[2] 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.
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).
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: In metaphysics, “a thing is identified by its properties” (23), but a rhetorical identification by property refers to any quality which can be attributed to a phenomenon, thing, event, action, person or group.
The wavering line between the two cannot be ‘scientifically’ identified; rival rhetoricians can draw it at different places, and their persuasiveness varies with the resources each has at hand” (25).
In this section, Burke also notes the way identification functions as a screen, placing the term again firmly within the realm of rhetoric.
Using science as an example, Burke explains that “however ‘pure’ one's motives may be actually, the impurities of identification lurking about the edges of such situations introduce a typical Rhetorical wrangle of the sort that can never be settled once and for all, but belongs in the field of moral controversy where men properly seek to ‘prove opposites’” (26).
“If a social or occupational class is not too exacting in the scrutiny of identifications that flatter its interests, its very life is a profitable malingering (profitable at least until its inaccuracies catch up with it) — and as such, it is open to attack or analysis, Rhetoric comprising both the use of persuasive resources (rhetorica utens, as with the philippics of Demosthenes) and the study of them (rhetorica docens, as with Aristotle’s treatise on the ‘art’ of Rhetoric)” (36).