A Rhetorical Journey into Darkness
Submitted by Ed Appel on Thu, 2005-09-22 15:03
My overall assessment is that Jennifer MacLennan's essay on crime-scene analysis as viewed in the light of Burke's dramatism makes for a rich, detailed, and generally convincing analogue. Obviously, if Burke's take on human symbolic action has validity, a dramatistic critic can dig up spadefuls of drama in any set of discourses. As she makes clear, though, MacLennan explores not just the way the pentad-related "who, what, when, where, and why questions" pervade the how-to-do-it books of the sleuths who solve serial murders. She unveils "deeper connections" and similarities. Both John Douglas and Robert Ressler, her primary guides in the hunt for what are superficially thought to be motiveless killings, have "assembled . . . a grammar of the symbolic elements of violent crime," a "language of the crime scene," that mirrors many of Burke's primary insights.
Some of those points of overlap between Burke and especially Douglas include:
Treatment of human actions as symbolically infused.
Emphasis on the "situatiod nature of symbolic acts," the "motivational force of the scene-act ratio."
The profound and predictive relationships among agent, attitude, and act.
Use of drama as "an analytic framework."
Stress upon form as "a manifestation of human desire."
"Estrangement" as "the origin" of the "most desparate" strategies of "redemption and reidentification" the criminals in question seek through "victimage."
The "fundamentally rhetorical" nature of serial murders, their character as acts of addressment.
These experts in crime-scene profiling employ different terminology, to be sure. Their conceptualizations are, however, strikingly reflective of Burke's approach to language and rhetoric, MacLennan effectively argues.
That's an overview. Let's get into some of the author's more specific probes in a later post.
Ed
Comments
MacLennan's lengthy introduction, like her analysis in general, displays a sound grasp of Burke's philosophy. I'll draw attention later to one or two claims she makes that could provoke discussion. Across the broad sweep of her paper, though, she, like Hubler, provides a useful primer in Burke's dramatism. For MacLennan, Burke, and Douglas, "symbolic acts" equal "rhetorical texts that can be read and interpreted using dramatistic methods." "As Burke notes," MacLennan continues, "while most of us communicate our messages through our verbal expression, 'others carve theirs out of jugular veins'" (P&C, p. 76). Plaudits to the author for tracking down that germane quotation.
MacLennan forecasts the major divisions of her treatment this way:
"Douglas links act and agent by a process of inference from the dominant ratios of SCENE-ACT and SCENE-AGENT. This link, Burke's AGENT-ACT ratio, is what enables the investigator to move from the features of scene to a profile of the offender. This emphasis on the ratios of SCENE-ACT and SCENE-AGENT, and by inference, of ACT-AGENT, is what marks profiling as a dramatistic method; the profiling studies the dynamic relationlships among act, scene, and agent in order to interpret the symbolic strategies embedded in the artifact" (emphasis added).
MacLennan goes on to deal with scene-agent ("The Symbol-Using Animal"), next with scene-act ("The Scene Contains the Act"), and then attitude-act, defining "attitude" as a "fusion of agent and act" ("The Dancing of an Attitude"). The final point in the proof of her argument is entitled "Attitude as Incipient Form." This last section of the body is the one I found most illuminating.
I'll take up that final analogy and insight first in my next post.
Ed