Nimble Navigation: Narrative, Fictionality, and Metanoic Reflexivity in Presidential Rhetoric

As the conditions for public deliberation are undergoing massive transitions, presidential rhetoric develops novel messaging tactics in order to remain visible and relevant in the multiple public spheres of present-day society. Recent work has demonstrated how the Obama and Trump administrations employ new digital platforms and how their communication interweaves with entertainment media formats. This article investigates an aspect of contemporary presidential rhetoric that so far has received far less attention: namely, its nonconventional use of fictionalized discourse. Drawing and elaborating on ongoing work in narrative theory on the rhetoric of fictionality, the aim of the article is to show how particular rhetorical practices, producing what I call metanoic reflexivity, have been employed by the Obama and Trump administrations. Metanoic reflexivity is a reading effect experienced when a rhetor's use of fictionality disrupts the audience's ascription of relevance to an act of communication.

Through readings of such effects in Barack Obama's and Donald Trump's rhetorics, the article makes two arguments. Firstly, that metanoic reflexivity, by disrupting processes of generic ascription, offers a window into how and why a given public sphere distinguishes the invented from the referential. Secondly, that Obama's experiments with fictionality take place according to meticulous designs which ultimately reinstate stable distinctions between the invented, the feigned, and the authentic, whereas Trump's experiments permanently invite mutually exclusive ascriptions of relevance, thereby extending doubts about intention indefinitely.