The Idea of Identification

Chapter 2: Conceptualizing Identification: Extensions of a Burkean View

Chapter 2 CONCEPTUALIZING IDENTIFICATION Extensions of a Burkean View Rhetoric . . . is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. —Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives The subtlety of his critical work has challenged, its perversity has provoked, its original insights have opened up immense corridors of thought. Nobody who is capable of following him at all plodges in his footsteps; he is a critic for the adventurous, you take from him what you can get, and only realize later how much that was. —Robert Adams describing Kenneth Burke From a communications perspective, arguably the most important theorist of identification was Kenneth Burke, whose influence on rhetorical and cultural criticism has been enormous. Burke’s lifelong speculations on the mediating nature of language was influenced by the intellectual firmament of his time. Writing his most important work between the 1930s and early 1950s, he absorbed the canon of modernist thought in the work of Freud, Mead, Marx, Veblen, and others, at the same time using critiques of socially generated meaning to create an extended view of the province of rhetoric.1 Rhetoric should not be known primarily for its ability to obscure the truth (though, to be sure, he understood such 21 22 THE IDEA OF IDENTIFICATION uses), but for how its “resources of ambiguity” could “induce cooperation ” or “transcend differences.” For Burke communication lies at the very core of our sociality. We cannot escape—and, indeed, should embrace—the rhetorical construction of consciousness. Burke was not alone in viewing the centrality of language to the matrix of a culture.2 But few did it with a greater sense of intellectual freedom and playful adventure. He has justifiably been credited for playing a pivotal role in the discovery of the “hidden history” of rhetoric, triggering its reestablishment as an important area of study.3 His somewhat surprising adoption by rhetoricians in many large but moribund English and speech departments helped regenerate these fields, aided by early interpreters such as Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Bernard Brock, Marie Hochmuth Nichols, and William Rueckert. In what he described as his own intellectual “wanderings,” he offered a rich range of possibilities to consider in describing the rhetoric of association and estrangement. In its totality, the Burkean scheme amounted to an explicit repudiation of the rising tide of academic behaviorism of his day, and an invitation to communication and social theorists to find an ontological basis for rhetoric. In the spirit of his work, this chapter is both a recapitulation of some of those ideas, and an attempt to probe their possibilities and inadequacies . The larger first part of the chapter explores his theories of identification and association. The second part moves somewhat beyond Burke’s emphasis on the resources of language to a consideration of identification’s effects and limits. Language as “Equipment for Living” Burke was not a linear thinker, nor an analyst who could be defined by a single methodology. He often approached subjects from oblique angles, as in his description of Marxist thought not as a sociohistorical account of class and culture, but “a critique of capitalist rhetoric.”4 The complex fabric of his work resists categorization in the lexicography of any one field. He was—in the best and broadest sense of the word—an undisciplined theorist. Much of his work shows the influence of other fields with similar assumptions about the a priori nature of language, including general semantics, the sociology of knowledge, and linquistics. Never one to honor 23 Conceptualizing Identification tight disciplinary boundaries, Burke nonetheless wove many of their ideas into his work, combining an anthropologist’s interest in magic, religion, and class with a literary critic’s skill for the “close reading ” of texts. Readers of his eclectic work find themselves in the presence of a thinker in the tradition of the Sophists: a scholar who placed symbolic action at the presumptive center rather than the periphery of human events.5 In his view, language creates and sustains its own reality. Our “natural vocation” is the construction and maintenance of an identity where words are not simply the names for things, but “entitlements ” conferred or denied. Language is not derivative of human experience, but is—in many ways—prior...