Five Formations of Publicity: Constitutive Rhetoric from Its Other Side

QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH, 2018 VOL. 104, NO. 2, 189–212 https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2018.1447140

Five formations of publicity: Constitutive rhetoric from its other side

Jason D. Myres Communication Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY This essay rethinks the constitutive formation of publics by Received 20 February 2017 foregrounding the desirability of publics themselves. This project Accepted 15 January 2018 begins by theoretically resituating publics as a series of KEYWORDS irrevocably lost objects. Specifically, I contend publics are Donald J. Trump; desire; composed of a montage of desires (oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and ’ public; prosopopeia; superego) modeled on Jacques Lacan s stages of the object in metonymy 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.

Working from recent scholarship of Barbara Biesecker, Christian Lundberg, Joshua Gunn, and a growing number of others, this essay theorizes public formation from the standpoint of desire. However, I have a different emphasis in mind: rather than studying the formation of publics, I demarcate five potential con-formations of publicity that undergird publics as epiphenomena. This schema of desire refers not to a universal structure, but a partitioning that introduces difference within and between modes of public formation. My objective is to render a theory of publicity more thinkable: an account of publics from the position of the complex set of desires that constitute them. To this end, psychoanalytic theory offers the precision necessary to account for the complex threads of desire involved. I hope to reinvigorate the current material, constitutive, and circulatory theory of public formation using conceptual language that more radically resists inadvertent recourse to social totality. Specifically, this essay models its contribution on Lacan’s “circular constitution of the object” in obsessional neurosis.1 Lacan’s schema, which he labeled “The forms of the object in stages,” offers a template for as many as five distinct regimes of desire: oral, anal, phallic, gaze, and superego (voice).2 I argue that this schema, when adapted to the study of publics, helps us to discern how any-given-public attains dimension (ethos) from these different desires. For critics, Lacan’s schema may help take

CONTACT Jason D. Myres [email protected] Communication Studies, University of Georgia, 617 Caldwell Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USA © 2018 National Communication Association 190 J. D. MYRES measure of publics on a smaller scale—ones too intricate and fleeting to be seen by the methodological instruments of today. For theorists, this schema identifies publics on a different register, such that a public’s procedure of formation might become as differentiated and singular as its structures of identification. The essay proceeds in three sections. Section one explores contemporary approaches to the public fantasm and argues that the term “public” remains an uneasy header for multiple discursive positions and functions. Section two introduces a conceptual distinction between “publics” and “publicities,” a term of art I propose for discussing structures of desiring publicness. Section three outlines five formations of “publicity” using Lacan’s schema of the object as a primer. Admittedly, theory without cases begets obscurity. To render aspects of this approach more accessible, section three exemplifies each formation by turning to the “Trump voter” from Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. I conclude by outlining the implications of this framework for rhetorical scholarship in three general areas: the material, constitutive, and circulatory aspects of public formation. A cautionary note: the payoff of this Lacanian account is that it introduces new symbolic dimensions of public differentiation. This move is not to be confused with pluralizing the unitary public into a diverse host of publics, or even the fragmentation of dominant publics into various forms of counterpublics. To be sure, publics scholarship has intro- duced some measure of differentiation into the equation—a deep texture of imagination. For this reason, this scholarship is simultaneously laudable and inadequate. Here, I refer to Lundberg’s more sustained contention that rhetorical studies sells itself short when it confines its investigations to the realm of intersubjective relations or “the imaginary register of rhetoric.”3 Beyond his criticism, I add that we must not mistake the scopic detailing of publics for their differentiation; this scopic emphasis is its own limitation. Indeed some publics, like Trump’s, operate more efficaciously when supporters bemoan the insuffi- ciency of their group’s representation. To understand this dynamic, our accounts must also differentiate between the operations that publics perform in discourse. Lacan’s symbolic understanding of the unconscious, uniquely, does not restrict us to differentiating the identities and intensities of publics. As I hope to demonstrate, Lacan provides a framework that allows us to name the different symbolic functions of publics (subject, fantasy, object, and so on) that exceed the public’s imagined role as an intersubjective social player or space. On strict Lacanian terms, a public is a signifier that may occupy a number of different discursive positions; it emerges from a montage, but is not (always) the portrait of a people. From this vantage, what a public “is” becomes overshadowed by what it “does” for the subject: to reorganize one’s structure of desire. Today, our theories lend a degree of sophistication to what a public “is,” but are limited with regard to what publics “do” in the unconscious. To grasp publics as a symbolic function, however, will first require us to reconsider some commonplace tendencies.

The public fantasm Contemporary theories of public formation, generally speaking, hold two habits of thought in common: the public is cast as an agent that has a fantasy, and/or the public itself is cast as a fantasy. I will discuss examples of these approaches, but my interest lies primarily at the interstices between—the manner in which a public may occupy either one or even both of these positions in a (theorist’s) discourse. In other words, I QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 191 look to name the specific structuration that allows a public to be framed both as a fantasizing subject and/or a fantasy unto itself. Despite the theoretical idiosyncrasies of scholarship, the “public” signifier performs at least two fundamental discursive functions interchangeably: either as a subject position, or a unified fantasy. In short, the term “public” is doing too much work. The first habit positions the public as if it were a fantasizing subject. In rhetorical studies, the articulation between publics and the fantasizing subject is evident in Ernest G. Bormann’s “Fantasy and Rhetorical Vision: The Rhetorical Criticism of Social Reality.”4 Bormann’s fantasy theme analysis applies the principles of small group communication to the formation of grand public entities. Building on the work of Robert Bales, Bormann argues that group fantasizing provides a window into “the group’s culture, motivation, emotional style, and cohesion.”5 Bormann emphasizes the study of any small group’s manifest content, or the dramatic elements which emerge and chain out from small group dynamics. Bormann posits a kind of public as an empirical precursor to fantasy production. A smaller “group” has a fantasy that establishes a rate of change within the “members’ sense of community,” which in turn becomes instrumental in the formation of “larger publics.”6 Bormann’s parallel wording between his “small groups” and “larger publics” has the signifier “public” do double-duty as both a fantasizing subject and a grander narrative product. Bormann’s substitution repeats itself in G. Thomas Goodnight and John Poulakos’ investigation of conspiracy rhetoric.7 Building upon Bormann’s fantasy theme, Goodnight and Poulakos forward “two different groundings for rhetorical discourse: pragmatism and fantasy.”8 For them, the pragmatic approach concerns verifiable ideas that may be corro- borated by other sources whereas fantastical rhetoric serves as an alternative (and largely negative) grounding for public discourse. Like Bormann, Goodnight and Poulakos subtly allow the active voice of “the American public” to usurp Bormann’s “small” group as the one who “discounts” rhetorical discourse as “pure fantasy.”9 Even though Goodnight and Poulakos invoke Bormann only moments before,10 their “larger” public nonetheless takes on the position of a speaking subject doing the fantasizing. Joshua Gunn’s reading of Bormann’s fantasy theme analysis may help to explain the slippage between subject and fantasy as a feature of a public’s symbolic operation. Gunn’s integration of psychoanalytical and rhetorical approaches to fantasy endeavors to return Bormann’s theory to its psychoanalytic roots through the (re)admission of Robert Bales’ more Freudian influences.11 Through Bales, Gunn replaces Bormann’s dependence upon individual consciousness with the more Lacanian notion of “fundamental” or unconscious fantasy, or in Gunn’s words a “defense mechanism of subjectivity.”12 Importantly, Gunn suggests a misnaming or misdiagnosis between conscious and unconscious fantasy—a “retroactive naming of the cause” that may account for the slippage between Bormann’s “larger” public and his “smaller” one.13 Drawing upon psychoanalysis, Gunn explains that “an individual’s entry into the social group is an entry into the symbolic, a thoroughly representational register that existed before her entry and that persists long after her death.”14 For Gunn, the important consequence is that the subject “becomes an agent in the world.”15 Gunn’s investigation of this retroactive naming appears restricted to the misapplication of agency to the individual, but it is equally applicable to the signifier “public” when occupying a similar position. 192 J. D. MYRES

Hence, the first habit of attributing agency to publics is intertwined with a second habit: the positing of the public as a fantasy. As early as 1925, Walter Lippmann’s The Phantom Public was already beginning to address the public itself as a fantasy. Lippmann lamented the public as “a false ideal” but not necessarily “an undesirable ideal,” marking how the public becomes increasingly desirable as its ideality is exposed.16 Lippmann’s mistake, of course, was in supposing that the diagnosis of a fantasy alone would result in its dissi- pation. Lippmann’s frustration at the persistence of desire shows how the fantasy designation can paper over the more intricate and challenging dimensions of public formation. Nearly a century later, the concept of fantasy has become far more (perhaps even exclusively) material, but the nature of the relationship between publics and desire remains no less enigmatic. In rhetorical studies, the naming of the public as a fantasy is perhaps best represented in Michael Calvin McGee’s “In Search of ‘the People’: A Rhetorical Alternative.”17 Like Lipp- mann, McGee contends that “the people” are best understood as fallacies or “mass fantasies.”18 The fallacy in question, argumentum ad populum, takes the “people” as merely “plural abstractions” of the individual.19 Taking the individual as the only true objective social category, McGee reads the rhetoric of Hitler to exemplify how “the people” are, in his words, “more process than phenomenon.”20 McGee casts “the people” as a mass illusion with a three-stage life cycle: “they [the people] are conjured into objective reality, remain so long as the rhetoric which defined them has force, and in the end wilt away, becoming once again merely a collection of individuals.”21 For McGee, “the people” are an “essential rhetorical fiction” characterized by its “social” and “‘objective’ reality.”22 “The people” are simultaneously real and fantasmic; this is to say real precisely because they are fictions. In the end, even for McGee, the materiality of peoples remains a false consciousness or “essentially a mass illusion.”23 Hence, McGee inverts (but does not dis- place) the priority of the fantasy/reality pair exemplified in Lippmann. Using McGee as a springboard, Maurice Charland’s constitutive rhetoric contends that the character of a people is formed rhetorically through address or interpellation.24 Char- land argues that supporters of a sovereign Quebec state were interpellated as a collectivized political subject, the people québécois, through a “process of identification in rhetorical narratives”25 that presumed their collective constitution in advance. Like McGee, Char- land identifies three ideological effects of a constitutive rhetoric or stages of a public’s life cycle: the constitution of a collective subject, the fashioning of this collective subject into a trans-historical one, and finally the fabrication of a sense of a people’s freedom.26 The ideological interpellation of a people is a rhetorical construct with material precursors and consequences—subjects are articulated according to preceding identifications, become embodied in political subjects, and are consummated in real social actions. Hence, McGee and Charland unite in suggesting that a “people” is conjured by the rhetorical mode of address, a material fiction. Each establishes a kind of circularity between the fantasy/reality pair. Michael Warner’s notion of publics and counterpublics lends additional complexity to the accounts offered by McGee and Charland by foregrounding circularity itself.27 I caution against, however, the uncritical impulse to accept Warner’s account as consistent with a truly rhetorical emphasis. In its most basic form, Warner’s public is an imaginary byproduct of the circulation and uptake of texts. Of course, the precedence Warner accords to the circulating “text” has met the occasional scholarly rejoinder.28 However, QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 193 beneath the general term of circulation Warner isolates as many as seven different “rules” which govern public formation: that a public is self-organized, a relation among strangers, simultaneously personal and impersonal, constituted through attention, serves to form a social space, becomes agential through a temporality of circulation, and finally is given character through poetic world-making.29 Warner’s “rules,” quite like Lippmann’s public phantoms, McGee’s mass fallacies, and Charland’s collective hails, consistently frame public(s) as an imaginary product of fantasy.30 The idea of the circulating text serves as skeleton for a larger public’s spectral social body. However, rhetoricians should be reticent to take Warner as wholly consistent with McGee or Charland. Note the ordering of Warner’s “rules.” Warner’s more intricate account of publics leaves aston- ishingly little room for (stylistic) rhetoric, that is, the prosopopeic deployment of publics within discourse is thoroughly subordinated to their formation by textual circulation. This limitation is evinced by the relegation of poetic world-making to a kind of finishing gloss appearing not only after circulation, but every other “rule” Warner observes in- between. Let us read Warner’s “rules” both backwards and forwards: as though poetic world- making could persist with minimal textual circulation, a public made-for-one, or a broken public. The purpose of this exercise is to enrich our understanding of circulation, not obliterate it. Backgrounding Warner’s more corporeal structure of circulation allows alternative circulations to surface. Warner’s own account performs an example. On at least one occasion, Warner’s circulating text takes on the very same character as the larger public it constitutes. Warner writes, for instance, “Public discourse craves attention like a child. Texts clamor at us. Images solicit our gaze … . The modern system of publics creates a demanding social phenomenology.”31 Here, Warner characterizes his “text” as an infantile emissary of a presupposed public. Warner’s move is more than a stylistic flour- ish; indeed, his figuration dodges the essential issue of why it is desirable to circulate these “texts” in the first place. In other words, Warner’s writing occasionally superimposes the “larger” public over his smallest unit of analysis, such that the circulating text is personi- fied as if it were its own fully functional social entity. Warner substitutes the ethos of publics as social effect into the position of the cause of uptake; the last rule usurps the underlying corporeal thematic of circulation. There is an excess of circulation that the ordering of these “rules” neglects—the circulation of poetic world-making into a primary position. Paradoxically, this means that publics formed through circulation are only desirable in pursuit of a presupposed, yet nonexistent, public. The habit of framing publics as a fantasy (and the corresponding slippage back towards a public that has a fantasy) is also exemplified in Jodi Dean’s Publicity’s Secret. Dean’s account of secrecy argues there are three ways in which her notion of “publicity” requires the secret: as a “point of exclusion through which the public becomes intelligible,” in a “concrete, historical” demarcation of public and private space, and as an ideological dimension that “protects the public from its own impossibility.”32 Dean contends that the public, or public sphere, is an ideological fantasy that “covers over the gaps, antagonisms, inconsistencies, and lacks that pervade the social field.”33 Citing Slavoj Žižek’s notion of ideology, which abdicates the tenet of false consciousness, Dean writes, “people know very well what they are doing, but they do it nevertheless.”34 In other words, “people” are quite aware of the intractable social antagonisms at work in their democracy, and yet “nevertheless” believe in the coherent social unity of a “public sphere.” Once again, 194 J. D. MYRES the “public” or “people” occupies a dual position: both as an epiphenomenal fantasy structure and as an operative part within. For instance, who are these “people” who supposedly “know very well?” Dean’s account of course ends with a socially unified fantasm, but it also begins with a knowing “people.” Even Dean’s more explicit theorization of the public as a fantasy contains slippages between the positions she accords to “subject,”“secret,” and “public.” In one reading, Dean’s “public” is a fantasizing subject. Here, the secret serves as the public’s object of desire and something designated (for this public) to uncover. Dean’s account routinely substitutes “public” for “subject,” most directly in her novel adaptation of Lacan’s “subject-supposed-to-know” into her own neologism “public-supposed-to-know.”35 Periodically, Dean’s “public” plays the role of a fictitious “subject” within its very own drama. Yet in its more forceful moments, Dean’s treatise demands a second reading: that the public qua public must be understood as a fantasy. Dean returns to this argument at key points, contending that “despite the rhetoric of publicity, there is no public.”36 The slippage between the differential functions of “public” becomes evident when Publicity’s Secret concludes with the oxymoronic demand, “For the sake of democracy, it is time to abandon the public.”37 Dean is treating publics as a fantasy in the weak sense (constitutive effect) rather than the strong sense (rhetorically deployable as effect and/or cause). Indeed, Lippmann encountered the very same obstacle in 1925. Publics become all-the-more desirable when they are identified as a false ideal—so long as publics are desired, they remain. In sum, theoretical accounts of public formation tend to address publics either as a fantasizing subject or as a fantasy themselves. This epiphenomenal approach allows us to capture some core constitutive elements of publics as unified fantasms. Of course, these accounts acknowledge textured or differentiated publics on what Lacanians call the imaginary register, the level at which the fantasy of intersubjective relations between subjects is effectuated. However, this approach remains constrained by a single structure of differentiation—fantasy itself. From a Lacanian viewpoint, these habitual references to the “imaginary” or “fantasmic” element of publics hold one thing in common: a scopic bias asserting that publics are formed primarily (if not exclusively) through the effectivity of their representation. These recurring, albeit occasional, references to “imaginary” or “fantasmic” publics symptomize a desire to “see” publics via theory and criticism. Framing publics at this level limits our conception of publicity to the presence or absence of social unicity and, hence, forecloses differentiated accounts of publics at the level of their irreducible partiality—the different things publics do in discourse. In other words, the problem facing a theory of publics comes down to one of naming. Theorists have asked the signifier “public” to carry water for a series of discursive functions, and this signifier is happy to oblige. Singularly, Lacanian psychoanalysis performs the difficult labor of parsing the fantasy/reality pair into its constituent symbolic operations. In the following section, I argue the signifier “public” coherently occupies the two aforementioned symbolic positions (subject/fantasy) only because it may occupy a third: that of an object of desire, or partial object.

Parsing public and publicity In 1998, Barbara Biesecker suggested rhetorical scholarship attend to a shift towards a “new psychoanalysis” taking place among the standard-bearers of Lacanian QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 195 psychoanalysis.38 Biesecker’s introductory foray into this “new psychoanalysis” drew attention to how Lacan’s progenitors had expanded their sights from the strict confines of the analytic situation to the realm of ideological critique. Since 1998, rhetorical scholarship has become increasingly comfortable with the fundamental, albeit daunting, termi- nology of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Today, Lacanian psychoanalysis has made significant contributions to rhetorical scholarship on a host of topics including (but not limited to) materiality, affect, rhetorical situations, public memory, visual rhetoric, and public address.39 Rhetorical approaches to the process of public formation have been no exception to the (appropriately) partial integration of the Lacanian perspective. Lund- berg, for instance, reads Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ as an example of how the “economy” of trope and affect within Warner’s theory of publics remains insufficiently explored.40 Drawing upon Lacan, Lundberg argues, “The Passion reaffirms and reformu- lates tropes of evangelical marginality” in a way that reaffirms an evangelical public as a social formation.41 Lundberg displaces the centrality of the circulating text in Warner with a Lacanian notion affect.42 In sum, Lundberg frames publics as quasi-empirical entities that are effect structures of desire and trope. I argue that psychoanalysis affords an opportunity to distinguish the study of publics from one of publicities. From a psychoanalytic vantage, publics may occupy more than just an epiphenomenal, quasi-empirical, or fantasmic position. Jacques-Alain Miller frames the distinction (between fantasy and its object) as analogous to the one between the “molecule” and the “atom” in chemistry.43 In Lacan’s algebra, fantasy is represented as ($<>a), or in something approximating English, the barred (unconstituted) subject’s relationship to their own eternally lacking object of desire (objet petit a). Parsing this com- plicated language, Miller explains that Lacan’s algebraic formula for fantasy may be understood as a molecule “composed of a significance atom and a jouissance atom.”44 Today theorists seem to agree that the unified public is a fantasy, that is, the public is one of Miller’s ($<>a) molecules. However, as discussed above, a messy characteristic of the signifier “public” is that it often performs a double-duty naming both the molecule and the atoms within it. One misnaming may occur when the public takes the position of a fantasmic agent within its very own drama—a (barred) fantasmic subject—the public that has a fantasy. In this regard, the public appears in agential form on account of a doubled fantasm: a fictional agent arrayed within an equally fictional frame. This slippage is not a problem on its own terms—indeed, articulation theory has a handle on the mise-en- abyme of the fantasmic operation. However, this misnaming is a symptom of an adjacent problem. A second, more inconspicuous, misnaming may occur when a public occupies the position of an elusive object or jouissance atom—in the sense that we often enjoy our publics precisely in their absence, meaning, their radical partiality. This second conflation, between fantasy and jouissance, is a significant obstacle that requires terminological adjustment. While molecular accounts of public formation con- centrate on the fantasy ($<>a), an atomic account would investigate what is at work within this molecule at the level of the objet petit a. In this regard, the overuse of the term “public” is neither necessary nor acceptable. There is no need to force the single term “public” to designate both Miller’s “molecule” (public = $<>a) and its “atom” (public = a).45 Instead, what we need is a distinct name for publics in their role as an objet petit a—one that leaves open the possibility of a public operating at the level of a fantasy (molecule), but distinguishes it from a public working at the level of the object 196 J. D. MYRES

(atom). Thus a little house cleaning is in order: let us retain “public” as a designation of a fantasmic effect, but instead adapt “publicity” into a term of art referring to the partial drive(s) toward publicness. Put otherwise, a “public” is a fantasy and a “publicity” is a part at work within this fantasy. When I have a public, I am fantasizing; when I desire a public, I hire a publicist to hunt one down. The emphasis upon the fantasy structure of publics comes at the expense of asking a fundamental question about this publicist’s emergence: Why desire a public? The study of publicities, then, would investigate a public at the level of its partial instantiations or what Lacanians call objet petit a, the structures that make publics themselves desirable. Lacan describes this elusive particle as a signifier that “embodies the dead end of desire’s access to the Thing.”46 In other words, Lacan’s object of desire refers to the material embodiment of a constitutive lack. In this regard, any desired object is structurally partial such that acquiring it leaves a remainder of desire. Miller describes the objet a as an “amboceptor” that serves as an uneasy middle ground between the amor- phous positivity of affect and a persistent irreconcilable lack.47 For Miller, the objet a is a portion of enjoyment “shaped by the mold of the signifier.”48 To discuss an objet a necessarily entails a cut or portioning of an economy of affective enjoyment. This object is material in two ways: (1) it is embodied in a signifier, but also (2) the absence of this object (paradoxically) serves as a material foundation for the fantasy.49 In this sense, “publicity” would refer to the structures of signification that capture a “public” only in its interminable partiality. A public (as fantasy) becomes desirable in direct pro- portion to the specific failures of its articulation/constitution in discourse. In other words, a “publicity” is a signifier calling out for its public. As a “publicity” frames its public as faceless and voiceless, it specifies the significance and mode of public desire. The con-formations of these miniature demands for partial publics embody their own peculiar form of truth. We routinely cast publics as dead, which is how they attain life and character. The stakes of a study of publicity also differ from those of publics, at least if we accord Miller’s chemistry analogy its full weight. Of course, the study of publicities taps into established reasons for the import of public formation: democracy, civic engagement, and so on. But while the study of public formation asks how one might “imagine” a public differently, an investigation of publicities considers how publics are “moved” by the con-formations of forces within. Once again, Miller’s chemistry analogy is instructive since there are significant differences between the “molecule” and the “atom” when it comes to their conditions for change. Miller writes that, “Chemistry teaches us that molecules are rather easily transformed: we pour the right thing, we heat it, and that transform[s] the molecules … . However, atoms are much less stable. In order to transform atoms, we need what is known as a nuclear reaction.”50 To reimagine a public requires what Miller is calling a simple “molecular” transformation. Anyone can reimagine a public quite easily. However, novel imaginings will not stick unless one learns how to desire these alternatives as well. To imagine a public is as simple as boiling water. However, to move a public requires an atomic rather than a molecular reaction—a fundamental reorganization of the ways publicity itself is formed as an object of desire. In the section that follows, I adapt Lacan’s schema for the “circular constitution of the object” (in obsessional neurosis) into a basic template for five distinct modes of publicity: oral, anal, phallic, gaze, and superego (voice).51 For Lacan, each term represents a cut or QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 197 partial account of enjoyment. Furthermore, while each of these partial publicities operates according to a similar set of abstract topographical rules, each ultimately establishes its own unique formation of desire. Lacan offers, in other words, as many as five regimes adaptable to the study of publics and that may appear independently or in various permu- tations. My adaptation of Lacan’s schema is an introductory template illustrating how any- given-public attains dimension through a series of partial publicities. Simply, five different ways we desire publics—but also—five faces of any-given-public.

Five formations of publicity A public is a complex object composed of a montage of publicities (oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and superego), each of which may be distinguished from the others. Classical rhetoric terms the complex tropological formation a conformatio, or a series of concurrent rhetorical formations working under a single header. Similarly, Lacan uses the term separ- tition, meaning “not separation but partition on the inside,” to describe the relationship between his partial drives.52 In the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, Lacan provides a fundamentally rhetorical definition of the drive as both “turn” and “trick.”53 Lacan characterizes the drive as a series of partial formations, metonymically constituted through the substitution of one signifier for an adjacent relative. Importantly, however, Lacan also writes, “if there is anything resembling a drive it is a montage.”54 We are not simply suggesting a montage of publics here. Instead, when a public operates at the level of a partial drive (or Lacan’s objet petit a) the montage appears between the discursive modes of desiring publicness. This montage of desires projects ethos and realistic dimension upon publics insofar as they become fantasies—such that it feels like publics not only exist, but also have distinct personalities. Importantly, publicity structures which constitutive elements are at work within any- given-public. Lacan refers to a “circular constitution” of the separate formations or stages of the drive.55 Lacan’s use of the term “circular,” however, must not be misunder- stood as suggesting a measure of harmony. Rather, Lacan means “circular” in the way one speaks of a circle of tensions.56 Indeed, Lacan likens his “circular” constitution of the partial drives to the drawing of an archer’s bow, an “outwards-and-back movement” or different instantiations of a “fundamental reversion.”57 In his seminar on Anxiety, Lacan renders his schema for the circular constitution of the partial drives not in the shape of an actual circle, but as an arch of the bow or trajectory of the arrow.58 Generally speaking, the first two (oral and anal) stages mark desire’s ascent, the third desire’s apex (phallic), and the final two desire’s repression (scopic) and displacement (superego). Lacan’s schema of these stages, pierced by an arrow conjoining them, adapts Karl Abra- ham’s stages of the object from a psychosexual developmentalism into a topographical formalism.59 However, Lacan writes, “there is no relation of production between one of the partial drives and the next.”60 Instead, the operation of each drive leaves a remainder that serves as the foundation for the next drive in the series. If one (excessively) repeats their oral fixation the oral drive subtly transitions into an anal one, and so on. Lacan writes,

The passage from the oral drive to the anal drive can be produced not by a process of matu- ration, but by the intervention of something that does not belong to the field of the drive—by the intervention, the overthrow, of the demand of the Other.61 198 J. D. MYRES

In other words, Lacan’s schema does not describe a temporal development (although it may appear in this way), but a metonymic recalibration of the discursive framing of demands.62 The arrow of Lacan’s schema (from oral through anal, phallic, scopic, and superego) depicts a series of rhetorical transformations, not behavioral or biological ones. If Lacan’s iteration of Abraham’s schema remains a developmentalism, it is only to the extent that one trope may set the stage for another—a metonymic ﬂow. For Lacan, each stage of the object (oral, anal, etc.) harbors its own “anxiety-point,” or a point at which the repetition of a demand becomes so rehearsed it loses its affective punch.63 Miller describes an “anxiety-point” as a juncture when “lack begins to lack, that is to say when the object is there and when there are too many objects.”64 Calum Matheson explains that anxiety is an “inherently rhetorical phenomenon arising from net- works of affective investment, mediated by symbols, which disrupts the condition of enjoyment for a subject’s fantasies.”65 Matheson argues that since “anxiety has to do with uncertainty about the desire of the Other (the Symbolic order which makes communication possible), it is inherently tied to language and the operations of trope.”66 Lacan’s separtitioning of partial objects pluralizes these anxiety-points such that the traver- sal of one regime of fantasy becomes the grounding for another. While each of Lacan’s anxiety-points obeys similar topographical rules, they may differ according to the particu- lar demands within a given rhetorical situation.67 Overall, each stage of Lacan’s object represents a regime of desire and a rhetorical pivot towards an alternative regime. This double-edged characteristic of the partial object (between desire and drive) suggests that there are both progressive and regressive traversals of fantasy. For example, Lacan becomes especially equivocal when discussing the rise and fall of his arrow at the (phallic) apex of his schema. Lacan tells us, “This arrow expresses what dic- tates, in each analytic phase of the reconstitution of the data of repressed desire, that in a regression there is a progressive side […] [and that in any progression] there is a regressive side.”68 Lacan is discussing the progression of the analytical situation here, but rhetoricians might take heed that moving forward along Lacan’s arrow is neither structurally ordained nor necessarily productive. For Lacan’s analyst, the forward transition between objects represents a progression in the sense that the patient is dislodging their prevailing regime of desire. A shift from the oral to the anal demand, for instance, may alleviate symptoms related to an oral fixation. On the other hand, an anal regime of demands has its own baggage and may result in new symptoms. For rhetoricians, Lacan’s equivocation between progression–regression means that traversing a fantasy (of a public) may just as easily constitute a regressive maneuver as a progressive one. Con- versely, a supposed regression towards the oral side of Lacan’s schema may have a productive result given the circumstances of a situation.

Oral publicity There are three basic characteristics of the oral drive: ingestion, an oral (primal) tropology, and a relation of dependence. First, the oral drive is founded upon what Lacan calls a “need in the Other,” meaning that the subject takes its nourishment from an ingestion of their object of desire.69 Like bodily hunger, nothing is more important than the ingested object.70 However unlike bodily hunger, the oral drive towards ingestion is insatiable.71 The oral drive is characterized by an intimate or close proximity with the object, but is QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 199 also constituted by a separation or cut. In psychoanalysis, this separation comes in the form of a substitution between nourishment harbored within the breast and the breast itself. Hence a second characteristic: discourse in the oral mode lends itself to a nucleus of oral tropes. Note that the oral appears as the first stage because it establishes a tropology of origins—not that it is an origin in itself. For instance, psychoanalysis consistently references the role of the breast, milk, and the nipple; however, these oral tropes also stem off to other terms like the infant’s suckling, the tongue, swallowing, biting, and even, as Abraham suggests, cannibalism.72 The important point is that the oral stage is characterized by a flexible metonymic set.73 Strictly speaking, no given bodily action, member, or attachment takes absolute precedence here. As Lundberg would have it, the “economy” of oral tropes, rather than any specific trope, frames a structure of desire.74 Therefore as a third characteristic, discourse in the oral mode takes on a relation of (primal) dependence. For Lacan, the oral drive conflates the objet a for the big Other (transferring the authority of one’s totalized symbolic order upon an object).75 The subject takes on a parasitic relation of dependency upon the mother (the typical big Other of the oral relation for psychoanalysts). In psychoanalytic terms, the oral publicity would constitute a positive transference—one takes their public into their own mouth and ultimately falls in love with it.76 In sum, oral publicity may be identified by the “ingestion” of a supposed public that provides sustenance, an oral tropology in its demands, and a parasitic relation of dependence upon a (partial) public. However, no discourse remains permanently lodged within a single desirous formation—tropological excess becomes its own rhetorical pivot. The oral drive reaches its anxiety-point through a failing nourishment of its object. For instance, the oral shifts to the anal when the tropology of demand transitions from ingestion to externalization. The archetypal fantasy corresponding to oral publicity would be that of the classical orator as a public’s mouthpiece. Etymologically, the term orator positions the speaker as a public object or site of oral cathexis. Michiel de Vaan’s etymology discusses how both oratio (speech, utterance) and orator (envoy, public speaker) derive from oro, orare (to pray to or beseech), yet, as his account presses further it encounters the Proto-Italic os, oris (mouth).77 The dual relationship between oro and the os renders a speaker whose mouth is supplicated to a higher power. Oral publicity performs a chiasmus between orator and public-as-object: the orator calls upon their public for sustenance; and in turn serves as a mouthpiece for a public’s speech. In modern terms, in oratory there is a subtle etymological shift from a “speaker” (an intending humanistic subject) to a speaker (the kind your radio has in your car). The ethos of oral publicity therefore takes the form of the primal orator. Let us turn to an example. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign structured his public in an oral mode for both the primaries and the general election. Mutual dependence structured the relationship between candidate Trump and his public. On January 23, 2016 of the Republican primaries, for instance, Trump famously claimed, “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”78 Jeremy Diamond, of CNN, noted that Trump had “repeatedly pointed to the loyalty of his supporters” and that “almost nothing could make them change.”79 Oral publicity remained prominent in Donald Trump’s address at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Referencing “laid-off factory workers,” Trump declared, “These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice.”80 The trope of “voice” deployed here projects from the 200 J. D. MYRES mouth, to be distinguished from the sort one hears in the ear. The conclusion of Trump’s address returns to the oral mode in its penultimate moment:

My pledge reads: “I’M WITH YOU—THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.” I am your voice. So to every parent who dreams for their child, and every child who dreams for their future, I say these words to you tonight: I am With You, and I will fight for you, and I will win for you.81 Oral publicity brings the orator and their public into intimate proximity—to the point that orator and public become substitutable. Trump is a mouthpiece for his people, and through an inversion his people are ingested—such that Trump speaks in their voice. The oral relation is a structure of love. Trump himself becomes the (partial) material embodiment of the public he ingests, and having obliterated the distance between himself and his public Trump’s rhetoric becomes increasingly dependent upon “his people.” For scholars, Lacan’s oral stage explains Trump’s resilience without constituting these “people” in advance: the symbolic proximity between the signiﬁer “Trump” and the object “his people” allows the former to beneﬁt from the enigma of the latter.

Anal publicity Basic characteristics of the anal drive include: externalization, a tropology of management, and an ambivalent obsession with the excremental object. First, the anal drive desires its object as externalized. Whereas the oral object is brought into intimate proximity with the body through ingestion, the anal object becomes distributed to one’s surroundings. No silliness is necessary here; indeed, the propensity to cast the anal drive as if it were exclusively transgressive may entirely miss the point. Lacan describes the anal drive as revolving around a “demand in the Other” that is the “educative demand par excellence.”82 This view remains consistent with Abraham, who wrote that a “pedantic economy and love of orderli- ness” characterize anal eroticism.83 For Abraham, there are two tendencies associated with the anal object, one being to “destroy the object (or the external world),” the other being “to control it.”84 In other words, the anal drive refers less to the disciplinarian than the one who enjoys being disciplined, or conversely, flaunting transgression. One must not hastily con- flate the latter with an ethico-political radicalism. However, the common point between discipline and transgression leads to the anal drive’s second characteristic: a tropology of management. For Abraham, the anal drive is marked by a tropology of the gift, which refers to how a child “identifies itself with the requirements of its educators and being proud of its attainment … in ‘being good’, in its parents’ praise.”85 Think potty-training. An anal tropology has to do with excrement, of course, but it also (more importantly) erects an economy of gift exchange around this object. Both discipline and transgression pivot upon the subject’s management of their gift: either they revel in the self-control involved in their restraint, or what Abraham calls their “right of decision” involved in refus- ing the parental demand.86 A third characteristic of the anal drive would therefore be the obsessive ambivalence directed at the excremental object itself—both as admired and fore- sworn. The anal drive captures the subject in a sado-masochistic axis: either one revels in their decision to destroy the object (quite the opposite of resisting its lure), or takes enjoyment from doing as they are told. However, the anal drive reaches its “anxiety-point” when the excremental object becomes (figured as) so distant it is no longer manageable—the flatly lost or castrated object. QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 201

The archetypal fantasy of an anal publicity is exemplified in Plato’s Republic, but is also identifiable across a broad swath of contemporary approaches. The “public” of the Repub- lic becomes bifurcated into two anal partitions: (1) the unruly multitude, and (2) Socrates’ ideally well-managed city.87 In each of these modalities, the public plays the role of a vulgus, or vulgar public, in need of management and control. Modern iterations of anal publicity regularly levy similar disciplinary injunctions at the appropriate imaginings of publicness. Walter Lippmann, for instance, wrote that, “The public must be put in its place … so that each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of the bewildered herd.”88 Or, with this anal partitioning in mind, we might return to Dean’s attempt to save the demos by destroying the public: “For the sake of democracy, it is time to abandon the public.”89 Remember, excrement is not an effect of desire, but its cause. The demand to “abandon” the public metonymically reframes publicity in the anal mode, which paradoxically enhances desire through a tandem of condemnation and admiration. As excrement, anal publicity frames its “public” as a Platonic foil—for itself. Hence, the ethos corresponding to the anal mode would be the Teflon public. At specific junctures in the general election, Trump’s public took a non-stick “Teflon” quality (once attributed to the former president, Ronald Reagan) from an anal formation of publicity. Amidst Trump’s growing storm of ad hominem attacks upon the parents of a fallen Muslim American soldier, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, commentators directed criticism at not only the Republican nominee, but also his people. Ben Jacobs of The Guardian, for instance, entitled his account of the issue as “Khan Controversy: Donald Trump Fans Don’t Know or Don’t Care.”90 Similarly, the Liberal firebrand Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC took to goading Trump supporters for their continued defense of the embattled candidate. Pivoting directly from his own ad hominem “Xanax Trump” (suggesting hand- lers had drugged the candidate to use a teleprompter), O’Donnell redirected his ire from the candidate towards his people:

[T]he Trump audience was laughing at Hillary Clinton for reading speeches while their hero was reading a speech.

The Trump audience had no idea that the unintended Trump joke was on them. In this case, Trump and his audience were perfectly matched in mental clarity. Just like most Trump audi- ences who love every word spoken by the most ignorant and mentally unstable presidential candidate in history.91 This form of ridicule, less against the man than his people, would find its way into the public speeches of Trump’s Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. On September 9, 2016 Clinton famously contended that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”92 Clinton’s comments spurred laughter among supporters, and became a rallying cry for the Trump campaign. Following Clinton’s comments, Trump retorted, “She divides people into baskets as though they were objects, not human beings.”93 Hence, anal publicity enflamed the desire for Trump’s public among both parties: Democrats desired Trump’s public as a foil, and the Trump campaign took it as an opportunity to add dimension to their public prosopon. Either way, a bad public was good for publicity. In 2016, this anal partitioning of publicity fortified the gaffe-prone Trump with an object desirable to lovers and haters alike. Lacan’s anal stage reveals a troubling characteristic within leftist resistance to Trump: that at the 202 J. D. MYRES level of desire, it was less opponent than unwitting accomplice. The left’s anal partitioning maintained and cultivated these people as a despised object rather than a dis-affected one.

Phallic publicity An excess of externalization manifests itself in radical lack. The phallic public is marked by castration, a rupture within public prosopopeia, and a rhetorical pivot towards its return. Lacan characterizes the libidinal form of the phallus as “a minus, as a blank” that is “cut out of the specular image.”94 For Lacan, castration represents a unique function of the object in that it becomes defined, exclusively and explicitly, by its lack. Lacan calls the phallic stage a “jouissance in the Other”—a point at which it seems my entire symbolic universe has turned against me.95 Lacan marks the emergence of the phallic object as when “the register of demand is exhausted.”96 The phallic stage of the object appears at the apex of Lacan’s schema, the point at which an arrow makes its turn back towards the earth.97 As the phallic stage reaches its apex, lack no longer buttresses desire, and the subject becomes confronted with anxiety. In Lacan’s words, the phallic stage performs an about face when “[t]here is no castration because, at the locus at which it occurs, there is no object to castrate.”98 Phallic publicity, then, refers to the manifestation of publicity minus its public—a point at which our publics are desired precisely in their radical absence. In the phallic mode, the public becomes castrated by publicity itself; in other words, there is simply no public left to demand within one’s symbolic structure. The desire-to-publicity becomes the only remaining trace of one’s public. Hence, the phallic stage represents both: (1) the locus of anxiety qua anxiety or the point at which lack stalls out, and (2) the pivot towards a new mode of publicity that creates something out of nothing. In the excess of absence comes a return of the public in force, a fantasmic public conjured by the scopic mode. Phallic publicity corresponds to a fulcrum rather than fantasy—a punctuation within and between prosopopeic public imaginings. The phallic anxiety-point of publicity finds an archetype in John Dewey’s figure of the “eclipse” in The Public and its Problems.99 Dewey repeatedly employs this tropology of lack over the course of his treatise, writing that the public, the public itself, is “passing away,”“unorganized and formless,”“uncertain and obscure,”“remote from government,”“confused and eclipsed,” and “so bewildered that it cannot find itself.”100 At other moments, Dewey’s general figurative economy of lack becomes a prosopopeic rupture. For instance, Dewey contends that the “primary problem of the public [is] to achieve such recognition of itself,” that it “cannot identify and distinguish itself,” and that the “prime difficulty [is to] … recognize itself as to define and express its interests.”101 In a moment of near resignation, Dewey writes, “If a public exists, it is surely as uncertain about its own whereabouts as philosophers since Hume have been about the make-up of the self.”102 However, amidst these castrated publicities there is no more telling moment than when Dewey’s figuration of lack, pressed to its excess, pivots: “There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there are too many publics.”103 It is from this anxiety- point, where the lack of a public is no longer enough, that Dewey asks the scopic question: “What are the conditions under which we may reasonably picture the Public emerging from its eclipse?”104 Lacan flips this logic; the foundational ethos of any public is derived from this public in eclipse. QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 203

Amid dropping poll numbers and a series of post-convention battles, there came a point when Trump’s public, even in its asserted presence, remained insufficient. With few disputing Trump’s professed mastery over his supporters, political insiders began to question whether his “ceiling” of support was an absolute sign of impending defeat.105 At its apex, Trump told a crowd of supporters that even with superior numbers the election would be “rigged” against them: “I’m telling you, November 8th, we better be careful because that election is gonna be rigged and I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s gonna be taken away from us.”106 Each characteristic of phallic publicity is condensed within Trump’s statement: first, his public is framed as so removed it becomes defined by its prospect of total disappearance; second, it contains a prosopopeic rupture such that even in victory its voice is usurped; and, third, it pivots towards a scopic mode in its call for “watching” the polls. In short, Trump’s “people” could not be imagined to death. Lacan’s phallic stage inverts the most basic constitutive logic of public formation. A public, in the strong (object) sense, is desirable because it radically resists representation in discourse. Publics are not born, nor do they die; their fate lies in the redistribution of their name across a network of signifiers.

Scopic publicity From impossible desires to idealized gods, scopic publicity overcompensates for castration by taking desire’s persistence as unquestionable evidence of a unified public’s presence. Scopic publicity is characterized by the public’s might, the triumph of its prosopon, and the alienation of desire. First, the scopic drive is marked by an overinvest- ment in the certitude of its object. Lacan describes the scopic regime as “might in the Other,” or a “mirage” of desire.107 For Lacan, the scopic drive is characterized by the “contemplative possession” of its object, and hence, is “strictly the level of the fantasy.”108 Fantasy, in other words, becomes the only recourse available to fill the hole of castration left in the symbolic economy. Hence, scopic publicity takes fantasy qua fantasy as its archetype—a Nixonian silent majority that, neither seen nor heard, is invoked as an absolute. A public in the scopic mode becomes both omniscient and almighty in its invisibility. Scopic publicity receives enjoyment from this almighty public, and, although its public remains unseen, insists upon the legitimacy of partial material traces, the public figures and places, that enable us to behave as if this public were an optical phenomenon.109 Scopic publicity therefore corresponds to desiring the unified public par excellence. Second, the almighty public finds its rhetorical supplement in the triumph of its prosopon. This public takes on an active voice, and becomes its own (fictive and totalized) subject position whose speech is not only possible but also common, supposed, and authoritative. Scopic publics become empirical agents wielding material agencies. In contrast to the anal public (corresponding to a disciplined/transgressive object), its scopic counterpart becomes resituated as the disci- plining Other, the fictive agent doling out judgment. As Dean aptly observes, the scopic public becomes transferred into the position of a subject-supposed-to-know a secret, gaze object, hidden from its view.110 Third, scopic publicity is a mode of desiring publics which reassures the subject through a near complete obfuscation of the public’s role as objet petit a. Lacan suggests the scopic level “is the most fully developed in its fundamental alienation.”111 Hence, scopic publicity names a regime of desire 204 J. D. MYRES aimed at masking the function of desire itself—by repressing desirous modes of publicity, publics reemerge from the void taking the ethos of the secret public. As the general election of 2016 concluded, Trump and his advocates became more insistent upon the existence of a Nixonian silent majority, that is, a public seen precisely in its persistent absence. Trump’s silent majority was less vocal than scopic—a public which attained an excess of might through its secrecy. At a scopic level, Trump’s public became figured as a secret where, as Atilla Hallsby writes, “subjects establish that they don’t know something, and how such not-knowing resonates across political discourse.”112 In Trump’s case, the public itself became this secret, and “not-knowing” became a figure for visualization. Throughout the campaign Trump would complain that his public was being underrepresented or miscounted by the polls, indeed calling upon his secret majority to “go down to certain areas and watch” polling locations.113 Even during the 2016 Republican primaries, Sam Sanders of National Public Radio (NPR) reported that Trump regularly trumpeted a silent majority on the stump. Interviewing the historian Rick Perlstein, the NPR segment traced Trump’s silent majority to its racialized Nixonian incarnation as something that “said just as much about who was in it as who was not”—the segment went on to chart these exclusions in scopic terms: “Black civil rights militants,” “feminists,”“students who were smoking drugs,” and “rock ‘n’ roll bands” who jeopar- dized the “1950s ‘Leave It To Beaver’ vision.” 114 Perhaps the most telling characteristic of Trump’s “silent majority” (where whiteness stays silent) is that it remained fantasmic even in its supposed moment of triumph. After the election, commentators observed how Trump continued to trumpet a public of excessive grandeur—one so magnificent that it remained miscounted and under-visualized even in victory.115 Lacan’s scopic stage wards against a reductive materiality of publics that would look no further than the corporeal. As a desire, a public’s corporeal traces come to matter through a supplemen- tal materiality of the signifier and its unpresentable remainder. Scopic publicity reaches its anxiety-point when an object resistant to the specular mode stains the public prosopon— when the imaginary ethos of a public becomes so vivid that one expects its voice.116

Superego publicity Superego publicity is characterized by the enjoyment (jouissance) of public demands, a rhetoric of radical substitution, and the prospect of differentiating publicness. First, the superego stage of the object establishes a regime of desire based on the enjoyment of (differential) publicities. Lacan calls the superego stage the emergence of “the desire of the Other” in “pure form.”117 In terms of the clinical situation, the obsessional’s tactical overcompensation for their perceived castration, the scopic fantasy, inscribes an irreducible gap into the patient’s prevailing regime of symbolic authority. Hence, for Lacan, the fifth stage represents the possibility for analytical progress: the emergence of a lack on the side of the Other, meaning, the recognition of the role of contingency in a symbolic universe. Lacan’s notion of the superego is unique insofar as it forks the road, rather than ending his analytical process. Lacan’s superego therefore requires nuance—it is not the law, but the disruptive mode of law’s articulation in the unconscious.118 Clarifying this distinction between superego and law, Éric Laurent warns, “It is important to rid our- selves of the notion that the superego serves a prohibitory function.”119 Laurent continues, “if the superego is dangerous, it is not because it prohibits, but because it pushes toward QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 205 crime. It pushes us to jouir.”120 For Laurent, the superego function is to “refer to the three registers of inconsistency, the indemonstrable, and the undecidable” in one’s symbolic economy.121 In the wake of authoritative order, only rhetoric can remain. Hence, second, superego publicity brings rhetoric itself to the fore: the radical contingency or sub- stitutability of public traces. As superego, publicity appears as pure rhetorical device and becomes enjoyed as such. In other words, superego publicity is not necessarily an aban- donment of our desire for publicness, but rather a rhetoric of desire’s redistribution. One enjoys the device used in public invocation and, by derivation, learns to desire the fantasmic peoples invoked. Therefore, third, superego publicity opens the prospect for enjoying one’s responsibility to/for any-given-public. Whereas oral publicity declares its fealty with the object, superego publicity commits treason through a radical fornication with other publicity rhetorics, meaning, the object in fantasy becomes exchangeable.122 Of course, the superego finds its fantasmic archetype in the desire for pluralism—the idea that a coherent people may be composed of a diversity of (contained) voices. However, the superego function pluralizes publics (fantasmically) only as effect—the recognition that any signifier might serve as desire’s foundation becomes reflected on an epiphenomenal plane. Our publics, therefore, harbor the untapped ethos of the public analyst. Superego publicity was atypical, if not altogether absent, from Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. If superego publicity had taken center stage, in a strong sense, it would have circumscribed Trump’s “people” as a radically substitutable object of desire. However, the fantasy of a pluralized superego public did appear, briefly, in the form of a question during the second presidential debate. James Carter, a town hall member, asked Trump (and Clinton): “Do you believe you can be a devoted president to all the people in the United States?”123 Carter’s question asks, can you hear the public’s voices and will you be devoted to all of them? The people, all of the people in the United States (legal or otherwise), become interchangeable objects of devotion. Trump’s response, however, substi- tuted this pluralistic fantasy for the oral/anal practice of enjoying his public. Trump responded: “Absolutely. I mean, she calls our people deplorable. A large group. And irre- deemable. I will be a president for all of our people.”124 In the second presidential debate, the demand to enjoy all of the public’s potential voices had fallen upon deaf ears. Trump’s response not only committed itself to a certain (oral/anal) fantasy, it marked the limits of desiring publicness throughout an entire symbolic economy. Trump’s answer deployed his public as rhetorical device (not empirical entity), but it lacked a recognition of rhetoric as a preeminent structure of enjoyment in his discourse. In the strong sense, superego publicity would hold us responsible for our different modes of desiring publics—regardless of membership. For scholars, Lacan’s superego stage provides an exploratory frame for our other stages without casting our accounts in the very same desirous frameworks they describe. Of course, I have only provided partial accounts of Trump’s public; a move quite appropriate if we take seriously the interminable partiality of publics themselves. Even in the brief examples provided here, Lacan’s schema of objects allows a key dimension of the “Trump voter” to be emphasized: its intensity was derived from its desirability rather than the traditional constitution of its membership. The “Trump voter” was less an identity than a pervasive series of differential formations of lack; it became desirable relative to the circumscription of its absence in discourse. Throughout the 2016 election, a cross- weave of publicities reinforced the “Trump voter” across political orientations: a series of oral, anal, phallic and scopic traits (exempting superego) permeated our symbolic 206 J. D. MYRES universe. In these ways, Trump’s public was not only imaginable; it was desirable. At this symbolic level, every last one of us was a “Trump voter.”

Conclusion Rethinking publics from the standpoint of desire is a continuing, indeed ceaseless, process. In contemporary rhetorical theory, the term “public” is being asked to do the work for a series of separable discursive functions: both as a fantasy and as a part or player within. As a result, wholly different regimes of desire become neglected under the clunky header “public.” As an introductory frame, I have suggested differentiating the fantasmic framing of a “public” from the drives to “publicity.” This essay has offered a template for these different publicities modeled upon Lacan’s stages of the object. Uniquely, Lacan’s stages organize desire into its series of constituent demands, such that a public may be named for its partial instantiations rather than the presence or absence of its unicity. We need not take this schema as a structuralism. Lacan’s framework is indeed an organizational structure, but it does not serve structuralist ends. For Lacan, organizing partitions of desire is a framework for inventing analytical provocations, little interpretive utterances designed to throw prevailing structures off their symbolic footing. Today, Lacan’s schema is useful because it agitates what I fear is becoming a unified theory of public formation, one which routinely cites the material, constitutive, and circulatory aspects of publics and enforces them as closed structures. These aspects, in my view, are only valuable if they possess a constitutive outside. Given time, a theory of publicity would have three basic implications for rhetorical theory and criticism. I will outline them briefly. First, a theory of publicity would expand the materiality of publics beyond their corporeal traces into the domain of surplus jouissance. In this essay, I have suggested that publics scholarship currently harbors a scopic bias that endows corporeality with structural clout. Put strongly, a single stage of desire is behaving as if it were a theory. A theory of publicity, on the con- trary, suggests that a public becomes desirable because the signifier “public” exceeds the social operations used to produce it. Simply, a (desired) public is more than the sum of its parts; it persists in excess of its members, non-members, texts, symbols, and spaces. Lacanian psychoanalysis reminds us that the most radically (im)material of things, the objet petit a, can paradoxically be of the greatest consequence—serving as the cause of the desire that logically precedes imagination. Hence, second, a theory of publicity displaces the question of public constitution with this question of desire. Today, the most important question to ask at the outset of our investigations is: Why desire a public? Answering this question requires identifying the specific ways in which “people” (as signifier) are circumscribed as discursive lack. This strategy does not require that we ontologize lack, only that we read it rhetorically. Lacan’s schema retrieves five well-rehearsed lacunae from psychoanalytic experience to nuance our answers with unique characteristics (oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and superego). These specific failures of a public’s constitution become organizing principles of social discourse, both as a grounds for desiring a public and a basis for its ethos. A theory of publicity therefore demands a fundamental rethinking of constitutive rhetoric that foregrounds the desire for publics themselves. Lacan allows a constitutive rhetoric from its other side, such that a public’s constitution becomes immaterial to the social equation. QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 207

Pressed further, Lacan’s schema promises accounts of publics from different starting points, featuring different functions, and perhaps even with different stakes. Finally, a theory of publicity expands our understanding of circulation from the imaginary into the symbolic register. This approach opens new domains of circulation. For a theory of publicity, the circulation of physical artifacts would be enriched by analyses of the discursive circulations of the public-as-signifier. As I have shown here, a public may circulate between different functions in discourse: taking the form of a collective subject, a fantasy, but also an object cause of desire. And furthermore, a public signifier may also circulate between different desirous stages: oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and superego. A theory of publicity, then, supplements literal circulation with figurative counter- parts. If a theory of publicity abandons anything, it is not the material, constitutive, or circulatory, but rather the one-size-fits-all structuration of public formation. One day, perhaps we will be able to articulate the singularity of a public not only in terms of its identity, but concurrently in terms of its absolutely unique procedure of formation. Lacan is merely an inaugural gesture, but a necessary one. Foregrounding the public’s role as objet petit a, a theory of publicity opens new hallways of thought and reinvigorates the material, constitutive, and circulatory by troubling their cause and resituating their limit.

ORCID Jason D. Myres http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0206-1424

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 Uni- versity 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. 208 J. D. MYRES

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 Counterpub- lics’,” 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, Rec- ognition,” 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. QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 209

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 Neolib- eral 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: Psy- choanalysis, 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 Mel- ancholic 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 Mate- riality 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 Rheto- ric 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 210 J. D. MYRES

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 Dif- férance,” 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 Uni- versity 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. QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH 211

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 Guar- dian, 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. Circu- lation 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 (Cam- bridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994); Joan Copjec, Imagine There’’s No Woman: Ethics and Subli- mation (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. 212 J. D. MYRES

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 Con- sidered (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 Psy- choses 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. Copyright of Quarterly Journal of Speech is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.