CCR 631/CCR 690

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A Rhetoric of Motives.
Kenneth Burke

Introduction
The intro opens with an explanation why the book proper beings with imagery of killing. It isn’t, Burke explains that he (btw, he doesn’t use the pronoun “I” but the pronoun “we” to refer to himself) is focusing on the principles of transformation, or rebirth, that occur through death. If the reader, he advises, is bothered by this use of killing imagery, then said reader can skim through and not fully participate with the text until page 19, where identification is introduced as a principle element. The intro continues on to explain the major purpose of the book is not to reclaim the original concept of rhetoric, ie, the art of persuasion, but to move beyond and introduce the concept that rhetoric is also a way to create identification between a speaker (and here let’s also insert “writer”) and her audience. The book closes with talk of the cold war and the digression of public figures–even clergymen–participating in and creating “torrents of ill will” (xv).

Question: When Burke talks about the “intermediary area of expression that is not wholly deliberate, yet not wholly unconscious” that “[i]t lies midway between aimless utterance and speech directly puposive” (xiii) is he alluding to identification? And does identification mean creating a kairotic moment?

Section One: Range of Rhetoric
What’s interesting about this book is that it’s not divided into chapters but sections. Each section has smaller subtopics, and so far, all the subtopics (up to this point, ie, page 12) have dealt with literary metaphors of death, here translated to the act of transformation/rebirth that such a rhetorical move within a text signals. Here, too, it seems Burke is arguing for “good” literature as, in reality, good rhetoric (ironically, I believe this is a quote attributed to him that I’ve picked up through reading other texts that talk about Burke). Specifically on page 12 Burke explains how a poet can choose to “kill” traits within herself she feels are evil, or unlikeable. Burke lists the different ways this can occur suggesting that the poet could write a poem where the poet identifies a character as her, and has said character take her own life, “another might symbolize this same transformation by imaginatively endowing some ‘outward enemy’ with the trait” (12) and the slaying her enemy, or the poet could create a character which represents her and have that character killed by another. Burke then makes material world ties to these figure studies, the Nazis and their use of the Jewish people (this would be a physical enactment of the “outward enemy”) and the pschoanalytic drive to uncover the unconscious drive to kill a family member because of rivalry or frustrated love. Burke explains this is the motive “expressed in reverse,” since in reality the aggressor doesn’t want the family member dead, but harbors “a desire to transform the principle which the person represents” (13).

Dramatic and Philosophic Terms for Essence
In this subtopic Burke asserts that ways to dramatically and philosophically the concept essence. The first way–which he seems to have covered in a Grammar of Motive–is to posit ultimate beginnings. Here Burke says “there is this ultimate of beginnings, whereby theological or metaphysical systems may state the essence of mankind in terms of a divine parenthood or an originating natural ground”, and therefore, “there is ultimate endings” (13).

This would work back to the death motif of this section and re-enforces the importance of killing and death within Western rhetoric (here, the ability to persuade in dramatic or philosophic works). This idea of endings, Burke asserts, allows for the demonstration of “the essence of a thing…defined narrativley in terms of its fulfillment or fruition” (13). This connects to the idea of “Aristotelian entelechy“, where something is defined by its finishedness (or perfection as the end result of process, or something smelted in a crucible). Burke explains “Man [sic] is a ‘rational animal,’ for instance, not in the sense that he is immune to irrational motives, but in the sense that the perfection of humankind is in the order of rationality” (14).

Identification and Consubstantiality
Under this heading is where Burke begins to talk in earnest about identification and how it works as a major element of rhetoric, therefore coming through on his promise that this text would try to not only reclaim but extend the boundaries of rhetoric. In this section Burke claims when person A is identified, ie, seen as similar or the same, with person B, then “A is ’substantially one’ with a person other than himself” (21). The ambiguity of the situation arises when A and B are still seen as two separate individuals, since this identification (and here I’m making a claim) is symbolic. So “at the same time he [A] remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another” (21). Identification becomes all the more important as it will be used, it seems, throughout the book to discuss division, specifically how “The Rhetoric deals with the possibilities of classification in its partisan aspects; it considers the ways in which individuals are at odds with one another, or become identified with groups more or less at odds with one another” (22). As an echo of the talk of the Cold War and Nazis from earlier parts of the book, Burke demonstrates how the identification/division binary works in acts of war:

Why “at odds,” you may ask, when the titular term is “identification”? Because, to begin with “identification” is, by the same token, though roundabout, to confront the implications of division. And so, in the end, men are brought to the most tragically ironic of all divisions,, or conflicts, when millions of cooperative acts go into the preparation for one single destructive act. We refer to tha ultimate disease of cooperation: war. (22)

Later, Burke makes statements which display how important the concept of identification is for his explanation of rhetoric. On page 24 he says “Indeed, since it is so clearly a matter of rheotric to persuade a man by identifying your cause with his interests,” pointing out the importance of not only logos and pathos in perusaion but also ethos and kairos. Here, I’ll make the claim this statement foreshadows how important the process of identification is for Burke since he seems concerned with how persuasion occurs in modern unholy activities like genocide and war intentionally designed to punish civilians as a way to break the will of an enemy nation to fight.

Burke also points out that “[i]n pure identification there would be no strife. Likewise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join battle only through a mediatory ground that makes their communication possible, thus providing for the first condition necessary for the interchange of blows” (25). Much like other writers we’ve read thus far, rhetoric is more than persuasion. It is also the way meaning is made, which points to the concept there is no pure language with a pure center and a stable center that describe all physical events are they actually occurred.

Identification and the “Autonomous”
In this section Burke explains that even the “autonomous” activity (later to be science) there is still identification of said endeavor with some other figure, trope, or concept. Burke explains the ecology of the rhetorical situation, saying “‘Identification’ is a word for the autonomous activity’s place in [the] wide context” and this context, due to distance temporally and spatially is “a place with which the agent may be unconcerned” (27). The example he gives is that of a shepherd. “The shepherd,” Burke explains, “qua shepherd, acts for the good of the sheep, to protect them from discomfiture and harm. But he may be ‘identified’ with a project that is raising sheep for market” (27, emphasis mine). Here, the shepherd is seen as the protector only to send off his charges for slaughter.

This talk builds into the topic of The Autonomy of Science, where Burke questions the ethics of those, who like the shepherd, feel they are autonomous and yet identified with institutions that promote the “disease of cooperation: war.” Here it seems Burke is pointing out the term and concept of “autonomy” allows the scientist to view himself as separate from the military (the institution I was referring to obliquely in the last sentence) but still benefit from the military’s largess. Still worse, Burke points out that this device (autonomy) to deny identification allows for the scientist to perform vile acts. This autonomy saturates the scientist’s worldview to the point it colors his language, where “impersonal terminology” allows for the mental gymnastics to distance himself from the “sinister” (35) projects of the military. Burke tells the reader:

The very scientific ideals of an “impersonal” terminology can contribute ironically to such a disaster: for it is but a step from treating inanimate nature as mere “things” to treating animals, and then enemy peoples, as mere things. (33)

It seems the concerns of ethics and rhetoric is still the motif of our shared readings.

Rhetoric of Address (to the Individual Soul)
In this topic Burke asserts that “a modern ‘post-Christian’ rhetoric must also concern itself with the thought that, under the heading of appeal to audiences, would also be included any ideas or images privately addressed to the individual self for moralistic or incantatory purposes.” (38-39). These private admonitions are then used by the individual person “to form himself in accordance with the communicative norms that match the cooperative ways of his society, is by the same token concerned with the rhetoric of identification” in an effort to identify himself with the dominant norms and practices of his society. “Education (‘indoctrination’) exerts such pressure upon him from without; he completes the process from within” (39).

Section Two: Traditional Principles of Rhetoric.
Persuasion
This section chronicles all the different Roman-Greco concepts of rhetoric as the art of persuasion and the methods that could be used to persuade an audience. There also a brief talk (54) on the idea of that the “truth” which persuasion relies on, especially when it is reached through dialectic, falls outside the confines as set by science. Nothing in this realm, Burke explains, meets “the strictly scientific, T-F, yes-or-no” tests of validity promoted by science (this could explain why Burke does such a complete job of discrediting science in the first section). This eventually works into the section Identification, where Burke brings in his concepts of identification and consubstantiality. Burke claims:

You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifyingyour ways with his. Persuasion by flattery is but a special case of persuasion in general. But flattery can safely serve as our paradigm if we systematically widen its meaning, to see behind it ithe conditions of identification or consubstantiality in general. And you give the “signs” of such consubstantiality by deference to an audience’s “opinions.” (55)

This section closes with Burke’s statement that the only thing has done differently in this subtopic is extend rhetoric through the concept of identification; and overall it seems Burke is introducing readers to the terms of classic rhetoric as a way to dissect moments of language for their rhetorical motive.

The general pattern seems to be: list the terms and accompanying concepts from classical rhetoric, comment, analyse, and update in some way–either a)extending what rhetoric does or b)reclaiming some discipline (esthetics, psychology, literary criticism) as part of rhetoric. For example, the topic “Rhetorical Form in Large.” Beginning with the Greeks, Burke explains how argumentation was eventually codified into the three types of rhetoric: forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. He then explains how each changed over time according to their milieu (mind you, from the time of the Greeks until the present–especially interesting is the appropriation of rhetoric by Augustine for Christianity). Burke ends the section rather casually, saying

In any case, note that once you treeat instruction as an aim of rhetoric you introduce a principle that can widen the scope of rhetoric beyond persuasion. It is on the way to include also works on the theory and pracitce of exposition, description, communication in general. Thus, finally, out of this principle, you can derive contemporary “semantics” as an aspect of rhetoric. (77)

Questions: What is the affect of Burke using the pronoun “we” when he speaks? Is this an act of identification in and of itself? Is Burke trying to persuade the reader by asking them to identify with his claims? And if so, does that make this text not only a teaching moment but also an enaction of traditional and Burkian (sp?) rhetoric, too?

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