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- TRAINED INCAPACITY AND COMIC CORRECTIVES
Kenneth BurkeKenneth Burke was a prominent literary and social critic who focused on the use of rhetoric by speakers and the way rhetoric was used strategically to affect audiences. His doctrine is very marxist and anti-scientific in nature. He was born in 1897and began school only to drop out in 1918 finding it too constraining. His first several books were written as literary and social criticisms without any cohesive project in mind. They do include some interesting argumentative tools however, such as the idea of trained incapacity, which we will be exploring. In 1945, he began a trilogy of books on rhetorical interpretation that he called Dramatism by writing A Grammar of Motives. This was followed in 1950 with A Rhetoric of Motives. These two were to be followed by a third called A Symbolic of Motives, but he had lost interest in the project by then and moved on to working on The Rhetoric of Religion which dealt more with his new interest in the power of words as ultimate terms. In the early seventies, he renewed his attacks on the use of technology and how it appeared to be dominating humanity’s definition of its own ends. He started to spend time reworking his older projects before dying in the early nineties. What criteria might be necessary for finding a single word that summed up Burke’s whole project? One might suggest ‘motive’ since it appears frequently, and is found even in the title of two books he wrote and one he intended to, but I don’t think this sums up Burke’s project for getting at motives. For that, we need a word that that can be used in place of the grammar of motives, or the rhetoric of motives, or the symbolic of motives. The one word that best describes the process of getting at the grammar, rhetoric, and symbol of motives is ‘Dramatism.’ Our first reason for this might be that it best gets at the concept of the motive. “The titular word for our own method is ‘dramatism,’ since it invites one to consider the matter of motives in a perspective that, being developed from the analysis of drama, treats language and thought primarily as modes of action” (A Grammar of Motives xxii). Burke has a need to separate the concept of motion from that of action. In motion, physical forces alone move something. In action, a will is involved in creating the movement. There is a motive behind the movement that is created by the will. The confusion of these two things is referred to as the pathetic fallacy. The pathetic fallacy that occurs when motion and action are confused has the impact of dehumanizing the actor by implying that his or her motives are physical motion instead of purposeful action. Thus, dramatism is an important label for Burke’s project because it creates a separation between Burke’s project and others such as science that might see motives as motion and not as action. Dramatistic analysis leaves room for the will, while science might blot it out as just physical motion. Our second reason for using dramatism is that it best fits with the other terms developed by Burke for analysis of human beings. In A Grammar of Motives, Burke establishes the pentad for analysis of action. His introduction refers to the pentad as “The Five Key Terms of Dramatism” (Grammar xv). The terms themselves (act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose) are suggestive of watching a drama. It is clear that in using these as his key or most basic terms of analysis, Burke intends his project to be defined in a word as the dramatistic. Finally, we might suggest that this is the most fitting term because Burke’s dramatistic pentad was made as a grounding for the later works. After writing about the coming works on the Rhetoric of Motives and the Symbolic of Motives, Burke writes that “we found in the course of writing that our project needed a grounding in formal considerations logically prior to both the rhetorical and the psychological” (Grammar xviii). It is the dramatic pentad that forms the grounding for all of the rest of Burke’s project. Since it is the dramatic that is the basis from which we get at the motive and at people as symbol using animals, we should think of the ‘dramatic’ as the word best fitting Burke’s whole project. TRAINED INCAPACITY AND COMIC CORRECTIVESLet’s assume some debater was debating policy for two years and then this debater’s partner quit. Now, our debater will have to make a transition into LD debate. Unfortunately, after two years debating policy, our debater has picked up some bad habits, talking too fast for example. This is what Burke calls trained incapacity. When you learn to do things a certain way, you are simultaneously learning how to be incapable of doing them certain other ways. This is especially useful for criticizing social theorists. For example, Burke applies this to his fellow marxists. They have learned to explain all social degradation in terms of the economic. The obvious problem with this is that they are incapable of conceiving other notions of problems or other ways to fix them. But how can someone who’s trained as a marxist break out of this trained incapacity? Since a marxist has learned to think of things in the economic, how can the marxist possibly see his or her way out of thinking this way? The marxist isn’t just going to assume everything he or she already believes is already wrong. Burke’s solution to this problem is a comic corrective, the foremost of them is called perspective by incongruity. Perspective by incongruity means to make an interpretation of something that is the complete reverse of what common sense or standard reason would tell you. Then look for ways that the perspective by incongruity could be correct as a means of opening up new perspectives. What Burke chiefly wants to avoid here is the danger of taking ideas to an extreme. Even perspective by incongruity can go too far. Another common danger Burke guards against is the rebunking of an idea shortly after the debunking of that same idea. For example, let’s look at post-modernism. Post-modernism attempts to defeat reason by critically analyzing its presuppositions. It supposes that one cannot have any kind of a cohesive or objective truth, only subjective interpretations. At this point, post-modernism has debunked reason. The problem comes after this at the point that post-modernists attempt to fill the void they themselves have created by appealing to the same objective standards they just attacked. They do this by attempting to show that there are ‘contextual’ realities that are created by a community standard in which most everyone is involved. This is rebunking. A hypocritical abuse of argument has occurred in which the post-modernist make him or herself the victim of the same attack that post-modernism was subjecting other ideas to. 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