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Constitutive Rhetoric
According to James Boyd White, constitutive rhetoric can be defined as the art of constituting character, community, and culture in language.” This invites the audience to experience the world in different ways.
Certain identities actually exclude some from “membership.” In his 2013 inaugural address, President Robert Mugabe categorized Zimbabweans as people who “follow African values here. We follow our conscience and are not Western” (Palczewski, Ice Fritch, 8). These Zimbabweans had no sense of self identity except for the facts of what they were “not” giving them no true identity to even be constructed. Symbolic action constitutes character and how rhetoric creates understanding of relations people have to each other and the world.
The constitutive model of rhetoric dates back to the Greek Sophists with theories that speech moved audiences to action based on similar beliefs and values. Kenneth Burke, an influential twentieth-century scholar, defined human beings as the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal. (P, I, F,8). Rhetoric highlights insights on the true meaning behind being human. People interact through symbols as they work together to derive decisions on a common concern. For Burke, rhetoric is rooted in “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (Paczewski, Ice, Fritch, 8). Burke also highlighted identification, rather than persuasion, as the main function for language. Burke contended that social identity is founded “spontaneously, intuitively, even unconsciously. Moreover, Edwin Black’s theory of the second persona also aided scholars in rhetoric that through textual analysis one can discover the imagined shared values and beliefs between speaker and audience. The audience adopts ethos prior to being persuaded by constitutive rhetoric, thus the ethos of the subject of discourse can be critically studied and interpreted through a text (Sloane, 617).
James Boyd White was the first to fully put the terms meaning together. In 1985 he described constitutive rhetoric ads rhetoric that called a common, collective identity into existence. When the audience understand and related to method and content, persuasion and identification occur. After this follows speech which happens within culture, speakers find the ability to adapt the views and ideas of a community. This provides a “calling identity” when speeches address a diverse crowd as if they are one big community. According to White, one can find 2 methods of proving an audience that they belong to an identity: Peithõ also known as persuasion and dolos, described as deceitful manipulation (White, 39-40). Persuasion convinces the audience of this shared identity meanwhile deceitful manipulation provides belonging through deceit.
In this case, one’s identity is rhetorically constructed in ways a person is unaware of. Their sense of self, group, or nation is perceived differently. Maurice Charland, a professor of communication studies, discusses the different ways in which people are rhetorically constructed to find this identity. For example, the way Texas people refer to themselves as “Texans” or those from the United States categorize themselves as “Americans.” Every person constructs their identity is a different way. In 1987 he further explained the importance of the narrative and Marxist theory. He discussed, “While classical narratives have an ending, constitutive rhetorics leave the task of narrative closure to their constituted subjects” (Charland). His theory is derived from Kenneth Burke and philosopher, Louis Althusser.
A real-life example of how constitutive rhetoric is used in our daily lives is AXE Commercials. These commercials help rhetors invest in something and believe the act. Maurice Charland wrote an article called, “Constitutive Rhetoric- the Case of the Pueple Quebecois,” on the effects of constitutive rhetoric and the way it helps groups of people feel as if they belong. He portrays that these people have a certain mission to accomplish together and discusses this manner through the 3 ideological effects of constitutive rhetoric. His first effect discusses constituting a collective subject. Identities exist through a specific group of people. His second, positing of a trans historical subject. This identity has existing for years despite the fact some people didn’t recognize themselves as a part of a collective subject. The third effect is the illusion of freedom by providing people with the opportunity to take action. The main subject in these commercials are Men. Axe commercials target men of all ages more specifically those on the lookout for ladies. The idea in this commercial is the thought of not using the AXE will solve all their problems. Men identify themselves as the collective subject to represent this product. Their solution to the problem is that if a man is wearing AXE, women will come running to them. By using women as objects, AXE is able to promise their buyers that nothing can go wrong with this purchase. AXE gives them the confidence that anything can happen. Charland discusses that constitutive rhetoric is important because it “positions the reader towards political, social, and economic action in the material world… and that its embodied subjects act freely in the social world to affirm their subject position” (Charland). This type of rhetoric gives subjects freedom to act in the world through power, confidence, and freedom. AXE in the rhetoric sense gives them their power and confidence that this product will have the woman crawling. It is agreeable when Charland says “constitutive rhetoric is a discursive background of social life.” Commercials are just a bombardment whether one notices it or not, it is always there. Consumer are always trying to hook their subjects to become a “forever user” (Paramo).
Moreover, on the views of Charland, he discusses constitutive rhetoric on viewing identity as an outcome of address. His views are similar to those of Kenneth Burke. He is concerned with identification, which as Burke says, must happen prior to persuasion. Identification happens spontaneously, even unconsciously. Charland, like Burke, wants a rhetorical theory able to account for how group and individual identities form “beyond the realm of rational or even free choice, beyond the realm of persuasion” (Charland). To further Charland’s case, one can understand the constitution of the pueple Quebecois. Prior to a specific speech act in 1967, the term “Quebecois” referred to a resident of the city of Quebec. But, when an organization publicly declared “We are Quebecois” that term became a totally different entity: The French- speaking Canadians who sought to separate from the nation. The declaration helped constitute a new political identity- previously, to be a “French Canadian” was a cultural and linguistic but not a political status. Charland had a theory called the “ideological trick.” It seems as though Quebecois were always “there” waiting to be named. But for Charland, that “natural” identity was in fact created in the address. Note, too that these constitutive narratives both create and constrain identity. He describes how constitutive rhetoric can be seductive: it has the effect of giving one a new point of self- recognition. Such speeches “give order to human experience and… induce others to dwell in it to establish ways of living in common, in communion in which there is sanction for the story that constitute one’s life” (Fisher quoted in Charland, 142). Thus, constitutive rhetoric is “akin… to conversion that ultimately results in an act of recognition of the ‘rightness’ of a discourse and of one’s identity…”
Overall, constitutive rhetoric is the theory of discourse about the capacity of language or symbols used to create a collective identity for an audience especially by means of symbols, literature or narratives. Such discourse often demands that action be taken to reinforce the identity and the beliefs of that identity. James Boyd White explains that it denotes the art of constituting character, community, culture and narrative. The different positions on the concept of constitutive rhetoric all derive from the same idea of find this identity. Kenneth Burke and Maurice Charland both have thoughts that mirror each other: the way one develops identity and the way it is found spontaneously. People develop it by accident as they experience their everyday lives. Their claims fail to discuss the way identities can be formed not just by accident. One’s identity can be found through exploration and discovery of themselves. People can seek out their own identity and find it along the way. Edwin Blacks theory of finding rhetoric through second persona and textual analysis is another way to find this identity. Through reading of text, the audience is simultaneously persuaded and the shared values are shown. Similar to Edwin Black, James Boyd White’s theory is also based on persuasion. His claim on the 2 methods of persuasion and deceitful manipulation provide insight into his idea. Both Black and White have an intuitive idea on the fact of naïve people being influenced into their values. Their theories fail to show another way identity can be found like by experience. People go about their daily lives and come across different situations. For example, if one comes across an act of bullying, their morals come into play. If that person identifies themselves as a person of doing the right thing, then they will step into the situation to stop it. Each experience they go through opens up to forming their identity based on how they would handle it. These theories each have their own idea, but fail to consider the others. Persuasion, textual discovery, manipulation, or through spontaneous ways, identity is formed which is the root of constitutive rhetoric.