the demand for love

Music: The Cure: Wish This week I have avoided SXSW festivities to work on ensuring tenure, which means writing: it's been Joshie Writing Camp (JWC)! At JWC we don't shave, rarely bathe, and eat ready-made. A JWC we read and re-read the reviewers suggestions for revision and try to make everyone happy. Making everyone happy is impossible, of course, when I cannot make myself happy.

Regardless, I've re-written a bunch of stuff for my "Hystericizing Huey" essay, focusing especially on the part that distinguished need, demand, and desire from one another. Here's that part, for the curious (I hope to gosh it makes sense; this is hard stuff to write about):

So what, then, is desire? From the perspective of Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire refers to the unconscious wishes of an individual that, by definition, cannot be satisfied. From a Lacanian perspective, "desire" should be sharply distinguished from its more popular understanding, such as that which is found in the OED: "that feeling or emotion which is directed to the attainment or possession of some object from which pleasure or satisfaction is expected." Lacan's understanding of desire refigures the desired object: with apologies to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, you can never get what you desire because, if you did, desire would disappear. To better explain this feeling of not getting what you desire, Lacanians often contrast the concept with "need" and "demand." Human need refers to purely biological needs (e.g., for food). Demand refers to a request for something (an object, a deed, a gesture, and so on) from another. As with desire, the distinction between need and demand concerns the status or character of the object, as Joan Copjec elegantly explains:

On the level of need the subject can be satisfied by some thing that is in the possession of the Other. A hungry child will be satisfied by food-but only food. . . . It is on the next level, that of demand, that love is situated. Whether one gives a child whose cry expresses a demand for love a blanket, or food, or even a scolding, matters little. The particularity of the object is here annulled; almost any will satisfy-as long as it comes from the one whom the demand is addressed. Unlike need, which is particular, demand is, in other words, absolute, universalizing. (148)

This "universalizing" or formalizing aspect of demand is important, because it underscores why the objects of demand are, in some sense, interchangeable. Demands reflect an emotional drive or push for "something more," insofar the "Other now appears to give something more than just these objects," a something-more that Lacan terms the object-cause or the objet a (Copjec 148-149). In other words, whereas need is satisfied with the production of a specific object, demand represents a partial awareness that the gesture of the person who produces the object is more important. The demand for this something more is the demand for a special kind of recognition: love.

The demand for love is problematic, however, because it mistakenly assumes this "something more" of the Other can be given away. Love, in this sense, is premised on the lie that the object-cause is attainable. For Lacan, "as a specular mirage, love is essentially deception" (Four Fundamental 268). In light of love's deception, "desire" is therefore the word for what is really happening to a subject when she feels that familiar pull of emotion toward an object or another. Desire is the feeling of lacking the presumed objet a and of pulsating around a substitute as the next best thing. For example, sexual desire can be stirred by a partial or part object, like a breast, or a beautiful face, and so on, but one knows very well what the point of sexual desire is not to "get" the breast or the face, but the yearning for this "something more" beyond the breast or the face (see Krips, 22-24). Copjec explains that with desire, "the Other retains what it does not have"--this something-more--"and does not surrender it to the subject." Consequently an individual's desire does not aim toward an object but is caused or inspired by this elusive "something more," this objet a, which the Other refuses to surrender (Copjec 148-149). Again, it is important to underscore that the reason desire is not aiming for a specific object because if that object were attainable, then desire would disappear. Hence desire is ceaselessly metonymic, moving "from one object to the next. . . . Desire is an end in itself; it seeks only more desire, not fixation on a specific object" (Fink 26).

Incorporating these Lacanian notions of demand and desire into the received understanding of emotional appeals expands its explanatory power, but not without some modification. Traditionally, the emotional appeal has been discussed in terms of a rhetor's ability to produce or promise something that the audience wants (Desire-->Object). So, for example, Aristotle suggests that one can enflame an audience's anger through the symbolic destruction of a person (the object) that has insulted or belittled them (Aristotle 124-130). In regard to the demagogue, Kenneth Burke identified emotional appeal working primarily to scapegoat a common enemy (the object) through the processes of identification and division (Burke, Philosophy 191-220). Roberts-Miller notes that "an important goal of the demagogue is to prevent" division among the ingroup by keeping "identification strictly within the ingroup, and to ensure no sense of consubstantiation with the outgroup: 'Men who can unite on nothing else can unite on the basis of a foe shared by all'" (Roberts-Miller 463). In the traditional scapegoating scenario, the object of desire is the destruction or removal of a common foe.

The psychoanalytic understanding of the emotional appeal is different, insofar as desire has no object, but rather, is caused or stimulated by an object or quality (Cause-->Desire). So with Aristotle's example of anger arousal, the target is really a ruse. Understood as stimulus to anger, the desirous appeal to enflame an audience has more to do with the way in which the rhetor's manner, tone, voice, and physical characteristics stimulate their desiring by becoming a cause of, or at least a catalyst for, their desiring. In other words, a rhetor's ability to turn an audience into an angry mob is not achieved by providing a target for their ire, even though the mob believes that the destruction of this target is the object of their passions. Rather, the rhetor him or herself is the cause and the mob identifies with his or her desire to have, for example, a political opponent defeated. Although the rhetor convinces the audience that they really want a given object (Desire-->Object), in actuality, she is the cause of their desiring and the ostensible object is ultimately exchangeable with another (Cause-->Desire).v The psychoanalytic read of scapegoating therefore changes: although hating a common enemy is the end of scapegoating, the source of its appeal in a given rhetorical situation concerns the audience's desire to please the rhetor; the arousal of anger is produced out of love for the rhetor, not hatred of a common foe. The real cause of their desiring is the objet a, which cannot be given. The emotional appeal is therefore fundamentally deception but, with regards to Nietzsche, "in a non-moral sense."

To say that the emotional appeal turns on love's deception is not to say that individuals do not believe that their desire is about a specific object. The ruse object of the emotional appeal is a result of "fixation." Indeed, we can define the emotional appeal as the masquerade of desire in demand, the causation of a fixation. Maintaining persuasion via emotional appeal requires the parade of a series of surrogates that betokens the objet a--otherwise persuasion would cease. Let us take, for example, a self-aggrandizing joke that Huey Long gave before a crowded room of dignitaries as he was readying himself for a run for the White House. In a newsreel that presumably ran in northern state theatres, an opening shot presents Huey speaking in a variety of venues inside a series of bubbles, four smaller bubbles in each coroner of the screen, and a larger bubble in the middle. In the center bubble, Long appears in a tuxedo, smiling. A voice over begins: "Presenting his Excellency, Huey Pierce Long, the dictator of Louisiana, the enigma who is making many Americans regret that the United States ever purchased Louisiana." The screen cuts to the contents of the center bubble; Huey appears in the center screen with his arms behind his back. With a smile and a lilting, southern drawl he says:

I was elected railroad commissioner in 1918 [a small smile]; and they tried to impeach me in 1920 [Long leans forward, a bigger smile appears, but his arms still behind his back; louder laughter from the audience is heard]. When they failed to impeach me in 1920, they indicted me in 1921 [Long leans forward again with a bigger smile, and louder laugher comes from the audience]. And I, when I wiggled through that I managed to become governor in 1928 . . . and they impeached me in 1929 [a big smile appears on Long's face, and there is even louder laughter].

In this brief example Long advances a subtle pedagogy of desire in the form of a joke, and its success is measurable in the increasing laughter of the audience at each turn (one can liken this appeal to Freud's famous example of the Fort-Da game, which is mildly similar to the peek-a-boo game one plays with infants; see Krips 22-25). From the audience's perspective, Long will not give his enemies what they want, eluding them at every step, thereby creating a homology between the audience's desiring and the desiring of Long's enemies. Mindful of being labeled a demagogue, Long's embrace of insincerity is signaled by his self-characterization as "wiggling" out of impeachments and indictments, as if he is a kind of lovable outlaw. The pull of the emotional appeal here is not reducible to simple identification-you the audience are like me, Huey, and we share a common foe of "they," as this is the ruse of the emotional appeal. Rather, by hinting at the substitute object of desire-an admission of guilt or a refutation of the changes against him-Long inspires this pull for "something more," for love, tacitly promising he has the power to give something that he does not have. In short: the audience laughs at Long's humor because they love him, or rather, they love the "something more" in him. He functions as the cause of their desiring, and they want to similarly be the objects of his desire.