Five formations of publicity: Constitutive rhetoric from its other side

This essay rethinks the constitutive formation of publics by foregrounding the desirability of publics themselves. This project begins by theoretically resituating publics as a series of irrevocably lost objects. Specifically, I contend publics are composed of a montage of desires (oral, anal, phallic, scopic, and superego) modeled on Jacques Lacan’s stages of the object in obsessional neurosis. To explicate, I use this schema to parse the symbolic dimensions of the “people” aligned with Donald J. Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Lacan’s schema of the object is adapted into a theory of publicity exemplified in the (astonishing) resilience of the “Trump voter,” the imaginary “people” routinely invoked throughout his emergence as a political figure. Lacan’s schema, I argue, helps explain the symbolic staging of the “Trump voter” as something more than just another potent social imaginary: an object of desire.