Refiguring fantasy: Imagination and its decline in US rhetorical studies

This essay retells the history of U. S. rhetorical studies as a negotiation over the meaning of the concepts of invention and imagination. By providing a genealogical outline of the transformation of the imagination in rhetorical theory, a trend toward an increasingly contingent, "posthumanist" understanding of the rhetorical agent emerges, reaching its fullest elaboration in symbolic convergence theory. Instead of accepting the possibility that some rhetorical processes are primarily unconscious, however, U. S. rhetorical scholars, including Ernest Bormann, continued to defend the fully conscious, autonomous subject or elided the question of agency by advancing "ideological" and "materialist" theories focused on abstract populations, publics, or audiences. The essay concludes by urging a consideration of the "imaginary," a psychoanalytic understanding of the collective unconscious, as a concept that may help to reconcile disciplinary tensions regarding the status of the rhetorical agent.