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?

Let us assume that one day a new sheep wanders its way into our barnyard. A particularly stunning sheep, but every animal in the barnyard is skeptical of the sheep’s presence because no one recognizes it. The sheep, aware of the discomfort being project from the other animals, retreats from the barnyard only to be spotted again the next day and every day after that until, eventually, the other animals in the barnyard are no longer surprised by our sheep’s presence. Eventually our stunning sheep is allowed to roam free and mingle with the other sheep in the barnyard. But, alias, something is amiss here because slowly the population of sheep begins to dwindle a little for no apparent reason. Our sheep, huddled together with other frightened barnyard sheep, however, shows no sign of fear and one can almost detect a slight smile behind its eyes.

The Human Barnyard is all Greek to me.

As some might've suspected, I dutifully went OED-ing, checking for any anomalies within the passage on the Human Barnyard. It was only the second word in that I came across something interesting.

A wrangle, as opposed to the act of wrangling (which has nothing to do with cows in the OED), is an angry dispute or noisy quarrel. It can also be a controversy. The "Wrangle of the Market Place" (RM 23), then, seems to be in line with Burke's earlier analogy of the Burkean Parlor:

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.

I was puzzled by Burke's choice of the "Barnyard" (RM 23) as the place in which people engage in dialog. This locus replaces the more "bourgeois" one of the parlor. This term, related to farming, does not suggest highly intellectual preoccupations but rather it makes one think of more mundane, utilitarian purposes. Could it be that Burke was disenchanted with the way in which people utilize language?

In this particular section of RM, Burke is contrasting the various explorations of the parts of his motives trilogy. RM, in its exploration of rhetoric, is devoted to the study of identification, cooperation, and the use of such things in order to create the ultimate division, war (RM 22). In his list on page 23 of RM, he's building to a climax--starting with what seem to be minor skirmishes to the ultimate contest, War with a captial "W."

Attempting to analyze ways in which we use symbols rhetorically, Burke refers to the difficulty of choice suggested by the word “Scramble” suggestive of a “distorted mass” (Merriam-Webster online). When we utilize language, we select words/symbols from the “distorted mass” of attitudes that will suggest a pattern of experience that will strengthen our argument. The term “Scramble” reminds me of the metaphor of the melted mass and the signifiers that congeal on the surface. Moreover, the word “wrangle” suggests that symbolic action takes place in a continuum, which brings to mind the parlor where people are engaged in a dialog that seems to be a prolonged dispute or “Wrangle,” an “argument that continues for a long period of time” (Oxford Dictionary online).

After reading the prompt question for this week, the first thing that came to my mind was the old saying: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” In “Identification and “Consubstantiality’” Burke states: “A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B” (20). If we take this passage and attribute me to A (the person trying to water the horse) and attribute the horse to B (the animal that has decided not to drink in the presence of water) I think we can come to some understanding of the meaning behind Burke’s stress upon the terms “identification” and “consubstantiality” when considering Rhetoric.