Burkean & Dramatistic Rhetoric

Kenneth Burke (1897-1993) was one of the most original and prolific thinkers in 20th-century rhetorical theory. Over a career spanning six decades and more than a dozen major works, he developed a comprehensive philosophy of language and human action; what he called "dramatism"; that fundamentally reoriented rhetorical theory. Where classical rhetoric had focused on persuasion in public life, Burke broadened the scope to include all symbolic action, all uses of language to induce attitudes and cooperation, and all the ways in which human beings use symbols to identify with; and divide from; one another.

Burke's work is dense, allusive, and frequently brilliant. Its central contributions; the concept of identification, the dramatistic pentad, and the theory of terministic screens; remain among the most productive analytical tools in contemporary rhetorical criticism.

Identification: Beyond Persuasion

Burke's most influential contribution to rhetorical theory is his recentering of the discipline around the concept of identification rather than persuasion. For Aristotle, rhetoric was defined as the art of persuasion; the use of available means to bring an audience to a conclusion or action. For Burke, this was too narrow: persuasion is only possible because of the prior condition of identification; the sense of shared substance, shared interests, shared identity; that makes an audience receptive to a speaker in the first place.

"You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his," Burke wrote in A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). Identification is not a single technique but a pervasive dimension of all communication; the way in which speakers make themselves recognizable to audiences, appeal to shared values and experiences, and create the common ground from which persuasion becomes possible.

Significantly, Burke noted that identification always implies its opposite: division. To identify with one group is implicitly to distinguish oneself from others. The rhetoric of social identity; the way in which political leaders, advertisers, religious communities, and social movements construct "us" and "them"; is, in Burkean terms, a rhetoric of identification and division. Contemporary analysis of political polarization, tribal identity, and in-group/out-group dynamics is essentially Burkean analysis.

The Dramatistic Pentad

Burke's dramatism is built on the observation that all human action is symbolic; that what distinguishes human beings from mere animals is their capacity to act through and within systems of symbols. The key analytical tool for understanding symbolic action is the dramatistic pentad: five terms drawn from drama that Burke proposed as the fundamental categories for analyzing any human act.

• Act; what is done; the event or deed itself
• Scene; where and when it is done; the context and background
• Agent; who does it; the person or persons responsible
• Agency; how it is done; the means and instruments
• Purpose; why it is done; the motive or goal

The pentad's analytical power lies not in the five terms themselves but in the ratios between them; the way in which different kinds of discourse emphasize different relationships between pentadic elements. A discourse that explains events primarily in terms of scene (the situation made them inevitable) has a different explanatory strategy than one that emphasizes agent (they made a choice) or purpose (they had a motive). These different emphases constitute different arguments about causation, responsibility, and meaning.

Political rhetoric makes constant use of pentadic emphasis: conservative discourse tends to emphasize agent (individual responsibility), while progressive discourse tends to emphasize scene (structural conditions). Neither is inherently correct; both are strategies for directing audience attention and framing causal explanation.

Terministic Screens

Burke's concept of terministic screens; developed in Language as Symbolic Action (1966); extends the dramatistic insight into a theory of how language shapes perception. The central claim is that any system of terminology is simultaneously a way of seeing and a way of not-seeing: every set of terms selects certain features of reality for attention, deflects others from attention, and reflects a particular orientation toward the world.

Burke's famous example is photographic: the same scene photographed through different color filters produces different images. None is false; all are selective. The same principle applies to language: calling a disputed territory "occupied" selects for attention the perspective of those who view the existing authority as illegitimate; calling it "administered" selects for a different perspective. The "war on drugs" terminological screen selects very different responses than a "public health approach to drug dependency" screen; not because the facts change, but because the terminology shapes how those facts are perceived, categorized, and responded to.

Terministic screens analysis is among the most powerful tools in contemporary rhetorical criticism precisely because it directs attention to the prior framing choices that make particular arguments possible; and make other arguments difficult to articulate or hear.