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 thought Tom Wright's two posts were superb. He certainly is correct that many nonverbal animals engage in activities and establish relationships that look to us like expressions of a hierarchical motive. I see no reason not to call those motions and apparent similarities hierarchal.
Differences between human and nonhuman hierarchies are, nevertheless, real and present, I do believe. The one-up, one-down correlation has moral overtones in human societies. (Burke deals with that ethical dimension somewhere, in the RHETORIC I think it is.) Also, language will exacerbate nonverbal hierarchal drives in a way that the "lower" animals do not experience them. Coming under the umbra of the verbal, they can take on a perfectionistic, entelechial intensity that can go way beyond the more practical concerns of the beasts. Moose will lock horns, seals will do battle, for mating privileges, etc. Lions as well as pigeons will follow a "pecking order" based on strength or some other physical superiority. They do not, though, appear to expend energy resources, and fanatically so, for mere symbolic status, the way humans are so offen driven to do. They want food, sex, and power, it would seem, not morally-tinged "social worship."
Maybe I'm wrong on that. Let's check with our local ethologist.
As for Ted Bundy's self-concept as maybe being one of inadequacy, despite his obvious talents, you may be right. Adler could provide some justificaion there. Humans pretty much start with a sense of their own limitations, he opines. It's not possible, of course, to get thoroughly into somebody's head, the "black box" of behaviorist psychology. So who really knows for sure?
Ed