Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. California UP. (1969).
“Thereafter, with this term as instrument, [identity] we seek to mark off the areas of rhetoric, by showing how a rhetorical motive is often present where it is not usually recognized or thought to belong.” (xii).

This is perfect for those rhetorics I seek to recognize in my works, those that are difficult to identify. Guilt has a great deal to do with identity, as does respect which I have just decided might bear looking at as a rhetorical device.

“All told, persuasion ranges from the bluntest quest of advantage, as in sales promotion or propaganda, though courtship, social etiquette, education, and the sermon to a “pure” form that delights in the process of appeal for itself alone, without ulterior purpose. And identification ranges from the politician who, addressing an audience of farmers, says, “I was a farm boy myself,” through the mysteries of social status, to the mystic’s devout identification with the source of all being” (xiv).

“We seem to be going to ways at once. In some respects, we are trying to bring these poems together as instances of the same motivation; yet in other respects we are insisting that the unique context in which this motive appears in each poem makes the motive itself different in all three cases” (9).

Language allows us to view different contexts as having the same motivation, but then the motive itself being different in all cases?

“The Nazis, locating the transformandum in the whole Jewish people as their chosen vessel, gave us a “scientific” variant: genocide. . .For the so-called “desire to kill” a certain person is much more properly analyzable as a desire to transform the principle which that person represents” (13).

We see certain aspects of humanity as being physical representatives of ideas or principles. This in turn makes certain aspects of humanity into some kind of rhetoric of their own. Desire to kill, then, is desire to change the principles which that person or people represent.

“We would find ways of transcending the imagery of killing that pervades our opening anecdote. At the same time, we do not want to ignore the import of the imagery in its own right, first as needed for characterizing a given motivational recipe, and second for its rhetorical effect upon an audience (17).
Identification

“an imagery of slaying (slaying of either the self or another) is to be considered merely as a special case of identification in general. Or otherwise put: the imagery of slaying is a special case of transformation, and transformation involves the ideas and imagery of identification. That is: the killing of something is the changing of it, and the statement of the thing’s nature before and after the change is an identifying of it” (20).

Identification & Consubstantiality

“A is not identical with his colleague, B. But inso far as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so.
People do not have to be “like” others to assume or believe they are. Desire is often a strong part of this, admiration brings about a desire to become like another. If we identify with another, then we are more likely to jump on his train of thought; we are, therefor, more easily persuaded of certain things because of our emotional relation to another.

“Here are ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is “substantially one” with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another” (21).

Very applicable to DuBois’ theory of double consciousness. We are two. We are one.

On “substance”: “They abolished the term, but it is doubtful whether they can ever abolish the function of that term, or even whether they should want to. A doctrine of consubstantiality, either explicit or implicit, may be necessary to any way of life. For substance, in the old philosophies was an act; and a way of life is an acting-together; and in acting together, men have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make them consubstantial” (21).

“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.
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” (22).

“If men were wholly and truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man’s very essence. It would not be an ideal, as it now is, partly embodied in material conditions and partly frustrated by these same conditions; rather, it would be as natural, spontaneous, and total as with those ideal prototypes of communication, the theologian’s angels, or “messengers” (22).

“The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the Wars of Nerves, the War (23).

“But one can systematically extend the range of rhetoric, if one studies the persuasiveness of false or inadequate terms which may not be directly imposed upon us from without by some skillful speaker, but which we impose upon ourselves, in varying degrees of deliberateness and awareness, through motives indeterminately self-protective and/or suicidal” (35).

Rhetoric then is not only work done by words we are approached by, but by our own sense of self and what the sense of self projects upon those words!!!!!!!

“For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols” (43).

An essential function of language and of human nature.

Traditional Prinicples of Rhetoric
Identification

“For purposes of praise or blame, the rhetorician will assume that qualities closely resembling any of these qualities are identical with them. For instance, to arouse dislike for a cautious man, one should present him as cold and designing. Or to make a simpleton lovable, play up his good nature” (55).
“Thus, all told, besides the extension of rhetoric through the concept of identification, we have noted these purely traditional evidences of the rhetorical motive: persuasion, exploitation of opinion (the “timely” topic is a variant), a work’s nature as addressed, literature for use (applied art, inducing to an act beyond the area of verbal expression considered in and for itself), verbal deception (hence, rhetoric as instrument in the war of words), the “agnostic” generally words used “sweetly” (eloquence, ingratiation, for its own sake), formal devices, the art of proving opposites (as “counterpart” of dialectic)” (64).

“In his Orator, an earlier work than the De Oratore, when defending his verbal opulence against a rising “Attic” school in Rome which called for a simpler diction, Cicero distinguishes these styles (genera dicendi, genera scribendi): the grandiloquent, plain, and tempered. And he names as the three “offices” of the orator: (1) to teach, inform instruct (docere); (2) to please (delectare); (3) to move or “bend” (movere, flectere) (73).

“In sum, today any representation of passions, emotions, actions, and even mood and personality, is likely to be treated as falling under the heading of “images” which in turn explicityly or implicitly involve “imagination” (81).

So, if emotions fall under the realm of the imaginary that explains why they’ve been ignored.

“Man is essentially a “rational” (that is, symbol using) animal (as stated in the opening words of St. John, “In the beginning was the Word,” the prior in substance being here expressed as the prior in time). And when we use symbols for things, such symbols are not merely reflections of the things symbolized, or signs for them; they are to a degree a transcending of the things symbolized. So, to say that man is a symbol-using animal is by the same token to say that he is a “transcending animal.” Thus, there is in language itself a motive force calling man to transcend the “state of nature” (that is, the order of motives that would prevail in a world without language (Logos, “reason”) (192).