Submitted by ddd on September 18, 2006 - 9:38pm
So today i had to throw together and turn in (a day late) my grad course description for next fall, and though i had to list "potential readings" there, i thought i'd see if you brilliant rhetors had suggestions for me. Anybody?
E 387M, Fall 2007
Rhetoric and/as Identification
Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the rhetorician to proclaim their unity.
--Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives
Identification is known to psycho-analysis as the earliest expression of an emotional tie with another person. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object that we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such.
--Sigmund Freud, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
In A Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke agrees with Aristotle that rhetoric's "basic function" is persuasive. He also argues, however, that persuasion's very condition of possibility is identification--indeed, that any persuasive act is first of all an identifying act: "You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his" (55). According to Burke, the primary aim of rhetoric is not to win an argument but to make a connection, shifting the imagery of the persuasive encounter from a duel to a "courtship." Identification, or what Burke also calls "con-substantiation," is both the mode by which individual existents establish a sense of identity and the mode by which they establish a relation to one another. As he puts it in Attitudes Toward History, identification "is hardly other than a name for the function of sociality" (267); it operates as a "mediatory ground" between non-unifiable existents. Nonetheless, many have argued that identification, as a mode of relating to the other, is ethically suspect; it involves appropriating (even annihilating, as Freud suggests above) the other with which or whom one identifies. Though Burke apparently based his own rhetoric of identification on Freud's, Burkean identification tells you "what" you are (you are your representations) while Freud's asks you "who" you are (who in you thinks, who dreams, who writes, who fantasizes, etc.). And we will take a close look at the difference between the two. We will also, however, zero in on other contemporary rhetorics of identification. Because if identification is truly rhetoric's most fundamental aim, as Burke suggests that it is, then we-rhetoricians would be wise to examine it carefully. In this course, therefore, we will work at the wildly trafficked intersection of rhetoric and identification, always with an eye to questions of identity and sociality.
Potential Readings:
Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives
Biesecker, selections from Addressing Postmodernity
Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie
Butler, The Psychic Life of Power
Derrida, selections from The Work of Mourning
Freud, Group Psychology,
---. The Ego and the Id.
---. "Mourning and Melancholia," and "Psychical Treatment"
The Freud/Einstein correspondence
Fuss, Identification Papers
Hawhee, "Langauge as Sensuous Action" (if she lets me use it! hi, debbie :))
Laclau, "Deconstruction, Pragmatism, Universality"
Mouffe, "Democratic Citizenship"
Nancy, The Inoperative Community
--. selections from Being Singular Plural
Quandahl, "More than Lessons in How to Read: Burke, Freud, and the Resources of Symbolic Transformation"
Rickels, selection from The Case of California
Ronell, Crack Wars
Stevenson, "Lacan, Burke, and Human Motive"
Wright, "Burkean and Freudian Theories of Identification"
