7 - A Rhetoric of Motives: ideological and utopian rhetoric

Summary

… pure persuasion in the absolute sense exists nowhere…

Burke, RM

… the effectively ideological is also, at the same time, necessarily Utopian…

Jameson, Political Unconscious

Under Burke's criterion of circumference, many terminologies qualify as grammatical. Equally grammatical terminologies, however, may not work equally well in a specific situation. By what criterion, in the absence of an epistemological criterion of truth, can one choose among the available grammatical alternatives?

In confronting this wide range in the choice of circumference for the location of an act, men confront what is distinctively the human freedom and the human necessity. This necessity is a freedom insofar as the choice of circumference leads to an adequate interpretation of motives; and it is an enslavement insofar as the interpretation is inadequate…

(GM 84; my italics)

Burke borrows this notion of adequacy – equally applicable to the choice of substance, circumference's companion – from Spinoza, who thought that “through the cultivation of ‘adequate ideas,’ one could transform the passives (of human bondage) into the actives (of human freedom)” (GM 139).

Dramatism, Burke indicates, prefers Spinoza to Descartes: Descartes put in place the epistemological subject–object opposition that dramatism is designed to displace, whereas Spinoza's adequate idea puts a dramatistic emphasis on activity and passivity, “freedom” and “enslavement” (GM 146–47). But Burke revises Spinoza by considering activity and passivity not in Spinoza's metaphysical context but in the dramatistic context of act and historical situation.