Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. Originally Published in 1950.

In pure identification there would be no strife. Like wise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join battle only through a mediatory group that makes their communication possible, thus providing the first condition 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 (p. 25).

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? (p. 25)

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. (p. 25)

And often we must think of rhetoric not in terms of some particular address, but as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reënforcement that to exceptional rhetorical skill. (pp. 25-26)

With a culture formed about the idea of redemption by the sacrifice of a Crucified Christ, just what does happen in an era of post-Christian science, when the ways of socialization have been secularized? (p. 31)

Not all people, perhaps, seek out a Vessel to which will be ritualistically delegated a purgative function, in being symbolically laden with the burdens of individual and collective guilt. (p. 31)

For the history of the Nazis has clearly shown that there are cultural situations in which scientists, whatever may be their claims to professional austerity, will contrive somehow to identify their specialty with modes of justification, or socialization, not discernible in the sheer motions of the material operations themselves. (p. 32)

The thought of self-deception brings up another range of possibilities here. For there is a wide range of ways whereby the rhetorical motive, through the resources of identification, can operate without conscious direction by any particular agent. (p. 35)

Whatever the falsity in overplaying a role, there may be honesty in the assuming of that role itself; and the overplaying may be but a translation into a different medium of communication, a way of amplifying a statement so that it carries better to a large or distant audience. Hence, the persuasive identifications of Rhetoric, in being so directly designed for use, involve us in a special problem of consciousness, as exemplified in the Rhetorician’s particular purpose for a given statement. (p. 36)

This aspect of identification, whereby one can protect an interest merely by using terms not incisive enough to criticize it properly, often brings rhetoric to the edge of cunning. A misanthropic politician who dealt in mankind-loving imagery could still think of himself as rhetorically honest, if he means to do well by his constituents yet thought that he could get their votes only by such display. (p. 38)

Whereas poetic language is a kind of symbolic action, for itself and in itself, and whereas scientific action is a preparation for action, rhetorical language is inducement to action (or to attitude, attitude being an incipient act). (p. 42)

For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of human society. It is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. (p. 43)

Since identification implies division, we found rhetoric involving us in matters of socialization and faction. (p. 45)

For in considering the wavering line between identification and division, we shall always be coming upon manifestations of the logomachy, avoid as in invective, unavowed as in stylistic subterfuges for presenting real divisions in terms that deny division. (p. 45)

We found that this wavering line between identification and division was forever bringing rhetoric against the possibility of malice and the life; for if an identification favorable to the speaker or his cause is made to seem favorable to the audience, there enters the possibility of such “heightened consciousness” as goes with deliberate cunning. (p. 45)

As for the relation between “identification” and “persuasion”: we might well keep it in mind that a speaker persuades an audience by the use of stylistic identifications; his act of persuasion may be for the purpose of causing the audience to identify itself with the speaker’s interests; and the speaker draws on identification of interests to establish rapport between himself and his audience. (p. 46)

In mystery there must be strangeness; but the estranged must also be thought of as in some way capable of communion. (p. 115)

Similarly, the conditions for “mystery” are set by any pronounced social distinctions, as between nobility and commoners, courtiers and king, leader and people, rich and poor, judge and prisoner at the bar, “superior race” and underprivileged “races” or minorities. (p 115)

On every hand, we find men, in their quarrels over property, preparing themselves for the slaughter, even to the extent of manipulating the profoundest grammatical, rhetorical, and symbolic resources of human thought to this end. Hence, insofar as one can do so without closing his eyes to the realities, it is relevant to attempt analyzing the tricky ways of thought that now work to complete the devotion of killing. Though churchmen may feel much genuine concern for human betterment in general, even the most scrupulous of them are susceptible to two major kinds of deception as regards religious motives: there can be the obscene mistaking of social reverence for religious reverence; and this obscenity is mingled with another, the furtive intermingling of the divine mystery with the “mystery” of the “demonic trinity,” the excretory functions of the body. (p. 264)

The first of these is the more easily recognizable. It is unmistakably present insofar as any congregation is “exclusive.” To say as much is to realize its ubiquity. The second is more difficult to detect, but attains its ultimate manifestations in “scrupulous” preference for militaristic solutions over peaceful solutions. The two probably merge in the “mystery” of private property, where many kinds of secrecy seem to converge: the secrecy of the holy, of plans in the stage of gestation, of conspiracy, of infancy and dream, of the privy parts and their functions, and of financial treasure. The study of human relations must attempt to make these interrelationships apparent, either in glimpses or when possible by organized critical method. (pp. 264-265)

There are many such Ersatzmystiken. There is a mysticism of sex, a cult wherein sex is sought as one’s overwhelming aim, about which all other motives subordinately cluster. There are mysticisms of money, crime, drugs – and many other such goadings that transform some instrumentality of living into a demonic purpose. (p. 332)

Thus, too, there is the mysticism of war. There are those for whom war is a vocation, to whom the thought of the universal holocaust is soothing, who are torn by internal strife unless, in their profession as killers, they can commune with carnage. The imagery of slaughter is for them the way of mortification. As leaders, they are not mere “careerists,” looking for a chance to let their friends in on government contracts at a high figure. They are mystic soldiers, devout – and killing is their calling. What of them?

They find solace in the thought of the great holocaust; and they love the sheer hierarchal pageantry, the Stoicism of the great disciplinary drill, the sense of unity in the communal act of all the different military orders marching in step, or the pious contemplation of the parade made static and “eternal,” in the design of a military burial grounds, with its motionlessly advancing rank and file of graves. (p. 332)

Mysticism is no rare thing. True, the attaining of it in its pure state is rare. And its secular analogues, in grand or gracious symbolism, are rare. But the need for it, the itch, is everywhere. And by hierarchy it is intensified. (p. 332)

In hierarchy it can exist under many guises. Nature, society, language, and the division of labor – out of all or any of these, the hierarchic motive inevitably develops. Anagogically, if you will, but at least “socio-anagogically,” in hierarchy reside the condition of the “divine,” the goadings of “mystery.” (pp. 332-333)

But since, for better or worse, the mystery of the hierarchic is forever with us, let us, as students of rhetoric, scrutinize its range of entrancements, both with dismay and in delight. And finally let us observe, all about us, forever goading us, though it be in fragments, the motive that attains its ultimate identification in the thought, not of the universal holocaust, but of the universal order – as with the rhetorical and dialectic symmetry of the Aristotelian metaphysics, whereby all classes of beings are hierarchally arranged in a chain or ladder or pyramid of mounting worth, each kind striving towards the perfection of its kind, and so towards the kind next above it, while the strivings of the entire series head in God as the beloved cynosure and sinecure, the end of all desire. (p. 333)