Dialectic of Fantasy: Toward a Rhetorical Theory of Economic Crisis

• In Event: The 2009 Crisis of Neoliberalism: Marxist Scholars on Rhetorics of Stability and Change

Abstract

The concept of fantasy has a long and controversial history in rhetorical studies. This essay draws upon fantasy’s origins in psychoanalytic theory to account for the inventional possibilities residing within moments of economic crisis. By drawing upon the literature of trauma studies, I argue that rhetorical scholars imagine crisis as a moment of profound discursive rupture. Students of psychoanalysis understand trauma as a profound failure of meaning, or an encounter with an ineffable real. In this essay, I retain a materialist understanding of economic crisis grounded in actually-existing social relations while noting that such relations are never entirely representable through discourse. Enlisting the work of Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, I argue that the dialectic between fantasy and sensuality enables a basis for the normative critique of social texts while instances of crisis make the contradictions at the heart of this dialectic more apparent. Social contradictions require new modes of fantasy that can recuperate dominant regimes of discourse and materiality, or provide inventional resources for resistance.

Author

• Bryan J. McCann, Marian University