Advances in the History of Rhetoric

ISSN: 1536-2426 (Print) 1936-0835 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uahr20

Escaping the Voice of the Mass/ter: Late

Neoliberalism, Object-Voice, and the Prospects for
a Radical Democratic Future

Barbara A. Biesecker & William Trapani

To cite this article: Barbara A. Biesecker & William Trapani (2014) Escaping the Voice of the
Mass/ter: Late Neoliberalism, Object-Voice, and the Prospects for a Radical Democratic Future,
Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 17:1, 25-33, DOI: 10.1080/15362426.2014.886926

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15362426.2014.886926

Published online: 21 Mar 2014.

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Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 17:25–33, 2014
Copyright © American Society for the History of Rhetoric
ISSN: 1536-2426 print/1936-0835 online
DOI: 10.1080/15362426.2014.886926

Escaping the Voice of the Mass/ter: Late

Neoliberalism, Object-Voice, and the Prospects
for a Radical Democratic Future

BARBARA A. BIESECKER
University of Georgia

WILLIAM TRAPANI
Florida Atlantic University

This article argues that the founding logics of late neoliberalism

actively mitigate against a radically democratic future. By calling
attention to the invocatory drive which is responsible for effect-
ing the Symbolic order’s interpellative address, the article makes
the case that Lacan’s retheorization of desire, the drives, and/as
jouissance opens the way toward an ontologically grounded con-
ception of radical political agency and rhetorical intervention
whose abiding ethical injunction is to “imagine there’s no Publics!”

There is no public but there are publics, public spheres, counterpublics,

publicity, even multitudes and masses: a statement that enjoys near universal
agreement in the field today. Now without a doubt, each of these desig-
nators is intended to take into account a perceived immanent difference in
this public which obliges it be given a new name that not only denotes its
singular feature(s) but also connotes the necessity of rethinking public from
the ground up.1 Hence the wild proliferation of case studies whereby careful
attention to differences in the world of practice has led to significant shifts
in theory. The significance of those differences is not only theoretical but
political too, because each is understood to move us some distance toward
specifying the conditions of possibility for progressive, emancipatory, even
radical democratic, social change.2 Thus, an abiding and impassioned desire

The intellectual labor necessary to produce this work has been shared and, therefore, the
authors wish to underscore their relation as coauthors, equal collaborators.
Address correspondence to Dr. Barbara A. Biesecker, Department of Communication
Studies, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA. E-mail: bbieseck@uga.edu

25
26 B. A. Biesecker and W. Trapani

to render actually existing democracies ever more democratic animates this

body of work.
We wish to declare our solidarity with the political aspirations of this
scholarship. However, we are not persuaded that more or even better
empirically based and biased analyses of public discourses, practices, and
events alone can succeed in carving out a theoretical account of the con-
ditions of possibility for radically democratic social change today. Quite the
contrary, it is our view that the empirical approach taken in the lion’s share
of scholarship on publics guarantees its ultimate failure in advance, as the
problem of democratization simply is not reducible to the clarity and com-
plexity of perception in the phenomenological sense of the term. If, as we
argue in this article, that which can inspire anything approaching radical
democracy today is precisely what contravenes the rationality organizing
empirical or positive space as such, the proliferation of these like-minded
analyses of publics may best be read not as pointing the way toward an
answer to the question of what is necessary for this kind of change to take
place, nor as indicative of the intractability of the problem itself, but rather
as symptomatic of a general disregard of desire. Therefore, our overarching
aim is to demonstrate that the urgent task of specifying the conditions of
possibility for radically democratic social change in the United States today
is best approached from a psychoanalytic perspective.
Pursuant to our general aim, this short article is delivered in two alto-
gether too abbreviated parts. The first offers a synoptic redescription of the
governing rationality in the United States today, drawing liberally on Nikolas
Rose’s astute genealogies of power and freedom. With him, we argue that
the ethicopolitical regime within which we now conduct ourselves actively
mitigates against a democratic future that would be anything other than a
future-present. Calling attention to the invocatory drive which is respon-
sible for effecting the Symbolic order’s interpellative address, the second
part makes the case that Lacan’s retheorization of desire, the drives, and/as
jouissance opens the way toward an ontologically grounded conception of
radical political agency and rhetorical intervention that is sensitive to but not
captive of its situatedness within the current regime. We conclude by identi-
fying the disposition of the subject of radical speech as “appearance without
belonging,” suggesting that to this newly politicized and uniquely disposed
political agent corresponds, first, a politics of the impossible whose rhetor-
ical mode is by definition always polemical with respect to the state of the
situation within which he or she issues an utterance or acts and, second, the
ethical injunction to “imagine there’s no Publics!”
Nikolas Rose has meticulously described the evolution of neoliberalism
into its present form that he calls late neoliberalism or enterprise culture
(Rose, 1996). On his view, enterprise culture extends neoliberalism’s prin-
ciples of calculation, efficiency, and opportunity beyond the market and
into the constitution, management, and sensibility of subjects as homo
 Escaping the Voice of the Mass/ter 27

economicus—a rational entity that vigilantly tracks and persistently assesses

the means by which it might earn its own advantage by making good
choices. These “calculating mentalities” not only make individuals over into
subjects of the late neoliberal regime but also provide the impetus for them
routinely to seek out “experts” and “professionals” who optimize advantage
not by dictating particular choices but by providing training in the sciences
of self-actualization (Rose 1999, 214). Consequently, the ethic of everyday
life by which the enterprising self ideally abides is, quite simply, “Mastery
through measure of all things.”
In light of its strident defense of individual choice, late neoliberalism’s
simultaneous espousal of the virtues of community may seem surprising at
best and internally incoherent at worst. However, every choice the enterpris-
ing self makes has a doubled significance: It both matters to the individual
and for the communities with which he or she identifies or to which he or
she belongs. In fact, in late neoliberalism the so-called good or prudent per-
sonal choice is the very mode of belonging to a community: it is that through
which the civic life worth living approaches sense, in the most literal sense
of the term; so civic identity conceived as a manifest or visible outcome of
rational self-making and, thus, a relation of belonging or inclusion through
recognition.3 Of course, what is absolutely key to, indeed presupposed by,
belonging or inclusion through recognition is that the “choice” must already
conform to the logic of the count which structures the particular community
for which it counts.4
Bearing in mind this article’s overall task, it is important for us to note
what, so far as we know, Rose does not, namely, that with the costs and
benefits rationality which subtends enterprise culture come three manners
of thinking and speaking about the management of democracy’s future: as
a politics of the necessary, as a politics of the contingent, and as a politics
of the possible. For all three, of course, the current state of the situation
(a determination on behalf of which every relevant calculative technology
would be brought to bear) presents itself as the only reasonable point of
departure for making the informed “choice,” which is to say the only reason-
able act. In the case of the necessary, then, democracy’s future is predicated
on enterprising selves freely making the only available choice. Given the
state of things, in other words, one obvious—say, daunting or dangerous or
both—course of action presents itself; the question is whether enterprising
selves have the foresight and fortitude to embark upon it. The politics of the
contingent represents the future of democracy as the freedom of enterpris-
ing selves to choose between two or more courses of action, both or all of
which present themselves as equally viable but for competing good reasons
given the state of the situation. Finally, the politics of the possible (which,
of the three, has the appearance of being the most liberal with respect to
the state of the situation) does not merely take exception to but willfully
rebukes altogether the positivities of the present by way of the given modes
28 B. A. Biesecker and W. Trapani

of making sense. Hence, this is the politics of the grand negation or the call
to the complete inversion of the status quo that redoubles the force of the
logics underwriting the late neoliberal democratic regime by lending it an
oppositional figure—all in all, then, a political triptych that, foreshadowing
our argument to come, triangulates in advance a politics of the impossible
or the radically democratic act.
The urgent question before us is then: On what grounds, other than an
uninformed choice, a fanatical attachment, or a naive leap of faith, would
anyone act otherwise or, put more precisely, risk the radical act? In Did
Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)Use of a Notion,
Slavoj Žižek (2001) issues a caution that, albeit far too abstract to stand in as a
full-bodied answer to our question, nonetheless signals the general direction
in which we intend to move:

“Naïve” people are not those who think that we can break out of our
ordinary reality; “naïve” people are those who presuppose this reality as
an ontologically self-sufficient given.

Or, with regard to the homologous question of the relationship between

necessity and freedom: “naïve” people are not those who think that
human subjects can miraculously break the causal chain of reality and
commit a free act; “naïve” people are those who presuppose the complete
chain of causal necessity. (Žižek 2001, 174)

To not only not be taken in by the existent order of things but, moreover, to
take exception to it in such a way that the operative coordinates of political
sense making (what Foucault will call the matrices of popular reasoning) will
not apply: an act that is not simply opposed to the status quo but one that
works at redefining it. This is precisely what we find revolutionary, in all
senses, about the Lacanian theory of desire, jouissance, and/as the drive(s):
left to its own devices, the proper function of the drives is to redirect a sub-
ject’s rapacious attachment to a given object of desire by way of a sublimation
through which both the subject and its object are productively transformed.
The object of the drive, this object around which the drive repeatedly turns,
is, of course, what Lacanians call the object (petit) a. Notably, the sublimated
object is not to be understood as a stand-in for an absent fullness or as “the
representation of the Thing, of a noumenal beyond” (Copjec 2004, 38). The
object a is not the idealized or cathected delegate of a jouissance that is
inaccessible but, instead, is satisfying in “itself.”
How so? How might the drive fulfill the subject without achieving
its goal? It is because, as Mladen Dolar (2006) has argued, on the way
to that inhibited end a certain by-product emerges: the voice—or, more
specifically—the “object-voice” of the drive, a “side-satisfaction, but one
which suffices to fuel all the machinery” (74). Dolar’s attention to voice,
 Escaping the Voice of the Mass/ter 29

and to the drive as object-voice in particular, is a willful effort to recuperate

“the story of the voice,” which lies at the “very heart of the psychoanalytic
endeavor” (127). It was Freud, after all, who founded psychoanalysis on the
premise that in attending to the dreams, jokes, malapropisms, and varying
other expressions of non-sense, the unconscious could be made to speak.
It was Freud, as well, who characterized the structural elements of the uncon-
scious by their vocality; the life instinct (Eros) as a noisy clamoring and the
death drives (Thanatos) as mute but incessantly at work.
Lacan later would underscore the significance of object-voice by identi-
fying it (along with the gaze) as the object petit a. To be clear, Lacan’s account
of voice does not depict it as having any phonic substance: the object-voice
of the drive is not speech. Alice Lagaay (2008) puts it, “[T]he voice is by
no means exclusively related to the acoustic dimension or to hearing . . .
the voice as object a is conceived as a totally essence-less object, as the
ground of desire, the thing-in-itself of the invoking drive” (60). The point,
therefore, is to understand that even in its emptiness the voice is “transfi-
nite,” that it “frames the endless set of empirical objects” in a way that, quite
unexpectedly, is satisfying (Žižek 1996, 91). As Dolar (2006) explains,

There is a speech which makes sense, and in that horizon of sense-

making there is suddenly a disturbance, the intrusion of the voice, the
sound, which functions as a disruption of which we cannot make sense.
The element of the voice, in the form of contingent and senseless co-
sonance, unexpectedly runs amok and produces nonsense, which in the
second step turns out to be endowed with an unexpected sense emerging
from it. (141)

The words that strike the subject as odd are the result of a dispossession, an
“ex-appropriation” due to the introduction of the object-voice into his or her
speech. Gunn (2007) has called this type of speech the voice abject, a form
of “glossolalia” that inflects the “‘something more’ of speech” (361).
While the drives may indeed be mute, the subject-cum-political agent
that operates under their influence is anything but silent, as the persistent
pressure exerted by the drive compels him or her to act and, even more
importantly, to speak (see Dolar 2006, 156). As Jacques-Alain Miller (2007)
explains, the invocatory drive provokes the subject into speech of her or his
own:

If I had to formulate the invocation of any signifying chain, I would say

that it is this: “Do not give me what I am asking you for because it is not
what I desire.” But perhaps we may put it more briefly under the form
of this fundamental injunction to the Other: “Shut up!” So we do not use
the voice; the voice inhabits language, it haunts it. It is enough to speak
for the menace to emerge that what cannot be said could come to light.
30 B. A. Biesecker and W. Trapani

If we speak that much, if we organize symposiums, if we chat, if we sing

and listen to singers, if we play music and listen to it, Lacan’s thesis is
that it is in order to silence what warrants to be called the voice as object
little a. (146)

The paradigmatic example of the object-voice compelling an efflorescence

of speech is, of course, the clinical setting. There, challenged to fill the end-
less void produced by the analyst’s silence, the analysand utters something,
anything. In those moments, of course, the analysand is not responding to
the therapist as such; she or he instead is addressing the Law. Dolar (2012)
explains:

The analyst has to keep silent, at least in principle, and the great majority
of the time. But here a curious reversal takes place: it is the analyst,
with his silence, which is the embodiment of the voice, the voice as the
object. He is the personification, the incarnation of the voice, he is the
voice incarnate, the aphonic silent voice. His is not his Master’s voice,
not the voice of a command or of superego, but rather the impossible
unbearable voice to which one has to respond. It is the voice which
doesn’t say anything and the voice which cannot be said, the voice of
radical silence and of an unbearable appeal, a call to respond, to assume
one’s stance of the subject. One is called upon to speak, one would say
anything that happens to fall into one’s mind to interrupt the silence, to
silence this voice, to silence the silence.

The pressure exerted on analysands in this moment incites the speech of a

subject other to its (imaginary) self, rendering the “subject who is supposed
to know” (personified by the analyst) immaterial.
We name this singular disposition appearance without belonging, by
which we mean to describe the relation of a subject to the late neoliberal
formation who, by virtue of speech is visible in the world but not of the
order of things.5 This is a subject who is perceived by himself or herself as
wholly inconsistent or out of sync with the rules of making sense—good or
common. Hence, neither included in nor excluded from, and certainly not
belonging to, the social order that is the structured outcome of the logic(s)
of the count: a subject for whose acts there is no accounting in the terms and
logic(s) at work in the existing regime. Indeed, this subject’s agency, which
is not to be confused with the subject as such, is precisely its appearance as
unaccountable.
So, then, radical political agency understood as appearance without
belonging rather than belonging or inclusion through recognition. And rad-
ical democratic politics understood as disjunction rather than identification,
union, and the dissolve: the “One and the Other . . . and the Other can-
not in any way be taken as a One” (Lacan, qtd. in Copjec 2004, 65). Radical
 Escaping the Voice of the Mass/ter 31

democratic politics, then, as the politics neither of the necessary nor the con-
tingent nor the possible but of the impossible with respect to the state of our
situation. Or radical democratic politics as both giving the lie to the dictator-
ship of positivities or the tyranny of structured appearances and exposing the
poverty of individual and collective thought that, in taking the given as “all,”
imagines the future exclusively in managerial terms by lending a subjective
figure to the late neoliberal void.
From all of this follows two additional consequences, the very brief elab-
oration of which will bring this article to its end. First, we can now specify
the radical democratic agent’s rhetorical mode as always already polemical,
which is to say as always untimely and already inappropriate with respect
to the state of the situation within which that agent issues an utterance or
acts (Poulakos 1983). Indeed, to productively use Kathyrn Thomas Flannery’s
(2001) work on the form and force of the polemic against its spirit or grain,
the discourses and practices of the radically democratic agent by definition
always will “exceed the bounds of good sense and good taste” (116) and
seem, from the perspective of the state of the situation, already “to rely on
[mere] persuasion at the expense of verifiable evidence” (Rand 2006).6 In
other words, the radical political agent’s utterances are those to which the
usual protocols of communicative exchange and deliberative reasoning—
from dialogue and debate to arguing both or, better yet, all sides—simply
do not apply insofar as they are predicated in the first and last instance on
the “common world view” or “shared experience” (Greene and Hicks 2005).
Hence, irreverent with respect to the existing order of things, radically demo-
cratic utterances find no resource in the usual forms of political speech—be
it the petition, the claim, or even the demand.7 Instead, they declare! Indeed
if, as Benjamin Arditi and Jeremy Valentine (1999) have astutely argued,
the polemic “puts the space of the habitual—the habitus—in question” (2),
it does so not by appealing to others but, quite to the contrary, by boldly
declaring and embodying something other—namely, the noncorrespondence
of actually existing democracy with itself. Finally, then, polemicization is the
rhetorical performance of the ethical injunction to “imagine there is no pub-
lic(s),” a flagrant act of disobedience on which a different kind of future of
our being and our being together depends.

NOTES
1. What is being suggested here, of course, is that the move from theorizing the Public to theorizing
publics, etc., can be mapped cognitively as a shift from antidescriptivism to descriptivism, both of which,
as Slavoj Žižek (1999, 90) has summarily pointed out, “aim at a general theory of referring function. For
descriptivism, proper names themselves are merely abbreviated or disguised definite descriptions, while
for anti-descriptivism the external causal chain determines reference even in the case of generic notions.”
Our aim over the course of this article is not to split this (non)difference but to deconstruct it.
2. See, for example, Asen and Brouwer (2001, 1) who suggest, “For ‘public’ seems at once both a
necessary and a fragile notion for democratic orders.” We are aware, of course, that a number of scholars
argue that publics, by whatever name they may be given, do not “exist” as such, but these scholars
32 B. A. Biesecker and W. Trapani

continue to maintain that they “matter” in the sense of their having effect. See, for example, Michael
Warner (2002, 8) who has argued that publics are a “kind of fiction that has taken on life” and indeed that
“if we did not have a practical sense of what publics are . . . we could not conduct elections or indeed
imagine ourselves as members of nations or movements.” Also, see Jodi Dean (2002, 11), who has argued
that “[t]he public is symbolic, it doesn’t exist, but it still has effects.” The arguments that follow in our
article do not depend on the “reality” of the public (or various versions of “publics”) but instead on the
“effect” of their imagined role.
3. In designating the late neoliberal subject’s disposition as belonging or inclusion through recog-
nition, we are wanting to account for both “the presented” or that which “is counted as one in a situation,”
what Alain Badiou (2005) terms a “consistent multiple,” and “the represented” or that which “is counted
as one by the metastructure” (what Badiou (2005a) terms a “part”).
4. Our analysis of the count finds its beginning in but aims to distinguish itself from the prior and
competing theorizations tendered by Alain Badiou (2005b) and Jacques Rancière (1999).
5. Miller (1997, 24) writes, “Put otherwise, giving privilege to a schema of communication, giving
a place to the symbolic relationship the Other, the drive is defined—I barely accentuate these terms—as
an enunciation of the unconscious. As [Lacan] explains—it is not very clear if it is the location or the
concept of the drive—‘it is all the further from speaking the more it speaks.’ I think I faithfully simplify
the slightly entangled formula in this phrase, by saying, finally, the lesson is that the drive is speech.”
6. It is worth noting Foucault’s distaste for the polemicist as well. Where Foucault faults the polemi-
cist for not engaging the dialogic process, or at least by not playing fair in that process, we, on the other
hand, find that unwillingness to succumb to the given’s rules of the game precisely the wellspring of
radical, interruptive, political possibilities. Foucault (1997) argues:

The polemicist . . . proceeds encased in privileges that he possesses in advance and will
never agree to question. On principle, he possesses rights authorizing him to wage war
and making that struggle a just undertaking; the person he confronts is not a partner in
search for the truth but an adversary, an enemy who is wrong, who is armful, and whose
very existence constitutes a threat. For him, then the game consists not of recognizing this
person as a subject having the right to speak but of abolishing him as interlocutor, from
any possible dialogue; and his final objective will be not to come as close as possible to
a difficult truth but to bring about the triumph of the just cause he has been manifestly
upholding from the beginning. The polemicist relies on a legitimacy that his adversary is
by definition denied. (112)

7. Here, we feel compelled to highlight a problematic, and symptomatic, insistence on the dis-
course of the demand in the recent and celebrated On Populist Reason by Ernesto Laclau (2005). While
he is to be credited for attending to the role affect plays in manufacturing the universal requisite to
the production of hegemony, and for being—as far as we are aware—the first major theorist to take
seriously the political implications of Copjec’s work on sublimation, he seems to us to have imported a
domesticated account of her theorization of sublimation, the consequences of which are disastrous for
radical democracy. He seemingly ignores, for example, any mention of jouissance or of the ways in which
sublimation shatters the subject’s previous sense of self and the object. As a result, “desire” in Laclau’s
work is much more akin to “need,” in the sense that it has long been understood by modernist political
theory. It is not surprising, then, that his understanding is “radical” about sublimation is the “contingent
character” of the cathected objects rather than its effecting a fundamental break from the order of things.

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