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Burke’s Pentad as a Guide for Symbol-Using Citizens

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Abstract

Ever since the rhetorical turn in education, education scholars have recognized the importance of rhetoric in constructing and mediating human society. They have turned to rhetorical theory to come to terms with this rhetorically mediated reality and to engage students as critical citizens within it. Much of this work draws on rhetorical theorist Kenneth Burke, but much of Burke’s work remains unexplored in this area. We argue that his theories can be part of a user’s guide to educate students about rhetoric’s function in society, to educate them about the opportunities and pitfalls that rhetoric brings. In this essay, we offer his dramatistic pentad as part of this larger user’s guide. The pentad identifies the logical elements of action and provides a model that explains the “grammar of motives”. It also provides a method for analyzing statements of motives, which rhetorical critics have long used to describe and explain strategic constructions of motives. Although the pentad is relatively easy to teach and to understand, its application to particular discourses can reveal complex relationships among the elements of action, laying bare their operation within the grammar of motives. We claim that the pentad offers lessons for students to engage with important societal issues, lessons about the limitations of any one construction of motives and how to overcome those limitations.

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Notes

  1. We do not have the time and space here to address Biesta’s philosophical concerns about the limitations of a discursive focus as relying on a problematic scheme-content relationship. Charles B. Guignon (1991) provides a thoughtful discussion of the problem and a hermeneutic response to it we find useful. Additionally, although Burke could be described as language-centric, rhetorical scholarship branches far beyond studies of language. We would point to work on nonverbal rhetorics, such as visual rhetoric (e.g. Dunn 2011; Cloud 2004; Johnson 2007) and even a burgeoning field of museum exhibit rhetoric (e.g. Zagacki and Gallagher 2009; Lynch 2013; Gross 2005).

  2. Such awe of symbol-use is consistent throughout Burke’s writings. He claims in other works that humanity’s linguistic nature leads to large societal problems such as the Holocaust and the Cold War (Enoch 2004, p. 274; The Rhetoric of Hitler’s “Battle” in Burke 1973).

  3. We recognize the irony involved in a theory that purports to explain the ambiguity and rhetorical subterfuge of language, and the constructedness of reality, to itself claim a foundation and a universality. Indeed, even seasoned Burke scholars have missed this foundationalism in Burke while reveling in the way he unpacks the pretensions of various philosophic idioms (see Rountree 2010). And we do not raise the point here to pick a fight with those whom we are happy to see raising Burke as a champion. But, we must stress, as Burke does, that an understanding of the functioning of human symbolizing requires a recognition of the commitments we make to the power of language, and that power is real, a consequence of humans in society with their “bodies that learn language.”

  4. Note that Burke’s key term in A Rhetoric of Motives is “identification,” rather than “motive.” However, throughout the book he shows the relationship between the Grammar’s concern with the “substance” of motives and identification’s strategies of making different people “consubstantial,” sometimes through a shared recognition of actions as evincing particular motives.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Communication Arts, 342 Morton Hall, University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, AL, 35899, USA

    Clarke Rountree

  2. Department of Communication, 1113B Twenty Five Park Place, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, 30307, USA

    John Rountree

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  1. Clarke Rountree
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Correspondence to John Rountree.

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Rountree, C., Rountree, J. Burke’s Pentad as a Guide for Symbol-Using Citizens. Stud Philos Educ 34, 349–362 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-014-9436-1

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