USC Press · Rhetoric & Communication
Edited by David R. Gruber & Jason Kalin
Order from USC Press →Introduction
Since Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives, identification has stood as the most defining and enduring concept of contemporary rhetorical theory, structuring how scholars approach persuasion, civic discourse, and political and ethical life. Burke's insight—that identification compensates for division—became not only a conceptual anchor but also a disciplinary telos. However, current rhetorical ecologies in which climate crises, algorithmic amplification, political fragmentation and polarization, and ontological indeterminacy circulate together and feed into one another may demand more tentative rhetorics that relinquish the conceptual grasp of identification.
Rhetoric After Identification considers again what we are after with identification: What do we want with identification? And it seems that what we want is Burke's sense of identification as a way of life after one another, an acting together. Burke posits a principle of identification to counter a double divide: Individuals are estranged from one another by motion ("the individual centrality of the nervous system") and action (symbol-using, symbol-making, and symbol-misusing). These biologic and symbolic estrangements motivate identification. In the article "Rhetoric—Old and New," Burke writes that the key term for the "new" rhetoric would be "identification," which can include a partially "unconscious" factor in appeal.
In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke explains "the simplest case of persuasion. You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea identifying your ways with his." Interpreting identification as identifying with something or someone accords well with a sense of intentionality and with rhetoric as a symbolic action that induces cooperation among individuals who are necessarily divided. In other words, before persuasion, rhetorical action must achieve identification by seeking consubstantiality with the other through symbolic action. By presuming a "motivational essence" in which one can know the other, identification seeks a common ground in which divided individuals bridge their differences to coordinate social action.
The rise of rhetorical identification coincided with the post–World War II and Cold War eras, periods in which division threatened annihilation and symbolic suturing was positioned as the primary means to mitigate violence. Identification forges the core of Charland's constitutive rhetoric and the rhetorical call to unification. More recently, identification provides a framework in a polarized society for examining "how political discourse really functions for many active participants" because political conversations so often include "identification with a certain sort of person—with members of my ingroup."
Identification's privileged place remains, even as Diane Davis flips Burke's originary division, arguing that any rhetoric not only passes through identification but also begins with identification, or what she calls "inessential solidarity." By exploring the "partially 'unconscious' factor[s] in appeal," Davis argues that the "individual centrality of the nervous system" is the condition of not our estrangement but our fundamental exposure to the Other. This inessential solidarity "shatters the presumption of an original biological disconnection between self and other."
Despite the value of this varied and compelling scholarship, this volume considers how identification may be now conceptually overextended and overused, politically limiting, and ethically insufficient. As Gruber argues in prior work, the invocation of identification in rhetorical theory too often collapses wildly divergent phenomena into a single conceptual frame, effacing the richness and specificity of individual encounters. Gruber critiques the dominance of identification as a rhetorical master trope, showing how everything from a mother's sobbing voice on NPR to an NBA promo is readily subsumed under Burkean consubstantiality and cooperation.
Consequently, whereas previously we asked what are we after with identification, now we ask what comes after identification: What might rhetoric and rhetoricity become if we let go of identification as this most cherished commonplace? Rather than replacing identification, thinking rhetoric after identification displaces a privileged topos and telos to ask what radical possibilities become available for rhetoric by conjuring seemingly unavailable diversities and multiplicities—unavailable because they are not necessarily seeking consubstantiality or common ground.
Rhetoric After Identification gets after identification in the sense of both criticizing the limitations of identification and pursuing new ways of conceiving rhetoric after—against, beyond, through, with, within, and without—identification. What if acting together does not lead to consubstantiality? What if cooperation, communication, and collectivity are possible, even preferable, without continual efforts at appearing the same? What might rhetoric become if its aim is not toward sameness, consensus, or mutual understanding? What if rhetoric and rhetoricity have no telos?
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Continue Reading at USC Press →Panel Discussion
A panel of scholars engages the book's central provocations—where does rhetoric go after identification?
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Graduate Student Resources
These questions are designed for graduate seminars, reading groups, and qualifying exam preparation. Each links to specific chapters for directed engagement with the book's arguments.
Two chapters make especially pointed cases against the continuing utility of Burkean identification as a master concept in rhetorical theory:
Izaguirre's chapter argues that Burkean identification sustains Modernist views and underwrites colonial objectives—showing how the drive toward consubstantiality encodes Western metaphysical assumptions that render non-Western, decolonial, and Indigenous rhetorical practices invisible or assimilable only at the cost of their specificity.
Gruber's chapter takes a different angle, observing that humans report feelings of "identification" with AI chatbots. This phenomenon raises a fundamental question: what does identification actually mean if it can be induced by an algorithm? The observation casts suspicion on how rhetorical scholars tend to figure identification as a bodily unification grounded in human sociality—a foundation that may be far less stable than the tradition assumes.
Rather than simply abandoning identification, two contributors develop generative conceptual extensions that push the term into new theoretical terrain:
Halm proposes "Schizoanalytical Identification," drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's schizoanalysis to theorize identification as a destabilizing, multiplicitous process that resists the coherence and unity that Burke's model presupposes. Where Burke seeks consubstantiality, schizoanalytical identification embraces productive fragmentation.
Mays develops the concept of "Misidentification"—a theorization of the rhetorical and political work done not by successful identification but by its failure, slippage, and productive error. Misidentification names a condition that is not merely a deficit of identification but a rhetorical phenomenon in its own right.
Some of the book's most original contributions arrive not as redefinitions of identification, but as concepts that identification-thinking made possible—ideas that have taken on a life of their own:
Conley develops "Stigmergic Recursion," a concept borrowed from biology (the way ants build by responding to what other ants have built) and applied to rhetorical ecologies. It describes indirect, environment-mediated coordination that produces collective rhetorical action without any requirement for identification or shared intent.
Chaput theorizes "Rhetorical Instincts," approaching the precognitive, embodied orientations that precede conscious identification and drive rhetorical response—challenging the symbolic and intentional emphasis that identification theory has traditionally prioritized.
Glad you asked! The book addresses this connection directly through a featured interview with Christa Ratcliffe—one of the foremost scholars of rhetorical listening. The interview explores how the book's critiques of identification—its tendency toward unity, consubstantiality, and the erasure of difference—resonate with Ratcliffe's own arguments for listening as a rhetorical practice attentive to what resists identification and understanding.
Rhetorical listening, in Ratcliffe's framework, refuses the demand that the other become legible or assimilable before communication can happen. This makes it a particularly resonant interlocutor for a volume that asks whether rhetoric can function—ethically and effectively—without identification as its telos.
About the Book
Since Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives, identification has been the discipline's most consequential and contested concept—the hinge on which persuasion, ethics, political solidarity, and symbolic action have turned. Rhetoric After Identification asks a provocation the field has long deferred: what if we let go?
The volume gathers original contributions from leading and emerging scholars working across rhetorical theory, new materialism, postcolonial criticism, affect theory, and digital media studies. Together they map the terrain of a rhetoric that does not require identification as its ground—a rhetoric adequate to polarization, algorithmic life, ecological crisis, and the stubborn irreducibility of difference.
Edited by David R. Gruber and Jason Kalin, the collection does not seek to erase Burke's legacy but to subject it to the pressure that genuine theoretical progress demands: sustained, rigorous, generative critique.