On the excerpt from Burke's "A Rhetoric of Motives"

In this piece Burke begins outlining his notion of "identification" in which various agents, who are already "consubstantial," may be made to realize this fact. In other words, inasmuch as various human beings have various features in common with one another, they are consubstantial--they share the same substance. When they recognize this fact about themselves, to the extent that they do recognize it, then they will identify themselves with one another. As a rhetorical technique, this seems like a solid approach, and its effectiveness should be straightforwardly apparent. Finding oneself in another immediately creates a concern in oneself for the well-being of the other, and Burke rightly notes that this entire process is only possible because of—indeed, depends upon—the fact that human beings are primarily physically divided from one another. It is the fundamental division among human beings that consubstantiality seeks to surmount, and the explanation for the efficacy of the technique of identification seems to rest in some deeply rooted human desire to erase the division that characterizes our physical existence. Burke then goes on to make the following claim: “In pure identification there would be no strife. Likewise, there would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can join battle only through a mediatory ground that makes this communication possible, thus providing the first condition necessary for their interchange of blows, ” (pg 1328). It is not entirely clear here what Burke could mean. Much seems to hang on the meaning of the term strife. In the context of this claim, strife would seem to need an opposite different from identification. In other words, if strife is only possible in the absence both of pure identification and pure separateness, then it would have to be the case that strife’s opposite—concord, perhaps?—also can only exist in the absence both of pure identification and pure separateness. Does this accord with Burke's wider set of claims?