Identification and Consubstantiality, A Brief Summary of Chapter 11 of On Symbols and Society

11. “Identification,” “Identification and ‘Consubstantiality,’” “The Identifying Nature of Property,” and “Identification and the ‘Autonomous,’” in A Rhetoric of Motives, 19-27.

Identification

Burke begins on page 19 by seeming to say that a person’s motives can be revealed through identifications. Imagery reduces motives to terms because it reveals the entelechy of the motive. (I.e. Burkean form in Counter-Statement—when we want something, we do what we can to fulfill that desire.) Killing something is changing it into another state (at least in terms of the poem Burke is analyzing before this section). Burke proposes that rhetoric be thought about in terms of identification, a term of wider scope than simply persuasion. People do fight among one another, but they do so because of identification. It’s better to work with terms of wider scope in this case because we can do more with them.

Identification and “Consubstantiality”

Here, Burke explains identification in passages that I have read so many times I seem to have memorized. Identification is when A is like B or when A assumes that A and B are alike. Since identification brings A and B together as if they were one, their oneness is somewhat ambiguous because they’re one and the same in one sense, but they’re also not one and the same in another sense. They are consubstantial, or of the same substance. To be consubstantial is to act together. The Grammar was about substance. The Rhetoric is about identification. The Symbolic will be about unique individuals, acts, or perhaps even forms.

Identification implies division, since identification with one side involves division from another side. “Rhetoric is concerned with the state of Babel after the Fall” (23). [There are many famous and important passages here.] Rhetoric is what we have to deal with as human beings. It is about how we understand and misunderstand one another.

The Identifying Nature of Property

Our stuff—our property—tells us about ourselves. We identify ourselves with the things that we have. We have what we have because we’re “that kind of person.” Our purchasing of a thing was a particular action that we chose. Hence both Marx and Veblen can be considered as theorists of rhetoric. There could be no strife in absolute sameness and absolute separateness. It’s because we’re in the middle of the two that we have problems. Hence “the characteristic invitation to rhetoric” (25). Our acts assume identifications, and so our speech makes subtle arguments because of the principle of identification. Rhetoric and morality become fused when one attempts to show others identifications they have not considered (26). [In short, if I can take a little interpretive freedom, I’d say that we’re always making “arguments” no matter what we do. We’re promoting something and we’re saying that what we do is better than other things we could have done but chose not to. Burke doesn’t say this in this passage, but he does say something similar to it in Philosophy of Literary Form, page 148 in the essay called “Semantic and Poetic Meaning.” There is also that passage in the Rhetoric, a passage which is not cited in On Symbols and Society, which reads {and I quote from memory here}, “Wherever there is persuasion there is rhetoric, and wherever there is ‘meaning’ there is “persuasion.” And in Permanence and Change, “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing. A focus on object A involves a neglect of object B.”]

Identification and the “Autonomous”

All actions identify. While we can talk about an action as being isolated from other actions, if we assume that it actually is, then we deceive ourselves. “Any specialized activity participates in a larger unit of action,” and “‘Identification’ is a word for the autonomous activity’s place in this wider context” (27). The shepherd may try to protect sheep from harm, but that shepherd could be identified with a project that is raising the sheep for purposes that don’t actually protect the sheep (but actually slaughter them!). In college education, the stress on the autonomy of a particular discipline privileges one class or discipline above another. Art is not autonomous. No discipline is. [Now Burke sounds like Cicero!]