Today’s Plan:
- For Next Sessions: Week 7 Article Sign Ups
- Your Passages
- Break
- Using the Pentad
- My Burke Notes
Week 7 Article Sign Ups
As I mentioned last class, for next week everyone will be required to read 3 articles and lead the class in a brief discussion of those articles. Since we have 7 people, including myself, and 165 minutes (leaving 15 minutes for break), we have 9 minutes to discuss each article (more time if folks team-up).
So, to prepare for your nine minutes, write a 3 minute summation, then a question that we have 6 minutes to think about and discuss. This might be tied to a particularly important passage of the text.
Your Passages
Using the Pentad
I approach rhetoric more as how we think about thinking, communication, knowledge, identity, relation, etc. But tonight I want to try an activity–let’s try putting Burke’s Pentad (or Hextad) to work.
I have some news stories.
My Burke Notes
I do not have time tonight to walk through all of my notes, but I wanted to tease together some passages and themes.
Point #1
In Elements of Dramatism, Blakesley explicates how language works through an inherent ambiguity, that words can mean something precisely because they do not certainly mean something, that meaning is a messy process often open to misunderstanding and misinterpretation (see EoD 2, 9, 22-22, and especially 26-27). Let’s take a quick look at page 26.
Burke stresses, however, in many places that this “ambiguity,” this lack of certainty, tends to trouble us. We want solid ground, not turtles all the way down. We are scared of the abyss (DoM, 58).
Point #2
In proposing rhetoric as identification (rather than persuasion), Blakesley suggests that Burke opens rhetoric up to more and deeper understandings of the unconscious ways we play with language and it plays with us (see EoD 9, 15, 18). Burke notes that our human desire for identification is quite strong (RoHB 217), intensified by the looming abyss of relativism (DoM 58). According to Burke, Hitler was skilled at weaponizing this desire for unity, and understood that there was much to gain by defeating critical questioning (“objectivity” as Burke calls it, perhaps better understood as seeing things from multiple perspectives) and demonizing the “babel” of democracy in favor of the One Voice (of which, Davis was quite critical last week) (see RHB 205, 217, 218).
We desire the beautiful, not the sublime. The simple and the clear. One voice. We also, Burke notes, desire perfection, perfect opposites and enemies, purified of contingency. Hence the danger Hitler identifies in the kind of messy democracy Lanham (very much channeling Burke) describes (see Mein Kamph passage, qtd in Burke 193). And Hitler’s Aryan community, as Burke describes it, is very much a perversion and twisting betrayal of Lingis’ Rational Community–it is an irrational community made rational through force, repetition, and tradition. As Burke notes, uncertainty can be trumped by rage (see RNB 197).
Point #3
Burke offers us something akin to the “saying,” then, in its relentless pursuit to remind us of the humanity, frailty, presence of others by alerting us to the possibilities that their discourses, their terminologies, might offers something different than our own. Perhaps Davis would accuse me of offering Burke too much charity on this front, given her critique that he takes as divided, fundamentally and originally divided, that which is (according to neuroscience) whole. I would argue that, at the very least, Burke recognizes the danger of homes with walls too strong, homes with fires too warm, homes in which we sit comfortably shielded by the other(‘s) elements.
A bit more safer, perhaps then, to say that Burke’s Dramatism is a methodology for producing dissensus? For, in the words of Readings, holding open questions rather than letting them close? Yeah, I feel more comfortable with that comparison. Let’s look at Blakesley’s “ethical” justification of dramatism on pg. 23 of EoD. Let’s also look at the closing of Terministic Screens.