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
If I'm understanding your question correctly, Ed, we have two quite different issues here. The first is whether Burke, himself, views the scene-act and scene-agent ratios as first among equals. My impression is that he views them as first, but not among equals. You and Jennifer MacLennan both observe that Burke places them "at the very centre of motivational assumptions." Furthermore, Burke adds a couple of pages later, "Elsewhere in the Grammar we shall examine two of these (scene-purpose and agency-purpose) in other connections; and the rest will figure in passing." To say that they figure only in passing would seem to imply that not all of the ratios are "equals."
But the other issue you raise is much more difficult for me to answer. "How one explains the world pentadically, or hexadically, is pretty much up for grabs, isn't it?" Yes, it is, and we certainly don't have to be limited by Burke's approach. On the other hand, we may find that the hand in Burke's opening metaphor is actually the most effective one. We may be needlessly handicapping ourselves by cutting off our thumbs.
In short, I think it makes sense to place our emphasis on the scene-act and scene-agent ratios, just as Jennifer MacLennan does and just as Burke seems to.
Tom