- Burke builds an argument about the motives of man. He asserts that “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). An act “has connotations of consciousness of purpose…If one happened to stumble over an obstruction, that would not be an act, but mere motion” (14). This also means that non-conscious objects cannot act. Agent “embraces not only all words general or specific for person, actor, character, individual, hero, villain, father, doctor, engineer, but also any words, moral or functional, for patient, and words for the motivational properties or agents, such as ‘drives,’ ‘instincts,’ ‘states of mind.’ We may also have collective words for agent, such as nation, group” (20).
- Burke “want[s] to inquire into the purposely internal relationships which the five terms bear to one another, considering their possibilities of transformation, their range of permutations and combinations – and then to see how these various resources figure in actual statements about human motives” (xvi). He also writes that by “grammar” be means the terms themselves; grammar refers to “a universal validity or complete certainty” as opposed to a particular situation or usage (xvii). Burke uses the term “dramatism” because his theories are “developed form the analysis of drama, [which] treats language and thought primarily as modes of action” (xxii).
Ratios
- In chapter 1, Burke discussion the scene-act and scene-agent rations. These ratios are guided by the “principle of drama that the nature of acts and agents should be consistent with the nature of the scene” (3).
- “From the motivational point of view, there is implicit in the quality of a scene that quality of the action that is to take place within it” (6). This is the scene-act ratio. “The proposition would be: scene is to act as implicit is to explicit. One could not deduce the details of the action from the details of the setting, but one could deduce the quality of the actions from the quality of the scene” (7). The scene also involves the chanters or previous acts (because past acts could “modif[y] (hence, to a degree motivate) the subsequent acts” (7)). The same kind of idea can be applied to the scene-agent ratio as the agent is a product of his environment. Thus, “inappropriate acts and temperaments do not ‘count for’ so much as they would in situations for which they are better fir. One set of scenic conditions will ‘implement’ and ‘amplify’ given ways and temperaments which, in other situations would remain mere potentials” (19).
- Similarly, “the principles of consistency binding scene, act, and agent also lead to reverse applications. That is, the scene-act ratio either calls for actins in keep with scenes or scenes in keeping with acts – an similarly with the scene-agent ratio” (9). This means that “the scene-act ratio can be applied in two ways. It can be applied deterministically in statements that a certain policy had to be applied to be adopted in a certain situations, or it may be applied in hortatory statements to the effect that a certain policy should be adopted in conformity with a situation” (13).
- Ultimately, all five terms can be combined with the others, meaning there are ten ratios. So, for instance, there is an act-agent ratio, which “strongly suggests a temporal or sequential relationship…The agent is an author of his acts, which are descended from him…And, conversely, his acts can make him or remake him in accordance with their nature. They would be his product and/or he would be theirs” (16).
Substance
- “Yet etymologically ‘substance’ is a scenic word. Literally, a person’s or a thing’s sub-stance would be something that stands beneath or supports the person or thing…That is, though used to designate something within the thing, intrinsic to it, the word etymologically refers to something outside the thing, extrinsic to it. Or otherwise put: the word in its etymological origins would refer to the attribute’s of the thing’s context, since that which supports or underlies a thing would be a part of the thing’s context. And a thing’s context, being outside or beyond the thing, would be something that the thing is not” (22-3). “For those who admire someone as a man of substance, or standing, have in mind not only his personal traits, but also the resources that spring from his environmental connections, the external powers that his position, income, status put in his command, the outside factors that, in backing or supporting him, enable him to make his personal characteristics count” (24).
- “‘Dialectic substance’ would thus be the over-all category of dramatism, which treats of human motives in the terms of verbal action. By this statement we most decidedly do not mean that human motives are confined to the realm of verbal action. We mean rather that the dramatistic analysis of motives has its point of departure in the subject of verbal action (in thought, speech, and document” (33).
Prelim meeting notes (Fleck):
- Burke is the inventor of the negative; choosing implies what we are not choosing
- Substance is the “essence” of a thing, but to know a thing, you have to know what it is not. It has to have a background (the “not) in order to have an identity. This is the paradox of substance.
- Because substance is not a given (not a once and for all encompassing “essence”, it’s not a given. Therefore, substance is variable; this also means that motive and meaning are variable. Even substance is affected by how we name it.
- Grammar = structure
- In order to understand symbolic action, we nee to know the motive. Motive is the way in which the situation/thing is named. Motive is not physical/material.
- Symbolic action -> choice -> conflict -> drama(tism) -> guilt
Reflection, Selection, Deflection
- “Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality” (59).
- Our circumference (focus) around an act affect hour we interpret the act (77). “The contracting and expanding of scene is rooted in the very nature of linguistic placement…To select a set of terms is…to select a circumference” (84, 90). “For its terms, in being restricted to the nature of the thesis, will thereby establish a circumference, marking the outer boundaries of the ground that is to be covered. As agent, the writer will have acted creatively – and the motives and motifs featured by his terminology will fix the nature of the constitution he has enacted” (86).
- Circumference = how we define the situation = the actions we can take = motive = what we claim as substance (ground or purpose) = man’s pursuits and identities (i.e. ultimately how we name affects what we see as possibilities for action which affects who we become)
- “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” (xi).
God term
- A God term is: “any hierarchy of values necessarily entails a supreme value term at the top, a god-term validating the steps in the hierarchy. Richard Weaver explains that a god-term is ‘that expression about which all other expressions are ranked as subordinate and serving dominations and powers. Its force imparts to the [other terms] their lesser degree of force, and fixes the scale by which degrees of comparison are understood’ (212). Some examples of god-terms, according to Burke, are progress, money, democracy and equality.