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6 Lacan in Public from the point of view of the public, my wish is to emit a sign of alarm. —Jacques Lacan, “interview, 1957” So far, my task has been to locate the place of rhetoric in Lacan’s work, primarily by mapping the diverse discursive functions entailed in a theory of rhetoric onto the the Symbolic, imaginary, and Real orders. My attempt to locate rhetoric has focused on articulating its suspension between the formal charge of the Symbolic, imaginary commitments and practices of relation, and the limit implied by the Real. in this chapter, i take the concept of location a bit more literally than i have so far, focusing on the public as the site in which the subject and its discourses unfold. Whether in the guise of the public sphere or spheres (the public as an antithesis to the private), public address, or public culture, things public have become a significant site for locating and analyzing the circulation of discourse in contemporary life. While many segments of the contemporary humanities embrace a variety of concepts rooted in the traditions of public theorizing, there is little consensus on how one might understand the concept “public.” The ways of theorizing it are as diverse as the tasks to which the concept can be applied. Has the concept suffered death by a thousand iterations? The plurality of public concepts may testify to the usefulness of the concept in a broad range of fora, each with distinctive needs. But plurality potentially comes at the expense of precision: Arthur Strum’s history of the German term Offentlichkeit—from which the idea of the public and cognates such as publicness, publicity, or the public sphere derive— concludes that the theorizing around the concept of the public has become cacophonous, embodying “loudly competing but mutually incomprehensible disciplinary public spheres, each with its own practical presuppositions and theoretical-methodological languages.”1 This confusion invites equivocation.The confusion surrounding the idea of the public stems from conceptual slippages between the varied elements that offentlichkeit has harbored from its inception: between public spheres, specific publics, and the “public” qualities of social phenomena. inspired by Lacan in Public / 125 Lacan,i propose a framework for parsing things public by defining three registers of publicness: public practices of address, specific identitarian publics, and finally, “the” public as a space of appearance. Practices of publicness name the habituated modes of imaginary affiliation and address that position subjects relative to others.When practices of publicness cohere around subjects who consume shared texts through common affinity to an economy of trope, enjoyment, and modes of relation to one another, a specific public emerges. Public “space” is the site where the practices that make up specific publics are mediated by exchange between the general and specific economies of trope and enjoyment that animate subjects and underwrite the production of their discourses. This tripartite distinction has an analytic and an empirical component. Analytically, this distinction signals that public making relies on three locative functions: an addressive function, an identitarian function, and an ontological function. At the level of address, practices of publicness are constituted by the specific modes of relation to other subjects that invest practices of public talk with an imaginary sense of the public as a space of the mutual negotiation of meaning-making practices—thus, modes of address are the imaginary supplement that ensures speaking subjects of the possibility of relation to other public subjects in advance, covering over the failures in unicity that inhere in the sign.At the level of identitarian practices, the lifeblood of specific publics, a public is a mode of shared affinity between subjects that is both a site of tropological production and a site of investment, one that both ensures an identity that a subject might enjoy and that orders their modes of relation to the self,to other subjects,and to the world.finally, at the ontological level, public space refers to the fact that entry into a publically shared language entails the labor of abstraction, which is the condition of possibility for establishing a shared language and simultaneously disfigures the subjects that enter into public discourse. Empirically, each of these registers comes together in an economically interlocked set of practices of tropological exchange and affective labor that constitute the field of publicness within which empirical publics emerge and are reproduced. A public is a specific formation that functions as it does because it solves a problem for a subject.Because speaking subjects...

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