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Quarterly Journal of Speech

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Post‐burke: Transcending the

sub‐stance of Dramatism
a
Celeste Michelle Condit
a
Associate professor in the Department of Speech
Communication , University of Georgia ,
Published online: 06 Jun 2009.

To cite this article: Celeste Michelle Condit (1992) Post‐burke: Transcending the sub‐stance of
Dramatism, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78:3, 349-355, DOI: 10.1080/00335639209384002

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 QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH
78 (1992): 349-355

POST-BURKE: TRANSCENDING THE SUB-STANCE

OF DRAMATISM
Celeste Michelle Condit

K ENNETH BURKE has offered us one of the most important corpora of works
of the twentieth century. The historical contexts that generated most of Burke's
work—the battle between communism and capitalism, Adolf Hitler, and World War
II—have, however, been substantially altered. As Burke himself might suggest, in a
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new scene, the agency must change, and so it may be necessary to generate a
post-Burkean discourse to fit this new scene. To move "post-Burke" is not, however,
to turn away from Burke's insights, as might be suggested were we to employ as our
analogy the term "post-modernism," which takes its "post" as an oppositional one.
Rather, the turn post-Burke might be after the model of the "post-marxists" and
"post-feminists," who use the prefix "post" to demarcate an effort to extend the
essence of an older program into new contexts in light of new understandings. Such
an effort will, of course, require some alterations in earlier doctrine, but we hope to
do it in a way that is in keeping with the spirit of Burke.
In Burke's case, of course, we ought to keep within his "sub-stance," rather than
to any "spirit." In the Burkean corpus, substance is the key term, identifying the
ultimate compromise (or dramatistic dialectic) upon which Burkeanism is built.1
Substance is key to Burke because the term allows him to combine "spirit" and
"matter" and hence to arrive at the ultimate trope whereby he defines human
beings as "bodies that learn language." This definition allows Burke to play both
sides of a series of important intellectual fences: universalism and particularism,
psychoanalysis and sociology, tragedy and comedy, structure and function—all this
built on the decision to endorse both body and mind. Although a thousand different
perspectives on Burke can be sustained, and at least a hundred have been printed,
as a rhetorical critic, it is this Burke—the one who embraces both sides of old
dualisms—that I find constructing a Dramatism which is more enticing than any of
the possible alternative discourses that cover similar ground—including structural-
ism, general semantics, psychoanalysis, and post-marxism.2
Therefore, to move post-Burke requires an identification of the substance of
Burke upon which, as "Bodies that learn language," we stand and may transcend.
Burke offers three subsidiary notions of substance: geometric, familial, and direc-
tional. He identifies all of these as special cases of dialectical substance. By examining
the Burkean corpus for each of these types of substance, we might point out both the
essences to be retained and the scenic baggage to be discarded on a post-Burkean
trek.
I take Burke''s familial substance to be constituted, in one half of his parentage, of
the set of literary figures to whom he frequently returns—Coleridge, Shakespeare,
Poe, Mann, etc. His other line of descent comes from literary critics, notably
Caroline Spurgeon (although he seems to claim her more as "sister" than parent),
and from a series of social critics—most notably Freud, Marx, and Korzybski.
 350
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1992

(Somewhere in the familial history, as in that of all academics, lurk Plato and
Aristotle, and their generation of "rhetoricians" as well).
Burke's geometrical substance can be located against two landmarks. The socio-
political canyon is that marked by the Great Depression and the greater depression
of Adolf Hitler. The academic mountain is B.F. Skinner (or his "brother" Watson,
who actually gets more ink from Burke). Burke's directional substance is far more
complicated, and it would take me a great deal of space to defend my description of
it against the myriad of other directions proposed for Burke, so I merely sum it up
by this statement of Burke's: "if we get involved enough in the using of words, the
words in turn begin using us" (Attitudes Toward History, p. 399, amplified in his
statement of educational goals on p. 375).
To construct a post-Burkeanism, then, we might maintain Burke's directional
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substance, while adjusting as needs be the familial substance to our own geometrical
context. As a rhetorician immersed in the tradition of public oral rhetoric, I would
obviously set aside Burke's lineage of literati and replace them with figures such as
Abraham Lincoln, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
The problem is more difficult with regard to Freud, Marx, and Korzybski, for I
believe that Burke built his program both by working through the patrimony of this
troika and by in part repudiating their heritage. I am not at all certain that the
relationship of post-Burkeanism to post-Marxism and Lacanianism can be the same;
and, I fear that general semantics has all but died out without surviving heir (other
than Burke himself). These other fields of discourse are now "kissing-cousins"
rather than parents; they offer more as dialectical opposites than as progenitors. But
let us set that issue aside.
The most pivotal concern is the shift in the "geometric substance" within which
Dramatism must do its work. There are many important differences between the
context offered by the Great Depression and World War II and the present year.
While Burke has addressed some of the trends that were then incipient (race and
gender conflict, globalism, Big Technology, and environmental devastation), the
shift from incipient trends to dominant concerns produces a qualitative shift. And
that shift shows itself most potently in the dialectic of universal and particular as it
played itself out in Burke's work. For Burke, the fact that we are "Bodies that Learn
Language" led him to place greater emphasis upon universals than upon the
particulars that divide humans. Burke did not deny that there were differences of
particularity and that these were both interesting and important. Nonetheless, his
philosophical or medicinal project clustered around what he assumed to be univer-
sals grounded in the common characteristics of the human body. Our present
contexts require that we pay greater attention to particulars. Three contexts in
particular require modifying extensions of Burke's dramatism: gender, culture, and
class.

Sex and Gender

In Burke's historical moment, most public discourse indicated that there were
basically two sexes of people—two kinds of human bodies—which they labelled
"male" and "female." In Burke's writing there is basically one gender—man (e.g.
the definition of "man"; male-gendered nouns and pronouns dominate Burke's
texts). Burke referred supportively to the women's movement and to the expansion
of women's rights, but he portrayed this expansion as the inclusion of women under
 351
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CONDIT

the sign of "man." In the historical moment, this was a progressive move, since
women had been virtually excluded by being classed as "not-man." Inclusion under
the sign of "Man" was a distinct improvement over exclusion from public life.
Today, however, the scene has changed. Today we are beginning to recognize
that there are at least four genders (and increasingly simply a range of gendering),
based more or less directly on six biological sexes (heterosexual xy, homosexual xx,
heterosexual xx, homosexual xy, xxy and xyy). One cannot use a pseudo-generic
term such as "Man" to refer to all these people, because of the dynamics of the
intervening stage we have passed through (or are at least passing through). For the
past two decades, we have rigorously recognized two genders (male and female),
emphasized the differences between these two genders, and promoted the "female"
gender to a status of equality or supremacy (as in the flourishing of essentialist or
"radical" feminism). That phase has highlighted the inadequacy of male-gendered
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language for including non-male sexed persons. Today, in going beyond that
dualistic stage, we must extend our language beyond duality to a broad "humanity"
and to "human beings," discovering ways to speak that emphasize human plurality.
To talk in this way, is not, of course, a simple matter of inserting new words. It is a
matter of coming to think in new ways or, as Burke might allow, letting the words
use us. As an example, let us spin out what such a fragmentation of gender would
allow us to do in revising Burke's definition of "Man." Burke defines Man as
the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal
inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)
separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making
goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order) 3
and rotten with perfection (Language as Symbolic Action, p. ]6).
This strikes me as a fairly perceptive summary of the average Euro-American
heterosexual XY. But essentialist feminism has taught us that it is not a good
summation of the majority of experiences of the other genders. For example, for
most Euro-American heterosexual XX's of the past, it is the positivity of particular
experiences (e.g. maternal love) that has formed the dominant influence on languag-
ing. Consequently, for such women thefact that "the negative" is a unique creation of
language does not mean that it forms the essence of language. Similarly, as radical
feminist critics of science and technology, especially critics of the new birth technolo-
gies, have pointed out, it is men who have created the instruments that separate
women from their natural conditions and it is largely for this reason that the
separation has been so oppressive.4 Furthermore, women have been largely shut out
of the hierarchy game and have been involved in "orderliness" (i.e. housekeeping)
rather than Order. Women are, therefore, rotted by men's vision of female perfec-
tion, specifically by the demands that women appear as the ultimately seductive
ideal oiThe Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and simultaneously as virtuous, unstained
mother-saints. Thus, the essentialist or radical feminist would be forced to project
this definition of Man's woman:
Woman is
the symbol-receiving (hearing, passive) animal
inventor of nothing (moralized by priests and saints)
submerged in her natural conditions by instruments of man's making
goaded at the bottom of hierarchy (moved to a sense of orderliness)
and rotted by perfection.5
 352
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1992

But, as I suggested, I think we must move to post-feminism, beyond essentialist

feminism to a philosophical gender deconstruction that allows people to construct
their own genders from a wide range of genderings. In that vein, I offer a
post-Burkean definition:
People are
players with symbols
inventors of the negative and the possibility of morality
grown from their natural condition by tools of their collective making
trapped between hierarchy and equality (moved constantly to reorder)
neither rotten nor perfect, but now and again lunging down both paths.

Culture
Enough sex. Let us turn to the issue of culture. Burke's emphasis on the body, as
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well as the discursive and sociological contexts of his time, led him to focus on race
rather than culture. Because the differences between the bodies of persons of
various races are clearly only of the most minor sort (difference within groups being
greater than difference between groups), I believe that this led Burke to underesti-
mate the impact of particularity and over-estimate the importance of universality. In
a context where cultures, not biological race per se, are the issue, we must move
post-Burke. All I can do here is to point out a direction.
Burke makes very many statements emphasizing universality. Most in point here
is his statement that, "a Dramatistic definition of man requires an admonitory stress
upon victimage as the major temptation in the symbol systems by which men build up
their ideas, concepts, and images of identity and community" (Language as Symbolic
Action, p. 2, also p. 373; also see Permanence and Change, p. 35, and 49). Burke does
not, however, work from multi-cultural materials in establishing this claim. He reads
almost exclusively what he openly describes as the texts of "Western" civilization.6
This proves repeatedly to be a fatal choice. For example, he argues, in the Rhetoric of
Religion, that religion is language used with thoroughness and that we therefore can
understand the essence of logology by understanding the essence of theology. But
he assumes, without any questioning of that assumption, that Christianity is a
representative anecdote for all religion. Rhetoric of Religion is about Christianity and
logology is therefore about language in a Christianized social system. The same
tendency pervades his other work. Thus, in place of the universal description of the
symbol using animal that Burke thought he was offering, we have gotten only a
description of the way westerners use symbols. It may be that the cycle of guilt-
victimage-purification-redemption is the single strongest motive in American dis-
course, but Burke leaves us with insufficient evidence to claim that it is the dominant
motive of all cultures.
I am not denying that victimage is a universal possibility for all human cultures. I
suspect that at some time, in more or less perfected form, persons in all cultures
engage in victimage rituals. What I am suggesting is that victimage may not be the
dominant motive structure of all cultures. What Burke's ethnocentric version of
Dramatism threatens to blind us to is the multiplicity of different motive structures
available in language. To move post-Burke is not, then, to deny that victimage is a
universally tempting potential growing out of the nature of languaging. Instead, it is
to suggest that we should look for other universally available potentials in language
and add them to the Dramatistic dictionary. Additionally, it is to hint that while
 353
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CONDIT

victimage might show up in many cultures, the nature of victimage might vary
substantially. The Burkean definition of "victimage" may need casuistric stretching.
To move post-Burke requires, therefore, that we begin to work in other languages
and cultures. Instead of taking the Christian mythic structure as our paradigm, we
need to look at the quite different structure of other narrative forms. To seek for
non-victimage oriented forms, we might turn to the mythologie structure of Bud-
dhism. To seek out victimage forms which are structurally different from the
Christian version, we might examine the trickster tales, so important in Amerin-
dian, African, and African-American discourse.' These stories can shallowly be
described as "mortification" tales, but such a classification is Procrustean. To
understand trickster tales simply as mortification of the powerful by the weak misses
much that is crucial. A good post-Burkean analysis might clear this up for us. But in
addition to dealing with cultural division, we need also to deal with class division.
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Class
Unlike the topics of gender and culture, Burke spent a great deal of effort on
characterizing class. In many ways, his milieu was one where class was the dispute
par excellence. Much of Burke's analysis of class is brilliant. His concept of the
"socializing of losses" is, I think, definitive for our present economy. Consequently,
when I suggest the need for revisions in concepts of class, I am suggesting as much
the need for revisions in the theories of "Burkeans" as the need for the revision of
the Burke texts themselves.
The need for revision is made urgent by the fact that another great depression is
reasonably likely in the near future. We are approaching the point in the business
cycle where so much wealth is held by so few persons that consumption becomes
inadequate to support industrial production. That we have reached such a point so
soon after experiencing the Great Depression is frustrating, but a great deal of
business money has been spent helping Americans to forget that unbridled capital-
ism tends toward monopolies of both production and wealth, and therefore, ulti-
mately, towards temporary collapses. However, it is not merely that the public is
gullible. Even academics never learned the lessons that those such as Burke taught
the last time around.
Before spelling out that lesson in greater detail, we need to indict specifically the
way in which critics within SCA, even Burkean critics, have failed to learn Burke's
lessons. As A. Cheree Carlson has pointed out with such sharp aim, Burke argued
for a comic perspective, not a tragic one.8 Rhetorical critics, however, responding to
the oppositional tragedies of the sixties, have written almost exclusively in the tragic
frame. As Burke accurately suggests, discourse in the tragic frame always produces
victims. Our critics, therefore, have merely participated in the oppositional pro-
cesses that lead to a dialectic in which we indict the powers that are "in," urging that
the "ins" become the "outs" and the "outs" become the "ins." In the end, we still
have "ins" and "outs." We still have tragedy and victims. We still have the excesses of
capitalism.
Burke would have us transcend this tragedy by adopting a comic frame. Burke
accepted Marx's analysis of the class situation, but he rejected Marx's solution. At
several points Burke suggests a preference for socialism, but he also indicates that a
specific economic form is not the fundamental problem. In other words, he locates
 354
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 1992

the problem of wealth and poverty outside of capitalism, at a deeper level, in

language itself, where the urge to hierarchy tends to be generated (or, I would
argue, at least exacerbated). Burke's analysis has been shown to be largely correct;
we have learned that even in non-capitalist systems, dominated by discourses of
equality, hierarchies reappear; and those "on top" systematically allocate to them-
selves more of the goods of social life than they allow to their "equals."
The solution to "poverty," therefore, and the solution to the cyclical collapse of
capitalism, lie in adopting attitudes more fundamental than a yes/no on capitalism
vs. communism. When we set ourselves "against" the rich, we simply set in motion
the tragic rhetoric of capitalism. The capitalists then simply and literally identify
themselves with "middle America" and thereby set themselves and the majority
"against" the critics (e.g. the "Reds"). Because of their greater access to the means of
communication, the capitalists win and the critics become the tragic victims. The
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way out relies on the adoption of a tragicomic attitude.

The tragicomic attitude transcends Burke's expressed preference for the come-
die, by adopting a realistic attitude, rather than a farcical or merely ironic one.9 The
tragicomic attitude might be summed up with the following quandary: "human
beings have the wondrous gift of life on a garden planet, and look what they keep
doing with it!" The tragicomic attitude would chart the progression of human
motives from petty jealousy to greed to overpopulation to toxic waste dumps to war,
as all of a piece. The tragicomic perspective sees implicit in the comedically petty
jealousy of the SCA critic who fails to receive a coveted award the same response to
hierarchy as that which leads to global war, with only a change of scene necessary.
Actions that are comedie edge into high tragedy as the scene changes. From this
perspective, learning to laugh at our petty jealousies is the prerequisite to calming
our war-like fervors.
Such a post-Burkeanism would have us react to the next depression not by
attacking "the rich" or the "capitalists"—"they" who got "us" here—but by an
educational program that teaches us about ourselves as "bodies that learn language,"
so that we may learn to laugh at our petty jealousies, so that they may not pool their
resources to become monopolistic tragedies. Such a program is logological disadvan-
taged—it is not as cathartic as angry attack. Oppositional discourses in feminism,
African-Americanism, and Marxism flourish precisely because they feed the linguis-
tic craving for victimage so well. But if we are truly to move post-Burke, we must first
learn the lessons of Burke. We must learn to stop letting our language "use us" quite
so facilely. We must step out of the tragedy and endorse the comedy. Let us laugh at
Donald Trump and Lee Iaccoca and Frank Lorenzo and most hilariously with
Stephen Job (as I write merrily away on my Macintosh Plus). These men are only the
demons and villains of our drama if we make tragedy our plot. But let us not cast
them even as murderous clowns; instead, let us dance them as poor buffoons naively
trapped by the linguistic love of hierarchy. Understanding that, they and we
together might dance our way out of the veneration of pernicious hierarchy. The
expansion of Burkeanism through gender and cultural analysis is central to such a
project because it provides a range of alternative hierarchies, exposure to which will
allow us to make comparisons, and hence to construct the kind of broad wisdom
needed to reject the identity frames into which we were born.
Ultimately, post-Burkeanism teaches us that linguistics is as important as econom-
 355
QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH CONDIT

ics, for they are both sign systems circulating within the presence of each other.
Therefore, neither capitalism nor communism can make us rich as individuals or as
gendered and cultured peoples. To do that, we must learn to know ourselves as
Diverse Bodies That Learn Many Languages.

NOTES
Celeste Michelle Condit is an associate professor in the Department of Speech Communication at the University
of Georgia. A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Speech Communication
Association, November 1991, in Atlanta, Georgia.
1 Many commentators on Burke ignore the role of "substance" in Burke, or suggest with Bernard Brock, that it
was an early "phase" that was later repudiated. However, I see such interpretations as simply an attempt to
"cleanse" Burke of his materialism in order to make him fit into contemporary relativist epistemologies with
which Burke is not, in fact, wholly isometric.
2
I do not wish to over-relativize Burke. Although many positions can be sustained by isolated quotations from
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Burke, I believe that if we were to turn a cluster analysis to the task, it is this combination that would identify the
"essence" of Burke. A Forum essay, however, seeks to stir up debate, rather than to close it off with indisputable
evidence.
3
I choose here Burke's "middle" definition. The earlier one omitted the material in parentheses and was
hence most univocal. The later one explicitly recognized plurality, but only in a codicilic second stanza.
4
See eg. Patricia Spallone, Beyond Conception: The New Politics of Reproduction (MA: Bergin and Garvey
Publications, Inc.).
5
I have previously employed a modified form of this definition in a forthcoming essay, in "Oppositions in an
Oppositional Practice: Feminist Rhetorics," Feminist Critiques of Speech Communication, ed. Nancy Wyatt and
Sheryl Permlutter Brown (Ablex, in press).
6
At times he mentions anecdotal support from China or Budhism, etc., but he takes as his "representative
anecdote," western christianized tradition.
7
I use the term "Amerindian" because I wish to be sensitive to the objections to the term "Indian," but I
believe the more politically current phrase "native American" is unclear, given that "native" is often employed to
mean a person born in a given place rather than to refer to the birthplaces of one's ancestors. We are left with this
choice because the original voice of these peoples themselves is tribal, naming themselves as specific collective
groups, rather than a universalized form naming themselves in terms of the continent they shared, which is the
manner in which contemporary issues leads the naming process.
8
"Limitations of the Comic Frame: Some Witty American Women of the Nineteenth Century," Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 74 (August 1988), 310-322. I believe that while Burke argued in favor of the comic perspective,
he actually himself held a tragicomic perspective, which may be the inevitable one for linguistically self-conscious
human beings. Placed in an intellectual milieu dominated by tragic perspectives, however, the dialectic of
Iogology led him to argue for the half that was missing, i.e. comedic elements. I owe my perspective here not only
to Carlson, but also to a graduate student, Kim Powell, in her paper on the "AWSPL: A Movement in a Comic
Frame."
9
Note the "comedic" is not "the humorous." Humor asks us to laugh against something, whereas comedy asks
us to laugh knowingly and sympathetically with something.