Five formations of publicity: Constitutive rhetoric from its other side

ABSTRACT

This essay rethinks the constitutive formation of publics by foregrounding the desirability of publics themselves. This project begins by theoretically resituating publics as a series of irrevocably lost objects. Specifically, I contend publics are composed of a montage of desires (oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and superego) modeled on Jacques Lacan’s stages of the object in obsessional neurosis. To explicate, I use this schema to parse the symbolic dimensions of the “people” aligned with Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Lacan’s schema of the object is adapted into a theory of publicity exemplified in the (astonishing) resilience of the “Trump voter,” the imaginary “people” routinely invoked throughout his emergence as a political figure. Lacan’s schema, I argue, helps explain the symbolic staging of the “Trump voter” as something more than just another potent social imaginary: an object of desire.

KEYWORDS:

• Donald J. Trump
• desire
• public
• prosopopeia
• metonymy

Acknowledgments

Jason D. Myres is a Visiting Lecturer of Communication Studies at the University of Georgia. I thank Mary Stuckey and the anonymous reviewers of QJS for their helpful comments. Special thanks to Barbara Biesecker, Lee Pierce, and Peter O’Connell for their suggestions and conceptual guidance.

Notes

1 Jacques Lacan, Anxiety: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book X, trans. A.R. Price, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014), 294.

2 Ibid, 294.

3 Christian Lundberg, Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 25.

4 Ernest G. Bormann, “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social Reality,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 58, no. 4 (1972): 396–407; Ernest G. Bormann, “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: Ten Years Later,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68, no. 3 (1982): 288–305; Ernest G. Bormann, “Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Communication Formulation,” Journal of Communication 35, no. 4 (1985): 128–38; Ernest G. Bormann, The Force of Fantasy: Restoring the American Dream (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985); Ernest G. Bormann, John F. Cragan, and Donald C. Shields, “In Defense of Symbolic Convergence Theory: A Look at the Theory and Its Criticisms after Two Decades,” Communication Theory 4, no. 4 (1994): 259–94.

5 Bormann, “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision,” 396.

6 Ibid, 398.

7 G. Thomas Goodnight and John Poulakos. “Conspiracy Rhetoric: From Pragmatism to Fantasy in Public Discourse,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 45, no. 4 (1981): 299–316.

8 Ibid, 300.

9 Ibid, 301.

10 Ibid.

11 Joshua Gunn, “Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 1 (2004): 1–23.

12 Ibid, 7.

13 Ibid, 8.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 Walter Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1927, 1993c), 29.

17 Michael C. McGee, “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical Alternative,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61, no. 3 (1975): 235–49.

18 Ibid, 236, 244.

19 Ibid, 236.

20 Ibid, 242.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid, 240.

23 Ibid, 242.

24 Maurice Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73, no. 2 (1987): 133–50, 138. For similar constitutive approaches, see Gerald A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 14. Robert Asen, “Imagining in the Public Sphere,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 34, no. 4 (2002): 345–67.

25 Charland, “Constitutive Rhetoric,” 134.

26 Ibid, 139–41.

27 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002). Applications of Warner's approach include: Ronald Walter Greene, “Rhetorical Pedagogy as a Postal System: Circulating Subjects through Michael Warner's ‘Publics and Counterpublics’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 434–43; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Performing Civic Identity: The Iconic Photograph of the Flag Raising on Iwo Jima,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 363–92; David Wittenberg, “Going Out in Public: Visibility and Anonymity in Michael Warner’'s ‘Publics and Counterpublics’,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88, no. 4 (2002): 426–33; Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites, “Public Identity and Collective Memory in U.S. Iconic Photography: The Image of ‘Accidental Napalm’,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20, no. 1 (2003): 35–66; Lester C. Olson, “Pictorial Representations of British America Resisting Rape: Rhetorical Re-Circulation of a Print Series Portraying the Boston Port Bill of 1774,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 12, no. 1 (2009): 1–35; Jenell Johnson, “‘A Man's Mouth is His Castle’: The Midcentury Flouridation Controversy and the Visceral Public,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 1 (2016): 1–20.

28 See Cara A. Finnegan and Jiyeon Kang, “‘Sighting’ the Public: Iconoclasm and Public Sphere Theory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 377–402; Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar and Elizabeth A. Povinelli “Technologies of Public Forms: Circulation, Transfiguration, Recognition,” Public Culture 15, no. 3 (2003): 385–97.

29 Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 67–115.

30 Warner consistently refers to publics as imaginary formations, and occasionally characterizes them as fantasies; Ibid, 146, 180–181.

31 Ibid, 89.

32 Jodi Dean, Publicity’'s Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 16–17.

33 Ibid, 8, see also 9, 17–18, 34, 42, 52, 78 for Dean on fantasy.

34 Ibid, 5; see also Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989).

35 Dean, Publicity's Secret, 34.

36 Ibid, 46.

37 Ibid, 175. In recent work, Dean wields “democracy” (rather than “public”) as fantasmic product, evidencing reversible discursive functions. Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 94.

38 Barbara A. 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): 222–40.

39 See 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): 495–500; Joshua Gunn, “On Dead Subjects: A Rejoinder to Lundberg on (a) Psychoanalytic Rhetoric,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90, no. 4 (2004): 501–13; Barbara Biesecker, “No Time for Mourning: The Rhetorical Production of the Melancholic Citizen-Subject in the War on Terror,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 40, no. 1 (2007): 147–69; Joshua Gunn, “Speech is Dead; Long Live Speech,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 94, no. 3 (2008): 343–64; Christian Lundberg, “On Missed Encounters: Lacan and the Materiality of Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric, Materiality, & Politics, eds. Barbara A. Biesecker and John Louis Lucaites (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2009), 161–84; 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.

40 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, 388.

41 Ibid, 388.

42 Ibid.

43 Jacques-Alain Miller. “The Economics of Jouissance,” trans. Asunción Alvarez, Lacanian Ink 38 (2011): 6–63, 19.

44 Ibid, 19.

45 Ibid. Miller's discussion does not, however, apply this analogy to publics.

46 Lacan, Anxiety, 271.

47 Miller, “The Economics of Jouissance,” 12.

48 Ibid, 21.

49 For an account of the materiality of the signifier in Lacan, see Lundberg, “On Missed Encounters.”

50 Miller, “Economics of Jouissance,” 19.

51 Lacan, Anxiety, 294.

52 Ibid, 237.

53 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jaques Lacan Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973/1977), 168.

54 Ibid, 169.

55 Lacan, Anxiety, 294.

56 On the “circular character” of the partial drives, see Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 178. On tension, see Ibid, 175.

57 Ibid, 178.

58 For a simplistic representation, see Lacan, Anxiety, 294.

59 For the oral, anal, and genital stages, see Karl Abraham, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido, Viewed in the Light of Mental Disorders (1924),” in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham M.D., trans. Douglas Bryan and Alix Strachey (London: Maresfield Library, 1988), 418–502—see especially 424; Isabel Sanfeliú and Kate Walters, Karl Abraham: The Birth of Object Relations Theory, Trans. Kate Walters (London: Karnac Books, 2014), 195–203; Karl Abraham, “The First Pregenital Stage of the Libido (1916),” in Selected Papers of Karl Abraham M.D., 248–79—see especially 276.

60 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 180.

61 Ibid, 180. See also Jodi Dean, Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 59.

62 I am referring here primarily to Lacan's schema as it appears in his anxiety seminar. On the appearance of “rhetoric” in the anxiety seminar, see Calum Matheson, “‘What does Obama want of me? Anxiety and Jade Helm 15,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 102, no. 2 (2016): 133–49.

63 Lacan, Anxiety, 237.

64 Miller, “Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety II,” 26.

65 Matheson, “What does Obama want of me,” 135.

66 Ibid.

67 Barbara A. Biesecker, “Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from within the Thematic of Différance,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 22, no. 2 (1989): 110–30.

68 Lacan, Anxiety, 295.

69 Ibid, 291.

70 Ibid, 299.

71 Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 167.

72 Abraham, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido,” 481.

73 Lacan preferences this “lip” trope for its elasticity. Lacan, Anxiety, 233.

74 Lundberg, “Enjoying God's Death,” 389.

75 On the conflation between object and Other, see Lacan, Anxiety, 302, 325.

76 For an example of how an oral tropology can frame the president as sign (in my interpretation), see the tie between Ronald Reagan and Davy Crockett in Anne Norton, Republic of Signs: Liberal Theory and American Popular Culture (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 93–102. Lacanian approaches expand the oral mode beyond representation or synecdoche. On the transference, see James Penney, The Structures of Love: Art and Politics beyond the Transference. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2012); Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “Analytic Speech: From Restricted to General Rhetoric,” in The Ends of Rhetoric: History, Theory, Practice, eds. John Bender and David E. Wellbery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 127–39.

77 Michiel de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the other Italic Languages (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 435–36; Jeffrey Walker, The Genuine Teachers of this Art: Rhetorical Education in Antiquity (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2011), 302.

78 Jeremy Diamond, “Trump: I Could ‘Shoot Somebody and I Wouldn't Lose Voters’,” CNN.com, January 24, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/23/politics/donald-trump-shoot-somebody-support.

79 Ibid.

80 “Fact Check: Donald Trump's Republican Convention Speech, Annotated,” NPR.org, July 21, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/07/21/486883610/fact-check-donald-trumps-republican-convention-speech-annotated.

81 Ibid.

82 Lacan, Anxiety, 291–92.

83 Karl Abraham, “Remarks on the Psycho-Analysis of a Case of Foot and Corset Fetishism (1910),” Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1988), 125–36, 134.

84 Abraham, “A Short Study of the Development of the Libido,” 428.

85 Karl Abraham, “Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character (1921),” Selected Papers on Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac Books, 1988), 370–92, 373.

86 Abraham, “Contributions to the Theory of the Anal Character (1921),” 377.

87 Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (New York: Barnes & Noble, Inc., 1999)—see especially 185–87.

88 Lippmann, The Phantom Public, 145, see also 60–62 for other examples of what I call anal framing.

89 Dean, Publicity's Secret, 175.

90 Ben Jacobs, “Khan Controversy: Donald Trump Fans Don't Know or Don't Care,” The Guardian, August 3, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/03/smear-today-gone-tomorrow-khan-controversy-goes-over-trump-fans-hats.

91 Peter en Vogel, Peter Wehner, Hugh Hewitt, Adrian Karatnycky, Ryan Maness, and Jim McLaughlin, “The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, Transcript 8/11/2016,” The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, August 11, 2016, http://www.msnbc.com/transcripts/the-last-word/2016-08-11.

92 “Trump goes after Clinton for ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Comment; Tim Kaine Comments on Clinton Health; Did Clinton Campaign Hide Pneumonia Diagnosis; Sen. Elizabeth Warren's Demands to Wells Fargo following Financial Scandal; Calm Prevails as Syria Ceasefire Starts,” CNN Newsroom, September 12, 2016), http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1609/12/cnr.06.html.

93 “Trump goes after Clinton for ‘Basket of Deplorables’ Comment,” http://www.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1609/12/cnr.06.html.

94 Lacan, Anxiety, 39.

95 Ibid, 292.

96 Ibid, 53.

97 In my view, Lacan's placement of the phallic stage in the middle of his schema emphasizes anxiety's role as a turning point rather than an origin or telos.

98 Lacan, Anxiety, 269.

99 Dewey, John, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954, c1927, 1954), 121, 125, 157.

100 Ibid, 31, 67, 120, 120, 121, 123. Also see 116.

101 Ibid, 77, 126, 146.

102 Ibid, 117.

103 Ibid, 137.

104 Ibid, 157, emphasis added.

105 See Patrick Healy, “Donald Trump's Missteps Risk Putting a Ceiling over His Support in Swing States,” New York Times, August 12, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/13/us/politics/donald-trump-voters.html?_r=1.

106 Tom Llamas, “Trump Calls Election Rigged after New Polls,” Good Morning America (ABC), Regional Business News, August 2, 2016, LexisNexis.

107 Lacan, Anxiety, 292.

108 Ibid.

109 Visual rhetoric, the rhetoric of public space and place, and circulation are largely scopic investigations. See John Louis Lucaites and James P. McDaniel, “Telescopic Mourning/Warring in the Global Village: Decomposing (Japanese) Authority Figures,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 1, no. 1 (2004): 1–28. It can be difficult to identify, however, the extent to which a scopic investigation adopts (rather than analyzes) the scopic mode. Circulation theories of publics, for instance, find appeal in the scopic mode because the circulated text (or part object) serves as scopic trace. Hence, circulation may be less a comprehensive theory of publics than one mode of desiring them.

110 My criticisms of Dean stem from an inattention to the particularities of the anal object and a tendency to paper over situational distinctions between regimes with her general metaphor of the secret. However, Dean's Publicity's Secret is an exemplary analysis of publicity in the scopic mode. Dean, Publicity's Secret, 22, 28, 121, 130, 149, 159. Other exemplary scopic investigations include: Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Joan Copjec, Imagine There’'s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); 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.

111 Lacan, Anxiety, 325.

112 Hallsby, “Imagine There’'s No President,” 355.

113 Patrick G. Lee, “Trump is Recruiting an Army of Poll Watchers: It's Even Worse than It Sounds,” Mother Jones, September 14, 2016, http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/trump-poll-watchers-discrimination.

114 Sam Sanders, “What is the ‘Silent Majority?’ Trump Supporters Weigh In,” All Things Considered (NPR), January 21, 2016, http://www.npr.org/2016/01/21/463865309/what-is-the-silent-majority-trump-supporters-weigh-in.

115 Jonathan Chait, “Why Donald Trump is Lying about the Popular Vote,” New York Magazine, November, 28, 2016, http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/why-donald-trump-is-lying-about-the-popular-vote.html.

116 See Jacques-Alain Miller, “Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety II,” trans. Barbara P. Fulks, Lacanian Ink 27 (2006): 8–63, 34.

117 Lacan, Anxiety, 292.

118 This mistaken understanding of the superego doubles as the analysand's tactic: a regression from the superego back to the anal stage. Lacan, Anxiety, 293. On the troubled relationship between Lacan's superego and the law, see Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953–1954, trans. John Forrester, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), 102, 196; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1988), 127, 251; Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses 1955–1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1993), 276; Miller, “Introduction to Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar on Anxiety II,” 37; Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 104–25.

119 Éric Laurent, “Lacan and Feminine Jouissance,” trans. Marcus Andersson, Lacanian Ink 38, (2011): 86–101, 89.

120 Ibid, 93.

121 Ibid, 94.

122 Lacan refers to this function as a “yieldable” object. Lacan, Anxiety, 313–17.

123 “Full Transcript: Second 2016 Presidential Debate,” Politico.com, October 10, 2016, http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/2016-presidential-debate-transcript-229519.

124 Ibid.