CHAPTER ONE

Towards A Systemic Theory of Burkean Symbolic Action

1.1.Introduction

This dissertation will argue that the corpus of Kenneth Burke's work provides the field of rhetoric with the basis for a systemic theory of symbolic action. The dissertation will argue that symbolic action is transformation of a system, quality space, which is made up of mental, linguistic and cultural subsystems. This transformation of quality space is generally effected through metaphor. Burke's theory of symbolic action is systemic because he is concerned with structure, function, interrelations and evolution. We can confirm Burke's systemic approach by comparing it to the systemic approach par excellence, Ludwig von Bertalanffy's General Systems Theory.

The purpose of the present chapter is to give an overview of the entire argument. This is necessary because presumably few readers will be familiar with both Burke and Bertalanffy. Having an overview of both before their theories are presented in any detail will allow the reader to make connections immediately, though the parallels will be presented after Burke and Bertalanffy's theories are set forth. The second chapter will be devoted to General Systems Theory. The third and fourth chapters will trace the development of systems thinking in the Burkean corpus. Chapter Five will demonstrate the remarkable parallels between Burke and Bertalanffy (including the privileging of language and the negating of mechanistic theories), and conclude that Burke's systemic theory of symbolic action is plausible, but it will also point out its limitations. The final chapter will demonstrate how a paradigm shift away from mechanistic and towards systemic thinking currently in progress in both the "hard" and the human sciences supports Burke's theory of symbolic action. Based on that current research, some refinements of Burke's theory of symbolic action will be offered, along with some suggestions for future research.

Because the argument being made here is complex, an overview with historical context may prove helpful. We can profitably begin by claiming that Burke is a systemic and a systematic thinker.¹ Burke is systematic in two senses: he is building a vast interpretive apparatus that can be brought to bear on virtually any critical problem. He is also systematic in his application of this apparatus. That Burke is systematic will come as a surprise only to his detractors with a superficial knowledge of his work. The more important claim is that Burke is also a systemic thinker; that is, he is interested in the interrelations within his object of study, as well as its interrelations with the context that produced it. He also shares with other systems theorists an interest in function, evolution, and dysfunction. Burke's work is systemic, in part, because his quarry, symbolic action, is a systemic phenomenon. Nearly everyone who knows Burke at all well for the last couple decades has been able to discern the systematic nature of his work (though many who know Burke only in fragments continue to be baffled, and dismiss him as incoherent). The systemic nature of Burke's work, however, has gone largely unnoticed. Because a major goal of the current work is to prove Burke has a systemic theory, we would do well to begin by asking why it has been overlooked.

Despite Burke's systemic and systematic proclivities, he has often been accused of being idiosyncratic, intuitive, and unsystematic. These misapprehensions have several sources: the first has to do with scope. Because Burke's overall project has been to account for symbolic action (involving mind, language and culture), he necessarily draws on and works in many fields. Stanley Edgar Hyman, one of the few critics to appreciate Burke early on, feels that "the reason reviewers and editors have so much trouble fastening on Burke's field is that he has no field unless it be Burkology" (375); moreover, he refuses to be "disciplined" (i.e., constrained by the academic specialization he calls the "philosophy of the bin"). So his wide-ranging interests sometimes make it difficult to comprehend his project. Nevertheless, interdisciplinary work is one of the hallmarks of systems approaches.

Another reason that the systematic nature of the Burkean corpus has not been apparent is that although his project has always been the same--to chart and account for symbolic action--he has moved through a number of methodological phases. Often he is amongst the first to employ a methodology, for example, formalism or structuralism, or even post-structuralism (Lentricchia 66). But he is also quick to abandon a method (though never irrevocably). It may well be that his systemic mind allows him to see both the possibilities and the limits of any one methodology. Frank Lentricchia holds that Burke engages system itself, finding that the "desire to be systematic is met by resistance to the essentializing consequences of systematizing thought" (55-6). But this is not to say that Burke is unsystematic. However, his reluctance to give up any speculative instrument, even when he has discovered its limitation, can be confusing. Ever the pluralist, Burke exhorts us to use everything there is to use (1969b 265).

Perhaps the most important reason that Burke has been considered obscure is because he was adopting a systemic approach in an intellectual episteme dominated by mechanistic thinking. Because of his precociousness, Burke also seems idiosyncratic because he is continually bucking the current consensus, especially if it is too reductionist. To the charge of being non-logical or intuitive, he responds that he simply divides the field up differently in order to get a different perspective. Burke's project to understand how human systems evolve and break down required him to deal with ideas such as wholeness, teleology and transcendence, which are systems terms beyond the pale of the mechanistic paradigm.

Paradoxically, at times it is Burke's very methodical and systematic spinning out of possibilities itself that leads to the charge of his being unsystematic. Sometimes he claims to pursue a line of thinking to "round out" the symmetry of a system. Whether this is done for the sake of completion, to see how far a technique can take him, or as a rationale to induce readers to follow beyond the point where they would ordinarily balk, Burke so doggedly follows his quarry that readers can easily become lost, especially if unfamiliar with the corpus. Lentricchia asserts that Burke cannot be taken in "small bearable doses," but rather "whole or not at all" (53).

 While there have been many who have come away from Burke with a very superficial understanding of a term or technique, those who are persistent will be rewarded with an immense interpretive apparatus. Professor William Rueckert, one of the foremost commentators on Burke, claims that Burke's Dramatistic system has produced "a complete theory of language (spoken and written), a complete grammar or dialectics and logic, a complete rhetoric, a complete poetics, and, I think, a complete ethics" (1982 21). Such a comprehensive approach is required because a systemic theory of symbolic action must include mind, language and culture. To fully understand why Burke's systemic ideas were not appreciated, we must understand some history.

1.1.1. Historical Context

In order to understand the genesis, trajectory and importance of Burke's career, a brief history of metaphor theory is required. Aristotle had a complete theory of metaphor; he understood that it involved mind, language and culture. He privileged metaphor, and understood its heuristic and persuasive power. However, his theory was seriously hampered by lack of a cognitive model. Over the next two dozen centuries, metaphor was reduced to language alone and thus to ornament, irrelevancy and, finally, to a danger to rational thought by the early empirical scientists. The Romantics tried to counter the denigration of language, metaphor and imagination, but the heuristic function of metaphor was largely ignored until I.A. Richards and other New Rhetoricians revived Romantic and traditional rhetorical theory. Burke completed the reclamation of the full Aristotelian context of metaphor with his interest in culture, but both he and Richards were hobbled by the same lack of an adequate cognitive theory which had also plagued Aristotle. For lack of this theory, Burke could be dismissed as a mystic. (Many years later Richards' work on metaphor was revived and made intellectually respectable by the philosopher Max Black. This eventually started a boom in metaphor studies not seen since the Renaissance. The most promising outgrowth of this boom is schema theory, which provides the supplement to Burkean theory in the final chapter.)

Now that the mechanistic model is being discarded even in the "hard" sciences, a systemic model is taking its place. Recent work in cognitive science has yielded schema theory and Connectionist models which make metaphor, as Richards wanted, "discussable science" (94). This science is supporting many of Burke's ideas about how symbolic action works, and what it is for. Burke holds that the essential function of symbolic action is evaluation (and ultimately persuasion): if one person accepts another person's interpretation of a situation, that is the essence of persuasion). Current theory also supports the idea that the primary way one person transmits an interpretation of a situation is by metaphor.

Burke clearly understood the importance of metaphor, but because it was not considered a proper problem for scientific study for most of his career, Burke lacked a specific account of how metaphorical transfer and transformations work. The schema theory of metaphor holds that when a speaker names a situation by metaphor, the hearers use that metaphor as a cue to scan through their analogy bank of schemas for one that the speaker is suggesting can account for the situation. The hearers then instantiate the elements of the situation into the template (schema) in order to understand the situation. For example, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait could be interpreted as a neighborhood squabble or as comparable to Hitler's early annexations.

So metaphor is important because human beings think analogically (i.e., metaphor evokes schemas). Schemas allow cognition because they allow recognition. Understanding a problem is primarily a matter of recognizing it as a kind of situation and dealing with it accordingly. Clearly Burke was aware of the categorical nature of thinking because he deals with classification and metaphorical thinking in all of his books. Thus Burke, whether he was fully conscious of it or not, spent his career trying to understand metaphor because it is the basis for symbolic action. He devotes a great deal of space in his early books reclaiming metaphor, and many of his key terms and strategies in his later books (such as identification and consubstantiation, as Chapter Six will show) are essentially all variants and subspecies of metaphor. This is why a systemic theory of symbolic action may provide a unified field theory for rhetoric.

Interestingly, though symbolic action is Burke's central term and his primary object of study, he never precisely defines the term. By supplementing Burkean theory with schema theory, we now can: it is the manipulation (transformation) of quality space by means of metaphor. "Quality space" is a term derived from anthropologist James Fernandez, whose work on the importance of metaphor in culture was influenced by Burke (11). Quality space is a supersystem made up of sub-systems: mind (an interactive network of schemas which constitutes a model of the world re-created by an individual), language (the labels applied to those schemas) and culture (a supermodel of the world, which is the sum of commonly held schemas of a group). This concept of quality space helps us understand why Burke's bringing culture back into rhetorical (and thus metaphorical) studies is crucial. Burke's work leading to the reclamation of Aristotle's insight that metaphor involves mind, language and culture is critical because metaphor (and thus symbolic action) is grounded in a supersystem, quality space. An understanding of the structure and function of quality space provided by schema and Connectionist theory yields insights into how metaphorical strategies function and interrelate, which may yield a kind of unified field theory for rhetoric.

1.1.2. Symbolic Action

Before we can proceed any further, we must establish at least a thumbnail sketch of Burke's theory of symbolic action. Interestingly, though it is Burke's basic term and his principle object of study, William Reuckert states that Burke "has never, as far as I know, given a concise and complete statement of the complex of ideas which constitutes the essence of the theory" (1963 57). Even if Burke offers no concise and precise definition of symbolic action, the theory of symbolic action that he develops may be summarized thus: a symbol is a reaction or adjustment to a situation. By selecting a name (i.e., a label from a repertoire of patterns which are so useful and recur so frequently that people feel the need to have a name for them), human beings get a fix on the flux of sense data; after all, as Burke is fond of pointing out, nothing really happens twice, but for convenience we use the same name for two situations in which we discern similarity (i.e., we classify the two situations together).

Any name foregrounds some aspects of a situation and ignores others, and hence creates a perspective and a corresponding attitude; Burke calls this metaphorical filter a "terministic screen" (1966 45). Names are a way of creating meaning, of evaluating, and of helping us decide how to act (as Kenneth Burke, following I.A. Richards, often notes, since attitude is incipient action). Burke holds that the choice of a name is never right or wrong, only more or less accurate (though too many inaccurate names lead to epistemological crisis and ultimately to extinction). Nor is naming disinterested. Contending factions will select different names--and hence ascribe different motives--for the same act or situation.

Some names, however, are more privileged than others. The most privileged terms Burke calls ultimate or God-terms--vague but powerful words for which people are expected to make sacrifices (e.g., freedom, the fatherland, jihad, etc.). Because of such terms, we know that the quality space system is a collection of hierarchically structured names. We also know that the system's main function is evaluation by means of classification. (The structure and function of the quality space system will be the subject of Chapters Five and Six). In addition to God-terms, according to Burke, the system is composed of equations, or associative clusters of names: what equals what, what goes with what, what leads to what (e.g., capitalism equals freedom and prosperity) (1973 38). Here we can see why Burke is interested in systems: studying relationships between the entities and transformations is the essence of understanding a system.

An important kind of equation, as Burke shows us in his analysis of Hitlerite rhetoric, is identification (1973 207). Symbolic action strategies such as identification have transformational power; Chapters Five and Six will argue that they are metaphors which reconfigure the system of associations that people use to evaluate and find their way through the world. Simple change can happen to anything (e.g., one rock can fall on another and crush it; this is nonsymbolic motion); however, transformation happens only in systems. For example, Winston Churchill calling Benito Mussolini "that utensil" is an action because a new Caesar is relegated to a merely instrumental, even inanimate role. If this linkage were accepted, the entire system would, to a degree, become reoriented.

When a system fails to predict, or at least account for, a situation, a new name (generally a metaphor) is created. This is what Burke means when he says that language grows by analogical extension (1969a 506). Any new term allows for the creation of new distinctions, and thus more accurate naming. However, if a system cannot be extended to cope with an important situation (whether in an individual or a culture), we have what Alasdair MacIntyre calls an epistemological crisis (54). At that point a shaman or "medicine man" is required, an expert in manipulating symbol systems. This expert will create a new metaphor or equation that will make the situation understandable, meaningful, and hence tolerable.

The preceding brief summary suggests the systemic nature of Burke's project. This will become even more evident when we compare Burke to other systemic thinkers.

next: 1.2 Overview of.Chapter Two: General Systems Theory

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