Fantasm: The Triumph of Form (An Essay on the Democratic Sublime)

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 86, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 48-66

  McDaniel, James P ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Aristotle; Burke (Edmund); Culture; Desire; Embodiment; Freud; Group consciousness; History; Identification; Image; Imaginary; Lacan; Phantasm; Phantasy; Pleasure reference; Public; Reconstruction; Restitution; Rhetoric; Roosevelt; Strategy; Subjectivity; Sublime; Visual

Indexed keywords

EID: 0040220335     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335630009384278     Document Type: Article

References (53)

1. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 1990): vii.
2. See Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Red and Black, 1983).
3. Richard Harvey Brown, "Cultural Representation and State Formation: Discourses of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Political Community, " Dialectical Anthropology 21 (1996): 265.
4. John Durham Peters, "Beauty's Veils: The Ambivalent Iconoclasm of Benjamin and Kierkegaard, " in The Image in Dispute: Cinema in the Age of Photography, ed. Dudley Andrew (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997): 9.
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life, " in Untimely Meditations, trans. R.J. Hollingdale, ed. Daniel Breaseale (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997): 59-123.
6. See Steve Whitson and John Poulakos, "Nietzsche and the Aesthetics of Rhetoric, " The Quarterly Journal of Speech 79 (1993): 131-145.
7. Walter Fisher, "Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm, " Communication Monographs 51 (1984): 1-22.
8. See Michael Calvin McGee and John Nelson, "Narrative Reason in Public Argument, " Journal of Communication 35 (1985): 139-155; John Louis Loucaites and Celeste Michelle Condit, "Re-constructing Narrative Theory: A Functional Perspective, " Journal of Communication 35 (1985): 90-108.
9. See Michael Calvin McGee and John Nelson, "Narrative Reason in Public Argument, " Journal of Communication 35 (1985): 139-155; John Louis Loucaites and Celeste Michelle Condit, "Re-constructing Narrative Theory: A Functional Perspective, " Journal of Communication 35 (1985): 90-108.
10. Michael Calvin McGee, "The 'Ideograph': A Link Between Rhetoric and Social Theory, " The Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1980): 235-249.
11. Jean-Francios Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
12. See Bruce Gronbeck, "Rhetorical Visions of America from the Margins, 1963-1988, " in Christer Åsberg (ed.), Rhetoriska Frågor: Texter om tal och talare från Quintilianus till Clinton tillagnade Kurt Johannesson (Stockholm: Nostedts, 1995): 267-281 . Gronbeck has made similar observations in various settings, but of particular relevance for this essay is his focus on fragmentation and fantasy in public address. For an account of breakdowns in "we" or "collective" the philosophical discourse of postmodernity, see also Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality: Addressing the Postmodern Challenge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
13. See Bruce Gronbeck, "Rhetorical Visions of America from the Margins, 1963-1988, " in Christer Åsberg (ed.), Rhetoriska Frågor: Texter om tal och talare från Quintilianus till Clinton tillagnade Kurt Johannesson (Stockholm: Nostedts, 1995): 267-281 . Gronbeck has made similar observations in various settings, but of particular relevance for this essay is his focus on fragmentation and fantasy in public address. For an account of breakdowns in "we" or "collective" the philosophical discourse of postmodernity, see also Calvin O. Schrag, The Resources of Rationality: Addressing the Postmodern Challenge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992).
14. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or, The Logic of Late Capitalism (1991; Durham: Duke University Press, 1995): iv.
15. Peters, "Beauty's Veils, " 12.
16. John Louis Loucaites and Maurice Charland, "The Legacy of Liberty: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Aesthetics in the Postmodern Condition, " Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory/Revue canadienne de théorie politique et sociale 13 (1989): 31-48.
17. On postmodernism, rhetoric, and hope, see James P. McDaniel and John M. Sloop, "Hope's Finitude: An Introduction, " in Judgment Calls: Rhetoric, Politics, and Indeterminacy, eds. Sloop and McDaniel (Boulder: Westview, 1998).
18. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idoly and The Anti-Christ, trans. R.J. Hollingdale (1968; New York: Penguin Books, 1990).
19. Aristotle on Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991): 91-97.
20. See Herman Rapaport, "Theories of the Fantasm, " in Between the Sign and the Gaze (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994): 17-90.
21. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990; New York: Blackwell, 1996): 31-69.
22. See Hannah Arendt, "Imagination" ("Seminar on Kant's (Critique of Judgment, given at the New York School for Social Research, Fall 1970"), in Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Biener (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982): 79-85.
23. On the fantasm as a defense against and suppression of the "archaic, " see Rapaport, "Theories of the Fantasm, " in Between the Sign and the Gaze, 58-59.
24. André Bazin, "Ontology of the Photographic Image, " in What is Cinema? Volume I, trans. Hugh Gray (Berekely: University of California Press, 1967): 9-16.
25. Ann Norton, Republic of Signs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993): 121.
26. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, The Harvard Classics (Volume 24), ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909): 96 (§13).
27. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A selection, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton 1977): 137.
28. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989): 202.
29. Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997): 17.
30. Michael Calvin McGee, "In Search of 'the People': A Rhetorical Alternative, " The Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 1975)7: 235-249.
31. Sigmund Freud, "Childhood Memories and Screen Memories, " in The Psychopathologgy of Everyday Life, ed. James Strachey, trans. Alan Tyson (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 1965): 43-52.
32. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Paper's on Technique, 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. John Forrester (1988: New York: W.W. Norton, 1991): 14.
33. "Childhood Memories and Screen Memories, " 44; The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, 14.
34. "Childhood Memories and Screen Memories, " 44; The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I, 14.
35. Rhetoric, 1.11 (1371a 21): 95.
36. New York Times (April 19, 1995): A22.
37. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990; Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996): 61.
38. Jacqueline Rose, "Introduction II, " Feminine Sexuality : Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985): 40.
39. Jacques Lacan, "The Meaning of the Phallus, " in Feminine Sexuality, 80.
40. Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1959).
41. Jacques Lacan, "In you more than you, " in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alana Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978): 268.
42. I refer, of course, to the classic work of H. Gallagher, FDR's Splendid Deception (New York: Dodd Press, 1985).
43. The Washington Post (17 April 1995): C2.
44. Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992): 112.
45. Washington Post (25 June 1996): A16.
46. Geoffrey C. Ward, "Fighting Ghosts, " American Heritage (October 1995): 13.
47. See G. Thomas Goodnight and Thomas B. Farrell, "Get a Lifeworld: Some Notes or, Dead Ends and Live Possibilities." in Argument and the Postmodern Challenge (Proceedings of the Eighth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation), ed. Raymie L. McKerrow (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1993): 79-85 . See also Raymie McKerrow, "Overcoming Fatalism: Rhetoric/Argument in Postmodernity, " in Argument and the Postmodern Challenge, 110-121.
48. See G. Thomas Goodnight and Thomas B. Farrell, "Get a Lifeworld: Some Notes or, Dead Ends and Live Possibilities." in Argument and the Postmodern Challenge (Proceedings of the Eighth SCA/AFA Conference on Argumentation), ed. Raymie L. McKerrow (Annandale, VA: Speech Communication Association, 1993): 79-85 . See also Raymie McKerrow, "Overcoming Fatalism: Rhetoric/Argument in Postmodernity, " in Argument and the Postmodern Challenge, 110-121.
49. I adapt this joke from Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989; London: Verso 1991): 29. And Zizek, in turn, borrows it from Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).
50. I adapt this joke from Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989; London: Verso 1991): 29. And Zizek, in turn, borrows it from Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-1960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W.W. Norton, 1992).
51. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1945; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975): 242.
52. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verson, 1994): 58.
53. On iconoclasm as an attitude toward images relevant to communication studies, see John Durham Peters, "Beauty's Veils, " 9-32.