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
To get at the nexus between Burke and Douglas on the question of form, developed in MacLennan's culminating division entitled "Attitude as Incipient Form," we need to backtrack to her preceding section, "The Dancing of an Attitude." There she introduces Douglas's distinction between "signature," or "the encoding of attitude," and "modus operandi," the "encoding of agency." Signature is "'the unique element and personal compulsion' that is evidenced in the arrangement of the crime scene." It is the "symbolic" aspect of the criminal act, symbolic in the conventional, nonpragmatic sense of the term. It typifies who or what the killer thinks he is, makes THE statement, embodies THE message, he is sending to his "audience." "The form of the act is [thus] the expression of signature." It's the murderer's personal calling card, so to speak, his own specialized exploitation of available cultural icons and emblems. The MO, in contrast, serves a merely practical purpose.
The audience the killer addresses is comprised of the public, the media, the police, even himself. The criminal is "gratified by the signature sequence of the transformative act of scapegoating." It takes a "repetitive form" and is "predictive." In Burke's phrasing, it follows "'the arrows of desire which are turned in a certain direction,'" stimulating particular expectancies and then fulfilling them. "The plot of the offender's drama is [consequently] one of transformation, in which he redefines himself, the victim, and the social scene through a process of victimage." He turns the tables socially and politically. He is no longer the inadequate, no-account loser his culture has told him he is, in one way or another, again and again. He has finally, or once more, asserted power and control, albeit in a dangerously risky way. He's achieved personal satisfaction AND public celebrity in one fell (!) swoop.
Capable of only "partial acts" like other humans, MacLennan says in Burkean fashion, serial murderers are capable of only fleeting, "partial transformations." Their gratifications are only temporary. The "affirmations" they derive from their brute rituals of sacrifice must be sought again and again, commandeering as they kill, "logical extensions of the surrounding culture, of worldly ambition, of success or failure, and of manly avenging violence."
Sam Pekenpaugh (sp?), anyone? Rambo? A thousand and one TV shows, video games, and rap songs? Serial murders are acts in a scene, Burke would suggest, Douglas asserts, and MacLennan makes emphatic. "'The spirit of hierarchy,'" the "'scapegoat principle,'" social motives all, are recapitulated time-and-place-wise in the form of the crime, violently wrenched from their normative modes of expression, hideously caricatured in the victim's house, in a dark alley, by a roadside.
We could call crime-scene profiling dialectical as well as rhetorical, as explained by John Douglas, and interpreted by Jennifer MacLennan. It seeks an answer to the questions: Who or what is being answered, yes or no? Who or what is being opposed? Who or what are you defining yourself against? And especially, what's being compensated for, what difficulty, embarrassment, or weakness of position, actual or potential?
More anon.
Ed