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5 Reference, Enjoyment, and the Materiality of Rhetoric The late nineteenth century form of psychology that claimed to be both scientific and forced itself even on its adversaries, thanks both to the apparatus of objectivity and the profession of materialism, simply failed to be positive, excluding from the outset both objectivity and materialism. —Jacques Lacan, “Beyond the Reality Principle” one of the most frequent targets of Lacan’s critical sensibilities is ego psychology , which holds that the goal of the talking cure is to square the function of the ego with the demands placed on it by desire. Ego psychology attempts to give a scientific account of symptoms as bearers of meanings produced by the subject’s interior life, understood through the lens of the desiring body. The talking “cure” works by revealing the meaning of the symptom to the analysand, thereby offering the analysand an opportunity to rearticulate their true desires in a more socially acceptable form. Ego psychology claimed both scientific objectivity in arguing for a systematic mode of attending to the meaning of symptoms and a form of materialism in attending to the body as a cause of desire. for Lacan, ego psychology fails because it presumes a subject that is given in advance, conceiving of it outside of the symbolic matrix that precipitates it. As a result, by ignoring the work of the Symbolic and the imaginary nature of the subject itself,the project of ego-oriented psychology excluded “from the outset” the very conditions that would afford it a claim to scientific status or attention to materiality . Although the analogy between rhetorical theory and ego psychology is not exact, the parallels are evocative: contemporary rhetorical theory is largely centered around practices of meaning making, it is interested in squaring meaning making with the demands of a subject negotiating discursive contexts , and it too would like to claim an understanding of the materiality of its processes.And if rhetorical studies fetishizes the imaginary register, it too may “exclude from the outset” the conditions that would afford it a claim to materialism. The question of the materiality of rhetoric,first heralded in Michael Calvin McGee’s “Materialist’s Conception of Rhetoric,” represents rhetorical Reference, Enjoyment, and the Materiality of Rhetoric / 99 studies’ continuing effort to define the persistence, durability, and scope of rhetorical processes in the social construction of reality. The primary question that debates over rhetoric’s materiality harbor is this: how much of reality is ultimately reducible to rhetorical effect? By implication, a second question emerges: if the field of rhetorical effects has a boundary, is it correct to imply only that which is beyond the boundary is necessarily “material ”? for example, a strand of the debate surrounding the materiality of rhetoric thesis critiques what it identifies as a certain rhetorical imperialism that would seek to reduce every phenomenon to the operation of discourse, arguing that a global conception of rhetoric elides attention to the historically situated, extra-rhetorical, material processes that constitute the world.1 yet, caution is in order: framing the debate over the materiality of rhetoric in a simple binary between a global account of the discursive production of the world and a dissent on the basis that some phenomena are external to the operation of rhetorical discourse invites a conceptual slippage.This framing conflates two senses of the concept of “materiality,” confusing one definition of the material as that which exceeds or exists independent of human discourse and cognition with another that frames materiality as the durable social character of discursive formations. Thus,one might reframe the binary conception of the materiality of rhetoric by posing two Lacanian questions that parallel these two senses of the term material. first, what is the relationship between rhetoric and the Real? Second, what is the relationship between rhetoric and the material? My goal will be to demonstrate why these questions ask two radically distinct things, and why an account of enjoyment is necessary to proffer an answer to both questions. in chapter 1 i asserted that the Real is rhetoric’s limit. if the Real is independent of or, more accurately, beyond the rhetoric, it follows that the Real exists outside of the symbolic and imaginary operations that relate a subject to its world. Although the Real can be effected by the movements of the Symbolic and imaginary orders (as the Borromean knot demonstrates), the Symbolic and imaginary cannot internalize it. for example, Lacan argues that as a result analytic practice must place “speech...

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