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
Man, we need to get some more people talking in here. But I’m getting a free Burke seminar, so I’m not complaining.
I’ll start by taking a shot at this question: “Does Burke stint, in a culpable way, on the issue of nonverbal motivation?” My answer would be yes. In the “symbol-using animal” perspective Burke holds, the emphasis is on “symbol-using,” not on “animal.” But we are animals at our core, and I believe that many of our motivations simply cannot be expressed in symbols. (Unfortunately, it’s very hard to give an example of such a motivation; my only tools for doing so are symbols.)
Perhaps more significantly, I believe Burke’s calling as “just a word man” led him to overstate the influence of language on social hierarchy. I know that statement seems incredible. The influence of language on social hierarchy, of course, is undeniably tremendous. But the influence goes both ways. Social hierarchy influences language as much as language influences social hierarchy. Indeed, I would guess that language is hierarchical in part because it developed in hierarchical communities.
Compare this statement with Burke’s claim that “in any order, there will be mysteries of hierarchy, since such a principle is grounded in the very nature of language, and reënforced by the resultant diversity of occupational classes” (Rhetoric 279). He attributes this to “the nature of man, generically, as a symbol-using animal” (Rhetoric 279).
But hierarchy, mysterious or not, is not grounded in the nature of language. Animals that don’t use symbols nevertheless live in hierarchical societies. Actually, I’m not aware of any animal societies—from bees to gorillas—that aren’t hierarchical. Granted, our symbols may enable us to develop finer gradations of hierarchies, but the hierarchical structures themselves were inevitable long before we thought of using symbols.
So what does all this have to do with the question above, which involves nonverbal motivation? I bring it up because some of our motivation relates to hierarchies. That seems to be the case with serial killers—murdering people is a way to climb the hierarchy. Their basic motivation may be no different from a corporate CEO’s, except that the serial killer’s methods are probably less humane.
I would argue that this was the case for Ted Bundy as much as for Ed Gein. “Where was Bundy's inherent inadequacy, other than in his twisted sense of values?” It was in his mind. The relevant factor isn’t a person’s placement in the hierarchy in any objective sense. It’s the person’s own view of his placement in the hierarchy that motivates him to climb it. By surrounding himself with people like those at the Republican National Convention, he may have come to view himself as inferior by comparison. Serial killing gave him “a means of empowering this inadequate personality,” as MacLennan quotes Douglas as saying.
Incidentally, I’m indebted to James Klumpp for his essay “Burkean Social Hierarchy and the Ironic Investment of Martin Luther King,” which inspired some of my thoughts on hierarchy. The mistakes I made in presenting Burke’s views are mine, of course, not his.
Tom