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
Tom raises the question about whether there is any difference between the "alogoi" motives (those that all animals, human and nonhuman, share) in nonverbal animals and those in the symbol-using animal, namely us.
I guess we could say that on one level, the physical, biological level, no such differences exist. If we take a gander at the base of Maslow's famous hierarchy of human needs and motivations, we'll note the same drives that probably all primates and most reptiles and prereptilian beings possess in common, the requirements for food, drink, cover, shelter, reproduction, and elimination. As physiological "itches" that need scratching, we're likely at one with other denizens of the biosphere.
The manner in which we satisfy those needs, though, is NEVER the same for us as it is for them. Our modus operandi is in all cases transformed by the notion of "moral purpose." In human life, those basic needs are linguistically modified and rule governed, in response to the hortatory negative, the negative of command. Humans eat prepared foods with utensils, drink from a glass or cup, wear clothing, reside in an often elaborately arifactualized dwelling, and perform acts of reproduction and elimination in private. All of these acts are highly acculturated and/or politicized via the rules of social etiquette or governmental laws. We don't just "take" food, clothing, housing, or reproductive partners as we wish on a whim, not without potentially serious consequences.
As for the exacerbation of our particular hierarchal motives, in contrast to those of nonverbal animals, we're "rotten with perfection" in a way that they are not. A human being might be top dog money- or position-wise in his or her particular community, but that's often not enough. He or she frequently wants to be top dog regionally, or nationally, or even globally. Or, he or she might "reason" thusly: I have all these distinguishing attributes and I'm Number One, but I want to put even more distance between myself and whoever is just below, by garnering more money and/or power still.
The hierarchal drives of nonverbal animals are practical. They can be sated. Animals of any kind, nonhuman and human, can eat or drink only so much, reproduce with only so many other animals, physically control and range over only so much territory themselves. The hierarchal fantasies of humans are infinite in their possibilties, at least as mentally envisioned. Some persons just gotta have more and more and more, of whatever!
Good questions, Tom
Ed