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.

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.

Burke's third clause in his definition of man, "Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making," when viewed in light of contemporary technological advances offers scholars an interesting point of analysis. When reading this essay, I was struck by use of the phrase "second nature" in describing the third clause. He writes, "The implements of hunting and husbandry, with corresponding implements of war, make for a set of habits that become a kind of 'second nature,' as a special set of expectations, shaped by custom, comes to seem 'natural.'" (13) When I read that phrase I thought of the recent move to "Second Life" that academics have made, and I began to wonder what Burke would think of this virtual environment. Would he be bothered by the fact that many people feel more natural communicating, using symbols, in their second life as opposed to their first life? Is Second Life another example of the Helhaven he later refers to?

Burke's attitude towards technology seems to be a mix of negative and positive. On the negative side of things, Burke describes the human drive to perfection, or the drive to achieve an ideal end. Within this pursuit of perfection, Burke, though not explicitly, acknowledges the non-reflective action of humans in this pursuit. He writes, "We must not turn back the clock. We must continue in the ways that made us great." What made us great, or at least what we thought made us great, were the technological developments that humans created, that helped us produce more and at a faster rate. Unfortunately, as Burke points out, this leads to negative consequences such as waste and its attendant pollution. So, technology, used/applied unreflectively (not tracking down its implications?), is negative. However, after reading Burke throughout the semester, I have a hard time believing that he does not see some positive in technology.

For the final project, I will continue what I began in my midterm essay. Specifically, in that I essay I discussed ways in which the training that law students receive can be supplemented and extended by Burke scholarship. Ultimately, I want to demonstrate that Burke's work offers law students fertile ground for developing their legal skills, or rather, their "Equipment for Lawyering." In the project, I will explore Burke's idea of logomachy, or a war of words, and will use that theme as a way to organize my discussion on how lawyers, despite what they might believe, are ill equipped for the war of words that goes on both in the courtroom and in the documentation that they create for their work. In particular, the training that they receive positions them to develop arguments that "elicit not assent, but instead, distrust, resistance, and even resentment." This quotation comes from Gerald B.

This is something I wanted to bring up last week, but Burke makes a reference to "public rhetoric" on pg. 71 in RoM. Near this reference to "public rhetoric" Burke uses the word public utterance, so is he equating "public rhetoric" to physical/vocal responses? The reason I ask is that a secondary area of mine for the PhD is public rhetoric, and last semester we tried to create a corpus of items that qualify as public rhetoric. We included things such as gravestones and cemeteries, commentary surrounding the Chief Illiniwek controversy at the University of Illinois, literature, copyright law, and many other items. What was interesting is that each example had a unique character and many did not have a vocal representation, and by vocal I mean spoken by humans. When thinking about Burke's definition (maybe it's a stretch to call it a definition rather than a discussion) is he limiting public rhetoric to only physical/vocal responses?

After reading section 2 of RoM, I'm still a little confused as to the distinction Burke makes between opinion and truth. Burke writes,"the competitive and public ingredient in persuasion makes it particularly urgent that the rhetoric work at the level of opinion" (54). From this, I assume that Burke is getting at the need to understand other's opinions first if one wants to seek identification with his/her audience b/c w/out such identification, persuasion will be difficult to achieve. Anyway, what I'm interested in are the implications of moving to opinion first rather than truth. Specifically, when we move to opinion, we begin to delve into people's subjectivity rather than an objective truth from which to persuade from. I know I'm short-circuiting this discussion a bit by jumping to my question now, but in stressing the need for rhetoric to work at the level of opinion, does Burke open the door for rationality to be based in subjectivity rather than objectivity?

On p. 30 in RoM, Burke offers a distinction in how we can understand a person's morality. In particular, when describing the morality of the technical expert, he writes "If the technical expert, as such, is assigned the task of perfecting new powers of chemical, bacteriological, or atomic destruction, his morality as technical expert requires only that he apply himself to his task as effectively as possible" (30). This statement opens up the idea of ethos in rhetoric and offers it more as a malleable/changing concept rather than a static one. What interests me about this distinction in morality is how I present the idea of ethos and cultivating ethos to my students. Specifically, when thinking about how I discuss the idea, I sense that I present it as static, as something they develop (in positive, ethical ways) and can sustain with them in all rhetorical situations.

When describing a molten mass Burke writes, "Distinctions, we might say, arise out of a great central moltenness, where all is merged. They have been thrown from a liquid center to the surface, where they have congealed. Let one of these crusted distinctions return to its source, and in this alchemic center it may be remade, again becoming molten liquid, and may enter into new combinations, whereat it may be again thrown forth as a new crust, a different distinction" (xix). Admittedly, when I first began to think how this method reflects Burke's understanding of rhetorical inquiry or invention, I struggled a little. In particular, when I tried to think of ways to introduce Burke's method into the FYC classroom, all I could imagine was one big mess. However, when I focus on the words distinction and difference that Burke uses, I see how his pentadic ratios are the vehicle through which students can come to discern and make distinctions on a particular subject.

In class on Tuesday we discussed the notion of purposive forgetting which Burke describes as the only way of remembering (271). After I left class I was a little unsure as to what I initially thought he meant by this notion of forgetting. In particular, in class there was an argument put forth that one can't entirely forget something, such as experience/memories about one's mother (I apologize if I misstated this). Anyway, to help clarify this for myself, Burke isn't actually talking about a total collapse in memory, that one can't remember anything. Rather, is what he referring to only a temporal forgetting in the moment, so we can can make meaning out of a symbol at that time?