Jeff’s Dinner Party

Below you will see my vision for my dinner party. The issue being discussed is constitutive rhetoric (persuasion through adherence to an identity that is personified by a symbol). In the contemporary political climate rhetorical symbols that have come to define an identity are common place. The dinner party seeks to discuss the function of constitutive rhetoric through the case study of political rhetoric in Florida regarding the removal of curriculum and texts that represent the history of oppression that people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community faced. The table is making the argument that these histories are being removed because they don't fit within the constitutive narrative developed in the dominant political discourse. By removing inconvenient truths the established identity is easier to adhere to and ultimately achieve persuasion.

The left side of the table includes authors who describe the basic understanding of constitutive rhetoric from a theoretical standpoint. Additionally, the left side depicts how constitutive rhetoric has been impactfully applied in the past as well as the most ethical way of constructing a constitutive rhetoric through coalition building.

The right side of the table provides a discussion on the dangers of "bad" rhetoric. Constitutive rhetoric is incredibly powerful and unethical use can create adherence and identity for an audience that isn't based in fact. The identity is bastardized and weaponized for political gain.

Quotes:

Left Side

Charland: "Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Quebecois"

"All narratives, as they create the illusion of merely revealing a unified and unproblematic subjectivity, are ideological, because they occult the importance of discourse, culture, and history in giving rise to subjectivity"

Blankfield: "Political Animals: Prosopopoeia in the 1944 Presidential Election"

"“Impersonations may signal identification with an audience.20 In the Fala letters, citizens used prosopopoeia to identify with their dog-loving president. Significantly, very few people—if any— used prosopopoeia to address FDR directly. "

Walker: "Divergence and Diplomacy as a Pluriversal Rhetorical Praxis of Coalition Politics"

"Cortes invited community leaders together to organize what was first named the Committee for Mexican American Action, but was later renamed Communities Organized for Public Services, or COPS (Rogers 111). The name change is significant—in discourse it strategically downplays social action through Mexican American identities, yet in practice it links these identities to an organization “for public services”—for investment in flood protection, in neighborhood improvements, and clean water—all the while playfully identifying, through a detournement, as the true civil servants and protectors of the people"

Right Side

Larson and McHendry "Parasitic Publics"

“If a public’s rhetoric of counterpublicity exploits oppressive conditions to narrow discursive space for others, then it is not a counterpublic—it is a parasitic public.”

Gunn "On Political Perversion"

“In this essay I have argued Trump’s rhetoric is perverse because of a litany of disavowals (1) at the level of the statement (occultatio); (2) at the level of style; and (3) at the level of genre. Such a remarkable consistency among multiple rhetorical contexts indexes a perverse psychical structure, or a disposition or set of strategies for relating to others characterized by the absence of doubt and the simultaneous acknowledgment and denial of consensus order."

Reames "Disproof without Silence: How Plato invented the Post-Truth Problem"

"a logos will never be definitively true or false; it will only be true or false according to the ever-shifting measure of human perception—or, as Protagoras puts it in his most famous doctrine, the “man-measure doctrine”: “man is the measure of all things; of things that are that they are, and of things that are not, that they are not”