Calum Lister Matheson

@dratropos.bsky.social

Rhetoric, media and culture, psychoanalysis, disinformation, conspiracy theories. I eat trash on the Internet and tell you what it lacked.

Lacan meticulously mapped linguistic concepts on to condensation and displacement, but not representation, and made shifting categories of trope and figure without engaging them in detail. What opportunities and challenges result?

Rhetorical performance can be immodest (although it doesn’t have to be so). Good rhetorical reading, however, has to have some grain of humility simply to acknowledge that ambiguity, multiple meaning, and aporia aren’t just a rhetor’s mistakes or products of an audience’s brilliant insight.