Distance as Ultimate Motive: A Dialectical Interpretation of A Rhetoric of Motives

Abstract

Drawing upon published and unpublished texts from Kenneth Burke, this article argues that A Rhetoric of Motives represents the first, “Upward” half of his project on rhetoric. Emphasizing this unexpected connection between Burke and Plato, the article offers a dialectical rereading of the text, one that locates the ultimate rhetorical motive not in identification, but pure in persuasion. Interpreting the latter as a “‘mythic image,”’ it emerges as a non-empirical, imagistic portrayal of the formal conditions underlying persuasion, the origin of rhetoric. Rhetoric, dialectically redefined in terms of pure persuasion, produces the divisions that we humans would (paradoxically) discursively bridge.

Notes

¹This is from a letter contained in the Stanley Edgar Hyman Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. The author expresses gratitude to Phoebe Pettingell Hyman for her permission to quote from these unpublished manuscripts. Letters from this collection will be parenthetically indicated “SH.”

²This manuscript is drawn from a folder in the Kenneth Burke Papers labeled: “R of M Drafts. Including final draft.” Apart from “The Rhetorical Radiance of the ‘Divine'” (and some scattered deletions in pencil), the manuscript indicated as the text's “final draft” is identical to the published version of the Rhetoric—and its 430 typed pages even include a table of contents. Thus it is quite clear that this was, until quite late in the process, the complete text of the Rhetoric. This material is taken from the archives of The Kenneth Burke Papers, Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection, Pattee Library, Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA. The author is grateful to Sandra Stelts, Jeannette Sabre, the Penn State Libraries, and the Burke Literary Trust for their help and for permission to quote from these unpublished manuscripts.

³Another appears during discussion of “timely topics” and the press: “We pass over it hastily here, as we plan to consider the two major aspects of it in later sections of this project (when we shall consider the new level of ‘reality’ which journalistic timeliness establishes, and shall study the relation between transient and permanent factors of appeal by taking the cartoons in The New Yorker as a test case)” (Rhetoric 63).

⁴Authorial intentions provide notoriously controversial evidence for reinterpretation. However, as the above-quoted header makes clear, Burke altered his initial plan late in the publication process. Although other Burkean texts were altered during composition (for example, the pentad was a later addition to the Grammar), the Rhetoric project is different; the material with which Burke began was postponed, not supplemented, as in the case of the Grammar. Most significantly, Burke's papers reveal an organizational framework linking the excised material to that which remained; thus, examination of Burke's original vision for the project as a whole sheds new light on the version of the Rhetoric that was published.

⁵This quote is from a letter from Burke to Cowley dated 26 January 1947, housed in the Burke Papers. Letters from this collection will be parenthetically indicated “KB.”

⁶Judging from this description, it seems that some of this material was published in Burke's essay, “Rhetoric: Old and New” (see especially the discussion of blandness [69–75]).

⁷Additionally, such interpretations of Burke's text often produce an artificial separation between Burke's rhetoric and dialectic. Having sharpened this difference into a distinction, effort is required to explain their connection (e.g., Crusius, “A Case,” “Orality”; Ercolini).

⁸Here one might object, also citing Burke's essay on the “new” rhetoric, whose “key term” is identification (“Rhetoric” 62–63). However, in both texts, identification is introduced in the first section (or “stage”), but is transcended by other sections/stages. Further, in the Rhetoric, Burke describes persuasion and identification as his “two interrelated themes” (x), and discusses his “generating principles,” “persuasion and/or identification” (169; emphasis added)—a point he later reaffirmed in letters to Cowley (e.g., Williams 12). Identification is undeniably important in Burke's rhetorical theory, but I contend it must be contextualized within Burke's foundational claim about the nature of rhetoric.

⁹See also “Rhetoric: Old and New,” which contains a dialogue patterned after the Platonic dialectic—including the character “Socraticus” and references to the “Upward” and “Downward Way” (63–66).

¹⁰Although I have not altered any quotations, contemporary scholarship recognizes that the masculine is not a universal, and so my own usage reflects this philosophical commitment.

¹¹Although there is extensive debate regarding Platonic dialectic (e.g., Kahn; Benson), Gonzalez is cited here to demonstrate two things: that appropriation of Plato is not necessarily the adoption of Platonist metaphysics and that Burke's definition is neither idiosyncratic nor outdated. Gonzalez's recent study does not cite Burke, but is distinctly Burkean in its rejection of Platonist metaphysics, and its refusal to divorce Plato's dialectic from the dramatic form of the dialogues. Further, Gonzalez emphasizes the role played by ideas and images in Plato's dialectic (e.g., 129), echoing the book cited within the Rhetoric's discussion of Plato: Stewart's The Myths of Plato.

¹²These unpublished notes are drawn from a folder labeled “Myth,” housed in the Kenneth Burke Papers.

¹⁴Here I draw on this essay because Burke identifies it as the foundation for this portion of the Rhetoric (e.g., Burke to Hyman, January 26, 1948, SH).

¹³Moreover, he argues that Mannheim's perspective gains much of its appeal—including “the feel of an ultimate order”—from its furtive resemblance to the Platonic dialectic, and (in its ambiguous concept of “Utopia”) an implicit foundation in chiliastic myth (A Rhetoric 200; cf. Burke, “Ideology” 306).

¹⁵These unpublished notes are drawn from a folder labeled “Myth” in the Burke Papers.

¹⁶These notes are also from the “Myth” folder (but: cf. A Rhetoric 203; “Ideology” 306–307).

¹⁷Said another way, by retaining our myth's connection to the Platonic dialectic, we will recognize the narrative order of myth as an imagistic portrayal of a logical order—and not as an accurate, objective account of origins (cf. Grammar 430–440).

¹⁸Which is not to say that Burke rejects Kafka; Burke's account is designed to place Kafka's (and Kierkegaard's) vocabulary within a broader whole, not dismiss it. Although I cannot here respond to a recent essay by Ercolini, disputing Burke's interpretation of Fear and Trembling, I feel Ercolini misses the point of Burke's reading of Kierkegaard. Here Burke is moving toward dialectical transcendence, and thus his critique of Kierkegaard focuses on the difference between empirical and mythic images of courtship.

¹⁹For this reason, I would argue that the definitions of pure persuasion in the scholarly literature—designed for critical use—fail to see its ultimate, mythic significance (e.g., Hagen; Lee; Olson & Olson; Sweeney).

²⁰This is again why, for Burke, Mannheim's approach falls short; Burke argues that unlike his own approach, Mannheim's sociology cannot provide an “ultimate ground of motivation” (Rhetoric 201).

²¹Of course, Biesecker is not the only scholar to draw on such statements to equate identification and pure persuasion. Robert Wess likewise does not recognize pure persuasion as a mythic image, and thus his formulation of it as the “identification of identifications” subordinates it to the latter concept (e.g., 214). Similarly, although Zappen's introduction to Burke's “On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical Symmetry” insists on the importance of the third section of the Rhetoric, he ultimately does not connect dialectic, “pure persuasion,” and “ultimate identification” (e.g., 334).

²²For this reason, I would argue (pace Wess and Biesecker) that identification cannot be equated with pure persuasion; identification presumes a preexisting distance between persons, unlike pure persuasion, which symbolically introduces and maintains distance. This is, I would argue, a more rounded interpretation of Burke's famous statement—early in the Rhetoric, I would add, prior to arriving at his mythic image—that “to begin with ‘identification’ is, by the same token, to confront the implications of division” (Rhetoric 22; Burke's emphasis). Thus, Burke's oft-cited discussion of the interrelation of identification and division in rhetoric follows from pure persuasion's more primary, ontological shattering of unity. This is also, I believe, why Burke later describes the most profound variant of identification as the partisan carving up of a situation through terminological means (see Burke, “The Rhetorical” 271).

²³As per the “paradox of purity,” these would be identical (e.g., Grammar 35–36).

²⁴For others beginning with symbols as introduction of division rather than unity, see Anton, Thayer, and Wilden.

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Bryan Crable

Bryan Crable is Associate Professor