Identity's Strategy

Title Information: Anderson, Dana. Identity’s Strategy: Rhetorical Selves in Conversation. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. 209 pages. ISBN: 978-1570037061. $39.95.

Summary

·       Identity is important to rhetoric not because of what identity “is,” but because of what it can suggest about language’s function in a strategic and generative process.

·       A “problematic of identity” is understandable as the dynamic and tense relationship between person and world.  The two co-create each other constantly.

·       Suggests that identity is a statement of self-perception where both the reduction to language itself (constitution) and process of reduction (act of defining substance) are rhetorical.

·       Applies constitutive rhetorics to self instead of surroundings.

Key Terms

·       Identity, Conversion, Circumference, Constitution, Character, Ethos

Significance

·       Generates a non-ontological understanding of identity (informed by but separate from identification and ethos).

·       Expands Burke’s idea of identity through exploration of grammatical, rhetorical, and symbolic problems.

·       Offers by way of Aristotelian and Burkean rhetorics a conception of identity as a consciously malleable, persuasive tool subject to dramatistic criticism.

Secondary Sources

Frobish, Todd S. “An Origin of a Theory: A Comparison of Ethos in the Homeric Iliad with

That Found in Aristotle’s Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 22.1 (2003): 16-30. Print.

Haines, Victor Yelverton. “Rhetoric and Existence.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 29.2 (1996):

103-120. Print.

Scult, Allen. “Aristotle’s Rhetoric as Ontology: A Heideggerian Reading.” Philosophy &

Rhetoric32.2 (1999): 146-159. Print.

Quotables

“Certainly the assorted ‘post-‘ critiques of identity that I allude to have been valuable, especially in revealing how the term has served to naturalize different ideologies of selfhood; consequently, I do not invoke identity here in the essentialist terms of the not-so-distant past, as a word for some ineffable, unified, and stable substance – that irreducible something that makes us a discrete, induplicable I.” (6).

“Within the general doxa that define the person, identity names the commonly held belief that human selves are capable of – and arguably incapable of functioning without – some sense of self-definition, some answer to the question of ‘who I am’ in the culture, society, and world they inhabit” (9).

“Like all symbolic action, the expression of identity is a strategy, a way of addressing a situation in order to transform it” (56).

“Simply stated, the identity or self-understanding a rhetor portrays evokes much more powerful expectations about realness and authenticity than the character or agential nature a rhetor may depict.” (96).

“Identity always has a reason behind its constitution – a purpose that, like any constitution, it exists to enact.  Identity thus can never simply ‘be’ for rhetorical inquiry.  It must do.” (165).

Glen Southergill, 26 Apr. 2011