"[2] The constitutive model of rhetoric dates back to the ancient Greek Sophists, with theories that speech moved audiences to action based on a contingent, shared knowledge.
Kenneth Burke contributed to the theory of constitutive rhetoric by highlighting identification, rather than persuasion, as the major means by which language functioned.
"[3] Edwin Black's theory of the second persona also aided scholars in rhetoric to analyze the imagined shared values and beliefs between speaker and audience through textual analysis.
White wrote that persuasion and identification occur only when audiences already understand and relate to method and content.
When speeches address a diverse crowd as though they are of one community, White describes this as "calling [identity] into being" through material identification.
Althusser explained interpellation, or "hailing", as the social phenomenon of a mass audience having already been "recruited" by an ideology.
[12] Jacques Derrida criticized the paradox of constitutive rhetoric when he analyzed the United States Declaration of Independence.