Dramatism, A Brief Summary, from On Symbols and Society Ch. 1

“Dramatism,” from International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Ed. David L. Sills, Vol. 7, p. 447-448. 1968.

There is action and there is motion. That is the basic pair. Symbol-using animals act, and non-symbolic operations move. There is a basic difference between things and the words for those things, res and verba. The distinction between these 2 realms can be summed up in 3 propositions:

1. There can be no action without motion.
2. There can be motion without action. 
3. Action is not reducible to terms of motion.

Reading On Symbols and Society, ed. Joseph Gusfield

On Symbols and Society, an edited collection compiled by Joseph Gusfield, a sociologist, includes excerpts from several books by rhetorician Kenneth Burke. 

I am going to post my notes from that book on this blog. 

I will partition these notes into 22 different sections, and each section will be based on an excerpt from On Symbols and Society. The sections are in the same order as the chapters, though I cite Burke’s original works and not Gusfield’s book.

While I have read most of the works cited in this book before (several of them multiple times), I am using Gusfield's book instead of the original texts because that book is listed as required on the PhD preliminary exam in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota, which exam I plan to take in October. 

As I work on this, I start to see why Gusfield put things in the order he puts them in. He’s trying to help readers understand Burke the way he understands Burke. His method does make a certain kind of sense, based on dramatism, which is how many understand Burke. (Though I can't here help but wish that Burke's definition of and discussion of form in his "Lexicon Rhetoricae" in Counter-Statement had been included, especially since Burke himself believed that his definition of form was from where one should begin to understand him.)

Below, I have scanned in a document that helped me read the original sources Gusfield cites in On Symbols and Society. On page 2, you can see, below a few personal notes to myself, what the abbreviations and acronyms mean. 

In the notes I will post later, I cite the original texts and not Gusfield's book, and this is the piece of paper that helps me to do that.

Finally, please note that Burke often uses the word man to refer to people in general, a convention of the time period in which he lived. He also dropped out of college (and never graduated), but I personally don't believe he means to exclude anyone by using the term in the way he does, though by today's standards it may seem so.

Percy Shelly's Ozymandias

In a footnote of the Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume D: The Romantic Period, on page 768, we have this statement: "According to Diodorus Siculus, Greek historian of the 1st century B.C.E., the largest statue in Egypt had the inscription 'I am ozymandias, king of kings; if anyone wishes to know what I am and where I lie, let him surpass me in some of my exploits.' Ozymandias was the Greek name for Ramses II of Egypt, 13th century B.C.E."

That footnote acts as a brief introduction to this 1818 poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

I met a traveller from an antique land 

Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand, 

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: 

And on the pedestal these words appear: 

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: 

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!' 

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, 

The lone and level sands stretch far away."

"Ozymandias Shelley draft c1817".
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Laura (Riding) Jackson's Project for a Whole Human Discourse: A Brief Summary

This post is a brief summary of A Brief Summary of Chapter 13 in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. The chapter was written by James Oldham and is called "The Telling: Laura (Riding) Jackson's Project for a Whole Human Discourse." 

In the essay, Oldham argues that Jackson’s The Telling offers a theory of epideictic rhetoric as the grounding of human discourse.

He begins by stating that all human beings are dependent on language, an axiom for Jackson, who began writing poetry to express the human experience: “A poem,” she wrote, “is an uncovering of truth of so fundamental and general a kind that no other name besides poetry is adequate except truth” (qtd. in Oldman 248). Later, however, Jackson abandoned poetry because it tended to focus more on the individual and not enough on the common ground between individuals, common ground that she believed was important that we not forget in our quest for individuality and understanding.

Her long essay, The Telling, corresponds with modern theories of language and rhetoric, though she never called it rhetoric because of her pejorative understanding of the term. The Telling promotes the idea that language is central to all that human beings do and are, and that human beings are therefore “both able and obligated to use language honestly and well” (249). We must therefore use good judgment and “exercise self-discipline in our use of language” (249). In other words, The Telling might be called an Isocratic approach to rhetoric because it is more about exercising good judgment in using language than it is about cataloging all means of persuasion. In addition to language as being central to human experience, The Telling also discusses major problems that rhetorics in general deal with, such as the problem of a speaker’s method and character, and the relationship between the one and the many. All of these things deal with Jackson’s “vision of a world in which women and men are collaborators in the project of telling” (250).

So what is language for Jackson? She believes language is a gift. It is immanent, it has a purpose and therefore a proper use, which is the advancement of Being, including human being, and it should be appreciated by all of us. Each of us ultimately comes from the same source, Being, which is synonymous with the universe, “whose animating spirit is manifest in the human mind” (qtd. in Oldman 251). When we find ourselves in the universe, it’s our responsibility to Tell, and our uses of language in these acts of telling should be true. On short, as human beings, we experience truth and then reflect that truth, through language, to each other. The standards for this act of telling are, needless to say, very high, but people often tell a version of their self that is not wholly true, and distorted. There is unfortunately a selfish kind of self which greedily attempts to get gain, prestige, and fame through the use of words. But this is not the true self, which is really concerned with its “common identity with other selves” (252).

When we over-emphasize our differences, we begin to desire the triumph of our wills over the wills of others. And that’s a dangerous position. For Jackson, this is what many disciplines, such as science and history do—they can’t explain us because they doesn’t tell us who we are, where we came from, and where we will go—even though she admits that they have done much for us (traditional religious stories, for example, do remind people that they are lost without remembering their origin in Being). But individual disciplines tend to only have parts or pieces of the whole, and are even known to be “more loyal to themselves than they are to the whole” (257). In short, “all of them fail to recognize that they depend, radically and ultimately, on the human capacity to produce, understand, and care about discourse” (257).

So speakers should be true to their real self, not a distorted version of it. Telling is not about ambition, and it is not about gaining fame at the expense of the audience. Individual people should genuinely search for truth and not impose what they discover onto everybody else. Oldham writes that for Jackson, “Discourses that lose sight of our essential commonality will always be false to the community on which they depend for their existence” (259).

So how does one perform an act of telling? Oldham writes, “The teller’s method must also help her to recover and represent her memory of original Being, and it should help her to avoid competing with others to tell better than they do” (253). A teller seeks to tell, by way of memory, imagination, and reason, the origin of human beings within the origin of Being—as well of our ongoing existence. Reminiscent of the Phaedrus, Jackson invites us to remember “the Before,” which is a time “back beyond one’s physical ancestors, and beyond the entire material ancestry of our bodies” (qtd. in Oldham 253). “By recovering this origin, . . . we will be able to overcome false stories of our Being” (253). Each individual person has his or her own “individual vestige of this original identity, but before we can tell it, we must recover it through memory” (253).

Telling seems to mean the sincere use of language to describe an individual’s search for truth and relate it to others without imposing one’s individual beliefs on others.

But this whole discussion of a search for common ground is precisely what epideictic discourse does. Hence, The Telling is epideictic discourse because it asks us to seek common ground: “to remember our common origin, common being, and common destiny” (254). So, Oldham comments, “our ultimate motivation should be the happiness of the Whole, a happiness we can achieve only through bringing our attention to Being, the only source of the Good. We can bring our attention to Being only by telling” and thus “epideictic [should] be adopted universally as the foundation of all discourse” (255). From this perspective, telling becomes a healing act whereby we realize that both women and men need one another.

Telling thus enables us to “overcome the habit of insisting on the triumph of our differences. If we do not believe that we are, at our core, one kind of being, one Being together, then we have only selfish reasons for survival, and no reason to be concerned for one another’s existence. If we do believe that we are one people, and that our common good is the only good we can know, then we have a rational basis for discourse that confirms that universal value, rather than enslaving and silencing one another” (260-261).

In conclusion, Oldham writes, “Jackson reminds us that there is some general Good in our being, in our existence here together, and that it is up to all of us to tell the story of our commonality and to hear one another’s telling. No one of us alone can tell the story completely, and there is neither competition for doing it better nor punishment for doing it worse” (261).

Chaim Perelman, The Realm of Rhetoric, A Brief Summary

In this excerpt from The Realm of Rhetoric from The Rhetorical Tradition on pages 1379-1383, Perelman gives a brief history of rhetoric and explains the realm of rhetoric.

He begins by discussing ancient philosophy and rhetoric, and uses the sophists to give a voice to a version of rhetoric that is greater than philosophy, can argue on both sides of the question, and puts specific opinions over general truths. Then philosophy is given a voice by Plato, who makes philosophy greater than rhetoric, makes rhetoric as a means to truth, and shows that when a philosopher has perceived truth, he or she uses rhetoric to make it known.

But for Perelman, Aristotle’s views are more nuanced, since he believed that philosophy and rhetoric are both important, useful, and necessary. For example, a rigorous mathematical proof would not be appropriate in a speech, and a speech would not be appropriate in a mathematical proof. Certain situations require certain ways of demonstration.

But while anciently rhetoric had been taught as consisting of the five canons of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery, later in the early modern period, Peter Ramus reduced rhetoric to style and ornamentation, and Descartes went even further to eliminate rhetoric from philosophy altogether. Descartes wanted a philosophy that was pure and unambiguous and, neglecting Aristotle’s advice, also wanted to have mathematical rigor in language, in all fields, and in all realms and areas of study. Descartes wanted to build all knowledge on what was self-evident.

But Perelman has a problem with self-evidence. He says that self-evidence imposes itself on everyone and takes away people’s free will. If a thing is self-evident, then nobody can choose to disagree with it. And even if a thing is self-evident, that self-evidence vanishes as soon as people try to communicate it because language is fallible and not self-evident. In other words, even the trope of “self-evidence” becomes problematic because too many deceptions can come from it. Our words never force anyone else to believe what we say—others have that choice whether to accept our statements or reject them. The choices we make in language and expression, however, are “influenced by reasons which come from dialectic and rhetoric” (1382).

Hence Perelman writes, 

“Even today the teaching of the sciences is inspired by the Cartesian approach. In the areas which are free from controversy, it is not customary to refer to the opinion of one or another scholar. The theses which are taught are considered true, or are accepted as hypotheses; but there is hardly any need to justify them.
“Thus, although axioms in the mathematical sciences, considered at first self-evident, were subsequently shown to be conventions of language, this change of perspective, however fundamental, has not affected the way in which such formal systems are laid out. In fact, if it is not a question of self-evidence, but of hypotheses or conventions, why choose this hypothesis or that convention rather than another? Most mathematicians consider such questions foreign to their discipline” (1381).

In other words, we confess that scientific thought is human thought. And that “Every new idea must be supported by arguments which are relevant to its discipline’s proper methodology and which are evaluated in terms of it” (1382). So, as human beings, we can’t get away from argumentation. Hence, rhetoric as a theory of argumentation is the way to go. We persuade one another to viewpoints, and we use good reasons to support our conclusions.

Philosophy is about separating “the important from the secondary, the essential from the accidental, the construct from the given, all from a perspective whose pertinence and superiority does not compel everyone. Hence the obligation to support the chosen perspective through argumentation, using analogies and metaphors, by which the adequacy and superiority of the one perspective over rival perspectives can be shown.” In other words, people have freedom to choose. A theory of argumentation lets people have freedom because it does not compel anyone to believe a certain way. A “general theory of argumentation” is “a new rhetoric” (1383).

So what is the realm of rhetoric? For Perelman, the realm of rhetoric includes anything that is human: “In identifying this rhetoric with the general theory of persuasive discourse, which seeks to gain both the intellectual and the emotional adherence of any sort of audience, we affirm that every discourse which does not claim an impersonal validity belongs to rhetoric” (1383). Or, put another way, “As soon as a communication tries to influence one or more persons, to orient their thinking, to excite or calm their emotions, to guide their actions, it belongs to the realm of rhetoric” (1383).

A Brief Poem From a Japanese Teamaster Who Lived from 1158-1237

Fujiwara Iyetaka writes,

"To those who only pray for the cherries to bloom, 
How I wish to show the spring
That gleams from a patch of green
In the midst of the snow-covered mountain-village!"

In other words, while there are some who anticipate the coming of spring, Spring in its entirety is implicit in a tiny, seemingly insignificant "patch of green."

Daisetz T. Suzuki comments,

"Here is just a feeble inception of life power as asserted in the form of a little green patch, but in it he who has an eye can readily discern the spring shooting out from underneath the forbidding snow. It may be said to be a mere suggestion that stirs his mind, but just the same it is life itself and not its feeble indication. To the artist, life is as much here as when the whole field is overlaid with verdue and flowers. One may call this the mystic sense of the artist" (Zen and Japanese Culture, 26).

Cicero's Dialogue on the Ideal Orator: A Brief Summary of Book III

Cicero begins this final book with a preface that tells his brother Quintus that Crassus spoke many “divinely inspired words” and was a “divinely gifted man” (225). He spoke like a swan, and swans were believed to sing more beautifully when they were about to die. In a footnote to this passage, James May and Jakob Wisse write that “Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo (84-85) interprets [the likeness of a speaker to a swan] as a sign of prophetic powers” (225n5).

Then the story continues. Most of the interlocutors rested during the noon hour, but Crassus spent it in intense reading. When it is time for him to speak, he begins by saying that style and content cannot be separated: “I have the impression that those great men of the past, having grasped in their minds something of a higher order, have thereby seen much more than our mind’s eye, today, is able to contemplate: they said that all the universe above and below us is a unity and is bound together by a single, natural force and harmony” (230). So there ought to be agreement and harmony between all disciplines, and true eloquence forms that unity. Speech is like a river that branches into many smaller streams but still comes from the same source. Since things aren’t separated as we sometimes think they are, a person’s words cannot be separated from that person’s thoughts. Hence, “discovering words for a distinguished style is impossible without having produced and shaped the thoughts,” and “no thought can shine clearly without the enlightening power of words” (231).

Each speaker, however, has a distinct style, and all are talented in their own way. So it is the responsibility of teachers to see which students have which talents and to adapt instruction in such a way as to maximize the learning and potential of all students. One must speak with clarity, distinction, and in a way that is both suitable and appropriate to the situation. Orators should learn to control breathing, their tongue, and the sound of their voice. Orators should also use common words and avoid both ambiguity and overly long periodic sentences. No one admires an orator for speaking correct Latin, but they do make fun of one that doesn’t, so speaking correctly is necessary. One may refine grammar and diction by reading other orators and poets.

And then there’s this key passage which I will quote in full:

“For the true orator ought to have examined and heard and read and discussed and thoroughly treated all aspects of human life, since it is with them that the orator is engaged, and it is this that constitutes his material. Eloquence, after all, has its own place among the supreme virtues. Of course, all the virtues are equal and equivalent, but still, one is more beautiful and splendid in appearance than another. This is the case with the power that I am talking about: having acquired all-embracing knowledge, it unfolds the thoughts and counsels of the mind in words, in such a way that it can drive the audience in whatever direction it has applied its weight. And the greater this power is, the more necessary it is to join it to integrity and the highest measure of good sense. For if we put the full resources of speech at the disposal of those who lack these virtues, we will certainly not make orators of them, but will put weapons into the hands of madmen” (239).

The ancients, Crassus continues, didn’t separate speech and act: “For the old form of learning seems to have taught both right actions and good speech. Nor were the teachers separated from each other, but the same people gave instructions for living and for speaking” (240). Disciplines became separated when people began to notice that they could prosper if they would specialize. A rupture between the tongue and the heart is also harmful. The best philosophers also said that “eloquence is a virtue and a form of wisdom” (244), and “used to link the principles of oratory with the entire study and knowledge of everything that was relevant to human conduct, to human life, to virtue, and to the state” (246). These ancients meant for there to be “communion between speaking and understanding” (247).

Hence, true eloquence includes everything: “The real power of eloquence is so enormous that its scope includes the origin, essence, and transformations of everything: virtues, moral duties, and all the laws of nature that govern human conduct, characters, and life. It establishes traditions, laws, and legal arrangements, governs the State, and addresses with distinction and copiousness all questions belonging to any area whatsoever” (248). An orator is an actor. Sure, this is a lofty ideal, but we’re examining the ideal orator, and we do the same thing when we theoretically examine any other art or skill—we try to see it in its best, most ideal, and fullest form possible.

Crassus then discusses style. He says that sweetness and poetic diction in speech can sometimes be effective, but we can’t stand to eat sweet food all day, so moderation is best. The best speeches shift back and forth from the specific to the general because the specific addresses particular concerns, but the general principles enable audience members to apply things in multiple contexts. To become better orators, we must put good things into our minds—the best things, actually. And since all subjects are connected with one another, any good we can gain will help us become effective speakers. The same is true with virtue and the virtues. Plato was a teacher of speech, of the mind, and of virtue.

Crassus goes on to say that metaphors are useful because the mind’s eye is drawn more easily to things we have seen than to things we have only heard. He discusses tropes and figures, juxtaposition, rhythm, and periodic structure. Good rhythm is pleasing to an audience. Crassus mentions figures of thought and figures of speech and their usage, but the underlying rule is that, no matter what, “In every area, the capacity to do what is appropriate is a matter of art and natural ability, but to know what is appropriate at each time is a matter of intelligence” (290).

Finally, Crassus discusses delivery, what he calls the dominant factor in oratory. Orators are actors because they must use their voice, gestures, facial expressions, and eyes effectively. Delivery is “wholly a matter of the soul, and the face is an image of the soul, while the eyes reflect it” (294). In fact, everything is dominated by the eyes. Put another way, “Delivery is, so to speak, the language of the body, which makes it all the more essential that it should correspond to what we intend to say” (294). Delivery is so important and influential because human beings want to see a speech performed. The most useful is the most appropriate.

Crassus concludes by saying that his speech isn’t perfect, but it’s the best he could do. Catulus thinks it was awesome, though, and the group decides to rest their minds after the long discussion.

Links to Additional Brief Summaries of On the Ideal Orator (De Oratore)

Book I  |  Book II  |  Book III

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