x-posted to 8040

Burke prioritizes rhetoric as identification because he sees identification as a more general term than Aristotle’s definition of rhetoric as persuasion. In setting up this distinction, Burke wants to discover a theory of human relations based on people’s motives and in the process reclaim rhetoric from the human sciences, which he sees as flawed, especially because they set up hierarchy of terms that are overly reductionist: “one cannot simply reduce the totality to the suicidal ‘gist’ and feel that one has done justice to the motivation as a whole” (17). In other words, we have to be careful of the terms we use to describe human behavior.

To make his case for rhetoric as identification, he uses literary examples. I think he does this primarily to show that literature and poetry are good sources to aid in our understanding because they capture more of a range of behavior, and we can identify with the characters and situations they face. However, “two persons may be identified in terms of some principle they share in common, an ‘identification’ that does not deny their distinctness” (21). While we may identify with another, we don’t share identities. When we are persuaded to act differently, we will.

I find Burke so dense to read and very hard to understand. Much of what I think I grasp now is thanks to having taken a History of Rhetoric course a couple semesters ago in which we studied Burke a bit, and also by reading the text over and over again. One of the things I’m curious about is Burke dedicates the Rhetoric of Motives to W.C. Blum and he also quotes him as saying, “In identification lies the course of dedications and enslavements, in fact of cooperation” (xiv). I sort of get that an author may identify with the person to whom a text is dedicated and even may have cooperated with that person, but I’m really not sure what he means by ‘enslavements’. Is he saying that because he is captivated by Blum, he is enslaved to his ideas? Are we enslaved to others through literary by the process of identification? When we are moved by texts, are we held captive by those ideas? Some would say that through an impure use of rhetoric we try and enslave others, or at a minimum, bring them around to our way of thinking. I don’t know that it’s productive, but I just keep turning this over in my mind.
Then, what of the nature of affect in all this?

I think one answer is that affect comes in when we talk about rhetoric as social cohesive energy that brings people together. That is, when we “put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric” (25). When we invite ambiguity, we do so with affective awareness of the other’s situation.