This article was downloaded by: [York University Libraries]

On: 03 March 2015, At: 08:30

Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954
Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Southern Communication Journal

Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsjc20

Re‐visiting Kenneth Burke:

Dramatism/logology and the problem
of agency
a b
Charles Conrad & Elizabeth A. Macom
a
Professor, Department of Speech Communication , Texas A&M
University , College Station, TX, 77843–4234
b
Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin , Austin, TX, 78712
Published online: 01 Apr 2009.

To cite this article: Charles Conrad & Elizabeth A. Macom (1995) Re‐visiting Kenneth Burke:
Dramatism/logology and the problem of agency, Southern Communication Journal, 61:1, 11-28,
DOI: 10.1080/10417949509372996

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10417949509372996

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever
as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any
opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the
authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the
Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary
sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,
claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities
whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in
relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms
& Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/
terms-and-conditions
 Re-Visiting Kenneth Burke:
Dramatism/Logology and the
Problem of Agency
Charles Conrad
Elizabeth A. Macom
In this essay we propose that the corpus of Kenneth Burkes work can be examined as an
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

effort to grapple with the issues involved in what we will call the "problem of agency." We
argue that Burke oscillated between an affirmation of a voluntarist view of human
action, with its related aesthetic theory of symbolic action, and multiple attempts to
integrate action and motion within a symbolicity-centered model of "practical" criticism.
We conclude that the core problematic in his perspective on the problem of agency led him
to end his career where he began, with an essentially aesthetic perspective on critical
action.

CHARLES CONRAD is professor, Department of Speech Communication,

Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4234.
ELIZABETH A. MACOM has recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of
Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712. Earlier versions of parts of this paper were
presented at the 1989 Temple University Conference on Discourse Analysis,
Philadelphia, and the 1990 annual meeting of the Speech Communication
Association, Chicago. The authors wish to thank James Klumpp and Phyllis
Japp for their helpful comments.

T his volume and the call for papers that generated it clearly indicate that it is
time for members of an academic discipline that has been profoundly influ-
enced by the thought of Kenneth Burke to re-visit his work, to re-appreciate its
intellectual power, to re-assess its strengths and limitations, and to re-understand the
complex set of "burdens" that motivated its creator. In this essay we explore what we
believe to be the central tension, the "hub," of Burke's dramatism/logology. Like
Tompkins and Cheney (1993) we believe that the key problematic in Burke's work is his
conceptualization of motives. We will propose that the corpus of his work, including his
conceptualization of motives, can be understood as an effort to deal with what we will
call the "problem of agency." We will suggest that such a reading can also provide
insight into the broader relationships among symbols, society, and critical action that
occupied Kenneth Burke for almost a century.

KENNETH BURKE AND THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY

When theorists define human actors as "choice-making animals," questions of bal-
ance between voluntarism and determinism immediately arise (Lukes, 1974). The
essence of agency is choice, but the concept of choice is meaningful only in a struc-
tured-but-not-determining situation. Individuals must have a certain degree of auton-
omy for choice to occur, a "space somewhere between fate and freedom" in their
11
 12 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

relationships with structures (Clegg, 1989). Conversely, the concept of choice also
entails some degree of constraint on action. A wholly unconstrained person may behave,
enacting her or his desires, but cannot be said to choose among alternatives. But, as
Burke (1993) notes, "there is a big difference between saying that a certain attitude
takes a certain factor into account, and saying that the attitude is determined by the factor"
(p. 97). In short,
the problem of agency is the problem of finding a way of accounting for
human experience which recognises (sic) simultaneously and in equal mea-
sure that history and society are made by constant and more or less purposeful
individual action and that individual action, however purposeful, is made by
history and society. How do we as active subjects make a world of objects which
then, as it were, become subjects making us their objects? It is the problem of
individual and society, consciousness and being, action and structure; a prob-
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

lem to which the voices of everyday life speak as loudly as those of scholars.1
(Abrams, 1982, pp. xiii-xiv)
The problem of agency is inescapable for students of human affairs,2 a problem that ini-
tially entered into Burke's (1937/1984) thought in the guise of the relationship
between "technical" and "social" criticism:
Our own program, as literary critic, is to integrate technical criticism with
social criticism . . . by taking the allegiance to the symbol of authority as our
subject.. .. Since the symbols of authority are radically linked with [social and
material] relationships, this point of departure automatically involves us in
socio-economic criticism. Since works of art, as "equipment for living," are
formed with authoritative structures as their basis of reference, we also move
automatically into the field of technical criticism.3 (p. 331)
The task of integrating aesthetic and social criticism was to become Burke's dominant
preoccupation. As he worked through these issues, he became more deeply involved in
the problem of agency, and thus more deeply immersed in the dilemma it contains.

The Problem of Agency and Action-Structure Dualisms

The core of the problem of agency is the unacceptability of pure determinism on
one hand and pure voluntarism on the other. The difficult task of negotiating a "space
between fate and freedom" has generated a number of different responses, each of
which is problematic in its own way (Clegg, 1989; Knights & Willmott, 1989). One
approach to the Scylla of voluntarism and the Charybdis of determinism, the one that
we will argue Burke chose, involves viewing action and structure as analytically and def-
initionally distinct constructs that are dialectically related to one another.5 In this per-
spective action and structure form a "dualism" in which the reciprocal relationship
between the two poles is revealed and reproduced in the consciousness of social actors
(Barbalet, 1987; Clegg, 1989; Hindess, 1987; Layder, 1985). Advocates for this dualistic
position assert that their conception of a dialectical relationship between action and
structure allows them to examine both situations in which action is constrained-but-
still-voluntary and situations in which structure largely determines action.
Dualistic models make an important contribution to social theory because they con-
front the problematic nature of action-structure relationships direcdy and because
their focus on dialectical processes reveals the mutual influences of action and struc-
ture. But their greatest contribution, inadvertendy, may lie in their power to reveal
dilemmas inherent in the dualistic models diemselves. If one takes the ontological posi-
tion that humans are choice-making creatures, and adopts the view that structural fac-
 THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY 13

tors are constraining but not determining, then the processes through which structure
simultaneously constrains and enables action in concrete situations must be the center
of the analysis. But what kind of analysis? The simplest approach is to focus on one pole
of the dilemma and deemphasize the other, thus avoiding or ignoring the problem of
agency. But either of these one-sided approaches is problematic. On one hand, deem-
phasizing structural constraints in order to avoid problems of determinism leads one to
treat symbolic action as a transcendent flight away from its societal grounding. On the
other hand, treating a priori structural conditions as independent of symbolic interac-
tion renders the concept of choice-making trivial and makes structural determinism
inevitable.5 A third strategy is to oscillate between the two poles of the dualism, depend-
ing on the conceptual problems being addressed in a given instance. But although the
ambiguities generated by this approach may obscure the dilemma, the approach itself
does little to resolve the problem.
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

Consequently, theorists operating from an action-structure dualism eventually are

forced to attend to the processes through which the two realms merge. The primary
challenge with this course is to achieve a "merger" that does not violate the underlying
assumptions of the dualism. In their extreme forms, "merger" perspectives tend simul-
taneously to make central to the analysis the micro-processes through which the dialec-
tic between action and structure occurs and to place the processes themselves outside
the model's scope of analysis (Clegg, 1989). As a result, when pressed, dialectical mod-
els that include a "merger" between action and structure typically reduce to an essen-
tially voluntarist perspective (Archer, 1982) .6

Burke the Dualist

It has been rather widely argued that Burke took a dualistic view of most of his key
concepts. Rueckert (1994) gives him the title "Burke the Dualist" (p. 30; also see Jay,
1988, p. 157). And, indeed, Burke himself offered it as a program: as early as 1922, he
told Waldo Frank that "we should operate in dualisms rather than monisms" (cited in
Heath, 1986, p. 160). During the next half century Burke's distinction between con-
scious (symbolic) action and unconscious (nonsymbolic) motion became the "basic
polarity" underlying his work (Burke, 1978a, p. 809; also see Condit, 1992, p. 349;
Heath, 1986, p. 131; Tompkins & Cheney, 1993). Because human beings are physiolog-
ical creatures, Burke writes, our ideas, symbol systems, and actions are infused by our
physical being. Quoting Bentham, Burke (1978a) concludes that "all our psychological
ideas are derived from physical ones—all mental from corporeal ones" (p. 812). Thus,
action is grounded in motion:
There can be motion without action (as the sea can go on thrashing about
whether or not there are animals that have a word for it).
There can be no action without motion (as we animals could not have words
for anything except for the motions of our nervous systems and the vibrations
that carry our words from one of us to another....
But (and this is the primary axiom that differentiates Dramatism from
Behaviorism) symbolic action is not reducible to terms of sheer motion. (Sym-
bolicity involves not just a difference of degree, but a motivational difference in
kind.) (p. 814)
Over the course of his career Burke continually moved among a number of different
interpretations of the relationships between action and motion, symbolism and materi-
alism, the aesthetic and the practical. At times, he saw the two realms as separate: "the
motion-action 'polarity' is unbridgeable in the sense that, although, in every tribal
idiom however rudimentary, there is a wholly reliable basic correspondence between a
 14 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

thing and its name; never the twain shall meet" (p. 815; see also Burke, 1938). But
Burke (1993) also realized that this position, which invited deterministic interpreta-
tions of human action, was untenable; indeed, determinism was the ground on which
he rejected vulgar Marxism (pp. 103-109). As Henderson (1993) notes, an argued-for
"unbridgeable" gap precludes an analysis of how symbolic acts become part of the soci-
etal scene (pp. 182-183) or how the material realm constrains (while not determining)
symbolic action.
At other times Burke suggested a second perspective: that the realm of the symbolic
("action") infuses the realm of "motion" (physical and/or material reality). In "Auscul-
tation, Creation, and Revision," written during the 1930s but left unpublished for sixty
years, Burke (1993) offered this view:
We might tentatively speak of primary, secondary, and tertiary worlds, with a
different order of "realities" for each of them. If some acquiescence to univer-
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

sal patterns is primary (as with the periodicity of growth and decay; or as learn-
ing of the mind is analogous to learning of the body, by habits under
repetition, and by the development of callosity from rubbing); and if some
primitive or natural society, in which tools are hand-shaped and appeasements
are doglike, is secondary; then our own coordinates (wherein we must steadily
observe graphs of foreign trade, credit expansion, gold supply, purchasing
power, and the like) must throw us into a tertiary world, (p. 64)
Aesthetics (symbolism) exists independent of these three "practical" realms but infuses
them in three characteristic forms:
Its relation to the primary world (the metaphysical or religious world) will be
established mainly as a. yearning. Its relation to the secondary world (to directer,
more "natural" ways of living, an ampler tapping of the "primitive") will be
established partially by actual attainment and partially by imaginings. Its rela-
tion to the tertiary world (of contingencies, passing problems, "news") will be
established by schematization and identification of a much fuller sort than is
now available to us... J (p. 144)
If aesthetics is related to other realms of experience but also exists independent of
them, retreat into an unreal frame of reference is always possible. In fact, part of
Burke's explanation of the three worlds is a warning against an aesthetic retreat into
mysticism:
The entire universe can thus become a crowd of beckoning symbols; for once
speech is considered merely "symbolic," it is only one more step to considering
action itself as symbolic, so that every specific act, colored by the contingencies
of the tertiary world, becomes a mere mode or manifestation of some deeply
universal process.... (p. 103)
At still other times Burke draws a third conclusion: that the realm of the practical/
material infuses the realm of the symbolic/aesthetic. In his response to Margaret
Schlauch's (1938) argument that Attitudes Toward History excessively deemphasizes the
material conditions of society, Burke (1938) examined the ways in which symbolism
may be a reflection8 of non-physiological material conditions:
The difference between the symbolic drama and the drama of living is a difference between
imaginary obstacles and real obstacles. But: the imaginary obstacles of symbolic drama
must, to have the relevance necessary to the producing of effects upon audiences, reflect
the real obstacles of living drama, (p. 247)

I _
 THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY 15

But this too is an unsatisfactory solution. If the material realm can infuse the symbolic
realm through the "reflective" nature of symbolism, material constraints can easily
become determining.
In his discussion of the concepts of the conscious and the unconscious, Burke
(1966) made yet another distinction, concluding that the two realms are neither sepa-
rate from nor "infused" by one another. Instead, they are linked together by an inter-
mediate realm of experience. Freud's thought, Burke argued, must be understood as
stemming from two concepts, repression and the unconscious, where the former is the
process through which the physiological realm influences the realm of the symbolic,
and the latter is the content "that is to be 'processed'" (p. 78). By
dwelling on the term "unconscious," we note first of all that it implies a direct
counterterm, the "conscious." But any such pair of antithetical terms suggests
the possibility of an intermediate term.... "Preconscious" is an ideal Freudian
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

choice of intermediate term here, owing to the strongly temporal connotations

of the prefix, (p. 77)
This intermediate realm seems to be of a very narrow type, however. It does allow the
physiological realm to influence choice-making (the central process of the symbolic
realm). But it does not (a) permit non-physiological material constructs9 to influence
symbolic action, (b) create a non-physiological material realm through symbolic action,
nor (c) resolve the problem of determinism.
Burke (1966) analyzed this intermediate realm in a lengthy examination of the
"varieties of unconscious" (pp. 67-80). The simplest version of unconscious (behavior)
is the "unconscious aspect of sheer bodily processes," which "proceed outside one's con-
sciousness." This type of unconscious behavior includes "processes of training, or habit,
whereby conscious effort becomes spontaneous (as with learning to walk or talk)" (p.
67). Burke did allow that some forms of unconsciousness can become conscious:
"unconscious memories which, though not explicitly recalled, are recallable on de-
mand" (p. 69); different "sub-personalities" that can become conscious through the
symbolism of dreaming; and "entelechial" motives implicitly present in a symbolic act
that can become conscious through the application of an appropriate critical method-
ology (pp. 69-70). However, he also suggested that in everyday experience these pro-
cesses of "sheer motion" must remain unconscious because "if we were specifically
aware of them all . . . , we'd be in a condition that, as judged by our present norms,
would be little short of horrible" (p. 67).
The relationship between the realms of the symbolic and material is clearest, Burke
repeatedly argues, in a familiar metaphor:
my distinction between "motion" and "action" is as "literal" as this: an "agent"
who is driving a car, obeying the rules of traffic and arriving at his [sic] destina-
tion with the help of a roadmap, is "acting" in my sense of the term, since the
whole operation (including the training of the driver) is thus critically guided
by interpretation in the realm of symbol systems. To this extent, the behavior of
the driver differs from the behavior of the car, which is "moving" (here defined
as "nonsymbolic" in the sense that the traffic rules, the destination of the jour-
ney, etc. are totally irrelevant to its particular situation as a machine being fed
by fuel and guided by levers that involve no such modes of "interpretation").
(Brock, Burke, Burgess, & Simons, 1985, p. 27)
For Burke, driving a car involves action, not habit-motion. But for most of us the act
of driving entails a constant process of transforming conscious choices into habitual
behaviors and vice-versa. New drivers do almost everything through conscious choice;
experienced ones do many things by "instinct." Confrontations with various "material"
 16 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

conditions (actions and/or habits of others) raise some instinctual behaviors to the
level of action and allow some actions to become habitualized. For example, one of the
authors of this article is "habitually" a more aggressive driver than the other. This "style"
is nonconscious until the less aggressive author, as passenger, comments nervously on
the other's driving style, which raises a number of the (reckless) driver's previously
habitual behaviors to a conscious level. Similarly, the less aggressive driver may observe
the more aggressive one—now the passenger—unconsciously fidgeting while s/he
yields the right of way to a (seemingly endless) succession of cars, an observation that
raises his/her own driving behaviors to a conscious level and requires choice-making
about heretofore habitual behavior. In both cases, "immediate" elements of interper-
sonal interaction underlie the de-habitualization of habit/motion.
At the same time, actions taken by persons who are wholly independent of and
unknown to our two drivers, neither of whom is a native Texan, create material condi-
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

tions to which they (eventually) become habituated. For example, cars entering or leav-
ing major highways in the Republic of Texas have the right of way over cars proceeding
on the highways' parallel access roads, some of which are themselves two-way. This means
that a driver entering an expressway can turn left in front of oncoming traffic, which
must by law yield to him/her. Whether this law was passed consciously (some rationale
was created for it), or habitually (in enactment of Texans' nonconscious tendency to be
contrary to everyone else), a driver new to Texas must quickly de-habitualize one set of
driving tendencies regarding yielding the right-of-way, only to habitualize another set
(which will cause additional problems should those drivers attempt to drive elsewhere
than the Lone Star State). None of these material conditions are physiological; all are
the outcome of symbolic action and all constrain conscious choice. A "literal" reading
of Burke's metaphor—the reading he suggests—seems to exclude both the possibility
and the analysis of these processes. When action and structure are treated as separate
but dialectically related, distinctions between "local" and "distant" aspects of structure,
and habitual and non-habitual aspects of acting, are obscured. Dialectical tensions are
then played out between actions and structure rather than among-elements of each.
In sum, Burke's rejection of deterministic perspectives that reduce action to
motion, like behaviorism and vulgar Marxism, leads him to ignore the actual processes
through which humans transform choice-making (action) into habit (motion) and
transform habit/motion into action.10 For Burke, an antithetical relationship between
action and motion is untenable, as are deterministic interpretations of human action.
But each of his attempts to bridge the polarity that he sometimes saw as unbridgeable
served to immerse him more deeply in the problem of agency. The genius of his early
work lay in his recognition of the complexity of the problem, of the unacceptability of
either a retreat into determinism or a flight into aestheticism. It was an insight that was
to occupy him for half a century more."

READINGS OF ACTION/MOTION IN BURKE'S DRAMATISM/LOGOLOGY

Of course, Burke's diverse treatment of the relationship between the realms of sym-
bolism/consciousness/aesthetics/action and physical-material/unconsciousness/prac-
ticality/motion can be interpreted in a number of different ways. First, it can be viewed
as an artifact of the sheer longevity of Burke's career, of such duration that even key
concepts will be developed in varied ways (e.g., Chesebro, 1992,1993).
Second, it can be viewed as a response to a passing moment, as evidence that—like
virtually every other intellectual of his generation—Burke was dealing with fundamen-
tal theoretical issues made unquestionably real by the dislocations of the Great Depres-
sion and the horrors of Nazism, issues that he would later successfully work out over the
remainder of his career. Representative of this interpretation is Henderson's (1993)
conclusion:
 THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY 17

The conflict between the aesthetic and the practical remains unresolved in
Counter-Statement. There is no escaping the fact that Counter-Statement sometimes
seems to endorse art-for-art's-sake aestheticism. That this collection of essays
should be riddled with ambiguities and tensions is hardly surprising when one
considers that it emerges out of the years of the Hoover presidency....
At first glance, "ACR" ["Auscultation, Creation, Revision"], the unpublished
manuscript that follows Counter-Statement and precedes Permanence and Change,
seems to privilege the aesthetic at the expense of the practical, its aim being, as
Burke retrospectively puts it, "to resist the mounting sociological emphasis in
criticism, even while dealing with the problems of 'orientation' to which the
author had been made uncomfortably sensitive by the brusque contrast
between the beginning of Hoover's presidency and its end." (Henderson, 1993,
p. 179, quoting Burke, 1931/1968, p. 213)
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

But Henderson (1993) concludes that by the late 1930s Burke was moving toward a
solution to the action-motion problematic:
It seems to me that, on the whole, "ACR" is more successful in assimilating the
mounting sociological emphasis in criticism than in resisting it. That is, Burke
sublates the aesthetic-practical dichotomy by linking forms of social communi-
cation with forms of social cooperation, (p. 179)
Lentricchia (1983) is even more specific about the point of Burke's transformation.
Whereas he finds that "Burke's response to historical complexity in Permanence and
Change is world-weary and nostalgic for the purity of a paradise called freedom" (p. 58),
he writes that during the 1930s Burke was trying to "work [himself] out of an aesthetic
theory that viewed art as self expression, into an emphasis upon the communicative
aspect of art," a perspective that did not "fall into shape" until A Grammar of Motives (p.
62; also see Brock, 1985; Burke, 1935/1984, p. 323; and Nelson, 1989).
Third, and finally, Burke's diverse treatments of the relationship between the sym-
bolic and the material can be interpreted as a fundamental problem within dramatistic
theory that can never be resolved adequately. Neo-Marxist critics of Burke's early works
were among the first to take this position. In 1931, for example, Granville Hicks (1931)
charged that Burke's aesthetic theory lacked "an ethic and a philosophy," and that
Counter-Statement was a defense of eloquence which failed to address the economic and
political crises of the Depression (p. 75). Burke (1931) responded that Hicks should
read the "Program" section of Counter-Statement, which challenged artists to speak out
on the conditions which gave rise to the Depression and to propose solutions for those
problems (p. 101). Although this position was a major shift from Burke's 1929 argu-
ment that "the artist does not run counter to his age; rather he [sic] refines the propen-
sities of his age, formulating their aesthetic equivalent" (quoted in "Announcement,"
1929, p. 90), it did litde to transform his theory of aesthetics to a theory of social action.
Margaret Schlauch (1938) concurred in her review of Attitudes Toward History.
The integration of Marxism with Freudianism, if it is to be made at all, will not
be accomplished by this method, which in effect divides the world without
from the world within, (p. 131)
In the remainder of this essay we will develop an interpretation of dramatism/logol-
ogy that diverges both from Lentricchia's (1983) and Henderson's (1993) view that the
action-structure problematic in Burke's early work is resolved during his later work and
from Tompkins and Cheney's (1993) view that problems in Burke's conception of
"motives" are not "insoluble" (p. 230) ,12 We will suggest that the unhappy combination
of Burke's ontological theory and his dualistic assumptions about the relationship
 18 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

between action and motion immerses him in an inescapable problematic, one that
eventually leads him back to the voluntarist/aesthetic position that characterized his
earliest work. We will do so through an examination of Burke's treatment of two
directly related concepts: (a) the relationship between "ideology" and symbolic action;
and (b) the role of symbolic transcendence/de-transcendence in Burke's conception
of "logology."

The Transformation of Ideology into Ideational Terms

In 1978, Frederic Jameson (1978a) published an essay in Critical Inquiry which
sought to determine the extent to which Burke's
work can be reread or rewritten as a model for contemporary ideological anal-
ysis, or what in my own terminology I prefer to call the study of the ideology of
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

form: the analysis, in other words, of the linguistic, narrative, or purely formal
ways in which ideology expresses itself through and inscribes itself in the liter-
ary text. (p. 509)
His answer: it can't. Within Burke's concept of "strategy" (which Burke consistently
equates with "situation") Jameson finds a view of ideology that transforms it from
action-in-situation (praxis) to language-in-system:
The problem is that this concept, which so boldly proclaims itself a praxis-
word, tends, by focusing our attention on the inner mechanisms of the sym-
bolic act in question, to end up bracketing the act itself and to suspend any
interrogation of what constitutes it as an act in the first place, namely its social
and ideological purpose. . . . What it [dramatistic/logological analysis] takes
for granted, what it "brackets" and therefore represses from its critical dis-
course, is what such an operation could possibly be symbolic of, in the largest
sense what it means, the concrete situation or context in which the ultimate
identification of Truth with Beauty and Beauty with Truth can be seen itself to
be the symbolic resolution of some more fundamental social contradiction or
ideological antinomy, (pp. 514, 515)
The Achilles' heel of Burke's system, Jameson noted, is its concept of "purpose," the
dramatistic link between "act" and "scene."13 The concept has two dimensions, an inner
logic of the symbolic act (in dramatism, the relationships among purpose and the other
terms of the pentad), and a broader dimension which links a particular act to the pat-
tern of symbolic acts within which it occurs (its context, or, in Jameson's terminology,
"subtext"). In dramatism, Jameson argues, "the operation by which this subtext has
been constructed remains essentially incomplete" (p. 517). If we define the realm of
the unconscious in terms of the material conditions of society (rather than via Burke's
own view of it as a physiological process),
Burke's system has no place for an unconscious, it makes no room for genuine
mystification, let alone for the latter's analysis or for that task of decoding and
hermeneutic demystification which is increasingly the mission of culture work-
ers in a society as reified and as opaque as our own.... The Burkean symbolic
act is thus always serenely transparent to itself, in lucid blindness to the dark
underside of language, to the ruses of history or of desire. . . . Drama is then
not so much the archetype of praxis as it is the very source of the ideology of
representation and, with it, of the optical illusion of the subject. . . . (p. 521-
522)
Burke's rebuttal to Jameson focused on a comment that Jameson made near the
end of his critique. There Jameson (1978a) noted "Burke's strange reluctance to pro-
 THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY 19

nounce the word ideology itself (p. 521). But he had used the word "ideology," and
often, Burke (1978b) objected, citing examples from the beginning of his career
through his most recent publications. Burke was correct in his lexical disputation. But
Jameson's attack dealt not with whether Burke did or did not speak the word "ideol-
ogy," but with the excessively symbolic and ideational nature of his conception of ideol-
ogy. For Jameson, the issue was whether Burke's conception of ideology inherently
abstracts the meaning of symbolic acts away from their material context, and from the
broader meaning systems that surround acts. In a personal letter to Malcolm Cowley,
Burke addressed this issue, making it clear that he understood that his disagreement
with Jameson was over their differing conceptions of "ideology," not the frequency with
which he had used the term:
The third guy to process me was a Yaley Marxist [Jameson] who had managed
to tangle Marx's notion of "ideology" (as per the German Ideology, which he pre-
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

sumably never understood, if he ever read it) in ways that only the Hermeneu-
tics is capable of. I was furious that, although I had brought all sorts of baggage
with me, I didn't have p. 104 of A Rhetoric of Motives, and thus couldn't dispatch
the guy as quickly as I could of. (Jay, 1988, p. 409)
That page of A Rhetoric of Motives (1950/1969) lists seven definitions of "ideology,"
the final one of which demonstrates that Burke recognized that Marx denned "ideol-
ogy" as "an inverted genealogy of culture, that makes for 'illusion' and 'mystification'
by treating ideas as primary where they should have been treated as derivative [of mate-
rial structure]" (p. 104; also see Burke, 1993, p. 114).14 This final definition is appar-
ently the one which Burke believed would have "dispatched" Jameson's argument. But
Burke's response missed the core of Jameson's attack. Jameson argued that, as drama-
tism/logology developed, Burke, purposefully or not, altered this Marxist definition to
create a dualism between the linguistic-ideational realm and the material realm.
Ironically, as Burke mustered evidence for the long-standingness of his own use of
the term "ideology," his rejoinder to Jameson provided evidence to support Jameson's
argument. For example, Burke invited the reader's attention to his analysis of Marx's
German Ideology. With an air of victory, Burke (1978b, p. 405) quoted his own statements
on ideology in A Rhetoric of Motives (1950/1969):
All told, "ideology" is equatable with illusion, mystification, discussion of
human relations in terms like absolute consciousness, honor, loyalty, justice,
freedom, substance, essence of man [sic]—in short, that "inversion" whereby
material history is derived from "spirit" (in contrast with the method of dialec-
tical materialism whereby the changing nature of consciousness would be
derived from changes in material conditions), (p. 110)
By means of passages such as this, which comprise the bulk of his response to Jame-
son, Burke made it clear that he had discussed the concept of ideology, and done so at
length (for corroboration see Lentricchia, 1983; Tompkins, 1985). However, in each
case Burke also demonstrated that his conceptualization of "ideology" was indeed ide-
ational, not material. In Counter-Statement (1931/1968), ideology is defined as "an
aggregate of beliefs [emphasis added] sufficiently at odds with one another to justify
opposite kinds of conduct" (p. 163). In A Grammar of Motives (1945/1969), Burke
explicitly described the dualism between idea/ideology and action: "Where the ideas
are in action, we have drama; where the agents are in ideation, we have dialectic" (p.
512). Thus, action, material structure, and ideology are separate and distinct, if interre-
lated, constructs. In A Rhetoric of Motives (1950/1969), identification and "identity"
(which Burke defined in his response to Jameson as the personification of ideology)
are defined as transcendent terms, necessarily so because of the inherent human ten-
dency to seek perfection.
 20 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

But Burke apparently recognized the implications of the difference between Jame-
son's (1978b) concept of ideology-as-action and his own view of ideology-as-indepen-
dent-of-action, noting that the
proper procedure [for critiquing his position] would be not to regret the
absence of the word [ideology] but rather to bear down upon what he [a critic
of Burke] might well want to dismiss for its brand of "ideology," which I would
characterize as an ironic wavering,15 ultimately reducible to the individual's
composite nature that "bridges" . . . the realms of physiological, nonsymbolic
motion and socially conditioned symbolic action, (pp. 408-409)
In his rejoinder to Burke, Jameson accepted Burke's challenge, reiterated that his pur-
pose in the original essay had been to deal with Burke's concept of ideology, and con-
cluded:
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

There are many ways in which the word ideology can be used, most of them
defensible, but there are two ways in which the word ought never to be used,
and that is to designate "value systems" on the one hand or "false conscious-
ness" on the other. The first meaning folds us back into the perspective of the
history of ideas, which it was the aim of the concept of ideology to spring us out
of in the first place. The second betrays a vulgar Marxist approach to culture
which it is the task of any genuinely contemporary Marxism to liquidate. . . .
When Burke documents his own use of the Marxian category of ideology,
unfortunately he turns out most often to have meant our old friend "false con-
sciousness," so unavoidable a part of the baggage of thirties Marxism, (pp. 417-
418)
In sum, dramatism is grounded in a dualism between action and motion, between
ideation and structure, a separation Burke cannot abandon because he understands it
as the essential element of the human condition. But his ontology makes it problematic
to adequately examine die processes through which action is transformed into habit
(and vice-versa) or the ways in which action and structure are reciprocally related
through the concept of ideology. During the early phase of his career, Burke attempted
to cope with this paradox by positing a dialectical relationship between the poles of the
action-structure dualism. This led him to oscillate between a voluntaristic/aesthetic
symbolic theory and a number of intermediate positions which, while not determinis-
tic, could not deal adequately with the ways in which social structure is instantiated in
human action. Burke's brilliance lay in his repeated recognition of this problem—as in
his advice to Jameson about how one should criticize his position. But that genius could
not provide an escape from the dilemmas that are inherent in an action-structure dual-
ism.
In the pages that follow we argue that as Burke transformed dramatism into logol-
ogy during the latter stages of his career, his perspective shifted progressively toward
the voluntarist/subjectivist pole of the action-structure dualism, a shift which, ironi-
cally, led him back to the kind of aesdietic theory that characterized his earliest work.16

Transcendence and De-transcendence in Dramatism/Logology

Recently, many interpreters of Kenneth Burke's work have recognized that his ideas
must be viewed as a progression, a movement with at least two major transitions (see
the summaries in Heath, 1986, and Feehan, 1979). The first was from aesthetic theory
to communication theory; die second involved a shift in focus from dramatism—an
"ontological" theory developed in A Grammar of Motives (1945/1969), A Rhetoric of
Motives (1950/1969), and an article in the Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968b)—to
logology, an "epistemological" model developed in The Rhetoric of Religion and later
 THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY 21

essays (see Burke, 1983, p. 859)." We argue that the development of Burke's thought
after 1945 can be understood as an oscillation between a transcendent focus on lan-
guage qua language and a de-transcendent focus on societal conditions.
Harnessing Burke's Aesthetic Impulse. In 1977 Burke situated his early essays, col-
lected in Counter-Statement, in the aesthetic tradition: "But by the time of 'Psychology
and Form,' which was written in 1924,1 began to bring in the element of audience, and
toward the end of the book, which I finished about 1929, there's more and more of
that" (Woodcock, 1977, p. 708). According to the interpretations of Burke's early work
offered by Henderson and Lentricchia, Burke's resolution of the problem of agency
started in Attitudes Toward History and culminated in A Grammar of Motives. There, Burke
says, he was trying to explain that "art is based on a kind of transcendence of experi-
ence" (Woodcock, 1977, p. 709), an observation which accents both the experiential
base of symbolic form and the transcendence that is inherent in language use. The
transformation was to come in two core concepts, the view of "comic and tragic frames"
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

developed in Attitudes Toward History and the ideas of "dialectic and transcendence"
described in A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and The Rhetoric of Religion.
Comic Resignation in Attitudes Toward History. Here Burke (1937/1984) lays out his
theory of poetic categories as "frames of reference" for comprehending life.18 A frame is
an attitude, a philosophy, a "terministic screen" for "confronting kinds of quandary that
mutatis mutandis recur under various historical conditions" (p. iii), a psychological
device with which the mind equips itself to "name and confront its situation" (p. 99).
Frames direct attention, emphasizing some aspects of "reality" and relegating others to
the background, so that many observations an individual makes, far from being objec-
tive, disinterested, scientific, or neutral "are but implications of the particular terminology in
terms of which the observations are made' (Burke, 1966, p. 46).
Because frames name friendly and unfriendly forces, they engender vocabularies
for the charting of human motives (Burke, 1937/1984, pp. 3-4, 20). Explicit in Burke's
theory of motives is a program of action, "since we form ourselves and judge others
(collaborating with them or against them) in accordance with our attitudes" (p. 92).
Burke divides frames into the polar categories of "acceptance" and "rejection," defining
a frame of acceptance as "the more or less organized system of meanings by which a
thinking man [sic] gauges the historical situation and adopts a role with relation to it"
(p. 5). Burke emphasizes acceptance frames, which enable people to feel "at home in"
empirical conditions (p. 35), rather than rejection frames, which structure inchoate
feelings of alienation and anomie for those who cannot or will not make themselves
feel at home.
In Burke's (1937/1984) schema, acceptance frames accomplish attitudinal adjust-
ment primarily through the recommendations of tragedy and comedy. The tragic
frame punishes human ambition, recommending that one resign oneself to one's limi-
tations and portraying good fortune as the first sign of punishment from the gods (p.
39). The comic frame also warns against hubris, but shifts the focus from evil to stupid-
ity, from "villain" to "tricked," from "hero" to "intelligent" (pp. 4-5, 41). Burke prefers
the comic frame because it promises to avoid the critical extremes of euphemism (that
is, transcendence away from social conditions) and debunking.
Comedy's traditional subject is "humanity in society," whereas tragedy treats
"humanity in the cosmos." When resignation is imported into the comic frame—as it is,
inherently, through irony—high tragedy and its actively positive conception of life as
heroic metaphysical failure risks transformation into a negative "comic" conception of
humans as passive losers in a fixed (social) game. There are clear signs that Burke him-
self succumbs to the strain; he often articulates the tension he feels in trying to main-
tain a comic frame in the face of what is, to him, the tragic reality of human society.
Although Burke (1935/1984) wistfully clings to his comic discount, he also notes that
the occasional inability to maintain a comic perspective on "this mighty drama still in
 22 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

progress" has its advantages for the strategic containment of unhappiness and thus the
acceptance of life: "Even if we are led to fear that this drama is essentially tragic, the
poetic metaphor reminds us that in a perfect tragedy there is "catharsis," hence we may
be heartened to inquire what form this catharsis may take" (p. 266).l9
Catharsis enacted in the socio-political realm is particularly problematic for Burke
because of its link to the rhetoric of the scapegoat. Originally, Burke (1935/1984) saw
scapegoating as an "error in interpretation" (pp. 14-17), an example of "faulty means-
selecting" (p. 15) or "trained incapacity" (p. 17) in which, for example, embittered
^Anglo-Americans attribute problems of the economic structure to the presence of Afri-
j can-Americans, or German Nazis attribute the same problems to the existence of Jews.
But, as dramatism became logology, scapegoating was transformed into an inherent ele-
I ment of human experience, the central means of managing the guilt that stems from
\ the human tendency to make and break covenants (Burke, 1961/1970, p. 172-241; also
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

see Conrad, 1984). In short, Burke had constructed a view of human beings which
made victimage inevitable and inherent, a conclusion that he (1963) found to be par-
ticularly unsettling. Seeking an alternative, a means of purification that did not lead to
enactment of victimage, he offered, in Language as Symbolic Action (1966), linguistic tran-
scendence:
Catharsis involves fundamentally purgation by the imitation of victimage. . . .
Transcendence is a rival kind of medicine. Despite the area of overlap, the dis-
tinction between the two is clear enough at the extremes. . . . Viewed as a
sheerly terministic, or symbolic function,. . . transcendence is: the building of
a terministic bridge whereby one realm is transcended by being viewed in terms ofa.
realm "beyond" it. (pp. 186-187)
However, the unintentional consequence of this comic solution, as Burke (1937/
1984) had recognized fully diree decades earlier, is that linguistic transcendence serves
to maintain a theory of symbolism that separates action from material structure:
One must erect a vast symbolic synthesis, a rationale of imaginative and con-
ceptual imagery that "locates" the various aspects of experience. This symbol-
ism guides social purpose: it provides one with "cues" as to what he [sic] should
try to get, how he should try to get it, and how he should "resign himself to a
renunciation of the things he can't get. . . We may find simply transcendence
on the part of an individual who attempts by his enterprise as symbolist to
bridge the gap between his private impulses and the social norms (his individ-
ual work becoming "universal" insofar as his audience shares his deviational
trend).... Since the transcendence of conflicts is here contrived by purely sym-
bolic mergers, the actual conflicts may remain, (pp. 179-180)
Thus, dramatism left Burke facing the same choices in the 1960s as his aesthetic
theory had left him in the 1930s. Inherent in frames of acceptance are the options of
transcending material conditions (aestheticism/euphemism) or railing against the sta-
tus quo (debunking). Scapegoating and debunking paradoxically function as accep-
tance frames in the socio-political realm. Because scapegoating is an ontological
process, and because the reductionism of science, technology, and behaviorism are
transformative tendencies which inhere in human beings' physiological/linguistic
nature, they will not be altered by debunking. But, because linguistic transcendence
focuses attention away from social and material conditions, it too generates, for all
practical purposes, an acceptance frame. Dramatism/logology offers a choice between
the Platonic Upward and Downward ways (Burke, 1945/1969, pp. 402-403), not a
means of analyzing their interpenetration. As Margaret Schlauch (1938) concluded
thirty years earlier, "forms of thought are given a position of primary importance in
 THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY 23

Burke's scheme of history, despite other passages which seem to disclaim this idealist
emphasis" (p. 130).
Transcendence in A Grammar of Motives, A Rhetoric of Motives, and The Rhetoric of
Religion. If the key term of Attitudes Toward History was "comedy," the key terms of
Burke's three major post-Depression works were "dialectic" and "transcendence."
Humans are "rotten" with perfection, imbued with an intrinsic motive to transcend
hierarchies of ideas, which simultaneously goad us toward further transcendence
(Burke, 1966, pp. 3-24; also see Heath, 1986, pp. 180-184). The basic agon of drama-
tism is the human need to confront the contradictions we face. If those contradictions
are not resolvable, a person has an innate tendency to construct "a 'higher synthesis,' in
poetic and conceptual imagery, that helps him [sic] to 'accept' them" (Burke, 1937/
1984, p. 92; also see Heath, 1986, p. 164). As Burke moved from dramatism to logol-
ogy—"words about words"—he extended his strategy of linguistic transcendence of
contradictory experience. Brock (1985) notes:
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

Essentially, Burke's dramatism as a method culminates with The Rhetoric of Reli-

gion in 1961 and Language as Symbolic Action in 1966 where his strategy of tran-
scendence upward toward "God" [the purely symbolic locus of human motives]
made the centrality of paradox and metaphor quite evident. However, as Burke
articulates a dramatistic philosophy, the strategy of downward transcendence
toward nature and "reality" is evident.... When Burke talks about taking state-
ments "literally" and the "literal" distinction between "motion" and "action,"
his central concern appears to be "reality" and his task is accounting for lan-
guage as a constant part of "reality." However, when Burke talks about "ambigu-
ity" and describes the transformation involved in making "distinctions,"
language itself seems his central concern and his task is to develop a method
for tracing all the potential and actual interrelationships of language involved
in interpreting the ambiguities in human perception (pp. 99-100,102).
In A Rhetoric of Motives (1950/1969), Burke describes "pure persuasion" as that sym-
bolic process through which identification becomes complete (pp. 267-294), a state not
attainable within a scene which is less than wholly linguistic. He also suggests that the
not-yet-published Symbolic of Motives would depict social actors as "purified," wholly
cooperative, and thus wholly separated from material conditions (pp. 22-23; see also
Rueckert, 1989, p. 252). Inherent in the nature of language, Burke repeatedly argued,
is the potential—entelechy—of linguistic transcendence (Burke, 1941/1973, pp. 37-39;
1950/1969, pp. 13-14; 1966, p. 200;). The purest form of linguistic action, religious
symbolism, operates in a realm that may borrow its terms from the material realm, but
employs those terms to affect purely symbolic transformations (Burke, 1961/1970, p.
7). By the time of A Rhetoric of Religion, Burke had reined language. As Chesebro (1992)
concludes,
In The Rhetoric of Religion, Burke has explicitly reported that a symbolic reality
can exist independently of and in sharp contrast to its material environment.
As he commented, "There is a sense in which language is notjust 'natural,' but
really does add a 'new dimension' to the things of nature. (Chesebro, 1992, p.
359; quoting Burke, 1961/1970, p.8. Also see Chesebro, 1992, p. 361)
By Language as Symbolic Action (1966), Burke had completed his shift to a view of
symbolic action as linguistic transcendence. Sociologist Michael Overington (1977b),
in an essay that Burke (1935/1984) praises in the afterword of the 1984 edition of Per-
manence and Change (p. 310), explains the significance of this development for a
Burkean social theory: Burke shifts from "a social psychological to a language-based
understanding of the social order" (Overington, 1977b, p. 134) so that his "slightly dil-
 24 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

ettantish combination of an interest-based pragmatism with a 'tentative Marxism'

[Brinton, 1937] evaporates as Burke directs his attention to the linguistic relations
among the terms of motivational orders" (Overington, 1977b, p. 137) .20
Just as transcendence is inherent in the nature of language, it is inherent in Burke's
ontology. Human beings are uniquely capable of acting, of making choices. But, in
logology, "act" is transcendent, purified of material conditions. Strikingly, the concept
of "pure act" developed in Burke's later work returns him to the aesthetic position that
he had tried to move away from during the 1930s:
Burke's is the spatially ubiquitous point of view of God—the space of freedom
itself—a historically uncoerced and unsituated understanding of the congeries
of interpretations that discerns their hidden principle of coherence, what all
conflicting interpretations aim at—a shared desire whose object, the full real-
ization of freedom in the stream of actual historical life, may be called "tran-
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

scendental." (Lentricchia, 1983, p. 58)

Logological definitions of human attitudes and purposes are similarly transcendent. In
a discussion of attitude as incipient act, Burke (1945/1969) notes that the descriptor
"incipient" can have alternative meanings: attitude as that which leads toward action
and attitude as a substitute for action (p. 236). Logology recommends the latter path,
not only in its analysis of art, but in its proposition that rhetoric provides a "poetic" solu-
tion for human conditions. Burke also uses the term "purpose" in two senses, one of
which is aesthetic, and the other of which requires an analysis of material conditions
that is external to dramatism/logology:
[There] the operation by which this [material] subtext has been constructed
remains essentially incomplete. We may indeed formulate a further principle
of ideological analysis as follows: the subtext must be so constructed or
(re) constructed as to constitute not merely a scene or background, not an
inert context alone, but rather a structured and determinate situation, such
that the text can be grasped as an active response to it. (Jameson, 1978a, p.
517)
Again, dramatism/logology offers a linguistic analogue for the paradox of the upward
and downward way: a choice between (a) the constancy of a purely linguistic realm
which is only reflective of material circumstances and (b) the instability, pain and con-
fusion of a material world. Because the two realms are related as a dualism, synthesis is
not possible. Instead, what Burke offers is an oscillation between linguistic transcen-
dence and a debunking of social structure. Brock (1985) notes that "Burke describes
'symbol-using' as a continual movement back and forth between the verbal (symbolic)
and nonverbal (reality)" (p. 96; also see Burke, 1966, p. 5). Overington (1977a) quotes
Abraham Kaplan to argue that Burke's symbol-use can be characterized by the same
kind of oscillation between the linguistic and the material realms:
"Burke explicitly declares his concern to be with the analysis of language, not
'reality.' But it remains doubtful whether he has in fact clearly distinguished
the two and successfully limited himself to the linguistic level" [citing Kaplan,
1970, p. 170]. Much of Burke's work shuttles between these two positions, and
the reader is not always clear whether a given analysis is addressed to terms
about action or to action itself. In practice, this unclarity beclouds the use of dra-
matism as a meta-method for talking about the explanatory (in his language, moti-
vational) terms of theories of social action, with its employment as a method (with
its own terms) for explaining social action, (p. 15)
As early as 1929, Burke was attempting to transform dramatism from an aesthetic posi-
tion to a theory of the relationship between symbols and society. But, ironically, his
 THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY 25

transformation of dramatism to logology returned him to his origins, as he suggests

that dialectics of transformation generally do. Logology left Burke the social critic with
only two choices—an aesthetics of transcendence or the polemics of debunking.

CONCLUSION
We have argued in this essay that theoretical paradigms which are grounded in a
dualism between action and structure inevitably force their adherents to (a) opt for
one pole and elide the other, or (b) oscillate between them via a conception of their
dialectical relationship. Because the transcendence/voluntarism/action pole leads the-
ory away from an analysis of material conditions, it cannot deal adequately with the
ways in which symbolic action produces, reproduces, and transforms material structure
or the ways in which structure serves as an impetus and constraint on action. Because
the debunking/determinism/structure pole invites a focus on the particular material
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

conditions which exist within a culture at a particular point in time, it leads at best to a
theory of morality, not a theory of society. For persons interested in developing a rhe-
torical theory of social action (or a social theory of rhetorical action),21 our analysis sug-
gests that we must begin at the beginning, with a view of the action-structure
relationship which is not grounded in dualism.
Fortunately, promising movements in that direction already exist. Henderson's
(1993) brief analysis of Burke's concept of transformation; Boor Tonn, Endress, and
Diamond's (1993) analysis of strategic de-habitualization of motion and habitualization
of action; and Tompkins and Cheney's (1993) promised reformulation of Burke's con-
ception of motives and re-contextualization of the pentad all may eventually lead to
valuable transformations of dramatism/logology. Future treatments of the action-struc-
ture relationship will make the greatest contributions to our understanding of the rela-
tionship between rhetoric and the problem of agency, however, if they have the
following characteristics:
1. They will not separate, even for the purpose of analysis, ideation and
praxis; instead providing an analysis of the active production, reproduc-
tion, and transformation of social structure. Consequently, they will ren-
der the concept of "false consciousness" nonsensical by locating sense-
making in symbolic action, not in cognitive interpretations of action.
2. They will replace the ontological assumption that human beings are
"choice-making animals" with a view that humans both act and are
moved, and that the former is entailed within the latter and vice-versa.
Such a perspective will allow for the analysis of the habitualization of
action and the de-habitualization of motion by treating them as coexten-
sive aspects of human experience, rather than as separate aspects of the
human psyche which may or may not be capable of being transformed
into the other.
3. They will not establish an epistemic dualism between the aesthetic/sym-
bolic and the social/political realms, but instead will propose either a
unity of the two or a duality between them.

NOTES
1
When applied to literary criticism, this concept implies that "sociohistorical reality does not cause a par-
ticular kind of literary response; it merely sets limitations upon the possibilities of response" (Henderson,
1993, p. 176).
2
See, for example, Giddens (1984, p. 219) and Whalen and Cheney (1991, p. 469). The action-structure
problematic also is at the heart of the "counter-discipline" of cultural studies, which interrogates the relation-
ship between culture (action) and society (structure). Its two major positions are described in Stuart Hall's
synoptic essay "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms" (1980). The "action" side, represented by Raymond Will-
 26 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

iams and popular culture scholars such as John Fiske and Janice Radway, explores the potentially liberating
effects of individual acts of cultural choice. "Structural" critics such as Stuart Hall and Lawrence Grossberg,
following Louis Althusser, critique the dominant forces of contemporary capitalistic society. For a taxonomy
of contemporary approaches to cultural interpretation, see Grossberg (1984). For an investigation of cultural
studies and symbolic action, see Beck and McCall (1990).
3
In "Auscultation, Creation, and Revision," written before Attitudes Toward History but not published until
1993, Burke equates the term "aesthetic" with the word "technical" and the word "practical" with the term
"social." We will return to this essay later in this article.
4
Recently Condit (1992) and Tompkins and Cheney (1993) have disagreed over the role that dialectic
plays in Burke's system. Condit argues that it is a substantive element; Tompkins and Cheney view it as a meth-
odology. Our view is that is both. For an extended explanation of the rationale for this position, see Fracten-
berg (1976).
5
Bhaskar (1979) provides a similar critique of Berger and Luckman's Social Construction ofReality.
6
Choice may be an inherent human characteristic, but sometimes it does not seem to be exercised—
human experience exhibits as much routinized and habitual behavior as it does conscious choice-making
(Clegg, 1989; Giddens, 1984). The processes through which individual actors first choose not to act
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

"humanly," and yet subsequently regain their choice-making ontology is not explained (Archer, 1982, p. 459;
Layder, 1985, p. 36).
7
There is a marked similarity between this view and the hierarchy of terms described in Burke's The Rheto-
ric of Religion (1961/1970, pp. 35-37).
8
For a discussion of why it is problematic to view symbolic action as merely reflective of material condi-
tions, see Fiske (1987); Galbo (1990/1991); Grossberg (1984). Fiske's position, strongly action-oriented, is
controversial: at the international culture studies conference held in 1990 at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, Fiske was accused of representing a "reductionistic pseudo-populism, which ventrilo-
quizes 'ordinary' people and panders to them by proclaiming reassuringly that they invariably 'resist' capital-
ist exploitation" (Rodden, 1990/1991, p. 10).
9
For example, the symbolism (as opposed to the deterministic "substance" of vulgar Marxist views of capital-
ism) of capitalist economics (Burke, 1993, pp. 106-109).
10
Frankly, we believe that the greatest potential for extending dramatism/logology lies in expanding/revis-
ing Burke's conception of symbolic transformation to encompass action-structure relationships within an
overall analysis of the problem of agency. Henderson (1993) gives us a start in that direction.
11
As with most of Burke's work, however, a different perspective sometimes does emerge. At one point
Burke (1966) complains of the human "temptation to become sheer automata," as illustrated in Spinoza's anal-
ysis of how humans become passive in the face of propaganda: "Man's [sic] involvement in the natural order
makes him in many respects analyzable in terms of sheer motion; but his powers of symbolicity give rise to
kinds of symbolic action that, by the same token, make him susceptible to corresponding kinds of servitude"
(pp. 59-60). Similarly, some of Burke's comments on religious symbolism seem to suggest an analysis of the
processes through which action produces, reproduces, and modifies structure:
Religion serves two functions that sometimes reinforce each other and sometimes are in conflict.
The one function is purgative, redemptive. . . . The other function is . . . the service of religion as
an instrument of social control. . . . Thus, often, to meet both tests, the cleansing of guilt must be
contrived in ways that reinforce the very assumptions on which the sense of guilt was based.... Cer-
tain principles of dramatization keep pressing for embodiment just as strongly in the psychoana-
lytic treatment of sick souls as in religion. Hence, if the psychoanalyst would become the complete
secular counterpart of the father confessor, he [sic] must not merely sweep away the assumptions
on which the confessant's sense of guilt was based. His catharsis must also, however roundabout,
serve to reinforce either these assumptions or the conditions that, however roundabout, reinforce
these assumptions, (pp. 351-352)
Even here Burke continues to verge on a consideration of the problem of agency. However, as we have sug-
gested, he does not do so.
12
Unfortunately, neither Henderson nor Tompkins and Cheney had sufficient space to develop their argu-
ments in detail.
13
Althoughwe endorse Jameson's critique of Burke (properly interpreted, of course), we do not accept his
alternative in toto. In attacking Burke for excessively deemphasizing material structure, Jameson himself may
well underemphasize the possibility of autonomous thought. We will examine Burke's treatment of these
issues in Attitudes Toward History, A Grammar of Motives, and A Rhetoric of Motives later in this essay. We begin our
analysis with Burke's colloquy with Jameson because the issues are more focused and clear in this dialogic
forum than in Burke's sometimes rambling prose.
Interestingly, Henderson (1993) has used Jameson's work as a basis for explaining Burke's merger of the
"aesthetic" and "practical" realm. We do not disagree with his analysis of similarities in their positions, but we
believe that the differences outlined directly in their conversations with one another are at least as illuminating.
14
Burke's seven definitions of ideology are (in paraphrase): (1) the study of ideas in themselves; (2) a sys-
tem of ideas aimed at political or social action; (3) any set of interrelated terms with political consequences;
(4) myth designed for purposes of governmental control; (5) a partial, and thus deceptive view of reality; (6)
 THE PROBLEM OF AGENCY 27

purposefully manipulated overemphasis or underemphasis in a discussion of ideas (of which, he implies,

Jameson [1978b] is guilty); and (7) an inverted genealogy of culture that treats ideas as primary rather than
derivative. See Burke(1950/1969), p. 104.
15
In the following section we will suggest that Burke is precisely correct in his assessment of the weakness
of his view of the relationship between action and structure—it lies in his "wavering" (we use the term "oscil-
lating") between a transcendent view of symbolic action and a deterministic view of material structure.
16
Perhaps it is merely ironic that the delayed publication of "Auscultation, Creation, and Revision,"
Burke's last published work, returns his readers to the issues that occupied him during the 1930s. Perhaps it is
more: if, indeed, endings and beginnings entail one another in forms that are complete (see Counter-State-
ment), this return to Burke's beginnings may identify the "essence" of his work.
17
Brock (1985) and others suggest a third transition, from epistemology to axiology. Unfortunately, space
limits preclude our examining this transition at length. For a summary see Conrad and Macom (1990).
18
For a more complete treatment of Burke's frames of reference and his moral philosophy see Macom
(1989).
19
Catharsis is a purging of emotion through aesthetic experience, which can occur for either the author or
the audience, but seldom for both. In Burke's aesthetic work his focus usually is on the experience of the
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

audience. From this perspective catharsis is accomplished through a structure which leads individuals "from
what to what" (Burke, 1941/1973, p. 82), a structure Burke links to "moral" action: "Must there not, for every
flight, be also a return, before my work can be called complete as a moral act?" (p. 160). Because catharsis
belongs only to tragedy, it should thus appear in Burke's comic frame only inadvertently, when the frame is
slipping toward tragedy. However, Burke (1966) reformulates the concept of catharsis when viewing contem-
porary culture or art. Calling it "ironically sympathetic contemplation" (p. 299), Burke imports catharsis into
his perspective, as he does with resignation, via irony. Where perfect comedy refreshes the audience for
future action in the world, comedy framed by irony, resignation, and catharsis awakens the higher emotions
only to satisfy them through linguistic consummation via an ironic and passive contemplation.
20
Overington's and Lentricchia's overall assessments of Burke's work, like our own, are strongly positive.
Of course, their analyses do not focus on the specific issues that we are addressing in this essay.
21
The authors are indebted to Phyllis Japp for this distinction.

REFERENCES
Abrams, P. (1982). Historical sociology. Somerset, U.K.: Open Books.
Announcement. (1929). TheDial, 86,90.
Archer, M. (1982). Morphogenesis vs. structuration. The British Journal of Sociology, 33, 455-483.
Barbalet, J. (1987). Power, structural resources, and agency. Current Perspectives in Social Theory, 8, 1-24.
Beck, H. S., & McCall, M. M. (Eds.). (1990). Symbolic interaction and cultural studies. Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press.
Bhaskar, R. (1979). The possibility of naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences. Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.
Boor Tonn, M., Endress, V. A., & Diamond, J. N. (1993). Hunting on trial: A dramatistic debate over tragedy,
tradition, and territory. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 79, 165-181.
Brinton, C. (1937, August). What is history? Saturday Review of Literature, pp. 304, 311.
Brock, B. (1985). Epistemology and ontology in Kenneth Burke's dramatism. Communication Quarterly, 33, 94-
104.
Brock, B., Burke, K., Burgess, P., & Simons, H. (1985). Dramatism as ontology or epistemology: A symposium.
Communication Quarterly, 33, 17-33.
Burke, K. (1931, December 9). Counterblasts on Counter-statement. New Republic, p. 101.
Burke, K. (1938). Twelve propositions on the relation between economics and psychology. Science and Society,
2, 242-249.
Burke, K. (1963). Thinking of the body. Psychoanalytic Review, 50(3), 25-68.
Burke, K. (1966). Language as symbolic action: Essays on life, literature, and method, Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press.
Burke, K. (1968a). Counter-statement. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1931)
Burke, K. (1968b). Dramatism. In D. Sills (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (Vol. 4, pp. 445-
451). New York: Macmillan.
Burke, K. (1969). A grammar of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published
1945)
Burke, K. (1969). A rhetoric of motives. Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work published 1950)
Burke, K. (1970). The rhetoric of religion: Studies in logology. Boston: Beacon Press. (Original work published
1961)
Burke, K. (1973). The philosophy of literary form: Studies in symbolic action (3rd ed.). Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press. (Original work published 1941)
Burke, K. (1978a). (Nonsymbolic) motion/(symbolic) action. Critical Inquiry, 4, 809-838.
Burke, K. (1978b). Methodological repression and/or strategies of containment. Critical Inquiry, 5, 401-416.
 28 THE SOUTHERN COMMUNICATION JOURNAL

Burke, K. (1983, August 12). Dramatism and logology [letter to the editor]. London Times Literary Supplement,
p. 859.
Burke, K. (1984). Attitudes toward history (3rd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work
published 1937)
Burke, K. (1984). Permanence and change (3rd ed.). Berkeley: University of California Press. (Original work
published 1935)
Burke, K. (1985). Dramatism and logology. Communication Quarterly, 33, 89-93.
Burke, K. (1993). Auscultation, creation, and revision. In J. Chesebro (Ed.), Extensions of the Burkeian system
(pp. 42-172). Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.
Chesebro, J. (1992). Extensions of the Burkeian system. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78, 356-368.
Chesebro, J. (1993). Preface. I n J . Chesebro (Ed.), Extensions of the Burkeian system (pp. vii-xxi). Tuscaloosa:
University of Alabama Press.
Clegg, S. (1989). Frameworks of power. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Condit, C. (1992). Post-Burke: Transcending the sub-stance of dramatism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 78, 349-
355.
Conrad, C. (1984). Phases, pentads, and dramatistic critical process. Central Slates Speech Journal, 35, 94-104.
Downloaded by [York University Libraries] at 08:30 03 March 2015

Conrad, C. & Macom, E. A. (1990, November). Rhetoric without Burke: Toward a rhetorical-critical theory of social
action. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the Speech Communication Association, Chicago.
Feehan, M. (1979). Kenneth Burke's discovery of dramatism. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 65, 405-411.
Fiske, J. (1987). Television culture. New York: Methuen.
Fractenberg, D. (1976). Kenneth Burke and the dialectical tradition. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Univer-
sity of Kansas, Lawrence.
Galbo, J. (1990/1991). An interview with John Fiske. Border/Lines, 20-21, 4-7.
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Outline of the theory of structuration, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Grossberg, L. (1984). Strategies of Marxist cultural interpretation. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 1,
392-421.
Hall, S. (1980). Cultural studies: Two paradigms. Media, Culture, and Society, 2, 57-72.
Heath, R. (1986). Realism and relativism: A perspective on Kenneth Burke. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press.
Henderson, G. (1993). Aesthetic and practical frames of reference: Burke, Marx, and the rhetoric of social
change. In J. Chesebro (Ed.), Extensions of the Burkeian system (pp. 173-186). Tuscaloosa: University of Ala-
bama Press.
Hicks, G. (1931, December 2). A defense of eloquence. New Republic, pp. 75-76.
Hindess, B. (1987). Rationality and the characterization of modern society. In S. Whimster & S. Lash (Eds.),
Max Weber, rationality and modernity (pp. 137-153). London: Allen and Unwin.
Jameson, F. (1978a). The symbolic inference; or, Kenneth Burke and ideological analysis. Critical Inquiry, 4,
507-523.
Jameson, F. (1978b). Ideology and symbolic action. Critical Inquiry, 5, 417-422.
Jay, P. (Ed.). (1988). The selected correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley, 1915-1981. New York:
Viking.
Kaplan, Abraham. A review of Grammar of Motives. In W. Rueckert (Ed.), Critical Responses to Kenneth Burke (pp.
169-173). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969. (Reprinted from Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, 1947, 5, 233-234)
Knights, D. & Willmott, H. (1989). Power and subjectivity at work. Sociology, 23, 535-558.
Layder, D. (1985). Power, structure, and agency. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 15, 131-149.
Lentricchia, F. (1983). Criticism and social change. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lukes, S. (1974). Power: a radical view. London: Macmillan.
Macom, E. A. (1989, April). Kenneth Burke, criticism, and the human condition. Paper presented at the Temple
University Conference on Discourse Analysis, Philadelphia.
Nelson, C. (1989). Writing as the accomplice of language: Kenneth Burke and poststructuralism. In T. Melia
and H. W. Simons (Eds.), The legacy of Kenneth Burke (pp. 156-173). Madison: University ofWisconsin Press.
Overington, M. (1977a). Kenneth Burke and the method of dramatism. Theory and Society, 4, 131-156.
Overington, M. (1977b). Kenneth Burke as a social theorist. Sociological Inquiry, 47(2), 133-141.
Rodden, J. (1990/1991). Cultural studies and the culture of academe. Border/Lines, 20/21, 8-12.
Rueckert, W. (1989). Rereading Kenneth Burke. In T. Melia and H. Simons (Eds.), The legacy of Kenneth Burke
(pp. 239-262). Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Rueckert, W. (1994). Encounters with Kenneth Burke. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Schlauch, M. (1938). Rev. of Altitudes toward History Science and Society, 2, 128-132.
Tompkins, P. (1985). On hegemony—"he gave it no name"—and critical structuralism in the work of Ken-
neth Burke. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71, 119-130.
Tompkins, P. & Cheney, G. (1993). On the limits and substance of Kenneth Burke and his critics. Quarterly
Journal of Speech, 79, 225-231.
Whalen, S. & Cheney, G. (1991). Contemporary social theory and its implications for rhetorical and commu-
nication theory. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 77, 467-479.
Woodcock, J. (1977). An interview with Kenneth Burke. Sewanee Review, 85, 704-718.