the maudlin machine revisited

Music: The Reindeer Section: Son of Evil Reindeer (2002)

Last night I watched the season finale of Phenomenon, a "reality" competition for illusionists. One of the strange "wow" moments of the show was when Criss Angel revealed he had (apparently) predicted Nine-eleven as a part of a mentalist trick. It was, as Peter Jackson might agree, in bad taste, but there was some attempt to channel affect about that dreadful event into holiday spirit.

This morning the executive producer of the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade gleefully announced the highlight of the parade is the Virginia Tech marching band, which lost one of its players in "the tragedy." "There will be a missing man formation," he said with a twinkle in his eye, as an all-smiles Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira nodded in anticipation.

So, to put on my rhetorician hat: what do we do with this stuff? How does one contend with the commemoration spectacle as a rhetoric? In previous years I tried to capture the condensation of affect via the memorializing spectacles in terms of "the maudlin machine," a term that tries to capture the attempt to generate brand loyalty and kick-start the drive to consume through a kind of commercial, melancholic interpellation process (also see this post). The maudlin machine is a mournful dispositif that articulates people into a temporary group structure in a manner that is perilously close to kitsch (think of a Thomas Kinkaid painting; that's what the apparatus produces, but in the form of "truth"). Although there is unquestionably an ambivalence to Virginia Tech's appearance in Macy's parade today---that is to say, some people need that band marching to mourn, namely, the people of Virginia Tech---the cheer with which the parade's producer announced the "missing man formation" made me throw-up a little. As a rhetorician, how do I deal with my reaction, as well as the desired reaction (people watching the parade to see such a maudlin display)?

The trouble is that rhetorical studies is impotent to explain the dynamics of the maudlin machine. This morning I was reading Bruce Fink's Lacan to the Letter, and found a good language for expressing rhetoric's impotence in terms of Lacan's many subjects. Fink explains that in Lacan's theory, there are many subjects (viz., paradigm selves) and Lacan slides among them fluidly, which can be quite confusing. Fink proposes three are the most important: the subject of the signifier; the subject of jouissance, and finally, the subject of enunciation (the latter is Fink's formulation). Let me explain each of these to help me detail the impasse of rhetorical theory when dealing with things like Criss Angel's evocation of Nine-eleven on a magic show.

The subject of the signifier refers to that structuralist subject, the one that speaks through me (the subject of the unconscious), the subject of language and representation. As we know from Freud, representation is always posed against affect in stark way but also in a way that requires it. I'm reminded of Antonio Damasio's example of Phineas Gage in Descartes Error: this man gets a pole through his head and loses his capacity to emote, which has devastating effects on his ability to reason. In other words, Gage became merely the subject of the signifier---a guy who did things without knowing why he did them, and he did them . . . well, "to the letter." Gage lost the subject of jouissance and the drives, the subject that couples representation with feeling.

The problem with most domains of knowledge, says Fink, is that they tend to exclude the subject of jouissance and focus almost exclusively on the subject of the signifier. Linguistics is the perfect example (as is Lacan's early work): what gets ignored in the study of linguistics is the "subject of enunciation." That is, there is a person with a tongue and lungs and breath and so forth who says, "I am Sam." Linguistics can only focus on the "I," but not the flesh and blood person. But that flesh and blood person, this enunciator, is where both the subject of the signifier and the subject of jouissance is located. Psychoanalysis is a privileged discourse, therefore, because it works to achieve effects at the level of jouissance, but can only do so via the subject of the signifier (there is no direct route to enjoyment via representation). This is why psychoanalysis is both literally and figuratively located in the "speech situation." Speech is the meeting place of these two subjects (or three, if you wish).

When we consider, then, the maudlin machine we are met with both representation and affect. Rhetorical studies would have me focus entirely of the surface spectacle, on what the producer of the parade said, for example, and not the enjoyment of his saying it. Hence, this choice quote from Fink:

While psychoanalysts obviously have to grapple with the heterogeneity of the subject [viz., the impossibility of establishing some direct relation between the subject of jouissance and the subject of the signifier], it seems to me that many other fields in the humanities and social sciences have to come to terms with these two faces of the subject in theory building and praxis---no doubt different ways that psychoanalysis due to the different aims that inform each field.

In short, in looking at suasive phenomena rhetoricians have really only dealt with half the picture. When making arguments for the study of psychoanalysis, I often catch myself saying that rhetorical studies does not have a theory of desire; what I mean by this is shorthand for this reckoning with the two subjects (or two faces). This argument is sometimes met with "but we have that in Burke," to which I have to bow and nod my head. Burke's career was a systematic exorcism of the subject of enjoyment from the domain of rhetoric.