Dramatism (communication studies theory)

Overview

Dramatism is an interpretive communications theoretical framework developed by literary theorist Kenneth Burke (1897–1993). While dramatism was developed as a theory of interpersonal communications, one in which individuals are understood as actors performing on a stage and guilt is the foundation of emotion and motive, it has also been applied to literature, popular culture, film, politics, and other areas. Fundamentally, dramatism is a framework for discussing interactions among people in terms of the underlying motives of the individuals involved.

Burke was one of the most influential, intellectual, and ultimately unconventional literary theorists of the twentieth century. In his work he interrogated the nature of knowledge and advocated for approaches to literature that considered the impact on the reader of elements outside the text, such as the historical and social context of the text or the life of the author. Influenced by the intellectual giants of the late nineteenth century—Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thorstein Veblen—he was part of a wide circle of thinkers and writers that included William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Malcolm Cowley, and Robert Penn Warren, and influenced Erving Goffman, Susan Sontag, Clifford Geertz, and Edward Said, among many others. Most of his work focused on rhetoric, beginning with his division between "old rhetoric" (the classically informed view of rhetoric as centered on persuasion) and "new rhetoric" (the twentieth century construction of rhetoric as driven by identification). Burke's definition of rhetoric is the use of words to form attitudes or induce actions in others, which is slightly different from simply "persuasion": rhetoric can be employed to motivate people to take specific actions or to adopt a point of view, but also simply to feel a certain way.

Dramatism constructs social interactions as performances by actors whose actions are driven not only by their motives but also by certain limits, demands, or conditions associated with their scene (the circumstances in which the interaction transpires) and the means available to them (or agency). Burke posited not only the basic principles and characteristics of dramatism, but also a set of ratios, or relationships, between the five main aspects of his Dramatistic Pentad. While some of the theorists who followed Burke treat the dramaturgical language of his theory as a metaphor—Erving Goffman, the foremost sociologist of the twentieth century, is the most influential example—Burke himself was insistent that dramatism is literal, that individuals involved in a social interaction are actors assuming a role that they perform on a stage.

Burke is focused on language—both the language spoken in social interactions and the language used to describe social interactions. His dramatism is not a framework for understanding all human activity—it does not (in most cases) shed any light on a man tripping over the threshold when walking through a doorway, or swatting at an insect that has just bit him, even though both of these actions may involve agency and purpose. If the man blames someone for forgetting the insect repellant, though, or attempts in vain to look graceful while tripping in front of his date and proceeds to nervously change the subject to something more flattering, those are interactions that dramatism can help to understand.

Further Insights

Burke's Dramatistic Pentad is a list of five areas of inquiry when considering any social interaction:

• Act: What actions are taken in the interaction?
• Scene: Where did the interaction occur?
• Agent: Who took the action(s)?
• Agency: How did the agent take that action?
• Purpose: Why did this interaction occur?

The Pentad is influenced by Aristotle's four causes (material, formal, efficient, and final), and similar to the "who, what, when, where, why, and how" of journalism. It serves as a checklist of sorts: a complete description of a social interaction will include answers to all five areas, but it will also apprehend the manner in which these elements work together. In a later edition of Grammar of Motives (originally published, 1945; second edition, 1955), Burke added a sixth area: Attitude, the agent's preparation for the act. Despite the sixth element, it is common to continue to refer to the model as the Pentad. Visual representations of the six-element Pentad usually depict a five-pointed star with Attitude off to the side, with a line connecting it to Agent.

The relationship between the areas or points of the Pentad can be discussed in terms of ratios—the lines connecting the points of the Pentad. There are ten ratios, though some theorists double this number by including their reversals (e.g., Act-Agent as well as Agent-Act):

• Agent-Act, in which certain kinds of people do corresponding certain kinds of actions;
• Agency-Agent, in which the tools (means) available to an actor influence their character;
• Agency-Scene, in which a situation is impacted by the available means of action;
• Scene-Purpose, in which a person's motives and intentions are influenced by their situation;
• Purpose-Act, in which someone's intentions drive their actions;
• Act-Agency, in which an intended action determines the appropriateness of the means to take that action;
• Scene-Act, in which the setting or circumstance influences the action taken;
• Agent-Purpose, in which a person's character reveals something about their motives;
• Scene-Agent, in which setting influences a person ("you can take the boy out of the city but you can't take the city out of the boy");
• and Agency-Purpose, in which the means of action available influence the intentions of actions taken.

Burke primarily discusses the Scene-Act and Scene-Agent ratios. In keeping with Burke's general approach to theory, he demonstrated ratios using examples both within literature and outside it. For example, the military proverb, "Terrain determines tactics," meaning that there is no effective tactical approach that can be designed that is terrain-neutral, is an example of the scene-act ratio: The terrain of a military engagement is its scene (where the interaction occurs), while tactics refer to the proposed actions that will transpire in that scene, and which moreover are dependent on the characteristics of that scene. "Terrain determines tactics" and the scene-act ratio are two frameworks that can be used to examine the same concern—the relationship between physical setting and military strategy.

Other ratios offer other frameworks. Burke offers as an example the way that scene-act or "terrain-tactics" has traditionally been used to discuss the failed German invasion of Russia, which could alternately been framed in act-agent terms, in which what is discussed are the respective character traits of the Germans and Russians and their impact on the actions taken.

Act-agent is a familiar ratio throughout both formal schools of theory and informal discussions of the world: it is the ratio that examines actions taken in terms of the characteristics (e.g., traits, dispositions) of the actor who takes them. This is the ratio that most closely adheres to what the layperson may think of when encountering the word "dramatism" or "dramatistic": the framework that considers actions in terms of the motives and nature of the actors. It is an approach we intuitively take to our interactions with other people, whether wondering what about a person led him to do what he did, or forecasting what "a person like that" will do.

Burke refers to "the ubiquity of ratios," alluding to the way that people have always examined interactions within the frameworks of dramatism, without having that specific vocabulary to describe such examinations. This is one place where his Freudian influence is clear, too—while much of Freud's work dealt with pathologizing certain kinds of human behavior because he approached it within a therapeutic, treatment-oriented framework, much of his thought on psychology (especially the aspects which influenced literary theory) deals not with mental illness, trauma, or unhealthy behavior, but rather the mechanisms of human thought, behavior, and development, and especially the understanding that human behaviors and personalities do not emerge from a vacuum but are created and motivated by both internal and external factors.

Issues

"Identification" has a specific meaning in Burke's discussion of rhetoric and dramatism, discussed at length in his A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). Identification—the process of identifying one party with another—is a key process in rhetoric, because in order for the listener to be persuaded by the speaker, he must identify with the speaker, or in some sense with a party involved in the speaker's argument. While empathy can be involved in identification—as with arguments that explicitly appeal to emotion, asking "imagine yourself in X position, wouldn't you want Y conditions?"—Burkean identification also refers to the process of identifying one external party with another, such as assigning group membership to an individual based on specific traits (e.g., "That person voted Democrat, so they must believe these things that I perceive Democrats to believe").

In 1956, Erving Goffman—widely considered the most important sociologist of his century—built on Burke's dramatism by introducing the "dramaturgical self" in his Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Presentation was an extended analysis of the concept of dramaturgy in sociology, in the same way that Burke had applied it to rhetoric, and expanded rhetoric to include human interaction as a whole. Like Burke, Goffman uses the metaphor of the theater, positing human interactions as performances people put on, on a stage constructed and constrained by their surrounding culture. The dramaturgical self is the self that is displayed on the stage—this performance need not be consciously thought of as performative, but performers are usually aware of many of the specific social constructs that call for specific kinds of performance (i.e., that expect people to exhibit behavior within specific constraints, regardless of whether this behavior is authentic to them): etiquette, manners, specific rituals and ceremonies in which roles are rigidly defined (e.g., wedding ceremonies, appearing in court in any capacity, singing "Happy Birthday"), and the social norms of specific scenes (work versus dinner at a restaurant versus relaxing at home, as well as the nuances of differences between the norms of behavior in one's own office compared with those of a work meeting or an office party or of dealing with a coworker compared with dealing with one's boss).

In Goffman's framework, identity is not a stable, independent aspect of the individual which is revealed or hidden to varying degrees depending on context; it is something that is constructed, or performed, in different scenes informed by different contexts. Social actions are taken with the intent of leaving the audience with a specific impression, which some sociologists call impression management.

Goffman divides social interactions into three metaphorical regions: the front stage, which is the most public-facing region, in which the actor's performance is guided by social conventions and expectations regarding public behavior; backstage, where the actor feels he can let down his guard and do or say things that would not be possible (or accepted by the audience) in front stage performances; and outside or off-stage, where individual actors can meet individual audience members in a context distinct from the collaborative performance of the stage. Much of the work on these dramaturgical regions discusses ritual and semiotics. Key to understanding the differences among the regions is Goffman's contention that in any performance, the performer is holding something back, concealing something from the audience, or actively deceiving the audience. Individuals may assume different roles based on their relationship to the information in the performance. For example, a mediator who facilitates communication between performing teams may have access to the concealed information of both; a "shill" is a performer who is publicly performing the role of an audience member while actually participating in the performance. One of the debates that has engaged the sociology community since Goffman's work is over the extent to which the dramaturgical self is a theoretical framework for examining behavior, or whether it is paradigm of behavior along the lines of the symbolic interactionist paradigm (which describes human society as small groups interacting according to their interpretation of cultural symbols). In either case, it is an example of microsociology: the study of behavior on a small scale, between individuals or groups, rather than the behavior of entire societies and institutions.

Dramatism can examine human behavior at a variety of scales. The Goffmanesque study of the dramaturgical self is only one example. Of similar scope but different emphasis is the dramatistic study of social relationships: the use of the dramatistic framework to discuss the roles actors assume in their relationships with others, how gender is constructed dramatistically, and what actors are seeking in their various relationships. Dramatism is also used as a framework for studying "organizational dramas," or the dramaturgical nature of social interactions within organizations and the role of drama in establishing (and reinforcing) both explicit and implicit social hierarchies within those organizations. Politics, too, is fertile ground for dramatistic examination, whether the messaging and semiotics of political advertising, the roles assumed in political campaigns, the dynamics among actors within a specific political scene (e.g., a campaign trail debate, a town meeting, a policy briefing, a press conference), or the dramatism of formal diplomacy, in which Goffman's reminder that acting involves withholding information is especially relevant.

While not all who followed Burke agreed with him on this, in Burke's formulation, the redemption or purging of guilt is the foundation of all rhetoric, and thus the underlying motive of all social drama. "Guilt" here has a broader meaning than "shame resulting from one's real or perceived wrongdoing," and encompasses embarrassment, anxiety, disgust, and most negative feelings. Human interactions are attempts to purge, reduce, or avoid these feelings. Consider the examples above of the man tripping over the lintel or being bitten by an insect: He deals with these negative emotions (embarrassment, discomfort) through social acts, in the first case with a performance that is meant to distract from or displace the perception the audience has developed of him, and in the second case by scapegoating and blaming his discomfort on another actor.

Bibliography

Anderson, Scott. (2021, Aug. 21). Diagramming dramatism: Hell or High Water and the guilt-purification-redemption cycle. Communication Teacher, 36(30), doi.org/10.1080/17404622.2021.1970786

Bygrave, S. (2015). Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and ideology. New York: Routledge.

Canel, M. J., & García Gurrionero, M. (2016). Framing analysis, dramatism and terrorism coverage: Politician and press responses to the Madrid airport bombing. Communication & Society, 29(4), 133–149. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=118902976&site=ehost-live

Crable, B. (2000). Defending dramatism as ontological and literal. Communication Quarterly, 48(4), 323–342. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=5035758&site=ehost-live

Jacobs, L. J. (2017). Burke's dramatism framework: A lens to analyse bullying. BCES Conference Proceedings, 15, 195–201. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=123236737&site=ehost-live

Järvinen, M., & Miller, G. (2014). Selections of reality: Applying Burke's dramatism to a harm reduction program. International Journal of Drug Policy, 25(5), 879–887. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=98358316&site=ehost-live

Kirk, J. W. (2017). Dramatism and the theatre: An application of Kenneth Burke's critical methods to the analysis of two plays. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

Mroz, G., Papoutsi, C., & Greenhalgh, T. (2020). From disaster, miracles are wrought: A narrative analysis of UK media depictions of remote GP consulting in COVID-19 pandemic using Burke's pentad. BMJ Journals, 47(3), doi.org/10.1136%2Fmedhum-2020-012111

Rutten, K., & Soetaert, R. (2015). Attitudes toward education: Kenneth Burke and new rhetoric. Studies in Philosophy & Education, 34(4), 339–347. Retrieved May 23, 2018 from EBSCO Online Database Academic Source Ultimate. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=asn&AN=103188175&site=ehost-live

Weiser, M. E. (2007). Burke and war: Rhetoricizing the theory of dramatism. Rhetoric Review, 26(3), 286–302. Retrieved March 15, 2018, from EBSCO Online Database Education Source. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eue&AN=26053769&site=ehost-live