For my final project, I am looking closely at the idea of identification. Part of its process seems to be "identifying," or understanding both the material conditions that a certain person or group faces, plus the way they see themselves positioned in the social world. I get the feeling that there Burke is giving us a way to address these issues. In fact, he describes the rhetorical motive of "portraying" as "biography" or even "portraiture":

We can conceive of biography in the most minute sense: detailed
information regarding some particular taxpayer at some particular
time and place. Or, at the other extreme, we can think of the given
work’s “personality” as the snapshot of some one posture that is at least
momentarily typical of “mankind” in general. (43)

To Cicero’s three offices, docere (Lat. “to teach”), delectare (Lat. “to charm”), and movere (Lat. “to move”) Burke adds a fourth, one, “portray” (ETSM 41). According to Oxford Dictionary online, the term means: 1. Depict in a work of art or literature. 2. Describe in a particular way. 3. (of an actor) play the part of. The term derives from the Old French portaire, from traire “to draw.” Words relfect "reality"; therefore, it is important for one to utilize the right words (This sounds like Mark Twain) (effective rhetorical devices) in order to obtain certain responses from one's audience. As self-expression, portraiture depends on the “’moral principle’ in the agent” (ESTM 44). This poses a problem in that the speaker/writer will draw his/her view of a certain topic based on a certain motive in a certain setting in order to move his/her audience to action.

Burke writes that " We refer to the utterance as “portraiture,” as the “self-expression” of an agent, as an act characteristic of the poet’s “personality” whether or not he so wills it." (41) Later, he notes that poetic symbolism requires a different kind of understanding. In reading his discussion of portraiture and the use of symbols I started thinking more broadly about symbols. I had been thinking about symbols in the terms of words and man as the symbol using animal but I'd neglected to think about the more concrete definition of symbol: A written character or mark used to represent something; a letter, figure, or sign conventionally standing for some object, process, etc. (OED, 2d edition, 1989). I think that the pivotal point in this definition is the word "conventionally" as it implies the shared social meaning the Burke discusses later when he writes that "the 'weighting' of words arises from extra-poetic situations in the social order" (41).

When reading Burke's discussion of the fourth purpose, "to portray," I immmediately thought of the rhetorical appeals of ethos, pathos, and logos. When describing the fourth purpose, Burke writes, "there is a fourth “office” still to be taken care of. We refer to the utterance as “portraiture,” as the “self-ex-pression” of an agent, as an act characteristic of the poet’s “personality” whether or not he so wills it" (41). Burke continues in the next sentence, "Aristotle deals with this problem from the purely rhetorical point of view when discussing devices whereby the speaker can deliberately promote an audience’s confidence in him simply as a person, regardless of the cause that is being advocated or of the speaker’s true nature" (41). I focus on Burke's use of the word "devices" and the phrase "to promote an audience's confidence" when describing the three rhetorical appeals to argue my point.

It appears, and I might be wrong here, that by adding “portray” to the Ciceronian offices Burke seems to be attempting to insert the agent in to rhetorical act. According to Burke, the three offices of Cicero are: “The first office (docere) would be the indicative or scientific function of speech, its relation to matters of knowledge. The third office (movere) would be the persuasive or rhetorical function of speech, its use to arouse in an auditor some attitude that implies a desired kind of act or acquiescence in a desired kind of policy. The second office, to please or entertain (delectare), must, for our purposes, be redefined” (ETSM 37). Notice from this definition of terms that there is no consideration for the author of the product and all three definitions deal with the product itself or the product’s audience (notice that it is the function of speech rather than the function of the speech’s generator that does the persuading in the definition).

His discussion of the fourth ‘office’ appears in “The Language of Poetry ‘Dramatistically’ Considered.” Here he tells us, “We refer to the utterance as ‘portraiture,’ as the ‘self-expression’ of an agent, as an act characteristic of the poet’s ‘personality’ whether or not he so wills it” (ETSM 41). He seems to be suggesting that the text reveals something about the agent responsible for its production, particularly within a given scene, for he goes on to write: “[H]ere would seem to be the situation, as regards the ‘portraiture’ (be it voluntary or involuntary) in a work of art:

In SoM, Burke , perhaps more explicitly and cogently than in previous works we have read, plays with connections between rhetoric and poetics. Coming from a literature background, I've always been curious about such connections, and why ancient and contemporary scholars on both sides (excluding sophists of both eras)are at such pains to keep them apart. Burke makes a connection between the two in chapter 3 of SoM that seems blindingly obvious in retrospect, but perhaps was never before stated so concisely. On page 38 of SoM, Burke makes this comment about man's love of his own symbolic creation:

So here is an attempt at creating a response for today’s readings. Although, I would like to say that it should be viewed as a naïve attempt at this point to understand, because I don’t think I’ve had enough time to completely digest the readings at this point. So here we go:

Burke's consideration of the effects of the computer in Towards Helhaven is interesting because it is chronologically positioned at the very beginning of the personal computer's presence in the market. Indeed, most of Burke's references to the computer have to do with government owned punch-card machines. His discussion of the 'cult of new needs' is predictive of, for example, the explosion of consumer technologies that have followed the personalization of the computer. Indeed, having a cell phone, digital camera, ipod, and pda is hardly unusual or excessive. Burke's consideration of planned obsolescence is helpful here in the case certainly of the cell phone which as to be replaced at least every two years. (In the alternative, I was at my grandmother's this weekend and noticed that she has had the same rotary dial phone in her living room since the early 80s). The invasion of technology into our lives has certainly occurred, but not entirely in the way in which he predicted.

Something I've developed an interest in as of late is how a person's subjective/personal experiences can become a part of the knowledge making process (by knowledge making I mean what type of info/facts/experience are considered as credible/valuable). Modernism stresses the importance of rational, verifiable thought, and this came at the expense of not recognizing certain aspects of a person's character such as his or her emotions, his or her affective responses towards things, etc. that makes that person who he or she is. I see this modernist impulse as a shortcoming as it does not acknowledge the full context of a person's experiences and thus potentially limits the knowledge making process. In The Symbolic of Motives, I see Burke getting at or opening the door a bit for subjective/personal experience in his discussion of entelechy and mimesis.