Gary McCarron, Simon Fraser University
Gary McCarron is Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. Email: gmccarro@sfu.ca
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Lecture five broadly addresses the work of the prolific American rhetorician Kenneth Burke. He was often criticized for his wide-ranging analyses, enlarging the field of rhetoric, including those aspects of everyday language that are moving and persuasive. This lecture attempts to contextualize his theories, laying the groundwork for further examination of his immense scope of scholarship.
Keywords: Kenneth Burke; Rhetoric
Le cinquième cours porte sur l’œuvre du prolifique rhétoricien américain Kenneth Burke. On a souvent critiqué celui-ci pour ses analyses ambitieuses par lesquelles il a élargi le champ de la rhétorique, y compris ces aspects de la langue quotidienne qui sont émouvantes et persuasives. Ce cours tente de contextualiser ses théories, jetant ainsi les bases d’un examen ultérieur de son vaste savoir.
Mots clés : Kenneth Burke; Rhetoric
This lecture discusses the American rhetorician Kenneth Burke, an important and sometimes perplexing figure in the world of rhetoric and literary studies. To describe Burke’s approach succinctly would be an enormous challenge; it would also be foolhardy to pretend to have the ability to do so. The immense scope of Burke’s scholarship not only leaves readers impressed but sometimes invites the criticism that his work is, by its very nature, impervious to being summarized, an observation that further suggests that Burke possessed a penetrating though undisciplined intellect. This is a view that dogged Burke throughout his long life, though among those same critics who complain of his disorderly approach, it is equally common to hear expressions of respect for his genius. With Burke, you frequently hear good and bad analyses of his work in the same sentence.
In a review of Burke’s work first published in 1952, for instance, author Marie Hochmuth (1952) wrote, “one cannot possibly compress the whole of Burke’s thought into an article” (p. 144), going on to say that the best anyone can accomplish is to “signify his importance and to suggest the broad outlines of his work” (p. 144). Still, no matter how inadequate such efforts might be, Hochmuth argued, they are worthwhile nonetheless, for she was convinced that Burke is “the most profound student of rhetoric now writing in America” (p. 144). Modern rhetoricians might dispute this claim today, but there is little doubt that among those names most frequently mentioned as important in modern rhetorical studies, Kenneth Burke is invariably near or at the top of the list.1 Although his writings are often difficult to follow, the richness of his thinking is unquestionable.
Burke (1950) used the words “new rhetoric” to describe his approach in his book A Rhetoric of Motives. With this expression, Burke was referring to a rediscovery of those aspects of everyday language that have rhetorical force—that are moving and persuasive—but that we often ignore, mainly because we tend to separate the rhetorical aspects of discourse from its other features. We have an unjustifiable tendency, he believed, to treat some texts as rhetorical and to treat others as though they lack persuasive ambitions. Burke challenged this dichotomy and sought to convince his audiences that all discourse has the property of rhetoricality to one degree or another.2 In other words, because Burke was interested in the rhetorical dimensions of all forms of discourse, he rejected the notion that only particular kinds of language, such as political speeches, should be regarded as rhetorical.3 This is an idea that began early in his career and that he developed and refined until his death. One consequence of Burke’s approach is that rhetoric can be seen to occur in all forms of language, and thus defining rhetoric as a separate and specific mode of discourse becomes a challenge. But the solution, of course, is not to focus on particular kinds of discourse but on specific properties of discourse itself. For this reason, Burke offered many definitions of rhetoric as his understanding of those aspects of discourse that he claimed exerted a rhetorical or hortatory appeal grew increasingly more numerous.4 In fact, it is good to keep in mind that Burke’s approach does not entail a redefinition of rhetoric, so much as it constitutes an expansion of our understanding of rhetoric.
Burke covers everything from proverbs to prose to propaganda in his efforts to make sense of the rhetorical properties of discourse. As a result of his wide-ranging analyses, a common criticism of Burke is that by enlarging the field of rhetoric, he is open to a conventional philosophical critique: if everything is X, then nothing is X.5 Translated into language suitable for our present discussion, if Burke sees all discourse as rhetorical, then perhaps no discourse is rhetorical. After all, in seeking out the rhetorical properties of all forms of discourse, some commentators wonder if Burke has not undermined the rhetorician’s claim that there is something “special” in those linguistic forms that endeavour to move an audience to one opinion or another, or to take one course of action and ignore a different path. Why study a field called “rhetoric” if it is synonymous with the field we call “discourse?”
In fact, the criticism is important, for when definitional boundaries are eroded, the integrity of a specifiable domain can potentially be damaged.6 On the other hand, how boundaries are established is often a matter of convention—and perhaps even prejudice—and expanding those boundaries does not necessarily destroy whatever it was those boundaries formerly guarded. When Marshall McLuhan decided to analyze comic books and advertising as important parts of the media environment, he provoked many critics to cry foul and claim that he was attacking the boundary that separated true literature from crass commercial texts. They complained, in other words, that those boundaries should not be breached, and they based that argument on the strength of their belief that one should never mix high and low culture. As you know, McLuhan’s approach prevailed in the end, and cultural studies has been richer for his success. Similarly, Burke’s determination to address the rhetorical properties of all forms of discourse helped make it possible to study newer forms of representation (such as visual communication) without abandoning the theories and concepts first developed by the ancient rhetoricians. Things should not lose their inherent interest for scholars just because they are matters of everyday life.
Interest does not necessarily equal endorsement, though, and in studying the inherently rhetorical qualities present in all forms of discourse, Burke was not adopting the naive view that persuasion was always good or that it was never used for disreputable purposes. As far back as 1931, Burke was advising people to be on guard against rhetoric—to avoid being taken in by the clever and sometimes deceitful use of language. This was motivated precisely by his expanded understanding of the essential rhetoricality of discourse, for he was aware of the power of rhetoric as a tool that might be used to promote ideas that ran counter to the public interest. Burke (1939) published “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” an influential essay that used the tools of rhetorical analysis to trace Hitler’s rise to power in 1930s Germany.7 He was one of the first to look at Hitler’s speeches not solely to condemn them but to try to understand why they might be persuasive in particular contexts. Tragically, hate speech is often persuasive, and simply dismissing it without trying to understand what makes it successful is to choose to be deliberately ignorant about things of considerable importance. One could say that it is difficult to be on guard against hate speech if we are unable to recognize it. This is a point we would do well to bear in mind today.
In broadening his understanding of rhetorical strategies, Burke (1931) began to promote the idea that rhetoric is “the use of language in such a way as to produce a desired impression upon the reader or hearer” (p. 210). In other words, Burke recognized that as a concept, rhetoric referred to the power of language to bring about effects in the non-linguistic realm, that language can have a considerable influence on how we think and act and what we believe. Hence, his expanded notion of rhetoric went far beyond the consequences of persuasion as an abstract concept to include things such as religious instruction, the power of myth, advice on how to care for the body, child-rearing, and educational practices. For Burke, then, rhetoric is a central part of our lives and includes fairy tales, falling in love, magical incantations, heated arguments—any form of discourse where language is used “to produce a desired impression upon the reader or hearer” (p. 210). Thus, Burke hoped that by increasing our understanding of rhetoric, we would also gain greater knowledge of the human condition.
One of the things that distinguishes Burke from his predecessors, and even his contemporaries, is his interest in the subject of motive. Burke was concerned with more than the mechanics of persuasion; he also had a deep and abiding interest in what drives us, or what motivates us, especially what motivates us to engage in persuasive discourse. He also possessed an equally intense interest in the ways that different motives can themselves motivate different rhetorical appeals; that is, we make strategic choices in regard to the means by which we endeavour to use the power of language to achieve our goals. These concerns led Burke to reconceptualize the idea of persuasion by framing it as a mode of identification or, as he preferred, “consubstantiation.” Thus, Burke suggests that when trying to appeal to someone to gain their consent, you must first choose the appropriate appeal before making a gesture toward identification—or consubstantiality. Identifying with your audience—what Aristotle would have called pathos—is, therefore, a significant subject for Burke. The rhetorician J. Killingsworth (2005), who was greatly influenced by Burke, clarifies this idea of identification/consubstantiation with an example:
A politician claims to have grown up as a farmer when he addresses an audience of farmers. He appeals to the common ground (sub-stance) of past experience in order to close the distance between himself and the people he seeks to please. Appeals always involve such acts of transformation and substitution. The politician becomes a farmer for the moment; or he substitutes an image of the farm boy from days past for the present image of the politician that stands before the eyes of the farmers. The identification depends upon the power of the appeal to close the distance. (p. 3)
Killingsworth’s example, which he derives directly from Burke, returns us to Aristotle’s idea of seeking the available means of persuasion for a given situation. In this example, that situation is a politician’s stump speech, and thus the traditional rhetorical overtones are obvious. But you could easily imagine a less overt situation, in which the speaker seeks a more attenuated or modest degree of compliance and yet still makes an appeal that involves a kind of transformative or substitutional movement. Let me give you a simple example. Not long ago, a friend told me that she had watched a film she knew I would enjoy because it was “boring and convoluted.” Here she made an appeal to me, “You should watch this film,” by trying to establish a sense of identification, “I know you well enough to know what sorts of films appeal to you,” and couched her appeal in humor, “It is boring and convoluted.” To persuade your audience, then, it is good to know your audience, to have some sense of the ways in which you and they are consubstantial, and then seek out the appropriate modality (e.g., humour, seriousness, pity) in which to frame your appeal.
Some of these ideas may seem a bit peculiar at the moment, but things will be made clearer shortly. For now, keep in mind as we travel through the field of Burkology—yes, his influence has been of such significance that the field of Burkology does indeed exist—that we are moving into territory rather different from most of the previous rhetoricians. Take Marshall McLuhan. Although Burke was critical of McLuhan’s work, the two men shared similar interests and even expressed themselves in similar styles of writing. Similar to McLuhan, Burke could be “telegraphic,” compressing a great deal of information into short and pithy expressions, and he also ranged widely across vast tracts of intellectual territory. Sometimes Burke compiled lists of key ideas in his books without an obvious organization or plan to help the reader along, as did McLuhan. We need to keep our minds open to Burke’s eccentricities—much as we need to be open to the kaleidoscope of ideas we find in McLuhan. I happen to believe that part of the appeal of both men comes from the esoteric nature of their ideas and modes of expression. Similar to McLuhan, Burke is a challenging but illuminating thinker and writer.
Before I offer a brief overview of the biographical details of Burke’s life, I want to add one final thing regarding Burke and symbolic language.
Burke says we act from complex motives, which is hardly surprising, but the way that he embraced this notion led to a great expansion of the very idea of rhetoric and persuasion. In his book A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke (1950) wrote, “Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And wherever there is ‘meaning’ there is ‘persuasion’” (p. 172). This observation often strikes people as highly problematic because it appears to suggest that all communication is rhetorical. The problem, of course, is that this is precisely what he is saying.8 Burke says that we are symbol-using and symbol-misusing animals, and he sees our symbol use as the defining feature of our humanity. We use language to deal with or respond to situations. People assess the “human situation” and shape their attitudes by constructing their conceptions of the world around them. In that process, they perceive certain functions or relationships as either friendly or unfriendly, necessary or unnecessary; they weigh their potential against probable opposition; and they select their strategies for coping with that situation. These strategies or stylized answers are symbols that reflect attitudes.
Let me make this plain. You are now in a human situation, whatever you are doing, and you need to shape an appropriate attitude to it by constructing the world as you see it. Your response might be boredom, confusion, pleasure, or indifference—any one of many possible attitudinal responses. But when you seek to formulate your response symbolically, your words will betray your attitude. You might ask a question of someone that shows interest, or you might ask a question that shows annoyance. You might decide to read a newspaper and, thereby, show your frustration, boredom, or indifference. Any form of symbolic activity that we engage in, Burke insists, carries with it a display of our attitudes. We react to our environments symbolically.
Burke refers to us as symbol-using and symbol-misusing animals, but what constitutes the misuse of symbols? Burke distinguishes us as creatures who inhabit both a realm of symbolicity and a domain of animality; that is, we are embodied beings—possessing animality—but capable of uniquely human communication—symbolicity. Moreover, he says, our animality is always present during times of deliberation. Burke sees communication as the union of the symbolic and the animalistic, a conjoining of the realms of symbolicity and animality (there are obvious hints here of Aristotle seeing rhetoric as the counterpart of dialectic). Hence, when we are moved by language—when the hortatory aspect of discourse cuts off some avenues of interpretation in order to direct us to others—we are being moved (a bodily metaphor) by our competence with symbols and by the prompting of our biological nature. When someone suddenly calls out an expletive (e.g., “F—— you!”), your reaction may be both visceral (bodily) and intellectual. Or, perhaps you are presented with a food that, though entirely nourishing, turns your stomach. Such so-called psychogenic reactions show how a rhetorical force is contained in objects, words, and images—all symbols that can also have an influence on our bodily states. Hunger, sexual arousal, anger, and embarrassment are all bodily states motivated by external stimuli, some of which might be regarded as highly symbolic. Burke, therefore, understands that symbol usage defines us in important respects, but he is also keen to remind us of the importance of our bodily nature.
Some details of Burke’s life will help contextualize his theories. Several incidents shaped his thinking, and knowing about them will help illuminate the forces that contributed to the development of his intellectual interests. Burke led a rather interesting life.
Kenneth Burke was born in Pittsburgh in 1897. His father, James, who held a clerical position at Westinghouse Electric Company, ignited his son’s love of literature. James was a book-loving man who submitted manuscripts (mainly short stories) to the famous Saturday Evening Post on a regular basis. Although the Post never published any of James Burke’s work, Kenneth remembered his father’s literary ambitions fondly, referring often to his father’s efforts to become a recognized writer as important to his own development as a person of letters. It was not the publications that mattered, it was the love of language.
High school was not entirely to Kenneth Burke’s liking—indeed, most schooling fell short of being appealing to him. His problems in high school were more temperamental than scholastic; he said he was an unpopular student, an early illustration of what we might call a geek or nerd. He hung out mostly with other literary types and generally avoided sports and other activities that did not advance his love of books and ideas. He read novels and poetry in equal measure, writing and publishing a few poems of his own. By his graduation in 1916, Burke “had taken six years of Latin, two years of Greek, and had begun studying French and German” (Rountree, 1987, p. 20). This interest in languages allowed him access to the original works of the people who most interested him, including Aristotle, Cicero, and Marx. Despite not enjoying the day-to-day life of high school all that much, Burke managed to get a good deal from his years in the classroom because he was willing to invest the time and energy required to make them productive.
One summer while he was still in high school, Burke took a job in a Pittsburgh factory. He did not like the work. In fact, he found the experience so distressing that he developed anti-technology views and became even more determined to carve out a career for himself in the realm of literature, away from the drudgery of the factory. Burke was not entirely opposed to technology, the sort of person Neil Postman calls a “technophobe,” but nor was he a technophile, someone who loves technology for technology’s sake. He fell between those two positions, believing that whereas technological innovation was important, his own career path would steer clear of the technological world.9 In some respects, Kenneth Burke was close to a modern-day environmentalist, someone who recognizes the necessity of technology in infrastructure (clean water, reliable power, and so on) but who is equally committed to a simpler, more rustic lifestyle.
When Burke finished high school, he moved in with relatives who lived in New Jersey and took a job as a bank runner in New York City. This job lasted for only three months, after which he decided to go to university. Burke chose Ohio State University but completed only three months there. His departure from the campus did not reflect problems with his intelligence or aptitude, but rather his impatience with finding a niche in which he could positively nurture his penetrating if idiosyncratic views of life and art. Once he left Ohio State University and was outside of the university system, however, Burke grew restless, and after a period of deep reflection, he decided to give university a second try. Post-secondary tuition was far cheaper in Burke’s time than it is today, and the competition for placements was less intense than what students encounter now. Hence, when Burke decided to return to university, it was only a matter of deciding where and when. He applied to Columbia and was accepted.
Unfortunately, this second attempt at higher education fared only marginally better, and Burke’s stay at Columbia was also short. The main difficulty was that Burke tired quickly at having to work within a methodical and linear curriculum. Burke had always been inclined to read voraciously in several different fields (and languages) at once, and he was uncomfortable being restrained by the conventions and regulations of a predetermined curriculum. In addition, he felt his courses were not sufficiently challenging and decided that he should take more advanced classes. Although he was still an undergraduate, he approached the university administration with an application to take graduate courses.
To his dismay, he was again thwarted by the rules of the university when the administration refused his request.10 The funny thing about the administration’s refusal was that from early on in his time at Columbia, Burke had made a considerable impression on the professors who taught him. Indeed, he was recognized by his teachers as a brilliant young scholar, and although the administration barred him from enrolling prematurely in graduate classes, certain people dropped hints that Burke was precisely the sort of intellectual the university should be seeking to add to its faculty. Despite such positive encouragement, however, Burke left college for the second time. He wrote to his friend Malcolm Cowley11 that he had become “horrified at the realization of what college can do to a man of promise. … I don’t want to be a virtuoso,” he lamented, “I want to be a … genius” (Foss, Foss, & Trapp, 2002, p. 188).
No longer in college and now unemployed, Burke considered the possibility of moving back home. If he returned to the family home, however, his parents would have to support him financially until he either found work or returned to school, and he relished neither option. So, Burke made an interesting proposition to his father, asking if James would consider paying Kenneth’s living expenses so he could move to New York City, where he would try his hand at writing full time. He explained to his father that this arrangement would probably be cheaper in the long run than him returning home, since his chances of finding work were much better in New York than in Pittsburgh. Moreover, if he moved back home and remained unemployed, his father and mother would not only end up having to pay for his food but his mother would likely find herself doing his laundry and cleaning up after him. In other words, his mother and father would be forced to bear all the expenses that come with having a child, especially an adult child, living at home. Therefore, Kenneth argued, since his father was going to have to pay either way, why not choose the less expensive alternative and pay the rent that would allow Kenneth to have his own New York apartment? He pointed out that he would strive to save his father’s money by living as frugally as possible.
James obviously had confidence in his son’s abilities, for he agreed to the plan. Kenneth Burke moved to New York. He took a small apartment in the Village, where he adopted a fashionable bohemian lifestyle, living the life of a struggling artist and, to a certain extent, flouting many of society’s traditional conventions.12 And struggle he did. Burke was intent on becoming a writer, but to live up to the bargain he had struck with his father, he had to live a life of poverty to survive. His New York apartment was a dark garret where he reportedly survived by eating oatmeal and milk twice a day. It was an austere existence, but Burke supplemented his meagre diet by nourishing friendships with an astonishing range of writers, including Cowley, and poets such as Hart Crane, e.e. cummings, and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Intellectuals and iconoclasts all. Burke joined forces with some of the most important literary minds in the history of American letters of that era. This collection of writers and intellectuals, all part of the modernist movement in literature and the arts, played an indispensable part in shaping Burke’s intellectual life and fuelling his desire to develop a successful literary career. But international events loomed on the horizon, and shortly after settling into his New York home, World War I started. His new circle of literary colleagues was dispersed. Burke himself was ineligible for the draft, having failed the military’s medical examination, so he spent the war working in a factory.
When the war ended, Burke restarted his plan to become a writer. First, however, he married Lillian Batterham in 1919. They spent the first years of married life in New York, where Burke continued to write and Lillian gave birth to two daughters. With the arrival of their third daughter, however, the Burkes left the city, complaining that they were beginning to find New York too polluted. They bought a dilapidated home on seventy acres in the western hills of New Jersey in the small village of Andover. Burke enjoyed Andover’s rustic nature and soon began restoring his rural home. This was a considerable enterprise that went on for years, but one that Burke seems to have thoroughly enjoyed. In 1928, he expanded his land holdings by purchasing an adjoining acreage, and he built a dam on a creek that traversed his property to create a lake for swimming. He also built a tennis court and erected additional buildings for guests. His dislike for technology continued, however, and for twenty years he refused to install running water in his house. In fact, it was not until 1949 that the Burke compound even had electricity. But while this was no doubt a challenging time, it was less of an inconvenience for Kenneth than Lillian because he continued to maintain an apartment in New York during this period. Kenneth would sometimes spend entire weeks in the city, leaving Lillian to care for the three children in a home without running water or electricity. Kenneth would return to his wife and children on weekends.
His literary career was at least paying the bills, as Burke supported his family with translating and editing jobs. In 1921, he managed an important advance in his fortunes by securing a position as an editor at a magazine called The Dial, for it was largely through his association with this magazine that Burke was able to finally set his literary course.13 Not only did his work at The Dial provide him with opportunities for meeting some of the leading lights in American (and, indeed, international) writing circles, it also allowed him a certain amount of time for his creative energies to blossom. During his time working as an editor at The Dial, Burke (1924) published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled The White Oxen and Other Stories. While at The Dial, he also published numerous stories, reviews, and essays.
When the magazine folded in 1929, Burke went through a period of spiritual dislocation, describing the time as a depressing episode during which he felt lost and disconnected. His years at The Dial, he wrote, had been a magical period in his life, and without it he was unsure which way to turn. However, two important occurrences during this time had a significant impact on him.
The first occurrence was a series of editorial and writing positions. Burke was hired to work for the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, where he researched and wrote on drug addiction.14 He also landed a position doing editorial work for the Bureau of Social Hygiene.15 Given Burke’s temperament and literary interests, these were mainly routine sorts of jobs—especially for a writer of his talents—and so it is unsurprising to note that he was far more energized by his success in gaining an additional position as a reviewer and music critic for the Nation and the New Republic. Working for these two periodicals was good for intellectual stimulation, and just two years after The Dial closed its doors, Burke (1931) published his first book of literary criticism, Counter-Statement. It was in this volume that he began the move toward what would become his allegiance to a form of rhetorical criticism that he would sharpen and expand for the rest of his career.
The second occurrence was of a more personal nature. To put it bluntly, Burke fell out of love with his wife, Lillian, and in love with his wife’s sister, Elizabeth. No doubt there are interesting psychological theories that might be invoked to account for this conduct but the upshot was simple: in 1933, after fourteen years of marriage and three daughters, Burke left Lillian to marry her sister, Elizabeth. Kenneth and Elizabeth had two sons.
Burke recognized that his behaviour was not entirely moral, at least not by his own critical standards. He was a man in a state of turmoil, and to deal with the chaos and confusion produced by his decision to leave one woman for her sister, Burke (1932) published a sort of confessional, semi-autobiographical novel called Towards a Better Life. This book comprises a series of letters from the protagonist to another man—his rival for the love of a woman. Although some commentators have said the novel’s events are so different from Burke’s own circumstances that its autobiographical elements are incidental, Burke suggested in interviews that the central theme of the story touched deeply on the problems he was experiencing and that writing the story saved him from needing to see a psychiatrist. The plot does not follow the actual events of Burke’s own life faithfully—the novel develops along the lines of a love triangle—but the general theme of emotional infidelity closely mirrors his circumstances.
A great deal more could be said about someone who leaves his wife to marry her sister, but let us leave Burke’s somewhat sordid personal life behind us and turn back to more academic concerns: what other influences are relevant to a consideration of his ideas about rhetoric? One thing worth mentioning is that for most of his life, Burke avoided partisan or party politics, with periodic exceptions. Like many intellectuals of the depression years in America, Burke began a flirtation with Communism that stemmed from his frustration with the government’s apparent inability to deal with the unemployment sweeping the nation. But his attempts to ingratiate himself with leading figures in the American communist movement were ill-fated. Talks he gave at workers’ congresses were too intellectual to be well-received. In addition, Burke was disgusted by the Stalinist purges, the Moscow show trials of 1936–1938, and the Russian invasion of Finland in 1939. Though he remained a life-long liberal, of a sort, and a strong anti-fascist, Burke generally kept overt political points of view from creeping into his literary work.
His teaching career began in 1937 (when he was 40) at the New School for Social Research in New York, where he worked as a lecturer. Then from 1943 until 1961, he held a teaching post at Bennington College in Vermont; he also enjoyed visiting appointments at Harvard, Northwestern, the University of Chicago, and Princeton. His home institution, Bennington, conferred an honorary doctorate on Burke in 1966—it was an honorary doctorate because Burke never attended graduate school and never earned a traditional MA or PhD.
From this point forward, Burke published a series of important volumes.16 His work crossed the borders of scholarship from English literature to history, from psychology to philosophy, and from the humanities to the classics. He was in every sense an autodidact, a self-taught genius, and he worked constantly on honing Burkology. When his wife passed away in 1969, he continued to live at his farm surrounded by his children and grandchildren (one grandson, incidentally, was the singer Harry Chapin). Kenneth Burke died on November 19, 1993.
As Burke developed his ideas regarding the inherent rhetoricality of all forms of discourse, he was also compelled to define and then redefine what he meant by rhetoric as his ideas evolved. Hence, I will commence my account of Burke’s theories about rhetoric with yet another one of his several definitions.
One of Burke’s (1950) most well-known definitions of rhetoric is “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents” (p. 41). Burke acknowledges in his own words that he may be “straining the conception of rhetoric to the breaking point” (p. 40) with this formulation, recognizing that his definition could be considered too broad for some people. However, his intention is more precise than the phrase might at first reveal. To get a sense of how extensive his definition really is, consider a typical situation you might find yourself in. In other words, what might be an example of a human agent using words to form attitudes (or induce action) in other human agents, and how would that example function rhetorically?
Imagine that you find yourself in trouble and calling for help. In such a situation, Burke would say that you are using human speech in a completely realistic and practical fashion. Your call for help will be “prejudiced,” Burke explains, insofar as you are going beyond mere description to hortatory discourse. In other words, you are not just providing people with information about your circumstances (though such information might be included in your call for help), you are trying to motivate them to act. When you call out, “Help, I am stuck in the elevator!” you are not simply informing people of a fact; rather, you are trying to move people (literally and metaphorically) with words—after all, you need help. A call for help, then, is clearly a rhetorical practice insofar as it requires “the use of words by a human agent to form an attitude [an attitude of urgency] and to induce actions [take steps toward a rescue] in other human agents” (Burke, 1950, p. 41). Note the relationship between attitude (urgency, in this case) and action (offering help, effecting a rescue, coming to assistance). People are motivated by words to form attitudes that are essential to the kind of action they subsequently pursue.
This is just one situation that illustrates how using words to move people to action—or to move people to change their attitude or adopt an attitude you seek to cultivate—is logically expressed in the notion of rhetoric. Burke, however, wants to take the idea of rhetoric much further. Thus, in a famous phrase from A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke (1950) further suggests that rhetoric
is rooted in an essential function of language itself, a function that is wholly realistic, and is continually born anew; the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols. (p. 43)
This definition, which is regularly cited in most texts explaining Burke’s approach—at least as often as the earlier definition—also captures the spirit of his fundamental notion of the relation between rhetoric, language, symbols, and human nature. It further suggests that in the general activity of our lives, we are (metaphorically) calling for help all the time; that is, we are seeking to induce attitudinal changes in others, just as we are also frequently seeking to motivate them to act. We can also go a little further in Burke’s (1950) text to find a couple of key points that are not always included alongside his famous definition of rhetoric and tease out a bit more information about the way Burke understands rhetoric.
Immediately following the passage cited above, Burke points out that, in their own way, many disciplines investigate the persuasive use of language.17 For example, anthropologists are interested in the study of magic and witchcraft, both of which are fundamentally concerned with persuading people. The shaman may cast a spell, thereby using symbols to try to convince someone that their attitude is incorrect or that they can adjust an attitude to cure an ailment—the words have the power to alter the course of their lives. Magical language is, in other words, thoroughly persuasive and, therefore, rhetorical, for magic and witchcraft are certainly concerned with persuasion, symbols, and human nature. Burke, however, does not want the anthropologist to toss out the terminology of their discipline; he only wants recognition of how far and how deeply our forms of everyday language are concerned with seeking to induce co-operation in beings that, by nature, respond to symbols. Once again, some critics have suggested that Burke is too expansive, that in bringing rhetoric into focus as a central preoccupation of the shaman, the priest, and the spiritualist, he is making it hard to keep our eye on the distinctive quality of those discourses ordinarily studied in rhetoric. Burke (1950) recognizes this concern and has an interesting response:
Are we haggling over a term? In one sense, yes. We are offering a rationale intended to show how far one might systematically extend the term “rhetoric.” In this respect, we are haggling over a term; for we must persist in tracking down the function of that term. But to note the ingredient of rhetoric lurking in such anthropologist’s terms as “magic” and “witchcraft” is not to ask that the anthropologist replace his words with ours. We are certainly not haggling over terms in that sense. The term “rhetoric” is no substitute for “magic,” “witchcraft,” “socialization,” “communication,” and so on. But the term rhetoric designates a function which is present in the areas variously covered by those other terms. (p. 44)
This explanation makes Burke a bit clearer, I think. Rhetoric is not only a type of discourse; rather, rhetoric is an important function of various kinds of language (and for Burke, this will eventually become all forms of language). More importantly, he clearly frames the persuasive use of language as a mode of activity that is peculiar to all forms of discourse and symbolicity. That is, there is a rhetoric to the use of magic and witchcraft, but there are equally rhetorical dimensions to socialization and communication. As Burke (1950) suggests, we need to see “what kinds of subject matter not traditionally labeled ‘rhetoric’ should … also fall under this head” (p. 46).
Let me go a bit further with the ways in which Burke proceeds with his modifications to conventional rhetoric. We now know that rhetoric is a function of discourse—or, more properly, it is one of the functions of language, what some writers influenced by Burke have called its “rhetoricality.” For his part, Burke presents multiple forms of discourse and then, in a rather unsystematic way, shows us their rhetorical qualities. To proceed, I will follow a line of reasoning that is not necessarily Burke’s own thought process, starting with his ideas about identification and then coming back to the idea of the functions of rhetoric.
Burke makes persuasion synonymous with identification or consubstantiation. According to his view of language, our first aim in confronting human situations that demand a symbolic response is to frame our response in such a fashion as to induce compliance from others. And the way that we seek to induce compliance is by trying to get others to identify with us and our view of things. In an alien situation, you probably do not want to stand out, and thus you will seek a means for demonstrating your essential similarity with others. Burke (1950) writes:
A is not identical with his colleague, B. But insofar as their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he may identify himself with B even when their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is persuaded to believe so. (p. 20)
The central thing here is that Burke is using the notion of identification, or consubstantiality, to suggest how our interests might overlap and thereby render us similar (i.e., help us to identify with one another). He chooses the term consubstantial because he recognizes that we are not of the same substance but we are joined nonetheless.18 Two communication students, for instance, are similar in many respects, but in an important respect, that of being communication students, they are indeed consubstantial. From the point of view of a formal public talk, we seek to present ourselves to audiences in ways that make our presentation acceptable. And because we are inclined to be more easily persuaded by those we perceive to be like us, our rhetorical practices often rise or fall on the success of our efforts at identification with our audience. As Burke (1950) says, “you persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (p. 55). We cannot persuade someone we are unable to communicate with, and so in seeking a means of communication—trying to find a common vocabulary, language, or set of gestures—we are also seeking some form of commonality. Hence, persuasion involves the effort to find out how we are alike, consubstantial, and identifiable as similar. According to Burke, this process of identification is crucial in understanding the rhetoricality of all discourse.
Identification can be a complex process, then, and in Burke’s thinking it has three distinct but overlapping functions. The first function is when one uses identification as a simple means to an end, an instrumental identification motivated by an elementary and usually immediate goal. This is most commonly seen when someone tries to establish a bond of common cause with others for the sole purpose of gaining some sort of compliance, with little or no regard for ethical considerations. This is not to condemn instrumental identification for being concerned with the practicalities of the situation but to point out that it is one of the forms of identification that is pursued for purely pragmatic interests. For instance, marketers try to identify important characteristics in a target audience for the purposes of making a sale. Or, to return to Killingworth’s (2005) example, a politician may relate a story of experiencing extreme hardship while campaigning in an area devastated by a natural disaster in order to win votes. From the individual level to the institutional level (e.g., advertising campaigns), identification of this elementary and instrumental variety is commonly used to achieve a practical end.
A second form of identification involves alignment with another person in the interest of opposing a third person. This is identification by antithesis and occurs when two agents find common ground in their opposition to a third agent. We sometimes use the expression “strange bedfellows” to mean the same thing as Burke intends here. You might not like someone but still decide that you can persuade them to adopt a common attitude against another person. Countries can do this as well, forming alliances of convenience to oppose a mutual enemy. On the individual level, people will often put aside their mutual dislike for a momentary gain achievable by joining forces; family alliances are a good example of this practice. Hence, people (or larger entities, such corporations or political states) can be described as consubstantial to the extent that they “share” a dislike for, or opposition to, a third. Such bonds tend to be weak because they are normally short-lived. Indeed, when temporary alliances of this kind are formed, it is common that the participants are aware of the convenience of their agreement, and they may even openly acknowledge the awkwardness of the arrangement. In addition, when the point of commonality is a mutually antagonistic attitude to another, the strength of the union may not survive the influence of those forces that normally lead to division.
The third function of identification Burke discusses is invisible identification. Perhaps this is not the most well-chosen phrasing, but Burke’s point is rather simple. Insofar as it entails symbolic representation rather than overt discussion, this mode of identification can be arrived at even when no open acknowledgement of the connection is given. For instance, imagine a corporation that has found itself on the receiving end of public scrutiny over its tendency to hire men over women. In order to persuade the public that the company is more egalitarian than its critics argue, the corporate executives deliberately place as many women on stage as possible at the annual stakeholders’ meeting, even if the number of women they publicly showcase misrepresents the company’s overall hiring history. The executives are not overtly stating that they hire plenty of women; in fact, they will not draw attention to the presence of the women at the front of the room at all. Rather, they hope that by keeping things “invisible,” they will persuade their audience that the company is responsive to the need to achieve gender balance and that it values the contributions of women. This is not a statement in the traditional sense, since no words are uttered. But the appearance of the women is nonetheless meant to “say” something about the company and establish a bond of commonality with the larger society.
Some kinds of consubstantiality are beyond our control, while others are actively cultivated. If you have siblings, you are (literally) consubstantial with them; you likely identify with them strongly, seeing their interests as ones you share. Family bonds can indeed be strong. Some writers have suggested that race and religious affiliation may be an inherent form of identification, though in the latter case, some people actively choose their faith rather than inherit it from their parents. Some religions, however, regard children as belonging to the religion of their parents; children inherit religion just as they might inherit eye colour. In other words, things get complicated when we try to catalogue the various ways in which we are consubstantially identified via a specifiable essence, such as biology, nationality, or religion.
It is easier to identify those forms of consubstantial identification that are produced in the process of actively seeking out reasons to ascribe commonality. People who are members of a student body such as a school of communication, for example, are consubstantial in a very basic sense. So, too, people might choose to join clubs or organizations that reflect their interests or passions and, in doing so, form close bonds with like-minded people. We see many subcultures forming around particular and sometimes narrow interests relating to style, music, literature, food, and so on. We might think of these sorts of associations as relatively new and connected to the rise of online communities, but this is not the case. People have formed bonds of association based on external cues and habits going back centuries. And sometimes these modes of identification can be very strong. In the early 1960s, for instance, there were several skirmishes between young men who identified strongly with the fashion and style of two different musical genres. The so-called mods and rockers identified sufficiently with those people who shared their musical preference that they were willing to get into fights defending the superiority of Bo Diddley (the rockers) over The Who (the mods). Consubstantiality, even when it arises from a cultural preference such as one’s taste in music or fashion, can be a compelling rhetorical force.19
Burke sees rhetoric as serving different functions, and one function that provides a kind of template for all the others is the way that rhetoric names or defines a situation. This is an idea that may bring to mind the work of Erving Goffman (1959), who wrote in his famous book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life that people coming to a social encounter need to “define the situation” (p. 1) to discover the appropriate social role for that encounter. Burke, it turns out, was an important influence on Goffman, who cited Burke’s work numerous times in The Presentation of Self. Burke, however, develops the idea of defining or naming a situation in slightly different terms, for he is interested in the way we use language to solve the problems created by different situations. And language does this by persuading us to adopt certain attitudes or choose specific courses of action. This can happen at a conscious or unconscious level, as we have already seen. In addition, because Burke’s interest in language is really a reflection of his broader interest in symbolic behaviour, his idea of the way we encounter and are influenced by different kinds of symbols (including language, of course) is both novel and provocative. In this passage from A Rhetoric of Motives, for example, Burke (1950) presents a situation in which persuasion transpires on more than one level:
We could observe that even the medical equipment of a doctor’s office is not to be judged purely for its diagnostic usefulness, but also has a function in the rhetoric of medicine. Whatever it is as apparatus, it also appeals as imagery; and if a man has been treated to fulsome series of tappings, scrutinizings, and listenings, with the aid of various scopes, meters, and gauges, he may feel content to have participated as a patient in such histrionic action though absolutely no material thing has been done for him, whereas he might count himself cheated if he were give a real cure but without the pageantry. (p. 171)
Here the situation is defined and named in a precise and commanding manner by the display of equipment that functions to persuade the patient of the legitimacy, authenticity, and, ultimately, cultural power of the doctor. According to Burke, the pageantry—that is, the very process of being assessed with the various implements in the doctor’s examination room—is such a highly valued procedure that some people might feel swindled if the doctor were simply to prescribe a cure without the ceremony of the medical exam. While you may not have previously thought about the appearance of a doctor’s examination room in these terms—a situation in which you are being “spoken to” by the medical devices—I suspect that the point is apparent, nonetheless. It is relatively simple to understand that while the arrangement of the equipment in a doctor’s examination room serves the necessary practical function of making the medical examination possible, it also serves to position you as a patient.20 The display of instruments attests to both the solemnity of the occasion and the expertise of the physician. The equipment displayed in other offices—say, an architect’s office—also provides for appropriate subject positions, just as the “equipment” in a synagogue, church, or mosque accomplishes the same task. A large library might serve to persuade visitors that you are a learned scholar.
Burke suggests that while rhetoric appears in places such as the assemblage that constitutes the doctor’s office, persuasion is made apparent with the display of other iconic objects and devices, such as charts, graphs, formulas, maps, and manuals. Each of these constitutes a piece of the equipment needed for carrying out specific social roles, so perhaps it is unsurprising that Burke also recognizes rhetoric, in his words, as a form of equipment for living. After all, it is rhetoric that shapes and changes attitudes, that convinces and prods us to make choices, and that ultimately helps us to define and name the situations in which we find ourselves. In more straightforward terms, we might say that rhetoric provides us with a way of orienting ourselves to different situations. The equipment in the doctor’s office is a good example, but Burke goes further by suggesting that the use of terms for naming and defining other people can also be important in this respect. To refer to someone as your friend as opposed to your colleague, acquaintance, fellow student, co-worker, or associate defines the situation of your relationship in a particular fashion and predisposes you and others in that situation to a specific orientation. The invocation of the simple word friend is a rhetorical act that provides assistance to others (your audience) in assessing the terms of the thoughts, actions, emotions, and attitudes that they should deem appropriate for interpreting the situation. The first time you introduce someone as your friend completely changes the situation of your relationship. Hence, Burke’s ideas about the function of rhetoric for defining situations move from the very large, macroscopic level to the remarkably small, microscopic level.
The idea that rhetoric is an aspect of all forms of discourse also suggests that there are certain patterns of rhetoricality evident in conversations, speeches, prayers, and salutations that help us identify the rhetorical elements at work. Indeed, Burke spent a lot of time discussing form, and it is clear that he is also often referring to social and cultural pattern. Form is a central consideration in his treatment of rhetoric, so we will spend a bit of time looking at his approach.
In Language as Symbolic Action, Burke (1966) explains that “form and content cannot be separated” (p. 487). This claim is advanced by many people schooled in modern theories of literary analysis and in various communication theories, so the basic premise is probably familiar. We are often trained in the idea that binary relations such as form and content are old-fashioned ways of thinking and that we should be far more dialectical in our understanding of the social functions of various forms and patterns.21 It is one thing to simply claim that form and content should never be completely separated, it is another thing to demonstrate instances where that separation is impossible. Burke provides a procedure for doing this by showing how form and content can be brought into contact. Burke’s efforts to offer just such a demonstration provide an interesting scheme for conceptualizing form.
Burke relies on an idea that is easily grasped but has far-reaching implications. He says that form produces effects in the audience by developing an idea in such a way that it both arouses and then satisfies expectations. This argument suggests that we are frequently conscious of form in advance of our awareness of specific content. For instance, if I were to ask you, “Have you heard the one about the man with the giant orange head?” the form of my question would prepare you for a joke, and thus, in an elementary sense, your curiosity would be aroused. According to Burke, it is the form that this question takes that arouses your expectation. In other words, the aspect of my question that achieves arousal is the basic form, “Have you heard the one about?” Whatever comes after the word about is, in a sense, peripheral to the rhetoricality of the form. When I tell you the joke and reach the punch line, your arousal will be satisfied, hopefully, with a laugh. The form arouses the audience with its invitational structure and is made complete by satisfying the expectation initially excited by the form. Form arouses first and satisfies second.
Burke viewed this idea of arousal-expectation as a way of rethinking a number of important theories of narrative, including ideas first proposed by Aristotle. Burke’s critique of Aristotle is interesting, but I want to focus on the main way that Burke conceptualizes form and narrative: his argument that form is often an unseen aspect of a text, whether we are considering a fictional narrative, tragic poem, formulaic joke, or complex academic paper. Form works best when it works surreptitiously because our capacity for arousal can be diminished when the form is too blatant, obvious, or self-referential. Form should be inconspicuous, even as it serves an important function in defining a situation, such as when, for example, it establishes the essential elements for a particular kind of narrative genre. This does not mean that form can ever be entirely invisible, only that it can often work beneath the immediate surface of the text.
As an illustration of some of these ideas, consider a scene from an old-fashioned Western movie that shows a posse riding out of town to rescue a beleaguered hero trapped under gunfire by villainous, black-hatted cattle rustlers. This scene sets up an expectation for the audience derived from a standard formula in the Western genre. It establishes an anticipatory moment in which the posse will ride into danger, exchange gunfire with the bad guys (ultimately vanquishing them), and then rescue the virtuous hero. There is a form that clearly articulates a particular effect—in this case, perhaps it is the satisfaction of seeing justice done—and works according to the way in which the narrative fulfills or satisfies the viewer’s expectations. Such scenes are meant to move us emotionally; thus, they fall under Burke’s general sense of rhetoric as the use of language (or communication) to lead people (the viewers of the film) to form a particular attitude. The rhetoricality of the cinematic discourse encourages an invisible consubstantiality insofar as we are brought into alignment with the cultural values of our society: bad people should not prosper at the expense of good people. In slightly different terms, it demonstrates a common assumption about the inevitable triumph of virtue.22
Form is also important for the rhetorical purpose of establishing a sense of logical continuity, for even in our everyday lives, we expect that things will transpire according to the procedures that are common to the form.23 Here is how Burke (1931) puts it: “A work has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to anticipate another part, to be gratified by the sequence” (p. 124). And yet another way to put this—citing Burke (1931)—is to say that form is correct when “it gratifies the needs which it creates” (p. 138). With this formulation of the idea of form, we engage with one of Burke’s earlier observations: the relationship between persuasion and identification. Let me spell this out plainly: if identification is persuasion (as Burke has argued), then the persuasion that comes from the production of correct form occurs when the audience identifies with the expectations produced by the text. This means that the patterned organization of the form can itself produce identification and persuasion; that is, persuasion can result from the form in which a claim or a proposition is presented.
A good example of this is syllogistic reasoning. A syllogism is predicated on the correctness of form, and it follows a procedure that establishes desire, even as it leads to the expectation of fulfillment.
All problems have solutions.
My lack of money is a problem.
Therefore, my lack of money has a solution.
This argument may be dubious, but that is beside the point. This syllogism establishes a familiar pattern that leads the reader through a series of propositions (two premises, to be exact), even as it sets up an expectation that makes agreement (identification, persuasion) more likely. This process is well-known as a rhetorical pattern, but it owes its power largely to the expectancy contained in the familiar form. For example, a politician might say the following: I stand for peace, whereas my opponent favours war. I stand for law and order, whereas my opponent prefers anarchy. I listen to the people, whereas my opponent listens only to his own voice. Though not a syllogism, this pattern of speaking establishes expectations that are fulfilled in the conclusions. Thus, the persuasive power of this form comes in part from the feeling, as Burke says, that it gratifies the desires it creates. It is, therefore, a particular kind of form that people rely on when trying to make persuasive claims or arguments. In describing the so-called Berlin crisis of 1948, Burke (1950) shows how powerful this simple form can be:
Who controls Berlin, controls Germany; who controls Germany controls Europe; who controls Europe controls the world. (p. 58)
Burke acknowledges that the proposition offered here is debatable. Nonetheless, he says, it is still highly suggestive. By the time you hear the second stage of its three-stage formulation (“who controls Germany”), you pretty much know how it is going to wind up. However, knowing where the pattern is taking you is only part of the interest of form. Indeed, Burke says that there is an additional factor at work here that makes the matter of form a compelling rhetorical issue: the way that the correctness of the form is important in securing agreement to the proposition. This needs some explaining.
Burke says that whereas it is obvious that most people become involved in the form once they recognize the pattern it establishes, they do more than simply accurately predict where the procedure is heading. In addition to learning to recognize the pattern, and in addition to being able to predict with a fair degree of certainty the next phrase or premise in the argument, the listener is also inclined to agree to the symmetry of the form and to transfer that assent from the formal nature of the proposition to its content. That is, “agreement” with the perfection of the form—and the tendency to want it to be completed to fulfill the expectation excited by the form—can be transferred from the form to the content. You not only “know” the last line will be something along the lines of “who controls Europe controls the world,” but you also tacitly agree with that claim. Why? Because our understanding of the correctness of the form produces a sense of the correctness of the argument as well. We transfer our understanding that the form is correct to the belief that the content must also be correct. This is not a rational or logical way to behave. It does, however, frequently happen.
Where else do we see this process of transference? A different kind of transference of the sentiments of approbation from one domain to another occurs in advertising, where the positive feelings associated with looking at youthful, beautiful, and happy people are transferred from the people (who you identify with) to the vodka they are drinking. Or, consider the importance of getting the form of an academic argument correct. If the argument fails to follow the traditional lines of expectation and wanders all over the place, the reader may finish the text unconvinced by the author’s presentation. When it is organized correctly, however, the argument may indeed be compelling, despite the fact that the main points of the argument remain the same. People are influenced by form, then, and often assess the content of the discourse in part based on their sense of the correctness of the form. This is why Burke was deeply interested in the way that form induces co-operation based on our wish to see the initial stages of the form fulfilled in a way that is consistent with our understanding of its specific traditions.
Because Burke’s ideas are applied to literary texts, advertising campaigns, political speeches, and religious sermons, it is clear that there are many kinds of form. Not all forms, in other words, are as neat and tidy as syllogistic logic, and yet all forms must, in one way or another, be effective when it comes to their rhetorical appeal. Burke defined three types of form: conventional, repetitive, and progressive.
Conventional form describes the expectations audiences bring to their encounter with the work. This includes a range of traditional assumptions largely based on our socialization, education, and cultural indoctrination. You have certain expectations about the form of the limerick, for example, even before you begin to read the poem.
There was a young lady named Bright
Whose speed was far faster than light!
She went out one day
In a relative way
And returned the previous night.
The limerick, in other words, sets up a condition of conventional expectation that invites the pleasure of completion with the final line, the punchline. This is the simplest and most obvious kind of form, thus, Burke describes it as conventional.
Repetitive form entails the successive repetition of phrases, images, or ideas. Repetition, then, is a rhetorical form. For example, at the start of a film, you may see images of abandoned buildings boarded-up with plywood and plastic. Then its cuts to scenes of overgrown plants emerging from cracks in the sidewalk. Finally, the camera lingers over broken road signs, burnt-out street lights, and swarms of rats. Taken together, these images produce a form or pattern leading the viewer to a certain expectation: this is a post-apocalyptic film about the end of the world, or perhaps a science-fiction film set in a time when a plague has decimated the population. Whatever it is, the repetition of images or words can easily establish an anticipation that requires further narrative development for gratification.
Repetition is a time-honoured rhetorical tactic, and the mastery of repetition requires far more than merely saying the same thing over and over or showing similar images one after the other. Take, for example, the opening lines of Rebecca, the classic novel by Daphne du Maurier (1938). The story begins with the main character relating a dream in the famous opening paragraph:
Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. It seemed to me I stood by the iron gate leading to the drive, and for a while I could not enter, for the way was barred to me. There was a padlock and a chain upon the gate. … I called in my dream to the lodge-keeper, and had no answer, and peering closer through the rusted spokes of the gate I saw that the lodge was uninhabited. (p. 1)
From this opening, we have learned that the protagonist dreamt of returning to a place she once knew but found it deserted. The second paragraph begins:
No smoke came from the chimney, and the little lattice windows gaped forlorn. (p. 1)
This paragraph proceeds at some length to extend the image of desolation and abandonment: “Nature had come into her own again and, little by little, in her stealthy, insidious way had encroached upon the drive with long tenacious fingers” (p. 1). Du Maurier is obviously repeating herself and building up a sequence of images of loss and decay, but she is doing so with a purpose in mind. The third paragraph continues with the same imagery:
The drive was a ribbon now, a thread of its former self, with gravel surface gone and choked with grass and moss. (p. 1)
This paragraph goes on for an additional ten lines, further describing how Manderley was no longer the grand mansion it had been in former years. The fourth paragraph commences:
On and on, now east now west, wound the poor thread that once had been our drive. (p. 2)
And again, the description of decay continues. “Nettles were everywhere,” the narrator laments “the vanguard of the army. They choked the terrace, they sprawled about the paths, they leant, vulgar and lanky against the very windows of the house.” (p. 3)
The entire first chapter, though brief, is an excellent illustration of repetitive form. Taken out of context like this, it might seem that it would grow tiresome, but in the hands of a skilled writer it manages brilliantly to elaborate a sense of desolation, a scene of tragic abandonment, and a nostalgic longing for a former life. It is repetitive in the classic rhetorical sense described by Burke. Du Maurier uses that rhetorical scheme to great effect in establishing a mood of temporal dislocation that pervades the rest of the novel.
Progressive form has two subtypes. The first is syllogistic progression. The form progresses from a deductive logic to a predetermined conclusion. In texts, the syllogism may be more or less formal. If it is formal, the premises might be spelled out and perhaps even numbered; if it is informal, they will be incorporated into the narrative or just assumed. Progressive form is a formal structure designed to lead the audience toward its conclusion. In short, in the face of a syllogistically progressive form, the audience will realize the likely conclusions to be drawn from the premises rather early on.
The second type of progressive form is what Burke calls qualitative progressive form. This is actually a more interesting kind of form because it sets up a relation between its parts according to particular qualities, creating a sense of probability rather than rigorous logic (as with syllogistic progression). For instance, the tone of a scene in a film may prepare you for a similar tone in a subsequent scene, even one with different characters. Du Maurier’s (1938) description of Manderley in the opening of Rebecca becomes more meaningful after you have completed the book. The violence of a murder scene in a Quentin Tarantino film may prepare you for the verbal violence that follows in a later scene; in other words, the action in the two scenes may be utterly different but the quality characterizing the scenes may be similar. Consider Aristotle’s works: they illustrate a progressive qualitative form through a similar style of presentation, regardless of shifts in subject matter. Qualitative progressive form is sometimes associated with style rather than with content.
Burke suggests that in qualitative progressive form, the structure cannot ordinarily be foretold early in the encounter with the work. Recall that Burke talks about forms “working” so long as they arouse and satisfy expectations. With qualitative progressive forms, the arousal and the fulfillment may be somewhat separated in time. A good example is when you look back on a film, a book, or maybe even a university course and realize that the structure of the form was appropriate—or “correct,” in Burke’s terms—and you come to understand how your expectations were aroused and fulfilled in ways that were less than obvious at the time. Indeed, Burke points out that while conventional form is apparent from the outset, we understand the logic of qualitative progressive form only after the work has been experienced.
For example, the director Alfred Hitchcock always maintained that his films were never intended to be viewed only once; his work is so complex that certain elements only begin to make sense after repeated viewings. In Psycho, for instance, the film commences with an opening montage that shows a city skyline, then a line of text identifying the location as Phoenix, Arizona. This is followed by another line of text indicating the date: Friday, December 11, which seems utterly incidental to anything we need to know as viewers, and then we are given apparently further extraneous information in the actual time of day: 2:43 p.m. Following the placement of these lines of text over the scene, the camera begins to zero in on a building. This is followed by a dissolve cut to a particular floor, as the camera appears to close in on an open window. But for just an instant, the camera seems to hesitate before moving inside, as if trying to decide which window it would be best to peer into. This leads to a jump cut that places us immediately outside of a window into which the camera moves slowly to reveal the interior of a hotel room. When first you see this sequence, you might be uncertain as to the point of the random details, the camera’s apparent hesitation in selecting a window, and so on, but after having viewed the film, you understand in retrospect that the random nature of the establishing shot coincides perfectly with the randomness of the character of Marion Crane, who is subsequently being targeted by Norman Bates for murder. It was not that she in particular was fated to perish but that her story, which was one out of innumerable possible other narratives, was the one chosen for this film. The cinematic touches used throughout the film to suggest the randomness of life tend only to become apparent to the viewer who views it more than once.
Burke says quite a bit more about form, but that is as far as I want to go in pursuing his ideas for this lecture. Form and pattern are inherently complex issues in literary studies as well as in rhetoric, and it is difficult to carry Burke’s analyses much further without engaging in close readings of particular texts to show how form can be understood as a rhetorical principle. Indeed, it might be useful to suggest that one way to take account of the importance of form in its conventional, repetitive, and progressive aspects is to think of cases where form fails—that is, cases where an author, artist, poet, or filmmaker deliberately confounds the audience’s expectations by arousing their interest but then refuse them the satisfaction of release that comes with the correct completion of the particular form in question. For instance, Ford Maddox Ford’s (1915) classic novel The Good Soldier, appears conventional in its form. However, significant deviations soon begin to crop up as the narrator of the story grows increasingly suspect and unreliable. Modernist literature and filmmaking are littered with such works, and part of their appeal is precisely their determination to avoid the hegemony of form.
The final portion of this lecture will address Burke’s theory of the pentad. You will recall that Burke had a long-standing interest in the subject of motive, and it was with his development of the pentad that he was able to provide an interesting structure to explain how human motives might be understood in relation to specific rhetorical encounters. Indeed, for some commentators, the pentad is virtually all a student needs to know about Burke; that is, some rhetoricians focus entirely on the pentad, paying little attention to some of his more theoretical musings. This is a shame, because it is helpful to understand how the pentad is connected directly to Burke’s more abstract work.
In order to situate this discussion of Burke’s pentad, a quick summary of what we have discussed will be helpful. Burke says that whenever you or I face a situation that requires a response, we will mobilize our motives according to particular structures. This will include trying to define and name the situation, interpreting the form of the event in order to make sense of it, and often seeking out some kind of identification or consubstantiality with others. We can take these ideas a step further by asking how we might go about this procedure in a practical sense; that is, in situations where we find ourselves seeking to move or persuade another person through the use of symbols. We know that for Burke, rhetoric is a symbolic means for creating co-operation that encompasses the concept of form as it relates to expectations and motives. What is important to note here is that Burke does not believe that we are using language to discover some deep, dark psychological motive that lies beyond, behind, or beneath the speaker’s words. That is, Burke is not suggesting a kind of Freudian model of the unconscious with his focus on motive. Rather, Burke says that motive is co-created with the arrangement of the words used to make a statement, ask a question, or seek co-operation. Motive and language are so closely aligned, so closely connected, that by an analysis of the textual elements of a work, we can discern the motive embedded within. When someone writes a story, produces a film, answers a question, or enters any kind of discursive relation with others, Burke claims that their motivation to write, film, or speak is synonymous with the structural way in which they put the events together when creating their work. How do we discover motive in the discursive strategies people choose?
Burke says that the way to discover the nature of the rhetorical strategy being used—who is saying what, how they are saying it, and so on—is by analyzing messages according to a particular structure he calls the pentad. Situations, he says, are made of up five elements (the dramatistic pentad) that frame the analysis of a rhetorical act (see Table 1).
The elements in the pentad are arranged according to what Burke calls “ratios.” That is, each element of the pentad can be related to any other element in the pentad; that relation is the ratio. So, for example, there can be an act-purpose ratio or an agency-act ratio. Burke tries to explain the essence of human motivation by putting these together.
A pentadic analysis, then, helps us to understand more fully the means of persuasion that the speaker (or writer) has used in the organization and structuring of their message. As mentioned above, these five elements are combined in ratios, and in unpacking those ratios we are able to comprehend the reasons behind certain accounts and explanations.24 In a scene-act ratio, for instance, we are usually dealing with the kind of act called for by the scene or the modes of response required by the situation in which the act occurs. Thus, a courtroom, for instance, is a scene that calls for certain kinds of acts, and when these are violated, when the form is not properly observed, judgements might be offered that would otherwise be thought ridiculous. That might not make sense at first, so let me offer some examples of some of these Burkean ratios.
Imagine walking into a very tidy room that was untidy when you last visited it and asking why a recently messy room is now so clean. In other words, you are asking why someone decided to tidy up the room. You are, then, inquiring into motives: why did you clean this room? Now, one person might choose a scene-act ratio to explain the action in question based on the conditions of the scene: “I looked around me, saw the chaos in the room, and decided to put everything back where it belonged.” This makes perfect sense, insofar as sometimes we actually say things such as, “This room is just asking to be cleaned.” Alternatively, someone else might explain the act based on an agent-act ratio: “Because I cannot tolerate disorder—I am, as you know, something of a neat freak—I decided to put everything away where it belongs.” This also seems reasonable, for each of us probably knows someone who has a low tolerance for disorder and untidiness. The agent-act ratio makes sense, then, in that it suggests an internal motive originating with the individual. And yet an agency-act ratio is different again, it might go something like this: “I noticed that all of the cleaning equipment had been left out, so I decided to clean up the room.” This is something most people can understand, too, and it appears to be a good explanation in cases where we take advantage of things being close at hand and ready to use. But there is at least one other account to consider: a purpose-act ratio. In this ratio, the speaker would privilege the end-goal of the behaviour as determinative: “I wanted to make a good impression on my in-laws, so I decided I had better clean up the room.” Thus, again we have a perfectly acceptable motive behind the cleaning of the untidy room.
You will note that in each case, my account for a particular act is presented as being the consequence of a different motive. Moreover, from a rhetorical point of view, each explanation is quite possibly equally persuasive. People can explain an event in different ways, and thus you may be inclined to ask which of the accounts is the true account, which of the reasons someone offers is the one that most correctly accords with their real intentions. While I want to avoid resorting to the simple claim that all truth is relative, I believe that the notion of an absolute and inviolable truth is probably inapplicable here—just as it would be hard to apply in most cases where people are called upon to present their motives for actions they have undertaken. Freud famously said that our motives are frequently unconscious and overdetermined, and while we can construct plausible accounts our motives can be situated on, we are not always entirely clear in our minds as to the why and wherefore of our behaviour.25 This is likely true—at least, I respect psychoanalytic theory sufficiently to accept some form of the theory of unconscious behaviour—but it is probably unnecessary for us to remove the field of motivation entirely from the realm of the conscious and relegate it to the subterranean world of unconscious mental processes. A more effective way of proceeding might simply be to ask yourself what motives lay behind a recent important decision and to look closely at the way your motives were turned into the kinds of narratives such as those offered above. Burke would say that in coming to a decision, you might have used multiple reasons, despite their being separate forms of argument. Hence, you might have said to one person that you made your choice because people you respect had made a similar choice (an act-act ratio), whereas you might have told other people that you made your choice because it reflected your personal experience and temperament (an agent-act ratio). In short, we often offer reasons of one sort to one group of people and reasons of a different sort to another group of people. The reasons you provide to your parents are not always the reasons you give to your close friends.
The riot following the Vancouver Canucks hockey team’s loss to the Boston Bruins in game seven of the Stanley Cup final in 2011 offers another example. In the aftermath of the riot, different stakeholders understandably wanted to know why people in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia resorted to the destruction of public and private property as a way of showing their anger and frustration at their team’s failure to win the championship. They wanted an explanation for an act (the riot) that focused on the motives of the various people involved. The mayor of Vancouver at the time, Gregor Robertson, said that the riots were perpetrated by a “small group of troublemakers,” that is, people of bad character. Vancouver’s then police chief, Jim Chiu, echoed this argument, describing the rioters as “criminals and anarchists.” Now, both Robertson and Chiu had an interest in protecting their reputations as civic leaders; therefore, they chose an agent-act ratio as the most effective way to remove responsibility from themselves and place it entirely on the shoulders of the rioters. In other words, people rioted (the act) because they were people of bad character (agent). The important thing to note is that the mayor cannot be responsible for people’s character. He cannot, therefore, be held responsible for the riot. Hence, he chose a pentadic ratio that served his interests.
Opponents of the mayor took issue with this account and suggested that the principal reason for the riot was that people were confined to a narrow space and were frustrated about not being able to move about freely (a scene-act ratio). Reasoning in this fashion makes the mayor accountable for a bad decision. Indeed, other opponents of Mayor Robertson argued that he should have had the foresight to remove objects from the street, such as trash cans and newspaper boxes, which were ultimately used as tools in the rampage. And when an independent review of the riot was completed and released, it suggested that alcohol was a main contributor (agency-act ratio). Issues related to police training, officer deployment, and patrol strategies were also mentioned, each of which could be cited as either pointing fingers at or away from authority figures, particularly politicians and the hockey club’s ownership. Of course, some people were drunk; some people probably were criminals; others may have simply imitated what they saw was going on; and many people may have seized the opportunity because objects such as trash cans were at hand. In trying to give a single account of why the riot occurred, individuals turned to the explanation that served their purpose (their view of the world) most effectively. People choose the explanation that most readily satisfies their beliefs.
It is clear, then, that each stakeholder presents an account that best suits their personal or political interests. The mayor finds that an agent-act ratio best satisfies his desire to be seen as not accountable; his opponents prefer explanations that suggest he was responsible. People choose explanations that are self-serving, although self-serving is not always the same as selfish. A self-serving account can also include striking the right tone with an audience. If you are speaking to liberals, it is sometimes jokingly said, use scene-act ratios; if you are speaking to conservatives, you are better off with agent-act ratios. As Burke says, our motives are themselves motivated by both political and personal interests.
In addition to considerations of motive, pentadic ratios also highlight particular features of an event while ignoring others. In Burke’s words, language simultaneously selects and deflects. Hence, a different attitude is conveyed according to the ratio that is employed. I have at my disposal, for example, a variety of methods with which I can organize my responses to human situations to make my meaning consonant with my motives. This is the key. Each ratio is really a means of trying to induce compliance according to a particular understanding of the audience. The choices available to me enable me to modulate my communication to be as persuasive as I possibly can, but this is only possible if I have some insight into the dispositions of my audience. Hence, we find ourselves reasserting the sociological character of the new rhetoric, with its focus on the social and cultural dimensions of the rhetorical nature of all language.
Let us consider another example—though a more abstract one—where we might apply Burke’s pentad. Whenever there is a mass shooting in the United States, we find a range of explanations as people look to different motives to account for the tragedy. That is, there is an urgent plea to explain the event and why it happened. Some people choose agent-act ratios and argue that bad people are everywhere (the agent) and sometimes innocent people will be shot (the act). Other explanations focus on the availability of guns, an agency-act ratio (firearms being the agency by which the act is perpetrated), while others, including some conservative religious commentators, such as the televangelist Pat Robertson, argue that these shootings happen for a divine purpose, such as people having fallen away from God. This is an example of a purpose-act ratio. Some Americans suggest that mass shootings occur because the social context offers inadequate mental health services to those most in need, which Burke would call a scene-act ratio. And in some cases, previous actions are cited, such as when the shooter is said to have suffered post-traumatic stress during overseas military duty, an example of an act-act ratio, where a prior act is the explanation for the current act.
You will note that these explanations are not motivated by a willful misunderstanding of the seriousness of the event. Neither are they necessarily examples of misinterpretations. They are essentially good-intentioned ways people explain things, strategies for trying to persuade others of the accuracy of their beliefs. And while it is likely true that certain explanations are conventionally adopted by people who hold a particular political position, this does not reduce to the argument that liberals always get it wrong or that conservatives are always biased. At the same time, our efforts to persuade others involve strategic elements that are discernible in our choice of a pentadic ratio. For instance, Burke wryly points out that if you ask people, “What is the reason for crime?” conservative thinkers will usually—though not always, of course—choose an agent-act ratio and say that crime is a consequence of bad people whose greed and lack of concern for the welfare of others leads them to illegal behaviour. By contrast, Burke suggests, people regarded as liberals tend to choose scene-act ratios. Liberals, in other words, are more likely to argue that crime is a product of poverty and poor education, that the people who commit crimes are themselves victims of inequitable social conditions, the scene in which they live. Whenever we seek to persuade someone of a position we endorse, Burke says, we will resort to some version of the pentad and search out the ratio that best suits our interests. We will not necessarily always prefer one ratio to another but might slip between different ratios depending on our sense of what we imagine will make the strongest argument. In a neo-Aristotelian sense, we are using various topoi to discover the most compelling artistic proof.
The sheer breadth of Burke’s interests has resulted in his work finding a home in many academic traditions, ranging from philosophy to literary studies. Burke knew his writing moved freely between disciplines, rarely pausing to acknowledge the boundaries the custodians of the academy have established to separate the intellectual fields into subject areas. His awareness of his tendency to disregard academic borders in pursuit of a more comprehensive understanding of how people communicate—how we seek to establish identification with others and how these factors define our experience as social and cultural beings—also indicates his awareness of the specifically interdisciplinary character of rhetoric.26 This awareness led Burke (1966) to compose a poem he called “The Definition of Man”:
Man is
the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal
inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)
separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making
goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)
and rotten with perfection. (p. 16)27
The poem is not a poem in the conventional sense given its topic, but it nicely sums up a good deal of what Burke believed about the relation between human nature and rhetoric. Unlike other creatures, he says, humans can be defined by their ability to use symbols to communicate, even though those efforts sometimes result in miscommunication. Of course, unlike other beings, we also are symbol-misusing animals; we deliberately lie and thus “misuse” symbols for nefarious purposes. We are also the only animals who can say “not,” or, as Burke says, use the negative. Negation is crucial to our lives because we are “moralized by the negative.” The commandments of the Old Testament, for example, advise that we are “not to steal.” The symbol not, in other words, is a highly charged and uniquely human capacity, not merely an idle term. No animal communication system includes the capacity to express not, whereas it is a symbol in every human language. In being “moralized by the negative,” we establish elaborate rituals and forms of religious worship (“thou shalt not steal”). Our symbols guide us to the most exalted human achievements.
In addition, we are separated from nature by techniques and tools that allow us to master our environments and establish us as unique among living creatures. We extend our bodies in technology, in other words, a point on which McLuhan and Burke would clearly have agreed. We are “goaded by the spirit of hierarchy” in that we are inherently involved in class struggle, status acquisition, professional prestige, and so on. Our sociality, in other words, is a complex web of consubstantial relations that define and ultimately determine our place in the social world. Finally, we act constantly on motives; that is, unlike other natural objects that are moved or directed by natural laws, we possess a desire to improve ourselves, to progress toward a goal, to seek out “perfection.” This pursuit, though commendable in so many respects, led to the tragedy of Nazism; the Nazis sought to “improve” the human race in pursuit of the Aryan ideal, an example that effectively captures Burke’s notion that we are “rotten with perfection.”
Burke reconfigured rhetoric by arguing that everything we do, whether it involves competition, romance, or conflict, we ultimately do through rhetoric. This does not mean that we abandon the ancient rhetorical scholars but that we understand them more properly if we see their insights as guiding us toward a fuller and more comprehensive conception of rhetoric as part of the action-orientation of all human behaviour. As rhetorical scholars William Keith and Christian Lundberg (2008) write, “Burke is important to modern rhetorical theory because he provided the first comprehensive theory that saw persuasion as more than rational argumentation plus emotion” (pp. 53–54). With his focus on symbolic action, Burke showed how ancient rhetoric needed adapting for the conditions of a media-rich world of modern communication.
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McCarron, Gary. 2021. Lecture 5: Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric in the Sphere of Motives. Scholarly and Research Communication, 12(1), 21 pp. doi:10.22230/src.2021v12n1a371
© 2021 Gary McCarron. CC BY-NC-ND