questions for 2/3/09

#1. Now I am all for drama in its various forms played out in the arts but I am not too sure about the dramatism. I understand the need to pull am audience into an imagined reality – a reality that asks us to connect with the actors, to feel their pain or happiness, to experience their struggles out of poverty or their fall from the top. We are asked to love them, hate them, but most of all identify with them. Even if we have had no prior experience (script) to guide us through the different acts of our new slice of life, each of us have gone in the span of two hours from being an individual to being a universal “we”.
This sounds good on the surface. Empathy, compassion, and a sense of right and wrong – the ability to feel justified when the hero wins out or injustice when helpless victims are preyed upon is a great gauge of a person’s moral fiber.
But I am not so sure that I want to agree with all of the assertions made in regards to the importance of dramatism as Burke lays them out. As is stated in Professor Philpott’s essay, Turning Tragedy into Triumph, “dramatism argues that the essential goal of effective contemporary rhetoric is constructing an alignment between and among audience and speaker based on shared qualities embodied in the symbols used in the discourse (“identification”).” This mirrors Burke’s argument “that 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.”
As I was reading this passage my thoughts were turned towards cult groups or groups of the outer fringes of society which tend to feed on their audiences’ fears. Fears which have weakened their morale or resolve. Fears which have allowed a victim mentally to crop up into their everyday lives. Fears which do nothing more than allow a pit of hate and loathing towards those they feel are getting preferential treatment (minorities), taking jobs away from them (illegal immigrants), or who may be contributing to what they perceive as an erosion in the moral fiber of our country (gays and lesbians).
Many cult leaders are well skilled highly charismatic rhetors who since they prey on people whose mental capacities may have been eroded via depression or a feeling of hopelessness are geniuses at recruiting initiatives into their hate mongering institutions through the ploy of identification “by invoking symbols and rhetorical patterns whose value is shared by the audience – whose members share a sense of identity.”
So my question is: the KKK just recently killed one of their own initiates because the 19-year-old decided against becoming a member of this particularly inclusive group. Do you think that he was killed due to the fact that the other members recognized that he was turning his back on their “shared sense of self”? And that the KKK could not allow their doctrine to be ingested and then spat back out at them – would his “turn coat” ways have cast an even longer shadow on the organization which still espouses its hate against African Americans but which cannot allow its members to stand in the light of day? Thus, throwing this particular groups consubstantial notions into the wild, for those of us, who are more enlightened, to pick clean.

#2. As I was reading another part of Professor Philpott’s essay I came across the section Rhetoric and Situation: The Strategic Transformation of Experience. In this section Philpott is explaining Burke’s theory of “symbolic action” which states that “rhetoric succeeds in modifying or adjusting situations by transforming interpretations of the situation and of ourselves.
This particular theory really hit home to me especially when I started to think about how we like to define or put everything into specific categories so that we are able to better deal with our everyday life. “Thus, the names and labels used to describe events contain an understanding of those events and of both the rhetor’s and audience’s relationships towards the situation’s features,” explains Philpott.
I agree with this perception because if it were not true than people would not feel the need to define themselves or others in terms of what do you/they do? Upon meeting a new person that is probably one of the top ten questions asked. Until recently when I was asked what do you do I would normally tell people that I was a server but that I was going to school. I am not very proud of the fact that I am in my mid-thirties and until recently have been working in a restaurant as my main source of income. I felt ashamed and as if people were going to look down on me – due to the general populations perception of restaurant workers. I always felt the need to qualify my occupation with the fact that I go to school.
Now I am able to say that I work in E-commerce which I feel is more “respectable” and more in line with where I feel I should be at this stage in my life. I never wanted people to see me as a waitress I never wanted to define myself in this way – so it always caused tension in my everyday sense of self. Even causing me to feel as if I were a failure.
However, as the section goes on I am validated in the knowledge that “naming is inherently an act of renaming, and serves to define the event and proper reactions to the situation: the human process of symbol using integrates, shapes, and controls both external and internal realities.” Thus, “understanding of both situations and of ourselves is continually transformed through rhetorical responses.”
Does anyone else feel this way in regards to how they feel people are sizing them up and perceiving who they are as people based on their career choices?
#3 This will be a short question. In Kenneth Burke’s Philosophy of Literary Form he argues that strategy is performed in many various forms – one being realism. He states that the author may forget that realism is an aspect for foretelling. Instead the author may do one of two things: 1. “he may take an ill digested philosophy of science, leading him to mistakenly to assume that “relentless” naturalistic “truthfulness” is a proper end in itself”, and 2. “a merely competitive desire to outstrip other writers by being “more realistic” than they.”
He goes on to talk about the American people having no shortage of rhetorical situations, and the recurrence of such situations – “singles out a pattern of experience that is sufficiently representative of our social structure, which recurs sufficiently often for people to “need a word for it” and to adopt an attitude towards it.”
Some of our more contemporary “authors” have tried to trademark common phrases which were used more as a catch-phrase to further their own economic gains – such as Donald Trump on The Apprentice with his “You’re Fired” slogan. Trump’s bid was not successful. However, basketball coach Pat Riley was successful when he trademarked his catchy phrase “threepeat” which helps the American population easily reference the accomplishment of winning three championships in a row.
So I guess my question is this: If language/words are the domain of the entire speaking world how is it possible or even ethical for a very elite portion of the population to be able to lay claim and potentially make money off of what is the only commodity which is truly free?