recourse to rhetoric

thought some of y'all might be thinking about the sophists again, in preparation for your final papers, and having stumbled across this little gem by the great, but understudied, Kenneth Burke; A Rhetoric of Motives (L.A.:University of California Press, 1969), I thought I'd share a little taste with you here, as it seems to me that Burke's take on rhetoric offers us a nice glimpse not only into the Plato v. Sophists debate, with Sen at the helm, but also into the notion of hegemony, as a kind of spontaneous social self-regulation...

"In pure identification, there would be no strife. Likewise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join in battle only through a mediatory ground that makes their communication necessary for their interchange of blows. But put identification and division ambiguously together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation to rhetoric. Here is a major reason why rhetoric, according to Aristotle, 'proves opposites.' When two men collaborate in an enterprise to which they contribute different kinds of services and from which they derive different amounts and kinds of profit, who is to say, once and for all, just where 'cooperation' ends and one partner's 'exploitation' of the other begins? The wavering line between the two cannot be 'scientifically' identified; rival rhetoricians can draw it at different places, and their persuasiveness varies with the resources each has at his command. (Where public issues are concerned, such resources are not confined to the intrinsic powers of the speaker and the speech, but depend also for their effectiveness upon the purely technical means of communication, which can either aid the utterance or hamper it. For a 'good' rhetoric neglected by the press obviously cannot be so 'communicative' as a poor rhetoric backed nation-wide by headlines. And often we must think of rhetoric not in terms of some one particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reenforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill.)" (25-26)

"just as God has been identified with a certain worldly structure of ownership, so science may be identified with the interests of certain groups or classes quite unscientific in their purposes. Hence, however 'pure' one's motives may be actually, the impurities of identification lurking about the edges of such situations introduce a typical Rhetorical wrangle of the sort that can never be settled once and for all, but belongs to the field of moral controversy where men properly seek to 'prove opposites'." (26)

"the rhetorician and the moralist become one at the point where the attempt is made to reveal the undetected presence of such an identification. Thus in the United States after the second World War, the temptations of such an identification became particularly strong because so much research had fallen under the direction of the military. To speak merely in praise of science, without explicitly dissociating oneself from its reactionary implications, is to identify oneself with these reactionary implications by default. Many reputable educators could thus, in this roundabout way, function as 'conspirators.' In their zeal to get federal subsidies for the science department of their college or university, they could help to shape educational policies with the ideals of war as guiding principle." (26-27)

"As regards 'autonomous' activities, the principle of Rhetorical identification may be summed up thus: The fact that an activity is capable of reduction to intrinsic, autonomous principles does not argue that it is free from identification with other orders of motivation extrinsic to it. Such other orders are extrinsic to it, as considered from the standpoint of the specialized activity alone. But they are not extrinsic to thefioeld of moral action as such, considered from the standpoint of human activity as such. But they are not extrinsic from the standpoint of human activity in general. The human agent, qua human agent, is not motivated solely by the principles of a specialized activity, however strongly this specialized power, in its suggestive role as imagery, may affect his character. Any specialized activity participates in a larger unit of action. 'Identification' is a word for the autonomous activity's place in this wider context, a place with which the agent may be unconcerned. The shepherd, qua shepherd, acts for the good of the sheep, to protect them from discomfiture and harm. But he may be 'identified' with a project that is raising the sheep for market." (27)

Just another angle on some of these things. Has anyone in the class studied Burke before?