Identification

their individual expressions lies the possibility of opining differently (Farrell, 1993, p. 228).

The conclusion to these considerations of the recursive relationship between the specific and the general is that creation of public opinion is an ongoing dialogic process. Each utterance is conditioned by preceding utterances and in being uttered forms part of the context out of which subsequent utterances arise. Or, as the Russian literary critic Mikhail M. Bakhtin so aptly puts it, “any concrete utterance is a link in the chain of speech communication of a particular sphere” (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 91). General conditions for public opinion formation and commonly perceived public opinions arise in and through the interrelations of the particular utterances that constitute the ongoing societal conversation.

The perception of the recursiveness of specific articulations and general conditions leads to a reconciliation of the rhetorical and the social scientific approaches to public opinion formation. In accordance with the combined rhetorical-social scientific conception public opinion formation should indeed be studied in its only concrete manifestations, namely specific

communicative encounters, but the investigation should take account of the social norms, political institutions, and media structures that provide the broader context for each instance of

communicative interaction. And most significantly the analysis should aim at explaining the relationship between the utterances, thereby reaching a deeper understanding of the formal and substantial commonalities and differences that are operative in the communicative network under study. Explaining the relations between different utterances and between the texts and their contexts will be an important aim of the analysis of the debate on the future of Europe.

translation of one’s wishes into terms of an audience’s opinions” (Burke, 1969, p. 55 and 57).

Third, there are purely formal devices of identification – argumentative patterns and procedures, tropes and figures that invite audience participation regardless of the specific subject matter. Such forms, Burke contends, have a universal appeal that, if successfully transferred to the matter at hand, may overpower audience resistances to a speaker’s proposition (Burke, 1969, p. 58). Burke’s concept of rhetorical identification places its emphasis on how the speaker can identify with the audience’s already existing values and beliefs, but also points to the speaker’s ability to change the audience’s identity.

Maurice Charland has elaborated upon the idea that rhetoric is not only about adapting a statement to the audiences’ existing identities. Rhetoric, Charland proposes, may not only alter the views of the audience, but can in fact constitute it as a group with a common identity. In his view

“…the very existence of social subjects is already a rhetorical effect” (Charland, 1994, p. 211) and the type of rhetoric that creates this effect – that “calls its audience into being” – is labelled

“constitutive” (Charland, 1994, p. 213). Constitutive rhetoric not only aims at creating a position for the speaker with which the audience already identifies, but holds up an identity for the audience to don.

Such identification of the audience in the rhetorical utterance is, however, not necessarily restricted to the constitutive rhetoric in which a new collectivity is explicitly being created. Edwin Black has suggested that establishment of the “second persona” is basic to all rhetorical utterances and that it is in this move rather than in references to the speaker’s own character that the intention and value of the utterance is revealed (Black, 1970). Black proposes the second persona as the pivotal concept of his analysis in order to avoid falling subject to the

intentional fallacy; instead of focusing on the relationship between the text and its author Black turns to the study of the audience conjectured in the text. However, Black proposes this move as a roundabout way of passing moral and intellectual judgement on the author, thereby implying that the author’s identity has by no means become irrelevant or external to the text (Black, 1970, p.

110). There are two central concepts for analysing authorial identity in the text: ethos and first persona. These two concepts are somewhat overlapping, but distinguishable along the following lines:

“…ethos refers to a set of characteristics that, if attributed to a writer [or speaker] on the basis of textual evidence, will enhance the writer’s credibility. Persona, on the other hand, […] provides a way of describing the roles authors create for themselves in written [or spoken] discourse given their representation of audience, subject matter, and other elements of context” (Cherry, 1998, p. 402).

The claim is that a persona is somehow more fictitious than the ethos. However, I concentrate my analysis entirely at the textual level, and only see the difference as being one of specificity. Whereas ethos refers to a predetermined set of characteristics (i.e. the Aristotelian qualities of wisdom, virtue, and goodwill), persona designates the multitude of traits that an author may attempt to present him- or herself as having.

Following Burke it is recognised that the unity between the first and the second persona is often created through reference to a common ‘other’ or third persona, and the textual establishment of the third persona, therefore, indicates the rules and norms that underlie

communicative interaction. Philip Wander has proposed that the third persona, marked by absences and explicit negations, is an expression of the possibilities and restrictions that condition the

utterance. By studying the constitution of the third persona – ignored positions, unaddressed or excluded groups – the critic may reach understanding of the rules for producing discourse that are operative in the context in which the utterance is made (Wander, 1999, p. 376).

The presence of first, second, and third personae in rhetorical utterances draws our attention to the interrelations between these different identificatory categories. The agency established in the utterance – that is, the capability for action, which the utterance ascribes to the personae – is a combination of ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’ and ‘they’ positions. Or, as Michael Leff puts the point:

In the interpretative frame, agency refers not just to the use of character appeals but also to the way rhetors place themselves within a network of communicative relationships.

At minimum, the explication of agency requires attention to: (1) the rhetor’s construction of self, (2) the rhetor’s construction of audience (what Edwin Black calls the ‘second persona’), and (3) the enactment within the text of the relationship between rhetor and audience (Leff, 2003, p. 9).

I suggest that the speaker’s establishment of the third persona and the enactment of the relationship between it and the other two personae should be added to this list of issues that require attention.

The study of textually established agencies and the relations between them enables the critic to account for both instrumental and generative aspects of rhetorical performance (Leff, 2003, pp. 6-7).

Furthermore, the combination of Charland’s constitutive rhetoric and Wander’s concept of the third persona points to the recursiveness of rhetorical identification; the utterance both draws upon established identities and creates new possibilities of identification. The identity formation of individual rhetorical utterances is related to already existent collectivities with or against which the speaker and the audience are identified in the same manner that individual and

public opinions relate to each other. The speaker is neither in a position to adapt freely to the perceived identity of the audience, nor capable of creating the audience entirely at his or her own will, but is instead constrained by personal and social identities that prefigure any concrete utterance. However, possibilities for change arise in the speaker’s ability to use the identities that exist beforehand creatively and to reconfigure the relationships between them.

The three identificatory strategies that Burke enumerates are means by which speakers may establish new collective actors and create the agency needed for altering the social and political context in which they speak. Analysis of the rhetorical strategies, which are employed in

constituting the textual positions of the first, second, and third personae, begins from the

assumption of the recursive relationship between individual utterances and social settings. The aim of the analysis is both to explain how the social identities existing prior to the utterance constrain communicative interaction, and to investigate the concrete and perhaps altered possibilities for collective action that arise in and through the utterance. Analysis of this kind will complement the study of textual and contextual relationships in the investigation of the European debate.