Rights Talk and Political Dispositions

I appreciate the thoughtful responses to my article “The Second Amendment as Demanding Subject” offered by J. Michael Hogan and Craig Rood, Brett Lunceford, and Joshua Gunn.¹ They each help to highlight what I think of as our field’s genesis in and responsibility to the political. It is this responsibility to and investment in the political that inspired my initial contribution and that I will explore in this rejoinder.

Hogan, Rood, and Lunceford do an excellent job of providing additional context for what has come to be known by some as the gun debate in this country. Hogan and Rood argue for a rhetorical history of this debate, suggesting that such a genealogy will better enable us to “move the debate forward.”² Lunceford posits that those who advocate for what I have called an unbridled Second Amendment have “painted themselves into a rhetorical corner” by favoring armed (and figurative) confrontation, suggesting that this renders reasoned debate unlikely.³ I share with Hogan, Rood, and Lunceford a concern over the grave consequences of gun violence in this country. I also share with Hogan and Rood the conviction that rhetoricians should envision a role for themselves outside of isolated criticism—we should think of ourselves as in and of the political rather than mere spectators or observers. However, I am dubious about our ability as rhetoricians to move this or any other debate forward if we don’t first work to develop a fuller and more accurate picture of the extant nature of American politics. Part of this, I argue, requires thinking not only about the terms of the debate but also about what political speech might do outside of advancing a particular conviction or belief.

As Gunn points out in his response, the demand and refusal pattern I note is not unique to the Second Amendment issue (he lists “the English language, capital punishment, abortion, the minimum wage, the U.S. border, or same-sex marriage” as other examples).⁴ Gunn argues, and I agree, that “this [pattern] implicates an affective dimension of rhetoric tied more to phatic utterance and identity than the content of claims.”⁵ It is this affective dimension of rhetoric and the importance of attending to it that I will address in the remainder of this response. Along with that, I will offer my thoughts on why I find rights discourses a particularly fruitful area for such inquiry. I turn to that latter point first.

Tracking the Rhetorical Lives of Rights

My study of the Second Amendment was initially motivated by my sense that rights are often deployed unproductively in a social- or political-change sense. I was frustrated that the Second Amendment appeared as a possession and, as such, could not help to produce anything but grief. However, as I began to examine these discourses more closely, I wondered if my notion of productivity might have been too narrow. That is, I began to appreciate how the rights discourse served an identity-stabilizing function. Political engagement produced certain desired effects for those engaging in it and was in this sense productive. As my article suggests, I am dubious that these productions can bring about a better and different world. However, I am also doubtful that ignoring them can bring a better world about either. It strikes me that it is important to consider these productive (otherwise conceived) political discourses not necessarily to refute them but to understand what they might say about our politics and why and how people engage the political.

While my initial inquiry was more motivated by concerns about how rights are abused and misapprehended in public political discourse, the question eventually became more about what these uses of rights do. Rights are always more than what the Supreme Court reads them to be or even than what political theory tells us they should ideally be. If we restrict our analysis of political rights speak to the instrumental uses (what they guarantee, who holds them, and to what ends) to which rights are put or experienced...