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The Dramatism Debate, Archived: The Pentad as “Terministic” Ontology
- University of South Carolina Press
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michelle smith the DrAmAtism DeBAte, ArchiveD The Pentad as “Terministic” Ontology Burke begins A Grammar of Motives with the following passage: “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to that question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives. . . . We shall use five terms as generating principle of our investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose” (xv). This deceptively readable passage, introducing the five terms of the pentad, has prompted two main interpretations.1 The pentad, the central terminology and analytical tool for Burke’s dramatism, offers either a means to uncover and understand human motives—ontology—or a means to understand the attributing of motives through language—epistemology. To put it differently, the pentad helps with either the analysis of acts or the analysis of how we talk about acts. Both views have been contested by readers and scholars since the publication of the Grammar in 1945. Burke’s initial presentation of the pentad in the Grammar lends itself to an epistemological reading. Epistemology is best defined, for our purposes, as the “theory of knowledge” or “knowledge of knowledge” (Crable 327). The epistemological reading of the above passage might be stressed as follows: “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?”; “The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which . . . are exemplified in the attributing of motives.” The passage can easily be read as presenting the pentad as a set of terms that function in statements about motives. Indeed much of the Grammar presents the pentad as a means of analyzing the attribution of motives through language, which Burke reads as a component of virtually all communication—“every judgment , exhortation, or admonition, every view of natural or supernatural reality, every intention or expectation involves assumptions about motive, or cause” (xxii). The pentad, in this light, offers a way of unpacking statements about human motives through the terminology of drama. Dramatism, in the epistemological view, is a metaphor, a perspective for understanding human motivation. 144 Michelle Smith In contrast a typical ontological reading of the same passage from the Grammar would direct its gaze towards human motives themselves. Within relevant scholarship , ontology is typically approached as the “science of being” or the “study of being”—the essence of a thing “in itself” (Crable 327). Thus an ontological view would read the passage for its resonances regarding “being,” “in itself,” and motives as they really exist. The stresses might fall accordingly: “What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? . . . The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives.” The ontological view, then, seems to involve a more literal approach—human motivations are a drama that necessarily involves the pentadic elements—whereas the epistemological view investigates human motivation through the lens, or perspective, of drama. Given Burke’s general emphasis on metaphor throughout his work, many scholars found the epistemological view more defensible and cohesive with Burke’s overall project—the ontological view seemed ripe with “theoretical hubris” and an unusual insistence upon accuracy and literality (Crable 330). Ontology seemed anti-Burkean. Given this attitude, it is no wonder that Burke scholars were surprised when, at a conference in 1982 and through an interchange with Bernard Brock and Herbert Simons, Burke insisted that the overall project of dramatism (with the pentad as a key component) was ontological. At the 1982 meeting of the Eastern Communication Association in Hartford, Connecticut, Bernard Brock presented “The Role of Paradox and Metaphor in Kenneth Burke’s Dramatism,” to an audience that included Burke himself. Brock’s discussion centered on dramatism as a whole, but his remarks about the pentad reveal his epistemological leanings. Brock asserted: “Having described reality as symbolizing in response to the ‘human situation,’ . . . Burke presents the pentad as a means of unlocking human motives, thereby understanding symbolic reality” (Brock et al. 20). Though Brock explains that symbolizing is a seeming ontological “reality” for Burke, his distinction between symbolic reality and the “human situation” to which symbolizing responds maintains a view of dramatism as a metaphor, as one perspective on reality...