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 for- mation 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 consti- tution 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 dimen- sion (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 differen- tiated 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 mul- tiple 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 sym- bolic 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 con- fines 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 sym- bolic 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 differ- ent 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 fanta- sizing subject and/or a fantasy unto itself. Despite the theoretical idiosyncrasies of scholar- ship, 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 com- munication 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