Dramatism, A Brief Summary: From On Symbols and Society, Ch. 19

19. “Dramatism,” from International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Ed. David L. Sills, Vol. 7, p. 450-451. 1968.

Remember, Burke is trying to understand human beings as actors on the stage of life: that's the basis of dramatism. He is trying to understand drama and story and myth and religion all at the same time. Why, for example, are the greatest dramas tragedies, and why do the great tragedies involve death and victimage? Often, the great tragedies involve the death of the main—and titular—character. This principle of death and sacrifice is part of what it means to be human. Ancient people were motivated to sacrifice animals. Since the history of thought went from magic and myth to religion and from religion to science, dramatism wants to know how the forms of magic and religion are changed into different forms in a scientific culture.

Burke is always interested in discovering a new answer to the question, “Why do we human beings do the things that we do?”

Dramatistic Analyses of Order

The idea of order implies a corresponding idea of disorder. (If we know what one is, we also assume that we know what the opposite is.) On the side of order there is belief and reason. On the side of disorder there are the senses and the imagination, since these things don’t totally gratify our impulses.

Between order and disorder, there’s the will—the place where one may say yes or no to a thou-shalt-not. “Ontologically, action is treated as a function of the will. But logologically the situation is reversed: the idea of the will is viewed as derivable from the idea of an act” (450). Will thus becomes the futuristic version of an action. (And, while Burke doesn’t actually say this, this is what the word will used to mean.)

There is a sacrificial principle implicit in all of this. We sacrifice something for something else and order is restored. When two people fight, for example, order is restored when an apology is made, though an apology assumes a sort of “sacrificial” humility.

In symbol systems, we often use the principle of substitution as a resource. Thus, vicarious sacrifice is the ultimate fulfilment of sacrifice. If there is order, then there is also guilt because there is no perfect order. Guilt is also a version of disorder. If there is guilt, then there is a need for redemption. Any redemption would be victimage. “Or: If action, then drama; if drama, then conflict; if conflict, then victimage” (450). Hence the scapegoat principle.

In short, because human beings are symbol-using animals, and since symbols involve using one thing to mean something else, we can explain some of the drives people have.

[It seems to me that Burke comes upon dramatism as if he was doing a sort of grounded theory. We are the actors in our dramas of life.]

“A dramatistic view of human motives thus culminates in the ironic admonition that perversions of the sacrificial principle (purgation by scapegoat, congregation by segregation) are the constant temptation of human societies, whose orders are built by a kind of animal exceptionally adept in the ways of symbolic action” (451).