Radney, J. Randolph. 1996.
(entire text follows:)
He who cannot see through the rules, cannot see except through the rules (Ojibway elder, quoted by Ross 1992:4)
The recent reading of Kenneth Burke's A grammar of motives has
proven a fascinating experience. I began reading in a very serious,
scholarly, systematic way, only to find myself semi-transfixed,
my attention drawn to a point of interest, with several minutes
having passed as I crawled through a sentence, pondered at length,
then crawled to the next, reflecting on possible implications
and applications. I would shake myself, reminded that this reading
was due in a short time and that I couldn't afford to pore over
every point, needing to press on to finish before the class discussion
began. I would progress for a few paragraphs or pages as a serious,
if superficial, scholar once more, only to have the process repeat
itself as I was again seduced by some other Burkean notion. The
reader must not assume by my saying 'notion' that what I had intercourse
with was necessarily some abstract meaning in the text; frequently
I was captured not by thought, but by the shape of some sentence
as if it had been pronounced upon some inner ear, or the (serendipitous
to me) juxtaposition of what I had formerly thought radically
incongruous subjects. Again and again, my mind would be drawn
to two quotes from earlier reading, one Derridean and the other
Foucauldian, that have become recent experimental themes of my
education:
In ''Structure, sign, and play'', Derrida advances
that:
There are two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology- in other words, throughout his entire history- has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play (1986:93).
In Foucault's writing as well, we find the idea of play invading
the serious:
The critical side of the analysis deals with the systems enveloping discourse; attempting to mark out and distinguish the principles of ordering, exclusion and rarity in discourse. We might, to play with our words, say it practises a kind of studied casualness. The genealogical side of discourse, by way of contrast, deals with series of effective formation of discourse: it attempts to grasp it in its power of affirmation, by which I do not mean a power opposed to that of negation, but the power of constituting domains of objects, in relation to which one can affirm or deny true or false propositions. Let us call these domains of objects positivist and , to play on words yet again, let us say that, if the critical style is one of studied casualness, then the genealogical mood is one of felicitous positivism' (1986:162).
Likewise, as I read Burke, I felt that he was being somewhat less
serious than one might suppose from the obvious care of his discussion;
if I might describe his writing in terms of another author, I
would say that Burke indeed displays a studied casualness coupled
with a felicitous positivism. Thus, the ideas that I pondered
as I read were now technical and comprehensive, seeming to talk
about all of life, and now again informal and figurative or discussing
some minor point that seemed little relevant to anything other
than Burkean whim. As a result, I will not attempt anything like
a comprehensive discussion of 'a system for understanding or applying
Burke'. Rather I would like to consider five significant textual
themes in Burke's work that seem to have triggered something very
like thought in me as I read. They are not necessarily the most
important of his ideas, nor even the ones I find most important
to me. They are merely the ones that I think I can write about
in the space allotted.
The first Burkean idea I will discuss is his famous pentad. Now
this is, of course, a very important contribution to the humanities,
if we judge by the number of times that it is discussed by other
writers in a wide range of fields. To quote Burke:
We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word that names the act (names what took place, in thought or deed), and another that names the scene (the background of the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must indicate what person or kind of person (agent) performed the act, what means or instruments he used (agency), and the purpose. Men may violently disagree about the purposes behind a given act, or about the character of the person who did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted; or they may even insist upon totally different words to name the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)' (xv).
The reader may muse, having just read this paragraph, 'This is
merely the old ''Five Ws (plus H)'' that are taught in English
composition at the most basic levels'. Such a comment would be
true, if it were a complete summary of Burke's work. However,
he proceeds to build upon this simple set the series of 'ratios',
the interrelation of paired questions. Thus, Who, What, Where
and When, Why, and How are not the only important questions to
ask, but also How the What and Where and When interrelate (Scene-Act
ratio), how the Who and Where and When interrelate (Scene-Agent),
and so on. So for Burke it wasn't enough to know that someone
did something at a given time and place using a certain instrument
and for a stated purpose, he also wanted to describe the Agent's
relationship to the Scene, now as acting and again as acted upon,
and similar sorts of things. Of course, as the title of his book
implies, he wanted to use such descriptions to better understand
why people do what they do.
Such considerations are basic to our consideration of whether
people speak languages or languages speak people. To put this
in Burke's terms, we might consider language as the scene within
which I am the agent/speaker. I then speak language, but with
a sense of the language being larger than I, I cannot fail to
see ways that my action is limited by the scene. Then again, lokking
at language behavior in another way, I am larger than my use of
the language. Therefore, it is possible for me to be seen as scene
with language as speaker and my 'control' of the language viewed
as a reduction of the possible acts that the language would choose
to say. This in turn leads to an interesting ambiguity and the
possibility of comedic understanding of the contradiction of my
relationship to 'my' language (and, as KB would say, v.v.). This
also leads to the second of Burke's notions that I will discuss
here.
Burke recounts in his book how he set out to write an account
of comedy that developed into what some would regard a work about
a larger topic. In his words:
A perfectionist might seek to evolve terms free of ambiguity and inconsistency (as with the terministic ideals of symbolic logic and logical positivism). But we have a different purpose in view, one that probably retains traces of its ''comic'' origin. We take it for granted that, insofar as men cannot themselves create the universe, there must remain something essentially enigmatic about the problem of motives, and that this underlying enigma will manifest itself in inevitable ambiguities and inconsistencies among the terms for motives. Accordingly, what we want is not terms that avoid ambiguity, but terms that clearly reveal the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise (xviii).
Now this notion is particularly interesting in light of translation
organizations that are committed to the stance that a given text
has a singular, unitary, stable meaning, and that the goal of
translation is to determine the stable meaning that the author
intended and render it in a second language. In Burke's view,
all language, even all action and motive whatever is inescapably
ambiguous. As a solitary statement, this idea might be refuted
by simply taking a different stance. However, he also offers a
simple but compelling explanation for why this must be:
Since no two things or acts or situations are exactly alike, you cannot apply the same term to both of them without thereby introducing a certain margin of ambiguity, an ambiguity as great as the difference between the two subjects that are given the identical title (xix).
Later in his work, Burke develops one implication of such necessary
ambiguity in language, what we might call the natural imperative
of the naming process. He says that:
Such tactics of entitling are as legitimate as any other, once the irony has been made explicit. Indeed, philosophies are never quite ''consistent'' in this sense. All thought tends to name things not because they are precisely as named, but because they are not quite as named, and the name is designated as a somewhat hortatory device, to take up the slack (54).
Thus, Burke uncovers the intent that I have when I name something
that it may be what I have called it. In so calling, Burke says,
I participate in the kind of creation the God of the Bible brings
forth, saying, 'Let there be light'. Indeed, there is a somewhat
serious school of Christian theology that says that this action
is precisely what the faithful who belong to God must do as the
operation of their faith: 'To call the things that are not, as
though they were'.
One particular kind of naming that is very prevalent in our Western
scholarly traditions comes in the next section.
Burke's understanding of the process of contextualization and
definition is the third of his ideas that I will discuss in this
paper. For him, the process of defining something is crucial to
the way we relate to and understand it. Further, this definition
must necessarily involve not the thing-in-itself, but rather the
thing in relation to what it is not. For example, Burke discusses
two possible strategies of definition, saying that 'contextual
definition stresses placement, ancestral definition stresses derivation'
(28). In slightly more detail Burke posits:
There is another strategy of definition, usually interwoven with the contextual sort, yet susceptible of separate observation. This is the ''tribal'' or ''familial'' sort, the definition of a substance in terms of ancestral cause....The Aristotelian genus is originally not a logical, but a biological, concept (26).
And he continues more at length later, saying:
When ''defining by location'', one may place the object of one's definition in contexts of varying scope. And our remarks on the scene-act ratio, for instance, suggest that the choice of circumference for the scene in terms of which a given act is to be located will have a corresponding effect upon the interpretation of the act itself. Similarly, the logic of the scene-agent ratio will figure in our definition of the individual, insofar as principles of dramatic consistency are maintained' (77).
In general Burke believes that in the defining process, 'there
is the reduction of one terminology to another. Any word or concept
is a reduction in this sense. One reduces this to that by discussing
this in terms of that' (96). Thus, when we define, we must talk
of something not in terms of what it is, but in terms of something
else that we would like it to be.
Building upon this, we can see why language is such a restless
thing, always changing, never the same from century to century,
generation to generation, decade to decade- or even from speech
to speech.
For Burke, such a process has a most interesting outworking in
the court system. He claims that:
Justice in ... an over-all sense would obviously serve the ends of unification. And insofar as the law courts would ''ideally'' serve this same role, in aiming at a kind of justice that mediated among the differing ways of differing classes, we can see how the profuse development of law invites to idealistic philosophy. Materialist ''debunkers'' of such legal idealism can then interpret the ''ideal'' in terms of its ''betrayal''; for ''unification'' is not unity, but a compensation for disunity - hence, any term for ''ideal'' justice can be interpreted as a rhetorical concealment for material injustice, particularly when the actual history of legal decisions over a long period can be shown to have favored class justice in the name of ideal justice (173).
This observation is similar to one Foucault made in another context:
True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it (1986:151).
Considerations of what is revealed and what is masked (and what
should be) lead us to the fourth Burkean topic that I wish to
discuss.
In his book Contingency, irony, and solidarity, Rorty discusses
at length the need for a publicly held liberalism together with
a privately held irony (1989:73-95). He discusses the insufficiency
of a singular position on all issues, public and private, and
discusses this in terms of example colleagues and historical figures.
In Burke we can also find a similar idea when he speaks of what
may motivate a person-as-patriot or the same person-as-individual:
In theological and metaphysical works, we can recognize the paradox of the absolute readily enough. Often, in fact, it is explicitly discussed. But in historicist writings it more easily goes unnoticed. Yet the paradox may be implicit in any term for a collective motivation, such as a concept of class, nation, the ''general will,'' and the like. Technically, it becomes a ''pure'' motive when matched against some individual locus of motivation. And it may thus be the negation of an individual motive.... What we are here considering formally, as a paradox of substance, can be illustrated quickly enough by example. A soldier may be nationally motivated to kill the enemies of his country, whereas individually he is motivated by a horror of killing his own enemies. Or conversely, as a patriot he may act by the motive of sacrifice in behalf of his country, but as an individual he may want to profit' (37).
Where some others would be hard pressed to reconcile such paradoxes
and inconsistencies into a single system of behavior, Burke (and
also Rorty) would expect and even embrace them:
Indeed, we can take it as a reliable rule of thumb that, whenever, we find a distinction between the internal and the external, the intrinsic and the extrinsic, the within and the without, (as with Korzybski's distinction between happenings ''inside the skin'' and happenings ''outside the skin'') we can expect to encounter the paradoxes of substance (47).
That such 'illogic' should be taken not only as not problematic,
but as in fact a mark of reliability of understanding brings us
to a discussion of a final contribution of Burke to be discussed
for the present.
A few years ago, I encountered a discussion of Ojibway and Cree
animism that revolutionized my thinking about such theologies
(or ontotheologies?). In his book, Ross attempts to dissuade his
readers from the conception that by believing in spiritual causes
for everything in the natural world, 'Indians believe little spirits
live in trees, rocks and waterfalls' (68). This is emphatically
not the substance of native spiritual belief (84). Ross recounts
his experience as a fishing guide, wherein he would have to try
to anticipate where the fish would be biting on a given day in
the vastness of the lake where he worked. There were some twenty
different potential 'hot-spots' for pickerel (walleye). As he
became more experienced at guiding, Ross would take some time
each morning to image each of the twenty potential places, trying
to get as much feeling for what the place would be like to be
at on that particular day as he could from his memory. Gradually
certain spots would begin to 'feel right' and he would take his
clients out to those places first. As he now analyzes his guiding
skills, it seems to Ross that there was no conscious if-then reasoning
as he considered the factors that might contribute to the fish
biting in one place more than others (73). There were too many
factors to keep track of consciously. What resulted was what Ross
calls 'pattern-thought' (70). He says that the hunter-gatherer
spent his entire day occupied by:
this one mental task: accurate prediction. Successful prediction could not ... be accomplished without paying close attention to details and to patterns, but that was not enough on its own. Observational skills had to be accompanied by a storing of those patterns in memory and by a skill at comparing those stored patterns, in their incredible diversity, with the ever-changing patterns of the day at hand (74).
Ross recounts one episode as a guide where he was able to predict
a severe weather change and avert disaster, while not being overtly
conscious of attention paid to any weather factor. He says:
I do not know, to this day, what signs I was reading, what patterns I was feeling. I suspect that the uneasiness I felt had something to do with barometric changes, but there was not, in my own mind, any question of having guessed. I knew that there was danger approaching, and felt it so strongly that I was ready to risk the displeasure of my guests (76).
Another significant observation of the thought patterns unique
to hunter-gatherers is the fact that they do not regard themselves
as primarily going after the animals they hunt or the plants they
gather. Instead the activity is one of placing oneself where one
can receive what is provided. 'It is predominantly a task of accommodating
yourself to an intensely dynamic and fluid reality, reading the
signs, trying to anticipate the most appropriate place to be at
the most critical moment' (77). Another observation Ross makes
is that pattern-thought frequently produces 'answers' that seem
to come from outside the individual hunter-gatherer. For this
reason when people are asked the reasons for actions, they frequently
reply 'It felt right', 'It came to me', or 'That was the guidance
I received' (86). In this way the hunter-gatherers' reasoning
becomes at once a spiritual process and not open to 'logical analysis'.
In a similar vein, Burke also rejects the traditional evaluation
of aboriginal 'animism', saying that the development of the traditional
view was determined by the philosophies that provided their context
such that aboriginal behavior could be evaluated in only a very
narrow way:
And we should infer that the original conception of the powers of motives in things is not exactly animistic. The evidences of animism which nineteenth-century anthropologists found so profusely among primitive tribes are, to our way of thinking, mainly indications of how thoroughly most of such anthropologists were imbued with the terms typical of nineteenth-century idealist philosophy, so that they saw things in these terms. We should expect, rather, that the basic perception of motives is a perception of things not as possessing the souls and personalities of agents, but as being essentially active. That is, they were not felt to be people; they were felt to be actions (118-9).
I find both Ross' and Burke's explanations of the aboriginal viewpoint
to be remarkably clear and less denigrating than other discussions
I have previously considered. Actually, I had conceived the animist
believing in exactly those ''little spirits'' that Ross does his
best to dispel from the discussion of native spiritual belief.
At times I thought of Plato's Ideals, that perhaps the ''spirits''
or ''manitous'' of things in the universe were a sort of essential
reality ''behind'' what we see. However, one obvious difference
between Plato and the native philosophy of Ross' description would
be that Plato conceived of the Ideals as being remote from the
natural world, producing dualism, whereas the native understanding
would be holistic, with the Ideal in no sense remote from its
natural manifestation. In this sense there is no real division
between what we refer to as natural and supernatural, sacred and
secular.
In this paper, I have presented five of the contributions I believe
that Burke has made to my scholarly development in his book A
grammar of motives. Of course, in such a short paper I
cannot have done justice to the range of topics he considers in
his manuscript. If I have given some vague notion of the brilliance,
but even more the tolerance, inherent in his work, I will be most
content.
In the last paragraph, I may have given the impression that Burke
touched me only as a scholar. To allow this to stand unmodified
would mask a more important reality. As I read Burke, I did not
just think about how his ideas would help me in my work or in
my studies, I considered what difference his way of seeing might
make in the whole of my life. In that way, reading Burke was a
somewhat exercise, a most savory experience.
Burke, Kenneth. 1945. A grammar of motives. Berkeley:
Univ. of California Pr.
Derrida, Jacques. 1986 [1970, 1978]. ''Structure, sign, and, play
in the discourse of the human sciences''. Translated [1970] by
Alan Bass. In Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (eds.), Critical
Theory Since 1965. Tallahassee: Florida State Univ. Pr.
83-94.
Foucault, Michel. 1986 [1970, 1971]. ''The discourse on language''.
Trans. (1971) by Rupert Swyer. In Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle
(eds.), Critical Theory Since 1965. Tallahassee:
Florida State Univ. Pr. 148-62.
Rorty, Richard. 1989. Contingency, irony, and solidarity.
Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Pr.
Ross, Rupert. 1992. Dancing with a ghost: exploring Indian
reality. Markham, Ontario: Octopus Publishing Group.
Last modified: 22 May 1996
Reply to randy_radney@sil.org