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Burke's notion off "pure persuasion" tantalizes. It seems to both hold and withhold great potential for rhetorical theory and criticism. Even if one were not familiar with Burke's difficult chapter of the same name, the phrase itself would tantalize, hinting both of a rhetoric that is guiltless and (the other sense of the word "pure") a rhetoric that is all there, thoroughly done, complete and unalloyed with baser things. The concept seems an ironic possibility for the "sham" art. That is, the phrase summons up a vision of a rhetoric that is guiltless of the charges levied at it for millennia: that anybody can be an expert in rhetoric, that rhetoric is ethically uncommitted and therefore equally useful for both ethical and unethical causes, and that all rhetoric is merely about acquisitiveness of some sort--about getting other people to act to our advantage and not necessarily to theirs. Furthermore, a concept called "pure persuasion" would seem on the face of it to be not for everybody since it would require absolute commitment and altruism, or at least the temporary abstention from advantage-seeking. At the same time, "pure persuasion' leads to thoughts of the most complete rhetoric, rhetoric taken to the extreme, a rhetoric so rhetorical that there is nothing beyond it.
Burke's (1950/1969) discussion of this concept does indeed head in both of these directions at once--a rhetoric that is both guiltless and thorough:
Pure persuasion involves the saying of something, not for an extra-verbal advantage to be got by the saying, but because of a satisfaction intrinsic to the saying. It summons because it likes the feel of a summons. It would be nonplused if the summons were answered. It attacks because it revels in the sheer syllables of vituperation. It would be horrified if, each time it finds a way of saying, "Be damned," it really did send a soul to rot in hell. It intuitively says, "This is so," purely and simply because this is so. (p. 269)
But by definition there is no real risk of pure persuasion (in its purest form, at least) being "horrified" by success, because built in to every pure persuasion is some sort of negativity or "self-interference" which seeks to undo the rhetorical purpose of...