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Dramatism and logology

a
Kenneth Burke
a
154 Amity Road, Andover, NJ, 07821
Published online: 21 May 2009.

To cite this article: Kenneth Burke (1985) Dramatism and logology, Communication Quarterly,
33:2, 89-93, DOI: 10.1080/01463378509369584

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 I Dramatism and Logology
Kenneth Burke
In this essay, Kenneth Burke re-examines his distinction between dramatism
and logology which he proposed in 1968, Dramatism is treated as a technique
for analyzing language as a mode of action in which specialized nomencla-
tures are recognized, each with particular ends and insights. Logology is cast
as the study of the knowledge acquired by the human being's aptitude for
learning communication. Implications for the rhetoric-as-epistemic question
conclude this discussion.

KEY CONCEPTS Kenneth Burke, dramatism, logology, ontology, episte-

mology, symbolic action, rhetoric.
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KENNETH BURKE (154 Amity Road, Andover, NJ 07821) lectures frequently at colleges
and universities throughout the United States. Certain sections of the first part of this essay
appeared in TLS: The [London] Times Literary Supplement, August 12, 1983, p. 859.

I
n a recent essay (1983), Robert M. Adams examines my theory of language.
While I am grateful to Adams for the generous allotment of space to
"Reasons for Reading Kenneth Burke," his review contains one error of
fact. He notes that I "first" called my theory of language " 'dramatistic' and
then baptised it 'logological.' " Adams says that "both these terms are
Burkean coinages."
I did give dramatism its special meaning, a meaning now formally specified
in Webster's Third New International Dictionary as "a technique of analysis of
language and of thought as basically modes of action rather than a means of
conveying information" (1965, p. 685). But for "logology," the Oxford English
Dictionary (1971, p. 403) records two eighteenth-century theologicalusages,
"the doctrine of the Logos" (referring to Christ as "the Word" in the Book of
John). And though "rare," as early as 1820 there is a secular meaning, "the
science of words," synonymous with "philology" (I confess at first I did think
that I had invented the term.)

The Distinction
This might be the place to explain why two terms for the one theory.
Though my aim is to be secular and empirical, "dramatism" and "logology"
are analogous respectively to the traditional distinction (in theology and
metaphysics) between ontology and epistemology. My 1968 "Dramatism"
article (in The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences) features what
we humans are (the symbol-using animal). Logology is rooted in the range and
quality of knowledge that we acquire when our bodies (physiological orga-
nisms in the realm of non-symbolic motion) come to profit by their peculiar

Communication Quarterly Vo\. 33, No. 2, Spring 1985, Pages 89-93 89

 aptitude for learning the arbitrary, conventional mediums of communication
called "natural" languages (atop which all sorts of specialized nomenclatures
are developed, each with its particular kind of insights).
Logology entered as a necessary term in connection with my work "on the
words and the Word" in The Rhetoric of Religion (1970/1961, pp. 7-42).
There my pages on St. Augustine's conversion from "word merchant" as a
teacher of pagan rhetoric to his ecclesiastical role as a Preacher of the
Christian Word get me to the centre of the distinction between the "creativi-
ty" of God's verbal fiats in the first chapter of Genesis and the fact that any
new verbal distinction, if but by virtue of its novelty, is to that extent
"creative." Here the two definitions of "logology" (the theological Word of
the eighteenth century and the secular words of 1820) are by analogy one.
In his Biographia Literaria (the last footnote of Chapter IV), Coleridge
observes that, "When two distinct meanings are confounded under one or
more words . . . men of research . . . having discovered the difference [may]
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remove the equivocation, either by the substitution of a new word or by the

appropriation of one of the two or more words, that had before been used
promiscuously" (1907; p. 63). And "When this distinction has been so
naturalized and of such general currency that the language itself does, as it
were, think for us . . . we then say, that it is evident to common sense.
Common sense, therefore, differs in different ages" (p. 63). (Surely among the
most notable of Coleridge's many notable footnotes.)
This principle would apply far beyond such "desynonymising" as Cole-
ridge proposed with his distinction between "imagination" and "fancy." It
would apply to any new word for anything, since any such word would be
"creative" as a verbal discrimination added to some "universe of discourse"
and not there until language puts it there. The word may designate some
"object" or "process" that owes not its actual imputed existence, but only our
awareness, to the name for it. The new nomenclature that guided the
inventing of the atomic bomb did not by creative fiat produce the atomic
energy that was absent from the universe of common sense as summed up in
the opening chapters of Genesis.
Further thoughts on logology as an epistemology suggest a perspective
along these lines: Surrounding us wordy animals there is the infinite wordless
universe out of which we have been gradually carving our universes of
discourse since the time when our primordial ancestors added to their
sensations words for sensations. When they could duplicate the taste of an
orange by saying "the taste of an orange," that's when STORY was born, since
words tell about sensations. Whereas Nature can do no wrong (whatever it
does is Nature) when STORY comes into the world there enters the realm of
true, false, honest, mistaken, the downright lie, the imaginative, the visionary,
the sublime, the ridiculous, the eschatological (as with Hell, Purgatory,
Heaven, the Transmigration of Souls, Foretellings of an Inevitable wind-up in
a classless society), the satirical, every single detail of every single science or
speculation, even every bit of gossip—for although all animals in their way
communicate, only our kind of animal can gossip. There was no story before
we came, and when we're gone the universe will go on sans story.

90 Communication Quarterly Spring 1985

 This distinction provides a base for related observations regarding the
rhetoric-as-epistemic question.

Implications
As I see it, the relation between ontology and epistemology, from the
standpoint of my terminology, is most quickly stated thus: My "Dramatism"
article (1968) is ontological. It stresses what we are: the symbol-using animal. I
call logology epistemological because it relates to the initial duplication that
came into the world when we could go from sensations to words for
sensations. The nature of language is such that our words for sensations can be
developed analogically (as per my section on Bentham on fictions and
Emerson on the figurative use of terms for natural conditions, whereby nature
supplies us with a source from which we could develop a vocabulary for the
"spiritual." My article, "(Nonsymbolic) Motion/(Symbolic) Action" (1978),
cites Bentham and Emerson together. But Emerson can make the account
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"transcendental" by having God give us Nature to help us have a start for our
spiritual nomenclature. The discriminations that we make by language consti-
tute our realm of knowledge, thus being epistemological.

Rhetorica Utens and Rhetorica Docens

The distinction between poetry and poetics has no corresponding distinc-
tion in rhetoric, except by distinguishing between rhetorica utens and rheto-
rica docens. It would correspond to the distinction between an oration and a
manual on oratory.
When Cicero designates, as the three offices of the orator, "to inform, to
please, to move (or bend)," he's talking about the oration as the use of devices
to get the audience to go in his direction with regard to some policy or
decision—to persuade. Information can be used to that end; and by the same
token, astutely doctored misinformation can help if it is believed in. Tricks that
build the orator up as a nice person, as witty, as chatty, and so forth,
contribute to the "pleasing" office. Devices for raising the audience's emo-
tions contribute to the office of "moving" them attitudinally in the desired
direction. In my Rhetoric (1950), I suggest that, with regard to Longinus' On
the Sublime where he is quoting both poets and orators as grand literary
examples of such diction, we get the point better by our expression, "how
moving!" when we're not responding to the diction by deciding to do this or
that or the other, but by simply "appreciating" the passage as a literary
gesture.
The sermon in Joyce's Portrait of the Artist is the imitation of a genuine
oration, designed to so move its auditors by the fear of Hell, as "information"
about what suffering is in eternity, that they'll be moved to be good. But in the
book, this is used as a poetic device. It entertains us. Yet, every such
development in that book serves as an analogue of the Bible's relation
between story and doctrine—it adds up to a BIBLE OF AESTHETICISM, with
corresponding story to match its doctrine.
As for rhetoric as a form of knowledge, any bug can contribute to the

Communication Quarterly Spring 1985 91

 science of entomology if it helps fill out a theory such as Darwin developed
about evolution. Along Freudian lines, the stupidest dreams of the dullest
person can be a contribution to knowledge. And the same goes for what we
might learn by systematically analyzing any rhetorical text and subjecting it to
modes of analysis we consider informative. In my Rhetoric of Religion (1961), I
viewed theology as both a statement of what is (an ontology) and a mode of
persuasion (i.e., a rhetoric), with its corresponding sub-rhetorics when we
turn from sermon to sermon or from papal Bull to papal Bull). Insofar as I
succeeded in my analysis, my observations would fall technically or methdo-
logically under the head of knowledge. And episteme being the Greek word
for knowledge, we're on the slope of "epistemology," which means words, in
the sense of reason, about knowledge.
There is rhetoric like an oration (utens). There is rhetoric like a treatise or
manual on oratory (docens). And, there is rhetoric like the analysis of one
particular work or figure and/or its use.
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Rhetoric in Particular and Language in General

Much of what has been attributed to rhetoric in particular is more
appropriately attributed to language in general. The notion of language in
general in shaping the human animal's "orientation" (notion of "reality" and
behavior accordingly) would encompass a wider field than rhetoric. It would
include "science" even beyond the "sociology of rhetoric," or notions of
human motivation-in-general (which I would classify with philosophy as in the
realm of "first principles").
The Afterword, "In Retrospective Prospect," added to the new edition of
Permanence and Change (1984/1935), distinguishes four loci of motives:
First, there is the locus of motives associated with our nature as physiological
organisms. Second, there is the realm of motives peculiar to symbolism in its
own right. Third, there are "magical" or "mythic" aspects of language, owing
to the fact that it has been learned in a period of "infancy" (speechlessness)
that is also physiologically the least mature stage of our existence.... A fourth
locus of motives is implicit in the formula, since language stimulates the kind
of attention and communication that make possible the gradual accumulation
and distribution of instrumental devices (inventions by humans in the role of
homo faber). (Burke, 1984/1935, pp. 295-296)
The epistemology of the situation would be quite near to the Kantian
pattern, though without his "transcendental" nomenclature. The body
receives, via the senses, reports of the surrounding world. When these
sensations are backed by words, the range of interpretations is increased
greatly, since the modes of human intercourse add suggestions and criticism
which the individual would not have thought of by him/herself. Every course
in the curriculum of a university adds discriminations of one sort or another to
extend our "knowledge." We know first-hand our contact with the earth
outside us, but the whole of geology is a realm of public knowledge
systematized by words. In that sense, sensation arid words for sensation, plus
their analogical properties, give us the groundings of interpretation we call

92 Communication Quarterly Spring 1985

 "epistemology." The rhetorical use of what Aristotle calls "topics" (literally,
"places") presents versions of such situations, processes, and relationships as
are best designed to argue for any policy, judgment, etc. The version of such
reality can be deliberately faked, or at least put in the best light; but even if it is
totally frank and honest, it is necessarily selected, to be most relevant, etc.
This would constitute the role of information in aiding persuasion. Symbolic
action in general involves its use for persuasion (rhetoric); for first principles
(philosophy, theology, beliefs, or speculations of some sort about what our
human condition is); for the spread of information (science); for love of the art,
the exercise of symbolic action for its own sake (poetics). The practice of
rhetoric can lead to new knowledge because the doing or experiencing of
anything can lead to new knowledge.
I should add: As attested in these paragraphs, the "magical" aspects of
language are not confined to the "mythic." Every new distinction is in effect a
'let there be' added to some universe of discourse. And the treatment of
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'identification' in my Rhetoric of Motives deals with considerations which the

astounding Rhetoric of Aristotle was not concerned with.
REFERENCES
Adams, R. M. (1983). Reasons for reading Kenneth Burke: The dance of language [Review of Kenneth Burke
and the drama of human relations], TLS: The [London] Times Literary Supplement, pp. 715-716.
Burke, K. (1950). A rhetoric of motives. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Burke, K. (1968). Dramatism. In D. L. Sills (Ed.), International encyclopedia of the social sciences (pp.
445-452). New York: Macmillan/The Free Press.
Burke, K. (1970). The rhetoric of religion: Studies in logology. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
(Original work published in 1961)
Burke, K. (1978). (Nonsymbolic) motion/(symbolic) action. Critical Inquiry, 4, 809-838.
Burke, K. (1983, August 12). Dramatism and logology. TLS: The [London] Times Literary Supplement, p.
859.
Burke, K. (1984). Permanence and change: An anatomy of purpose. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press. (Original work published in 1935)
Coleridge, S. T. (1907). Biographia literaria (1965 ed.). London: Oxford University Press.
Oxford English Dictionary. (1971). London: Oxford University Press.
Webster's Third New International Dictionary. (1968). Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam.

Communication Quarterly Spring 1985 93