Rhetoric
For Burke, a work is rhetorical when it is “written with a definite audience in mind, for a definite purpose” (4). He defines rhetoric as “the art of persuasion, or a study of the means of persuasion available in any given situation” (46). “Rhetorical language is inducement to action (or attitude, attitude being an incipient act)” (42).
Persuasion
“Persuasion involves choice, will; it is directed to a man only insofar as he is free…Insofar as a choice of action is restricted, rhetoric seeks rather to have a formative effect upon attitude” (50).
Identification
“People would here spontaneously classify themselves; for by reason of the ‘scene-agent ratio’ the individual can identify himself with the character of a surrounding situation, translating one into terms of the other” (17). “A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so. Here are the ambiguities of substance. In being identified with B, A is ‘substantially one’ with a person other than himself. Yet at the same time he remains unique, an individual locus of motives. Thus he is both joined and separate, at once a distinct substance and consubstantial with another” (21).
“Identification is affirmed with earnest precisely because these 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” (22). This means that “the principle of identification in general [is] a terministic choice” (20); language and rhetoric are incredibly important for identification then. “It is so clearly a matter of rhetoric to persuade a man by identifying your cause with his interests” (24).
Persuasion and Identification
Burke writes, “Traditionally, the key term for rhetoric is not ‘identification,’ but persuasion” (x). However, the two cannot be completely separated.
As for the relation between ‘identification’ and ‘persuasion’: we might well keep 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. [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).] So, there is no chance of our keeping apart the meanings
of persuasion, identification (‘consubstantiality’) and communication (the nature of rhetoric as ‘addressed’). (46)