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

 

I apologize for any formatting issues. I just copied and pasted.

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

If Kenneth Burke were to construct a rhetoric (dare we say, a philosophy?[1]) of community, what would it look like? While most scholars who are familiar with Burke’s writings will see identification as the key term for understanding rhetoric, and, therefore a potential rhetoric of community, I will assert it to be the case that pure persuasion is the term we must understand to envision what form a Burkean notion of community would embody. I’m not concerned with an idealized or utopian community, but a conception of community that would help us understand the phenomenon (phenomena?) of community, and how such a conception might better enable us to recognize the existence of community. Throughout this essay I will not only justify my choice of pure persuasion over identification for what Burke might see as grounding the concept of community, I will attempt to establish a conception as to what this idea of community (though not necessarily communities) would be.

There have been various interpretations of pure persuasion that seem to ignore Burke’s claim that it is “logically prior to any one persuasive act,” or that it is “of the essence of language” (Rhetoric of Motives 252), and instead have held on only to the idea that it is “the farthest one can go, in matters of rhetoric” (267). This belief is held because of passages like this, and because Burke, early on in the Rhetoric marks out identification as the key term in rhetoric (xiii).Most conceptions of pure persuasion consider the term to be the equivalent, if not the mythical and, thus empirically impossible, complete embodiment of identification. For those familiar with Burke’s philosophy that “rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall” (Rhetoric 23), it has been, perhaps, only too logical to comprehend pure persuasion as a metaphorical or mythical image of the Biblical Day of Pentecost, where rhetoric’s end has been fulfilled, and all are one in metaphorical communion with a Rhetorical Holy Spirit.

Barbara Biesecker and Robert Wess, respectively, and similarly, for example, take Burke’s statement regarding identification at the beginning of A Rhetoric of Motives and make all other terms fall under it. Both consider pure persuasion to be the equivalent of identification, if not its ultimate expression, and thus contained in it—as Wess writes, the “identification of identifications” (Wess 214)[2]. William Irmscher recognizes the a priori essence of pure persuasion as an essential motive and entelechial apex of human interaction, but, similar to Biesecker and Wess, he associates pure persuasion directly with identification, at the point of “ultimate [and mythical]…transcendence, the point of summation, oneness, and common understanding,” where division is ultimately and completely bridged (Traditions of Inquiry 113, 115).

In the third section of A Rhetoric of Motives, which is titled, “Order,” Burke devotes approximately thirty pages to the concept of pure persuasion (267-94). Strangely enough, he mentions the term about fifteen pages earlier where he claims (as I mentioned above), “‘pure persuasion’ is an absolute, [it is] logically prior to any one persuasive act. It is of the essence of language…[it] would transform courtship into prayer, not prayer for an end, but prayer for its own sake” (252). Again, pure persuasion is “the farthest one can go, in matters of rhetoric” (267). Yet this doesn’t mean that pure persuasion is the best way to persuade one's audience, in other words, perfect persuasion. Nor is it necessarily the most extreme of rhetorics, or even a transcendence of rhetoric; rather, its goal is the maintenance of the form of the persuasive appeal itself, that of speaker, message, and audience. It is in this way that pure persuasion is the finitude of rhetoric, its limit. A motive for a rhetoric that is the perpetuation of the form that allows that rhetoric to occur in the first place: this is pure persuasion.

Burke continually rephrases what he means by pure persuasion since it is the condition for rhetoric—the appeal of the rhetorical form itself—with which pure persuasion is concerned (not an easy thing to grasp, and thus it is easy to see how some interpret it differently): pure persuasion requires “interference” and/or “standoffishness” to prevent the completion of identification (267) for this perpetuation of the ultimate form to take place. This, rather than some form or manifestation of identification as Biesecker, Wess, and Irmscher each want to see it. And instead of solely an “attainable advantage,” such as “a direct bid for sexual favor, or commercial advertising” (268-9), those things which we usually consider rhetoric and persuasion to be concerned with, pure persuasion is more interested with the eternal perpetuation of the “ultimate form of persuasion,” the relationship of “speaker, speech, and spoken-to” (274-6). This is not to say that advantage-seeking is not part of pure persuasion, or that interference is what pure persuasion is all about in its totality. Rather, that both and more must “cooperate” to maintain the ultimate form of speaker, message, and audience. It is in this motive of pure persuasion that I propose Burke would ground his notion of community. This will not be an easy task, for there are scholars of rhetoric that would find the exact opposite of community, even its destruction, in pure persuasion.

One example of this latter conception, in particular, is Richard Thames. In his recent article, “The Gordian Not: Untangling the Motivorum,” Thames puts forth the argument (among others) that for Burke “poetic action for itself alone brings Peace; rhetorical action brings War.” And while Thames agrees that pure persuasion is motivated by “persuasion for persuasion’s sake” (in other words, he does not mistake pure persuasion to be the “identification of identifications”) he sees Burke’s statement that “the ultimate disease of cooperation” is war (RM 22, Burke’s emphasis) being grounded in the perpetuation of the rhetorical act. In other words, Thames sees war as “the ultimate instance of pure persuasion” (Thames’ emphasis).

Similar but different to Thames, Bryan Crable, in his recent article, “Distance as Ultimate Motive: A Dialectical Interpretation of A Rhetoric of Motives,” recognizes in pure persuasion the motive to perpetuate the rhetorical form, and sees in this perpetuation “a condition of anguish, one where a sacrifice of unity precedes (and is a prerequisite for) any rhetorical act” (237). Yet, for Crable communication itself can’t even exist without the motive of pure persuasion taking part in all rhetorical appeal: “In order for any appeal to continue, for the rhetorical situation to endure, the appeal must not be completed” (236). Thus, while Thames sees in Burke an identification of pure persuasion as an acknowledgement that we should work toward the end of rhetorica utens (the practice of rhetoric, rather than the study of it, rhetorica docens), Crable sees a comprehension of pure persuasion as the key to understanding how language itself prevents this end form occurring. His reading of pure persuasion is similar to that of Richard Engnell’s 2007 NCA conference talk, which must also be considered in this parlor conversation. My readings have mot in common with Crable’s and Engnell’s interpretations, in general, while Thames sees in Burke the idea that the division inherent in rhetoric that an understanding of pure persuasion exposes is intrinsically a bad thing (for Crable and Engnell, it can be a bad thing), and that it is toward an understanding of how we may rid the world of it (rhetorica utens), that rhetorical scholarship must work[3]. I, in general agreement with Crable and Engnell, disagree—both with how we should conceive of the overall goal of rhetorical scholarship, and with how Burke viewed the role of rhetoric and its relationship to the mythical image of pure persuasion.

Throughout the remainder of this essay, through a close reading of Burke’s writings on pure persuasion (including his relevant discussions leading up to the concept, such as the paradox of purity, etc.), and through contrasting Irmscher’s, Biesecker’s, and Wess’s similar but very different readings of pure persuasion as the ultimate manifestation of identification with that of Thames,’ Crable’s, and Engnell’s similar but very different understandings of pure persuasion as the appeal of the rhetorical form itself, I will try to bring pure persuasion into focus. By focus I not only mean a clearer understanding of pure persuasion as a rhetorical concept; I also hope to bring more attention to Burke’s thoughts on pure persuasion in the hopes that scholars may learn to see manifestations of it and begin to see its motives at work elsewhere, whether in theory or practice.

 I will conclude this essay with some speculative thoughts regarding pure persuasion and community, and maybe even ethics. From these thoughts I will make the claim that Burke would have argued that we may best understand what community is through an understanding of this concept that is “of the essence of language” (RM 252). Rather than only understanding the idea of community in terms of identifications of similarities, works toward unity, or even as a term always to be aligned with positive connotations, I will posit that pure persuasion, which actually perpetuates and even needs difference, interference, distance (as Crable puts it), and even resistance, as well as identification, is vital to our recognitions and constructions of the existence and thought of community.

 

Early (Mis)Handlings of Pure Persuasion

Most scholars have dealt with pure persuasion by not dealing with it. Perhaps, like the term “substance” for Burke, in banishing the term pure persuasion from our Burkean and rhetorical vocabularies, “far from banishing its functions [we have] merely conceal[ed] them” (see GM 21). This concealing of the term and its functions may have occurred for various reasons. First of all, Burke didn’t seem to talk about pure persuasion that much. Daniel Fogarty, in his often-cited essay on Kenneth Burke (located in his Roots for a New Rhetoric), doesn’t even mention pure persuasion at all, never mind him seeing it as a major part of Burke’s rhetorical theory. Another work that has been cited in various contexts when summing up Burke’s theory[4], William Irmscher’s, “Kenneth Burke,” devotes only one short paragraph to the concept, and rather cryptically. Based upon personal correspondence with Burke in 1984, Irmscher explains that Burke envisioned his entire project as “a verbal pyramid, patterned after Aristotle,”

one side of which represents the logical, one the rhetorical, the third poetical, and the four the ethical. The base of the pyramid is Babel, the “Human Barnyard,” as he calls it inA Rhetoric of Motives. The apex is the ultimate point of transcendence, the point of summation, oneness, and common understanding. The movement must be upward if the distance and the division between the sides are to be narrowed. The Upward Way—the reach for order and peace—is the essential motive of the symbol-using animal. (112-113)

The next two pages following this passage are devoted to an understanding of how this oneness is to be accomplished and, for Burke according to Irmscher, it is through identification or consubstantiality, “which the apex of the verbal pyramid represents” (114-15). It is the next move that is difficult to comprehend. According to Irmscher, it is this apex that “leads Burke in Part III” of A Rhetoric of Motives toward the discussion of pure persuasion. He then quotes two brief passages that will get rehearsed more often in the following couple decades, regarding pure persuasion: 1. Pure persuasion “involves the saying of something, not for an extra-verbal advantage to be got by the saying [recall the aim of traditional persuasion], but because of a satisfaction intrinsic to the saying (RM 269, qtd. in Irmscher 115, his brackets)” and 2. “For if union is complete, what incentive can there be for appeal?” (RM 271). These are both excellent starting points to discuss pure persuasion, but instead of continuing to build upon the term, Irmscher leaves it alone, never to be discussed again in the essay. This leaves the reader to jump to conclusions, use the bracketed passage (“recall the aim of traditional persuasion”), and simply associate pure persuasion with identification; for on the previous page, Irmscher delineates identification, “a more subtle means of drawing ‘you’ and ‘me’ together,” from traditional persuasion “that attempts to change others by explicit design or to manipulate” (Irmscher 114).

            Now pure persuasion has more recently been identified as “puzzling and confusing” (Lee 403), and this probably being accurate, as well as Burke apparently not saying much about pure persuasion in correspondence, no doubt led to some of Irmscher’s and Fogarty’s respective avoidances of the concept.  They are not alone. Many scholars[5] who have tried to capture a summary of A Rhetoric of Motives most often follow the multiple instances where Burke himself has said that identification is the key term for rhetoric (cf. Rhetoric of Motives xiv; “Rhetoric—Old and New”;). With these statements, coupled with the observance of the work of one of the most prominent Burke scholars, William Rueckert, who writes that the Rhetoric “is built on the principle of identification” (Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations 152), it is no wonder that many readers encounter pure persuasion in Part III of the Rhetoric and lightly touch upon it or avoid it altogether, presuming it is just an extension of his concepts of identification and division.

            In more recent scholarship there has been a similar hit-and-run mentality with pure persuasion. Peter Hagen, in his article, “Pure Persuasion” and Verbal Irony,” early on posits that pure persuasion has “great potential for rhetorical theory and criticism” (46), while acknowledging that though scholarship on the concept has been vague, it deserves to be considered as more than just a god-term of irony (47). Yet, as Richard Engnell notes, after this statement, “the profundity that Hagen grants the concept…is then immediately left behind to pursue more interesting[6] projects” (Engnell 4), much in the same way that Irmscher abandons it. Hagen, who seems to yearn for a concrete example of pure persuasion, can only seem to find in it a notion of ironic rhetoric that continually fails “by design” (47). 

 

Taking Pure Persuasion Seriously: Biesecker and Wess              

However, in the mid-to-late nineties, two scholars of rhetoric, Robert Wess and Barbara Biesecker, each respectively write books attempting to situate or locate Kenneth Burke within discussions of postmodernity (the condition and the accompanying critical lenses[7]), particularly those discussions regarding ontological questions of the subject or agent (or groups of agents, for that matter), as well as questions regarding agency and political action. Both will see in pure persuasion ideas grander in scope than those I have mentioned to this point, and will attempt to engage more thoroughly with the concept; however, similar to those in the past, both will subordinate the term to identification.

       Unlike Hagen, Wess, in Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism, attempts to engage with the concept of pure persuasion, and finds in it a political rhetoric of the freedom to speak[8] (214-16). This is perhaps the strangest of the various interpretations of pure persuasion, though it is understandable. Wess does see it in some sense as the ground or ultimate motive of rhetoric, the appeal of taking part in the rhetorical triangle itself, the condition for rhetoricity; however, heseems very motivated to see pure persuasion as a Burkean utopian politics. This comes from the idea of it being “pure” and the paradox of purity Burke explores inA Grammar of Motives:

We confront this paradox when deriving the nature of the human person from God as ‘super-person,’ as ‘pure,’ or ‘absolute’ person, since God as a super-person would be impersonal—and the impersonal would be synonymous with the negation of personality. Hence, Pure Personality would be the same as No Personality.” (Grammar of Motives 35)

In other words, Burke acknowledges that while we use language that leads to conceptions of a thing in its totality, absoluteness, or purity, and these conceptions seem to see this thing’s unity as singularly defined by, in, and of itself (e.g., the cliché, “it is what it is”), these things are defined by anything but their singularity or totality—it is similar to the argument of Big Rhetoric in some ways: if everything is rhetoric, then nothing is. Since a thing can’t be, or at least, we can’t think to know it, without the relations which differ from it (including its opposite), any notion of purity can never quite be captured, or even thought, in its completeness or totality without acknowledging those other relations, even if this is done through negation. Wess would seem to presume this premise, the idea of the paradox of purity, in the term “pure persuasion,” taking note that in the Rhetoric Burke marks pure persuasion as “an absolute” (RM 252) and an illusory “ultimate motive” (269). Thus, Wess acknowledges that pure persuasion can never occur in its totality; however, because of this paradoxical ultimacy he sees pure persuasion as a perfect (but impossible) politics, so to speak. The self-interference aspect of pure persuasion, for Wess, becomes the capability to control or have power over one’s speech in any political context—to speak and interfere with one’s own speech when one desires. This leads him to see in pure persuasion a particular strategy of rhetorical grace in power relations, as well as somehow simultaneously the condition of rhetoricity. Some of his examples include the rhetorics of passive resistance of Ghandi and Martin Luther King. Wess, thus interprets the “freedom of rhetoric,”—which Burkes references as the result of the perpetuation of the rhetorical form (speaker, spoken-to, message)—as the individual agent’s rhetorical freedom to self-interfere (Wess 213). This, rather than, as Engnell, Crable, and I see it: Burke is actually talking about rhetoric’s freedom being pure persuasion’s motive. If a complete identification into a unity is to occur, then rhetoric is dead (cf. RM 273), disabled from its capacity to be freely exercised. If division is still there, then rhetoric is still free to be exercised by all (including those potentially) participating in the form. Read this way, if Ghandi and King had been actually deliberately using a rhetoric of solely pure persuasion (which, remember, doesn’t actually ever exist in its totality), their motive would have been to keep the conversation, protests, etc. going eternally rather than to actually make concrete change in each one’s respective political climate. Of course, Wess doesn’t see this, as most don’t who are hoping to find specific examples of pure persuasion.

Even with the recognition that Wess mistakenly posits his version of pure persuasion as a rhetorical strategy, it must be noted that he still recognizes it as the ground for all appeal, as well. So how does Wess make or allow this seemingly disparate transition? By creating his own definition of pure persuasion. Wess makes pure persuasion (as I mentioned earlier) the “identification of identifications” (214). In some sense I could go with Wess here, because he is still arguing that it is “the primal identification that makes possible the rhetorical activity of communication characteristic of living in any culture” (214), but it is difficult to know what he means by this because of the specific examples of pure persuasion that he wishes to promote around this definition. Perhaps he is arguing that it is the identification of the necessary divisions required for rhetorical activity; however, this would seem to be little more than a hermeneutic and/or, again, strategical practice, and not get at the essence of the term itself, which actually grounds the requirements for identification, not the other way around. In the end, Wess lumping pure persuasion under the sign of identification makes the term more of a wrangle than even Burke left it, and creates more inconsistencies and questions.

      In Addressing Postmodernity, Barbara Biesecker tries to find a social ontology in A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives. Of course, this is difficult because Burke himself tells us from the start of the Motivorum that he isn’t interested in what or how people are or what and how people do[9], but “what is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it” (GM xv, my emphasis). This ontology of the social, or “ontology of collective being” (40), she believes is found in Burke’s concept of pure persuasion, though unfortunately, she calls it identification.

She argues that “a careful reading of part three of the Rhetoric, wherein we witness a qualitative shift in Burke’s conception of language and rhetoric from means or agency that facilitates social cohesion to his conception of language as “containing within it the motive force of sociality,” suggests that for Burke the question ‘what are the conditions of the possibility for the social?’ cannot be answered [as] simply” (41-2, Biesecker’s emphasis) as common conceptions of identification may portray. She is, of course, right in this reading.

Biesecker believes that part three in the Rhetoric “signifies an effort to come to terms with the social as a structural possibility logically anterior to its historical emergence in language and through rhetoric” (42). In other words, for Biesecker, what is at stake in the Rhetoric is the tension between knowing that language and rhetoric are a priori to social formations, but that they aren’t “the sufficient cause of the social” (42). She makes this conclusion based upon Burke’s thought regarding “man” as “a transcending animal.” It is this transcendence that occurs through language, which in itself is the motive that calls “man to transcend the ‘state of nature’” (qtd. in Biesecker 43). It is the motive already found in/prior to language where she wants read this ontology of the social in Burke’s work. And she finds the answer in the section of the Rhetoric on pure persuasion. It is in this section, she argues, that Burke is working specifically toward a social ontology (44).

After succinctly summarizing the sections in A Rhetoric of Motives (particularly 267-76), where Burke exposes the concealing (rather than the assumed “revealing”) character of psychoanalytic and political economy critiques to literature, Biesecker posits that pure persuasion is not located originally in “language, though it is most certainly in language that it becomes visible to us, but in the human being per se as ‘homo dialecticus’ (45). This is based upon Burke’s claims that this prior to the social motive inherent in communication may actually precede the construction of language (see RM 270).

Strangely enough, at the point where she seems to discover a definition for Burke’s social ontology—“a unity that both is and is not”—she abandons the term of pure persuasion, where this supposed definition is discovered. Rather than naming the form that motivates both unity and disunity simultaneously, that is, pure persuasion, Biesecker calls this Burkean insight a “concrete instance of identification [as] a heterogeneity” (48).  Thus while Biesecker acknowledges the motive of division and distance that is to be found in all rhetoric and that is manifest in deliberate acts of “standoffishness” or “self-interference,” she forgoes any discussion that this could be something other than identification, or that this thing precedes identification. The term, “pure persuasion,” that thing that she is really naming, at least in this moment, seems to have left her radar.

I, in fact, am in almost total agreement with Biesecker’s reading of Burke and pure persuasion until this point. Still, it must be noted that I do also slightly disagree with her statement that for Burke, “the social appears not as a perfectly egalitarian space of cooperation but always and already as a field necessarily fraught with factional strife” (49). The basic principle outlined here is correct, I would argue; however, where I would depart from this comment is in the negative connotation that terms like “fraught” and “strife” carry. Distance and difference aren’t necessarily pejorative, and I don’t think Burke would desire to moralize it in this way[10] (cf. RM 275). Later in her book (see 96-102) Biesecker does come back and acknowledge aspects of pure persuasion that, I think, are strong readings of Burke; however, she continues to label it identification.

 

From the Cult of Identification to the Cult of Persuasion

             At this point, I have probably talked too much about the different ways pure persuasion has been perceived; but wait, there are more interpretations. Before I get to these “more,” though[11], I actually would like to write some exposition regarding what we do know of pure persuasion directly from Burke himself.

            Perhaps the place to start is with the introduction to A Rhetoric of Motives. A careful reading doesn’t necessarily delineate the position of identification as completely separate from pure persuasion, but Burke does hint that they are not one and the same thing. In somewhat of a foreshadowing of what’s to come, Burke prepares the reader by claiming that there is a need for a wider range of rhetoric than that which the classical scope may contain. And though he has at this point already told us that identification will emerge as the key term in this analysis (xiii), he warns the reader not to fall in love with the concept of identification too quickly. Quoting W.C. Blum, Burke reminds us that, “in identification lies the source of dedications and enslavements, in fact of cooperation” (qtd in . xiv)[12]. After this warning, Burke gives us one paragraph that summarizes the book in its entirety, a paragraph that also differentiates pure persuasion and identification:

All told, persuasion ranges from the bluntest quest of advantage, as in sales promotion or propaganda, through 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, my emphasis)

Though we have a multitude of Burke commentators associating or subordinating pure persuasion to identification, Burke has from the very start differentiated the two concepts.

            Let us fast forward to what we can know of pure persuasion in the Rhetoric. While Bryan Crable has claimed that there are sources outside of the text itself that provide evidence for positing pure persuasion as the entelechial (its end and ground) essence of all persuasive acts, as well as the original culmination of the Rhetoric[13], I believe the evidence for the importance of pure persuasion is in the text itself.

            First of all, as mentioned earlier, we know that it is a priori  “to any one persuasive act,” and an absolute that “is of the essence of language” (252). In pure persuasion, this ultimate form, we “confront an ultimate motive” (269). It is important to keep in mind that for Burke any concept as absolute (remember the paradox of purity) can never actually take its “absolute” form as some unrelational singularity existing in and only by itself. Rather we can only attempt to know this absolute form in terms of a mythic image[14], which “would be a reduction of the ‘pure idea’” (RM 200). Always the dialectician, Burke argues that though we can only attempt to understand such concepts through “temporal ground[s],” such as “sociological description” (205), it is possible (in its impossibility) to go “from sensory images to ideas, then through ideas to the end of ideas, [where] one [is] free to come upon the mythic image. True, such an ultimate motive would not be correctly stated in terms of image. But men [sic]have only idea and image to choose from” (202). As the form that contains an ultimate motive, which is to perpetuate the form itself, pure persuasion can never be known in its totality through language (which can never provide the totality of anything, something for which some so desperately yearn).

            From 267-69 in the Rhetoric, Burke devotes a significant amount of time to showing how psychoanalytical, political economy, and socioanagogic[15] frameworks, while often helping to explain the motives of any communicative action, can never always be present. Pure persuasion can be—“All these modes of expression are ‘impure,’ and seek advantage, as compared with the absolute, and therefore nonexistent, limit we here speak of. Yet, though what we mean by pure persuasion in the absolute sense exists nowhere, it can[16] be present as a motivational ingredient in any rhetoric…” (268-9). So what is this form that is nowhere in its totality, but everywhere present as an ingredient, or the “the precondition of all appeal” (271)? It is the form that in other places has been called the rhetorical situation: it is the form of the “three elements (speaker, speech, and spoken-to)” (274). The ultimate motive found within this form is simply self-preservation—Burke believes that the ultimate motive for all human communication isn’t sexual, isn’t economic, isn’t preceded by language (as it is already implicit in language), and isn’t socioanagogic. Rather, this ultimate motive is the appeal of the form itself. Human beings are ultimately, and above all else[17] (though also with all else), motivated to communicate for the sake of communication itself.

            To some this may seem a simple premise. We have all heard the common saying that humans are social beings. However, if we (and Burke tries to) take this premise to its limits we find a paradox. For “as regards the act of persuasion alone obviously you could not maintain this form except insofar as the plea remained unanswered. When the plea is answered [i.e. some complete identification or transmission of thought is transferred in its completeness to an audience], you have gone from persuasion to something else” (274). This is why the form depends upon distance, perpetual difference, and even resistance through what Burke labels, “self-interference” to complete identification for the form to be maintained. It is for the maintenance of the form of pure persuasion that in our own rhetorics of advantage can always be found some semblance of a motive for one of these characteristics being present.

Over and above all such derivations [motives of sexual taboos, class, etc.], there is implicit in language itself, the act of persuasion; and implicit in the perpetuating of persuasion (in persuasion made universal, pure, hence paradigmatic or formal)there is the need of “interference.” For a persuasion that succeeds, dies. To go on eternally (as a form does) it could not be directed merely towards attainable advantages. And insofar as the advantages are obtainable, that particular object of persuasion could be maintained as such only by interference. (274, original emphasis)

 

From Pure Persuasion to Community

            Even though Burke does not wish to moralize pure persuasion, “we cannot see it as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in the moralistic, political, institutional sense” (275), I believe there is a sense of ethics that can be abstracted from the concept, and it is an ethics that helps us understand what community is. By employing ethics here I want to be careful not to imply the construction of a utopian-like community that should be. While yes this move to use pure persuasion to understand the ontology of something—in this case, community—may seem only epistemological in character, I believe that how we perceive something like community, which immediately draws connotations of humanity, life, death, etc., is inherently involved in ethics no matter how much such a claim is in its base form epistemic.

            Richard Engnell sees this possibility for an ethic as well (though he doesn’t speak of it in terms of community). However, he is much more fearful of an ethic built upon pure persuasion than I am. He is afraid of pure persuasion in its absolute form and so finds an ethic based upon it limiting such an ethic to promoting indecision because of the necessary self-interference aspect of pure persuasion (“The Place of Pure Persuasion” 16-17). Of course, as should be understood by now, pure persuasion in its absolute form cannot exist, and cannot even be imagined past a mythic image of the form. If this is so, why would an ethics informed by a knowledge of pure persuasion seek to be something that it can never be?

            First of all, I want to reiterate the claim that were Burke to construct an idea of community, it would be based upon his theory of pure persuasion[18] rather than identification. Most thoughts on community, popular and scholarly, would choose the latter term as that which best situates our understanding of community, seeing in the term a positivistic sense of unity, oneness, cooperation. When we hear the term, “community,” most often it is used to designate as a singularity or unity groups of people that come together, and are identified as a group, by and through their similarities; however, this isn’t an inherently positive thing, and so it should cease to be thought of as so. We have only to look at examples of the Nazis and other groups that have performed concerted acts of genocide to know that if this is our definition of community, community isn’t necessarily a good thing. So we find, and of course Burke is aware of this, not only is identification related to the metaphorical killing of a thing (cf. RM 20), it is intimately linked with the “ultimate disease of cooperation: war” (22, original emphasis).

            Pure identification, like pure persuasion, also isn’t even possible in its absolute form (cf. “Paradox of Purity,” GM 35-8). Were we to understand what community means through pure identification, which would not allow two things to remain only consubstantial (substantially one, yet at the same time unique (RM 21)), for a community to survive it would have to eliminate all difference, which if taken to its limit, of course, would be that community’s own death, as well as the death of others (not to mention the death of communication). Instead of basing a notion of community on identification, a concept that is compensatory to division, (and therefore paradoxically can’t exist without it), I believe Burke would argue for pure persuasion, a form containing motives of both identification and division in their simultaneity. And if pure persuasion privileges one over the other (because remember it needs both) it would probably be division (but not death), for it can’t exist without the distance required to maintain the form of speaker, message, and audience, which implies division between the three elements. Again, this isn’t to utopianize the concept, but to understand that an act of community based upon an ethic of pure persuasion (remembering that it cannot be in its purity) would designate an attempt to maintain the form needed for communication to exist, rather than an attempt to be rid of those things which amount to difference. However, as pure persuasion cannot ever exist in its absolute form (i.e., be the only motive for all communication) this type of thought on community would also allow or accept impurities of persuasion to occur (those based upon desires for sexual, economic, socioanagogic advantage), and thus the closure of some persuasive acts would still be recognized and take place.

            It may be important to know that for some pure persuasion in its ultimate instance is exactly the opposite of community. Richard Thames rightly sees in pure persuasion “the perpetual means to no end.” However, because of the ultimate motive inherent in pure persuasion Thames mistakes this form for the form for all action, not just communicative action. He also contradictorily assumes that humans are all ultimately motivated by the very idealistic notion of pure identification: “if what we ultimately seek is the end of all division (i.e., merger or union), then in war the unity we seek could never be attained except as diseased union and never maintained except by means of perpetual division.” While the similarities are definitely there, (and, of course, I am arguing that a thought of community based upon pure persuasion doesn’t utopianize community itself, but helps us understand what community really is) Thames is conflating the motive to perpetuate war with the motive to perpetuate the form of communication[19]. While there are obvious overlaps in how each functions (as the theory of pure persuasion admits, there will be situations where other motives will win out over it for closure to take place—including those based upon the basic survival instinct), and, of course, while I believe looking at community through a lens aware of the dominant motive of pure persuasion will actually help us understand war better, they are not[20] one and the same thing.[21]

            In fact, I believe there is ample evidence where we can see manifestations of community seen through a lens cognizant of the dominant motive of pure persuasion in many of Burke’s writings, including those taking a political stance. For example, in his 1941 essay titled, “Americanism: Patriotism in General, American in Particular, Interspersed with Pauses,” Burke argues that there is a sense in which the perfect patriot, in identifying with “national interests alone” would be “the Nazi or Fascist totalitarian.” Referring to those conditioned to identify in such a way, “such figures are the ultimate, the absolute completion, of nationalistic attitudes[22]” (2).  Being careful not to idealize American democracy (he is critical of America’s notion of democracy making the country’s meaning synonymous with business), Burke argues that in contrast to the totalitarian patriot who makes nationalism the “very center of his [sic] thinking, with all else deduced from it…the ‘democratic’ patriot would consider his [sic] national identity as one in a hierarchy[23] or graded series of many identities, all of them requiring their full consideration” when decisions regarding important issues need to be made (2). We might say that a democratic patriot must conceive of his or her community with the motive to keep multiple points of view and multiple conversations alive. For this to happen, difference, distance, and even self-interference must occur. In other words, this democrat must be highly motivated by pure persuasion.

            Again, this politic and notion of the democratic patriot (and community, I would argue) shouldn’t be mistaken for an absolute pure persuasion, where the ideological entelechy is to never make decisions and always make sure there is never resolutions or closure of rhetorics. “The ‘self-interference’ of ‘pure’ persuasion can derive from many ‘impure’ sources, or become compromised by ‘entangling alliances’” (RM 270). Within a series of follow-up essays to “Americanism,” America by now entered World War II and Burke recognizes that America was in just such a moment where a recalcitrant[24] “impure” source that once just kept the conversation open, and thus perpetuated the ultimate form that is pure persuasion, must now be allowed to complete an identification and persuade.

We are now in what is surely to be the mightiest war the human race will ever experience…in this solemn situation, our first duty to our nation and to ourselves is to approach every problem, to conceive of every issue, in terms that will make for the maximum of national unity, and so for the maximum of effectiveness against our axis enemies. (“When ‘Now” Became ‘Then’” 5)

In this moment, thought that understands community in terms of pure persuasion could still allow the conversation to ignore its dominant motive (to perpetuate the ultimate form via acknowledging difference and preventing unity between speaker, message, and audience) and move on “to something else” (274) where decisions had to be made for the survival of humanity.

           

Conclusions

Reader, if you are still not completely convinced, I applaud you. But you must realize by now that alongside your action to resist in any way this new way to look at community through pure persuasion is potentially being helped along by a motive to perpetuate the form that is pure persuasion itself. Nevertheless, let me briefly, to conclude, draw on other dominant themes in Burke’s work that would continue to support my thought that he would choose pure persuasion as his god term for thinking community.  In Counter-Statement we get a Burke who sides with the “aesthetic rather than the practical,” “non-conformity” over “conformity,” “dislike of certainty” over “undeviating certainties,” (111) and sees motive, appeal, and “a way of experiencing” stemming from forms (138-143). In Permanence and Change we get a Burke who runs with the Nietzschean term, “perspective by incongruity,” and who calls for a stable fluctuancy in the educational system[25] (294). Last but certainly not last or least, in Language as Symbolic Action we get a Burke who promotes and contributes to keeping the distinction between poetics and rhetoric“forever on the move” (LSA 307).

            If community were to be conceived or perceived through a lens dominated (though never consumed in totality) by pure persuasion, then we would view constructions resembling totalitarian doctrines as actually perpetuating the decomposition of community, rather than seeing them as paralleling our current naïve positivistic constructions of community based upon identification. With a knowledge of pure persuasion dominating our terministic screens regarding thought of community, totalitarian and similar regimes would signify community’s end. This isn’t to make of the concept of community a utopia. Dissonance, difference, self-interference, standoffishness, and distance, in other words, all those things that are necessary to maintain the ultimate form that is pure persuasion, lead to strife and conflict. But this new way to look at community will still mark these things as necessary to how we understand the phenomenon that is community.

If there is a social ontology that would inform how we conceive of community, it would not be found in identification, but pure persuasion.[26] I am not arguing that we should emulate or wish to make a utopian community through a model of purely pure persuasion. As Engnell says, this would “secure the death of the human species through decisional incapacitation” (16). Rather a greater understanding of pure persuasion as the dominant-always-present-to-some-degree motive will allow us to see sociality in new ways, in particular, our ideas on what it means to construct, or even just already recognize (if constructing in some sense isn’t possible—if it always already is) community.

 

Works Cited

Biesecker, Barbara A. Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1997. Print.

Burke, Kenneth.  Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: U of California Press, 1966. Print.

---. “Rhetoric: Old and New.” New Rhetorics. Ed. Martin Steinmann, Jr. New York: Scribner’s, 1967. 59-76. Print.

---. Counter-Statement. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968. Print.

---. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Print.

—. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969. Print.

    ---. The Rhetoric of Religion. Berkeley: U of California P, 1970. Print

—. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd Edition. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

Crable, Bryan. "Distance as Ultimate Motive: A Dialectical Interpretation of A Rhetoric of Motives." RSQ: Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39.3 (2009): 213-239. Print.

Engnell, Richard. "The Place of Pure Persuasion in Burkean Rhetorical Theory" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the NCA 93rd Annual Convention, TBA, Chicago, IL, Nov 15, 2007 <Not Available>. 2011-04-29<http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p190411_index.html>

Fogarty, Daniel. Roots for a New Rhetoric. New York: Columbia University Bureau of Publications, 1959. Print.

Hagen, Peter L. “Pure Persuasion” and Verbal Irony.” The Southern Communication Journal. 61 (1995): 46-58. Print.

Irmscher, William. "Kenneth Burke." Traditions of Inquiry. Ed. John Brereton. NY: Oxford UP, 1985. 105-35. Print.

Kennedy, George.  Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. 2nd ed.  Chapel Hill, NC: U of North Carolina P, 1999. Print. 

Lee L. “Pure Persuasion: A Case Study of Nüshu or ‘Women's Script’ Discourses”. Quarterly Journal of Speech [serial on the Internet]. (2004, Nov), [cited April 11, 2011]; 90(4): 403-421.  Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 11 Apr. 2011.

Murray, Jeffrey W. Kenneth Burke: A Dialogue of Motives. Lanham, PA: University Press of America, 2002. Print.

Olson, Kathryn M., and Clark D. Olson. “Beyond Strategy: A Reader-Centered Analysis of Irony’s Dual Persuasive Uses.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 24-52. Print.

Rueckert, William H. Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations. 2nd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Print.

Thames, Richard H. “The Gordian Not: Untangling the Motivorum.” K.B. Journal 3.2 (2007). Web.

Wess, Robert. Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[1]George Kennedy argues that Kenneth Burke’s “work is more deserving of being called a ‘philosophy of rhetoric’ than are some other writings with that title” (294-5).

[2]I must give credit to Bryan Crable for first recognizing Biesecker’s and Wess’s understandings of pure persuasion. However, Crable seems to just see the association of the two terms (identification and pure persuasion) as evidence enough that Wess and Biesecker don’t understand the concept of the latter term through his subordinating it to the former (Crable 235). There is some truth to this, as I will discuss later, but Biesecker and Wess (especially the former) have more correct understanding of pure persuasion than Crable lets on in his article.

[3]This conception is not uncommon. We have only to look at Lloyd Bitzer and Paul Shorey for similar understandings of the purpose of rhetoric studies.

[4]Fogarty and Irmscher’s essays are quoted often because they both rely upon personal correspondence with Burke for the clarification of certain concepts.

[5]See Crable 215-16 for a laundry list of scholars who have done this.

[6] Perhaps “clearer” would be a better word here.

[7]Post-structuralism, post-Marxism, etc.

[8]I think there is actually something to Wess’s finding “freedom to speak” in pure persuasion, but, of course, I will explain this in a different light.

[9]I actually think Burke is concerned with ontology, but more concerned with language, and perhaps even in what language tells us about being. This is the man with multiple definitions of “man,” is it not?

[10]Whether he does moralize it is another story. One I hope to address when discussing the commentaries of Engnell and Thames, respectively.

[11]And I won’t address these as directly as I have the interpretations that have led to this point. The reason being is that they are close enough to my interpretation—I am thinking of Richard Thames, Bryan Crable, and Richard Engnell’s respective readings of pure persuasion. I will address some of their differences as I go along, as well as in my footnotes.

[12]It is this passage, as well as later ones regarding war as cooperation that should actually comfort those like Murray (Kenneth Burke:  A Dialogue of Motives), who recognize the problems with utopianizing identification.

[13]From Crable: “Burke closes the section with the verbal equivalent of an intake of breath:

‘Less exactingly, for our purposes, it is the pause at the window, before descending into the street’ (Burke, Rhetoric 294). After this sentence, a break in the text appears; a new section is introduced, one that does not directly continue the previous theme and is divided—unlike any other in the book—into numbered subsections. Burke attempts to patch this textual crack with a footnote, inserted between the sections: ‘The closing sentences were originally intended as transition into our section on The War of Words. But that must await publication in a

separate volume’ (Rhetoric 294). Although typically overlooked, this footnote suggests that Burke’s pause marks more than a simple section break. I believe that this note represents not the end of a section, but the original end of A Rhetoric of Motives—and, further, that the

published text represents only half of Burke’s rhetorical project.” (Crable 214) Thus, Crable is arguing that originally the Rhetoric was supposed to culminate figuratively and literally with pure persuasion.

[14]Engnell refers to it as a mystical realism, while Crable, calls it a mythic image. I favor the latter term, as it not only conjures up less religious imagery (though it can be found in religious discourse (294), it can be accounted for by secular means (252)), but also because it is the language Burke uses in the sections discussing the Platonic dialectic (e.g. 197-205). Part of Crable’s argument is that Burke is following a Platonic dialectic more than he lets on to reach this ultimate term. However, see 187-89 for “mystical” references. Perhaps there is a difference that needs to be mapped out.

[15]William Rueckert explains this as “the analysis of everything as social allegory, with the social-political hierarchy as primary cause” (Kenneth Burke 142).

[16]Engnell, whose reading in general is in sync with my own, writes, “the modal ‘can’ implies that there may exist instances where pure persuasion may not be present” (5). I disagree. If we look at the context in which Burke introduces pure persuasion to the reader, it is in contrast to these other frameworks of analysis. I read it in this way: since it is everywhere it can be found in any rhetoric. One may not be looking for it, and therefore not find it. But it can be found “as a motivational ingredient in any rhetoric” (269). Yes, it will never be found in its absolute form. In this way, yes, there are instances where it won’t be present, but only because in its absolute form it is never present.

[17]Though still potentially with all other motives. Above, in this sense, doesn’t mean that the other motives are negated in some sort of complete dismissal.

[18]Out of all the sources I have and will reference in this essay, I think Biesecker gets closest to this in arguing for a Burkean social ontology.

[19]Something, admittedly, Burke does as well when he compares the cult of persuasion (pure persuasion) and the cult of new needs (RM 274-5). While the latter does help to maintain the form of persuasion (and so pure persuasion is there), it is not in itself necessarily dominated by the perpetuation of the communication triangle, but economic motives. We have only to look at cultures that have arguably not participated in the cult of new needs for this evidence. In contrast, can we find a culture that has never been motivated by pure persuasion? It would no doubt be a challenge.

[20]Though both forms have a sender and a receiver, per se, the medium in the middle is a message in one, a missile in the other.

[21]Of course, it must be noted that Thames also looks at rhetoric as an inherent evil in its totality, a thing that must be transcended in order to achieve love. This is something I obviously disagree with in principle. I may agree that it can always be seen to contain elements of manipulation, etc. Only if one is to consider rhetoric in the context of an impossible modernist utopian society where communication is pure transmission would one be able to conclusively identify rhetoric with pure evil, i.e. something that we should always seek to avoid. This of course, is similar to notions of rhetoric espoused by Lloyd Bitzer and Paul Shorey (see fn. 3). To be fair to Thames, many people read Burke this way, especially when considering his work in the context of the verbal pyramid described by Irmscher above. Still, I am not talking about an impossible pre-Babel community I’d love us all to become (as Thames seemingly is). I am attempting to describe what community is, and what I think Burke would think community is (not what he wants it to be—e.g. when Burke does talk of the verbal pyramid).  Also, there would seem to be a difference between “oneness” (i.e., the death of the other) and “common understanding” which apparently occurs at the apex of this pyramid.

[22]Thames, of course, is not imagining this type of “merger or union,” when he says that “what we ultimately seek is the end of all division.” (Thames’ emphasis).

[23]Note that while a hierarchic “order would be more social than sexual, it is ‘prior’ even to the social, deriving ultimately from the nature of communication per se” (270), in other words, pure persuasion.

[24]See Engnell 14-15 for a different take on the relationship between recalcitrance and pure persuasion.

[25]Some will argue that this more radical Burke is nowhere to be seen in his later writings (see Thames on Burke’s conservatism). However, whether this be the case or not, would this fact bear witness to a motive of pure persuasion allowing Burke’s political opinions to be changed, having never completed the persuasive form in which his politics was situated?

[26]In some ways, again, this is not arguing too differently from Biesecker’s main argument, except that she mistakenly names it identification, and not pure persuasion.