38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 2020] STATELESSNESS AS RHETORIC 1/16/2021 12:59 PM 267 decades, scholars of domestic law have suggested that critical rhetoric could supply important schools of thought with theoretical understanding. 153 To understand critical rhetoric and its developments, I must briefly explain the theory of ideographs. 154 Ideographs are concepts that possess "force and meaning because of how they constitute and trigger a particular ideology."155 They are abstract, standing "for beliefs and commitments that constitute ideologies." 156 However, they often have competing and contradictory dimensions.157 To illustrate, the right to life and the right to choose are presented as oppositional in the abortion debate; gun control and the right to bear arms are positioned as oppositional in the debate over guns in the United States. Guns can be used to both protect and destroy lives. Since ideographs have the capacity to be used in contradictory ways, 158 critical rhetoric posits that the analysis should recognize discursive indeterminacy.159 Based on Martin Koskenniemi's idea of radical indeterminacy, international law standards are porous, malleable, and can defend any State's course of action.160 International law is not free from decisionism; it involves choices. 161 States argue based on choices amidst indeterminacy. Much like ideographs (although he does not call them ideographs), Koskenniemi validates international law's creation of various binarisms—reality is "constituted as language and as such, of binary distinctions." 162 In other words, the language of international law is indeterminate as it creates, sustains, and reinforces ideographs, while the ideographs themselves create and recreate international law. Proceeding from this, I put forward that States are rhetors who create citizens and stateless persons and constitute status. They pull together the conceived meanings of statelessness, citizenship, or both from fragments of texts. In rhetoric 153. See, e.g., Warren Sandmann, Critical Legal Studies and Critical Rhetoric: Toward a Reconceptualization of the Acting Human Agent, 17 LEGAL STUD. F. 367, 367 (1994). Despite this call, there remains a dearth in legal literature of scholarship that explicitly takes critical rhetoric as informative of critical approaches to law. 154. STEPHEN LITTLEJOHN, KAREN FOSS & JOHN OETZEL, THEORIES OF HUMAN COMMUNICATION 451 (11th ed. 2017). 155. Id. at 451–52. 156. Id. at 425. 157. Id.; see Michael Calvin McGee, The "Ideograph": A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology, 66 Q. J. SPEECH 1 (1980). McGee observed that "many use the term [ideology] innocently, almost as a synonym for 'doctrine' or 'dogma' in political organizations; and others use the word in a hypostatized sense that obscures or flatly denies the fundamental connection between the concept and descriptions of mass consciousness. The concept seems to have gone the way of the dodo." Id. at 1–2. 158. LITTLEJOHN, FOSS & OETZEL, supra note 154, at 452. 159. See McKerrow, supra note 18, at 98 (adding that ideas and concepts could be reconstructed after discursive indeterminacy is recognized in a critical rhetoric analysis). 160. MARTTI KOSKENNIEMI, FROM APOLOGY TO UTOPIA: THE STRUCTURE OF INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ARGUMENT 25, 591 (2006). 161. Id. at 596. 162. Martti Koskenniemi, A Response, 7(12) GERMAN L. J. 1103, 1104 (2006).