Hi Ed and all,

Ed re-raises important issues.

Two points:

1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
(in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.

2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
management.

Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first KB
Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was always
at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
Gayle was not.

The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.

Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor. The
poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.

Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.

I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.

The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.

Goodnight Floyd.



> All,
>
> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
> to be online.
>
> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
> putting on greasepaint.
>
> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
> metaphor.
>
> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>
> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>
> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
> .




--
Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Communication
Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
Home phone: 215 844 5969
http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons

Hi Ed and all,

Ed re-raises important issues.

Two points:

1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
(in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.

2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
management.

Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first KB
Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was always
at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
Gayle was not.

The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.

Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor. The
poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.

Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.

I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.

The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.

Goodnight Floyd.



> All,
>
> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
> to be online.
>
> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
> putting on greasepaint.
>
> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
> metaphor.
>
> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>
> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>
> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
> .




--
Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Communication
Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
Home phone: 215 844 5969
http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons Herb, Ed, and others--

I didn't catch the first part of this thread, so I have to pick up with Ed's
and Herb's last post.

I like Ed's "actual" or "actually" as opposed to "literal" and "literally."
I think this is in the spirit of Burke's description of himself as a
"realist" because he starts with the proposition that people REALLY do act
(in reality).

The flexibility of the pentadic terms, which Herb points out and Burke
certainly highlighted, does not detract from the idea that dramatism is
literal, because the issue must be handled on a general (philosophical)
level, rather at the level of "application." It is a fact that agents may be
constructed as scenes--that's one aspect of how the grammatical terms are
related. So, when I say that a bunch of people in a particular room
constitute a crowded SCENE, I'm not becoming metaphorical about AGENTS.
People's BODIES really do take up space and change the nature of a scene.
That is not to say that you can't also talk about those same people as
agents engaged in conversation; these are simply two aspects of the same
situation that may be drawn out of the "alembic" that is the molten
substance called motives.

What is literal about such a "conversational" situation, and any situation
involving human action, is that there is a limited set of relevant questions
that can be asked about "what are people doing and why they are doing it,"
and Burke has identified that set. I have taken the strong stand that the
pentadic questions are UNIVERSAL. (See "Dramatism as Literal" and "Coming to
Terms with Kenneth Burke's Pentad" [ACJ] before that.) I've been to Asia,
Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places, and everyone
I've engaged in conversation talks about motives as imbued with questions of
purpose and means and scenes and agents and types of actions and even
attitudes. I've never read a mystery writer, playwright, philosophical
treatise, history, biography, or any other work about humans that did not
deal with the same issues concerning motives, whether they were written in
bibilical times or yesterday, in exotic lands or in my local paper. That's
why Burke claimed he didn't discover them, but drew upon the same list that
Aristotle had in Nicomachean Ethics and Talcott Parsons had in his writings
about humans in society. The whole idea of action--philosophically, but also
in our day to day human interactions--requires the interplay of elements
Burke called the pentad.

When Burke interviewed with students for the Iowa tapes, he was very careful
to deny that the pentadic terms were "positive terms." He insisted they were
questions. Perhaps that emphasis was a way for him to deal with recent
challenges to dramatism. (Remember, the Iowa interviews were held shortly
after Herb, Bernie, Jim, and Parke Burgess participated in the "Dramatism as
Literal" panel at ECA, published in CQ the next year.) Can a question be
literal? Questions engage in a kind of speech act that, unsurprisingly,
embodies human interaction. You can say that a question is bad or misplaced
or off the point or insulting, etc., but can you say they are or are not
literal? I didn't raise issue that in my "Dramatism as Literal" essay
because I was trying to respond to the argument as it had developed up to
now, but perhaps I should have.

Here's a trivia question: Are there any basic questions that the pentad
leaves out? I realize "in what manner" (attitude) is a Johnny-come-lately,
and not as basic sounding as what, who, where, how, why, and when. The one
that might be included, but was not, is "Which?" Of course which is
indexical, selecting out among a field of things. And it certainly can deal
with issues that do not involve human action (though I guess when, where,
and how can also). Some of the work I've done in the last few years gets at
"which" issues, though I've never phrased it that way. I've been working on
the issue of "Which act?" when you find a field of related actions that are
strategically connected. (See my book, *Judging the Supreme Court*, for the
most recent examples of this; my Korematsu v. U.S. essay in QJS addresses
some of these as well. I also have an essay I'm finishing for the next Burke
conference that elaborates on inter-pentadic relationships.)

I have great admiration for Herb, Ed, Bernie, Jim, and others who have
discussed this issue. I'm happy to engage in the "unending conversation"
with them as companions and I will "dance with tears in my eyes" if I find
them taking a position I feel compelled to wrestle with. I think that what
KB wanted all of us to do anyway, and this is a great venue for it.

Clarke

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, HERBERT W. SIMONS <>wrote:

> Hi Ed and all,
>
> Ed re-raises important issues.
>
> Two points:
>
> 1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
> this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
> Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
> for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
> (in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
> with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
> various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
> become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
> or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
> right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
> journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
> literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
> Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
> whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
> our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.
>
> 2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
> colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
> management.
>
> Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first
> KB Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was
> always at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
> operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
> was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
> Gayle was not.
>
> The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
> doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
> to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
> over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.
>
> Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor.
> The poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
> conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
> at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.
>
> Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
> actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.
>
> I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
> thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
> The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
> He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
> should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
> that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.
>
> The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
> suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.
>
> Goodnight Floyd.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:11 AM, <> wrote:
>
>> All,
>>
>> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
>> to be online.
>>
>> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
>> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
>> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
>> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
>> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
>> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
>> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
>> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
>> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
>> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
>> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
>> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
>> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
>> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
>> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
>> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
>> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
>> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
>> putting on greasepaint.
>>
>> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
>> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
>> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
>> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
>> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
>> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
>> metaphor.
>>
>> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
>> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
>> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>>
>> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
>> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
>> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
>> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
>> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
>> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
>> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
>> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
>> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
>> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
>> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
>> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
>> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
>> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>>
>> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
>> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
>> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>>
>>
>>
>> Ed
>>
>> .
>
>
>
>
> --
> Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of Communication
> Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
> Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
> Home phone: 215 844 5969
> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
>
> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe.

Hi Ed and all,

Ed re-raises important issues.

Two points:

1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
(in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.

2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
management.

Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first KB
Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was always
at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
Gayle was not.

The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.

Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor. The
poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.

Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.

I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.

The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.

Goodnight Floyd.



> All,
>
> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
> to be online.
>
> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
> putting on greasepaint.
>
> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
> metaphor.
>
> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>
> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>
> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
> .




--
Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Communication
Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
Home phone: 215 844 5969
http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons Herb, Ed, and others--

I didn't catch the first part of this thread, so I have to pick up with Ed's
and Herb's last post.

I like Ed's "actual" or "actually" as opposed to "literal" and "literally."
I think this is in the spirit of Burke's description of himself as a
"realist" because he starts with the proposition that people REALLY do act
(in reality).

The flexibility of the pentadic terms, which Herb points out and Burke
certainly highlighted, does not detract from the idea that dramatism is
literal, because the issue must be handled on a general (philosophical)
level, rather at the level of "application." It is a fact that agents may be
constructed as scenes--that's one aspect of how the grammatical terms are
related. So, when I say that a bunch of people in a particular room
constitute a crowded SCENE, I'm not becoming metaphorical about AGENTS.
People's BODIES really do take up space and change the nature of a scene.
That is not to say that you can't also talk about those same people as
agents engaged in conversation; these are simply two aspects of the same
situation that may be drawn out of the "alembic" that is the molten
substance called motives.

What is literal about such a "conversational" situation, and any situation
involving human action, is that there is a limited set of relevant questions
that can be asked about "what are people doing and why they are doing it,"
and Burke has identified that set. I have taken the strong stand that the
pentadic questions are UNIVERSAL. (See "Dramatism as Literal" and "Coming to
Terms with Kenneth Burke's Pentad" [ACJ] before that.) I've been to Asia,
Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places, and everyone
I've engaged in conversation talks about motives as imbued with questions of
purpose and means and scenes and agents and types of actions and even
attitudes. I've never read a mystery writer, playwright, philosophical
treatise, history, biography, or any other work about humans that did not
deal with the same issues concerning motives, whether they were written in
bibilical times or yesterday, in exotic lands or in my local paper. That's
why Burke claimed he didn't discover them, but drew upon the same list that
Aristotle had in Nicomachean Ethics and Talcott Parsons had in his writings
about humans in society. The whole idea of action--philosophically, but also
in our day to day human interactions--requires the interplay of elements
Burke called the pentad.

When Burke interviewed with students for the Iowa tapes, he was very careful
to deny that the pentadic terms were "positive terms." He insisted they were
questions. Perhaps that emphasis was a way for him to deal with recent
challenges to dramatism. (Remember, the Iowa interviews were held shortly
after Herb, Bernie, Jim, and Parke Burgess participated in the "Dramatism as
Literal" panel at ECA, published in CQ the next year.) Can a question be
literal? Questions engage in a kind of speech act that, unsurprisingly,
embodies human interaction. You can say that a question is bad or misplaced
or off the point or insulting, etc., but can you say they are or are not
literal? I didn't raise issue that in my "Dramatism as Literal" essay
because I was trying to respond to the argument as it had developed up to
now, but perhaps I should have.

Here's a trivia question: Are there any basic questions that the pentad
leaves out? I realize "in what manner" (attitude) is a Johnny-come-lately,
and not as basic sounding as what, who, where, how, why, and when. The one
that might be included, but was not, is "Which?" Of course which is
indexical, selecting out among a field of things. And it certainly can deal
with issues that do not involve human action (though I guess when, where,
and how can also). Some of the work I've done in the last few years gets at
"which" issues, though I've never phrased it that way. I've been working on
the issue of "Which act?" when you find a field of related actions that are
strategically connected. (See my book, *Judging the Supreme Court*, for the
most recent examples of this; my Korematsu v. U.S. essay in QJS addresses
some of these as well. I also have an essay I'm finishing for the next Burke
conference that elaborates on inter-pentadic relationships.)

I have great admiration for Herb, Ed, Bernie, Jim, and others who have
discussed this issue. I'm happy to engage in the "unending conversation"
with them as companions and I will "dance with tears in my eyes" if I find
them taking a position I feel compelled to wrestle with. I think that what
KB wanted all of us to do anyway, and this is a great venue for it.

Clarke

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, HERBERT W. SIMONS <>wrote:

> Hi Ed and all,
>
> Ed re-raises important issues.
>
> Two points:
>
> 1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
> this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
> Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
> for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
> (in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
> with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
> various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
> become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
> or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
> right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
> journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
> literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
> Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
> whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
> our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.
>
> 2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
> colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
> management.
>
> Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first
> KB Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was
> always at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
> operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
> was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
> Gayle was not.
>
> The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
> doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
> to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
> over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.
>
> Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor.
> The poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
> conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
> at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.
>
> Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
> actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.
>
> I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
> thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
> The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
> He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
> should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
> that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.
>
> The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
> suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.
>
> Goodnight Floyd.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:11 AM, <> wrote:
>
>> All,
>>
>> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
>> to be online.
>>
>> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
>> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
>> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
>> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
>> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
>> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
>> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
>> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
>> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
>> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
>> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
>> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
>> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
>> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
>> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
>> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
>> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
>> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
>> putting on greasepaint.
>>
>> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
>> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
>> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
>> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
>> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
>> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
>> metaphor.
>>
>> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
>> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
>> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>>
>> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
>> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
>> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
>> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
>> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
>> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
>> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
>> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
>> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
>> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
>> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
>> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
>> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
>> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>>
>> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
>> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
>> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>>
>>
>>
>> Ed
>>
>> .
>
>
>
>
> --
> Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of Communication
> Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
> Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
> Home phone: 215 844 5969
> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
>
> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe. All You Folks Out There!

I must say, I'm a bit stunned to see the second of my 5 posts in
response to Clarke's current article in the KBJ on the kb listserv. I rarely
post on kb anymore. A half dozen of us Burkeans have our own off-list list
We've been posting voluminously to one another for about two years now. I
no longer hear from people who say, stop cluttering up my inbox; or that's
too political, or that my rants are not Burkean enough. We;ve even produced
some significant scholarship together, I think. Six peas in a pod!

Clarke, you're one of my best Burkean friends. I was afraid, and
still am, that if you read my whole series of screeds on that
literal/metaphorical question, you'd never speak to me again!

Let me merely say, in reply to what you've just posted, I, too,
agree wholeheartedly that Burke's dramatistic/logological take on human being
and communication is universally applicable. Beyond that, for the time being,
I stay mum.

Best wishes to you all.

Your former house jester,



Ed

Hi Ed and all,

Ed re-raises important issues.

Two points:

1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
(in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.

2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
management.

Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first KB
Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was always
at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
Gayle was not.

The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.

Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor. The
poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.

Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.

I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.

The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.

Goodnight Floyd.



> All,
>
> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
> to be online.
>
> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
> putting on greasepaint.
>
> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
> metaphor.
>
> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>
> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>
> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
> .




--
Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Communication
Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
Home phone: 215 844 5969
http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons Herb, Ed, and others--

I didn't catch the first part of this thread, so I have to pick up with Ed's
and Herb's last post.

I like Ed's "actual" or "actually" as opposed to "literal" and "literally."
I think this is in the spirit of Burke's description of himself as a
"realist" because he starts with the proposition that people REALLY do act
(in reality).

The flexibility of the pentadic terms, which Herb points out and Burke
certainly highlighted, does not detract from the idea that dramatism is
literal, because the issue must be handled on a general (philosophical)
level, rather at the level of "application." It is a fact that agents may be
constructed as scenes--that's one aspect of how the grammatical terms are
related. So, when I say that a bunch of people in a particular room
constitute a crowded SCENE, I'm not becoming metaphorical about AGENTS.
People's BODIES really do take up space and change the nature of a scene.
That is not to say that you can't also talk about those same people as
agents engaged in conversation; these are simply two aspects of the same
situation that may be drawn out of the "alembic" that is the molten
substance called motives.

What is literal about such a "conversational" situation, and any situation
involving human action, is that there is a limited set of relevant questions
that can be asked about "what are people doing and why they are doing it,"
and Burke has identified that set. I have taken the strong stand that the
pentadic questions are UNIVERSAL. (See "Dramatism as Literal" and "Coming to
Terms with Kenneth Burke's Pentad" [ACJ] before that.) I've been to Asia,
Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places, and everyone
I've engaged in conversation talks about motives as imbued with questions of
purpose and means and scenes and agents and types of actions and even
attitudes. I've never read a mystery writer, playwright, philosophical
treatise, history, biography, or any other work about humans that did not
deal with the same issues concerning motives, whether they were written in
bibilical times or yesterday, in exotic lands or in my local paper. That's
why Burke claimed he didn't discover them, but drew upon the same list that
Aristotle had in Nicomachean Ethics and Talcott Parsons had in his writings
about humans in society. The whole idea of action--philosophically, but also
in our day to day human interactions--requires the interplay of elements
Burke called the pentad.

When Burke interviewed with students for the Iowa tapes, he was very careful
to deny that the pentadic terms were "positive terms." He insisted they were
questions. Perhaps that emphasis was a way for him to deal with recent
challenges to dramatism. (Remember, the Iowa interviews were held shortly
after Herb, Bernie, Jim, and Parke Burgess participated in the "Dramatism as
Literal" panel at ECA, published in CQ the next year.) Can a question be
literal? Questions engage in a kind of speech act that, unsurprisingly,
embodies human interaction. You can say that a question is bad or misplaced
or off the point or insulting, etc., but can you say they are or are not
literal? I didn't raise issue that in my "Dramatism as Literal" essay
because I was trying to respond to the argument as it had developed up to
now, but perhaps I should have.

Here's a trivia question: Are there any basic questions that the pentad
leaves out? I realize "in what manner" (attitude) is a Johnny-come-lately,
and not as basic sounding as what, who, where, how, why, and when. The one
that might be included, but was not, is "Which?" Of course which is
indexical, selecting out among a field of things. And it certainly can deal
with issues that do not involve human action (though I guess when, where,
and how can also). Some of the work I've done in the last few years gets at
"which" issues, though I've never phrased it that way. I've been working on
the issue of "Which act?" when you find a field of related actions that are
strategically connected. (See my book, *Judging the Supreme Court*, for the
most recent examples of this; my Korematsu v. U.S. essay in QJS addresses
some of these as well. I also have an essay I'm finishing for the next Burke
conference that elaborates on inter-pentadic relationships.)

I have great admiration for Herb, Ed, Bernie, Jim, and others who have
discussed this issue. I'm happy to engage in the "unending conversation"
with them as companions and I will "dance with tears in my eyes" if I find
them taking a position I feel compelled to wrestle with. I think that what
KB wanted all of us to do anyway, and this is a great venue for it.

Clarke

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, HERBERT W. SIMONS <>wrote:

> Hi Ed and all,
>
> Ed re-raises important issues.
>
> Two points:
>
> 1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
> this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
> Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
> for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
> (in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
> with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
> various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
> become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
> or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
> right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
> journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
> literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
> Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
> whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
> our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.
>
> 2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
> colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
> management.
>
> Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first
> KB Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was
> always at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
> operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
> was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
> Gayle was not.
>
> The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
> doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
> to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
> over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.
>
> Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor.
> The poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
> conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
> at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.
>
> Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
> actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.
>
> I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
> thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
> The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
> He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
> should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
> that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.
>
> The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
> suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.
>
> Goodnight Floyd.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:11 AM, <> wrote:
>
>> All,
>>
>> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
>> to be online.
>>
>> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
>> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
>> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
>> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
>> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
>> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
>> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
>> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
>> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
>> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
>> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
>> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
>> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
>> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
>> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
>> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
>> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
>> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
>> putting on greasepaint.
>>
>> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
>> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
>> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
>> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
>> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
>> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
>> metaphor.
>>
>> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
>> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
>> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>>
>> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
>> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
>> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
>> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
>> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
>> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
>> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
>> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
>> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
>> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
>> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
>> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
>> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
>> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>>
>> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
>> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
>> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>>
>>
>>
>> Ed
>>
>> .
>
>
>
>
> --
> Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of Communication
> Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
> Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
> Home phone: 215 844 5969
> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
>
> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe. All You Folks Out There!

I must say, I'm a bit stunned to see the second of my 5 posts in
response to Clarke's current article in the KBJ on the kb listserv. I rarely
post on kb anymore. A half dozen of us Burkeans have our own off-list list
We've been posting voluminously to one another for about two years now. I
no longer hear from people who say, stop cluttering up my inbox; or that's
too political, or that my rants are not Burkean enough. We;ve even produced
some significant scholarship together, I think. Six peas in a pod!

Clarke, you're one of my best Burkean friends. I was afraid, and
still am, that if you read my whole series of screeds on that
literal/metaphorical question, you'd never speak to me again!

Let me merely say, in reply to what you've just posted, I, too,
agree wholeheartedly that Burke's dramatistic/logological take on human being
and communication is universally applicable. Beyond that, for the time being,
I stay mum.

Best wishes to you all.

Your former house jester,



Ed Burkelers--

Ed did send me his response. He's very kind in posting a supportive excerpt,
despite the serious differences he finds with my position. It's a good read
worthy of consideration against what I argue in the "Revisiting" piece. He's
welcome to post the rest of it if there is interest, or to formalize it as a
reply in KBJ.

Clarke

On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 8:59 PM, <> wrote:

> Just to follow up:
>
> I sent Clarke my five-part response to his article in the current
> KBJ. In the first installment of my series, three sentences read:
>
> "First off, I think Clarke's essay is brilliant. It makes just
> about as good a case for late Burke and the 'literality' claim for
> dramatism/logology as has been made. In fact, Clarke asserts that Burke was
> a 'literalist' about his philosophy pretty much all along."
>
> I strongly recommend that you read Clarke's article.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
>
> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe.

Hi Ed and all,

Ed re-raises important issues.

Two points:

1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
(in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.

2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
management.

Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first KB
Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was always
at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
Gayle was not.

The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.

Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor. The
poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.

Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.

I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.

The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.

Goodnight Floyd.



> All,
>
> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
> to be online.
>
> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
> putting on greasepaint.
>
> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
> metaphor.
>
> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>
> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>
> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
> .




--
Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Communication
Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
Home phone: 215 844 5969
http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons Herb, Ed, and others--

I didn't catch the first part of this thread, so I have to pick up with Ed's
and Herb's last post.

I like Ed's "actual" or "actually" as opposed to "literal" and "literally."
I think this is in the spirit of Burke's description of himself as a
"realist" because he starts with the proposition that people REALLY do act
(in reality).

The flexibility of the pentadic terms, which Herb points out and Burke
certainly highlighted, does not detract from the idea that dramatism is
literal, because the issue must be handled on a general (philosophical)
level, rather at the level of "application." It is a fact that agents may be
constructed as scenes--that's one aspect of how the grammatical terms are
related. So, when I say that a bunch of people in a particular room
constitute a crowded SCENE, I'm not becoming metaphorical about AGENTS.
People's BODIES really do take up space and change the nature of a scene.
That is not to say that you can't also talk about those same people as
agents engaged in conversation; these are simply two aspects of the same
situation that may be drawn out of the "alembic" that is the molten
substance called motives.

What is literal about such a "conversational" situation, and any situation
involving human action, is that there is a limited set of relevant questions
that can be asked about "what are people doing and why they are doing it,"
and Burke has identified that set. I have taken the strong stand that the
pentadic questions are UNIVERSAL. (See "Dramatism as Literal" and "Coming to
Terms with Kenneth Burke's Pentad" [ACJ] before that.) I've been to Asia,
Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places, and everyone
I've engaged in conversation talks about motives as imbued with questions of
purpose and means and scenes and agents and types of actions and even
attitudes. I've never read a mystery writer, playwright, philosophical
treatise, history, biography, or any other work about humans that did not
deal with the same issues concerning motives, whether they were written in
bibilical times or yesterday, in exotic lands or in my local paper. That's
why Burke claimed he didn't discover them, but drew upon the same list that
Aristotle had in Nicomachean Ethics and Talcott Parsons had in his writings
about humans in society. The whole idea of action--philosophically, but also
in our day to day human interactions--requires the interplay of elements
Burke called the pentad.

When Burke interviewed with students for the Iowa tapes, he was very careful
to deny that the pentadic terms were "positive terms." He insisted they were
questions. Perhaps that emphasis was a way for him to deal with recent
challenges to dramatism. (Remember, the Iowa interviews were held shortly
after Herb, Bernie, Jim, and Parke Burgess participated in the "Dramatism as
Literal" panel at ECA, published in CQ the next year.) Can a question be
literal? Questions engage in a kind of speech act that, unsurprisingly,
embodies human interaction. You can say that a question is bad or misplaced
or off the point or insulting, etc., but can you say they are or are not
literal? I didn't raise issue that in my "Dramatism as Literal" essay
because I was trying to respond to the argument as it had developed up to
now, but perhaps I should have.

Here's a trivia question: Are there any basic questions that the pentad
leaves out? I realize "in what manner" (attitude) is a Johnny-come-lately,
and not as basic sounding as what, who, where, how, why, and when. The one
that might be included, but was not, is "Which?" Of course which is
indexical, selecting out among a field of things. And it certainly can deal
with issues that do not involve human action (though I guess when, where,
and how can also). Some of the work I've done in the last few years gets at
"which" issues, though I've never phrased it that way. I've been working on
the issue of "Which act?" when you find a field of related actions that are
strategically connected. (See my book, *Judging the Supreme Court*, for the
most recent examples of this; my Korematsu v. U.S. essay in QJS addresses
some of these as well. I also have an essay I'm finishing for the next Burke
conference that elaborates on inter-pentadic relationships.)

I have great admiration for Herb, Ed, Bernie, Jim, and others who have
discussed this issue. I'm happy to engage in the "unending conversation"
with them as companions and I will "dance with tears in my eyes" if I find
them taking a position I feel compelled to wrestle with. I think that what
KB wanted all of us to do anyway, and this is a great venue for it.

Clarke

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, HERBERT W. SIMONS <>wrote:

> Hi Ed and all,
>
> Ed re-raises important issues.
>
> Two points:
>
> 1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
> this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
> Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
> for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
> (in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
> with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
> various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
> become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
> or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
> right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
> journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
> literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
> Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
> whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
> our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.
>
> 2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
> colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
> management.
>
> Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first
> KB Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was
> always at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
> operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
> was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
> Gayle was not.
>
> The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
> doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
> to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
> over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.
>
> Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor.
> The poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
> conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
> at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.
>
> Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
> actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.
>
> I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
> thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
> The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
> He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
> should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
> that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.
>
> The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
> suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.
>
> Goodnight Floyd.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:11 AM, <> wrote:
>
>> All,
>>
>> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
>> to be online.
>>
>> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
>> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
>> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
>> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
>> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
>> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
>> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
>> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
>> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
>> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
>> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
>> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
>> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
>> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
>> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
>> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
>> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
>> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
>> putting on greasepaint.
>>
>> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
>> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
>> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
>> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
>> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
>> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
>> metaphor.
>>
>> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
>> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
>> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>>
>> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
>> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
>> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
>> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
>> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
>> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
>> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
>> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
>> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
>> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
>> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
>> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
>> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
>> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>>
>> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
>> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
>> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>>
>>
>>
>> Ed
>>
>> .
>
>
>
>
> --
> Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of Communication
> Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
> Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
> Home phone: 215 844 5969
> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
>
> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe. All You Folks Out There!

I must say, I'm a bit stunned to see the second of my 5 posts in
response to Clarke's current article in the KBJ on the kb listserv. I rarely
post on kb anymore. A half dozen of us Burkeans have our own off-list list
We've been posting voluminously to one another for about two years now. I
no longer hear from people who say, stop cluttering up my inbox; or that's
too political, or that my rants are not Burkean enough. We;ve even produced
some significant scholarship together, I think. Six peas in a pod!

Clarke, you're one of my best Burkean friends. I was afraid, and
still am, that if you read my whole series of screeds on that
literal/metaphorical question, you'd never speak to me again!

Let me merely say, in reply to what you've just posted, I, too,
agree wholeheartedly that Burke's dramatistic/logological take on human being
and communication is universally applicable. Beyond that, for the time being,
I stay mum.

Best wishes to you all.

Your former house jester,



Ed Burkelers--

Ed did send me his response. He's very kind in posting a supportive excerpt,
despite the serious differences he finds with my position. It's a good read
worthy of consideration against what I argue in the "Revisiting" piece. He's
welcome to post the rest of it if there is interest, or to formalize it as a
reply in KBJ.

Clarke

On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 8:59 PM, <> wrote:

> Just to follow up:
>
> I sent Clarke my five-part response to his article in the current
> KBJ. In the first installment of my series, three sentences read:
>
> "First off, I think Clarke's essay is brilliant. It makes just
> about as good a case for late Burke and the 'literality' claim for
> dramatism/logology as has been made. In fact, Clarke asserts that Burke was
> a 'literalist' about his philosophy pretty much all along."
>
> I strongly recommend that you read Clarke's article.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
>
> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe. Let me add my appreciation for Clarke's recent KB Journal article. As
someone outside the field of communication, I especially appreciated
his account of the literal/metaphor debate in the context of this
field. It helped me to see things in Brock et al. that I didn't see
before in my account of this debate in my KB book.

Let me, further, (1) offer my understanding of Clarke's argument and
then (2) ask one question:

#1

What is literal? (or "actual"--Clarke accepts Ed's modification, but
I'll stick to "literal" because that is the term featured in Clarke's
article). Clarke seems to assume that one can make literal statements
only about realities, or possible realities (or selective realities,
as in the example in his email below, where people in a room may be a
"scene" or "agents"). An example of a possible reality appears in his
article in the example of someone not raised as a Catholic saying, "I
was raised a Catholic." This statement would be false but is
nonetheless literal in the sense that it is a statement about
something that could be real. By contrast, to say a macho guy is a
tiger is necessarily a metaphor because the guy can't possibly be a
real tiger.

Okay, what makes the pentad real? Clarke's answer seems clearly to be
that the pentad is real because it is universal. This is the main
point in the opening pages of the article. Clarke returns to this
point in his email in saying that he has seen the pentad in operation
in "Asia, Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places."

#2

My question (here I may get too philosophical for Clarke's taste but
when I read something I see philosophical assumptions in play, and
without clarification on these assumptions what I'm reading remains
unclear): To say that universality is the mark of reality (in this
case, the reality of the pentad) seems to me to point to a Platonic
argument. One of Clarke's examples in the article seems to underline
such Platonism. In this example, he notes how one may debate whether
Obama is a free-spending liberal ("agent") or forced to spend because
of the economy ("scene"). The reality in this example seems to be the
universal (agent, scene), not Obama's activities, which are debatable
(the "agent" argument vs. the "scene" argument). In other words,
everyday reality occurring at particular places and times is
contingent, debatable, something we can never know for sure, because
it always falls short of the reality we can know, the reality of
universals, which are everywhere and therefore nowhere in the sense
that a universal can not be brought down to the finite reality of a
particular place and time.

Clarke's reality? Burke's? Both? Neither?

Granted, you may not want to go there, but philosophical speculation
was surely something Burke never shied away from.

Bob





Quoting Clarke Rountree <>:

> Herb, Ed, and others--
>
> I didn't catch the first part of this thread, so I have to pick up with Ed's
> and Herb's last post.
>
> I like Ed's "actual" or "actually" as opposed to "literal" and "literally."
> I think this is in the spirit of Burke's description of himself as a
> "realist" because he starts with the proposition that people REALLY do act
> (in reality).
>
> The flexibility of the pentadic terms, which Herb points out and Burke
> certainly highlighted, does not detract from the idea that dramatism is
> literal, because the issue must be handled on a general (philosophical)
> level, rather at the level of "application." It is a fact that agents may be
> constructed as scenes--that's one aspect of how the grammatical terms are
> related. So, when I say that a bunch of people in a particular room
> constitute a crowded SCENE, I'm not becoming metaphorical about AGENTS.
> People's BODIES really do take up space and change the nature of a scene.
> That is not to say that you can't also talk about those same people as
> agents engaged in conversation; these are simply two aspects of the same
> situation that may be drawn out of the "alembic" that is the molten
> substance called motives.
>
> What is literal about such a "conversational" situation, and any situation
> involving human action, is that there is a limited set of relevant questions
> that can be asked about "what are people doing and why they are doing it,"
> and Burke has identified that set. I have taken the strong stand that the
> pentadic questions are UNIVERSAL. (See "Dramatism as Literal" and "Coming to
> Terms with Kenneth Burke's Pentad" [ACJ] before that.) I've been to Asia,
> Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places, and everyone
> I've engaged in conversation talks about motives as imbued with questions of
> purpose and means and scenes and agents and types of actions and even
> attitudes. I've never read a mystery writer, playwright, philosophical
> treatise, history, biography, or any other work about humans that did not
> deal with the same issues concerning motives, whether they were written in
> bibilical times or yesterday, in exotic lands or in my local paper. That's
> why Burke claimed he didn't discover them, but drew upon the same list that
> Aristotle had in Nicomachean Ethics and Talcott Parsons had in his writings
> about humans in society. The whole idea of action--philosophically, but also
> in our day to day human interactions--requires the interplay of elements
> Burke called the pentad.
>
> When Burke interviewed with students for the Iowa tapes, he was very careful
> to deny that the pentadic terms were "positive terms." He insisted they were
> questions. Perhaps that emphasis was a way for him to deal with recent
> challenges to dramatism. (Remember, the Iowa interviews were held shortly
> after Herb, Bernie, Jim, and Parke Burgess participated in the "Dramatism as
> Literal" panel at ECA, published in CQ the next year.) Can a question be
> literal? Questions engage in a kind of speech act that, unsurprisingly,
> embodies human interaction. You can say that a question is bad or misplaced
> or off the point or insulting, etc., but can you say they are or are not
> literal? I didn't raise issue that in my "Dramatism as Literal" essay
> because I was trying to respond to the argument as it had developed up to
> now, but perhaps I should have.
>
> Here's a trivia question: Are there any basic questions that the pentad
> leaves out? I realize "in what manner" (attitude) is a Johnny-come-lately,
> and not as basic sounding as what, who, where, how, why, and when. The one
> that might be included, but was not, is "Which?" Of course which is
> indexical, selecting out among a field of things. And it certainly can deal
> with issues that do not involve human action (though I guess when, where,
> and how can also). Some of the work I've done in the last few years gets at
> "which" issues, though I've never phrased it that way. I've been working on
> the issue of "Which act?" when you find a field of related actions that are
> strategically connected. (See my book, *Judging the Supreme Court*, for the
> most recent examples of this; my Korematsu v. U.S. essay in QJS addresses
> some of these as well. I also have an essay I'm finishing for the next Burke
> conference that elaborates on inter-pentadic relationships.)
>
> I have great admiration for Herb, Ed, Bernie, Jim, and others who have
> discussed this issue. I'm happy to engage in the "unending conversation"
> with them as companions and I will "dance with tears in my eyes" if I find
> them taking a position I feel compelled to wrestle with. I think that what
> KB wanted all of us to do anyway, and this is a great venue for it.
>
> Clarke
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, HERBERT W. SIMONS
> <>wrote:
>
>> Hi Ed and all,
>>
>> Ed re-raises important issues.
>>
>> Two points:
>>
>> 1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
>> this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
>> Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
>> for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
>> (in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
>> with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
>> various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
>> become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
>> or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
>> right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
>> journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
>> literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
>> Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
>> whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
>> our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.
>>
>> 2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
>> colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
>> management.
>>
>> Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first
>> KB Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was
>> always at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
>> operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
>> was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
>> Gayle was not.
>>
>> The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
>> doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
>> to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
>> over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.
>>
>> Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor.
>> The poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
>> conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
>> at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.
>>
>> Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
>> actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.
>>
>> I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
>> thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
>> The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
>> He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
>> should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
>> that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.
>>
>> The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
>> suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.
>>
>> Goodnight Floyd.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:11 AM, <> wrote:
>>
>>> All,
>>>
>>> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
>>> to be online.
>>>
>>> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
>>> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
>>> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
>>> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
>>> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
>>> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
>>> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
>>> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
>>> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
>>> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
>>> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
>>> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
>>> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
>>> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
>>> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
>>> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
>>> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
>>> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
>>> putting on greasepaint.
>>>
>>> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
>>> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is
>>> transfered
>>> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that
>>> to which it
>>> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
>>> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
>>> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's
>>> view. That's
>>> metaphor.
>>>
>>> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
>>> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is
>>> not an area
>>> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>>>
>>> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
>>> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
>>> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
>>> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally
>>> prefer the
>>> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
>>> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
>>> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
>>> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
>>> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in
>>> the sense of
>>> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really
>>> happening in human
>>> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in
>>> symbol-using
>>> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
>>> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
>>> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>>>
>>> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
>>> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
>>> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Ed
>>>
>>> .
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
>> Emeritus Professor of Communication
>> Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
>> Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
>> Home phone: 215 844 5969
>> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
>>
>> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe.

Hi Ed and all,

Ed re-raises important issues.

Two points:

1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
(in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.

2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
management.

Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first KB
Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was always
at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
Gayle was not.

The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.

Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor. The
poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.

Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.

I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.

The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.

Goodnight Floyd.



> All,
>
> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
> to be online.
>
> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
> putting on greasepaint.
>
> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
> metaphor.
>
> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>
> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>
> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
> .




--
Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
Emeritus Professor of Communication
Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
Home phone: 215 844 5969
http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons Herb, Ed, and others--

I didn't catch the first part of this thread, so I have to pick up with Ed's
and Herb's last post.

I like Ed's "actual" or "actually" as opposed to "literal" and "literally."
I think this is in the spirit of Burke's description of himself as a
"realist" because he starts with the proposition that people REALLY do act
(in reality).

The flexibility of the pentadic terms, which Herb points out and Burke
certainly highlighted, does not detract from the idea that dramatism is
literal, because the issue must be handled on a general (philosophical)
level, rather at the level of "application." It is a fact that agents may be
constructed as scenes--that's one aspect of how the grammatical terms are
related. So, when I say that a bunch of people in a particular room
constitute a crowded SCENE, I'm not becoming metaphorical about AGENTS.
People's BODIES really do take up space and change the nature of a scene.
That is not to say that you can't also talk about those same people as
agents engaged in conversation; these are simply two aspects of the same
situation that may be drawn out of the "alembic" that is the molten
substance called motives.

What is literal about such a "conversational" situation, and any situation
involving human action, is that there is a limited set of relevant questions
that can be asked about "what are people doing and why they are doing it,"
and Burke has identified that set. I have taken the strong stand that the
pentadic questions are UNIVERSAL. (See "Dramatism as Literal" and "Coming to
Terms with Kenneth Burke's Pentad" [ACJ] before that.) I've been to Asia,
Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places, and everyone
I've engaged in conversation talks about motives as imbued with questions of
purpose and means and scenes and agents and types of actions and even
attitudes. I've never read a mystery writer, playwright, philosophical
treatise, history, biography, or any other work about humans that did not
deal with the same issues concerning motives, whether they were written in
bibilical times or yesterday, in exotic lands or in my local paper. That's
why Burke claimed he didn't discover them, but drew upon the same list that
Aristotle had in Nicomachean Ethics and Talcott Parsons had in his writings
about humans in society. The whole idea of action--philosophically, but also
in our day to day human interactions--requires the interplay of elements
Burke called the pentad.

When Burke interviewed with students for the Iowa tapes, he was very careful
to deny that the pentadic terms were "positive terms." He insisted they were
questions. Perhaps that emphasis was a way for him to deal with recent
challenges to dramatism. (Remember, the Iowa interviews were held shortly
after Herb, Bernie, Jim, and Parke Burgess participated in the "Dramatism as
Literal" panel at ECA, published in CQ the next year.) Can a question be
literal? Questions engage in a kind of speech act that, unsurprisingly,
embodies human interaction. You can say that a question is bad or misplaced
or off the point or insulting, etc., but can you say they are or are not
literal? I didn't raise issue that in my "Dramatism as Literal" essay
because I was trying to respond to the argument as it had developed up to
now, but perhaps I should have.

Here's a trivia question: Are there any basic questions that the pentad
leaves out? I realize "in what manner" (attitude) is a Johnny-come-lately,
and not as basic sounding as what, who, where, how, why, and when. The one
that might be included, but was not, is "Which?" Of course which is
indexical, selecting out among a field of things. And it certainly can deal
with issues that do not involve human action (though I guess when, where,
and how can also). Some of the work I've done in the last few years gets at
"which" issues, though I've never phrased it that way. I've been working on
the issue of "Which act?" when you find a field of related actions that are
strategically connected. (See my book, *Judging the Supreme Court*, for the
most recent examples of this; my Korematsu v. U.S. essay in QJS addresses
some of these as well. I also have an essay I'm finishing for the next Burke
conference that elaborates on inter-pentadic relationships.)

I have great admiration for Herb, Ed, Bernie, Jim, and others who have
discussed this issue. I'm happy to engage in the "unending conversation"
with them as companions and I will "dance with tears in my eyes" if I find
them taking a position I feel compelled to wrestle with. I think that what
KB wanted all of us to do anyway, and this is a great venue for it.

Clarke

On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, HERBERT W. SIMONS <>wrote:

> Hi Ed and all,
>
> Ed re-raises important issues.
>
> Two points:
>
> 1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
> this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
> Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
> for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
> (in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
> with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
> various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
> become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
> or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
> right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
> journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
> literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
> Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
> whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
> our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.
>
> 2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
> colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
> management.
>
> Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first
> KB Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was
> always at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
> operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
> was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
> Gayle was not.
>
> The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
> doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
> to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
> over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.
>
> Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor.
> The poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
> conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
> at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.
>
> Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
> actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.
>
> I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
> thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
> The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
> He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
> should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
> that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.
>
> The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
> suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.
>
> Goodnight Floyd.
>
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:11 AM, <> wrote:
>
>> All,
>>
>> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
>> to be online.
>>
>> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
>> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
>> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
>> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
>> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
>> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
>> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
>> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
>> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
>> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
>> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
>> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
>> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
>> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
>> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
>> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
>> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
>> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
>> putting on greasepaint.
>>
>> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
>> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transfered
>> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it
>> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
>> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
>> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view. That's
>> metaphor.
>>
>> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
>> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an area
>> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>>
>> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
>> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
>> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
>> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer the
>> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
>> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
>> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
>> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
>> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the sense of
>> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in human
>> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in symbol-using
>> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
>> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
>> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>>
>> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
>> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
>> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>>
>>
>>
>> Ed
>>
>> .
>
>
>
>
> --
> Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
> Emeritus Professor of Communication
> Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
> Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
> Home phone: 215 844 5969
> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
>
> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe. All You Folks Out There!

I must say, I'm a bit stunned to see the second of my 5 posts in
response to Clarke's current article in the KBJ on the kb listserv. I rarely
post on kb anymore. A half dozen of us Burkeans have our own off-list list
We've been posting voluminously to one another for about two years now. I
no longer hear from people who say, stop cluttering up my inbox; or that's
too political, or that my rants are not Burkean enough. We;ve even produced
some significant scholarship together, I think. Six peas in a pod!

Clarke, you're one of my best Burkean friends. I was afraid, and
still am, that if you read my whole series of screeds on that
literal/metaphorical question, you'd never speak to me again!

Let me merely say, in reply to what you've just posted, I, too,
agree wholeheartedly that Burke's dramatistic/logological take on human being
and communication is universally applicable. Beyond that, for the time being,
I stay mum.

Best wishes to you all.

Your former house jester,



Ed Burkelers--

Ed did send me his response. He's very kind in posting a supportive excerpt,
despite the serious differences he finds with my position. It's a good read
worthy of consideration against what I argue in the "Revisiting" piece. He's
welcome to post the rest of it if there is interest, or to formalize it as a
reply in KBJ.

Clarke

On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 8:59 PM, <> wrote:

> Just to follow up:
>
> I sent Clarke my five-part response to his article in the current
> KBJ. In the first installment of my series, three sentences read:
>
> "First off, I think Clarke's essay is brilliant. It makes just
> about as good a case for late Burke and the 'literality' claim for
> dramatism/logology as has been made. In fact, Clarke asserts that Burke was
> a 'literalist' about his philosophy pretty much all along."
>
> I strongly recommend that you read Clarke's article.
>
>
>
> Ed
>
>
> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe. Let me add my appreciation for Clarke's recent KB Journal article. As
someone outside the field of communication, I especially appreciated
his account of the literal/metaphor debate in the context of this
field. It helped me to see things in Brock et al. that I didn't see
before in my account of this debate in my KB book.

Let me, further, (1) offer my understanding of Clarke's argument and
then (2) ask one question:

#1

What is literal? (or "actual"--Clarke accepts Ed's modification, but
I'll stick to "literal" because that is the term featured in Clarke's
article). Clarke seems to assume that one can make literal statements
only about realities, or possible realities (or selective realities,
as in the example in his email below, where people in a room may be a
"scene" or "agents"). An example of a possible reality appears in his
article in the example of someone not raised as a Catholic saying, "I
was raised a Catholic." This statement would be false but is
nonetheless literal in the sense that it is a statement about
something that could be real. By contrast, to say a macho guy is a
tiger is necessarily a metaphor because the guy can't possibly be a
real tiger.

Okay, what makes the pentad real? Clarke's answer seems clearly to be
that the pentad is real because it is universal. This is the main
point in the opening pages of the article. Clarke returns to this
point in his email in saying that he has seen the pentad in operation
in "Asia, Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places."

#2

My question (here I may get too philosophical for Clarke's taste but
when I read something I see philosophical assumptions in play, and
without clarification on these assumptions what I'm reading remains
unclear): To say that universality is the mark of reality (in this
case, the reality of the pentad) seems to me to point to a Platonic
argument. One of Clarke's examples in the article seems to underline
such Platonism. In this example, he notes how one may debate whether
Obama is a free-spending liberal ("agent") or forced to spend because
of the economy ("scene"). The reality in this example seems to be the
universal (agent, scene), not Obama's activities, which are debatable
(the "agent" argument vs. the "scene" argument). In other words,
everyday reality occurring at particular places and times is
contingent, debatable, something we can never know for sure, because
it always falls short of the reality we can know, the reality of
universals, which are everywhere and therefore nowhere in the sense
that a universal can not be brought down to the finite reality of a
particular place and time.

Clarke's reality? Burke's? Both? Neither?

Granted, you may not want to go there, but philosophical speculation
was surely something Burke never shied away from.

Bob





Quoting Clarke Rountree <>:

> Herb, Ed, and others--
>
> I didn't catch the first part of this thread, so I have to pick up with Ed's
> and Herb's last post.
>
> I like Ed's "actual" or "actually" as opposed to "literal" and "literally."
> I think this is in the spirit of Burke's description of himself as a
> "realist" because he starts with the proposition that people REALLY do act
> (in reality).
>
> The flexibility of the pentadic terms, which Herb points out and Burke
> certainly highlighted, does not detract from the idea that dramatism is
> literal, because the issue must be handled on a general (philosophical)
> level, rather at the level of "application." It is a fact that agents may be
> constructed as scenes--that's one aspect of how the grammatical terms are
> related. So, when I say that a bunch of people in a particular room
> constitute a crowded SCENE, I'm not becoming metaphorical about AGENTS.
> People's BODIES really do take up space and change the nature of a scene.
> That is not to say that you can't also talk about those same people as
> agents engaged in conversation; these are simply two aspects of the same
> situation that may be drawn out of the "alembic" that is the molten
> substance called motives.
>
> What is literal about such a "conversational" situation, and any situation
> involving human action, is that there is a limited set of relevant questions
> that can be asked about "what are people doing and why they are doing it,"
> and Burke has identified that set. I have taken the strong stand that the
> pentadic questions are UNIVERSAL. (See "Dramatism as Literal" and "Coming to
> Terms with Kenneth Burke's Pentad" [ACJ] before that.) I've been to Asia,
> Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places, and everyone
> I've engaged in conversation talks about motives as imbued with questions of
> purpose and means and scenes and agents and types of actions and even
> attitudes. I've never read a mystery writer, playwright, philosophical
> treatise, history, biography, or any other work about humans that did not
> deal with the same issues concerning motives, whether they were written in
> bibilical times or yesterday, in exotic lands or in my local paper. That's
> why Burke claimed he didn't discover them, but drew upon the same list that
> Aristotle had in Nicomachean Ethics and Talcott Parsons had in his writings
> about humans in society. The whole idea of action--philosophically, but also
> in our day to day human interactions--requires the interplay of elements
> Burke called the pentad.
>
> When Burke interviewed with students for the Iowa tapes, he was very careful
> to deny that the pentadic terms were "positive terms." He insisted they were
> questions. Perhaps that emphasis was a way for him to deal with recent
> challenges to dramatism. (Remember, the Iowa interviews were held shortly
> after Herb, Bernie, Jim, and Parke Burgess participated in the "Dramatism as
> Literal" panel at ECA, published in CQ the next year.) Can a question be
> literal? Questions engage in a kind of speech act that, unsurprisingly,
> embodies human interaction. You can say that a question is bad or misplaced
> or off the point or insulting, etc., but can you say they are or are not
> literal? I didn't raise issue that in my "Dramatism as Literal" essay
> because I was trying to respond to the argument as it had developed up to
> now, but perhaps I should have.
>
> Here's a trivia question: Are there any basic questions that the pentad
> leaves out? I realize "in what manner" (attitude) is a Johnny-come-lately,
> and not as basic sounding as what, who, where, how, why, and when. The one
> that might be included, but was not, is "Which?" Of course which is
> indexical, selecting out among a field of things. And it certainly can deal
> with issues that do not involve human action (though I guess when, where,
> and how can also). Some of the work I've done in the last few years gets at
> "which" issues, though I've never phrased it that way. I've been working on
> the issue of "Which act?" when you find a field of related actions that are
> strategically connected. (See my book, *Judging the Supreme Court*, for the
> most recent examples of this; my Korematsu v. U.S. essay in QJS addresses
> some of these as well. I also have an essay I'm finishing for the next Burke
> conference that elaborates on inter-pentadic relationships.)
>
> I have great admiration for Herb, Ed, Bernie, Jim, and others who have
> discussed this issue. I'm happy to engage in the "unending conversation"
> with them as companions and I will "dance with tears in my eyes" if I find
> them taking a position I feel compelled to wrestle with. I think that what
> KB wanted all of us to do anyway, and this is a great venue for it.
>
> Clarke
>
> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, HERBERT W. SIMONS
> <>wrote:
>
>> Hi Ed and all,
>>
>> Ed re-raises important issues.
>>
>> Two points:
>>
>> 1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
>> this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
>> Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal foundation
>> for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific readership
>> (in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
>> with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable of
>> various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts can
>> become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a film
>> or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
>> right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the ECA
>> journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question the
>> literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
>> Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
>> whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
>> our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.
>>
>> 2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
>> colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
>> management.
>>
>> Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first
>> KB Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was
>> always at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his hip
>> operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
>> was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
>> Gayle was not.
>>
>> The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd, the
>> doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent him
>> to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical theory
>> over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.
>>
>> Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor.
>> The poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the Williams
>> conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd remained
>> at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.
>>
>> Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
>> actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.
>>
>> I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
>> thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
>> The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was KB's.
>> He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
>> should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
>> that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.
>>
>> The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of another
>> suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.
>>
>> Goodnight Floyd.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:11 AM, <> wrote:
>>
>>> All,
>>>
>>> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
>>> to be online.
>>>
>>> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
>>> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self in
>>> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
>>> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
>>> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
>>> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
>>> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical. Goffman
>>> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to what
>>> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily life,
>>> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
>>> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
>>> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
>>> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
>>> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
>>> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
>>> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
>>> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
>>> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
>>> putting on greasepaint.
>>>
>>> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
>>> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is
>>> transfered
>>> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that
>>> to which it
>>> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle" (the
>>> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
>>> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's
>>> view. That's
>>> metaphor.
>>>
>>> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
>>> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is
>>> not an area
>>> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>>>
>>> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
>>> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
>>> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons are
>>> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally
>>> prefer the
>>> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are doing
>>> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
>>> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too well
>>> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
>>> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in
>>> the sense of
>>> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really
>>> happening in human
>>> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in
>>> symbol-using
>>> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can effect
>>> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined generally
>>> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>>>
>>> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
>>> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the disparate
>>> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Ed
>>>
>>> .
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
>> Emeritus Professor of Communication
>> Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
>> Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
>> Home phone: 215 844 5969
>> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
>>
>> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

Posted on the KB mailing list. Go to https://lists.purdue.edu/mailman/listinfo/kb to subscribe. Bob,

Let me make one comment before I call it a night and I'll come back to this.
I don't believe that a claim that something is universal has to be Platonic.
In fact, I was attempting to be the opposite of Platonic, drawing an
inference from numerous examples. Anthropologists have noted that people in
all cultures and all times appear to have developed some kind of belief in
gods or the supernatural. Are such anthropologists being Platonic? No,
they're seeing if there's a negative example that disproves their
generalization. I don't know of any negative examples in the case of the
questions the pentad answers in terms of human motives and I challenge
someone to come up with one. Of course, philosophically, you can't prove
such a generalization, you can only disprove it. However, I think there are
other lines of argument that can be taken. More later.

Clarke

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 6:56 PM, <> wrote:

> Let me add my appreciation for Clarke's recent KB Journal article. As
> someone outside the field of communication, I especially appreciated his
> account of the literal/metaphor debate in the context of this field. It
> helped me to see things in Brock et al. that I didn't see before in my
> account of this debate in my KB book.
>
> Let me, further, (1) offer my understanding of Clarke's argument and then
> (2) ask one question:
>
> #1
>
> What is literal? (or "actual"--Clarke accepts Ed's modification, but I'll
> stick to "literal" because that is the term featured in Clarke's article).
> Clarke seems to assume that one can make literal statements only about
> realities, or possible realities (or selective realities, as in the example
> in his email below, where people in a room may be a "scene" or "agents"). An
> example of a possible reality appears in his article in the example of
> someone not raised as a Catholic saying, "I was raised a Catholic." This
> statement would be false but is nonetheless literal in the sense that it is
> a statement about something that could be real. By contrast, to say a macho
> guy is a tiger is necessarily a metaphor because the guy can't possibly be a
> real tiger.
>
> Okay, what makes the pentad real? Clarke's answer seems clearly to be that
> the pentad is real because it is universal. This is the main point in the
> opening pages of the article. Clarke returns to this point in his email in
> saying that he has seen the pentad in operation in "Asia, Africa, Europe,
> Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places."
>
> #2
>
> My question (here I may get too philosophical for Clarke's taste but when I
> read something I see philosophical assumptions in play, and without
> clarification on these assumptions what I'm reading remains unclear): To say
> that universality is the mark of reality (in this case, the reality of the
> pentad) seems to me to point to a Platonic argument. One of Clarke's
> examples in the article seems to underline such Platonism. In this example,
> he notes how one may debate whether Obama is a free-spending liberal
> ("agent") or forced to spend because of the economy ("scene"). The reality
> in this example seems to be the universal (agent, scene), not Obama's
> activities, which are debatable (the "agent" argument vs. the "scene"
> argument). In other words, everyday reality occurring at particular places
> and times is contingent, debatable, something we can never know for sure,
> because it always falls short of the reality we can know, the reality of
> universals, which are everywhere and therefore nowhere in the sense that a
> universal can not be brought down to the finite reality of a particular
> place and time.
>
> Clarke's reality? Burke's? Both? Neither?
>
> Granted, you may not want to go there, but philosophical speculation was
> surely something Burke never shied away from.
>
> Bob
>
>
>
>
>
> Quoting Clarke Rountree <>:
>
> Herb, Ed, and others--
>>
>> I didn't catch the first part of this thread, so I have to pick up with
>> Ed's
>> and Herb's last post.
>>
>> I like Ed's "actual" or "actually" as opposed to "literal" and
>> "literally."
>> I think this is in the spirit of Burke's description of himself as a
>> "realist" because he starts with the proposition that people REALLY do act
>> (in reality).
>>
>> The flexibility of the pentadic terms, which Herb points out and Burke
>> certainly highlighted, does not detract from the idea that dramatism is
>> literal, because the issue must be handled on a general (philosophical)
>> level, rather at the level of "application." It is a fact that agents may
>> be
>> constructed as scenes--that's one aspect of how the grammatical terms are
>> related. So, when I say that a bunch of people in a particular room
>> constitute a crowded SCENE, I'm not becoming metaphorical about AGENTS.
>> People's BODIES really do take up space and change the nature of a scene.
>> That is not to say that you can't also talk about those same people as
>> agents engaged in conversation; these are simply two aspects of the same
>> situation that may be drawn out of the "alembic" that is the molten
>> substance called motives.
>>
>> What is literal about such a "conversational" situation, and any situation
>> involving human action, is that there is a limited set of relevant
>> questions
>> that can be asked about "what are people doing and why they are doing it,"
>> and Burke has identified that set. I have taken the strong stand that the
>> pentadic questions are UNIVERSAL. (See "Dramatism as Literal" and "Coming
>> to
>> Terms with Kenneth Burke's Pentad" [ACJ] before that.) I've been to Asia,
>> Africa, Europe, Mexico, the Caribbean, and many other places, and everyone
>> I've engaged in conversation talks about motives as imbued with questions
>> of
>> purpose and means and scenes and agents and types of actions and even
>> attitudes. I've never read a mystery writer, playwright, philosophical
>> treatise, history, biography, or any other work about humans that did not
>> deal with the same issues concerning motives, whether they were written in
>> bibilical times or yesterday, in exotic lands or in my local paper. That's
>> why Burke claimed he didn't discover them, but drew upon the same list
>> that
>> Aristotle had in Nicomachean Ethics and Talcott Parsons had in his
>> writings
>> about humans in society. The whole idea of action--philosophically, but
>> also
>> in our day to day human interactions--requires the interplay of elements
>> Burke called the pentad.
>>
>> When Burke interviewed with students for the Iowa tapes, he was very
>> careful
>> to deny that the pentadic terms were "positive terms." He insisted they
>> were
>> questions. Perhaps that emphasis was a way for him to deal with recent
>> challenges to dramatism. (Remember, the Iowa interviews were held shortly
>> after Herb, Bernie, Jim, and Parke Burgess participated in the "Dramatism
>> as
>> Literal" panel at ECA, published in CQ the next year.) Can a question be
>> literal? Questions engage in a kind of speech act that, unsurprisingly,
>> embodies human interaction. You can say that a question is bad or
>> misplaced
>> or off the point or insulting, etc., but can you say they are or are not
>> literal? I didn't raise issue that in my "Dramatism as Literal" essay
>> because I was trying to respond to the argument as it had developed up to
>> now, but perhaps I should have.
>>
>> Here's a trivia question: Are there any basic questions that the pentad
>> leaves out? I realize "in what manner" (attitude) is a Johnny-come-lately,
>> and not as basic sounding as what, who, where, how, why, and when. The one
>> that might be included, but was not, is "Which?" Of course which is
>> indexical, selecting out among a field of things. And it certainly can
>> deal
>> with issues that do not involve human action (though I guess when, where,
>> and how can also). Some of the work I've done in the last few years gets
>> at
>> "which" issues, though I've never phrased it that way. I've been working
>> on
>> the issue of "Which act?" when you find a field of related actions that
>> are
>> strategically connected. (See my book, *Judging the Supreme Court*, for
>> the
>> most recent examples of this; my Korematsu v. U.S. essay in QJS addresses
>> some of these as well. I also have an essay I'm finishing for the next
>> Burke
>> conference that elaborates on inter-pentadic relationships.)
>>
>> I have great admiration for Herb, Ed, Bernie, Jim, and others who have
>> discussed this issue. I'm happy to engage in the "unending conversation"
>> with them as companions and I will "dance with tears in my eyes" if I find
>> them taking a position I feel compelled to wrestle with. I think that what
>> KB wanted all of us to do anyway, and this is a great venue for it.
>>
>> Clarke
>>
>> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 10:12 AM, HERBERT W. SIMONS <
>> >wrote:
>>
>> Hi Ed and all,
>>>
>>> Ed re-raises important issues.
>>>
>>> Two points:
>>>
>>> 1. KB waffled on whether "act" was literal or? (what's the alternative in
>>> this case?) not. Writing in the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences on
>>> Dramatism, he was unequivocal: action/motion provided a literal
>>> foundation
>>> for his work. KB was here "performing" for his social scientific
>>> readership
>>> (in Goffman's terms). In the Preface--or it the intro?--to GofM he plays
>>> with each of the pentadic terms, saying (literally) that each is capable
>>> of
>>> various permutations and transformations. Scenes can become acts, acts
>>> can
>>> become scenes, etc. An example of my own: sometimes the setting for a
>>> film
>>> or play is so central that critics describe it as an "actor" in its own
>>> right. (I wrote about all this in a symposium on Burke years ago for the
>>> ECA
>>> journal. Burke wrote back, wondering how I of all people could question
>>> the
>>> literality or actuality of action/motion; worse yet, how I could question
>>> Burke's own unqualified commitment to it?) At issue more fundamentally is
>>> whether we construct reality by way of language, whether reality leads to
>>> our linguistic representations of it, or some combination.
>>>
>>> 2. Goffman had more in common with KB than is suggested in Ed's post. A
>>> colleague in the UK urged me to read him as a rhetorician of impression
>>> management.
>>>
>>> Which brings me to Floyd, the doctor. Those of you who attended the first
>>> KB Society conference held in 1984 may remember Floyd as the guy who was
>>> always at KB's side, helping him to navigate through the hotel after his
>>> hip
>>> operation. We'd allowed him to room with KB for free on his claim that he
>>> was there to see to KB's needs at KB's request. I was skeptical, my wife
>>> Gayle was not.
>>>
>>> The question for those of us running the conference was whether Floyd,
>>> the
>>> doctor, was an impostor. I conjectured fancifully that Goffman had sent
>>> him
>>> to Philadelphia to demonstrate the superiority of his dramaturgical
>>> theory
>>> over dramatism when it came to questions of this kind.
>>>
>>> Without Goffman's help we eventually learned that Floyd was an impostor.
>>> The poor guy liked to "collect" famous literati. KB met him at the
>>> Williams
>>> conference in Orono and felt obliged to hang with him after Floyd
>>> remained
>>> at the bar after everyone else had left and then drove him to the motel.
>>>
>>> Until near to the end of the conference we weren't sure whether Floyd's
>>> actions were an "act" in the dramaturgical sense.
>>>
>>> I thought in any case that he was harmless. Burke's daughter, Eleanor,
>>> thought I was too cavalier in entrusting a madman to stay in KB's suite.
>>> The final decision as to whether Floyd could remain in the suite was
>>> KB's.
>>> He deflected the questions we thought were at issue by saying that Floyd
>>> should probably be given space elsewhere because Burke had reading to do
>>> that night -- all night -- and didn't want to disturb Floyd.
>>>
>>> The final decision: Floyd spent the night in the unused bathroom of
>>> another
>>> suite. He was given the bathtub and a pillow.
>>>
>>> Goodnight Floyd.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Jul 15, 2010 at 12:11 AM, <> wrote:
>>>
>>> All,
>>>>
>>>> Sorry for the sudden break in the thought, but someone else needed
>>>> to be online.
>>>>
>>>> Yes, Burke's "dramatism" as opposed to Erving Goffman's
>>>> "dramaturgy," as elaborately developed in Goffman's Presentation of Self
>>>> in
>>>> Everyday Life, Anchor Books, 1959---that's the dialectic that perhaps
>>>> constrains the definition of dramatism somewhat in Rountree's direction.
>>>> How can we distinguish between these two theories of, or approaches to,
>>>> human "action"? Goffman's perspective is plainly "metaphorical" in the
>>>> traditional sense of the term. That angle of view is theatrical.
>>>> Goffman
>>>> compares persons' social life and the communicative component of it to
>>>> what
>>>> actors do in and before and after and around a stage play. In daily
>>>> life,
>>>> people craft a "role" "on stage," so to speak, in social relationships.
>>>> "Settings," the "scenic parts of expressive equipment," are important in
>>>> "impression management" or convincing play-acting, the skill and
>>>> effectiveness with which the social "actor" carries off his or her
>>>> "performance." "Back stage," the actor can let his or her hair down, be
>>>> unkempt, use vulgar language, speak disrespectfully of those who require
>>>> deference "out front," "veg out." But: "Out fraont" or "on stage" is,
>>>> perhaps, the office downtown, and "back state" is the kitchen in one's
>>>> house, not an actual dressing room in a theater for donning a costume or
>>>> putting on greasepaint.
>>>>
>>>> In respect to Goffman's conceit, we're dealing with "a [patent]
>>>> figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is
>>>> transfered
>>>> to an an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to
>>>> which it
>>>> is literally applicable" (Shorter OED, 2007 Edition). That "vehicle"
>>>> (the
>>>> theater and its nomenclature) enhance our understanding of the "tenor"
>>>> (human social action and communication), at least in Goffman's view.
>>>> That's
>>>> metaphor.
>>>>
>>>> The analogical transference is as plain as day: A business space
>>>> downtown is not literally a stage in a theater, and a kitchen is not an
>>>> area
>>>> in the wings just off a stage, or a dressing room for putting on makeup.
>>>>
>>>> So, how do we in some helpful way contrast Burke's dramatism from a
>>>> construction of human action and communication that is paradigmatically
>>>> "metaphorical," and which holds to the view that "backstage," persons
>>>> are
>>>> often pretty much "off script," out of the "drama"? I personally prefer
>>>> the
>>>> terms "actual" or "actually" as descriptives for what symbolizers are
>>>> doing
>>>> Burkewise. They "actually" act, always. They do so in "reality," "in
>>>> fact." "Literal" carries connotative baggage I don't think fits too
>>>> well
>>>> with Burke's corpus overall, or in a categorical sense. Yet, in a loose
>>>> sense, I think we can say that symbol-users "literally" act, in the
>>>> sense of
>>>> partly "true to life" or "realistic." "Action" is really happening in
>>>> human
>>>> life "on stage," "back stage," or wherever. It is happening in
>>>> symbol-using
>>>> and in the interference with causes in nature that symbolizing can
>>>> effect
>>>> via the negative of command, causes in nature here being defined
>>>> generally
>>>> as that which nonverbal animals do that humans abjure.
>>>>
>>>> Burke's "dramatism" in dialectical opposition to "postivist" or
>>>> "scientist" conceptions of language and human behavior, and the
>>>> disparate
>>>> constraints that juxtapositioning affords, later.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Ed
>>>>
>>>> .
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Herbert W. Simons, Ph.D.
>>> Emeritus Professor of Communication
>>> Dep't of STOC, Weiss Hall 215
>>> Temple University, Philadelphia 19122
>>> Home phone: 215 844 5969
>>> http://astro.temple.edu/~hsimons
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
___________________________________________________

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