[KB] Editing Redux

[Jim Moore]

Jim Klumpp wrote:


"Let the humble pentad do its work well.  If
we do, I think that we will have less chance of losing the point that
the pentad was posited for in the first place: to capture ways that
symbolic accounts carve up the world differently."


Jim Moore responds:


Back in the day, my Burkean prof put it this way:  the pentad is not a taxonomy.  Rather, it is a heuristic designed to function as Prof. Klumpp has adumbrated.  I agree with Jim K. that incorporating the term Trouble into pentadic analysis will add little, if anything, to the pentad's power as a heuristic.  The idea that "Trouble" is somehow "missing" from the pentad seems tacitly to attempt to give the pentad purely objective descriptive accuracy that Burke did not claim for it.


Burke's eventual division of Agency into Means/Attitude served a different purpose:  to emphasize the coexistence of instrumental and postural Agencies, which sometimes may be useful to construe as discrete.  "Trouble" seems to be an attempt put another scoop on the ice cream cone, a scoop that is already implied by the presence of the Agent (an actor, not just a mover) amid the other four or five scoops.  That needless scoop leaves the ice cream in danger of tumbling with only questionable benefit to be derived from the new scoop.


I love rocky road,


Jim

________________________________
From: KB <kb-bounces at kbjournal.org> on behalf of James Klumpp <jklumpp at umd.edu>
Sent: January 23, 2017 1:57:41 PM
To: kb at kbjournal.org; edwardcappel at frontier.com
Subject: [KB] Editing Redux

I am not certain that I disagree at all with Ed Appel.  But I do think
that we err when we try to overburden the pentad by loading all Burkean
insights on it.  Trouble is one of those.  We need to remember that the
pentad was a vocabulary designed to work with variety of accounts.
"This book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in
accordance with the nature of the world as all men experience it, are
exemplified in the attributing of motives. . . We shall use five terms
as generating principle for our investigation.  In a rounded statement
about motives . . ."  Now when we accomplish this task of understanding
the ways in which the symbol using animal attributes motives, provides
symbolic accounts of situations, we have not said all that is to be
said.  Very well. Why does the pentad need to capture all of the world's
insight?  Let Ed say that the dramatistic process is necessary to a
fuller statement about diachronic narrative (and to human conflict).  I
am fine with that.  I agree.  And, drama is a natural metaphor because,
Burke argues elsewhere, the state of Babel creates disorder and
conflict, as Jim Moore adds.  But let us not lose sight of the necessary
work that the pentad does so well -- illuminating the variety of motives
that mark the Babel of human speech.  Let it do that work well and let
other insights take that necessary work and proceed further in the human
drama.

In short, the addition of Trouble into the pentad does not enhance its
ability to clarify accounts, in my judgment.  Save the insights that
flow from Trouble and the many other terms of disorder that Ed has
cataloged for a fuller discussion of the rich complex of terminologies
of which the pentad is one.  Let the humble pentad do its work well.  If
we do, I think that we will have less chance of losing the point that
the pentad was posited for in the first place: to capture ways that
symbolic accounts carve up the world differently.

Jim Klumpp

--
-------------
James F. Klumpp, Professor Emeritus
Department of Communication, University of Maryland
409 Upper Haw Dr., Mars Hill, NC 28754
Email: jklumpp at umd.edu
Voice: 828.689.4456
Website: http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~jklumpp/home.htm


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