner, July 22, 2014, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/1668-there-can-be-no-crisis-of-psychoanalysis-jacques-lacan-interviewed-in-1974.
85 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 124.
86 NRA-ILA, and National Rifle Association, “Why Gun Control Doesn’t Work,” NRA-ILA, https://www.nraila.org/why-gun-control-doesn-t-work/ (accessed August 8, 2023).
87 Bracher, “Lacan’s Theory of the Four Discourses,” 48.
88 Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More, 36.