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2 Locating Rhetoric My students, in reading works of rhetoric, recognized it to be their daily fare at my seminar. —Jacques Lacan, “Appendix ii:The Metaphor of the Subject” A difficulty looms as soon as one takes up the task of figuring rhetoric in Lacan’s work.The difficulty is not Lacan’s impenetrable writing,nor the possibility that there are lenses other than rhetoric through which one might read Lacan:the difficulty is a prevailing indecision about what exactly rhetoric is. But one might begin with a more modest question than “what is rhetoric?” The question is this:where is rhetoric located? This chapter takes up the American iterations of rhetorical theory to figure where they have located rhetoric, followed by a treatment of Lacan’s tripartite scheme for the three orders of the subject’s experience:Real, Symbolic, imaginary. Because part of the confusion surrounding rhetoric is that it becomes an umbrella term for all the functions of discourse, my goal in turning to Lacan’s three orders is to locate rhetoric by parsing and subsequently mapping the discrete discursive functions that are usually lumped together under the concept of rhetoric onto Lacan’s triad. next, i extend this map by treating exemplary points in Lacan’s work where he reflects most explicitly on the nature and functions of rhetoric. finally, i will conclude with a provocation on Lacan’s injunction to “wring the neck of rhetoric.” Locating Rhetoric in the American Rhetorical Traditions Largely as a result of the utilitarian leanings of rhetorical studies in composition and communication studies, rhetoricians largely defer questions regarding the ontology of rhetoric by referring to a set of standard definitions: symbolic action, a faculty for observing the available means of persuasion in any given situation, the study of the effects of discourse, and, occasionally, the study of figures and tropes. Although rhetorical studies’ attempt to address the contingent and contextually bound nature of discourses is significant on its own terms,it is also significant as an exemplar of the basic options for the humanities in engaging discourse. The critical question, for rhetori- 18 / Chapter 2 cians and the humanities generally, is how one figures the effectivity of and relationship between the formal and contextual registers of discourse. Difficulties arise when one pushes any of the readily available definitions of rhetoric for a foundation, compares them to the demands of the objects they take up, or—perhaps worst of all for the contemporary iterations of rhetoric—calls for rhetoricians to decide on or argue for a definition of rhetoric. The rag-tag mélange of objects and methods that conventionally fit within rhetorical studies might give an outsider the impression not only that rhetoric has no real content, but that virtually any practice for attending to the contextual effects of spoken, written, visual, material, and mediated discourse can be included under the rubric of rhetoric. in practice, rhetorical studies has validated Plato’s infamous critique of rhetoric, which emerged virtually at the instant of its inception, that rhetoric lacks a determinate center and a firmly demarcated field of inquiry.What was formerly the grounds for a dismissal of rhetoric has been transfigured into an open secret about the nature of rhetorical inquiry,and is possibly one of the defining characteristics of rhetoric as a field (or rather, set of fields) of study: when it comes to rhetoric,both methodologically and in terms of the objects rhetoric takes up, almost anything goes. The indecision that enables this radical pluralism in rhetoric has become so central to the American iterations of rhetorical studies that many students of rhetoric have, following Robert Scott, decided it is better to not define rhetoric at all.1 of course, this impulse to not define rhetoric does not translate into indecisiveness in rhetorical practice. As Scott’s prescient and often misread essay argues, the impulse to not define rhetoric is dependent on a whole range of implicit phenomenological understandings of the subject, the discourses that it participates in, its relation to others, and the modes of meaning making that underwrite everyday rhetorical interaction. Even though rhetoricians assiduously avoid defining rhetoric, they nevertheless relentlessly locate it, implicitly defining it through specific framings of rhetoric’s context, in operational definitions of rhetorical effect, and in defining objects of rhetorical study. figuring the location of rhetoric, one does more than simply identify the spaces in which rhetoric is operative:implicitly defined locations of rhetoric inscribe the character of and means by which...

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