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
Since we're on the subject of motivation---as in scene-act, scene-agent, and agent-act-cum-attitude---what are your thoughts on this question: Does Burke stint, in a culpable way, on the issue of nonverbal motivation? At a regional convention about a dozen years ago, I heard a well-known scholar impugn Burke for just that putative failing.
Now, Burke has defined himself as "just a word man" (Em Griffin, A FIRST LOOK AT COMMUNICATION, First Edition, chapter on Burke), not, by calling, given to the arcana of purely physiological drives. And he certainly can't be accused of neglecting the function of nonverbal causation in a general way. We cannot have action without motion, he readily concedes in his encyclopedia article. Burke even has allowed, in "Terministic Screens" (LASA) and elsewhere, that human beings may, in fact, actually but move, not act. (Bottom line, however: We will inevitably treat one another as morally accountable, acting beings, whatever the undergirding reality may be.) In CRITICISM AND SOCIAL CHANGE, Frank Lentricchia picks up on that concession (p. 115) and accords it some emphasis.
The philosophers of action of the rules perspective define physical action as "interference with causes in nature" (Toulmin, Taylor, etc.) Burke seconds that construction with his notion of "self-interference" (RM, "Pure Persuasion"). Nonverbal animals don't give evidence of such demonstrable human fastidiousness.
Still, what are the wellsprings of such self-disciplined muscular contractions, unique in the animal kingdom? Only the gossamer negative? Or an indeterminate blend of involuntary neural impulses and spiritual/mental intuitions and intentions?
Just asking.
Another thought: The theorists of crime profiling, MacLennan tells us, describe the typical serial killer as something of a living ganglion of irreconcilable contradictions (if you recognize that expression from G & S's HMS PINAFORE, you win the door prize). He (it's almost invariably a "he") knows deep down he's an inadequate failure, yet he harbors delusions of grandeur, a sense of outsized importance, at one and the same time.
Where does Ted Bundy, an almost paradigmatic specimen in terms of an insatiable compulsion to murder, fit into this scheme? He was a handsome guy with obviously a lot of talent. One judge told him he'd have made a great lawyer, if only he had chosen another path in life. He was an up-and-coming young Republican, present in some capacity at the 1972 Party Convention in Miami. "What about that guy?", as Dave Letterman would inquire. Where was Bundy's inherent inadequacy, other than in his twisted sense of values?
See ya' later alligators.
Ed