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
Here's a question for discussion, prompted by MacLennan's estimable essay: Are the scene-act and scene-agent ratios necessarily first among equals in Burke's dramatism? MacLennan seems to suggest that is the case. Burke certainly inaugurates his treatment of the ratios in GM by putting them front and center (pp. 3-15). And Burke does say, in the midst of this opening discussion of the pentad at work, "If we but look about us, we find examples of the two ratios [the two mentioned above] everywhere; for they are at the very centre of motivational assumptions" (p. 11). Proto- or quasi-postmodernist that he was, Burke surely put great stress on scene, situation, context, constraining environment, as causal or selective force, throughout his work.
Is such prioritizing necessarily implicit in dramatism, however? To put the issue another eay, is Burke's "system," as it's been somewhat risibly labeled, fundamentally materialistic? Or, if we reverse the scene-act correspondence (which we can readily do, since the addendum that came with the second edition was not there for the first one [pp. 443-44]), is Burke's dramatism essentially realistic, as Walter Fisher and some co-authors argued in an article in CSSJ, I believe it was? Burke does, in fact, so very frequently begin his explanation of dramatism with the term "act" in the forefront.
A few years back, I took, and argued for, a contrary position on the KB discussion list. My view was then, and still is, that dramatism/logology is something of a metasystem (there's that questionable characterization again) that embraces materialism (accent on scene), realism (accent on act), pragmatism (accent on agency), idealism (accent on agent), and mysticism (accent on purpose) without particular partiality (GM, pp. 127-320). And don't slight out of hand the "Neo-Stoic" attitude Burke urges at the conclusion of GM and elsewhere. How one explains the world pentadically, or hexadically, is pretty much up for grabs, isn't it? Or do we "grab" onto symbolic action must efficiently by making scene, or act, the "thumb" in Burke's opening metaphor in GM (pp. xv-xxiii), the digit without which the other four can't operate?
I throw that out for discussion, if anybody cares to join the fray.
Still more at a later time.
Ed