burke on love

Music: Cassius: Rock Number One (2007)

For the past couple of days I've been able to work---albeit slowly---on my love essay. It is my hope that I can wrap this essay up shortly after the summer school session ends; it's been in the works for a couple of years now. I figure now that psycho-babble friendly editors are seated in the major journal outlets for my field, now is the time to send this out for review.

In any event, the part of the paper I've been working on is on Kenneth Burke. Folks frequently suggest that Burke shifted (or helped to shift) the focus in US-style rhetorical studies from rhetoric as argument to rhetoric as courtship. So I'm trying to argue that Burke's theory of persuasion in A Rhetoric of Motives is actually a theory of love. But to make the case, love is defined in a very specific, structural sense as "the supplement to a failed relationship." Basically, I'm fetching Lacan through Burke. I think it works ok. My next move will be to show how both Burke and Lacan's understanding of persuasion/love is "neo-Hegelian," or is premised on an understanding of specular recognition (e.g., "the gaze"). I will then argue that the critiques of rhetoric offered by Foss and Griffin in their invitational rhetoric stuff are actually critiques of the Hegelianism undergirding rhetorical theory since Burke. It seems to me that, more than Freud or Marx, Hegel is the ghost in Burke's work.

Anyhoo, here's a teaser:

Thus far love has been described as (a) a supplement to a failed relationship, or the name we give to the impossibility of overcoming a fundamental disjunction between two experiences in the world; and (b) as a persuasive gesture of "something more," or as an emotional appeal whereby someone causes the desiring of another by the tacit or explicit promise to produce the objet a. The significance of this twofold understanding of love for rhetorical studies is that it is fundamentally a theory of persuasion: rhetors are literally lovers, promising audiences to a coming unity (to "make them whole") and stimulating their desire for that unity with various substitute objects: an end to their suffering and loneliness; a re-united union; better welfare reform; a war "to show'em that we can do it"; and so on.[1] In other words, Lacan's understanding of love helps us to redescribe the persuasive process as a desirous one that is necessarily deceptive (but, with regards to Nietzsche, in a non-moral sense): insofar as the objet a is merely the label for this excessive "something more" to a person betokened by a substitute object (e.g, the breast, a voice, whatever it is about a rhetor that appeals to us), any pretense to satisfying the desires of the audience is a ruse. Not only is it impossible to produce the object cause of desire, but as Lacan insists with his claim that "there is no sexual relationship," it is also impossible to unite an audience or a people "as One." As Lacan puts it, "love is impotent, though mutual, because it is not aware that it is but the desire to be One, which leads to the impossibility of establishing the relationship between 'them-two.'"[2] Alternately stated, this "desire to be One" is the underlying logic of persuasion as transcendent unification, a promise that only works, of course, if one is stupid enough to believe, consciously or unconsciously, that a rhetor has this impossible power. From this vantage, our received understanding of persuasion in rhetorical studies is fundamentally idealist, or rather, premised on the transcendent fantasy of spiritual unification by erotic means originally advanced in Plato's Phaedrus.

The Platonic ideal of persuasion is perhaps no more explicitly extended than in the much studied work of the Mac-Daddy of modern rhetorical studies, Kenneth Burke. In his A Rhetoric of Motives Burke argued that the default condition of all persuasion is "identification," which helped to eclipse a centuries-long obsession with rational argumentation and deliberation. "Here is perhaps the simplest case of persuasion," explains Burke. "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."[3] Yet for Burke identification is not merely the flattery of walking and talking like a duck when amongst ducks; rather, one is persuaded by another because of a deep seated desire to become "as One," a desire cued by some common substance---speech, gesture, tonality, and the like. "Consubstantiality," argues Burke, is a condition of persuadability that is only possible because "identification implies division."[4] Rhetoric is thus implicated "in matters of socialization and faction," or in the processes of subjectification and human conflict, which implies that identification or states of consubstantiality are the consequence of some prior alienation or division.5 For Burke this division is fundamentally biological, for as Barbara Biesecker explains, "prior to the identifications and divisions of rhetoric, there is the biological division of one nervous system from another."[6]

At this juncture the parallels between Lacan's understanding of love and Burke's understanding of rhetoric are starting to emerge: First, insofar as love is supplement for an impossible sexual relationship, rhetoric is the promise of unity through consubstantiality; rhetoric is thus the supplement for what Burke terms division, or rather, the impossibility of pure consubstantiality. The key difference between these two different understandings of what persuasion is, however, concerns essentialism: For Lacan disjunction is wholly a symbolic relationship, irrelevant of biology or any other essentialist facticity; one simply must fiat an unbridgeable gap among subjects in the world, a gap that cannot be thought or known precisely because the experience on either side will never overlap.[7] Love is thus a failure to reckon with this disjuncture. For Burke, however, division is fundamentally biological, the fact that human beings are neurologically discrete entities; rhetoric thus becomes the way in which these separate neurological beings "induce cooperation" through representation (of course, such a view has essentialist implications for understanding sex and gender).[8] Second, insofar as love's desire is caused by an object that betokens a "something more," identification is the promise that this mysterious and elusive X can, in fact, be produced. Consubstantiality is thus a term for a state of desiring, a longing for the "something more" of a persuasive, attractive, or charismatic individual.

From a Lacanian perspective, Burke's understanding of identification comes very close to collapsing love and rhetoric. He likely did not do so-at least explicitly-because he objected to the psychoanalytic characterization of human motivation in sexual terms.[9] Nevertheless, Burke's theory of identification is unquestionably founded on the desiring subject.[10] As with Lacan, Burke agrees that "it is of the essence of man to desire," and this is because of a division (or disjunction) central to subjectivity.[11] Burke also seems to suggest that persuasion is a desirous event:

implicit in the perpetuating of persuasion . . . there is a need of 'interference.' For a persuasion that succeeds, dies. To go on eternally (as form does) it could not be directed merely toward attainable advantages. And insofar as the advantages are obtainable, that particular object of persuasion could be maintained as such only by interference. Here, we are suggesting, would be the ultimate rhetorical grounds for the tabus [sic] of courtship, the conditions of 'standoffishness.'[12]

Such an understanding of persuasion is similar to Lacan's explanation of desire: a desire that attains its object is not desire, but simple need. Desire desires only more desire, which is why various substitute objects come into play: for the toddler, her cries for candy are not really for candy, but for "something more" that the candy represents: love, the recognition of a parent. In the state of Burkean consubstantiality, then, the object of common substance is necessarily a ruse: the speech, gesture, tonality, image, and so on that invites feelings of desire and that creates the conditions of identification are actually forms of "interference" analogous to a love interest who is "playing hard-to-get."[13] Consequently, like Lacan, Burke downplays the object of identification in his account of persuasion by urging a focus on form, that which psychoanalysis locates in terms of repetition: the ultimate human motive or cause of human effort should be located "in a form, in the persuasiveness of the hierarchic order itself. And considered dialectically, prayer, as pure beseechment, would be addressed not to an object (which might "answer" the prayer by providing booty) but to the hierarchical principle itself, where there is an answer implicit in the address."[14] The missing link between Lacan and Burke in this respect is "the Other": whereas for Burke persuasion is ultimately understood abstractly as desirous repetition ("form"), for Lacan a person always gets in the way, or a person is usually mistaken as the cause of the pleasures (and pains) of repetition. In other words, Burke's "Soylent Green is people!" Although Burke is correct to point out that the presumed object of desire is ultimately interchangeable with something else (and thus the common substance of identification is really a ruse), persuasion necessarily situates an individual person into the field of desire as a representative of the so-called hierarchical principle. Alternately cast, persuasion can be redescribed as a simple but familiar query: "do you love me?" or as Lacan puts it, "what do you want from me?" To be persuaded, one must be asking at some level, "what can I do for you to receive your love?"

Insofar as one agrees that Burke is among the most widely read theorists of rhetoric in our time, then a theory of love is already tacit in the shift from rational deliberation, the supplication of good reasons, and so on, to the study of persuasion as "identification," thereby expanding the process into the domain beyond conscious awareness. Consequently, one of the reasons few rhetoricians have attempted to theorize love is because it is already assumed: I am suggesting that, after Burke, the default understanding of rhetoric is the promise and question of love. The evidence of this homologous relation is explicitly discernable, of course, in the essays that claim love in the name of rhetoric. In his "Arguers as Lovers" essay, for example, Wayne Brockriede . . . [here briefly explain how Corder and Brockriede's theories . . . .

NOTES

[1] Fischerspooner, "We Need a War" . . .. For a more detailed explanation of this argument [source withheld for the purposes of blind review].

[2] Lacan, XX, 6.

[3] Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 55.

[4] Burke, A Rhetoric, 45.

[5] Burke, A Rhetoric, 45.

[6] Barbara Biesecker, Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997), 204-205; also see Burke, A Rhetoric, 130.

[7] Slavoj Zizek's latest book is devoted to explaining the character of this gap. See The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).

[8] Burke, A Rhetoric, 43.

[9] See, for example, Kenneth Burke, "Ausculation, Creation, and Revision: The Rout of the Esthetes; Literature, Marxism, and Beyond." In Extensions of the Burkean System, Ed. James Chesebro (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press), esp. 103.

[10] Diane Davis, "Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are." Pre/Text [forthcoming]: 6. ASK DIANE FOR FULL CITATION.

[11] Burke, A Rhetoric, 275.

[12] Burke, A Rhetoric, 274.

[13] ". . . biologically it is of the essence of man to be sated," says Burke. "Only the motives of 'mystery' . . . are infinite in their range, as a child learns from himself when he first things of counting to the 'highest number.'" Such counting is the algebra of desire. Burke, A Rhetoric, 275.

[14] Burke, A Rhetoric, 276.