Lundberg ’12 (Christian, Associate Prof. of Rhetoric @ UNC Chapel Hill, “Lacan in Public: Psychoanalysis and the Science of Rhetoric,” University of Alabama Press, November, 2012, pp. 87-88)
An economically figured practice for reading trope can provide rhetoric with an account of the force of individual texts, primarily by attending to the intertextual tropological exchanges that animate and exceed them. An economic theory of trope and affective investment (primarily in the form of enjoyment, as I detail later) provides rhetoric with the capacity to understand the imaginary commitments that subjects hold, the modes of public relation that they imply, . By extension, if the general economy marks the relationship between the trauma of failed unicity, trope, and affect that arises at the level of signification, then one can read the specific economies that underwrite the circulation of texts and tropes at specific sites of economic exchange both as the result of what is unique to a tropological configuration and simultaneously in reference to the work that such configurations do in accommodating subjects to thetraumas of the general economy. Imaginary relations and their instantiation in specific publics can be profitably read as structures of performance through which subjects negotiate the problems of the general economy generated at the three distinct moments of failed unicity: in the constitutive gaps that characterize a subject coming to life in processes of signification in the impossibility of communication and a communicative account of the social; and in the imaginary framing of others. In each of these moments, subjects are forced to comport themselves toward the constitutive functions of trauma in producing and addressing these gaps and toward the surplus enjoyment generated by these modes of comportment. Collectively, these processes constitute both a general economy of tropological exchange, read as the set of processes that subjects must negotiate generally when moving in the realm of representation, and a specific economy of tropological exchange, or the set of specific imaginary commitments and tropological exchanges that root a subject within a specific social formation and in relation to individual texts as nodes of exchange that negotiate a relationship to the general economy.
