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Toward Plural Forms of Rhetorical Identification:
On Positive Vulnerability and the Rhetorical Unseen
David R. Gruber
On Positive Vulnerability and the Rhetorical Unseen
David R. Gruber
I cry most often in the shower. The car is a good place to let it flow too, but you never know who is going to pull up next to you at the stoplight. There you are—face beat red,
blubbering like a baby—and then you look over: Oh Jesus, it's Shirley from Human Resources. She turns away,
pretends not to see you, after obviously seeing you. An hour later, over bad coffee and stale muffins, you
lie and decide to tell her that a classic Bon Jovi song always blindsides you—hits you right in the heart—but the
truth is that you just took a phone call from your mother: Terrible family news.
For those who share a home and have the privilege of a bathroom that is far enough
away from common areas to feel secure and secluded, the shower is a fantastic place for a good sob. If I am ever crying in the car,
unlike in the shower, it is a sudden and momentary expression. More than likely, a heart-wrenching National Public Radio story is to blame. I get all wrapped up in one man's
tireless dedication to saving an endangered species, fighting against all odds, only to discover
that the whole family of elephants was slaughtered overnight by those fucking poachers—except one
tiny baby elephant with a broken leg hiding in the bushes that the man then nurses back to health;
they become best friends. Or maybe it's the story of the soft-hearted kid with terminal brain cancer
telling us in a sweet, frail voice how he got to play basketball with a real NBA star and wave to the
crowd before the big playoff game. He's a super-fan and wears the team jersey in his hospital bed.
We pick up the story from his mother's perspective as we round 2nd Avenue and pull into the McDonalds
drive-through. We hear about the family's terrible struggles, feel that we are sitting right there in
the living room, and suddenly burst into tears—"Welcome to McDonalds, may I take your order?"
Having a rush of feelings for strangers results from an identification of
some kind or another: the basic recognition that we are essentially the same, unified in our suffering,
tied together in this world. Foregrounding the persuasive power of identification, Kenneth Burke
makes that term the centerpiece of rhetoric. He stages identification as the primary means of "inducing
cooperation," a way of appearing the same in "speech, gesture, tonality, order, attitude, idea" (A Rhetoric 55). From Burke's perspective, we can confidently say that a good story with true sadness should make us cry;
if we do not cry, the narrator is doing something wrong. Brian Crable describes identification as the manner
of "bridging a distance" with others (213). NPR knows how to do this in the space of one minute. Diane Davis argues that identification is better conceptualized as an already preexisting,
internal disposition, like an automatic unconscious unity with others, prior to the divisions of
signification; unfortunately, that deep interconnectedness continually needs to be rebridged after
being broken by symbolical experiences (124-126). But which kind of bridging are we talking about across
these diverse cases?
Is crying over a baby elephant the same as crying for the kid with cancer? And what
about that phone call from Mom? I am reminded of Lawrence Grossberg, who once said that affect is too
often deployed as a "magical term" such that appeals to it as a vague bodily force or intensity keep
scholars from doing "the harder work of specifying modalities and apparatuses" (315). The same seems
to be the case, and has been for a much longer time now, with rhetoricians deploying that all-encompassing term "identification."
Of course, identification is also a mega-scale transformation of the field
of rhetoric itself. It signals a transition to the "new rhetoric," away from a classical focus on
"persuasion" (Day 270). Identification marks a step toward thinking about the formation of identities and
embodied experiences. Identification shifts away from rhetoric taught exclusively as a pedagogy of formalisms for argumentation and
allows Burke to present a dramaturgical view of everyday life (Sinha and Jackson). For this reason,
the term identification, we can argue, remains broad-sweeping and rightly so. It is, after all, a signpost
for the field and a way of looking as much as any discrete rhetorical maneauver. But at some point, the term becomes overused—precision
disappears. Terms can grow muddy over time, like a headlamp so regularly taken down into the coal mines
that the miner wearing it can't see the way anymore for all of the collected dust.
At present, there are 834 results when using the search term "identification"
to find articles in Rhetoric Society Quarterly [RSQ]. Take a look. This is some feat given that the journal has only
published less than one quarter of that number of articles since it was even called RSQ in 1976
(with only a handful of newsletters prior to that time). Reviewing those articles reveals the flexibility
of the term.
One of my favorite articles argues that the construction of likemindedness or
compulsion to see each other as "the same" must be continually maintained for it to be effective over
the long run (Belk). Another suggests that identification can be created in a way that it is applied to whole people groups
(Dougherty). Another says that identification is a way to establish contrast and creates outsider groups: i.e. it functions to isolate
a subset or construct an enemy (Desilet and Appel). More recently, identification has been described as a personal
feeling of proximity to something like the characterizations of a particular medical condition
such that we feel that we are obsessive-compulsives (Rothfelder and Johnson Thornton). This is to say, identification is a flexible rhetorical vehicle, and if it has conceptual bounds,
then it nevertheless seems applicable as a description of many different rhetorical moves. It can encompass as many or as few people as needed, and it can be turned inward or individualized.
Most often, identification is, as Burke says, a linguistic strategy of a
rhetor, but it can have a wide or narrow range. It can manifest as a recognition of
class, ethnicity, or nationality, as Maurice Charland shows in his examination of the declaration of the "Peuple Québécois" (133). Or it can operate in a more conceptually fluid and temporal way, as in the presentation of a type of "urban
creative" or a "bad mom," which one might adopt as a self-description for but a brief season. Accordingly, identification's action or function can also be wide or
narrow; it can lead to temporary alterations of behaviors (like voting for a political candidate at the
last minute), it can alter beliefs (like thinking that all environmental activists are valiant or
despicable), or it might generate altered psychological states (like the embodied feeling of seeing one's self as suppressed and ultimately defined by a socially
stigmatized disorder). In fact, to be a suasive force, identification needs no subject-driven rhetor
at all, as people presumably self-create identities by making their own identifications with circulating
signifiers in mishmosh fashion. A man on a flight playing a memory game on his mobile phone recently
told me that he was a "brain-gamer"; I said, "Is that a term?" He said, "No, I made it up." Put simply,
answering the question "which identification?" exposes an underlying diversity in identification. When we say, "I feel emotional," we are then tempted to ask, "Well, which emotion do you feel?"
Why would it be any different with identification—which we should remember is not an emotion but, at best, a term describing a
realization or state of embodied being—when applied in a specific kind of way?
The plural of identification can be cajoled out of the dark by asking
questions of the research reviewed above: What is being maintained, exactly, when identification needs
to be maintained? What is abstracted or transformed into a feeling of identification when identification
supposedly unites the people? Is this feeling different than the one made when viewing enemies created through
contrast with opposing "identifications"? Are these examples as powerfully composed as the internal personal
feelings that we make when adopting a medical descriptor like OCD? Is it reasonable to imply that this
diagnostic identification is at all the same as a political one? Likewise, do we presume that feeling a
"bridged distance" with the park ranger, the injured elephant, the kid with cancer, or our own mother
are equivalent enough to be labelled "identification" and to cite Burke? The term identification cannot
be expected to do so much work.
https://abc7news.com/sports/8-year-old-warriors-fan-with-leukemia-passes-away/1942077/.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/zimbabwe/10390634/Poachers-kill-300-Zimbabwe-elephants-with-cyanide.html.
https://people.com/human-interest/man-down-syndrome-covers-dad-in-kisses/.
This breaks to a larger point: Rhetoric itself cannot be so unified, so singular. Rhetoric cannot be a matter of maneuvers with an essence that can be boiled down, elegant in form/ation, neatly encapsulated within
the loveliness of a grand unifying theory. And if rhetoric can, then its construction of identification is the equivalent of a plastic anatomical model. The body lives in active, juicy, often untamed and strange, chemical and electrical transformations.
In a Burkean sense, it seems immediately fair to say that identification was meant as
the covert operation happening within all possible formations of a persuasive moment for humans; identification is, after all, a kind of
"nature-of" explanatory claim about how we
move along together in this world. The term captures a big idea: that any human outreach emerges
from a psychological drive for, or need for,
cooperation. Thus, identification is necessarily mixed within divergent expressions of ethos, logos, and pathos. That is to say, for Burke,
identification never was meant to be specific. Indeed, when instances are subject to phenomenological inquiry,
the idea appears not specific at all. In scope, intensity, tenor, and directedness, each identification
discussed so far in this paper is in some obvious, embodied way quite different. That
noted, nobody doubts that rhetorical scholars do tell us, usually in some specific terms, what they see when they see an
identification in a particular social situation. Yet, each invocation of identification is like a universe labelled "universe," and each is capacitated differently just as it has different
outcomes.
Thinking through the rhetorical appeals and positionings that stir me to drive 500 miles to help
my sister is an entirely separate matter from how it is that I start to cry for a park ranger saving
elephants. Each may have qualities worth teasing out; each also may well be a mode of identification more common to a particular kind
of social situation than another. Taking an interior view, or the rumination of experiences of
"identifying," it seems reasonable to suggest that making rhetorical identification plural and theorizing
specific forms will be valuable for rhetorical theory and criticism. This, of course, is the smaller claim,
or what I see as another call for conceptual diversity in rhetoric, following
in the same new materialist vein as Thomas Rickert's call not to see rhetoric so often
in terms of subject-driven rhetorical situations and Nathan Stormer's call to see rhetorical events
as distributed and mutable. These calls push toward greater awareness of bodies and pursue terminological expansion. But abandoning the domination of identification
suggests the need for a broader disruption for a field so unrelentingly reliant on this one foundation.
https://earth.google.com/web/@35.85617763,-111.33326426,1309.3783779a,3224.35340372d,35y,-0h,0t,0r.
The seismicity of making identification plural—and, thus, undermining the
conceptual unification of rhetoric as such—can be made more evident when noticing how Rickert and Stormer, despite offering
highly valuable and important critiques, both still operate within the paradigm of identification. Their
cases are coming-togethers of various material, or we might say aesthetic, relations of humans and nonhuman things
acting within—as well as below and before the consciousness of—bodies living amid community discourses and confronting
defined discursive appeals in a specific time and place. Put another way,
if people change course, then the workings of the interface or the acrid smell of burning tires in the air might be reasons, as they suggest; but are
these not identifications made into nonhuman compatibilities or susceptibilities? I wonder if Burke's well wrought "inducement of cooperation"
could ever be displaced from the underlying unity of rhetoric being about sharing in common (i.e. interests uniting), about a force that draws together. Can rhetoric also diversify here and be about more than integrations, matches, co-formations, or things that come together?
If this is possible, and I am not entirely convinced myself, then I think it must become more than a dyad: identification-repulsion
(although repulsion as a basis for rhetoric as a suasive motion would be a different kind of start). Perhaps we can allow identification to slither out onto a muddy bank and evolve in a thousand directions without a
conceptual guide. Maybe then rhetoric could be shaken to its identification core and realize the ineffable passing of time,
the undetected surge of radioactivity sweeping over a landscape, the ripping of epithelial skin, the elevated CO2 at a bus stop, the sensation of the Holy Ghost, the insensible and unintelligability of a moment, the
unbridgeable distance that nevertheless activates a motion, initiates—or should we here sometimes say generates—action. Could the rhetorical be always obtuse and indefinite and, in so being, eliminate a constant of rhetoricity?
Of course it can: but what
would we, as rhetorical scholars, do? We must press on with the detectable; we must analyze
and make discriminations; we must do what we can to identify the root of oppression and subjugation; no one
disagrees. But can this include also separation not born of some identification? I am thinking here of the independence of
the materiality of subjects and objects and how they do not necessarily have very good access to each other, as Quentin Meillassoux suggests. I am also thinking of the inaccessible core of an object proposed by
Graham Harman in his conception of "Object Oriented Ontologies." I am thinking of dark matter forces, of the elusive, of a rhetoric within the beyond-us and beyond identifications we see and feel.
https://www.starnetlibraries.org/event/a-universe-of-nasa-resources/.
But now I already risk a terrible divergence. The big argument that rhetorical identification
in a Burkean sense is a mythology of human action and a dominating paradigm is not primarily what I
set out to prove here, even though I just crammed it in. I, rather, wanted in this piece to consider what appears
amid "identifications" when thinking rhetoric out from a body. If rhetoric is
essentially a complex human-nonhuman entanglement of many bodies and affects, then there seems to be
an injustice in labelling yet another identification. In the same way that we do not
title our papers "Metaphor in Political Argument" but find it more exacting to say "Metaphors of X type
in Y's political argument" so, too, are we probably going to be able to unpack the valences and
vibrancies of identification if we follow the trail of identification a little further down the road of
embodiment. So the "smaller" argument does not wave goodbye to identification just yet but seeks for it
better articulation through phenomenological reflection.
Lisa Meloncon sets out an argument in support of phenomenological reflection
in rhetorical inquiry, which proves valuable here. She notes that, as rhetoricians, "we tacitly agreed to the supposition that
we carry the responsibility of ensuring that their [our subjects'] experiences are accurately
represented" (97). Doing this well, she asserts, means that rhetorical scholars need to give more focused attention to spaces,
materialities, and affects. Phenomenological experience, then, is one way to embrace new materialisms
and find means to study how things come together across symbols and bodies in localized ambient environments [1]. Striving for "accurate representations"
necessitates specificity and a focus on the feeling of lived realities, which are often not captured in audio recordings or textual accounts (Meloncon 97-98). In brief, Meloncon encourages rhetorical scholars to think cases through their own experiences and to try to
experience the situations of others.
Reflecting phenomenologically on various examples of identification proves
useful for initiating some questions about the present terminological opaqueness of rhetorical
identification. Imagine, for instance, the last time that you needed to seriously discuss a difficult
topic with a sibling or other family member; consider trying to generate useful and caring discussion about your
sibling's possibly abusive husband or maybe a drinking problem the family is whispering about behind the person's back. "Inducing cooperation," as Burke says, to enter into such a conversation in a productive way that can break
the family facade often requires being vulnerable first. When it works, it works. And that kind of positive vulnerability wherein someone says something carefully
and self-reflectively emotional—powerful, personal, and pertinent to the moment and the case at hand—can
throw open the flood gates. That form of rhetorical identification is unlike other kinds. Bill Clinton
famously sold his Southern "good ol' boy" persona to his political advantage while yet being able to
mingle with the elites (see Jones). In like manner, Dwight D. Eisenhower crafted identifications
with the people as a "simple man" who nevertheless exerted powerful leadership by saying profound
things about America in a "plain style" (Crable, "Ike" 190). But those are other kinds of
identifications. Different too is crying in the car for a stranger who supports a son
as he is dying of cancer; phenomenologically, that case has its own mechanisms and radio-specific ways of
"bridging the distance" with the listening audience. Hearing a mother cry for
her son and gasp to catch a breath of air amid a sob as she tries to hold it together on the radio is
as much about identifying with her as a parent as that gasp. Hearing Bill Clinton say "ya'll" is not a
comparison case, even though, of course, that too, is an identification.
Here is where we can circle back to the shower ...
Thinking about why people might cry in the shower helps pinpoint an
internal disposition that I will call
"positive vulnerability," which I hope to situate as one type or performative mode of identification. The vulnerability that the shower induces might teach something
about some instances of identification; here, I argue, we have a case for phenomenological
reflection on the pluralism of identification that can
also show how rhetorical means for forging identifications are likely to be to some extent socially
patterned. Said differently: Why we cry in the shower can tell us something phenomenologically about
why an expression of one's own vulnerability might, in the first place, prove so productive for "inducing
cooperation" during situations when needing to raise difficult topics, especially with those we love and desire to help.
Belk, John. "Snapshots of Identification: Kenneth Burke's Engagements with T.S. Eliot."
Published in: Enculturation, Responses, March 2020
To examine the case, I will simply consider what it is about the shower
that encourages emotional upwelling. Thinking from experience, I can say
that crying in the shower happens for the following reasons: First, I have privacy from
eyes of others to hide the sight of the crying. Second, I have the needed privacy from the ears of others to hide the sounds
of the crying. Third, I can guess that the experience of nakedness in the shower might contribute to some internal
sense of being exposed or create a total loss of pretense and an increased embodied feeling of solitude or aloneness that makes me embrace my own
vulnerability. Fourth, the water pouring down keeps me from feeling uncomfortable with the sensation of tears streaming down
the face. Fifth, the opportunity to prepare myself for suitable social appearance afterwards, such as drying off the face, blowing the nose, fixing the hair,
allows me to exit the room, get-on with life, and pretend that all is normal if I wish. Sixth, the total lack of distraction
due to the absence of media offers the opportunity for self-reflection. Finally, the atmosphere of the shower
environment, including the enclosed room, the sound of falling water, and the steam, creates a calming atmosphere and sense of ease.
In such an ambient space, it is hard to resist reflective thinking.
In the shower, we mull the day or dwell on particular points of conversations. Sometimes we even
devise strategies for starting over once we exit the bathroom. The bathroom becomes a little
recuperation tank, a haven. It is a place where reality can be rebooted. We condense down the space of
what needs attending; and there, we finally find the time for peace, we escape the demands of partners
and children, and we exist absent the social impositions of text messages and email updates. We linger
in the bathroom for precisely these reasons. Or maybe we're crying.
I want to suggest that this kind of vulnerability—which we have most of the
time only with ourselves when we are separated from others' judgmental tendencies and demands—is similar
to the emotional release that can happen to others when we show ourselves to be in real emotional need also, and then, like a deluge, a sibling or a
spouse falls into our arms and sobs about a tragic experience or a hidden problem. Getting to that point
often requires that they see themselves reflected first in the mirror of the interlocutor's own face. The emotional exposure of one's own life is a risk set out before another in order to break existing
conditions and provide the other person with some security for their own exposure; doing so can instigate a release of raw, often socially taboo, communication from another; and it may require a space of comfort and privacy: This is
positive vulnerability. If crying in the shower represents, at least sometimes, what we long to do with
others whom we hope will embrace us when we do, then positive vulnerability, as I conceptualize it, is an unexpected pathos or the rhetorical risk of the interlocutor—the
family member, friend, or even the stranger—who makes the first move to say: It's OK; I am like you; I feel awful a lot too; I want to support you
because I, too, need support.
Richard Marback writes on vulnerability in his essay on rhetoric's own disciplinary vulnerability, as scholars seek to overcome the simplistic idea that any
rhetoric is "mere rhetoric" while also resisting the totalizing power of rhetorical appeals. In sharing
how rhetorical scholars see vulnerability in both directions, he argues that being
vulnerable is often equated to being weak. To be vulnerable means taking on the risk of opening
one's self to being "duped"; within this thought pattern, "vulnerability constrains openness" (4). But
"it is necessary to develop a richer sense of vulnerability itself" so that it extends openness and
pushes inquiry further (6). He goes on:
When we are vulnerable to the appeals of others, we cannot so easily withdraw our susceptibility;
perhaps we cannot ever really withdraw it at all. To accept our vulnerability is to accept less rational
control and more emotional involvement... Yet we can find ourselves vulnerable to the appeals of others in
ways we would not want to characterize as weaknesses. We can instead find ourselves susceptible to the
appeals of others in ways that we would characterize as strengths of character, as more integral to our
senses of who we are, as when we find ourselves willing to believe a loved one despite suspicions to the
contrary... A loyal lover and a victim's forgiving family are making themselves vulnerable in the acts of
believing and reconciling, but their doing so is not inherently a weakness. (Marback 7-8)
Taking identification as a master trope for the state of the field
of rhetoric does not require rhetoricians to take it as a master term for describing localized and
socially situated events where people come together or enter into a realization of shared
interests. In fact, the diagnostic identification made by people adopting the term OCD, as Rothfelder and
Johnson Thornton describe, is worth singling out not as identification but, rather, as a specific kind of identification—one internal, crafted from personal "proximity" to what were otherwise presented as recurring negative traits and affects; these are distinct from the ethnocultural performances
of politics, such as Bill Clinton's Southern slang drawn out at just the right moment at the local Alabama diner (Jones). Carpenter almost
moves in this direction when showing that identification in a rhetorical performance can happen through mannerisms or styles, not only
through "lexical matters," yet the presumption of singularity to identification itself, as an embodied mode, remains undisturbed.
In brief: We must ask what is lost and at stake when we do not see these instances as worthy of new names or as much different—and not only different in the delivery
but also in the flesh. If rhetoric exists, then it is neither on paper nor on the screen; rather, it is alive in us at the same time as across environments radically alien from us and divided from any touchability. The examples provided
here may be, in a broad sense, Burkean identifications, but when phrased in that way, they are also conveniences.
At some level, not naming the specificity hides important interior nuances even when the scholar offers
a detailed description of the case. The default mechanism of "rhetorical identification" forgets the
multiplicity of sociality and variability of bodily materiality. And as suggested earlier in this essay, it may also forget
what is not coming together, meeting, unifying, bridged, or able to be bridged. Even if we can resist
relegating all that is not witnessable, describable, or tangible to non-scholarship, those weird things nevertheless crawl their way
through the critic's objects and feel their way into the critic's bodily sensations; a gaping incomprehensibility must also be inherent to any groundings of rhetoric.
A Conclusion
Cases of identification are more or less personal, rational, affective,
cognitive, tied to place, engaged with stereotype, routine, tradition, or taboo. They appear through different kinds of appeals and take place in different social encounters
having often targeted social actions (See: Miller, "Genre"). Accordingly, the identification that happens because of an expression of personal
vulnerability occurs only in specific kinds of encounters, is dependent upon
breaking a taboo, and enacts a social exposure, just as it aims for a tumultuous result and more often than not forever
alters terms of engagement. The "identification" in any given case of positive vulnerability is what might be called an upwelling of feeling,
a unity of psychological frailities in a moment that over-runs the rational demands of
social pretenses. If positive vulnerability generates a case of rhetorical identification, then it does not feel precisely like
the one that Burke (A Rhetoric), Crabel ("Ike"), Jones, Desilet and Appel, Belk, or
Doughtery describe. But the better point may be that we can never describe these rhetorical events, not one, not all. To go further, identification may only arise in the realm of what is visible
and may not be agentive or primary. Rhetoric need not remain tied to identification, and the rhetorician's result
need not be the flat demarcation of an identification.
We can now smear a sticky black brushstroke of paint across the crisp white page of Burke's proclamation and darken—make the unimaginable part of the picture—a rhetorical commonplace: Rhetoric ever conceals as much as it reveals,
but there is more: Inside of every revelation lies a much bigger secret. [2]. And nobody will ever describe it.
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---. Language as Symbolic Action. Cambridge UP, 1966, 45.
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[1] For discussion of new materialism and ambient environments, see: Rickert.
[2] Burke discusses this in the passage on terministic screens; see Language as Symbolic Action, 45; however, Carolyn Miller discusses this idea in her work also. See: Miller, Carolyn. 'Should We Name the Tools? Concealing and Revealing the Art of Rhetoric.' In The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, edited by David Coogan, John Ackerman, Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2010, pp. 19-38.