ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author suggests that Burke’s privileging of the term “identification” and an understanding of rhetoric’s constitutive and ontological effect, as suggested by structuralist discourse theory, have certain consequences for the theory and practice of rhetoric. In the Rhetoric of Motives, Kenneth Burke proposes “identification” as an alternative to “persuasion” as the key term of the rhetorical process. Burke’s project is a rewriting of rhetorical theory that considers rhetoric and motives in formal terms, as consequences of the nature of language and its enactment. Furthermore, the tautological logic of constitutive rhetoric must necessitate action in the material world; constitutive rhetoric must require that its embodied subjects act freely in social world to affirm their subject position. Canadian Confederation would deny that Quebecois exist and so would deny the very possibility of this constitutive rhetoric and so of an audience inhabiting it. This identification occurs through a series of ideological effects arising from the narrative structure of constitutive rhetoric.
