Abstract
This article: Provides a theoretical exploration of rhetorical persuasion as a practice aimed at ‘capturing desire’. Elucidates the shared interest of rhetorical and psychoanalytical theory in the production of so-called ‘plausible stories’ that mobilise and shape affects. Surveys different psychoanalytical approaches to the rhetorical articulation of ‘symptomatic beliefs’ that support political reasoning. Demonstrates the applicability of psychoanalytical theories to the analysis of a specific example of political speech.
In this article I argue that psychoanalytical theory can help us understand the emotional force of political rhetoric. I undertake a theoretical enquiry into the method of interpreting political speeches as strategies of affective persuasion. Both rhetorical and psychoanalytical studies converge in their concern with the production of ‘plausible stories’ that aim to fold psychic investments into political judgements. To capture desire, I claim, political rhetoric must articulate ‘symptomatic beliefs’ in relation to wider situational exigencies. I sketch three distinct psychoanalytical approaches, each of which emphasises a different scenario of unconscious organisation where rhetorical strategies are pertinent: namely Freudian, Kleinian, and Lacanian approaches. These are then applied to the example of a controversial rhetorical intervention—Enoch Powell’s infamous Birmingham speech of 1968—to demonstrate the various potential foci when undertaking analysis.
Introduction
Persuasive speech acts upon desire. Its aim is as much to capture mood and sentiment, as it is to reason logically. Although politicians are routinely maligned as ‘liars’ and deceivers, in reality they are not tasked with communicating facts but with shaping the public’s reception of facts. If truth undoubtedly matters, how so, how much and for whom is for politicians to persuade their audiences. Affective persuasion—enabling an audience to feel emotionally stimulated by an argument and not only assent to its logic—demands a skill that is nonetheless difficult to pin down. Getting citizens to know is one thing, getting them to want to know is quite another.
My claim here is that capturing desire is one of the primary rhetorical challenges in politics. Politicians spend considerable time formulating words, making arguments, criticising, joking, remembering, doubting, as well as evading criticism to gain whatever discursive foothold they can on the fragile surfaces of public sentiment. But desire is a slippery phenomenon: repertoires of speech are prone to become hackneyed and in need of reinvention. To understand how rhetoric captures desire—however temporarily—I propose we explore the unconscious dimension to emotions. This dimension is often neglected in rhetorical studies in favour of explicit appeals to pathos, which usually highlight the overt, intended emotional impact of speech. Psychoanalytical theory, however, can help expand the horizons of rhetorical analysis by investigating how speech strategies activate deeper libidinal forces that intensify the sentiments mobilised in argument.
In this article I explore the connection between rhetorical analysis and psychoanalytic enquiry in order to develop methodological insights for the study of political speech. Both fields, I suggest, share an interest in the production of ‘plausible stories’ that render otherwise confusing or conflictual situations emotionally manageable. Rhetoric explores these stories in relation to an external realm—the situational exigencies that call for political judgement. Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, explores such stories in relation to an internal realm—the psychic conflicts and forces that shape personal experience. To combine both fields involves locating moments where rhetoric articulates psychic investments by engaging what one author calls ‘symptomatic beliefs’: the points of fixation that organise unconscious desire (see Alcorn 2002). These moments, however, are not easily identifiable. Yet psychoanalytical theory offers a number of approaches that guide us towards scenarios of ‘psycho-rhetorical’ significance. I survey the Freudian, Kleinian and Lacanian approaches, which emphasise different dimensions of unconscious experience. I then apply their insights to the examination of a controversial speech—Enoch Powell’s infamous oration of 1968 in Birmingham—to see how they may illuminate the ways affective persuasion is sought.
‘Plausible Stories’: Rhetoric and Psychoanalysis
How are we to understand the emotional dimension of political speech? A popular, if crude, conception of persuasion is of a type of verbal ‘seduction’ whereby people’s desires are cynically aroused by self-interested politicians. Of course, this is a reductive image that presumes a passive public readily available to suasion. Nonetheless, it rightly recognises that politics involves motivating others, often by non-rational (as well as rational) means. Persuasion never implies total mastery but, rather, an ongoing process whereby individuals’ subjective attachments to ideas and objects are defined and folded in to public judgements. Intense attitudes to immigration or war, for example, are rarely mute feelings but are harnessed through arguments that articulate them by way of repeatable assertions, inventive analogies, or narratives that give them affective grip. Both rhetorical study and psychoanalysis acknowledge this social and subjective element to communication: rhetorical enquiry explores the discursive dimension whereby efforts are made to shape audiences’ judgements in relation to particular situations; and psychoanalysis examines the psychic dimension whereby unconscious mechanisms structure subjective dispositions. In this section I establish how both fields converge in an interest with what one author calls ‘plausible stories’ that organise affective dispositions to the world (see Phillips 2014, 9).
As analytical disciplines, both rhetorical enquiry and psychoanalysis share a preoccupation with symbols and their interpretation. Both explore language, narrative and how emotion is mobilised therein. Yet for each there is also a degree of opacity to speech that invites enquiry into communicative manoeuvres that obscure or misdirect the intent of speakers. Around such manoeuvres both fields identify recurring patterns and the personalities constructed through them. There is, then, at least at first glance, a commonality between the two upon which we might build a method of enquiry.
Rhetorical study has a long history with numerous traditions emphasising varied aspects of communication in domains such as literature, law or philosophy (see Herrick 2005). Here I am concerned primarily with rhetoric as a practice of civic discourse in which ‘plausible stories’ are formulated about matters of public concern. Rooted in the customs of classical civilisation, rhetoric supplies a vast array of categories to describe and analyse the strategies of public speech (see Martin 2014, chs 2 and 3). Ancient rhetoricians accepted the blending of reason (logos) with emotion (pathos) and personal authority (ethos), regarding each as legitimate persuasive strategies. Speakers, or ‘rhetors’, were expected to combine appeals, adapting their arguments to the expectations of the audience and locating the type of issue (topos) that would most effectively persuade them. Plato’s criticisms notwithstanding, most rhetoricians did not advocate a cynical approach to truth but regarded speech as a flexible tool to bring audiences to the most plausible account. Usually that meant operating inside community conventions, with an awareness that what counted as ‘true’ was of necessity ambiguous and changeable (see Martin 2014, 34–38). Rhetoric thus denotes a form of motivated discourse in which a certain affective force—and not pure reason alone—is channelled through argument.
Rhetoric has been marginal to modern political scholarship, despite the Humanities’ increasing concern with linguistic models of behaviour. Instead, terms such as ‘ideology’ or ‘discourse’ are preferred in order to locate speech in a wider cultural frame, one for which power relations are regarded as integral. However, rhetorical analysis is now undergoing a resurgence in political studies and, while still compatible with other approaches, usefully directs attention to particular moments of discursive encounter (see Finlayson 2007; Grube 2013; Atkins et al. 2014; Martin 2014). This is, in part, due to rhetoric’s unique situational focus: the preparation and delivery of speech as it relates to specific audiences, moments and issues. Rhetorical analysis supplies tools to understand how speech contributes to shaping public space and orients audiences within it. Ancient rhetoricians often presumed certain spatio-temporal parameters—above all, those of the polis and the speech opportunities allocated therein—that no longer are as well defined. Nonetheless, it is still possible to conceive public speech as a type of action designed to assert control over an unfolding situation (a crisis, a policy decision, an election, and so forth) whose parameters are not absolutely defined in advance. As I argue elsewhere (see Martin 2014, 94–99) rhetorical analysis re-describes speech-action as a means to ‘appropriate’ such situations. This is sought by supplying arguments, definitions, characters, turns of phrase, and so on, to configure the moment, often displacing other available representations. The rhetorical preparation of discourse in politics is, increasingly, a highly strategic practice involving the purposeful selection and repetition of key terms and phrases in order to heighten the impact of a preferred message (see Grube 2013).
Analysing rhetoric in relation to a wider situation or controversy, however, underscores the various elements and dynamics at work in political speech. Rather than merely selecting the words and phrases deemed ‘suitable’ for an occasion, as though the speaker’s intentions had automatic primacy, the situation itself imposes constraints. Rhetorical action entails a calculation of limits—including the skills of the speaker, the character of the audience, and the ‘exigence’ or controversy that provokes the intervention, as well as the intense feelings it arouses (see Bitzer 1968). Speech is not so much imposed as filtered and adapted, adjusted and calibrated to meet a situation whose dimensions often exceed the speaker’s mastery. To make political stories plausible, speakers are compelled to communicate as though they were answering directly the needs of the moment, formulating judgements that define, explain or resolve urgent matters at hand. Curiously, this imperative to adapt the message is sometimes perceived as the source of politicians’ unreliability or lack of principle. An alternative criticism might be that it is the inability to adapt speech to new circumstances (or audiences) that constitutes weakness in political discourse.
Psychoanalysis, too, holds an ambivalent view of speech. Attuned primarily to the unconscious, analysts recognise speech and language as a means to intersubjective dialogue: in the clinical setting ‘analysands’ identify their symptoms and talk about their lives. The so-called ‘talking cure’ privileges speech as a medium for initiating and treating psychic distress. Yet, at the same time, it is not the direct content of speech that supplies the focus of psychoanalytical therapy. As Frosh (2010, 8) remarks: ‘there is always something else speaking in the place of the subject’. The analyst explores traces of ‘latent’ unconscious material only partly audible in ‘manifest’ speech, usually without the analysand’s full awareness, and ‘translates’ this material into something intelligible. Trained to look for slips-of-the-tongue, contradictions, self-censorship, defensive behaviour and other markers of repression—often in what is not said or is evaded—the analyst treats the analysand’s conversation with a degree of suspicion so as to register unconscious motivations (see Billig 1999; Parker 2005). Thus, analysts sit not directly in front of analysands, as would an interlocutor but, rather, aside, out of direct view. Speech therefore forms a necessary surface for psychotherapy, but one that brings into relief the unconscious dynamics it simultaneously conceals.
For all the ‘scientific’ validity sought by its early founders, psychoanalysis remains inescapably an interpretive enquiry, exploring unconscious forces and the ways individuals persistently resist, displace, condense, sublimate or transform affectively charged feelings to render their experiences personally plausible (see Freud 1925; Freud 1966). Affect—later ‘libido’—was originally understood by Freud to be a kind of energy originating in biological drives and ‘discharged’ by attaching to mental representations, sometimes via emotion states such as love, fear or hate (see Freud 1915a, 1915b). But Freud tended to focus on its more ambivalent, symbolic manifestation in dreams, jokes and other ‘motivated’ representations (see Stein 1991, 14). The individual’s self-interpretation—revealed in direct speech but also in fantasies or dreams—is thus integral to the analyst’s reading of their underlying condition, a route towards the ‘something else’ that is communicating. Speech (in its various guises) constitutes a ‘symptom’ or ‘compromise formation’ that censors, selects and substitutes psychic impulses in ways that, however bizarre, help figure the individual’s experience, mediating inner and outer worlds, between repressed wishes and public convention (see Freud 1916–17, 286–302). For Freud words never directly align with the world—we always mean more than we say because our words are (over) invested with desires that originate outside of conscious thought. Yet we persistently refuse to acknowledge the unconscious by channelling it away from danger so as to secure adequation with social expectations, even if this merely relocates affect elsewhere (see McGowan 2013, 17–18).
This channelling of libido—partially revealed and hidden in speech—is, for most psychoanalysts, prepared early on by our intimate, familial relations. As Freud claimed, unconscious wishes originate in sexual drives directed towards ‘objects’ such as the parents, upon whom we are dependent for most satisfactions. Individuals develop through stages (such as the ‘Oedipus complex’) whereby exterior figures are brought into the organisation of the psyche. The infantile ‘introjection’ of images, authority figures and later ‘identification’ with social roles and personal qualities eventually forges libidinal attachments and aversions that shape personality and provide templates for later interactions and attitudes (Freud 1916–17, 303–338). Thus, psychoanalytical theory construes the self as a complex affective structure, emotionally oriented through investments plotted in childhood that remain unconscious and from which it never entirely escapes. Speech and communication work upon the contours of this hidden configuration of desire, reactivating some parts and obscuring or displacing others.
Both rhetorical enquiry and psychoanalysis, then, explore the production of plausible stories, but at very different levels: the one with attention to overt techniques of speech and argument, the other attending to the management of the individual psyche. Freud’s great insight, perhaps, was that plausible stories hide people from the truth of their desire, masking their fears, disguising their ambivalence or anger, making compromises with ‘reality’ in order to render life intelligible and tolerable: ‘We welcome illusions because they spare unpleasurable feelings, and enable us to enjoy satisfactions instead’ (Freud 1915c, 280). Likewise, political speech channels desire but also masks it or renders it acceptable by folding it into practical judgements about reality. What is ‘plausible’ politically and psychically is not necessarily the same thing. But if we are to understand better the affectivity of political discourse, we need to combine the insights of both fields. Below I argue that this involves articulating ‘symptoms’.
Articulating Symptoms: Three Psychoanalytic Approaches
In their own ways, rhetoric and psychoanalysis explore the representation of something—a wish, an outlook, a decision—that cannot spontaneously represent itself and must be expressed through some other means. In psychoanalysis, as I have noted, this is called the symptom; the strange obsessions, fears, and other types of what Freud called ‘affective fixation’ that substitute for repressed wishes (see Freud 1916–17, 276, 280). In his analysis of dreams, Freud understood the symptom as a compromise, that is, the attachment of an unconscious wish to an otherwise acceptable idea or symbol. Symptoms thus disclose unconscious forces by virtue of the affective intensities (and often distress) they import into routine existence. Similarly, political speech must use the ‘available means’ (words, phrases, commonplaces) to represent controversy and formulate judgements. Thus, we may talk of a ‘rhetorical symptom’ as a discursive articulation that renders acceptable an otherwise psychically painful, or unspeakable, wish. Rhetorical theory supplies a whole range of devices through which such rendering is achieved—often by deploying commonplaces, idioms, aphorisms, humour, the suppressed premise of the ‘enthymeme’, and so on. These devices are mechanisms through which controversial feelings become acceptable by attaching to ideas we implicitly endorse.
Shaping people’s judgements, from this perspective, is not about the truth content of a discourse. What matters, as Marshall Alcorn claims, is not how discourse aligns with facts but ‘where the discourse takes up residence in the organization of the subject’ (Alcorn 2002, 17). An affectively persuasive rhetoric must direct itself to what he calls ‘symptomatic beliefs’, that is, libidinally invested commitments—points of fixation developed in childhood—that may support knowledge but are not amenable to mere contradiction or refutation by evidence. The fulcrum for changing such beliefs—such as hatred for foreigners, a longing for authority, or anger towards women—is desire, not knowledge (2002, 39). Rhetoric must therefore engage symptomatic beliefs, resituating desire by articulating these to exigencies thrown up by external events where a practical difficulty offers prospects for psychic reorganisation or reinvestment. This is not an exact science and politicians are forever invoking ‘crises’, publicizing policy ‘failure’, or stoking public ‘outrage’ in order to evoke and recast symptomatic beliefs.
But what kind of symptomatic beliefs are manifest in social and political life and how? Here, psychoanalysis offers a variety of scenarios based on different views of unconscious dynamics. Below I set out three distinct, sometimes competing, paths of enquiry. These do not exhaust psychoanalytic theory but instantiate major reference points for any understanding of the ‘psychosocial’ domain (see Parker 1997; Frosh 2010): the ‘classic’ Freudian, Kleinian, and Lacanian approaches. Nor are these three necessarily mutually exclusive. Indeed, many thinkers underscore their debt to Freud, even when diverging from his approach. It might help to think of what follows as sketches of traditions rather than full summaries of the ideas of the thinkers concerned.
Freudian Analysis
As the ‘father’ of psychoanalytical thought, Freud is, not surprisingly, understood as the inspiration behind the many ideas that came after him. We can identify numerous strands and accents in his work that are developed by later thinkers. For now, however, I sketch a ‘classic’ Freud around themes that originally opened psychoanalysis to the wider world.
What is noticeable about Freud’s reflections on the application of psychoanalytical ideas to society is his rather pessimistic liberalism (see Freud 1928, 1930). Freud was concerned for the psychic health of the individual in ‘mass’ society, which he felt accentuated neurotic behaviour. If the so-called ‘pleasure principle’ was the source of human creativity and imagination, nonetheless civilized society required its partial repression via prohibitions that enabled the practical management of social affairs: ‘it is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the non-satisfaction […] of powerful instincts’ (Freud 1930, 97). While such accommodation permitted society to function, nonetheless it also introduced an injurious stifling of individual desire in support of moral and sexual conventions. Freud’s talking cure was thus a response to the neuroses that accompanied social repression. In that respect psychoanalysis was always ‘political’, casting a critical eye on the psychic damage caused by society and culture (see Brunner 2001).
While Freud never developed a systematic psychosocial framework, his liberal orientation inclined him to regard the political world as a setting for unconscious fantasies among the ‘masses’ to coalesce around charismatic father figures and all-embracing organisations (such as the Church and the army) that attach individuals to authorities and help structure their repression (see Freud 1921). Politics thus functions like an enlarged patriarchal family, a restaging of father-son Oedipal relations where sexual prohibition is first contested and then eventually internalised (Brunner 2001, 147–8). If we think of this in rhetorical terms we might say that Freud typically underscores the element of ethos—or personal authority—in society. He was concerned that democracy might obliterate the distinctive life of the individual, replacing a rich (bourgeois) private world with ‘lazy and unintelligent’ masses—against whose passions ‘arguments are of no avail’—easily in thrall to tyrannical leaders (Freud 1928, 7, 8). Here, speech is less important than the symptomatic images and ‘oceanic’ feelings of incorporation that return individuals to a primitive sense of subjugation to, and identification with, parental authority (on rhetorical ‘identification’, see Burke 1969).
Freud’s frequent elitist, liberal inclinations give a clue to how psychoanalysis was taken up in the 1930s and 40s to interpret political behaviour. The focus was largely on the individual ego as the bearer of a personal unconscious that accounted for its behaviour, and the notion of mass society vulnerable to manipulation. In the 1940s, this scenario was employed to make sense of phenomena such as Hitler, Nazism and other examples of mobilised ‘prejudice’ (see Lowenthal and Guterman 1949; Adorno 1991). Hitler’s speeches were analysed for evidence of repressed feelings and his background was examined to explain his unconscious motivations and the force of his ‘charisma’. Likewise, German society was subjected to ‘psychoanalytical’ assessment in order to understand the mass appeal of authority figures like Hitler (see Pick 2012).
Kleinian Analysis
Melanie Klein’s work between the 1920s and 1950s laid the basis for an extension of psychoanalysis beyond the classic Freudian preoccupation with repressed sexual wishes. Although inspired by Freud, Klein’s emphasis was largely on anxiety and the early development of the ego, rather than the pleasure principle, as the key to the unconscious and its pathologies (see Klein 1997 and 1998).
Drawing upon her clinical work with infants, Klein explored the child’s capacity to form a supportive bond with its ‘objects’ (primarily the mother), conceiving this ability to ‘relate’ as the underlying template for emotional development and forming judgements. A ‘person’s conscience’, she claimed, ‘is a precipitate or representation of his early relations to his parents’ (Klein 1998, 248). The child develops a superego much earlier than Freud believed and this agency—an internalisation of the parents—exerts a severe and terrifying influence in the child’s inner world. Unlike Freud, who tended to see pre-Oedipal children as enjoying a blissful communion with the mother, Klein painted a picture of infancy in which extreme feelings of fear and anger at the mother’s absence intertwine with feelings of love and attachment. At this stage, inner and outer worlds are not clearly differentiated and the infant internalises objects and ‘part objects’ (such as the breast) and externalises inner feelings, projecting them on to the objects it encounters. For Klein, the young infant moves through ‘positions’, such as the ‘paranoidschizoid’ position where it is overwhelmed by fears of attack and so ‘splits’ off bad parts of itself from the good (Klein 1997, 61–93). Later, the growing child adopts the ‘depressive position’—learning to regard the mother as a mixture of good and bad, in turn satisfying and unsatisfying—and withdraws its intense attachments and sadistic anger. Although difficult, this period of ‘mourning’ produces a balanced individual, accepting of the difficulties of the wider world without paranoia or splitting (see Klein 1998, 344–369). Symbolisation—the capacity to sustain meaning—is, fundamentally, an ability to relate to objects, maintain balanced attachments, and adopt degrees of distance towards the world with confidence (see Klein 1998, 219–232; Haartman 2006).
Klein’s focus was not, like Freud’s, on prohibitive paternal authority but on the mother and her role in sustaining the child’s ontological (in)security. This mirrored, in part, an international environment dominated by war and, later, the expansion of welfare institutions (see Riley 1983; Rustin 1991; Zaretsky 1998). Yet Klein did not write about the application of her work to society and politics, even if this was at times implied. Nonetheless, later followers elaborated her early ‘object relations’ theory in new directions. In essence, adults are viewed as bearers of ‘phantasies’, that is, unconscious affect-laden imprints of early relationships. These involve emotional defences (such as personal attachments and aversions) that are symptomatic of underlying feelings of aggression, envy, guilt or a desire for love. Often, they reflect unresolved or lingering wishes to reconstitute the mother figure, to protect her, and to split off undesirable parts of oneself and project them onto others (see Segal 1985).
Klein’s work permits us to understand behaviour in environments where individuals must cope with extreme anxiety. The emotional strategies of professionals in public organisations are, in Kleinian terms, ways to manage relationships that reactivate shared phantasies of fragmentation (see, for example, Menzies Lyth 1960; Hoggett 1992). Splitting occurs in divisive behaviour that separates out one group from others; ‘projective identification’ involves an individual or group being made to personify the bad parts of social activity, as in various kinds of prejudice; and ‘envy’ is visible in the deliberate destruction of the pleasures of others. In these scenarios, sentiments mobilise, often as negative reactions justified by an urge to protect something valued. The political relevance of this framework is abundantly clear: politics is typically manifest as a site of grievance and despair, of objects broken, lost and mourned (see Lapping 2011; Crociani-Windland and Hoggett 2012). Although Klein and later Kleinians rarely examined speech as such, in rhetorical terms we can relate this especially to strategies of pathos, the appeal to idealized figures, symbols and metaphors evoking collective sentiments of aggression or attachment.
Lacanian Analysis
In his heterodox rethinking of psychoanalytic theory and method in the 1950s and 60s, Jacques Lacan proclaimed his own ‘return to Freud’. For him that meant an explicit reference to language and rhetoric as a means of psychic organisation: ‘The form in which language expresses itself in and of itself defines subjectivity’ (Lacan 2006, 246). Lacan’s complex and controversial work has assisted the expansion of psychoanalytic ideas into cultural theory, as well as the subversion of its traditional normative orientations. That is because he conceived the unconscious as present in all texts and communicative exchanges. Lacanian theory thus contributes to the view that subjectivity is constituted in and through language, although only recently has this rhetorical dimension been fully acknowledged (see Lundberg 2012).
Lacan insisted upon the utter centrality of speech and language to the psychoanalytic enterprise (see Lacan 2006, 237–268, 358–360, 413–441). Affects are present in language, not in some prelinguistic realm (see Fink 2004, 50–52). But this was not to imply the possibility of transparent communication. For Lacan, speech was not really about communication, if by that we mean one self-conscious ego exchanging ideas with another. The ‘function of language in speech’, he asserted, ‘is not to inform but to evoke’ (2006, 247)—and what is evoked is desire. Lacan disputed the primacy often given to the ego by analysts encouraging adaptation to reality (2006, 346). The ego, he claimed, is an imaginary construct that individuals ‘misrecognise’ as a unified ‘self’ prior to social interaction (2006, 75–81). Subjects are permanently split between what they can say and what they desire. Language shapes subjectivity but never fully captures desire, which strives for an unobtainable fullness. Lacan’s three ‘registers’—the Imaginary, Symbolic and the Real— denote the overlapping dimensions by which desire binds its illusory identifications (via images, language, and traumatic ‘enjoyment’ respectively). But identification is doomed to ultimate failure because it aims to reconstitute something that never was complete. The incompleteness of the self thus haunts the subject, compelling it to further acts of identification, sustaining its desire. No amount of therapy can resolve the subject’s alienation. The best that can be hoped is to recognise the symptoms of its own futile struggles to identify through others (see Stavrakakis 1999).
Lacan understood language in an expanded sense, as the whole structure of meaning in society—the ‘symbolic order’ or ‘Big Other’. This is a transindividual phenomenon to which subjects attach themselves by ‘inhabiting’ signifiers in speech. According to Lacan, language functions more like an unconscious ‘pact’ or bond with this enigmatic third party than a medium of open dialogue (Lacan 2006, 358). We identify via signifiers (‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘citizen’) that connect us to what we think the Other desires: for example, we proclaim ourselves ‘professionals’ or ‘experts’ to gain symbolic recognition ‘at work’. Yet although language evokes desire and promises fulfilment, nonetheless it persistently fails to fulfil its promise. The primary rhetorical focus here could be said to be logos but one that closely coordinates ethos and pathos, and which can never be fully mastered.
As Lundberg explains, Lacan transforms rhetoric as an object of analysis. For neither the subjects of rhetoric (the auditors or speakers) are ever fully captured by speech nor is the situation that speakers appropriate ever entirely mastered (Lundberg 2012, 18–23). All subjects and objects are permeated by an intrinsic ‘lack’. No degree of intentionality or ‘objective’ situational exigencies can ensure persuasion entails ‘the last word’. Something will always be missing and desire keeps desiring. This dimension of lack/failure is not just an empirical observation; it means that there is no part of the situation that remains outside the play of affective figuration. Libidinal investment is not limited to the characters named in speech or the relations between them but comprises the entire symbolic space in which speech unfolds and to which it makes reference. Rhetoric is therefore not something that can be neutrally reconstructed and shown to ‘fit’ an original context but, rather, is a practice that always exceeds its context.
Lacan offers up a way of interpreting speech as a means of harnessing desire to the prospect of sustaining an (impossible) identity. He provides a vocabulary to explore the effects of language in symbolic orders that constantly fail to cohere and must be re-stitched to secure psychic consistency (Lundberg 2012, 3). Lacanian approaches to cultural artefacts explore scenarios in which desire is invoked via signifiers, images and fantasies that offer up sites for identification. Words and arguments, visual performances, or the attraction of ‘jouissance’ capture subjects and commission paths for affective investment—while simultaneously decommissioning others—and offer platforms to manage desire by concealing or displacing its blockages (see Bracher 1993).
The approaches sketched above alert us to the structured scenarios through which recurrent symptomatic beliefs become rhetorically inscribed. These scenarios comprise beliefs about authority figures and charismatic personalities (Freud); beliefs concerning group relations that invoke and contain social and personal anxiety (Klein); and beliefs activated when language grapples with a potentially traumatic failure of social identity (Lacan). While there are fundamental differences of focus and method in these approaches, that does not exclude combining them to analyse politics (see, for example, Salgó 2014). Each supplies insight into the way symbols figure as channels for libidinal investment. The Lacanian formulation is undoubtedly the most sophisticated approach and, given its overt rhetorical orientation, helps us see how political speech mobilises affect, as the next section will demonstrate.
Affective Rhetorical Strategy: An Example
How do rhetorical strategies articulate symptomatic beliefs and organise psychic affects? In this section I set about ‘applying’ the three approaches to one well-known political speech: Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ address, delivered in Birmingham, UK, on 20 April 1968 (see Powell 1968). That speech offers a useful—though certainly not exhaustive—example to demonstrate how psychoanalytic insights can inform rhetorical analysis. Its controversial nature and its powerful emotional resonances underscore various affective dimensions in speech.
Powell’s address is notorious for its controversial topic of UK immigration policy. At one time a fervent supporter of Empire, the Conservative MP came to embrace a romantic nationalism that bridled at increased flows of immigrants from ex-colonies (see Nairn 1981, ch. 6; Cosgrave 1989). A classics scholar, Powell assumed an air of cerebral authority and his orations often displayed an uncompromising attention to logical reasoning and the fallacies of others. At the same time, his preoccupation with Britain’s post-Imperial status, scolding critique of the ‘illusion’ of imperial identity, and desire to salvage some essential core of British tradition, drew upon highly charged themes (see Powell 1964a and 1964b). His opposition to immigration policy in the 1960s resonated with an exigence that in certain urban constituencies in England had already become the locus of popular resentment. In its challenge to the liberal establishment, Powell’s speech was a forerunner to the right-wing populism of Margaret Thatcher. For our purposes, it is an example of psychoanalytically pertinent rhetoric because it articulates symptomatic beliefs concerning national identity, ‘race relations’, and the prospect of social disintegration.
Powell opens his speech with a rhetorical commonplace that justifies the need for statesman-like leadership on a practical topic accorded insufficient attention: ‘The supreme function of leadership is to provide against preventable evils’ (1968, 212). By way of a series of reported conversations with constituents and an enumeration of statistical ‘trends’, he alerts his audience to one specific evil: a rapid growth in immigration levels that, he believes, demands ‘extreme urgency of action’ (1968, 214). This growth, he argues, is causing serious grievances among ‘native’ communities in the UK. Powell extrapolates on current figures to claim, hyperbolically, that immigration numbers will swell out of all control—‘Already by 1985 those [immigrant descendants] born here would constitute the majority’ (1968, 214)—unless an end is brought to the current policy and forced repatriation is undertaken. In a final, alarming flourish, he announces a sense of foreboding by reference to Virgil’s prophecy of Rome’s river Tiber ‘foaming with much blood’ (1968, 219). The speech is notable not only by this apocalyptic imagery but also by its reliance upon reports from others that distance the speaker from the immediate exigence. Powell hectors the establishment with ‘facts’ and examples, utilising a forensic-style appeal to logos rather than direct emotion (or pathos). Indeed, the situation is treated as a consequence of the refusal to reason by the formal political realm: ‘We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation, to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents’ (1968, 215). Yet his reference to immigrants (who, he claims, don’t want to be integrated) and native citizens (‘ordinary English people’ exposed to foreign demands (1968, 217)) employs a crude, contrastive imagery of irreconcilable difference that he assumes can only generate conflict.
How, then, are symptomatic beliefs and unconscious affects articulated in this speech? Below I set out three possible readings from each of the psychoanalytic approaches discussed above. The first—a Freudian reading—looks to the unconscious of both speaker and audience as separate loci of affect. The second—a Kleinian reading—conceives the speech as a relational medium to cope with unconscious anxiety. The third—a Lacanian reading—finds the unconscious in the fantasmatic feigning of national identity.
A Freudian Reading
A Freudian reading may regard the speech both as an expression of the unconscious wishes of its speaker and as a medium for audiences to identify with his character. In this approach, ethos is the primary rhetorical factor—the speech represents the struggle of Powell, the man, to assert his authority as a public superego. Here the logic of the pleasure principle is at work: as an aspiring politician, Powell satisfies a wish to lead by authoritatively defining the situation and identifying himself as the archetypal ‘statesman’ audaciously confronting a troublesome issue: ‘At all events, the discussion of future grave but, with effort now, avoidable evils is the most unpopular and at the same time most necessary occupation for the politician’ (1968, 213). The speech thus express Powell’s own Oedipal wishes by way of a prohibitive posture toward a social group that invokes a popular hostility to which he gladly makes himself an uncritical servant: I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation? The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so (1968, 214).
Here Powell projects himself as a moral crusader, ready to forego the quiet life, obliged by an innate sense of justice to transmit what ‘thousands and hundreds of thousands [of people] are saying and thinking’ (1968, 214). Furthermore, Powell’s persistent correction of misunderstandings, use of examples, censure of the liberal Establishment, and high-brow references present himself as a gifted communicator in touch with popular sentiment and, consequently, an idealised figure for identification. We find this focus on ethos mirrored in responses such as Tom Nairn’s withering critique of Powell’s ‘messianic project’ to reformulate English nationalism (Nairn 1981, 280). Nairn refers to Powell’s contradictory and unrealistic ‘fantasy’ and ‘destiny-fantasy’ (1981, 285, 287) and the opportunistic identification by ‘the Powell ego’ with ‘the obscene form of racism’ to resolve the nation’s split personality (1981, 269).
Likewise, we can understand the attraction of Powell for his audience in terms of popular desires for an authoritarian father-figure representing order, control, and truth. Powell achieved—momentarily—intense admiration among sectors of the public for his controversial stance. In a society whose urban centres were undergoing rapid change, where competition from other economies made growth uncertain, the audiences that embraced him found precisely a promise of restored national prestige. As Nairn declares, Powell was himself ‘a symptom’ of the collapse of the post-war consensus and the fraying investments placed in it (Nairn 1981, 286). A respectable yet maverick politician, who appeared to ‘speak truth to power’ and challenged his own party, plausibly engaged symptomatic beliefs in a lost national integrity and the necessity of a bold personal intervention to cut through establishment conventions.
A Kleinian Reading
A Kleinian reading of Powell’s speech underscores the difficulties of relating that unfold within it. Here the symptom is not sexual but one of anxiety over the potential disintegration of the nation. Powell’s address instantiates a common psychic defence against a perceived threat, one that splits the world into good and bad objects. The good object is the national community symbolised through the reported citizens and their concerns. The bad object is the immigrant population that threatens bloody disorder. Paranoid splitting objectifies an internal threat by projecting onto it bad qualities and intentions, treating it like a devouring monster that consumes all good and leaves one bereft of nourishment. The dominant sentiment of the speech is thus the claim of persecution: ‘The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine’ (1968, 217).
The affective force of Powell’s oration, then, may lie less in the personal authority it articulates than in its address to collective infantile feelings—a rhetorical appeal to pathos. The paranoid, aggressive projection of inner pain onto an external object is common in racist discourse generally (see Rustin 1991). Hate—expressed in the vilification of a whole group—is routinely referenced via bodily objects of disgust. We see this in Powell’s (1968, 218) report of excrement being pushed through the door of a constituent by immigrants (see Rustin 1991, 67). But the objectification of bad feelings is combined with the idealization of a loved object. As Rutherford (1997, 134) argues, Powell’s reference to an old lady besieged by immigrants symbolises the vulnerable mother in need of protection (‘She lost her husband and both her sons in the war’. 1968, 217) and acts as an implicit metaphor for the nation: an idealised source of nurture attacked by foreign bodies.
A Kleinian reading of Powell’s speech—and of rhetorical interventions generally—underscores its role as a ‘container’ of contrasting, near-psychotic feelings. The speech symbolises anxious sentiments and objectifies difficult psychic material by venting incredulity towards the political establishment and ‘horror’ at social ‘fragmentation’ (1968, 219). Powell’s imagery of communal strife elaborated a phantasy to split apart immigrants from indigenous citizens, ascribe to immigrants a malign intent, and to idealize the nation as a mother figure. In that respect, the speech exemplifies Klein’s view of distorted mourning: a melancholic refusal to recognise the object of love as a complex whole and to repair the relation in a mature, inclusive way.
A Lacanian Reading
A Lacanian reading looks to the way desire—and hence affect—is symbolically organised through language in general and not just evocative imagery (see Hook 2011). Powell’s speech can be said to function as a fantasy binding together Imaginary, Symbolic and Real dimensions. The purpose of fantasy is not to fulfil desire but to sustain it, typically focussing on some kind of discord whose presence ‘blocks’ fulfilment (see Glynos and Stavrakakis 2008). The key aspect of the speech, then, is its provision for ‘symbolic identification’ with the wider scenario (or situation). Let us explore what this means.
What is notable about the speech is that it is presented, like many of Powell’s orations, as an eminently rational argument, driven by a faith in logic rather than overt sentiment, and presenting its exigence as a ‘preventable evil’ requiring urgent resolution (1968, 213). Powell invites his audience to identify with the logos of his argument—supported by appeals to ‘facts’, anecdotes, and logical extrapolation— and not simply his personality. The key reference here is the voice he announces both at the start and end of the oration to frame his argument: the politician fulfilling the function of ‘statesmanship’, bearing responsibility for the ‘future’ of the polity (1968, 213), who looks ‘ahead […] filled with foreboding’, and feels he has ‘to speak’ to avoid ‘betrayal’ (1968, 219). This voice is not strictly that of Powell but the ‘ego-ideal’ from whose perspective the situation is grasped. As Žižek argues, symbolic identification is ‘identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love’ (Žižek 1989, 105). It is from the perspective of the ego-ideal—a virtual, ‘impossible gaze’ (Žižek 2008, 21) surveying both present and future—that the experiences of ordinary (white) citizens are narrated.
From that gaze the inconsistency of the symbolic order is exposed as short-sighted, wilfully neglectful of the perils brought by immigration. The immigrant confuses and disrupts a symbolic order felt to be infuriatingly inaccessible to ordinary subjects. Like other racialised narratives, the speech is a response to this confusing presence, whose intentions are not clear: the immigrant doesn’t want to integrate, it doesn’t want to live in harmony with ordinary English citizens, it doesn’t recognise their ways, and so on. Powell’s response to the question of what ‘it’ wants is therefore to send it ‘home’. In that respect, the rhetorical symptom lies not merely in charged images but in the implied ego-ideal around which the oration is structured. It is its gaze, we might say, that serves as the point-de-capiton, or ‘quilting point’, and stitches together the discourse into a fantasy. As Žižek argues, fantasy is always an answer to the question, Che Vuoi? (what do you want?), by means of a scenario (here, of inevitable discord). Rather than wish fulfilment, in a Lacanian approach fantasy coordinates desire and thereby sustains it. The fantasy of impending inter-racial conflict is constructed—indeed, it only makes sense—by virtue of the integrated polity evoked by the lofty voice of the ideal politician. The unconscious investment of desire is therefore placed in a symbolic statesman—not Powell himself, for others must adopt this perspective too—who sees things as they truly are, and not only in the imaginary subjects that populate the story.
Powell’s speech therefore functions as a fantasy precisely in the way it appears to disavow fantasy as such. For some years, Powell had offered himself up as a speaker of bracing ‘truths’ pulling away the veil of ‘illusions’ he felt Britons had constructed around Empire and Britain’s international status. Yet his very directness and lack of embellishment disguises the fantasmatic dimension to his argument and, by consequence, the affective investment it captures. Unlike other speeches where Powell underscores his nationalist affections for a certain image of England (see Powell 1964b), this one evokes merely a place from which immigrants can be regarded as scandalous excess. The symbolic statesman’s perspective offers a blank screen for his audience to project their own symptomatic beliefs in a lost polity.
The purpose of fantasy, Žižek argues, is to teach us how to desire by providing us with coordinates through which to identify. In his words, fantasy ‘provides a rationale for the very deadlock of desire’. It invokes desire by identifying something objective that prevents our being fulfilled (and experiencing jouissance): ‘it constructs a scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the Other who stole it from us’ (2008, 43). In Powell’s speech, the immigrant—who enjoys its newfound property, its enhanced social status, and scolds ‘ordinary’ folk for their purported ‘racism’—is the demonic thief of national enjoyment. In so presenting the immigrant, Powell invokes desire for an absent world, one whose very lack of content makes it a repository for numerous wish fulfilments (international status, social equality, employment, and so on). The immigrant is a fantasmatic object, transgressing the symbolic order and evoking the horror scenario of ‘rivers of blood’. As Jason Glynos (2001) points out, the evocation of horror serves a discernibly ‘ideological’ function. It supplements our attachment to the symbolic order with a transgressive underside that evokes our secret enjoyment and secures libidinal investment (via disgust, fear, or horror). This fantasmatic element, Glynos argues, covers over the true horror: namely, the impossibility of a ‘complete’ or stable social identity (2001, 209–210). Powell’s reference to rivers of blood, then, intensifies a racist fantasy of threatened national integrity, supplying it a secret element of enjoyment at the prospect of violence (see Smith 1994, ch. 4). Yet, at the same time, it works ideologically to obscure the (for Powell, unacceptable) prospect that different races could live together reasonably well and that no national community ‘naturally’ exists.
From a Lacanian perspective, Powell’s speech becomes rhetorically effective in so far as it creates a fantasy space in response to a situation of failed identity by invoking a desire to restore the symbolic order. The affective strategy here consists in provoking symbolic identification. Powell’s speech demonstrates how it is not just the personal intentions of the speaker or the expectations of the audience that determines the affective force of the speech but, moreover, the way the wider situation they occupy is crafted within the speech itself.
Conclusion
Few would deny that political rhetoric often has an explicitly emotional purpose. As Cicero put it in De Oratore: ‘everyone knows that the power of an orator is most manifest in dealing with people’s feelings, when he is stirring them to anger and resentment, or is calling them back from these same emotions to mildness and compassion’ (Cicero 2001, 70). Speaking to emotions helps capture desire and makes arguments into plausible stories that grip us in non-rational ways. Psychoanalytical theory, however, expands our understanding of how rhetoric achieves this: namely, by articulating ‘symptomatic beliefs’ that affectively organise subjectivity.
More than just registering the presence of emotion, psychoanalytical approaches explore the scenarios through which individuals affectively orient themselves to their personal situations by identifying with reasonings, characters, as well as expressed feelings—and it is these scenarios we also find elaborated rhetorically in political speech, as the Powell example demonstrates. The canny orator is thus not one who crudely ‘stirs emotions’ but, more precisely, one who articulates desires in terms that permit audiences to grasp a situation and place themselves in it. Blending rhetorical and psychoanalytical insights thus opens avenues for further research into affective rhetorical strategies in politics. Such research might explore how psychically painful experiences (such as war or scandal) stimulate rhetorical invention, creating new speech repertoires; or, conversely, how rhetorical controversies (over the definitions or meanings of events, for example) assemble and condense contrasting symptomatic beliefs. In exploring the linkages between the psychic and the rhetorical, we might develop greater insight into the ways that—‘beneath’ overt appeals to emotion or to knowledge—political arguments continue to animate our desires and recruit our support.