Digital Rhetoric
James P. Zappen
Rhetorical Theory 2b: Kenneth Burke
A. Traditional Rhetoric: Plato and Aristotle
1. "Anyone else who seriously proffers a scientific
rhetoric . . . will, in the first place, describe a
soul very precisely, and let us see whether it is single and uniform in
nature or, analogously to the body,
complex . . . . And secondly, he will describe
what natural capacity it has to act upon what, and through what means,
or by what it can be acted upon . . . . Thirdly, he
will classify the types of discourse and the types of a soul and the
various ways in which souls are affected, explaining the reasons in
each case, suggesting the type of speech appropriate to each type of
soul, and showing what type of speech can be relied on to create belief
in one case and disbelief in another, and why." (147)
Plato, Plato's Phaedrus, trans. R. Hackforth (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1952), 147.
2. "That rhetoric, therefore, does not belong to a single defined genus
of subject but is like dialectic and that it is useful is
clear—and that its function is not to persuade but to see the
available means of persuasion in each case." (35)
3. "Let rhetoric be [defined as] an ability, in each [particular] case,
to see the available means of persuasion." (36)
Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans.
George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 35-36.
B. Social Upheaval and the Quest for Community
1. "During the 1920s and early 1930s great social events and
cultural trends profoundly changed the way people thought about the
world. The horrors of World War I demarcated a new horizon in humanity's
capacity for conflict, terror, and organized destruction—and the
'sausage factory' utterly shattered pretensions of human nobility and
value. Economic problems in Europe, compounded by political upheavals and
general loss of faith, stimulated a great emigration of Eastern Europeans
to the United States in general and New York in particular. Large numbers
of marginalized immigrants passing through Ellis Island fueled the growth
of ghettos on the Lower East Side and in Hell's Kitchen, aggravating
the already inhumane exploitation of workers. The stock market crash
and the Great Depression just exacerbated the situation." (53)
2. "[Burke] begins with speculations about human motivation in order
to find alternatives to hand-to-hand combat, rifle fire, and aerial
bombardment . . . to find better ways to establish
common ground between people with differing interests and views of the
world." (149)
3. "Rhetoric is fundamentally a study of how language, through its
aesthetic and social functions, contributes to the formation of ethical
communities." (172)
Ross Wolin, The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke, Studies
in Rhetoric/Communication (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
2001), 53, 149, 172.
C. Dramatism and the Pentad
1. "We shall use five terms as generating principle of our
investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a
rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the
act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another
that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation
in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of
person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he
[or she] used (agency), and the purpose." (xv)
2. "The occasion: a committee meeting. The setting: a group of
committee members bunched about a desk in an office, after hours. Not
far from the desk was a railing; but despite the crowding, all the
members were bunched about the chairman [sic] at the desk, inside the
railing. However, they had piled their hats and coats on chairs and
tables outside the pale. General engrossment in the discussion. But as
the discussion continued, one member quietly arose, and opened the gate
in the railing. As unnoticeably as possible, she stepped outside and
closed the gate. She picked up her coat, laid it across her arm, and
stood waiting. A few moments later, when there was a pause in the
discussion, she asked for the floor. After being recognized by the
chairman [sic], she very haltingly, in embarrassment, announced with
regret that she would have to resign from the committee.
Consider with what fidelity she had set the scene
for this pattern of severance as she stepped beyond the railing to
make her announcement . . . . She had strategically
modified the arrangement of the scene in such a way that it implicitly
(ambiguously) contained the quality of her act." (11)
3. "But first surveying the entire field [of philosophy] at a glance,
let us state simply as propositions:
For the featuring of scene, the corresponding philosophic
terminology is materialism.
For the featuring of agent, the corresponding terminology is
idealism.
For the featuring of agency, the corresponding terminology is
pragmatism.
For the featuring of purpose, the corresponding terminology is
mysticism.
For the featuring of act, the corresponding terminology is
realism." (128)
4. "At first glance, one finds in the doctrines of Darwin a fairly
simple instance of the scenic principle . . . .
Hence, in fact, the law of the Conditions of Existence is the higher
law; as it includes, through the inheritance of former variations and
adaptations, that of Unity of Type.
The last sentence here is as nearly perfect an instance
of materialism, or reduction to scene, as one could hope for. And Darwin's
term, frequently used elsewhere, 'accidental variation,' is as scenic
as is 'conditions of existence.' Yet it is worth noting, at least,
that many of the key terms in Darwin lend themselves readily to appeal
by ambiguities of the pathetic fallacy . . . . For
instance, 'adaptation,' 'competition,' 'struggle for life,' 'natural
selection,' and 'survival of the fittest' can all be read and felt as
action words . . . .
We even find him, in explaining his 'Natural System'
that is 'utterly inexplicable in the theory of creation,' slipping into
references to purpose . . . . 'Fruit and
flowers have been rendered conspicuous by brilliant colors in contrast
with the green foliage, in order that the flowers may be readily
seen, visited and fertilized by insects, and the seeds disseminated by
birds.' Yet if I understand his doctrines in their literal application,
the flower's use of colors in attracting insects must arise as the result
of purely accidental variations, which survived because they happened
to attract insects, which in turn happened to make the species more
prolific by aiding in the distribution of the pollen." (153-54)
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969), xv, 11, 128, 153-54.
D. Rhetoric as Advantage-Seeking
1. "Indeed, all the sources of 'happiness' listed in Aristotle's
'eudaimonist' rhetoric, as topics to be exploited for persuasion
and dissuasion, could be lumped under the one general heading of
'advantage.'" (60-61)
2. "We think this term, 'advantage,' quite useful for rhetorical
theory, in that it can also subsume, before we meet them, all possible
'drives' and 'urges' for the existence of which various branches of
psychology and sociology may claim to find empirical
evidence . . . . Surely all doctrines can at least
begin by agreeing that human effort aims at 'advantage' of one sort or
another, though there is room for later disputes as to whether
advantage in general, or particular advantages are to be conceived
idealistically, materialistically, or even cynically. Advantage can be
individual, or the aim of a partisan group, or even universal. And that
men [and women] should seek advantage of some sort is reasonable and
ethical enough—hence the term need not confine one's terminology
of rhetorical design to purely individualist cunning or aggrandizement,
as with the rhetorical implications lurking in those 'scientific'
terminologies that reduce human motives to a few primitive appetites,
resistances, and modes of acquisition . . . ." (61)
3. "To expose the workings of such [Hegelian and Marxist] 'ideologies,'
it was necessary to give an exhaustive analysis of the 'objective
situation' in which they figured. Insofar as the terms describing this
extraverbal situation were correct, they would apparently be a
'dialectic' . . . . They could be called a
rhetoric, however, in several important senses: (1) The account of
extralinguistic factors in a rhetorical
expression . . . is itself an aspect of
rhetorica docens [the study of rhetoric], though perhaps on the
outer edges; (2) insofar as the Marxist vocabulary itself is partial,
or partisan, it is rhetorical, and we could not have a dialectic in the
fullest sense unless we gave equally sympathetic expression to
competing principles . . . ; (3) it is concerned
with advantage, not only in analyzing the hidden advantage in other
terminologies (or 'ideologies'), but also in itself inducing to
advantages of a special sort. (Here it becomes a kind of rhetorica
utens [the use of rhetoric].)" (36, 103)
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969), 36, 60-61, 103.
E. Rhetoric, Persuasion, and Identification
1. "A is not identical with his [or her] colleague, B. But insofar as
their interests are joined, A is identified with B. Or he [or
she] may identify himself [or herself] with B even when
their interests are not joined, if he assumes that they are, or is
persuaded to believe so." (20)
2. "To identify A with B is to make A 'consubstantial' with
B . . . . A doctrine of consubstantiality,
either explicit or implicit, may be necessary to any way of life. For
substance, in the old philosophies, was an act; and a way of life
is an acting-together; and in acting together, men [and women]
have common sensations, concepts, images, ideas, attitudes that make
them consubstantial." (21)
3. "Identification is affirmed with earnestness precisely because there
is division. Identification is compensatory to division. If men [and
women] were not apart from one another, there would be no need for the
rhetorician to proclaim their unity. If men [and women] were wholly and
truly of one substance, absolute communication would be of man's [and
woman's] very essence." (22)
4. "Such considerations make us alert to the ingredient of rhetoric in
all socialization, considered as a moralizing process.
The individual person, striving to form himself [or herself] in
accordance with the communicative norms that match the cooperative ways
of his [or her] society, is by the same token concerned with the
rhetoric of identification. To act upon himself [or herself]
persuasively, he [or she] must variously resort to images and ideas
that are formative." (39)
5. "Now, the basic function of rhetoric, the use of words by human
agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents,
is certainly not 'magical.' If you are in trouble, and call for help,
you are no practitioner of primitive magic . . . . A
call for help is quite 'prejudiced'; it is the most arrant kind of
'wishful thinking'; it is not merely descriptive, it is hortatory.
It is not just trying to tell how things are, in strictly 'scenic' terms;
it is trying to move people." (41)
6. "For rhetoric as such is not rooted in any past condition of
human society. It 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." (43)
7. "'It is not hard,' says Aristotle, in his
Rhetoric, quoting Socrates, 'to praise Athenians among
Athenians' . . . . When you are with Athenians,
it's easy to praise Athenians, but not when you are with Lacedaemonians.
Here is perhaps the simplest case of persuasion. You
persuade a man [or woman] only insofar as you can talk his [or her]
language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea,
identifying your way with his [or hers]." (55)
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969), 20-22, 39, 41, 43, 55.
8. "The Pentad is a way of systematically contemplating any act from a
multitude of hermeneutical perspectives, 'terministic screens' in
Burke's vocabulary . . . it gives us a scheme for
sorting out existing views of any act and for detecting the major lines
of opposition." (27)
9. "Traditionally, rhetoric is the art of persuasion. While recognizing
the value of ancient rhetoric, Burke chooses not persuasion but
identification as his key term, the implications of which expand
the field of rhetoric well beyond persuasive discourse.
Basically, rhetoric seeks to build a community, a
sense of oneness amid diversity of conflicting interests and values."
(28)
Timothy W. Crusius, "A Case for Kenneth Burke's Dialectic and
Rhetoric," Philosophy and Rhetoric 19 (1986): 27-28.
F. Dialectical Symmetry and Transcendence
1. "As written by Plato, the work [a Platonic dialogue] would probably
have proceeded thus: First, the setting up of several voices, each
representing a different 'ideology,' and each aiming rhetorically to
unmask the opponents; next, Socrates' dialectical attempt to build a
set of generalizations that transcended the bias of the competing
rhetorical partisans; next, his vision of the ideal end in such a
project; and finally, his rounding out the purely intellectual
abstractions by a myth." (200)
2. "The primary thing to note about The Book of the Courtier,
from the standpoint of dialectic, is the great change in the quality of
motivation that occurs as one turns from the third book to the last.
The third book has some inklings of the final transcendence, since it
deals with the code of courtly intercourse between men and women. It
thus introduces the theme of sexual love which Cardinal Bembo will
platonically transform at the ecstatic, sermonlike close of the work.
But though there are occasional signs of a new stirring, in general men
and women here confront each other as classes, considering questions of
advantage, in a war of the sexes reduced to dance steps." (227)
3. "For if man [and woman], as symbol-using animal, is homo
dialecticus, and if the use of symbols is a kind of
transcendence, then each rounded instance of dialectical
transcendence as we find in The Book of the Courtier may contain
the overt expression of elements that elsewhere exist covertly, and in
fragments . . . . With the dialectical symmetry of
The Book of the Courtier in mind, consider Franz Kafka's grotesque
novel, The Castle . . . [as a caricature of
courtship]." (232-33)
4. "But since, for better or worse, the mystery of the hierarchic is
forever with us, let us, as students of rhetoric, scrutinize its range
of entrancements, both with dismay and in delight. And finally let us
observe, all about us, forever goading us, though it be in fragments,
the motive that attains its ultimate identification in the thought,
not of the universal holocaust, but of the universal order—as with
the rhetorical and dialectic symmetry of the Aristotelian metaphysics,
whereby all classes of beings are hierarchally arranged in a chain or
ladder or pyramid of mounting worth, each kind striving towards the
perfection of its kind, and so towards the next kind above it,
while the strivings of the entire series head in God as the beloved
cynosure and sinecure, the end of all desire." (333)
Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (1950; Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969), 200, 227, 232-33, 333.
5. "For in both the Platonist and neo-Platonist versions of
transcendence, the dialectician begins with the particulars of the
senses, with the images of imagination—and he [or she] subjects
these to progressive transformations whereby their sensory diversity is
thoroughly lost in generalization, the structure being completed in the
vision of the One." (429)
Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (1945; Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1969), 429.
G. Collaboration in Education
1."'Identification' at its simplest is also a deliberate device, as
when the politician seeks to identify himself [or herself] with his [or
her] audience. In this respect, its equivalents are plentiful in
Aristotle's Rhetoric. But identification can also be an end, as
when people earnestly yearn to identify themselves with some group or
other. Here they are not necessarily being acted upon by a conscious
external agent, but may be acting upon themselves to this end. In such
identification there is a partially dreamlike, idealistic motive,
somewhat compensatory to real differences or divisions, which the
rhetoric of identification would transcend.
But we are now ready for our second stage. For, if
identification includes the realm of transcendence, it has, by the some
[i.e., same] token, brought us into the realm of transformation, or
dialectic. A rhetorician, I take it, is like one voice in a dialogue.
Put several such voices together, with each voicing its own special
assertion, let them act upon one another in co-operative competition,
and you get a dialectic that, properly developed, can lead to views
transcending the limitations of each." (203)
Kenneth Burke, "Rhetoric—Old and New. Journal of General
Education 5.3 (April 1951): 203.
2. [As the final rung in an "education ladder,"] "one would try to
decide how many positions one thinks are important enough to be
represented by 'voices,' and then one would do all in one's power to
let each voice state its position as ably as possible. No voice deemed
relevant to the particular issue or controversy would be subjected to
the quietus, and none would be inadequately represented (as were one to
portray it by stating only its more vulnerable arguments). But although
one would be as fair as possible in thus helping all positions to say
their say, a mere cult of 'fair play' would not be the reason. Rather,
one hopes for ways whereby the various voices, in mutually correcting
one another, will lead toward a position better than anyone singly.
That is, one does not merely want to outwit the opponent, or to study
him [or her], one wants to be affected by him [or her], in some degree
to incorporate him [or her], to so act that his [or her] ways can help
perfect one's own—in brief, to learn from him [or her]." (283-84)
Kenneth Burke, "Linguistic Approach to Problems of Education," in
Modern Philosophies and Education: The Fifty-Fourth Yearbook
of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part I,
ed. Nelson B. Henry, 259-303 (Chicago: National Society for the Study
of Education/University of Chicago Press, 1955), 283-84.
H. Collective Intelligence
1. Collective Intelligence. "What is collective intelligence? It is a
form of universally distributed intelligence, constantly
enhanced, coordinated in real time, and resulting in the effective
mobilization of skills. I'll add the following indispensable
characteristic to this definition: The basis and goal of collective
intelligence is the mutual recognition and enrichment of individuals
rather than the cult of fetishized or hypostatized communities.
My initial premise is based on the notion of a
universally distributed intelligence. No one knows everything, everyone
knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity. There is no
transcendent store of knowledge and knowledge is simply the sum of what
we know." (13-14)
2. Collective Intelligence in Cyberspace. "With respect to its
relationship to future projects, cyberspace will assume the form of a
cultural attractor, which we can summarize as follows.
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1.
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Called, controlled, dismissed, distanced, combined, etc.; no matter how
they are orchestrated, messages, regardless of type, will now revolve
around the individual receiver (the opposite of the situation
represented by the mass media).
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2.
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The distinctions between authors and readers, producers and spectators,
creators and interpreters will blend to form a reading-writing
continuum, which will extend from machine and network designers to the
ultimate recipient, each helping to sustain the activity of the others
(dissolution of the signature).
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3.
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The distinction between the message and the work of art, envisaged as a
microterritory attributed to an author, is fading. Representation is
now subject to sampling, mixing, and reuse. Depending on the emerging
pragmatics of creation and communication, a nomadic distribution of
information will fluctuate around an immense deterritorialized semiotic
plane. It is therefore natural that creative effort be shifted from the
message itself to the means, processes, languages, dynamic
architectures, and environments used for its implementation." (121)
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Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind's Emerging
World in Cyberspace, trans. Robert Bononno (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Perseus Books Group, Helix Books, 1997), 13-14, 121.
Latest Update: 2011-09-26
