- Had some anti-technology sentiments
- Lived on a farm that didn't have electricity or running water for quite a while
- Was interested in communism, but was not a member of the communist party
- Associated with authors such as e.e. cummings
- Did research on drug addiction
- Divorced his wife and married her sister
- Burke's is a large, encompassing system
- Defines rhetoric as "the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or to induce actions in other human agents" (qtd in Perspectives 191).
- Defines a human as "the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative), separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order), and rotten with perfection" ("Definition of Man" 507). He consistently tinkered with this definition.
- Key concept is symbolic action, of which rhetoric, poetics, science, and philosophy are all parts
- Key concept is Identification
- as a means to an end
- as union through shared opposition
- as unconscious identification through wanting or not wanting to be something
- Identification and division are two sides of the same coin, because identification implies an obverse
- Movement from division to identification drives rhetoric
- Included the self as a potential audience, as a means to cultivate what the individual wishes himself or herself to be.
- His treatment of form, creating and satisfying expectations, resonates with Richards's concept of feedforward
- Dramatism is perhaps what Burke is most know for in rhetorical history
- Dramatism is analyzing language use as symbolic action rather than information transfer
- motion (movement of objects) versus action (chosen acts)
- Three parameters for symbolicity (which is invested in conscious choice):
- The Pentad (or occasionally hexad) is a means to uncover motives through a dramatistic lens
- The Pentad consists of act, agent, agency, scene, purpose and later attitude
- purpose is the agent private intent; motive is the broader reason of the act's occurrence
- ratios (putting elements of the Pentad together) explore how particular elements establish the context for others
- Logology was Burke's method of examining how language functions on the word/meaning level
- It applied a secular theological method to symbols to discover how words create symbolic reality
- Humans invented the concept of the negative
- There is no negative in the material world of motion, only things that are
- thus the negative is a product of symbolicity
- The negative leads to hierarchies based on social commandments about what not to do
- Hierarchies lead to a drive toward perfection, to become the fullest expression of whatever the hierarchy structures
- This is connected with Aristotle's notion of entelechy, wherein each thing seeks to be the perfect example of its kind.
- Burke calls humans "rotten with perfection" because of this drive, because hierarchies aren't always what we might call moral. For example, something like the Holocaust was born out of the creation of a perfect cultural enemy, a perfect negative.
- Mystery is part of hierarchies
- Mystery encourages obedience
- Mystery allows different members on a hierarchy to communicate by submerging differences and associating commonalities
- Mystery is in part created through three modes
- occupational psychosis (a certain way of thinking tied to a certain way of living)
- terministic screens (a vocabulary filter based on occupational psychosis)
- trained incapacity (a kind of incapacity based on the very success in one frame causing failure in another)
- These can be understood through the platitude "to a guy with a hammer everything is a nail." The idea is that our very success in a mode of living makes us view everything from that perspective. It is a complete form of confirmation bias or Richards's feedforward.
- The pollution-purification-redemption cycle is visible in language
- Our positions in hierarchies inevitably lead to some form of guilt (or pollution)
- Guilt is purified through a position of victimage (scapegoating something) or mortification (penance)
- Purification leads to a temporary redemptive state
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