Abstract:
The Oxford English Dictionary declared “post-truth” the 2016 Word of the Year, an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (McComiskey 5). Post-truth gained conceptual traction in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the exit of United Kingdom from the European Union (Brexit). Both events were driven by disinformation campaigns in which raw emotions and unsubstantiated belief overwhelmed reason and rational deliberation. There is, however, a need to look at instantiations of post-truth beyond Western contexts and toward the Global South for a more holistic and rhetorically nuanced understanding of post-truth as a global epistemological issue. This dissertation is an intervention in this regard as I situate post-truth as a rhetorical strategy in contemporary political discourse in the Philippines. With such focus, this project decenters Western experiences in post-truth and argues that post-truth is a discursive construction with material and performative elements aimed at flooding democratic discourse and deliberation with political spin and weaponized rhetoric. Through three case studies that variably draw on Robert Scott’s rhetoric is epistemic thesis; Dana Cloud’s discursive strategies of affect, spectacle, embodiment, narrative, and myth; and Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen’s conceptual frame of rhetorical citizenship, this dissertation aims to provide a productive criticism of the rhetoric of political figures and pundits in the Philippines by also theorizing paths of resistance against post-truth. The first case study concerns how incumbent President Rodrigo Duterte used post-truth in shaping perceptions on his “war on drugs.” The second case study looks into former First Lady Imelda Marcos as a post-truth icon whose narratives are countered in The Kingmaker documentary film. Finally, the third case study situates post-truth in the anti-intellectualism of Facebook pages maintained by Duterte’s propaganda machine. Each case study, structured according to James Martin’s method of rhetorical political analysis (RPA), is divided into three sections: rhetorical context, argument, and effect. As “truth” and “post-truth” are issues entwined in agency, this dissertation invites rhetorical citizenship as a corrective to post-truth.
