Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives, 1950–1955. Kenneth Burke
and making specific observations about it, along the lines previously indicated. As regards the relation between individual texts and social motives in general (poetic “beauty” as seen in terms of social tensions), we aim to indicate how the work reflects, and “cathartically” transforms for aesthetic purposes, the “pyramidal” motives of the social order, by the tragic symbolizing of a “perfect” victimage. We lay special stress upon the Negative here, because of its relation to the ethical (which characteristically heads in such negatives as the Decalogue). In the third section we seek to round out our concerns by indicating how the symbolizing of perfect victimage relates to a purely technical kind of perfection (the “entelechial” principle that we consider natural to the genius of language).
I
We would spin this discussion from Cicero’s terms for the “three offices of the orator.” (See Orator, De Oratore, and St. Augustine’s use of this alignment for his analysis of Christian persuasion in his De Doctrina Christiana.)
First office: to teach or inform (docere). Second office: to please (delectare). Third office: to move, or “bend” (movere, flectare).
Thus instead of beginning with a theory of “signs,” and looking for ways to “expand” it into a theory of “symbols,” we begin with terms that assume the full ‘‘emotionality’’ of speech. 7
The first office (docere) would be the indicative or scientific function of speech, its relation to matters of knowledge. The third office (movere) would be the persuasive or rhetorical function of speech, its use to arouse in an auditor some attitude that implies a desired kind of act or acquiescence in a desired kind of policy. The second office, to please or entertain (delectare), must, for our purposes, be redefined.
In its simplest guise, the “entertainment” aspect of an orator’s speech corresponds to the fiction in a popular commercial magazine. The fiction is nominally of the “art for art’s sake” sort. But it functions rhetorically to assemble an audience which the rhetorical advertisements can then address as prospective customers. Similarly, an orator who is trying to persuade an audience to some decision or attitude must find ways of keeping his audience sufficiently amused so that they will continue to be an audience (though the purpose of his address is not to amuse them, but to enlist them in some “cause”). For the purposes of this paper, however, the “second office” must be greatly expanded beyond so rudimentary a notion of the pleasurable.
The first and third offices concern elements outside the address. (The first is, at least ostensibly, concerned with information about nonverbal “reality”; and the third is directed toward the moving of the auditor to attitudes with practical consequences which, it is hoped, will prevail after the speech is over.) But we would expand the second office in keeping with a principle of internality.
Insofar as a work is appealing through the laws of its resources as a medium, we would treat such appeal as a function of the second office.
Man being the typically language-using species, there is for him an intrinsic delight in the sheer exercising of his distinctive characteristic (language, or symbol-using in general). This delight in itself is not addressed either to “reality” or to “the auditor.” It is a delight in the internal consistency of a symbolic structure as such (in such a spinning-out-of-itself as Santayana calls the distinguishing mark of dialectics).
Aristotle, it will be recalled, had divided up the field of rhetoric somewhat differently. He distinguished not three offices of the orator but three kinds of oratory: the deliberative (as with debates on public policy); the forensic (as with pleas in the law courts); and the epideictic or demonstrative (concerned with matters of praise and blame). The third would probably have included such modern variants as a publicity man’s attempt to “build up” his client in the public imagination. A patriotic oration delivered at a celebration of Independence Day would be a closer approximation.
The nearest overlap between Aristotle’s way of carving up the field and Cicero’s is the area where Aristotle’s category of the “epideictic” or “demonstrative” overlaps upon Cicero’s second office. The overlap becomes more obvious when we think of oratory in decay. The decadent Athenian orator, for instance, might deliver an oration in praise of his beloved’s cosmetics; or the decadent Roman orator might delight his audience by improvising a trick-laden oration on a topic called out to him from the audience. And you could, as you prefer, class such toying with the medium for its own sake either as an instance of the second Ciceronian office or as an instance of Aristotelian epideictic.
(Indeed, precisely when such oratory is in decay its condition may best reveal the delight in the linguistic forms as such. Whereas the formal devices were invented for the purposes of intense persuasion, a weakening of moral urgency brought strongly to the fore the cult of sheer formality. When men had nothing much to say they could still enjoy the purely internal exercise of the saying.)
Over and beyond the profound significance of the reference in Spinoza’s Ethics, the work has appealed to men because it “dramatizes” the principle of internal development. Spinoza’s proposal to spin his demonstrations more geometrico from a limited number of definitions and axioms was a very entertaining gesture. All cogent argument has an appeal of this sort, the appeal of symbolic structure developing from its own internal resources, in accordance with its own principles. But in Spinoza’s case the principle of internality was more than merely formal, it was challengingly formalistic. Considered as rhetoric, it was a kind of stylistic “conceit”; and in this sense it meets the requirements of Cicero’s second office (though, of course, only for readers who can find such a difficult device of exposition “entertaining”).
The often-heard statements that mathematics is “elegant,” or that the solving of problems in physics can be “beautiful,” or that there can be something “aesthetic” in “science,” would seem to involve our proposal for widening the scope of Cicero’s second office to include this sheer delight in symbolic unfolding for its own sake (a delight one could expect of an animal species whose every attainment and every misfortune strikingly shows the results of its symbol-using fury).
Science, as knowledge or information, would obviously belong with the first office. But in its nature as expression for its own sake a scientific exposition would be like a “poem.” Indeed, though scientific utterance is primarily indicative, “descriptive,” it can also be analyzed secondarily as either poetically expressive or rhetorically hortatory; similarly, even “pure” poetry can be analyzed secondarily as “scientific information” or as “rhetorical propaganda”; and rhetoric has both its measure of “truth” and its measure of “poetry.” (In his treatise On the Sublime Longinus shows us how, once the urgency of the occasion is past, an orator’s attempts to move an audience to practical decisions involve formal devices that can be enjoyed for themselves, as pure appeals to the “imagination.”)
In sum, arbitrarily assigning to the letters svid the meaning “a loathsome person,” if one says, “Mr. Q is a svid” not just because he is but because one wants the auditor to loathe him, one is using the term rhetorically. If one says “Mr. Q is a svid” not because he is, or because one wants people to loathe him, but just because one takes delight in vituperation as such, then one is using the term poetically (as sheer exercising of the linguistic medium). If one says “Mr. Q is a svid” purely because Mr. Q is actually deemed loathsome, one is using the term scientifically, indicatively. And the test of this usage would be in the fact that one could accomplish one’s purpose as well, if not better, by a “neutral” paraphrase, as were one to add, “And by a ‘svid’ I mean a person deemed loathsome by persons who may or may not be justified in their judgment.” Though a complete absence of attitude is probably impossible, a typical scientific expression can at least point in that direction, whereas rhetorical expression will seek to make the attitude as intense as is deemed proper to the desired practical (“external”) result, while poetry will seek to make the attitude as intense as is deemed proper to the desired “aesthetic” (“internal”) result.
Such a purely “aesthetic” aim can greatly contribute to “science” (or perhaps, more properly, to “philosophy,” science in the sense of “wisdom” rather