Burkean Rhetoric

Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) is the most original and arguably the most influential American rhetorician of the 20th century. A literary critic, philosopher, poet, and theorist who defied academic categorization, Burke developed a comprehensive account of human symbolic action — how we use language not merely to communicate but to constitute our identities, manage our relationships, and negotiate the social world. His key concepts — identification, dramatism, the pentad, the negative — transformed how scholars in rhetoric, literary criticism, sociology, and communication studies think about language and motive.

From Persuasion to Identification

Burke's most decisive theoretical move is his replacement of persuasion with identification as rhetoric's master term. Classical rhetoric defined rhetoric as the art of persuasion — the use of available means to move an audience toward a particular conclusion. Burke does not reject this but argues it is too narrow: it treats rhetoric as merely instrumental, ignoring the more fundamental process by which language constitutes and maintains social bonds.

Identification is the process by which separate individuals or groups come to see themselves as sharing substance — interests, attitudes, values, sensations. When a political candidate says "we are all in this together," when an advertisement associates its product with an aspired-to identity, when a lawyer subtly adopts the idiom of the jury — all are performing identification, inviting an audience to find itself in the speaker.

Burke's crucial observation is that identification is necessary precisely because of division: we are irreducibly separate beings, with different bodies, different histories, different interests. Rhetoric bridges that division — not by eliminating it, but by creating provisional commonality sufficient for communication and collective action. Division is not rhetoric's enemy but its condition of possibility.

The Dramatistic Pentad

Burke's analytical framework for understanding human motives is the dramatistic pentad — five key terms that together describe any human action:

These five terms always apply to any complete account of a human action. But Burke's analytical insight is not the terms themselves but the ratios between them — the way different rhetorical discourses emphasize different terms, and what those emphases reveal about ideological commitments.

Terministic Screens

Burke's concept of terministic screens is among his most practically useful and widely applied ideas. Every terminology — every set of terms we use to describe reality — simultaneously directs attention toward certain features and away from others. The terms are not neutral labels but selective emphases that shape perception.

Burke illustrates with photographs: the same landscape, photographed through different color filters, produces dramatically different images — all accurate, all partial. Our conceptual vocabularies work the same way. The terms "entitlement spending" and "earned benefits" both describe the same government programs but filter perception differently. The terms "illegal alien," "undocumented immigrant," and "unauthorized resident" all describe the same people but through very different screens.

The implication is not relativism — Burke does not say all terministic screens are equally useful or valid. It is rather that any description is a selection, and critical analysis requires asking: what does this terminology illuminate, and what does it conceal?

The Rhetoric of Identification in Practice

Burke's concept of identification opens rhetorical analysis to dimensions that classical approaches miss. Consider how political rhetoric works: a successful political speech doesn't just make arguments — it constructs an identification between speaker and audience, creating a "we" that didn't fully exist before the speech. Burke calls this consubstantiality — the creation of shared substance through symbolic means.

Advertising is almost pure identification: advertisements rarely make logical arguments; they associate products with identities, lifestyles, and values that target audiences already have or aspire to. "This isn't just a car — it's who you are." The argument is identification, not inference.

Guilt, Redemption, and the Cycle of Purification

Burke's later work developed a quasi-theological account of the rhetoric of guilt and redemption. His claim: the uniquely human capacity for the negative (the ability to say "thou shalt not," to distinguish the is from the ought) generates an inevitable sense of guilt — the awareness of falling short of normative standards. Rhetoric provides the mechanisms for managing and purging this guilt, through three paths: mortification (self-punishment), victimage (projecting guilt onto a scapegoat), or transcendence (reframing the situation to dissolve the guilt).

This framework, developed in The Rhetoric of Religion (1961) and elsewhere, provides disturbing insight into the rhetorical mechanics of scapegoating — the way communities purge internal tensions by identifying and punishing an external or internal enemy. Burke developed it partly in response to observing the rhetoric of Nazism in the 1930s.

Burke's Legacy

Burke's influence extends well beyond academic rhetoric. His concepts have been taken up in literary criticism (through the analysis of symbolic action in texts), sociology (by Erving Goffman's dramaturgical approach), communication studies, political science, and organizational theory. His insistence that language is not merely a vehicle for thought but the medium in which human social life is constituted anticipated the "linguistic turn" in the humanities by several decades.