Abstract

Joining an active conversation within rhetorical theory and beyond about the agency, boundaries, and conditions of possibility for contemporary subjectivity within online environments, this dissertation aims to articulate the transformative capacity of digital media for contemporary rhetorical subjects. Positioned at the intersection of rhetorical studies, media ecology, and poststructuralist criticism, this project attempts to break with rhetoric’s abiding humanist inheritance, including many of the foundational presuppositions about a writer’s autonomy, being, and consciousness that have historically subtended rhetorical theory. Couching my argument within the evocative wordplay and enigmatic lexicon of Lacanian psychoanalysis, this research complements work by a growing number of rhetoricians from various other-oriented vantages who contend that the conventional belief in a rational and independent human mind at the center of communicative practice is no longer tenable in the face of emergent ecosystems of online presence and digital rhetoric. Technological developments such as these not only have not only threatened the accustomed priority of human being, but can moreover provide novel ways of inventing and enacting an original posthumanist subjectivity, I argue, especially when approached from a psychoanalytic standpoint that emphasizes the convolutions of anfractuous signification, indestructible desire, forged onto-epistemology, and a tropical unconscious. To this end, I suggest that Lacan’s reconfiguring of the classical Freudian unconscious as a cybernetically structured symbolic network of signifiers that he characterizes as the extimate Other provides one avenue for rethinking how modern media affect the means of communicating with and conceiving of one another, helping rhetoricians to theorize a compositional practice that embraces rather than represses the various ways technological developments disturb and displace customary notions of solidified and singular human being. From a position that grounds rhetorical subjectivity not according to static sovereign selfhood but in the precarious disruptions of the Other and taking the figure of the social media post as my model for posthumanism, this project opens a way for rhetoricians to reconceive pedagogical practice from a perspective that would relinquish customary commitments to raising consciousness and objective reason in favor of the jocose and allusive contingencies of a hybridized digital unconscious.