Extending the Burkean System Online

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CHAPTER 1

Extending the Burkean System Online

Introduction: Internetworked Symbolic Action

This work is an extension of the Burkean system into the domain that I have called “internetworked symbolic action.” It is organized under the aegis of Dramatism, the name Burke gives to his analytical and critical approach to language, literature, rhetoric, and social interaction. Before Searle elaborated upon illocutionary and perlocutionary acts in his speech-act theories; before anthropologist Blumer developed his approach to “symbolic interactionism”; before the Reagan administration attempted to bring down the political center of the Soviet Union not by creating a “Star Wars” missile defense system, but by openly planning such a system – by simply talking about it; before all of these extensions and variations of concepts rooted in the same philosophy and science as are the elements of dramatism, Kenneth Burke was working out his idea of the rhetorical and linguistic, or “logological,” implications of the Freudian approach to language as symbolic action:

By “symbolic action” in the Dramatistic sense is meant any use of symbol systems in general; I am acting symbolically, in the Dramatistic sense, when I speak these sentences to you, and you are acting symbolically insofar as you “follow” them, and thus size up their “drift” or “meaning.” (LSA, p. 63).

Burke’s landmark monograph, A Grammar of Motives, is in a sense the psycho-rhetorician’s dream-text: an attempt to provide a road-map for dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing the ways in which human beings talk (and write) about “what people are doing and why they are doing it.” The work builds upon Burke’s conviction that, as “symbol-using, symbol-making, and symbol-made” animals, humans as a species tend to conduct – and construct – a large portion of their lives in the symbolic; because of this, our symbol-systems as means by which we act (and interact) can be seen as the products of our own impulses: of our motives. On the other hand, Grammar and its companion volumes, A Rhetoric of Motives, The Rhetoric of Religion, and Language As Symbolic Action, can often be viewed as a rhetorician’s nightmare. “Doing Burkean analysis” is much more than “doing dramatism,” much more than “using the pentad.” G.S. Fraser (1965) describes the body of Burke’s work better than anyone else:

…if one’s mind, say, were a carpenter’s work-table – he offers one a new tool, suggests half a dozen different ways of using it, points out that it can be used to shape plastics as well as to carve wood, disappears for half an hour to come back with two or three completely different tools, and in the end one’s table is so cluttered with fascinating gadgets that one has to clear the wood off it to make room for the tools; there is a suggestion in his manner also that one might well give up carpentry and take up something else. (p. 366)

With Burke’s works representing such an amazing, magical mystery tour of carpentry, this extension of the Burkean system onto the internet should be seen as a small tool-kit, an organized but by no means full Black & Decker “starter set” of terms and concepts based upon Burkean systems for rhetorical analyses and critique of internetworked symbolic action.

Starting with motive rather than with rhetorical frameworks such as genre, topics of invention, logic, or style is conceivably a backwards approach. As logologists, as “word people,” we usually start with the symbol, and work our evidentiary way toward suspected (but rarely proven) motives. And yet as computer networked technologies create textual and virtual “worlds” and environments, we find ourselves sifting through texts that are not fixed in codex form, and we often fear that we will work our way logologically toward intentional fallacies. In the world of “computers and writing” as it is called, the verdict has not (and may never) come down. In terms of the pedagogy, history, study, and practice of rhetoric, computers are neither good nor bad. They have not yet completely “infantilized” us as Jacques Ellul feared, but neither have they created Howard Rheingold’s once hoped-for “open frontier” of freedom, egalitarianism, and capital wealth. In this study of internetworked symbolic action, the goal is to seek out stated motives, suggested motives, and acts surrounding motives by means of extending the Burkean system, not as social, moral, literary, philosophical, or political critique, but rather as a way of demonstrating that these things can be done by means of extending Burkean concepts and lines of thought into analyses of online communications technologies, and more importantly, the many unpredicted – and unpredictable – uses people make of them. Specifically, I am arguing that beginning not with the technology questions alone, such as “what can the machines do?,” and “How can we make them do it better?” is counterproductive in the sphere of human interaction and human symbolic action. Rather, I propose that “getting at motives” first, or asking “what are people doing, and why are they doing it?” is the more fruitful and rich – perhaps even more practical – approach to studying what I have called “internetworked symbolic action.”

Getting at motive, the source of human action (“purposive motion”), is one possible key to a rhetoric, to systematizing and analyzing symbols-in-action around us. In A Grammar of Motives, Burke organizes his rhetorical theory of Dramatism into five terms: Act, Agent, Scene, Agency, and Purpose:

Our five terms are “transcendental” rather than formal (and are to this extent Kantian) in being categories which human thought necessarily exemplifies. Instead of calling them the necessary “forms of experience,” however, we should call them the necessary “forms of talk about experience.” For our concern is primarily with the analysis of language rather than with the analysis of “reality.” Language being essentially human, we would view human relations in terms of the linguistic instrument. Not mere “consciousness of abstracting,” but consciousness of linguistic action generally, is needed if men are to temper the absurd ambitions that have their source in faulty terminologies. (GM, p. 317)

This study is heavily influenced by the Grammar, a critical exploration in which Burke privileges and foregrounds “Act” – what people are doing – by creating what he calls “ratios,” or pairings of terms of the pentad that appear with astounding reliability within human explanations of “what we are doing and why we are doing it.”

Burke’s ratios are not always well-understood (with good reason), and rarely explained with ease, in part because the terms are – as Burke repeatedly tries to explain – not formal, even though in attempting practical applications of the pentad one feels forced, at least to a certain extent, to formalize them. Thus, when Burke refers to a “scene-act” ratio, some readers are tempted to work from a conscious or unconscious form of mathematical equation:

“scene ÷ act = motive” or “scene + act = motive”

However, Burke is not doing this at all. The range and type of relational possibilities between the two terms is large, springing from among other things classical rhetoric, philosophy, semiotics, and psychology. For example, the “act-scene ratio” as an “equation” is rather sterile (and can be critically employed in flat and sterile ways), yet Burke reminds us that relational patterns between and among the terms of dramatism are far from limited to “term-plus-term.” His discussion of the act-scene ratio reveals substantial thematic and ideological themes in a text because “act” and “scene” in literature and in the human mind are not lumped side-by-side, but are juxtaposed and entangled in various ways. Burke suggests that one productive dramatistic approach to constructing ratios is to consider terms such as “scene” and “act” as “container and thing contained”:

Using “scene” in the sense of setting, or background, and “act” in the sense of action, one could say that “the scene contains the act.” And using agents” in the sense of actors, or acters [sic], one could say that “the scene contains the agents.”

(GM, p. 3)

The “agent-scene” ratio is one in which events or acts are explained (and subsequent motives identified) by means of examining a person and his or her circumstances, such as a particular personality (agent) in the office of the presidency, in the role of prison guard, or as a stock yard wrangler (scene). Even these examples are oversimplifications of Burke’s system, but they are evocative enough to illustrate the literary, linguistic, and social possibilities for commentary and critique inherent in the ratios. They provide a rich and provocative framework in which to construct rhetorical analyses and arguments.

This study assumes internetworked symbolic action as act qua act to be explored in terms of motive, and moves from there. My pairings are admittedly presumptuous “extensions” of the Burkean ratios. They privilege Agent, the human half of the human-computer interface. The “sites” or mental and physical locations of internetworked symbolic acts, whether serendipitously or by some unconscious design, do have meaningful and even striking correspondence with the terms of the dramatistic pentad. The five sites of interaction – user-machine, user-screen, user-task, user-purpose, and user-user – are in direct alignment with the terms of the pentad. I might have called these sites “agent-agency,” “agent-scene,” “agent-act,” “agent-purpose,” and “agent-agent,” except that instead of considering the terms as elements of explanatory ratios, the scope here is to name them as “sites” or loci of focus, mental and sometimes physical “places” where humans and computers come together to act, to perform symbolic action, and in the case of internetworked computers, to create internetworked symbolic action.

Burke’s lifelong journey into the mirrored caves of logology – his term for the study of language as symbolic action – can be traced through his works and the subsequent metatheoretical studies and extensions of his systems. And what a long, strange trip it has been, from the kind of counterrevolutionary, deconstructivist project taken up by postmodernists in earnest decades after he left it behind, into a project of building, reinforcing, furnishing, and maintaining an enduring collection of rhetorical approaches, tools, and systems of investigating ourselves, the symbol-using animals.

Perhaps we should call them “counter-systems” -- I have tried to involve and fold into this study the spirit and thrust of his ideas on rhetoric and social interaction with a focus on motive and human symbolic action as they occur on the internet. It is as yet a growing, changing, infant-mewling, confusing jumble of electronic signs and symbols awaiting systematic themes and roadmaps for classification and evaluation of its many phenomena. The assumption here is that Burkean approaches to internetworked symbolic action are enlightening and helpful tools for critics, theorists, and practical applications of internet tools and texts, in industrial, educational, and social arenas.

Kenneth Burke’s relevance to the study of internetworked writing is exciting and complex. Burke’s lifelong pursuit of logology has left us with a rich legacy, an omnium gatherum, of conceptual frameworks and provocative ideas about language, about symbol-systems, and symbol-using. He was suspicious of technology – the offspring of the 20th Century worship of science – and yet he recognized that language itself is a kind of technology. Because of this, and in spite of this, his ideas will serve us well in our search for ways to explore the question of motive and various forms and forums of internetworked language and symbol-using.

In his essay on “Kenneth Burke’s Conception of Reality,” Dale Bertelson (1993) points out that Burke attempts to reconcile the idea that humans, who experience a huge portion of their perceived lives as performed and understood through “symbolic action,” must also understand an “animal, biological” world in which their bodies dwell. Bertelson reminds us that in “Mind, Body, and the Unconscious,” and again in “The Thinking of the Body,” Burke argues that epistemological man must negotiate a compromise between the biological “real” world, and the subjective “symbolic” world. In this study it is important that this facet of Burkean approaches to texts and human events be made explicit. For although the initial development of this approach concentrated upon internetworked texts, was based in Burke’s concepts of dramatism as laid out in A Grammar of Motives and elaborated in A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke’s wider views of humans as symbolic and physical “creatures” are of crucial importance to contemporary discussions of electronic texts and the motives of users who develop and use the powerful new computer-network technologies to transmit and exchange symbols, images, signifiers and signs. It is understood that various kinds of social and transactional discourse have carved out “virtual places” in today’s Wide Area Networks (WAN), yet the bulk of these are still textual places and spaces, made up of messages written and read by their creators and participants. In “Definition of Man,” 1 for example, Burke elaborates upon the importance of symbol-systems in the human subject-position and cognitive construction of “reality”:

Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so “down to earth” as the relative position of seas and continents? What is our “reality” for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? . . . And however important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced firsthand, the whole overall “picture” is but a construct of our symbol systems. To meditate on this fact until one sees its full implications is much like peering over the edge of things into an ultimate abyss. And doubtless that’s one reason why, though man is typically the symbol-using animal, he clings to a kind of naïve verbal realism that refuses to realize the full extent of the role played by symbolicity in his notions of reality. (1966)

Although Burke’s argument here centers “symbolicity” in the hard copy, paper-published word, this study will discuss ways in which Burkean concepts and approaches to written discourse extend and enrich our examination of electronically transmitted symbols. In addition, where the forms of electronic data and information are bundled with images and sound, this study will consider visual and aural components of the “message” to be within the scope of the “symbol-using” transactional and interactive functions of language 2 For as electronic technologies have expanded into the modern educational, professional, and personal lives of Western civilization, our perception, processing, and understanding of “reality” is fed largely by a combination of digital images and sound glued together in various ways by “scripted” – written – narratives, guidelines and commentary (Welch 1999).

In Life on the Screen (1995), social psychologist Sherry Turkle works toward, within, and in support of the same post-Freudian, postmodern, Lacanian interpretation of the decentralized conceptualization of mind and of self embraced by Burke. In concluding a brief description of the evolution of modern psychological understanding of the “self,” Turkle remarks,

Lacan insisted that the ego is an illusion. In this he joins psychoanalysis to the postmodern attempt to portray the self as a realm of discourse rather than as a real thing or a permanent structure of the mind. (Turkle 178)

If we can accept the Burkean human self as “a realm of discourse,” or perhaps, as Barbara Biesecker implies (Addressing Postmodernity 1997), an evolving realm of discourses moving through time, the idea of “virtuality” and the phenomenon of “virtual selves,” “virtual spaces,” even “virtual reality” – the term often used to refer to computer-networked online shared texts, images, and sounds – gains a kind of logical credence as an extension of “logological man” worthy of exploration from within our understanding of Burke’s ideas of symbolicity and human action/interaction.

Burke and Technology: Human Action vs. Machine Motion

Nowhere else in the history of writing and reading has there been such a moment of potential confusion between the human act of using/making symbols to convey meaning, and the machine motion of producing the visual, artifactual/textual product of that act. There were, however, previous moments of dissonance and amazement between humans and other machines of communication, as Sarah J. Sloane illustrates with her reference to Sitting Bull’s shock upon discovering that the telephone, an instrument “invented by a Scotsman,” could actually transmit messages back and forth in his native Sioux language (49). What I refer to is something different from the admittedly culture-shifting moment that revealed to a Native American that the machine against his ear was transmitting – as opposed to emitting – sound. Although Sitting Bull takes a moment to adjust his view of the newfangled machine’s capabilities, he never misunderstands the source of the sounds he hears – he knows that they are not originated in the telephone, but in the person who is talking to him from Cannonball River, 25 miles away. In other words, Sitting Bull quickly gathers is that he is not talking to the phone, he is talking to Mrs. Parkin by means of the telephone. As I will illustrate anecdotally later, there is evidence that internetworked writers are capable of losing their sense of the computer as mere instrument between themselves and other writers, instead characterizing the text generated from afar as a function of the machine itself. In other words, aside from the relative anonymity of role-play, “screen-names” (or nicknames), and textual “aesthetic distance,” the detachment of textuality coupled with the immediacy of real-time symbolic interaction may, for some users, produce a kind of confusion or conflation of the machine and the disembodied, text-based “other.” In a bizarre twist of Walter Ong’s (1978/1994) famous claim that “the writer’s audience is always a fiction,” evidence from further studies of online textual interaction may indicate that even when that audience is writing back, in real-time, some writers may be capable of fictionalizing that audience despite its responsiveness, even characterizing it as automated, simply by virtue of its physical, pixellated appearance as text-only, on the computer screen.