Kenneth Burke, On Human Nature: A Gathering While Everything Flows 1967-1984

Parts 1 and 2

Part One: Creativity

I. On Stress, Its seeking

A. Burke notes that there are three orders of motives of “work”: the aesthetic or poetic, the personal or psychological, and the environmental or sociological.

1. The aesthetic or poetic motive places stress upon a stress-seeking character in a narrative for such stress advances the plot.

2. The personal or psychological motive is present when an author reproduces his/her own experiences for the purposes of generating fiction.

3. The environmental or sociological motive accounts for the cultural and economic situations that engulf a writer during the composition of a narrative.

B. In the section “The Stylistics of Stress” Burke recounts a scenario in his own writing where an envious friend sets up a situation where his friend has to share an apartment with a woman he himself covets. The jealous man leaves town only to later encounter the woman of his desire, who has carried on with his friend. In the jealous man’s eyes, the woman has “lost her magic” and he forsakes her. Burke notes, “At many points throughout the text a principle of divisiveness (a kind of ‘separating out’) manifests itself” (p. 15).

C. Burke notes he wrote this story as an adolescent student “beset by an acute sense of isolation.” He explains the process of ‘symbolic regression’ whereby a narrative attains a formal representation by reducing itself to a story within a story, “a withinness-of-withinness that was ideal of my purposes” (p. 16). He adds, “For I could not have so directly reimagined such conditions of my past that were now closed to me, so far as my conscious retrieval was concerned. Yet here was the essence of the regression with which I was dealing. An accommodating fate had preserved one copy of the story and let me find it” (p. 16).

D. The story within a story Burke mentions places the narrator in a vicious circle. He notes, “His loneliness begets loneliness, and there is no way out except for the flare-up of a compensatory fantasy, the vision of a mystic reversal whereby he is not alone…” (p. 17) and later “Hence all this regression might somehow add up to rebirth?...The development may be inexorably back, back, back into silence—i.e, the womb in the absolute—or things may be directed towards resurgence…”(p. 17). The fluctuation between tragedy and comedy is an aspect of distress.

E. In the section “The Sociopsychology of Stress” Burke suggests that a character’s self-interference, a willfully imposed stress, leads to self-perpetuating state of total isolation. Burke argues that this type of calamity finds fullest bloom in the stylistics of lamentation. Lamentation is actually a form of pleasure. To this end Burke notes the example of an infant crying him/herself to sleep.

1. Calamity, or pathos, serves a function Burke identifies as ‘tragic dignification.’ Burke notes, “I here refer to the rhetorical fact that one can dignify a cause by depicting serious people who are willing to undergo sacrifices on behalf of that cause. Suffering is a way of ‘bearing witness’—that is, in etymological literalness, being a ‘martyr’” (pp. 20-21).

2. The “cult of stress” is, to Burke, a “courting of near-insanity.” Such a state toes the edge of the abyss, but does not succumb to it. Burke here cites Roethke and his stated desire to transcend rational experience in search of a “neoinfantile” type of expression.

3. Burke refers, perhaps autobiographically, to the ‘aesthetic of alcohol’ in which the “desire to attain, in one’s sober writing, the kind of effects that one feels one is getting when under alcohol’s influence” is sought (p. 21). Alcohol stimulates assertiveness and simplifies complexity. Burke adds, “All told, that complex composed a subpersonality within oneself, so that one was, as it were, ‘hearing a call’ of that sort from within. In a sense, it added up to a vague, nagging kind of vocation for which no sheer job would be the answer” (p. 22).

4. Any inquiry into stress-seeking must account for the unresolved conflict present in the “secularized version of the poor-church principle”—essentially referring to the conviction that “poverty is spiritual.” This prosperity of poverty had to “combine with the thought that wealth and aesthetic flowering need each other. A devious fusion, or compromise, was attained by imaginary acquiescence to mental stress—mental distress as a kind of ideal” (p. 24).

5. Burke notes, “all such fictions are ‘ideal completions’ of personal experiences that are circumstantially quite different; but they contain some problematic motivational trace which, if isolated and made absolute, would be symbolized most accurately—or with most dramatic thoroughness, most ‘drastically’—by such a fulfillment as the fiction settles on” (p. 26).

6. “Addendum: On ‘Sparagmos’ and the Eye” is Burke’s explanation of how disintegration prepares for reintegration. He revisits sparagmos (“rending and tearing” along with his perspective by incongruity to explain a clash of categories. He notes, “there is a similar kind of disintegration intermediate between two quite distinct motivational realms, although necessarily, by the nature of the medium, the observer confronts the three stages—of Before, During, and After—simultaneously” (p. 33).

II. On ‘Creativity’—A Partial Retraction

A. Burke addresses the conflict between the physical sciences (or technology) and the humanities. The progress of the humanities is viewed as “unfriendly” by the triumphs and accomplishments of technology. Burke notes, “And the physical sciences’ kinds of innovations have produced such radical changes in the realm of motion, they have placed corresponding responsibilities of innovation upon the literary or poetic or humanistic realm of acting symbolically” (p. 39).

B. Burke warns of the instability of scientific beliefs. Specifically, he takes exception with the scientific method which amounts to ‘the acceptance of skepticism as a major principle of guidance’ (p. 41).

C. Ecological problems can possibly result from technology’s “creativeness, or inventiveness, or innovative prowess” (p. 42).

D. Burke writes, “In all likelihood we today are neither more nor less virtuous than mankind ever was, neither more nor less stupid, neither more nor less imaginative” (p. 42). Danger results in the massive proliferation of technology that threatens human survival itself. The physical sciences are powerful, for no other race or civilization in the past has faced the threat of self-extermination. Burke adds, “Given the fantastic coefficient of power with which the creative genius of the physical sciences has provided us, when we make mistakes now, they can be whoppers” (p. 43).

E. Burke terms “side effects” for the unintended by product of selecting a means ill-adapted and ill-suited for a particular purpose. As an example he uses the “bureaucratization of the imaginative” from Attitudes Toward History. Bureaucratized technologic creativity challenges our “spiritual creativity” and forces us to endure the threat, the possibility that as a side effect annihilation of the human race may result. He adds, “I take it that our ecologists are basically concerned with a possible design of that sort, the fear that, by the time the dislocations caused by man’s [sic] great technologic prowess become obvious enough for even the ‘silent majority’ to see and renounce, things may have passed a point of no return” (p. 46). As an analogue, Burke cites Sophoclean tragedy.

F. In Section IV, Burke notes that the futurism of scientific creativity can spill over into a “Super-Futurism,” one that carries to excess the carpe diem formula. He writes, “there’s much creativity of that sort in our attitude toward situations that seem beyond our powers” (p. 46).

G. Poetic creativity achieves its resolution through catharsis. We are all moved, writes Burke, by the “ultimate logic of the summarizing, attitudinizing moment” (p. 47). Catharsis does not just involve a “spitting forth of undigested problems.” Rather, “total tragic catharsis also involves an attitude that is on the slope of love. If one could intensely love all mankind, but that very condition he [sic] would be cleansed. Tragedy provides a surrogate; namely; pity, which is on the slope of love” (p. 48).

H. Burke summarizes the chapter thus: “I realize now, so late in the day, I might easily have talked (quite as many of us, including myself, quite often have) about the civilizing virtues of imagination. There is great ‘enrichment’ of our lives to be derived from the human pursuit of the humanities. Appreciation is a form of thanksgiving—and thanksgiving is among the most felicitous of attitudes (perhaps the best of all we can have, towards the opportunities that the need to have lived affords us” (p. 50). Humans double their experiences by finding for themselves a “counterpart purely in the realm of symbols” (p. 51).

III. Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision

A. Burke begins his satirical treatment of hypertechnologism by noting the absurdity of fashioning computers that can process information so quickly, yet require constant feeding by humans. Computers allow for a collection of a prodigious amount of information, so much so that humans cannot even process it, much less be interested in the results.

B. The computer can help determine who is employable and thus who is eligible for military conscription. Computers can even manage military operations with maximum efficiency. Burke writes, “Similarly, you’d tend to think that by ‘body count’ is meant body count. But once you introduce the computer as a factor into your calculations, everything falls perfectly into place…Thanks to the computer, a notable idealistic dimension has been added to what would otherwise be a pretty sorry show” (p. 60).

C. Burke sardonically notes that the problem of pollution as a result of hypertechnologism should be viewed through “the gospel of Total Futuristic Promotion.” Specifically, “when you find that, within forty years, a great and almost miraculously handsome lake has been transformed into a cesspool, don’t ask how such destruction might be undone. That would be to turn back—and we must fare ever forward. Hence, with your eyes fixed on the beacon of the future, rather ask yourselves how, if you but polluted the lake ten times as much, you might convert it into some new source of energy” (p. 61).

D. In the next section Burke lays out a (dys)topian view of Helhaven, a lunar colony, where technologism meets imperialism. Such a place extends its hegemony, even in outer space.

E. Burke concludes with a comment on the creativity of technologic progress: “the ever-intensifying cult of industrial power is robbing the world of many delicious natural flavors, as when oil spills and thermal pollution destroy good fishing areas. One angle I thought of was to boast that ‘some chemists, fired by the Helhaven vision, have nearly perfected a way of so treating mercury that it tastes like caviar…Along these lines, the denizens of Helhaven can be promised a food supply wholly industrialized, plus an artificial stomach better able to digest such products’” (p. 65).

IV. Why Satire, With a Plan For Writing One

A. Burke comments that “the world tends to outdate scientific Utopias by catching up with them and even going beyond them” (p. 70). Burke suggests that his essay, “Waste—Or the future of Prosperity” written in 1929, failed to be excessive enough by satirical standards, as the world outpaced the consumption he called for in his satire.

B. Burke offers as a platitude “the driver drives the car, but the traffic drives the driver” (p. 71). He notes, “Our cult of waste was not merely a bad habit; the market for a vast glut of mass-produced consumer goods became an economic necessity” (p. 71). He offers another platitude “we must double our production and consumption of energy every ten years” to explain the basis for writing a satire on technologism.

C. In this section titled “How Settle on Satire?” Burke notes that in an ideal world comedy would be the perfect fit. Technological process, though its results have led to much suffering, is not “in spirit” tragic. Burke notes that “the technological impulse to keep on perpetually tinkering with things could not be tragic unless or until men [sic] became resigned to the likelihood that they may be fatally and inexorably driven to keep on perpetually tinkering with things” (p. 72). Burke argues that people might be “asking for it” when they are beguiled by problems affecting them. Lamentation is near to tragedy, for Burke.

D. Burke cites the example of projects that “go to the end of the line.” These projects, as envisioned by their creators, “glimpse certain ultimate possibilities in their view of things, and there is no rest until they have tracked down the implications of their insight, by transforming its potentialities into total actualization” (p. 73). Burke describes this process as a “third creative motive” along with self-expression and communication. Utopias are an example of this “terministic goad.” The Aristotelian term “entelechy” applies here.

E. Satire can embody the entelechial principle but it does so “perversely, by tracking down possibilities of implications to the point where the result is a kind of Utopia-in-reverse” (p. 74). The satirist establishes friction by taking his or her work to the “end of the line,” reducing the rational to the absurd. However, the satire is rendered rationally, and is such a victim of itself. Burke explains, “If I am to write a satire, when all the returns are in, it mustn’t be holier than thou. I must be among my victims. That is to say: I take it that my satire on the ‘technological psychosis’ will be an offspring of that same psychosis” (p.77).

F. In the section titled “Towards Helhaven” Burke notes that the major resource of satiric amplification is called an “excess of consistency.” The satirist takes these existing considerations and conditions and extrapolates, or “takes them to the end of the line.” Satire is universal for, as Burke inquires, “who among us is not affected and infected at least to some degree by technological ways of thinking and living…? (p. 77).

G. Burke explains that his satiric amplifications “would be rooted in the proposition that money, mechanisms in general, and now the computer in particular represent culminating aspects of specifically human genius” (p. 78). The aforementioned represent potentialities under the entelechial principle. However this selfsame principle caricaturizes humans by emphasizing some traits at the expense of others. Computers, if viewed as caricatures of humankind, computers represent very thoroughly certain aspects of humanity and exclude others.

H. Burke expresses the desire to write a satire that would depend on the factual thesis that the development of more technology is inevitable. He adds, “On the contrary, the satiric foretelling would be motivated devoutly by the hope that, in the world of facts, such a trend is not inevitable. And the satire would be constructed on the assumption that, by carrying such a speculations to the end of the line, one keeps the admonitions alive” (p. 80). The satire must be in principle “morally here already.” In other words, the psychosis must already be established. Burke cites his own Helhaven idea as an example.

I. In the section titled, “The Plot Thickens” Burke explains in his own satirical idea of Helhaven that the logical conclusion, the reduction to absurdity, of hyper-technologistic energy consumption “could attain ‘perfect’ fulfillment in the total population of our once handsome planet” (p. 82). Burke famously, and with his tongue firmly in cheek, notes, “When we are confronting so fundamental a problem of sociology, precisely then, in keeping with the methodology of logology the first principle of axiology advises us to look for some analogy of morphology in the realm of theology” (p.82).

J. Burke spends the rest of the essay detailing how he would write a satire, complete with characters and monologues, around his Helhaven project attacking hyper-technologism.

V. Realisms, Occidental Style

A. Burke addresses the problem of using works of literature as documentary evidence about their ‘contexts of situation.’ What Levi-Strauss refers to as myth, Burke calls ‘context’ or ‘realism.’ Myths do not necessarily depict what is real, but ‘justify the shortcomings of reality, since the extreme positions are only imagined in order to show they are tenable’ (p. 99). To this end Burke suggests that “the study of literature as social document can lead to an overemphasis upon motives that are merely local in some given historical period; whereas a literary work’s appeal does not depend on motivational ingredients that appear and disappear with the duration of that particular period” (p. 103).

B. In the section titled “Realism and Reality” Burke writes that human nature makes for a kind of doubling, “whereby things and situations do not seem wholly to exist for us until or unless we have words for them” (p. 104). He thus defines context in two different ways. The first is in its “strictly literary context,” where an author can claim a critic, in isolating a part from the whole, has misrepresented the work as a whole. The second is the “context of situation,” or the historical conditions that prevailed at the time of the writing of a narrative.

1. Realism refers to the literary work as its own context. Burke elaborates, “By ‘realism’ is meant whatever sheerly symbolic reality is designed somehow or other to reflect, or refract, or duplicate the nonsymbolic reality out of which it somehow emerged, whether such context of situation is represented ‘objectively’ or ‘subjectively’” (p. 105).

2. Reality corresponds to the context of situation.

C. Burke notes the major problems in using realisms of literary context as documentary insight into the realities to be found in contexts of situation.

1. There is a “deceptive tendency to overstress the sheer context of literary work, any formal considerations being dismissed as mere ‘formalism,’ as a purely literary matter” and then later “It is much easier to show, by the examination of literary texts, that a certain motive or situation was present at a given time than it is to specify the exact proportion of that element in the cultural context of a situation as a whole” (p. 107).  

2. Burke notes that we end up in a kind of circularity when we use the fictions of realism as the study of reality. Burke uses intelligence tests as an example. Whether intelligence tests measure intelligence is debatable, but intelligence tests seem to do a really good job of testing one’s ability to take an intelligence test.

3. Burke writes, “literary works are not designed for purely documentary purposes. Their primary source of appeal is not truth but verisimilitude. The mere fact that something actually happened is no assurance that the reader will go along with your use of it in a fiction, however accurate the details” (p. 110).

4. The nostalgia element in art’s appeal presents another difficulty in regard to literature as a document. Burke argues, “no matter how accurate the details of the fictive scenes (and in the movies the scenes shot ‘on location’ can have the factual accuracy of photographic records), the true cultural reality to which they bear witness is their temperamental appeal to readers whose actual way of life is wholly different” (p. 110).

5. Burke notes the problem of proportion as it relates to literature as a document. He argues, “In evaluating traces of a motive, we must also ask of what cluster it is a part, since its effect is reinforced or constrained by the presence or absence and comparative intensity of other motives. That is to say, a motive is but one ingredient of a motivational recipe. The other ingredients may modify its implications” (pp. 112-113).

6. Burke observes that any perspective dealing with the motivational implications of a work is going to involve the use of a terministic screen. Extraliterary motivations seen in the context of situation are viewed through the terministic screen. Burke concludes, “We can avoid these problems somewhat by building methodically around the fact that every literary work has its own set of ‘equations,’ its explicit and/or implicit ways of saying what equals what. One can establish these by direct reference to the work itself” (p. 116).

Part Two: Logology

I. Archetype and Entelechy

A. Burke observes that nomenclatures have a formative element that affects our observations by “turning our attention in this direction rather than that, and by having implicit in them ways of dividing up a field of inquiry” (p. 122). The methodological approach to the dramatistic perspective, then, is a choice of a particular terministic perspective.

B. Burke makes reference to Aristotle’s Poetics and the ideal situation for tragedy. The tragic situation should involve discord between intimates. Aristotle neglects to mention patricide. Burke notes that Western tradition from the Old Testament account of Abraham and Isaac and the psychoanalytic insights of Freud regarding father-kill focus on patricide.

C. Burke rephrases Aristotle’s question on the ideal character for tragedy to mean, ‘What would be the perfect imitated victim?’ (p. 125). He observes, “The distinction between the tragic imitation of victimage would be the difference between the Athenian theater and the Roman gladiatorial contest” (p. 125).

1. Perfect victimage is entelechial. Specifically, Burke defines entelechy as the use of symbolic resources such that potentialities attain their “perfect fulfillment.” Aristotle’s Poetics debates what form of plot would best serve the tragic telos.

2. Burke expands Freud’s perfectionist motive to include its use ironically. Ironic uses include Hitler’s portrayal of the Jew as the perfect villain.

D. Traumatic experiences provide terminologies in tune with compensatory attitudes. Burke explains, “A traumatic experience can serve to select such a set of key terms, which will than act as a basic nomenclature, with implications corresponding to their roles in connection with the original (and originating traumatic experience involved in their selection as key terms” (p. 127). A ‘repetition compulsion’ emerges as a following tendency to view new circumstances and people according to the narrative produced from the original stress. This compulsion is entelechial as the sufferer strives to impose a ‘perfect form’ using the “key terms of his [sic] formative wound as a paradigm” (p. 127).

E. Burke defines ‘archetypes’ as mythic ways of formulating entelechial implications (or possible summings-up in principle) by translating them into terms of a vaguely hypothetical past” (p. 128). Burke explains that the ‘temporizing of essence’ results when “by the very fact of setting up an order, you make men [sic] potentially transgressors. For you give orders only to the kind of being who might possibly disobey them. Thus, order makes man [sic] in principle subject to temptation” (p. 128).

F. Archetypes have a quasi-temporal nature to them. It is only by abstracting language that one begins to see the forms of grammar organizing it. The forms are then viewed as being logically prior to usage of the language, even though this is not the case. Archetypal reasoning thus gets things backwards as when Socrates helps an interlocutor ‘remember’ the pure forms in a temporally prior state of existence.

G. Burke observes, “In one sense we are all myth-men [sic], insofar as no important incident in our lives seems quite complete (that is, entelechially perfected) unless some expert in the resources of mythopoeia has rounded things out with a mythic counterpart…The important consideration is not where such mythic completions come from geographically, but what they add up to symbolically” (p. 131).

H. The entelechial principle is not just confined to ‘symbolic structures’ but can embrace the ‘symbolizing of an attitude.’ He adds, “Similarly an attitude towards a situation can be developed in terms of a narrative that sums up a situation not by discussing the situation as such, but by depicting a thoroughgoing response to it” (p. 131).

I. Entelechy helps to explain the motivation behind “system-building types of insanity.” Burke explains, “The person who has built up an elaborate structure of persecution has a kind of psychic treasure which could not be renounced without a sense of great impoverishment, despite the suffering that may be connected to it” (p. 132).

J. Satire is also entelechial, in the sense that “certain ills that beset our society can become so depressing that we would gladly close our mind to them” (p. 132). The satirist establishes a situation where his/her text promotes the very ills to which s/he is reacting against. Burke adds, “he [sic] can ‘perfect’ his presentation by a fantastic rationale that calls for still more of the maladjustments now besetting us. By reduction, the absurd seems logical is “surely an entelechial pursuit.”   

II. (Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action

A. Burke distinguishes motion from action by noting motion to be the human body in its nature. Action, Burke notes, “would involve modes of behavior made possible by the acquiring of a conventional, arbitrary symbol system, a definition that would apply to modes of symbolicity…” (p. 140).

1. Intuitive signaling systems used by animals are not an example of symbolic action.

2. Conventional, arbitrary systems such as language acquisition have a reflexive element. Humans can talk about themselves. However, “a dog can bark but he can’t bark a tract on barking” (p. 141).

3. Burke argues, “The realm of nonsymbolic motion needs no realm of symbolic action; but there could be no symbolic action unless grounded in the realm of motion; the realm of motion having preceded the emergence of our symbol-using ancestors; and doubtless the time will come when motions go on after all our breed will have vanished” (p. 141). Burke expands his definition of bodies learning language by adding, “Though the mutation that makes speech possible is in itself inherited in our nature as physical bodies (in the realm of motion), the formation of a nomenclature referring to sensory experiences is on the side of symbolic action” (p. 143).

B. The “self” grounded in motion is characterized by the “centrality” of the nervous system. The “self” in the realm of symbolic action when grounded in a community becomes a product of culture. Burke writes, “the nature of symbolic action shapes the Self largely in modes of role, of sociality” (p. 144). Burke adds, “In sum, when to the principle of individuation (involving the underlying physiology of sheer motion) there is added an organism’s ability to parallel the realm of sensations by learning to use words for them, the concept of Self must necessarily be defined in terms of polarity” (p. 145).

C. Duplication can be explained, in part, by the axioms, “there can be motion without action” and “the can be no action without motion.” What distinguishes Burke’s dramatism from behaviorism is that “symbolic action is not reducible to terms of sheer motion (symbolicity involves not just a difference of degree, but a motivational difference in kind” (p. 145). Duplication, then, proceeds from the “nomenclature of symbolic placement…borrowed from the principles of sensory motion” (p. 145).

D. Burke observes of the Self: “The Self, like its corresponding Culture, thus has two sources of references for its symbolic identity: its nature as a physiological organism, and its nature as a symbol-using animal responsive to the potentialities of symbolicity that have a nature of their own not reducible to a sheerly physiological dimension” (p. 146). And then later, “The Self as a ‘person’ beyond the individual’s identity as a strictly physiological organism, confronts with varying degrees of comprehensiveness and profoundness the interrelationships among the manifold details of ‘reality’ (whatever that ‘orientation’ may be) as known and interpreted in terms of the symbolic lore current in the Culture of that time” (p. 148).

E. By “implications” Burke refers to the process of a narrative, or myth, establishing a temporal sequence whereby a story proceeds “irreversibly” ‘from’ one ‘to’ the other. Burke observes, “Insofar as IMPLICATIONS all fall harmoniously into place, any given exercise in symbolic action approaches the feel of mystical unity” (p. 151).

F. Aristotle’s common sense and Plato’s idealism are different from one another vis-à-vis the length each is willing to view imitation as a species of duplication. Plato’s idealism is willing to go deeper than Aristotle’s common sense. Burke concludes, “Whatever the possible range of incidental readjustments, DUPLICATION is so basic to the relation between motion and symbolicity…” (p. 154).

G. In the section, “Some Comments on William Willeford’s ‘Jung’s Polaristic Thought in its Historical Setting” Burke notes that his logology would be on Jung’s side “insofar as terms like ‘psychic apparatus’ implied a reduction of ‘symbolic action’ to ‘nonsymbolic action’” (p. 154).

1. In response to Jung’s tendency to conceive the world in polarities, Burke comments, “Though language does talk a lot, the very essence of its genius is in its nature as abbreviation. A sentence such as ‘The man walks down the street’ is in effect a kind of title that sums up an uncharitable complexity of details involved in any particular situation to which such words might be applied” (p. 155).

2. In response to Kant’s polaristic thinking Burke argues that there is a basic correspondence between the realms of motion and action. “We can put things together and take things apart…the very nature of words leads to ‘pseudoproblems,’ as theorists speculate on how to ‘resolve’ antitheses in nature that were already ‘resolved’ because they didn’t exist in the first place and were but the result of symbolism’s failure to formally recognize its limitations…” (p. 156).

3. In response to Jung’s regarding the archetype as ‘psychoid,’ Burke writes, “Since the archetypes all have a notable imagistic feature, they relate to the role that sensation plays in providing the material for symbolic action’s nomenclatures” (p. 159).

4. In response to Jung’s attempt to resolve the problem of opposites, Burke notes, “the goads to DUPLICATION that are intrinsic to the unbridgeable polarity between the realms of motion and action embedded in the physiological developments whereby the physical organism became genetically endowed with ways to build this unbridgeable gulf” (p. 161).

H. In the section titled, “The Polarity Poetically ‘Resolved,’” Burke cites a Wordsworth poem, noting of its female character, Lucy, “Lucy now has ‘no motion’ in the sense of her motions as an individual biologic organism…And the merger with ‘symbolic action’ is embedded in the very constitution of the poetic medium that celebrates her oneness with nature as the ground of all physiologic bodies. I mean: Though she has been reduced to terms of wordless motion, her transformation is being performed in terms of poetry; hence all is as verbal as with God’s creative word in Genesis” (p. 163). Burke argues that humankind as the symbol-using animal creates a One World by “making everything symbolic.” Burke offers a summation: The dialectical relationship between Self and Culture centers in a nonsymbolic principle of individuation or rudimentary physiological identity which becomes matched (or countered, or extended) in the full (social) sense by symbolic identifications with both personal and impersonal aspects of the Non-Self” (p. 164).

I. In the section titled, “Motion and Action on the Screen,” Burke observes that the effects of cinema are in the realm of motion, but once these effects are interpreted dramatically by an audience they enter the realm of symbolic action. Burke uses an example of air-conditioning in a theatre. The air conditioner must work much harder when a thriller is shown due to the demands placed on it by an anxious audience. As such, there exist two realms of behavior, the first involving the interpretation of the film as a symbolic act and the second involving the realm of nonsymbolic motion wherein humans react bodily as a result of symbolic interpretation.

J. In the section titled, “After Reading the Essay by Jon D. Ringen,” Burke writes, “But the realm of purely symbolic action allows for a graded series of attitudes such that we can communicate with one another by a deflective variety of ways in which we touch upon the need for a solution” (p. 169). Burke concludes in support of Ringen’s essay for it allows him to clarify his claim “that there is a basic distinction between verbal behavior (which I call ‘symbolic action’) and nonverbal processes (which I call ‘nonsymbolic action’). The terms are not important, but the distinction is, whatever be the terms one chooses” (p. 170).

III. Theology and Logology

A. Burke observes that every infant “emerges from organic infancy (speechlessness) into language during a period of total subjection—subjection to the ministrations of ‘higher powers,’ the familial adults…” (p. 175). When an infant cries out s/he is summoning higher powers. Burke links the pleas of infants to the prayers of religion. He uses the metaphor “cradle of theology” to defend logology. Specifically, logology is words about words; it can only talk about words for “God;” it involves only empirical considerations about our nature as a “symbol using animal.” Burke observes that logology is “fascinated by the genius of theology; and all the more so because, through so much of our past, theologians have been among the profoundest of our inventors in the ways of symbolic action” (p. 176).

B. Burke notes that the relationship between logology and behaviorism unfolds: “Logology is as dualistic in its way as theology is, since the logological distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion is as ‘polar’ as theology’s distinctions between mind and body, or spirit and matter. Logology holds that ‘persons’ act, whereas ‘things’ but move, or are moved” (p. 179). Burke later adds, “logology need not be driven to a ‘mentalist’ position when in controversy with a behaviorist. Indeed, seizing upon a behaviorist term, logology needs but point to the empirical distinction between verbal behavior (which logology would call ‘symbolic action’) and ‘molecular’ behavior (which logology would call ‘nonsymbolic physiologic motion’)” (p. 180).

C. Following Coleridge Burke observes that when a new distinction becomes established, the corresponding words “think for us.” The center of the logological inquiry is the “close but indeterminate relationship between substitution  and duplication” (p. 181).    Duplication occurs by the verbal paralleling nonverbal things. Substitution happens when a thing and its symbol begets other symbols.

1. There are extensions by analogy—what Burke calls ‘legal fictions.’ He notes, “Terms that have a quite literal meaning as applied to physical conditions can be adapted figuratively to subject matter that does not admit of such usage” (p. 181).

2. The ‘Christian logology’ employs substitution by viewing Christ as the perfect substitute of the victim offered as redemption for the guilt of others. This substitution is carried out to the extent of being “perfectly abhorrent” as Christ becomes the bearer of the world’s sinfulness. Burke adds, “The most perfect divine Logos also become the perfect fiend, in serving as the substitute vessel for the guilt of all” (p. 183).    

3. Burke takes exception with J. Hillis Miller’s assertion that Burke’s program ‘psychologizes reduction’ by making literature into an account of ‘something psychic “that precedes it and which could not exist without it’ (p. 185). Burke responds, ‘I think the relation between the physiology of disease and the symbolic action of poetry can be of the ‘vicious circle’ sort. One poetizing, in the very act of transcending hints got from the body’s passions, can roundabout reinforce the ravages of such sufferings’ (p. 186).

D. Burke writes about the differentiating the terms “theology” and “logology.” Of logology he notes, “however variously theologians may treat of the revelation between the Old Testament and the New Testament, they have in common the theological stress upon the principle of sacrifice” (p. 187).

1. There exist two kinds of priority. Burke dubs the first kind “logical priority” to designate the place of premises and conclusions in logical relationship with one another. He notes, “Or in the sense that the name for a class of particulars is ‘prior’ to any particular included under that head, quite as the term ‘table’ already ‘anticipates’ the inclusion of countless particular objects that don’t even yet exist” (p. 188).

2. The second priority Burke names “temporal,” referring to the sequence yesterday as it relates to today as it relates to tomorrow.

3. Matters of principle (Burke refers to these as firsts of beginnings) can be stated in either logical or temporal priority. He writes, “Logologically, we confront the fact that, given the fluid relation between logical and temporal priority, the logical ‘firstness’ of principles, when stated in the ways of story (mythos), as with the opening chapters of Genesis, calls for translation into terms of temporal priority” (p. 190).

4. Burke refers to the invention of the negative (from his Language as Symbolic Action) being present in the principle of law. He notes, “Thus, implicit in the legal narrative, the ‘thou shalt not’ of the Law…is the possibility that its negativity can be extended to the negating of negativity. There is thus the ‘responsibility’ of being able to say no to a thou-shalt-not” (p. 190).

E. In the fourth section Burke addresses Milton’s Paradise Lost as a mode of derivation that reverses the biblical account. He argues, “Thus, whereas logologically the story of the revolt in Heaven would be derived from motivational ambiguities whereby the eventuality of the Fall was implicit in the conditions of the Creation, Milton’s theological route would proceed from the revolt in Heaven to the Fall, and consequent expulsion from the Garden” (p. 191).

F. Burke notes the key distinction between theology and logology: logology is “words about words” whereas theology is “words about Logos.” He notes, “Although there are many respects in which logology and theology are analogous…there are also many occasions when, as we have been noting, they will unfold a series of interrelated terms in exactly the reverse order” (p. 191).

G. The negative allows terms “the timeless implication of their contrasting terms.” Therefore, “Myth, story, narrative makes it possible to transform this timeless relationship between polar terms into a temporal sequence. That is, myth can tell of a step from either one to the other. Thus, with regard to the perfection of Heaven outside of time, the resources of narrative made it possible to carry out the implications of polar terms such as ‘order’ and ‘perfection’ by such stories as the revolt of Lucifer in Heaven” (p. 192).

H. Regarding monotheism and the application of logology Burke observes, “Looking upon both mythology and theology as involved in the problem of translating supernatural ‘timeless’ relationships into terms of temporal sequence, logology tentatively views monotheism as in various ways struggling to ‘perfect’ the simpler rationales of polytheism while still deeply involved in the same motivational quandaries” (p. 194).

I. In section five Burke writes about tribal poetry and myths, specifically noting how tribal language shaped both group and tribal identity. He writes, “Myths are grounded in beliefs. And beliefs are ‘myths’ to whoever doesn’t believe them. And the step from poetry to criticism takes over to the extent that the conditions under which our hypothetical tribe’s body of poetry and mythology took form have become notably altered,” (p. 197).

J. Burke discusses logology as it relates to other systematic studies of thought by asking, ‘What all is going on, when someone says or reads a sentence?’ (p. 198). Burke notes that there is something taking place in the saying or understanding of any sentence. “It must start from the fact that logology’s first question is a variant of the prime Socratic question, the questioning of itself, and of its relation to nature (whereby it becomes the purely technical analogue of the theologians’ ‘grace’ that ‘perfects’ but does not ‘abolish’ the realm of nature’s speechlessness)” (p. 198).

1. It is tempting to note how much logology resembles behaviorism. Burke warns, “Behaviorism is essentially monistic, in assuming the differences between verbal behavior and nonverbal behavior (logology would call it a distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion) is but a manner of degree. But logology is dualistically vowed to the assumption that we here confront a difference in kind. Hence, it puts primary stress upon DUPLICATION, POLARITY, NEGATION (and countless variations of such) as the very soul of linguistic inquiry” (p. 199).

2. Burke addresses Platonist considerations of ideas having an ‘imperfect imitation’. He writes, “As viewed logologically, such ‘forms’ are ‘prior’ in the sense that the name for any class of objects can be viewed as ‘logically prior’ to the particulars classed under that head. And any particular can be called an ‘imperfect’ instance of that class name, because such a word (and its ‘idea’) is not a thing, but a blank to be filled out by a definition, which wouldn’t be a thing in that sense. Yet not particular thing could perfectly represent the definition” (p. 200). All understanding originates in the senses, therefore logology must account for the ambiguous relationship between ideas and images.

K. Burke confronts the “socially morbid” art of television realism, which suggests no difference between simulated acts of violence and real ones. This is akin to saying “there is no appreciable difference between the artistic imitation of suffering in Greek tragedy and the actual brutalities witnessed by the mobs who attended the gladiatorial contests in decedent Rome” (p. 203). Burke continues, “writers for the current market operate in a field which, by the very nature of contemporary realism (or naturalism) as addressed to both eye and ear, wholly obliterates the distinction between real and simulated happenings…” (p. 204).

L. The socially morbid leads to a consideration of a physiological frustration. Burke argues, “I do not refer to ways whereby imaginary substitutes help us ‘compensate’ by fantasies that fulfill our wishes for dominance, sexual gratification, or vengeance, and like wishes…I have in mind a more paradoxical kind of frustration; namely, if human bodies have been selectively disciplined through countless years of prehistory to endure certain purely physical kinds of strain, might the conditions of civilization frustrate the direct experience of such aptitudes as get developed by, and inherited from, the conditions that prevailed prior to the conditions of civilization?” (p. 205).

M. Burke concludes his cumbersomely long chapter by discussing the logological  situation through three explanations.

1. There is polarity between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion. “This is

the primary source of duplication, insofar as the experiences of bodily sensation shape the materials which language draws upon as the source of its ‘fictions,’ in the realm of symbolicity” (p. 206).

2. The negative adds a polarity to nonsymbolic nature in the form of the propositional (is-is not) and the hortatory (do-do not).

3. In the realm of the body there is the “polarity of the distinction between the need for struggle (in the effort to attain the means of livelihood) and the rewards of relaxation (when a hunger has been sated)” (p. 206). Symbolic factors (Burke mentions property relations) can confuse the physiology of distinctions between struggle and relaxation.

4. Burke adds to the above three explanations an account of how formal symbolic structures can be reduced to three “terministic relationships”: equations (identifications), implications and transformations.

5. Burke concludes, “Logology holds to the notion that the relations between poetry and mythology…must in all likelihood embody ‘imaginative’ traces intrinsic to any symbolic (that is, human) medium in its own right, along with traces of the formative experiences undergone while the human animal is gradually acquiring familiarity with the medium…” (p. 208). In this way language is “innately innovative” as no one can continue to make his/her words mean the same, despite any effort to the contrary.

IV. Symbolism as a Realistic Mode

A. Burke defines his dramatistic method as viewing language as ‘symbolic action.’ By ‘symbolism” Burke refers to communicating in ‘terms of a symbol-esteem’ (p. 211). By viewing logology through the psychoanalytic modes of interpretation, we are concerned with theories of analogy. Burke adds, “The manifest content of some symbolic expression is the analogue of a latent content, the nature of which is defined in accordance with the particular theories of motivation and interpretation propounded by the given psychological nomenclature” (p. 211-212).

B. The resources of analogy explain how terms like ‘archetype’ or ‘initiation’ are highly generalized. He notes, “Any pronounced transformation from one state to another could be conceivably classifiable under the head of ‘initiation,’ particularly if there were some rite that formally commemorated the development or event as a change of social status” (p. 212). Archetypes are not things with “definable edges,” (like tables and chairs). Rather they are ‘titles’ for some kind of principle.

C. Symbolic resources can be learned in a “context of situation” that are outside the realm of symbolism. Burke cites Augustine who “believed that we are born in the image of God, [he] offered purely realistic speculations as to how, as infant, he learned language by hearing words spoken in nonverbal contexts of situation, though that wasn’t his name for them” (p. 215).

1. In guarding against the ‘genetic fallacy’ Burke notes, “the kind of ‘logological

realism’ that I am trying to put in a word for would be ‘ahistorical’ in the sense

that, whether ‘ideas’ (or language in general) be derived from an idealistic

metaphysical background or from a materialistic one, there are many notable

realistic observations that we can make about the resourcefulness of symbol-

systems, as innovative or ‘creative’ forces, in their own right” (p. 215).  

2. Burke warns that a “purely secular, realistic analysis of motives should be ‘neutral,’ rather than embodying a ‘materialist’ debunking’ of ‘idealistic’ pretensions” (p. 216).

D. Logological materialism would answer the question, ‘When is an archetype not an archetype?’ with the response, ‘An archetype is not an archetype when it’s an entelechy.’ Burke adds, “This would involve a distinction between Platonic archetypes as idealistic and Aristotelian entelechies as realistic” (p. 217).

E. In the fifth section Burke addresses the Freudian archetype of ‘primal crime’ by explaining that logological realism could answer his problem by “turning from thoughts of Platonic archetypes to thoughts of Aristotelian entelechies” (p. 219). The entelechial aspect of symbolic motivation leaves open the possibilities for further development. Therefore, psychoanalysts need not concern themselves with whether a ‘culmination,’ a perfection, will actually occur; rather, they should note that nothing but symbolism is necessary to express the tension and likely outcome of human relations.

F. In the section named “ADDENDUM TO SYMBOLISM AS A REALISTIC MODE” Burke notes his earlier criticism of the temporizing of essence by arguing, “my criticism is built around my point about the ambiguous relation between terms for logical and temporal priority whereby statements about how something essentially is can be phrased narratively in terms of derivation from how it originally was (a device all the more ‘natural’ to an age so Darwinian in its thinking)” (p. 220-221).

            1. Burke discusses revision as an attempt to aim at perfection. Rejecting revision,

then, “is to fear lest a ‘primal’ perfection already there in essence will get lost” (p. 222).

2. Burke concludes by noting “an early ‘traumatic’ experience might lead one to see life in those terms. Accordingly, one might so interpret a later situation that it was like the older situation all over again. And this process ‘would be entelechial’ or ‘perfectionist’ in the ironic sense of the term, insofar as the sufferer was in effect striving to impose a ‘perfect’ form by using the key terms of his formative wound as a paradigm” (p. 224).

Critical Response

Barber, Charles. (2005). Performances. Canadian Literature, 186, pp. 128-129.

“The collection is centred in an effort to define the neologism ‘Logology,’ which basically entails a fascination with highly formal, self-reflexive language, but which Burke wants to elevate to mythological heights, seeing literature, in typically modernist style, as secular salvation-perhaps the only real alternative to the alienating "counter-nature" of modern technology” (p. 129).

“Literary form is for Burke a privileged expression of "entelechy"-an eternal striving after perfection that, in the Aristotelian cosmology Burke adopts, propels humans through time, or what Burke calls ‘the temporizing of essence’ (p. 129).

“After three decades of poststructuralist repudiations of ‘binaries,’ Burke's essays provide a welcome reminder of just how effective a simple distinction can be-nature and culture, permanence and change, archetype and entelechy, symbolic and non-symbolic, motion and action” (p. 129).

Outline by Sam Boerboom, December 2006.