Davis, Diane. “Identification: Burke and Freud on Who You Are.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 38.2 (2008): 123-147.
Abstract:
The article grapples with similarities and important differences between Freud’s identification, which is squarely in the subconscious and precedes the social aspects of “self” and “other,” and Burke’s identification, which is “a symbolic act – whether conscious or unconscious – which therefore remains available for sober critique and reasoned adjustment” (127). For Burke, there is no essence in the contemplation of the self; rather, the “I” is a result of multiple contradictory identifications, positioning rhetorical identification as symbolic and social. Yet he also purports that the notion of “self” and “other” is biological and rooted in nature; identification is the social maneuver to bridge the gap between self and other dug out by nature. Davis then works through these two sentiments – the social “I” and the natural self vs. other paradigm – in asking questions about the individual (see third quote). She walks through neuroscience of infants to contemplate the pre-identification subject, “shattering” Burke’s claims about the natural division between self and other with evidence of mimetic identification at 42-minutes post-birth, and makes the bold argument “that the entire logic of identification has to be rethought: it can no longer be understood as an identification of one with another, at least not at first, because it would necessarily precede the very distinction between self and other” (133). So Davis, then, returns to Freud to examine what Burke’s identification avoids – the distinction between desire and identification (that is, wanting the mother versus wanting to be the father) – through an analysis of Freudian primary identification and hypnotic suggestion, closing with a proposal that we think of subjects as “suggects,” permitting both rational persuasion and irrational affection in our reading of identification.
Quote(s):
“Burke agreed with Freud that humans are motivated by desire at least as much as by reason, but he ditched the Oedipal narrative, arguing that the most fundamental human desire is social rather than sexual, and that identification is a response to that desire. By all appearances, then, the disagreement is in the details, because both Freud and Burke describe identification as a social act that partially unifies discrete individuals, a mode of ‘symbolic action’ (as Burke would say) that resides squarely within the representational arena (or the dramatistic frame)” (124-125)
“…what I habitually call ‘‘my’’ identity is the product of an identification with figures or symbols that reside outside my self, that the relation to symbolic structure precedes the relation to the self. Inasmuch as ‘‘my’’ identity is an effect of ‘‘my’’ inscription by this structure, ‘‘I’’ am always already other than myself, non-present to myself, inessential” (127)
“”Who is this ‘individual,’ this human being per se who precedes predication and/so predates the processes of identification? Who is there, there already, to experience alienation, to desire sociality?”(129-130)
