CHAPTER ONE cont.
1.3. Chapter Three Overview: Evolution of Systems Theory in the Early Burkean Corpus
Burke began his career trying to account for the aesthetic effects of literature. But his rhetorical training led him to wonder about the cultural situation which gave rise to the work and about the mind of the audience that would read it. Thus Burke's project--indeed the project of all the human sciences in the twentieth century--is accounting for context. Classical science stripped context so that phenomena could be reduced to two variable problems. This works well in Newtonian clockwork physics (i.e., very simple systems), but not in analyzing symbolic action and human motivation. In this respect we can view Burke's entire career as a counter-statement to mechanism and positivism.
Burke's effort to account for Shakespearean rhetorical strategies led to Counter-Statement (1931) with its three breakthrough ideas which would set Burke irrevocably on a systems approach path: 1) art (later amended to symbol) is an adjustment to a situation; 2) human beings respond to form; 3) networks are made up of clusters of terms. The first assertion is important because it requires that Burke deal with context. Scientistic strategy strips context, the importance of which we have just noted. This need to deal with context might account for the dominance of field theory and systems approaches manifest in the most significant work of this century, e.g., Picasso, Whitehead, Einstein, et al. The key term "adjustment" in Burke's first idea by its very nature takes him into systems theory, since only systems have the ability to compensate. Also, understanding context requires an interdisciplinary approach since it involves history, sociology, economics, anthropology, as well as the psychology of author and audience. Burke must also deal with the relations among the author, text and audience. Interdisciplinary work and interest in interrelations are both important characteristics of a systems approach.
Burke's second breakthrough, his interest in form (both natural and cultural), will also prove crucial. An artist's naming of a given situation allows the audience to see form underlying the chaos of experience. This idea anticipates the importance of metaphor in later works, as well as the schema theory examined in Chapter Six. Thirdly, Burke's interest in clusters will develop into his system theory. His intuitions can be supplemented by Self-Organizing Theory in Chapter Five.
We can readily see that from the start Burke's ideas are in conflict with scientistic reductionism and positivism. In his first book, he opposes his aesthetics to positivism: anti-machine, anti-practical (107-121). As we noted above, the machine metaphor is central to over-reductive scientism. In "practical" we find a hint of the dichotomy that will provide the basis for his definition of symbolic action: machines and animals have practical, nonsymbolic motion, whereas humans can create action (an important distinction for Burke that will be developed later). Also significant, we can discern from the start that Burke defends metaphor, which is really the principle of transformation in symbol systems. Umberto Eco concurs that "to study metaphor is to study rhetorical action in all its complexity" (1983 218).2
Burke's next work, Permanence and Change (1935), was written in response to the Great Depression. In this volume Burke is more concerned with social criticism and communication than aesthetics. Heavily influenced by the systems approach to biology (he calls this work a "meta-biology," as opposed to a work of metaphysics, classical physics being the source of the mechanistic metaphor Burke opposes), his key term in this text is "orientation," roughly equivalent to a world view. He asserts that an orientation is a self-perpetuating system (which may be seen as an ur- or proto- quality space). Burke wants to know how an orientation breaks down, and how it can be repaired, or reoriented. In Permanence and Change Burke begins to deal with systems as systems.
In Permanence and Change Burke more pointedly questions the value of scientism, asserting that experiments with lower animals can tell us little about the symbol-using animal, since the laws of simple conditions may not apply to complex conditions (29). Burke objects to human motives being reduced to a simple stimulus-response model, or even to primitive drives. For example, he asks what happens when drives conflict, which creates precisely the kind of multi-variable problem with which the mechanistic model cannot cope (35). Burke observes that the prestige of the physical sciences has allowed their methodology to be imported to realms where they do not apply, though because their claims cannot be easily tested, it is difficult to evict them (101). But even as positivism was making its biggest conquests, Burke claims, the limits of the method were becoming evident. Burke offers his own methods as a philosophical corrective to reductive methodology.
Burke's next work, Attitudes Toward History (1937) is also a reaction to the Great Depression. The epistemological crisis that the country is going through shakes Burke as well, and he begins to think more about social and ideological systems. Orientations of the last book are renamed "frames of acceptance," which are "organized systems of meaning" for evaluation, interpretation and compensation (1984a 5). Burke comes to the crucial insight that the individual's frame (mind) is based on the collective mind (culture). The job of the rhetorician is to chart these systems. The task is daunting because of the sheer size and complexity of the system, the constant change within it, and the fact that competing factions will name the same situation in accordance with their own interests.
Burke tries to establish the reality of the system and to produce a model for understanding it with his term "Poetry Exchange"(202). The Poetry Exchange is a system wherein the value of a given cultural concept rises and falls in response to changes in the symbolic and/or "real" worlds. Burke states that Logical Positivism cannot understand the Exchange because it does not know how to "discount," i.e., it cannot account for metaphorical transformation, which is the basis of symbolic action (246). Scientism can only deal with entities; Burke wants to understand the system, which requires that he concern himself with the relationships between entities, and the transformations of those relationships. In this text Burke begins in earnest the defense of metaphor that will be continued in the next several books. The full significance of this privileging of metaphor will become apparent in the concluding chapter of the present work.
In Attitudes Toward History, then, we find important components of Burke's emerging theory of the systemic nature of symbolic action: individual frames of acceptance (and rejection) are "organized systems of meaning" for evaluation, integration (kairos) and compensation, which are built from the collective frame, and tested by public discourse. The network is composed of clusters of terms/ideas which can be transferred, modified and charted. The theory here is still tentative, however. Burke speaks generally of "cooperative and symbolic networks," by which he seems to mean the economy, culture, and perhaps language (234). Having rejected the mechanistic model, Burke must find an alternative, so he makes analogies between the symbol systems he is charting and the undeniably real systems of the market and the body. Here Burke develops the crucial idea that an orientation is a classificatory evaluative system learned from the culture.
In the last of the Thirties books, The Philosophy of Literary Form, Burke moves from an interest in the structure of orientations to their function. He does, however, continue to analyze the system by tracking down key terms and the associations between them. But he also claims that the structure of a system (e.g., a text) cannot be grasped without understanding its function as well. Burke uses the tracking of key terms in his brilliant analysis of Hitler's rhetoric, which he claims is essentially religious--a snake oil cure for an epistemological crisis.
In The Philosophy of Literary Form Burke discards the heuristic metaphors (such as the Poetry Exchange) and asserts that culture is a system: we should treat a group of people as a functioning system, not as an aggregation of individuals (74). Here again he asserts the primacy of the biological model (a more complex and hence qualitatively different system) over the machine metaphor. In a machine, the same input will result in the same output. In human systems, however, identical inputs can produce opposite results. (Moreover, the use of symbol systems makes symbolic action possible, a level which is a quantum leap from biological motion.) Burke asserts that the ideal of science is to explain "the complex in terms of the simple, but the simple is precisely what the complex is not" (262). We can also see the evolution of systemic thinking in Burke's exhortation that we approach a text as the functioning of a structure, and that we chart its structural relations or clusters. Burke holds that we can identify clusters of terms by beginning with a key term and asking: what is equated with that term, what goes with it, what leads to it, and what can be substituted for it (1973 38).
next: 1.4. Chapter Four Overview: Systems Theory in the Later Works