Dramatism
Dramatism is a rhetorical theory and method of analyzing human motivation developed by the American literary theorist Kenneth Burke, who introduced it in his 1945 book A Grammar of Motives as a way to interpret symbolic actions through the structure of drama.[1][2] At its core, dramatism posits that language and thought function as modes of action rather than mere knowledge conveyance, enabling the examination of motives by clustering terms into dramatic patterns that reveal how individuals frame reality and justify behaviors.[2][3] Central to dramatism is the dramatistic pentad, a set of five interrelated terms—act (what took place), scene (the background or setting), agent (the actor), agency (the means employed), and purpose (the underlying intention)—which Burke used to dissect communicative acts and uncover ratios or tensions between them, such as scene-act ratios that highlight contextual influences on behavior.[3][4] This framework distinguishes purposeful symbolic action, driven by human capacities for language and symbolism, from mere physical motion, emphasizing how terministic screens—chosen vocabularies—shape perceptions of causality and guilt in social interactions.[3] Burke's approach has proven influential in fields like literary criticism, communication studies, and sociology, offering tools to analyze persuasion, ideology, and conflict without reducing motives to deterministic or idealistic extremes.[4][2]Origins and Development
Kenneth Burke's Formative Influences
Kenneth Burke was born on May 5, 1897, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he grew up in a middle-class family and graduated from Peabody High School in 1915.[5] After brief enrollments at Ohio State University (1916–1917) and Columbia University (1917–1918) without earning degrees—leaving the former amid personal and academic challenges and the latter to pursue independent writing—Burke eschewed formal academia for self-directed study, establishing himself as an autodidact whose intellectual pursuits spanned literature, philosophy, music criticism, and social theory.[6] This period of voracious reading, documented in correspondence with peers like Malcolm Cowley, fostered a synthetic approach to knowledge, blending aesthetic sensibility with critical analysis and laying groundwork for his later emphasis on symbolic motives in human action.[7] Burke's early literary influences centered on fin-de-siècle aesthetics and modernist irony, with Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (read October 1915) proving pivotal in shifting his focus from raw sensation to intellectual form and exploring tensions between permanence and flux—themes echoed in his initial poems and fiction like "Beyond Catullus" (1917).[7] Complementary readings included George Meredith's "Essay on Comedy" (shaping his ironic social lens, per a 1915 letter), Oscar Wilde (fostering ambivalence toward social pose), Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (probing self-expression and despair), Theodore Dreiser (critiqued for overemphasizing sensation), Arthur Symons's Studies in Prose and Verse, and André Gide's La Porte Étroite (refining artistic restraint).[7] These works, drawn from high school curricula and personal crises (e.g., a 1916 mountain retreat), oriented Burke toward form as a tool for navigating personal and cultural transitions, evident in his evolving short stories.[7] By 1917, philosophical engagements at Columbia expanded this foundation: Arthur Schopenhauer's On the Will in Nature influenced views of will versus intellect (though Burke favored empirical flux over metaphysical stasis); Henri Bergson's Creative Evolution informed concepts of temporal change and transitional form; Immanuel Kant introduced systematic epistemology; and Cicero's Letters to Atticus and De Senectute sparked a "rhetorical awakening," highlighting epistolary rhetoric's blend of personal expression and public persuasion—prefiguring dramatism's scenic analysis.[7] Later integrations drew from Friedrich Nietzsche (profound on the younger Burke's perspectivism), Karl Marx (dialectical materialism reframed symbolically), Sigmund Freud (psychoanalytic motives as dramatized conflicts), and Thorstein Veblen (social critique via ritualistic behaviors), often synthesized to prioritize linguistic and attitudinal causation over mechanistic determinism.[8][9] From 1918 onward, French Catholic authors like Joris-Karl Huysmans (À Rebours) and Remy de Gourmont (18 works cited by 1920) deepened historical and rhetorical schematization, culminating in a "comic frame" that resolved antithetical impulses through ironic perspective.[7]Emergence During and After World War II
During World War II, Kenneth Burke intensified his analysis of rhetorical strategies amid global conflict, viewing the war as a catalyst for examining how language framed human motives and divisions. He critiqued fascist rhetoric, such as in his 1939 essay "The Rhetoric of Hitler's 'Battle,'" which dissected Mein Kampf as a dramatistic appeal to scapegoating and purification rituals, warning against simplistic unity in opposition that mirrored the enemy's binaries.[10] Burke's wartime writings emphasized a "poetic dialectic" to navigate ideological extremes, promoting diverse perspectives over absolutism to prevent post-war dissipation of democratic clarity.[11] [12] This period shaped Dramatism's core as a tool for motive analysis beyond material causation, formalized in Burke's 1945 publication of A Grammar of Motives, released immediately after the war's end on September 2, 1945. The book introduced the dramatistic pentad—act, scene, agent, agency, purpose—as a framework for interpreting symbolic actions, drawing from Burke's observations of wartime propaganda's role in motivating masses without reducing humans to mechanistic responses.[13] Burke positioned Dramatism as a response to conflict's rhetorical excesses, aiming to "purify war" through terministic screens that reveal multiple interpretive ratios rather than endorsing victors' narratives uncritically.[14] Post-war, Dramatism evolved through Burke's 1950 A Rhetoric of Motives, which extended the theory to identification and consubstantiality, addressing Cold War tensions by analyzing how shared symbols bridge divisions without erasing differences. This development reflected Burke's ongoing engagement with realpolitik, prioritizing symbolic causality over ideological purity, as evidenced in his essays on attitudes toward history amid atomic age uncertainties.[15] Burke's framework gained traction in literary and rhetorical circles by the 1950s, influencing critiques of conformity and applied to phenomena like McCarthyism, though it remained marginal in mainstream academia favoring positivist approaches.Key Texts and Evolution of the Theory
Kenneth Burke's dramatism found its initial systematic exposition in A Grammar of Motives, published in 1945, where he outlined the theory as a method for interpreting human action through the lens of dramatic terminology, introducing the pentad of act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose as key analytical terms.[16] This framework built upon Burke's earlier investigations into symbolic action in works such as The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (1941), which explored literature as a mode of understanding human motives via form and ritual, and Attitudes Toward History (1937), which analyzed historical and poetic attitudes as responses to societal "piety" and division.[17] In 1950, Burke extended dramatism's scope in A Rhetoric of Motives, shifting emphasis to persuasion and consubstantiality—processes of identification that bridge divisions in human relations—while integrating the pentad into rhetorical analysis beyond mere literary critique.[18] These core texts established dramatism as a heuristic for motive attribution, rejecting scientistic reductionism in favor of linguistic patterns that reveal how symbols shape perception and conduct.[19] The theory evolved iteratively through Burke's subsequent writings and revisions, incorporating "dramatistic ratios"—dyadic relations between pentadic elements, such as act-scene ratios—to highlight interpretive ambiguities in motivation—as in The Philosophy of Literary Form's third edition (1957), which refined symbolic action concepts.[20] By the 1960s and 1970s, Burke applied dramatism to broader sociocultural phenomena, introducing extensions like the hexad (adding attitude as a sixth term) and cycles of guilt, mortification, and redemption, as elaborated in Dramatism and Development (1972), a lecture series tracing biological to symbolic stages of human development. This progression reflected Burke's ongoing dialectic between literary origins and interdisciplinary reach, adapting the method to psychology, sociology, and ethics without rigid dogmatism.[21]Fundamental Assumptions
Humans as Symbol-Using Animals
Kenneth Burke characterized humans fundamentally as symbol-using animals, emphasizing their unique capacity to employ linguistic and symbolic systems to interpret, construct, and navigate reality. This view posits that unlike other animals driven primarily by biological imperatives and physical motion, humans generate motives through symbolic action, where words and signs serve as tools for meaning-making and social coordination.[22] In dramatism, this assumption underpins the analysis of human behavior as inherently rhetorical and dramatic, shifting focus from mechanistic causation to the interpretive roles of symbols in shaping perceptions and interactions.[23] Burke elaborated this in his 1966 essay "Definition of Man," outlining a multifaceted definition: humans are "the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal, inventor of the negative (or moralized anti-thesis), rotten with perfection, separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making, goaded by the spirit of hierarchy or moved by a sense of order, doomed to seek perfection yet doomed to fail, hence forever condemned to the dialectic of purification and redemption."[22] The symbol-using aspect highlights how language enables abstraction, negation, and ethical hierarchies absent in non-symbolic species, allowing humans to envision ideals, critique realities, and form cooperative yet competitive social structures. This capacity for symbolic misuse, such as through ambiguous or ideologically laden terms, further complicates human motives, often leading to conflict or persuasion via rhetorical strategies.[4] In the framework of dramatism, the symbol-using nature of humans implies that motives cannot be reduced to empirical or material causes alone; instead, they emerge from symbolic dramas where individuals act as agents employing scenes, acts, purposes, and agencies defined linguistically. This perspective critiques reductionist views in psychology or sociology that prioritize instinct or environment over the constitutive role of symbols in human agency.[24] For instance, Burke argued that symbols equip humans to "discount" immediate sensory data in favor of abstract hierarchies, fostering attitudes of order and perfectionism that drive historical and cultural developments.[23] Consequently, dramatistic analysis treats human conflicts—such as political ideologies or moral dilemmas—as symbolic enactments, resolvable through identification rather than mere factual adjudication.[25]Drama as a Method for Motive Analysis
Burke conceived dramatism as a systematic approach to motive analysis by framing human actions as dramatic performances, wherein motives emerge from the interplay of symbolic language rather than from mechanistic causation alone. In this view, motives are not intrinsic psychological states or material determinants but linguistic imputations shaped by the grammar of drama, allowing for a nuanced dissection of why agents perform acts within specific scenes using particular agencies toward defined purposes. This method prioritizes the symbolic constitution of human conduct, treating rhetoric as the medium through which motives are articulated and contested.[1][26] Central to this analysis is the dramatistic pentad, comprising five key terms—act (what happened), scene (the contextual backdrop), agent (the actor), agency (the means employed), and purpose (the intended end)—which Burke outlined in A Grammar of Motives to probe the structure of motives without reducing them to a singular causal factor. By examining "ratios" or dialectical relations between these terms, such as scene-act ratio (where the environment determines the action) or agent-purpose ratio (emphasizing the actor's intentions), the method reveals how different emphases yield varying interpretations of the same event, exposing the rhetorical framing of motives. For instance, a historical event like a political assassination might be motivated by agent-focused individualism in one ratio or scene-driven inevitability in another, highlighting interpretive flexibility inherent in symbolic action.[27][28] Unlike positivist or scientistic approaches that seek unique, empirical causes for behavior, Burke's dramatistic method embraces multiplicity, positing that drama's form mirrors human motivation's complexity as "symbol-using animals" engage in consubstantiality and division through language. This entails a rejection of reductive materialism, favoring instead a "grammar of motives" that scrutinizes terministic screens—clusters of terms that direct attention toward certain aspects of reality while obscuring others. Empirical applications, such as rhetorical critiques of public discourse, demonstrate how pentadic analysis uncovers hidden hierarchies of motive, as in Burke's own examinations of literary and philosophical texts where purpose often subordinates other terms to reveal underlying orders of guilt and redemption.[26][29][30] The method's strength lies in its applicability to diverse domains, from literary criticism to social conflict, where it functions as a diagnostic tool for symbolic inducement rather than predictive science, emphasizing attitude formation over behavioral determinism. Burke maintained that such analysis fosters critical awareness of how motives are "dramatized" in everyday rhetoric, enabling interlocutors to transcend partisan reductions by considering alternative pentadic emphases. Scholarly extensions, including applications to media and political campaigns, affirm its utility in decoding layered motivations, though critics note its interpretive subjectivity demands rigorous terministic consistency to avoid arbitrary ratios.[31][32][33]Rejection of Pure Materialism in Favor of Symbolic Causality
Kenneth Burke critiqued pure materialism, which posits that human behavior arises solely from physical, biological, or economic determinants akin to mechanistic causation, by distinguishing it from symbolic action inherent to human motives. In his framework, materialism corresponds to "motion," the realm of non-purposive, scientistic explanations where events follow deterministic physical laws without regard for interpretive symbols. Burke contended that such reductions fail to account for human agency, which operates through "action"—purposeful behaviors induced by linguistic and symbolic structures that frame perceptions and choices.[34][28] This rejection stems from Burke's observation that human motives cannot be fully explained by material conditions alone, as symbols intervene to constitute reality and drive conduct. For instance, economic scarcity (a material scene) may prompt varied responses not due to physiological imperatives but through symbolic interpretations that assign purpose, such as narratives of redemption or hierarchy. Burke argued that dramatism restores causality to the symbolic domain, where language acts as an inducement: terms and vocabularies "select" certain facts for emphasis while "deflecting" others, thereby shaping what agents perceive as causal. This symbolic causality operates via terministic screens, linguistic filters that direct attention and motive attribution beyond empirical observables.[35][36] Burke's preference for symbolic over material causality aligns with his view of humans as "symbol-using animals," whose dramas unfold through rhetorical inducements rather than Pavlovian reflexes or Marxist dialectics. He explicitly contrasted dramatism with scientistic materialism in works like A Grammar of Motives (1945), warning against "scientism" that equates all causation with quantitative motion, thereby overlooking the qualitative, attitudinal layers of symbolic negotiation. Empirical support for this lies in Burke's analyses of historical texts, where motives emerge from dramatic ratios (e.g., scene-act pairings) rather than isolated material triggers, as seen in his dissection of political rhetoric where symbols like "guilt" propel cycles of accusation and purification independent of base economic forces.[27] Critics of materialism within Burkean scholarship reinforce this by noting its inadequacy for interpretive flexibility: materialist models predict uniform responses to stimuli, yet human actions diverge via symbolic reframing, as in wartime propaganda that transforms material defeat into purposeful narrative. Burke did not deny material influences but subordinated them to symbolic ones, asserting that "the symbolic" provides the causal grammar for understanding why agents pursue ends amid material constraints. This positions dramatism as a corrective to reductionism, privileging causal realism through the pentadic analysis of symbolic inducements over unmediated physical determinism.[37][38]Core Concepts
The Dramatistic Pentad
The Dramatistic Pentad, introduced by Kenneth Burke in his 1945 work A Grammar of Motives, comprises five key terms—act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose—designed to systematically investigate human motives by treating symbolic actions as dramatic performances.[37] Burke posited these terms as generating principles for a "grammar of motives," emphasizing that a comprehensive account of any motivated action requires addressing all five elements without reducing motivation to a single deterministic factor.[37] This framework rejects simplistic causal explanations, instead highlighting the interpretive ratios between terms to reveal underlying rhetorical strategies and worldviews.[3] The act refers to the event or deed itself—what is done—which forms the central unit of analysis in Burke's dramatism, representing voluntary action imbued with symbolic meaning.[3] The scene denotes the contextual backdrop, including the physical, temporal, or situational circumstances surrounding the act, often serving as a container that influences or determines the action's interpretation.[3] Burke illustrated scene-act ratios by noting how environmental conditions might be invoked to explain behaviors, as in naturalistic philosophies where the setting predominates.[37] The agent identifies the actor or entity performing the act, focusing on the human (or anthropomorphic) subject whose choices and capacities drive the drama.[3] Agency pertains to the means or instruments employed to accomplish the act, encompassing tools, techniques, or rhetorical devices that mediate the agent's intentions.[3] Finally, purpose captures the underlying goal, intention, or "why" of the act, linking the other terms to motivational ends and revealing teleological aspects of human conduct.[3] Burke stressed that the pentad's utility lies in its flexibility for ratio analysis, such as scene-agent ratios emphasizing contextual determinism or agent-act ratios prioritizing free will, allowing analysts to cluster terms and expose biases in motivational accounts.[37] Originally formulated without a sixth term, the pentad was later supplemented by "attitude" in Burke's evolving schema, though the core five remain foundational for dramatistic critique.Dramatistic Ratios and Interpretive Flexibility
The dramatistic ratios refer to the systematic interrelations among the five terms of Burke's pentad—act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose—serving as formulas for transitions between terms to uncover motives in symbolic action.[28] Burke delineates ten principal ratios, each highlighting a distinct pairwise dynamic, such as the scene-act ratio, where the contextual scene shapes or contains the act, as illustrated in analyses of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, wherein middle-class settings dictate the unfolding plot.[28] Similarly, the scene-agent ratio posits that the environment molds the actor, evident in Wordsworth's sonnet linking a divine scene to a divine child or workers formed by factory conditions.[28]| Ratio | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Scene-Act | Scene determines or contains the act. | Darwin's "Conditions of Existence" influencing biological acts.[28] |
| Scene-Agent | Scene shapes the agent's nature or role. | Factory scene forming worker identity.[28] |
| Scene-Agency | Scene prescribes the means or tools available. | Factory tools as agency within industrial scene.[28] |
| Scene-Purpose | Scene defines or constrains purpose. | Spinoza's nature as scene for rational necessity.[28] |
| Act-Purpose | Act reveals or advances purpose. | Biblical Creation as act embodying divine purpose.[28] |
| Agent-Purpose | Agent's intrinsic motives drive purpose. | Proletarian emancipation in Marxist analysis.[28] |
| Act-Agent | Act influences or reveals agent's character. | Presidency altering the agent's disposition.[28] |
| Act-Agency | Act requires or implies specific means. | Revolutionary acts employing party organization.[28] |
| Agent-Agency | Agent selects or embodies means. | Aquinas's co-agent in theological action.[28] |
| Agency-Purpose | Means aligned toward ends. | Aristotelian purging for health via medical agency.[28] |