For writing communication, Identification is a key term for the discussion of rhetoric in Kenneth Burke′s A Rhetoric of Motives. Burke himself states that "identification" is more important for the work than persuasion, traditionally associated with rhetoric.
Burke suggests that whenever someone attempts to persuade, identification occurs: one party must "identify" with another. That is, the one who becomes persuaded sees that one party is like another in some way. His concept of identification works not only in relation to the self (e.g. that tree has arms and is like me, thus I identify with that tree), but also refers to exterior identification (e.g. that man eats beef patties like that group, thus he is identified with that beef-patty-eating group). One can perceive identification between objects that are not the self.
Summary argument of A Rhetoric of Motives
The book opens with an analysis of John Milton's Samson Agonistes and Matthew Arnold's Empedocles on Etna; from his analysis, Burke eventually arrives at the term "identification", and uses it to reclaim elements of rhetoric that have fallen away, while also expanding on it to show how identification supplements traditional emphases on persuasion. He argues that it gives us insight into social cohesion.
Identification and the Realm of Rhetoric
In particular, the concept of identification can expand our vision of the realm of rhetoric as more than solely agonistic. To be sure, that is the way we have traditionally situated it: “Rhetoric,” writes Burke, “is par excellence the region of the Scramble, of insult and injury, bickering, squabbling, malice and the lie, cloaked malice and the subsidized lie. . . . We begin with an anecdote of killing (in Samson Agonistes and “Empedocles on Etna”), because invective, eristic, polemic, and logomachy are so pronounced an aspect of rhetoric” (19-20). But while impelled to acknowledge this nature, we can look for more from rhetoric, he argues: “We need never deny the presence of strife, enmity, factions, as a characteristic motive of rhetorical expression. We need not close our eyes to their almost tyranneous ubiquity in human relations; we can be on the alert always to see how such temptations to strife are implicit in the institutions that condition human relationships; yet we can at the same time always look beyond this order, to the principle of identification in general, a terministic choice justified by the facts that the identifications in the order of love are also characteristic of rhetorical expression.” (20)
Facets of Identification
What is identification? Burke spends most of the rest of Section I of A Rhetoric of Motives exploring the concept, at the same time hammering out the realm of rhetoric.
Identification and Consubstantiality
In identifying with the interests of another (or being persuaded that shared interests exist, even if they do not), one is “substantially one” with that other, or consubstantial. At the same time, each individual can retain unique substance. Substance, a recurring Burkean theme, was examined in terms of its “universal paradoxes” in Grammar of Motives and in its manifestations as unique constructed acts in Symbolic of Motives; here, in the Rhetoric, substance is examined in its implications of division. To “identify with” is to become consubstantial, but, at the same time, as the Rhetoric shows us, “to begin with ‘identification’ is, by the same token, though roundabout, to confront the implications of division” (22).
It is in this key discussion of identification, consubstantiality, and division that Burke lays out his crucial definition of the realm of rhetoric: “Insofar as the individual is involved in conflict with other individuals or groups, the study of this same individual would fall under the head of Rhetoric. . . . The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the War of Nerves, the War.” (23)