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Author: Burke (pronunciation: berk sounds like “work”)

Application: Have you wanted to know how to persuade someone? Maybe you are in sales, want a raise, a date, a better shift at work. Perhaps you would like your children to be more obedient or your employees more...obedient.

Context: Public because the speech making takes place in a public forum.

Approach to knowing: Interpretive because each person is motivated by different reasons and Critical because anytime one tries to influence another there is the question of power and if the power is equal.

Goal: To understand what motivates an audience to take action.

“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players;” - Shakespeare, As You Like It. Act II, Scene VII.

Burke’s theory compares life to a play and states that, as in a theatrical piece, life requires an actor, a scene, an action, some means for the action to take place, and a purpose. The theory allows a rhetorical critic to analyze a speaker’s motives by identifying and examining these elements. Furthermore, Burke believes, guilt is the ultimate motive for speakers, and Dramatism suggests that rhetors are most successful when they provide their audiences with a means for purging their guilt.

Burke was a critic. He believed that language is a strategic human response to a specific situation: “Verbal symbols are meaningful acts from which motives can be derived.” He considered clusters of words as dances of attitudes. According to Burke, the critic’s job is to figure out WHY a writer or speaker selected the words that were choreographed into the message. The task is ultimately one of assessing motives.

Burke incorporated a variety of disciplines as tools in his theory. He uses philosophy, literature, psychology, economics, linguistics, sociology and communication. Burke doesn’t see life as like a drama, to him, life is drama.

The reading for this week is chapter 19, pp 328-342.

When reading, look for

How the concept of Identification is fundamental to Dramatism.
The fundamentals of Dramatism in Agent, Act, Agency, Purpose, Attitude and Scene, and how they are used to weigh a speaker’s message.
How language and symbols form a critically important system for humans.
How the guilt-redemption cycle is fundamental to understanding the principles of Dramatism.

Let’s take a look at some of the major concepts of dramatism.

Identification

The first part to Burke’s Dramatism is Identification. This is the recognized common ground between speaker and audience. Elements such as physical characteristics (how a person looks), talents (successful businessman, award-winning actor, great sports player), occupation (how they earn their living), experiences (war veteran, foreign experience, cultural depth), personality (brash, strong, weak, go-getter), beliefs (religion, philosophy, ideology), attitudes (love, hate, gentility, perception) Burke believed make an ‘Identification” between speaker and audience, a solidarity if you will. Burke says identification works both ways, as well. As a speaker seeks to identify with their audience, the audience is simultaneously trying to identify with the speaker. But identification in either direction will never be complete. But without some kind of division in the first place, there would be no need for identification. And without identification, there is no persuasion.

The Dramatistic Pentad

ACT	What is being done
AGENCY	Mean by which an action occurs
AGENT	Person doing the act
SCENE	Setting/background for action
PURPOSE	Reason or rationale behind action

Burke regarded persuasion as the communicator’s attempt to get the audience to accept his/her view of reality as true. The dramatistic pentad is a tool to analyze how the speaker tries to do it.

The dramatistic pentad is similar to the standard journalistic stand of answering who, what, where, when, why, and how in the opening paragraph (the “lead”) of a story. By evaluating the ratio of importance for each element in the pentad the critic can determine which element or pairs of elements provide the best clues to the speaker’s motivation. When a message stresses one element over the other four (now five with the addition of “attitude”: the manner in which the speaker positions themselves relative to others, for example “I am a Christian, and therefore better than a Muslim”), it reveals a speaker’s philosophy or worldview.

Guilt-Redemption Cycle

The immediate purpose of a speech may vary according to the scene or agent, but Burke was convinced that the ultimate motivation of all rhetoric is to purge ourselves (both speaker and audience) of an ever-present, all-inclusive sense of guilt. Guilt is Burke’s catch all term to cover every form of tension, anxiety, embarrassment, shame, disgust, and other unpleasant emotions he believed were intrinsic to the human condition.

Burke said that the speaker has two choices. The first option is to purge guilt through self-blame (Mortification). This route requires “confession of sin and a request for forgiveness. But even obvious candidates (Richard Nixon, O.J. Simpson, Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, and many others) find it excruciatingly difficult to admit publicly that they are the cause of their own grief.

Since it is much easier for people to blame their problems on someone else - the second option - Burke suggested that we look for signs of victimage in every rhetorical act. Scapegoating is the process of designating an external enemy as the source of all ills. The list of candidates is only limited by our own imagination - Eastern liberals, ISIL, drug cartels, the military-industrial complex, African-Americans, Muslims, homosexuals, religious fundamentalists, the police, the poor, the 1%, immigrants, even our own government.

Burke says, “perfect guilt requires the perfect victim.” Burke was not an advocate of redemption through victimization, but he said he couldn’t ignore the historical pattern of people uniting against a common enemy. We’ve already discussed his claim that identification is the central strategy of dramatism. The easiest way for a speaker to identify with an audience is to lash out at whatever or whomever the people fear.

Rhetorical Critique of Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet” (Courtesy of Ken Chase, Wheaton College and Glen McLish, San Diego State)

Often paired with Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X was one of the most influential civil rights speakers of the 1960’s. Malcolm’s rhetoric, though, was more militant, angry, and for many African Americans, more realistic than the idealism of King’s “I Have a Dream”. Malcolm delivered his famous speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet” in April 1964, only 11 months before his assassination.

By viewing public rhetoric as an attempt to build a particular social order, Burke helped reveal the power of Malcolm’s speech. His address portrays America as a nation that promises full equality, dignity, and freedom for all its citizens, yet African Americans have never received their birthright. Emphasizing his commitment to Black Nationalism, Malcolm urges his brothers and sisters to start their own businesses and elect their own leaders. At the same time he attacked white politicians who impede civil rights. The audience at the Corey Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio, interrupted Malcolm X with applause and laughter more than 150 times during his speech. Listen to the speech and see if you can identify the elements of Burke’s Pentad. Then read what follows the video.

Excerpt recording from “The Ballot or the Bullet”, Malcolm X, April 1964; Corey Methodist Church, Cleveland, Ohio.

Malcolm asserted that the struggle for civil rights is not only the work for his fellow Black Muslims, but is shared by all concerned African Americans. By strategically aligning himself with Christian ministers like King and Adam Clayton Powell, he minimized the alienation his Islamic faith could potentially create. He emphasized the shared heritage of all African Americans. In this way, Malcolm created a strong sense of identification as he coaxed his audience to share his social purpose and his means of achieving it.

The title of the speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet,” refers to the means, or agency, by which the agents - African Americans - can act as citizens to accomplish the purpose of equality, dignity, and freedom. Malcolm strategically placed his audience within a larger context of American history and the international struggle for human rights. It is this scene that motivates the militant message that African Americans will proclaim - “We’ve got to fight until we overcome.”

Malcolm’s emphasis on the means to achieve his purpose results in a high agency-purpose ratio; an indicator of his pragmatic motivation. The ballot enforces civil rights legislation; the bullet defends blacks from white violence. The bullet also warns white society that equality must not be delayed: “Give it to us now. Don’t wait for next year. Give it to us yesterday, and that’s not fast enough.”

Malcolm criticized his brothers and sisters for failing to show the courage, knowledge, and maturity necessary to reap the full benefits of citizenship. It is the white man, however, who has enslaved, lynched, and oppressed the Africans living on American soil, and it is he who must bear the brunt of collective guilt. Through victimage, the white man and his society become the scapegoat that must be sacrificed for the redemption of blacks. Within the drama of African-American life, “Black Nationalism” serves as the god term that embodies the spirit of the movement. Conversely, “white man” is the devil term that epitomizes all who oppose equality, dignity, and freedom for all.

Communication concepts and theories include many terms that can be unfamiliar, but they are important to memorize and understand. This page lists the vocabulary terms you will need to know for this theory. On the following page, you will have the chance to use flashcards to practice these terms.

guilt	tension, embarrassment, shame, disgust, or other unpleasant feeling in a person
act	that which is done by the person
scene	the context surrounding the act
agent	the person performing the act
agency	the means used to perform the act
purpose	the goal the agent had for the Act
attitude	the manner in which the agent positions himself/herself relative to others
dramatistic ratio	the proportions of one element of the pentad relative to another element
substance	the general nature of something
identification	when two people have overlap in their substances
consubstantiation	when appeals are made to increase overlap between two people
order (hierarchy)	a ranking that exists in a society primarily because of our ability to use language
the negative	rejecting one’s place in the social order; exhibiting resistance
victimage	the way we attempt to purge the guilt we feel as part of being human
mortification	one method of purging guilt, by blaming ourselves
scapegoating	one method of purging guilt, by blaming others
redemption	a rejection of the unclean and a return to a new order after guilt has been temporarily purged