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
I have one complaint to make about this essay, maybe two issues to raise of a Burkean nature, and perhaps one thought that might cut athwart, just a trifle, John Douglas's theory of crime-scene profiling.
Where's the bibliography for this article? Where's the list of references? Failing that, where is complete documentation, U. of Chicago style, in the endnotes? Several passages I tried to find in the sources mentioned I could not locate. There wasn't enough info. Was the Rueckert reference I hunted for to be found in KENNETH BURKE AND THE DRAMA OF HUMAN RELATIONS? It wasn't on the page listed, not in my copy of that work. What about the reference to "Interaction, Dramatism"? I figured this note had to do with the ENCYCLOPEDIA article, but wasn't sure.
Don't get me wrong. This piece is thoroughly, copiously documented in respect to volume of references. It's just not always easy to discover what publication those notes and page numbers are referring to.
One issue "Rhetorical Journey" raises, for me anyway, is that of Burke's definition of "motive." If I'm not mistaken, MacLennan seems to use the term to designate a reality of causation or motivation behind and undergirding the heinous actions of the serial killer. I don't think her interpretation is foreign to Burke, given the ambiguities inherent in his analysis of the wellsprings of action across his many books. I would just point out that Burke's primary point in the featuring of that term has to do with "interpretation" of reality, not reality itself. Note how Burke defines "motives" in P&C: They are "shorthand terms for [perceived] situations" and are derived from "our orientation in general." They are distinctively "linguistic products." Note, too, Burke's introduction of the pentad in GM. He underscores its ubiquity in the "attribution" of motives. Those attributions, given their tendency toward an entelechial highlighting of one or two terms over the others, will surely "deflect" from reality as well as possibly "reflect" reality.
In her discussion of motive, the author references Gusfield's SYMBOLS AND SOCIETY (note 62). Gusfield, though, on page 11, avers that "'motive' is a lingistic device, a concept by which the observer, including the self, explains and understands situations." Quoting Burke, he says, "'These relationships are not REALITIES, they are INTERPRETATIONS of reality---hence different frameworks of interpretation will lead to different conclusions as to what reality is'" (P&C, p. 35; emphasis not added).
Now, this does not mean that in the practical, quotidian search for motivations that the crime-scene profiler is involved in, Burke's take on motive is too academic and abstract. Pretty obviously, Burke's whole project is founded on the notion that there's potent motivational force in language use in and of itself. Language doesn't just construe motivations; it induces them, functions as a source of them. Burke's scheme is one of tamping down, moderating, the inherent excesses language seems to promote, driving the symbol-user too frequently to some end-of-the-line perfectionism that turns out to be counterproductive for persons and societies. Those entelechial compulsions are evidenced in spades in the savage symbolic actions of the serial killer.
So: Perhaps we can hierarchize Burke's notion of motive in this fashion:
"The motive is in the symbol" as attribution or interpretation.
"The motive is in the symbol" as cause, principle of selection, or "magical" inducement (see the opening of PLF).
"The motive is in the symbol" as reified in morally purposeful motion, human artifacts, and even symbolically inscribed nature (see "What Are the Signs of What," LASA). Actions, after all, Burke says, change the conditions of action.
More rants and expostulations later.
Ed