“What does Obama want of me?” Anxiety and Jade Helm 15

ABSTRACT

This article reclaims the concept of anxiety for rhetoric and demonstrates the usefulness of doing so by examining reactions to the Jade Helm 15 military training exercise. Following Lacan's recently translated seminar on Anxiety, the essay argues on behalf of a conceptualization of anxiety as a result of affective investments in a network of discourse rather than an individual feeling. This rearticulation of anxiety has implications for both rhetorical theory and criticism as well as practical responses to right-wing conspiracy theories such as those surrounding Jade Helm.

KEYWORDS:

• Anxiety
• psychoanalysis
• Jade Helm
• conspiracy theories
• fantasy

Acknowledgments

Calum L. Matheson is Assistant Professor of Public Deliberation and Civic life in the Communication Department at the University of Pittsburgh and Director of the William Pitt Debating Union. The author would like to thank Tim Barouch, Eric English, Paul Johnson, Chris Lundberg, and both anonymous reviewers for their comments and support.

Notes

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2. US Army Special Operations Command, “Request to Conduct Realistic Military Training (RMT) JADE HELM 15,” no date, accessed October 1, 2015, https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/1695249/258605525-jade-helm-martial-law-ww3-prep.pdf

3. See, for example, “Are The Wal-Mart Closings In Jade Helm 15 States A Sign We've Sold Them The Rope They'll Use To Hang Us With By Shopping At Wal-Mart All These Years?” All News Pipeline, April 14, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015, http://allnewspipeline.com/What_Martial_Law_Will_Look_Like.php; Dave Hodges, “World War III, Walmart, FEMA Camps, Jade Helm: A Clergy Response Team Insider Reveals What Lies Ahead,” The Common Sense Show, June 21, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2015/06/21/world-war-iii-walmart-fema-camps-jade-helm-a-clergy-response-team-insider-reveals-what-lies-ahead/

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6. Dalia Mae, “Mastering the Human Domain (Jade Helm and Artificial Intelligence),” Gumshoe News, September 4, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015, http://gumshoenews.com/2015/09/03/mastering-the-human-domain-jade-helm-and-artificial-intelligence/

7. Sorcha Faal, “Jade Helm-15 War Exercise Linked To Nordic Alien UFO's Invading Texas,” WhatDoesItMean.com, July 9, 2015, accessed October 8, 2015, http://www.whatdoesitmean.com/index1887.htm

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11. Louie Gohmert, “Gohmert Statement on Jade Helm Exercises,” May 5, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015, http://gohmert.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=398216

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15. “Ted Cruz Says He Has Asked the Pentagon for Answers on Jade Helm 15,” Bloomberg Politics, May 2, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-05-02/ted-cruz-says-he-has-asked-the-pentagon-for-answers-on-jade-helm-15

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17. Agnes Heller, A Theory of Feelings 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 75.

18. Michael Hyde, “The Experience of Anxiety: A Phenomenological Investigation,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, no. 2 (1980): 140. Even Hyde's more sophisticated study concentrates on how anxiety “individualizes” subjects, turning them inward towards their own subjective experiences.

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20. Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 23.

21. Lundberg, Lacan in Public, 84.

22. Barbara Biesecker, “Rhetorical Studies and the ‘New’ Psychoanalysis: What's the Real Problem? or Framing the Problem of the Real.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84, no. 2 (1998): 224.

23. Biesecker, “Rhetorical Studies,” 238.

24. 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), 26–27.

25. Joshua Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 1 (2004): 2.

26. Christian Lundberg, “The Royal Road Not Taken: Joshua Gunn's ‘Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity and Talking to the Dead’ and Lacan's Symbolic Order,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 496.

27. Lundberg, “Royal Road,” 499.

28. Lundberg, Lacan in Public, 87.

29. Michael Kaplan, “Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric by Christian Lundberg (review).” Philosophy & Rhetoric 47, no. 3 (2014): 336.

30. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th ed., ed. American Psychiatric Association, 2013, accessed October 1, 2015, http://dsm.psychiatryonline.org/doi/full/10.1176/appi.books.9780890425596.GlossaryofTechnicalTerms

31. Campbell, Robert, Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary, 8th ed. (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004), 46.

32. “Anxiety,” American Psychological Association, 2015 accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.apa.org/topics/anxiety/; The Corsini Encyclopedia of Psychology, 4th ed., eds. Irving Weiner and W. Edward Craighead (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), 131.

33. Hyde, 140.

34. Pat Gehrke, The Ethics and Politics of Speech : Communication and Rhetoric in the Twentieth Century (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009), 21–32.

35. Hyde, 142.

36. Hyde, 147.

37. Edwin Black, Rhetorical Criticism a Study in Method (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 7.

38. Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. A.R. Price (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2014), 14.

39. Lacan, Anxiety, 14–15.

40. Lacan, Anxiety, 6.

41. Lundberg, Lacan in Public, 60–5.

42. “Reality” refers to the fabric of social mediation and language that stands in for a mind-independent world with which it does not perfectly correspond, but for which it is often misrecognized. This is distinct for the order of the Real, which is best understood as the realization that the world exists in excess of language when the function of the Symbolic is disrupted, and that the order of this Symbolic can therefore not fully tame the contingency of the seemingly chaotic world.

43. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 76–80. As is true of almost everything in Lacan's teaching, the mirror stage need not be taken literally as a universal event in childhood requiring a baby and a mirror. It is best understood as an example illustrating the ongoing process of subject formation and not a discrete developmental stage.

44. Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 13–14.

45. Lacan, Anxiety, 49.

46. Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy,” 10.

47. Lacan, Anxiety, 41.

48. The Freudian term cathexis refers to a subject's attachment to an object, often to a point “beyond the pleasure principle” where attachment becomes destructive. Its use here is meant to be synonymous with Lundberg's “affective investment,” but can hopefully avoid some of the confusion about how the many different commentators on “affect” use that term.

49. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1961), 16–17.

50. Lacan, Anxiety, 65.

51. Lacan, Anxiety, 53.

52. The role of the object distinguishes Lacan's theory of anxiety from Freud's. Anxiety does not lack an object, but is rather “not without an object,” meaning that the object is displaced or obscure, always elsewhere. See Lacan, Anxiety, 89.

53. Lacan, Anxiety, 41.

54. Lacan, Anxiety, 160.

55. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 2008), 83.

56. Lacan, Anxiety, 53.

57. Lundberg, Lacan in Public, 36–39.

58. Kenneth Burke. The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1973), 110–11.

59. Lundberg, Lacan in Public, 52–3.

60. Gilles Deleuze, “Gilles Deleuze, Lecture Transcripts on Spinoza's Concept of Affect,” 1978, accessed February 18, 2016, http://www.gold.ac.uk/media/images-by-section/departments/research-centres-and-units/research-centres/centre-for-the-study-of-invention/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf

61. Lacan, Transference, 367.

62. Jacques Lacan, Transference, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2015), 366.

63. Gohmert.

64. Kit Daniels, “Rep. Gohmert on Jade Helm: We Never Named a State ‘Hostile,’” Infowars.com, May 6, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.infowars.com/rep-gohmert-on-jade-helm-we-never-named-a-state-hostile/

65. Rob Milford, “Louie Gohmert, ‘I Can Understand These Concerns’ About Jade Helm 15,” Breitbart.com, May 6, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.breitbart.com/texas/2015/05/06/louie-gohmert-i-can-understand-these-concerns-about-jade-helm-15/

66. Brian Tashman, “Louie Gohmert Once Again Fuels Jade Helm 15 Fears,” Right Wing Watch, May 19, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/louie-gohmert-once-again-fuels-jade-helm-15-fears. A Google search done on September 26, 2015 revealed around 26,000 results for “Gohmert Jade Helm,” while a similar search on Bing reported slightly over two million results.

67. Gohmert.

68. Gohmert.

69. Examples include: M.D. Creekmore, “Six examples of federal government overreach as we move toward a total takeover of individual and states rights,” The Survivalist Blog, March 6, 2015, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/six-examples-of-federal-government-overreach-as-we-move-toward-a-total-take-over-of-individual-and-states-rights/; Mark Slavo, “Executive Doomsday Order: Obama Authorizes Gov to Seize Farms, Food, Processing Plants, Energy Resources, Transportation, Skilled Laborers During National Emergency,” SHTFPlan.com, March 18, 2012, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/executive-doomsday-order-obama-authorizes-gov-to-seize-farms-food-processing-plants-energy-resources-transportation-skilled-laborers-during-national-emergency_03182012; “Martial Law: What You Need to Know to Survive,” Survival Life, December 18, 2014, accessed September 23, 2015, http://survivallife.com/2014/12/18/martial-law-how-to-survive/

70. Popular survivalist blogger Michael Snyder has consistently advanced this claim. See: Michael Snyder, “All Over America Government Control Freaks Are Forcing Preppers Back On To The Grid,” End of the American Dream, June 18, 2012, accessed October 1, 2015, http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/all-over-america-government-control-freaks-are-forcing-preppers-back-on-to-the-grid; Michael Snyder, “All Over America, Government Officials Are Cracking Down On Preppers,” The Economic Collapse Blog, January 8, 2015, accessed September 23, 2015, http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/america-government-officials-cracking-preppers

71. Melissa Melton, “National Guard Whistleblower: ‘Doomsday Preppers Will Be Treated As Terrorists,’” Infowars.com, October 25, 2012, accessed October 1, 2015, http://www.infowars.com/national-guard-whistleblower-doomsday-preppers-will-be-treated-as-terrorists/

72. Various examples are found on The Armageddon Times. http://thearmageddontimes.com/

73. Lundberg, Lacan in Public, 39.

74. For a discussion of the necessary elements of conspiracy fantasies including the need for the conspirator's motives to be opaque, see G. Thomas Goodnight and John Poulakos, “Conspiracy Rhetoric: From Pragmatism to Fantasy in Public Discourse,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 45, no. 4 (1981): 310–16. For a discussion of prepping as fantasy rather than fear for survival, see Richard Mitchell, Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 210–12.

75. Atilla Halsby, “Imagine There's No President: The Rhetorical Secret and the Exposure of Valerie Plame,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101, no. 2 (2015): 364.

76. Gohmert.

77. Lacan, Anxiety, 48.

78. Recall that, while ego psychology distinguishes anxiety from fear based on the lack of a specific object in anxiety, Lacan argues that anxiety is “not without an object” in the sense that the specific object that appears in the place of the Other's desire does not matter, but that petit objet a is still the genesis of this dynamic. See Lacan, Anxiety, 89.

79. “2 Men Open Fire On Soldiers At Jade Helm Training Site In Mississippi,” TPM, August 4, 2015, accessed September 30, 2015, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/two-men-open-fire-mississippi-military-facility

80. Diane Turbyfill, “Anti-gov't conspiracy suspects indicted; 2 plead guilty,” Gaston Gazette (NC), September 18, 2015, accessed September 30, 2015, http://www.gastongazette.com/article/20150917/NEWS/150918921/?Start=2

81. Randy Neugebauer, “Addressing Concerns and Rumors About Jade Helm 15,” Texas GOP Vote, May 6, 2015, accessed September 30, 2015, http://www.texasgopvote.com/security/addressing-concerns-and-rumors-about-jade-helm-15-007767

82. D'Angelo Gore, “Jade Helm Not Martial Law,” FactCheck.org, May 11, 2015, accessed September 30, 2015. http://www.factcheck.org/2015/05/jade-helm-not-martial-law/