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A Community of Interference: Pure Persuasion and Its (Dis)Contents

  At the end of Counter-Statement Burke makes a somewhat radical statement (for his time and ours, depending on your ideological leanings). He argues that “effective literature could be nothing else but rhetoric” (210). So as I was reading Language as Symbolic Action I admit that I was intrigued by his essay titled, “Rhetoric and Poetics.” I wondered if he still held the same radical stance on the relationship between the two. The answer to that question is both a yes and a no.

A Community of Interference: Pure Persuasion and Its (Dis)Contents

One of KB's most famous lines in RM is, "Identification is compensatory to division" (22). What does this actually mean? Obviously "compensatory" is the key term to understand. But if compensatory means what it usually means, "aiming at compensation for, or reducing, or offsetting" (any other definitions?) then does this imply that division comes first? Or do they appear together? Doesn't identification also create division? This is how categorization works, right? Species, genus, differentiae, etc. Thoughts?   

-dreamfever

For Burke (who references Hegel and Aristotle in this discussion), the “paradox of purity,” or “paradox of the absolute,” is the form ambiguities of substance take as a result of dialectical pairings, such as “Being and Not-being” (GM 34-5). His example of how this paradox appears: humans derive “the nature of the human person from God as ‘super-person,’ as ‘pure,’ or ‘absolute’ person, [therefore] since God as a super-person would be impersonal…the impersonal would be synonymous with the negation of personal.

Following the advice of Dr. Blakesley, and in order to discover how Burke’s concept of “pure persuasion” works toward a rhetoric of community, my first goal of the project will be to come to a clearer understanding of what Burke intends in his use of the term pure persuasion. This will entail the paradox of purity (which I will discuss to some extent in my post today) as well.

Title Information:

Feyerabend, Paul. Against Method. London: Verso; 4thedition, 2010. 336 pages. ISBN-10: 1844674428. $22.95.

Summary Points:

1. Feyerabend questions the notions of scientific progress, the nature of knowledge, and rationalism. He is critical of any fixed standardization of the scientific method. ““Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise” (1).

  How might Burke’s concept of “pure persuasion” work toward a rhetoric of community?

  If I remember correctly (I can’t seem to find it now), Burke says in one of the Forwards to PLF that the book is a compilation of essays not necessarily written chronologically.