Overview cont-
1.5. Chapter Six Overview: The Metaphorical Basis of Burke's Theory of Symbolic Action
If Burke is as prescient as he has been portrayed in earlier chapters, then some corroboration of his theories should exist. In fact, many fields are abandoning the mechanistic models that Burke challenged and are finding evidence that support his intuitive ideas. For example, in the human sciences a paradigm shift is being driven by anomalies related to categorization. Current research, particularly in cognitive science, will allow us to refine and extend Burke's theory of symbolic action. This chapter will argue that symbolic action is the transformation of quality space, and that transformation is accomplished primarily through metaphor. These hypotheses will be supported by historical, textual and empirical arguments.
The historical evidence is that for two thousand years metaphor was always central to rhetorical teaching and theory. The problem is that since the cognitive theory was not available to explain metaphor, rhetoricians could only investigate the phenomenon by constructing Byzantine taxonomies. The Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century denigrated Aristotle (who had the best metaphor theory), language in general, and metaphor in particular. Despite this attack, metaphor was one of the few parts to survive what G. Genette calls "the shipwreck of rhetoric," albeit in a severely attenuated form (113). Early science also provided a passive mechanical model of cognition which has only recently been challenged. It is no coincidence, therefore, that Burke is obliged to spend a great deal of effort in attacking mechanism and in reclaiming metaphor in the process of his reclamation of rhetoric (while metaphor is dismissed as a minor form in Burke's first book, by the last he more or less equates it with symbolic action itself).
The third and main argument presented in Chapter Six, the empirical, builds on the theory set forth in Chapter Five. Connectionist research is relevant to our attempt to understand symbolic action because Connectionists construct models of the brain called neural networks. These models think like brains (analogically) and learn like brains (forming and associating categories, ultimately leading to rule-like behavior).
Connectionism suggests that Burke is correct in asserting that thought is largely analogical and categorical. But what is the connection between the two? George Lakoff has done considerable work on both metaphor and categories. Based primarily on his work, this chapter will attempt to clarify the relation between metaphorical and categorical thinking.7 Lakoff employs schema theory which is central to both metaphor and categories, and thus helps elucidate the relation between them: the mind is made up of schemas, which are packets of information distilled from experience. They are skeletal structures with slots (perhaps along the lines of Charles Fillmore's case grammar: actor, instrument, patient etc.) into which information from a given situation can be instantiated. Thus we make sense of the world through the application of schemas.
Schema theory is also crucial to our "rounding out" of the theory of symbolic action set forth in chapter five because it gives a fuller account of how the quality space system is constructed and how it works (i.e., how metaphor transforms quality space). When a situation arises which must be evaluated, the brain scans through its analogy bank for a template (schema) which will accommodate the most salient stimuli. If no match is found, the closest matching schema can be modified, or a schema can be imported from a different domain; this is the essential nature and function of metaphor (for example, a hydraulic model for electricity). A schema structures perception and inference, which accounts for the heuristic and perspectival functions of metaphor. Metaphor evokes a schema which structures experience. Hence cognition is recognition, essentially analogical.
General Systems Theory suggests that quality space is a system, and like any other system it must balance stability and flexibility. The system is made up of associated schemas. Such associations come about when a metaphorical linkage is useful enough to be repeated often enough to become a permanent (thus stable) part of the system. But the forging of new linkages also leads to flexibility and system growth. This flexibility not only allows the system to grow, but allows it to stay apt (thus avoiding epistemological crisis).
Usually quality space is up to the job of making sense of the world. When it does fail for an individual, that person generally seeks some sort of counselor who can provide a metaphor or story which will make the situation understandable and tolerable. (This will be referred to as the shaman function.) As Burke points out, however, sometimes an entire culture is afflicted with the same sort of epistemological crisis of meaning. In that event, various shamans (or "medicine men," as Burke referred to Hitler) will offer new ways of seeing. The resulting prescriptions are almost invariably metaphors (cf. Darrand and Shupe 18-21). This is because metaphors are the best way to get a handle on an abstraction or a confusing situation.
Because metaphors make the unknown or incorporeal concrete and graspable, they are essential in discussing what Wayne Booth calls the contingent, that which matters most. For example, politics is characterized almost exclusively by war and sport metaphors. The metaphors evoked to understand a political situation will often lead to certain policies (e.g., the war on drugs emphasizes interdiction, whereas a drug epidemic metaphor would favor treatment).
The centrality of metaphor in persuasive discourse supports the thesis of this chapter: symbolic action is the purposeful manipulation or transformation of the system of quality space. This reorientation requires the making and breaking of associations. Metaphor is the primary means of breaking old connections and forming new ones. For example, the addiction as disease metaphor dissociates addicts from immorality and associates them with innocent victimage, thus reclassifying the addict as a patient.
next: 1.7 A Unified Field Theory for Rhetoric