CHAPTER 1
EXTENDING THE BURKEAN SYSTEM ONLINE
Introduction: Internetworked Symbolic Action
This work is an extension of the Burkean system into the domain that I have called
“internetworked symbolic action.” It is organized under the aegis of Dramatism, the name Burke
gives to his analytical and critical approach to language, literature, rhetoric, and social
interaction. Before Searle elaborated upon illocutionary and perlocutionary acts in his speech-act
theories; before anthropologist Blumer developed his approach to “symbolic interactionism”;
before the Reagan administration attempted to bring down the political center of the Soviet
Union not by creating a “Star Wars” missile defense system, but by openly planning such a
system – by simply talking about it; before all of these extensions and variations of concepts
rooted in the same philosophy and science as are the elements of dramatism, Kenneth Burke was
working out his idea of the rhetorical and linguistic, or “logological,” implications of the
Freudian approach to language as symbolic action:
By “symbolic action” in the Dramatistic sense is meant any use of symbol systems in
general; I am acting symbolically, in the Dramatistic sense, when I speak these sentences
to you, and you are acting symbolically insofar as you “follow” them, and thus size up
their “drift” or “meaning.” (LSA, p. 63).
Burke’s landmark monograph, A Grammar of Motives, is in a sense the psycho-rhetorician’s
dream-text: an attempt to provide a road-map for dissecting, analyzing, and critiquing the ways
in which human beings talk (and write) about “what people are doing and why they are doing it.”
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The work builds upon Burke’s conviction that, as “symbol-using, symbol-making, and symbolmade” animals, humans as a species tend to conduct – and construct – a large portion of their
lives in the symbolic; because of this, our symbol-systems as means by which we act (and
interact) can be seen as the products of our own impulses: of our motives. On the other hand,
Grammar and its companion volumes, A Rhetoric of Motives, The Rhetoric of Religion, and
Language As Symbolic Action, can often be viewed as a rhetorician’s nightmare. “Doing
Burkean analysis” is much more than “doing dramatism,” much more than “using the pentad.”
G.S. Fraser (1965) describes the body of Burke’s work better than anyone else:
…if one’s mind, say, were a carpenter’s work-table – he offers one a new tool, suggests
half a dozen different ways of using it, points out that it can be used to shape plastics as
well as to carve wood, disappears for half an hour to come back with two or three
completely different tools, and in the end one’s table is so cluttered with fascinating
gadgets that one has to clear the wood off it to make room for the tools; there is a
suggestion in his manner also that one might well give up carpentry and take up
something else. (p. 366)
With Burke’s works representing such an amazing, magical mystery tour of carpentry, this
extension of the Burkean system onto the internet should be seen as a small tool-kit, an
organized but by no means full Black & Decker “starter set” of terms and concepts based upon
Burkean systems for rhetorical analyses and critique of internetworked symbolic action.
Starting with motive rather than with rhetorical frameworks such as genre, topics of
invention, logic, or style is conceivably a backwards approach. As logologists, as “word people,”
we usually start with the symbol, and work our evidentiary way toward suspected (but rarely
proven) motives. And yet as computer networked technologies create textual and virtual
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“worlds” and environments, we find ourselves sifting through texts that are not fixed in codex
form, and we often fear that we will work our way logologically toward intentional fallacies. In
the world of “computers and writing” as it is called, the verdict has not (and may never) come
down. In terms of the pedagogy, history, study, and practice of rhetoric, computers are neither
good nor bad. They have not yet completely “infantilized” us as Jacques Ellul feared, but neither
have they created Howard Rheingold’s once hoped-for “open frontier” of freedom,
egalitarianism, and capital wealth. In this study of internetworked symbolic action, the goal is to
seek out stated motives, suggested motives, and acts surrounding motives by means of extending
the Burkean system, not as social, moral, literary, philosophical, or political critique, but rather
as a way of demonstrating that these things can be done by means of extending Burkean
concepts and lines of thought into analyses of online communications technologies, and more
importantly, the many unpredicted – and unpredictable – uses people make of them. Specifically,
I am arguing that beginning not with the technology questions alone, such as “what can the
machines do?,” and “How can we make them do it better?” is counterproductive in the sphere of
human interaction and human symbolic action. Rather, I propose that “getting at motives” first,
or asking “what are people doing, and why are they doing it?” is the more fruitful and rich –
perhaps even more practical – approach to studying what I have called “internetworked symbolic
action.”
Getting at motive, the source of human action (“purposive motion”), is one possible key
to a rhetoric, to systematizing and analyzing symbols-in-action around us. In A Grammar of
Motives, Burke organizes his rhetorical theory of Dramatism into five terms: Act, Agent, Scene,
Agency, and Purpose:
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Our five terms are “transcendental” rather than formal (and are to this extent Kantian) in
being categories which human thought necessarily exemplifies. Instead of calling them
the necessary “forms of experience,” however, we should call them the necessary “forms
of talk about experience.” For our concern is primarily with the analysis of language
rather than with the analysis of “reality.” Language being essentially human, we would
view human relations in terms of the linguistic instrument. Not mere “consciousness of
abstracting,” but consciousness of linguistic action generally, is needed if men are to
temper the absurd ambitions that have their source in faulty terminologies. (GM, p. 317)
This study is heavily influenced by the Grammar, a critical exploration in which Burke
privileges and foregrounds “Act” – what people are doing – by creating what he calls “ratios,” or
pairings of terms of the pentad that appear with astounding reliability within human explanations
of “what we are doing and why we are doing it.”
Burke’s ratios are not always well-understood (with good reason), and rarely explained
with ease, in part because the terms are – as Burke repeatedly tries to explain – not formal, even
though in attempting practical applications of the pentad one feels forced, at least to a certain
extent, to formalize them. Thus, when Burke refers to a “scene-act” ratio, some readers are
tempted to work from a conscious or unconscious form of mathematical equation:
“scene ÷ act = motive” or “scene + act = motive”
However, Burke is not doing this at all. The range and type of relational possibilities between the
two terms is large, springing from among other things classical rhetoric, philosophy, semiotics,
and psychology. For example, the “act-scene ratio” as an “equation” is rather sterile (and can be
critically employed in flat and sterile ways), yet Burke reminds us that relational patterns
between and among the terms of dramatism are far from limited to “term-plus-term.” His
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discussion of the act-scene ratio reveals substantial thematic and ideological themes in a text
because “act” and “scene” in literature and in the human mind are not lumped side-by-side, but
are juxtaposed and entangled in various ways. Burke suggests that one productive dramatistic
approach to constructing ratios is to consider terms such as “scene” and “act” as “container and
thing contained”:
Using “scene” in the sense of setting, or background, and “act” in the sense of action, one
could say that “the scene contains the act.” And using agents” in the sense of actors, or
acters [sic], one could say that “the scene contains the agents.”
(GM, p. 3)
The “agent-scene” ratio is one in which events or acts are explained (and subsequent motives
identified) by means of examining a person and his or her circumstances, such as a particular
personality (agent) in the office of the presidency, in the role of prison guard, or as a stock yard
wrangler (scene). Even these examples are oversimplifications of Burke’s system, but they are
evocative enough to illustrate the literary, linguistic, and social possibilities for commentary and
critique inherent in the ratios. They provide a rich and provocative framework in which to
construct rhetorical analyses and arguments.
This study assumes internetworked symbolic action as act qua act to be explored in terms
of motive, and moves from there. My pairings are admittedly presumptuous “extensions” of the
Burkean ratios. They privilege Agent, the human half of the human-computer interface. The
“sites” or mental and physical locations of internetworked symbolic acts, whether
serendipitously or by some unconscious design, do have meaningful and even striking
correspondence with the terms of the dramatistic pentad. The five sites of interaction – usermachine, user-screen, user-task, user-purpose, and user-user – are in direct alignment with the
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terms of the pentad. I might have called these sites “agent-agency,” “agent-scene,” “agent-act,”
“agent-purpose,” and “agent-agent,” except that instead of considering the terms as elements of
explanatory ratios, the scope here is to name them as “sites” or loci of focus, mental and
sometimes physical “places” where humans and computers come together to act, to perform
symbolic action, and in the case of internetworked computers, to create internetworked symbolic
action.
Burke’s lifelong journey into the mirrored caves of logology – his term for the study of
language as symbolic action – can be traced through his works and the subsequent
metatheoretical studies and extensions of his systems. And what a long, strange trip it has been,
from the kind of counterrevolutionary, deconstructivist project taken up by postmodernists in
earnest decades after he left it behind, into a project of building, reinforcing, furnishing, and
maintaining an enduring collection of rhetorical approaches, tools, and systems of investigating
ourselves, the symbol-using animals.
Perhaps we should call them “counter-systems” -- I have tried to involve and fold into this study
the spirit and thrust of his ideas on rhetoric and social interaction with a focus on motive and
human symbolic action as they occur on the internet. It is as yet a growing, changing, infantmewling, confusing jumble of electronic signs and symbols awaiting systematic themes and
roadmaps for classification and evaluation of its many phenomena. The assumption here is that
Burkean approaches to internetworked symbolic action are enlightening and helpful tools for
critics, theorists, and practical applications of internet tools and texts, in industrial, educational,
and social arenas.
Kenneth Burke’s relevance to the study of internetworked writing is exciting and
complex. Burke’s lifelong pursuit of logology has left us with a rich legacy, an omnium
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gatherum, of conceptual frameworks and provocative ideas about language, about symbolsystems, and symbol-using. He was suspicious of technology – the offspring of the 20th Century
worship of science – and yet he recognized that language itself is a kind of technology. Because
of this, and in spite of this, his ideas will serve us well in our search for ways to explore the
question of motive and various forms and forums of internetworked language and symbol-using.
In his essay on “Kenneth Burke’s Conception of Reality,” Dale Bertelson (1993) points
out that Burke attempts to reconcile the idea that humans, who experience a huge portion of their
perceived lives as performed and understood through “symbolic action,” must also understand an
“animal, biological” world in which their bodies dwell. Bertelson reminds us that in “Mind,
Body, and the Unconscious,” and again in “The Thinking of the Body,” Burke argues that
epistemological man must negotiate a compromise between the biological “real” world, and the
subjective “symbolic” world. In this study it is important that this facet of Burkean approaches to
texts and human events be made explicit. For although the initial development of this approach
concentrated upon internetworked texts, was based in Burke’s concepts of dramatism as laid out
in A Grammar of Motives and elaborated in A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke’s wider views of
humans as symbolic and physical “creatures” are of crucial importance to contemporary
discussions of electronic texts and the motives of users who develop and use the powerful new
computer-network technologies to transmit and exchange symbols, images, signifiers and signs.
It is understood that various kinds of social and transactional discourse have carved out “virtual
places” in today’s Wide Area Networks (WAN), yet the bulk of these are still textual places and
spaces, made up of messages written and read by their creators and participants. In “Definition
of Man,” 1 for example, Burke elaborates upon the importance of symbol-systems in the human
subject-position and cognitive construction of “reality”:
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Take away our books, and what little do we know about history, biography, even
something so “down to earth” as the relative position of seas and continents? What is our
“reality” for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this
clutter of symbols about the past combined with whatever things we know mainly
through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? . . . And however
important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced firsthand, the whole
overall “picture” is but a construct of our symbol systems. To meditate on this fact until
one sees its full implications is much like peering over the edge of things into an ultimate
abyss. And doubtless that’s one reason why, though man is typically the symbol-using
animal, he clings to a kind of naïve verbal realism that refuses to realize the full extent of
the role played by symbolicity in his notions of reality. (1966)
Although Burke’s argument here centers “symbolicity” in the hard copy, paper-published word,
this study will discuss ways in which Burkean concepts and approaches to written discourse
extend and enrich our examination of electronically transmitted symbols. In addition, where the
forms of electronic data and information are bundled with images and sound, this study will
consider visual and aural components of the “message” to be within the scope of the “symbolusing” transactional and interactive functions of language 2 For as electronic technologies have
expanded into the modern educational, professional, and personal lives of Western civilization,
our perception, processing, and understanding of “reality” is fed largely by a combination of
digital images and sound glued together in various ways by “scripted” – written – narratives,
guidelines and commentary (Welch 1999).
In Life on the Screen (1995), social psychologist Sherry Turkle works toward, within, and
in support of the same post-Freudian, postmodern, Lacanian interpretation of the decentralized
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conceptualization of mind and of self embraced by Burke. In concluding a brief description of
the evolution of modern psychological understanding of the “self,” Turkle remarks,
Lacan insisted that the ego is an illusion. In this he joins psychoanalysis to the
postmodern attempt to portray the self as a realm of discourse rather than as a real thing
or a permanent structure of the mind. (Turkle 178)
If we can accept the Burkean human self as “a realm of discourse,” or perhaps, as Barbara
Biesecker implies (Addressing Postmodernity 1997), an evolving realm of discourses moving
through time, the idea of “virtuality” and the phenomenon of “virtual selves,” “virtual spaces,”
even “virtual reality” – the term often used to refer to computer-networked online shared texts,
images, and sounds – gains a kind of logical credence as an extension of “logological man”
worthy of exploration from within our understanding of Burke’s ideas of symbolicity and human
action/interaction.
Burke and Technology: Human Action vs. Machine Motion
Nowhere else in the history of writing and reading has there been such a moment of
potential confusion between the human act of using/making symbols to convey meaning, and the
machine motion of producing the visual, artifactual/textual product of that act. There were,
however, previous moments of dissonance and amazement between humans and other machines
of communication, as Sarah J. Sloane illustrates with her reference to Sitting Bull’s shock upon
discovering that the telephone, an instrument “invented by a Scotsman,” could actually transmit
messages back and forth in his native Sioux language (49). What I refer to is something different
from the admittedly culture-shifting moment that revealed to a Native American that the machine
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against his ear was transmitting – as opposed to emitting – sound. Although Sitting Bull takes
a moment to adjust his view of the newfangled machine’s capabilities, he never misunderstands
the source of the sounds he hears – he knows that they are not originated in the telephone, but in
the person who is talking to him from Cannonball River, 25 miles away. In other words, Sitting
Bull quickly gathers is that he is not talking to the phone, he is talking to Mrs. Parkin by means
of the telephone. As I will illustrate anecdotally later, there is evidence that internetworked
writers are capable of losing their sense of the computer as mere instrument between themselves
and other writers, instead characterizing the text generated from afar as a function of the machine
itself. In other words, aside from the relative anonymity of role-play, “screen-names” (or
nicknames), and textual “aesthetic distance,” the detachment of textuality coupled with the
immediacy of real-time symbolic interaction may, for some users, produce a kind of confusion or
conflation of the machine and the disembodied, text-based “other.” In a bizarre twist of Walter
Ong’s (1978/1994) famous claim that “the writer’s audience is always a fiction,” evidence from
further studies of online textual interaction may indicate that even when that audience is writing
back, in real-time, some writers may be capable of fictionalizing that audience despite its
responsiveness, even characterizing it as automated, simply by virtue of its physical, pixellated
appearance as text-only, on the computer screen.
Especially in personal (as opposed to commercial or educational) interchanges,
internetworked writers seem capable of muddling non-reflexively in between what Roland
Barthes (1982/1994) might call texts of Desire and of Pleasure. Our writer may have a strong
mental tendency to configure the computer as a site for pleasure – gaming, shopping, gambling,
stock-trading, pornography-viewing – and thus fall into a habit of conflating interaction with the
machine with interaction with other internetworked writers. In a recent study by psychologists
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Sedalla, Kenrick, Butner, and Sagarin (2000), college students were asked to chat one-on-one
with an unknown partner using a computer, and then asked whether they thought their “partner”
was a human being, or an “artificial intelligence” program. All subjects were in fact chatting
with humans, but in the first experiment 41% of the subjects said that their partner was the
computer program. In the second group, 46% thought that they were chatting with an artificial
intelligence, not another human (also see Chapter 6).
Another kind of internetworked writer may have a strong notion that she is simply
writing through, rather than to, the computer, correctly assuming an equally human object of
social/professional desire at the other end of the wires. The first user may be frustrated if
responses from the second are not framed consistently in pleasant / pleasurable / desired
symbolic actions that his signals ought to be calling up out of the machine (thus, it appears there
is some machine-malfunction), while the second may treat the interaction as a social event,
expect interplay, revel in personal disclosure and/or reciprocity, and consider the potentiality of
“actual” or “real” (i.e. physical) social, sexual, or cultural interaction with the other computer
user. It is an extreme example, one which seems illogical or improbable, but on occasion, a
writer at one end seeks (textual) pleasure – that is, the session in front of the monitor is the endproject – while the writer at the other end is experiencing a kind of textual desire, because the
session in front of the monitor is merely one among many possible (and better) types of
interpersonal connection.
In Burkean terms, the distinction between human action and the mere “motion” of
machines is critical, especially since discussions of human physiology, neurology, and cognition
have wavered during the latter half of the 20th Century in and out of a metaphor that embraces
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the human body and mind as intricate machines. In “Definition of Man,” (1963/1966)
however, Burke rejects this metaphor:
The idealizing of man as a species of machine has again gained considerable popularity,
owing to the great advances in automation and “sophisticated” computers. But such
things are obviously inadequate as models since, not being biological organisms,
machines lack the capacity for pleasure or pain. . . . [A] definition of man without
reference to the animality of pain is, on its face, as inadequate as a definition would be
that reduced man to the sheer kinetics of chemistry. (23)
Lest we conflate man’s “animality” with some superior qualitative assessment of animals
themselves, Burke separates the “non-symbol using” world of organisms from man, the symbolusing, symbol-making, symbol-misusing animal in “Terministic Screens” (1965/1966):
Despite the evidences of primitive animism (that endows many sheer things with “souls”)
and the opposite modes of contemporary behaviorism (designed to study people as mere
things), we do make a pragmatic distinction between the “actions” of “persons” and the
sheer “motions” of “things.” The slashing of the waves against the beach, or the endless
cycle of births and deaths in biologic organisms would be examples of sheer motion. Yet
we, the typically symbol-using animal, cannot relate to one another sheerly as things in
motion. Even the behaviorist, who studies man in terms of his laboratory experiments,
must treat his colleagues as persons, rather than purely and simply as automata
responding to stimuli. (53)
For Burkean analysts, then, there is no confusion between computer-generated symbols, and
computer-mediated texts. Symbols generated by the machine are pre-programmed, manufactured
and designed mechanical responses to electronic stimuli (thousands of on-off electrical signals,
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the bits and bytes of electronic computer chips). However, language that is mediated by
computers is neither of or from the machine – its origin is the human users, and is merely
transported and displayed by the machine(s). While experiments and projects in artificial
intelligence (AI) continue to multiply and progress in power and sophistication, even the most
adroit Turing-tested (see p. 61, Chapter 2) programs do not pass the Burkean “action” as opposed
to “motion” test – because regardless of their level of sophistication or whom they have fooled,
they do not emanate from that combination of symbolicity and animality that is human. The
machine has no motive.
Computing as Rhetorical Act
Computing is a rhetorical act – it uses language, carries meaning, has purpose,
accomplishes tasks, can be marked by particular styles, is heavily dependent upon stasis and
kairos, and above all it is a human act. “Computing” can be defined broadly as the use of a
computer to facilitate an act, participate in an activity, or accomplish a task. Used in this broad
sense, the term “computing” can mean programming, designing, writing, emailing, chatting,
socializing in online communities, entering data, researching, accounting, gaming, calculating
and analyzing statistics, managing electronic transactions and distribution of data. Computing is
still often used in narrower senses, however, either defined as “manipulating numbers and
numerical data,” or “composing lines of computer-language (or code) which constitute in their
entirety an “application” which can then be compiled, initialized and run” either by the
programmer or by a “user” – who, in the computer-programming culture is not seen as
“computing,” but as merely “using” the computer.
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The broader usage of “computing” has become acceptable as the once specialized and
arcane terminologies of the computer sciences become popularized and creep in to general usage.
The purpose for laying out definitions for such a seemingly innocuous term is that later it will
become necessary to include “computing” as one of many activities involved in “writing with a
computer.” Although writers often opt to refer to writing produced by means of a computer as
“word processing,” this leads to conflation of important cognitive activities and processes. The
term “word processor” refers to the application, the computer program, that is running on the
operating system of the computer. Simply put, the computer application “processes” words,
whereas the “user” (writer) writes or reads them. For example, while we might claim that
“Middle managers are required to have word processing skills,” what we really mean to say is
that “Middle managers must have writing skills, and be able to use computers and word
processing software in the production of documents and other written materials.” 3 Because
“computing” in straightforward, generic, contemporary argot, simply refers to “using a
computer,” it is a useful term for discussion of the mechanics and situated circumstances of
various kinds of internetworked writing. For example, in the act of composing and sending an
email, a user may take into consideration various rhetorical and stylistic issues while composing
the written text, may employ any of a myriad of cognitive, heuristic processes to produce a text
which fits the situatedness of the writer and the intended reader. Problems the writer solves while
composing the text of the message are writing problems. However, after completing the
composition, the writer may encounter various computing problems, such as an “undeliverable
mail” message from the target server, inability to connect to her own POP (post office protocol)
server, or problems with text formatting. These are not, in a true sense, writing problems at all.
And although they may be considered elements of the rhetorical situation, they, and
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issues/elements like them, are designated in this study as elements of computing in the
discussion of internetworked texts in general and writing in specific.
In all but a very few instances, computing requires the use, possibly even mastery, of
some kind of iconic or alphanumeric symbol-system (an exception might be picture-games
specifically designed for pre-verbal toddlers). Therefore, while a writer may wish to use
“hanging indentation” formatting for a bibliography, finding and implementing the proper
commands to use such formatting in her document is not actually a writing issue, but a
computing problem – i.e., she knows what the hanging indent will look like, and could
“manually” create such a page layout – that is, use the typing conventions learned on older
typewriting or word processing technologies, of return and space-bar keying – but is choosing to
use the hanging indent feature in the software to format all or part of a document. This, too, is the
kind of element of internetworked writing that is referred to as part of computing, rather than
writing the text.
Beyond “Computing”: Why “Internetworked Symbolic Action”?
For purposes of rhetorical and critical analysis – especially Burkean analysis – of
computer networked media, “internetworked symbolic action” is more sturdy and reliable than
other proposed and used terms, such as "virtuality," "cybertext," "computer-mediatedcommunication," "ergodic literature," and "internetworked writing."
Virtuality
“Virtuality” is an especially problematic term, particularly because it is arhetorical and
ill-defined. Common usage of the term “virtual” in connection with internetworked writing,
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images, and file-sharing has on the one hand brought wider familiarity and acceptance among
the general population regarding the “unique,” or “new” (in any case, the as yet unquantified)
nature of online discourse and transactions. People log into the “virtual store” for books,
medication, toys, or other merchandise. We tap into the “virtual discussion” forum if we need
references or information pertaining to our research. If we are lonely, we can join a “virtual
community.” If we are just bored, we can don space-age equipment and log into an adventure
game in “virtual reality.” The concept of virtuality is fast becoming a commonplace, and yet it is
rarely defined in satisfactory terms. In The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic
Frontier, Howard Rheingold (1993) makes a less than comprehensive attempt to define
“virtuality,” explaining:
…As it goes digital, [the Library of Congress] is virtualizing. I can already get the
Library of Congress catalog from my desktop. When I can download the source text itself
to my desktop, my sense of where that information resides changes. It’s at the other end
of my modem line, along with the rest of the Net, which means it is more or less on my
desktop. (79)
To Rheingold, “virtual” means “on the screen” – messages, narratives, thousands of lines of data,
a future in which information can be downloaded at unimaginable speeds – these things make
geographical location irrelevant. Rheingold illustrates that a downloaded amalgam of images and
text that converge on “my desktop” is an important key to virtuality. But I wish here to go
further, to uncover a deeper and broader understanding of virtuality.
Sherry Turkle (1995) makes a case for equating virtuality with “a culture of simulation in
which people are increasingly comfortable with substituting representations of reality for the
real.” Turkle is concerned largely with role play and identity, centering the bulk of her writing on
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the culture of online real-time Multi-User Dimensions (MUDs), electronic gathering-places
programmed with various textual objects, spaces, places, corridors, settings, and background
narratives that users nevertheless insist upon calling “virtual” rather than “textual”:
. . . Dred’s Bar, for example, [is] a watering hole on the MUD LambdaMOO. It is
described as having a “castle décor” and a polished oak dance floor. Recently I (here
represented by my character or persona “ST”) visited Dred’s Bar with Tony, a persona I
had met on another MUD. After passing the bouncer, Tony and I encountered a man
asking for a $5 cover charge, and once we paid it our hands were stamped. (233)
Turkle wisely draws upon Janice Radaway’s Reading the Romance as a worthwhile and accurate
analogy to her own project, drawing momentary attention to the textuality of escapist and
resistant fiction and various communities that form around such escapism (i.e., science fiction
fandom). However, Life on the Screen does not foreground issues of symbolic action that are
specifically realized in written language. Turkle considers the virtuality of textual worlds and
interactions between “personae” (also known as users) to equate more or less with other
computerized, interactive media:
Compare a rafting trip down the Colorado River to an adolescent girl using an interactive
CD-ROM to explore the same territory. In the physical rafting trip, there is likely to be
physical danger and with it, a sense of real consequences. One may need to strain one’s
resources to survive. There might be a rite of passage. What might await the girl who
picks up an interactive CD-ROM called “Adventures on the Colorado”? A touchsensitive screen lets her explore the virtual Colorado and its shoreline. Clicking a mouse
brings up pictures and descriptions of local flora and fauna. She can have all the maps
and literary references she wants. All this might be fun, perhaps useful. But it is hard to
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imagine it marking a transition to adulthood. But why not have both – the virtual
Colorado and the real one? Not every exploration need be a rite of passage. The virtual
and the real may provide different things. Why make them compete? (236)
While Turkle does not make a conscious effort to conflate text and imagery, her treatment of
what has become an increasingly vague term, “virtuality” comes to mean all that appears on the
screen (and any accompanying sounds), all that is computer generated and interpreted by human
eye, ear, and brain. It is not so much a lack of precision as a feature of the main focus of her
work – social psychology – that renders the “virtual” merely an opposition to the “real,” or the
“physical” objects and events in the everyday lives of people who are compelled to spend
significant amounts of time in front of their computers. Her project is the investigation of their
sense of being “in the computer,” interacting through internetworked programming, or immersed
in sophisticated animated games that visually and aurally approximate the real – or surreal –
physical world.
Working within the prescriptions in his “Definition of Man,” Burke might have posited
that, as a psychologist, Turkle’s first obligation in her study is to focus on man as the
“psychological” animal (LSA 23), or in her capacity as a social psychologist, to focus on the
psycho-social content of the “virtual” experiences she details, whereas a rhetorician’s study of
these online phenomena requires what amounts to a greater precision in terminology about
language, in order to come to a “more general starting point,” a way into a discussion of
symbolicity, that is, of human language. In a sense, I am arguing that it is time to separate the
biological species crocodile – the real crocodile – from the Disneyland robotic crocodile, which
could in some sense be considered a “virtual” crocodile, and then to separate animal and robot
from the Peter Pan film-animation crocodile – once again, another candidate for “virtuality.”
19
And finally, all of those must be separated terministically once again from the textual
crocodile in story-books. Just as computerized robotic crocodiles or animated crocodiles
appearing on a computer screen present many crocodilian elements, their “crocodileness” does
not share the particular kind of symbolicity present in a textual crocodile.
In Becoming Virtual (1998), Pierre Lévy concentrates recursively on the textual nature of
“virtuality,” and seems to be reaching for a concept that equates with, or at least approximates,
what Burke means by man’s “symbolicity”:
Language virtualizes a “real time” that holds the living captive in the here and now. In
doing so it opens up the past, the future, and time in general as a realm unto itself, a
dimension with a consistency of its own. Through the creation of language, we now
inhabit a virtual space – temporal flux taken as a whole – that the immediate present only
partially and fleetingly actualizes. (91)
Lévy’s ideas about virtuality and textuality, like Burke’s ideas about symbolic action, both
complicate and deepen our understanding of human symbolicity. Yet even as they resonate with
the same language as Burke’s concepts of “prophesying after the event” (LSA 37; RR 78) and
especially “perspective by incongruity” (P&C 107), Lévy’s project is philosophical, not
rhetorical. “Virtuality” spills loosely into too many possible perlocutionary directions, and thus
will appear only sparingly in reference to online textual interactions, primarily because
“internetworked symbolic action” invokes the stasis and kairos of action, while “virtuality” is an
umbrella too large and too vague to be useful for rhetorical analysis.
Cybertext and Ergodic Literature
“Internetworked Symbolic Action” is also preferred over terms such as Espen Aarseth’s
(1997) “Cybertext” and “Ergodic Literature,” since they were developed explicitly for the
20
purpose of discussing hypertextual documents and belletristic works. “Cybertext,” Aarseth
tells us, is “a neologism derived from Norbert Wiener’s book (and discipline) called Cybernetics
(1948),” solves various problems for critics and writers, because it provides a much-needed
shorthand reference to the elements and conditions of online writing that set it apart from print or
“codex” forms:
The concept of cybertext focuses on the mechanical organization of the text, by positing
the intricacies of the medium as an integral part of the literary exchange. However, it also
centers attention on the consumer, or user, of the text, as a more integrated figure than
even reader-response theorists would claim. The performance of their reader takes place
all in his head, while the user of cybertext also performs in an extranoematic sense. (1)
To fully investigate the “extranoematic” participation of the reader that sets cybertext apart from
other texts, Aarseth appropriates the term “ergodic” from physics: “In ergodic literature,
nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text” (1). Throughout his study,
Aarseth is careful to provide examples and illustrations of various types of cybertexts, and
patiently walks his readers through the more difficult features and claims he makes about ergodic
literature. Although the terms are not yet widely used by rhetoricians, writers in the “new” and
growing subdiscipline of computers and writing may soon begin to comment on them and
experiment with their use. 4
Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC)
While I hesitate to abandon as yet the popular phrase “computer-mediated
communication” (CMC) in referring to online interactive forums, in order to open up the
discussion for Burkean analysis and some modest extension, as Chesebro (1993) and others
might call it, of the “Burkean system,” it seems safest to begin with a terminology that makes
21
sense rhetorically, linguistically, and symbolistically. This study will attempt as far as possible
to maintain conscious awareness of the terministic screens which have evolved around
computers and their use for the construction and distribution of internetworked texts. “Virtual
reality,” “cybertext,” “ergodic literature,” and “CMC,” while useful in their narrow senses, do
not invoke the dramatism that is necessary in order to analyze and demonstrate what people are
doing online, much less why they are doing it (i.e. motive).
Internetworked Writing
I also leave behind “internetworked writing,” the terminology James Porter finds more
appropriate and comfortable for rhetoricians who analyze textual exchanges and interactions
carried out via the internet. Instead of relying on terms such as “virtual interaction” or “CMC,”
Porter argues that “computer-networked activity is a type of writing,” and that is an important
designation. While I will attempt to extend Burkean concepts and theories into the realm of
“virtual” experiences, in “cyberspace,” these terministic maneuvers cannot be made without
grounding their meanings and their effects in symbolic action, in language, in its systems, in
images and innuendoes, events and agendas, and acts.
Part of what I will attempt to show through this extension of the Burkean system is the
importance of realizing that the internet itself, even in its largest scope, is primarily a site of
action, of internetworked symbolic action. As internet commentator David Hudson (1997) has
observed, we must also along the way be careful always to keep in mind what part of this textual
interchange is human, and which part is machine:
Granted, computers are changing our lives, but are they changing us? Our ability to
crunch bigger numbers faster means we can now walk around with our offices tucked
under our arms, but aren’t we still writing the same dumb memos to each other? Whether
22
we fear or embrace any new technological development, the extremity of our reaction
is directly proportionate to the inability to recognize that it is merely an extension of what
was already there. (121-122)
Thus Porter’s conceptualization of “internetworked writing” folds into what I mean by
“internetworked symbolic action” (not motion). Language carried via the internet, and language
about the internet, is encased in various terministic screens both valorized and vilified in 20th
Century narratives about the computer sciences and the development of the internet. At the same
time we seek definitions, it is still not a bad idea to keep in mind the vision of hypertext inventor,
programmer and pioneer Tim Berners-Lee (1999): “[The internet] should be like clay to mold,
not sculpture to look at from a distance.”
Study of Motive in Online Interactive (Real-Time/Synchronous) Networks
As is the case with most studies of this kind, the goal is not so much to ask and answer
specific questions, as it is to find ways to explore and invite new questions – or at least new
angles or perspectives on the “old” questions. I have employed several strategies of dramatistic
investigation of motive, with Internet Relay Chat networks as the “primary text” or focus as
illustrations of ways that internetworked symbolic action and other extensions of the Burkean
system(s) can be employed for purposes of rhetorical, analytical critique. To effectively locate a
way of reading or examining the unique environment of Internet Relay Chat nets and participants
through a Burkean lens (or set of lenses), it is best to eliminate the desire to seek and set apart
generic or stylistic classifications. Because of the chaotic and unusual texts and contexts of
23
online interaction, I have tried to keep in mind Burke’s caution about limiting discourse
analysis to strict considerations of genre or form:
[T]here are certain things to be said about a poem as poem; and there are certain things to
be said about it as an example of language in general. From the standpoint of Poetics,
one should try ideally to work out explanations in terms of the poem as poem. But such a
puristic attempt should in itself be enough to admonish us that a wider range of
derivations may be necessary. (LSA 30)
In other words, it is acceptable (and advisable) to read both literary and non-literary texts with an
eye for their logical (grammatical), rhetorical (hortatory), poetic, and ethical linguistic
dimensions (LSA 28). As we will see, logged dialogs and multi-participant conversations often
defy generic classification, both intentionally and unintentionally. Questions about user identity,
persona, and textual rhetorical strategies have arisen (and will continue to arise, both in this
study and elsewhere). But the overarching question, one which will be explored, but not
answered to any level of direct satisfaction, comes out of the very phenomenon, the existence of
online, textual “chat”: why are over 200,000 people logged on to their computers, chatting in
textual form? 5
After four years of online observation, it became apparent to me that there were either too
many questions to ask, or none at all, due to the speed with which the hardware, software, and
the nature of the participants and the online “communities” were changing. Even the nature of
this change was hard to define. Although terms like “evolving” and “morphing” somehow seem
more appropriate, I hesitated to quibble over the nature of change on the Internet since
sociologists, industrial psychologists, anthropologists, and marketing analysts are all clamoring
to do this on a daily basis, in both scholarly publications and the commercial media. Studies of
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Internet “culture” began to pile up during the mid-1990’s in many academic disciplines,
including Psychology (cf. Turkle; Reid; Haratani, Fugigaki & Asakura; Marin; Carroll), Cultural
and political studies (cf. Postman; Murray; Escobar; Ellul; Rheingold), in rhetoric and
communications studies (cf: Takayoshi; Moran; Howard; Bechar; Shaw; Liu) and especially the
“new” field of computers & writing (composition) studies (cf. C. Selfe; Hawisher; Palmquist, et.
al., Sullivan & Dautermann, Vitanza; Warschauer; Johnson-Eilola; Kress; Faigley; Porter;
Haynes). The Internet has fast grown to be a wildly popular site of research in the humanities and
social sciences. David Hakken (1999), while warning that we should probably avoid excessive
premature codification of our rhetorics (or terministic screens) about “cyberspace,” voices a
common, yet curiously invigorating “complaint” about the current state of internet ethnography:
As I read the work of others interested in cyberspace, I encountered multiple, diffuse,
disconnected discourses. I hoped initially that coherence might emerge on its own, but
this has not happened. Perhaps because too many cyberspace ethnographers use its
rhetorics uncritically, the diffuseness of cyberspace ethnography mirrors the hype of
popular cyberspace talk. (p. 6)
In Burkean terms, if ever there was an environment “rotten with perfection,” one that illustrates
ways in which man is “separated from his natural state by instruments of his own making,” it is
the Internet. Further, it may be possible to argue that the human struggle for perfection through
artificial instruments is one motivating force in shaping internetworked symbolic action. Rather
than seeking “meaning” in the texts and transactions of internet discourse, this volume is a search
for motive, or more importantly, it is an examination of how motive is expressed and interpreted
within online discourses – what I call internetworked symbolic action. By “motive” I am
referring simply to the wide-open concept Burke intends from the beginning of A Grammar of
25
Motives, but with a twist. This study will be asking in various ways, and through various
Burkean approaches two kinds of questions. The first is a straightforward question about the
online activities of Internet users: “In the textual, “virtual” online environment, what are people
doing, why are they doing it?” But since this is a rhetorical study, the further question is, “How
do people talk about what they are doing online, and why they are doing it?”
The premise for extending the Burkean system into computer-internetworked media is
that the textual "culture" of the internet is driven/entered by user motive, rather than by form,
structure, or genre. For example, although the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) environment can be
logged, printed, and analyzed stylistically, linguistically, and rhetorically, very little of this is
actually done. As various scholars have noted from early in its use (see Reid, Daisley, Butler &
Kinneavy), logs of IRC “chat” channels are described as chaotic, distracted, playful, postmodern,
shallow, and Saturnalian – in short, a dialogic mess. Much more compliant with the strategies
and applications of textual analysis are email archives, newsgroups, bulletin-board (or “webboard”) systems, Usenet groups, and even, to an extent, Multi-User Domain (MUD)
environments (for reasons I shall attempt to discuss in chapters 2 and 6).
Taking great liberties with suggestions from Hakken’s and Liu’s ideas and designs for
ethnographic collection of data, I have collected quantitative and qualitative data from the
internet IRC wide area networks. However, this is not an attempt to derive statistical or
mathematical psycho-social conclusions about the nature of online “communities” or “society,”
nor is it an attempt at generic classification of online “texts.”
For purposes of illustration and demonstration of extending the Burkean system online I
have provided short example studies, each employing a site of human-computer interface (HCI)
as an online extension of the Burkean system of dramatism. Because chapter 2 features
26
“agency,” focusing upon human interaction with – or more correctly, human use of – computer
hardware and software, the features and abilities of program applications serve as the topic of
Burkean analysis. In chapter 3 the Graphical User Interface (GUI) as site of HCI undergoes
Burkean “scenic” analysis, employing the help of Arnie Madsen’s extension of the
“representative anecdote” as a model.
For chapters 4, 5, and 6 I have collected raw data on user motive in synchronous
computer networks and their “netizens.” As a participant-observer on IRC, I have employed
three different approaches to gathering information for analysis. In chapter 4 I will report on a
pilot survey in which 100 IRC users were asked “Why you do think people use IRC? What is
their reason for chatting online here?” The answers fell into rough categories, which can be
organized according to motive. In chapter 5 I offer a discussion of IRC channels and the web
sites their founders have established explaining the purpose and “mission statement” of each
group. I include a brief demonstration showing how Burkean “ratios” might be employed in the
analysis of online statements of “group motive” and identity on the World Wide Web. In the
absence of brick-and-mortar place identification, the channel names themselves are evocative,
indicating the descriptive “address” of the gathering-places that users create and perpetuate,
where they come together to form what may or may not be classified either as actual or virtual
“communities.” The names of the places to which people are drawn are sharp indicators of their
motives for logging on, for remaining online, and for their levels of participation (or nonparticipation, as the case may be). But as the experienced online netizen knows, the names can
be as deceiving as the “superficial” chatter in the main channels. The web pages composed and
hosted by channel founders and operators include statements “About Us” that are sometimes
open, sometimes cryptic, sometimes downright puzzling, but always textually revealing in terms
27
of motive and internetworked symbolic action. Finally in Chapter 6 I have put together several
case studies from my own experiences with communities and with single users as the prototypes
for possible future “representative anecdotes” about issues, characteristics, and conflicts that
arise in online, real-time environments.
Burke’s ideas are available and accessible as we make analytical approaches and passes
at texts, hypertexts, real-time computer-mediated chat forums, and asynchronous electronic
forums/spaces. As we attempt to “interpret” the peculiar and distinctive – and at the same time
familiar – features of these media, we are already using what Burke called “terministic screens.”
We “choose a particular nomenclature, and proceed to track down the kinds of observation
implicit in the terminology…. whether [the] choice of terms was deliberate or spontaneous.”
(LSA 47)
Burke demonstrates methods for teasing out key terms, sometimes called “God-terms,”
employed in human discourse, and in identifying “clusters” of terms, that surround and adhere to
technologies, industries, academic disciplines, political ideologies, events, persons, things, and
texts. Burke and the internet are destined for each other, while at the same time at odds with
each other. While the internet begs for a Burke to tease out the irony, comedy, romance, and
tragedy of internet mail, bulletin boards, webbed discussion forums, email lists, chat spaces, and
hypertext pages, at the same time Burke’s suspicion of technology and its power-brokers calls
into question the purposes for extending Burke’s systems of logology into direct contact with the
internet. Unlike the texts subjected to Burke’s critical essays and monographs – primarily
canonized, belletristic texts – the internet is a shifting, unstable, refracted, pixellated, polyphonic
text.
28
Likewise, as computer users and theorists, we are often both inspired and discouraged
by our rooms full of technology. On the one hand, internet technology has tapped into
invaluable resources, but on the other hand, internet technology has fostered a seeming anarchy
of data, hard to sift through, even harder for beginning critical thinkers to call into perspective.
The very grammar and diction of our conversations about writing and technology is often
strained. With deep apologies to Malcolm X – an entire generation of American Workers,
mostly women, mostly in lower middle-income jobs – feel that we did not land on the computer,
the computer landed on us, here in the last decade of the 20th Century (Bereano 281). It seems
we spend much of our time in the profession scrambling to make some sense of it. We are
dabbling in new vocabularies, struggling to privilege one term or another, and thereby attempting
to give a voice and a vocabulary to the perspectives, attitudes, issues, and concepts that seem
important. We are simultaneously finding, rejecting, creating, re-arranging, and seeking our own
terministic screens; we want a lingo of our own. We are, as Burke is so fond of saying, “Symbol
using animals,” whose primary system of symbols is on the one hand shifting and changing as it
has always done when new technologies, systems, cultural and social stratifications have
changed, and on the other hand presented us with a moment in history rarely experienced before,
a time of such huge economic, social, rhetorical and ethical change (to name but a few
dimensions) that we can, if we will, seize the chance to make some conscious decisions about
our occupational psychoses, our perspectives and incongruities, and perhaps even our terministic
screens.
Because we live a large component of our temporal existence in the realm of symbol – in
our language and thought, our intellectual, symbol-using, symbol-making lives are as rich and as
much a part of us as our visceral, conscious existence. That is to say, in Burkean terms, our past
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and present experiences give form and shape to language as symbolic action. We begin to talk
and write about it – we worry over it and work it out in our literature, our rhetoric, our grammar
and logic, and in our political discourse. Burke argues that we socially construct knowledge, and
what passes for knowledge. We invent (in the classical sense of “invention”) the topics and
issues, the gods and the devils, the despair and the optimism, in short, the terms that according to
Burke tend to cluster around our experiences, creating/re-creating and shaping that experience.
Language gives meaning to ongoing real events; it colors and shapes our perception of
experiences and situations. Therefore, it is no surprise that language takes on a power of its own.
As we proceed to study the relationship between humans and computers, and computers and
language, we at the same time continue to use language as a powerful means to interpret, control,
perhaps even to reconcile what seem to be dissonant elements of human life.
There are days when American workers especially, probably cannot think of anything
more dissonant (or desolate?) than the relationship between a human being and a computer.
There are days when many are tempted to fix the “bugs” on the Pentium II or the Macintosh G4
processing unit with a hammer (“when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”).
On the other hand, there are times in my internet explorations and experimentations when it is
easy to see why Kenneth Burke insisted that our symbolistic and our animalistic – our visceral
and intellectual – natures cannot be separated. The online friendships and alliances described in
these pages are both real, and surreal. They are both virtual and actual. Some days, we get lost
in the computer. Other days, we seem to be scrambling out of its way, trying to escape it.
Burke’s Dramatistic Pentad is a rational starting place to gain some sense of order, a way
of locating sites of discussion or issues where computers and humans meet. And although my
method for conceptually organizing discussion, questions, answers, and analyses may seem
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simplistic and incomplete – in short, unsatisfying – for Burkean scholars, please remember it
is, to apply a computer-discourse terministic screen “In its beta version” right now. Therefore,
although this study includes empirical data collection and analysis, its aim is qualitative rather
than quantitative.
Organization
As I have indicated, the sections of this work are divided according to what I call the
“sites of human-computer interaction,” a concept that correlates with interface design
terminology, or “loci of attention.” Because these “sites” correspond in deep and interesting
ways with the five terms of the dramatistic pentad, I have organized each chapter so that it does
three things. First each chapter introduces, explains, enumerates, and perhaps elaborates upon the
Burkean dramatistic term and its alignment with the corresponding human-computer site of
interaction (for example, “user-machine” is a site of human-computer interaction that correlates
quite obviously with the Burkean ratio Agent-Agency, in the sense that the computer is an
agency by means of which humans accomplish acts). Second, I make one or more passes at
bringing my own and others’ attempts at extensions of the Burkean system (in the spirit of the
excellent collection edited by James Chesebro) of Burkean terminologies, ideas, and conceptual
frameworks as analytical tools into the discussion of the site as a focal point of internetworked
symbolic action. Third, I provide a demonstration, a critique of specific internetworked acts
utilizing the Burkean principles and their extensions of the specific site of human-computer
interaction (for example, in Chapter 3, as a way of examining and evaluating computer program
interfaces as scene, I advocate, even encourage us all to develop a Burkean “perspective by
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incongruity, and employ Arnie Madsen’s elaborate reconstruction of the Burkean
conceptualization of the “representative anecdote”).
To sum up, with admitted digressions and illustrations along the way, I have constructed
each chapter, sometimes strictly, sometimes more complicatedly, to encompass the following
structure: 1) introduction of one site of human-computer interaction and its relation to Burkean
terms and concepts; 2) extension of that concept into the realm of research and internetworked
symbolic action, including research done in computers and writing, psychology and the internet,
and sociological studies of internet interaction; and 3) demonstration, by means of application of
the extension of the Burkean system.
Dramatistic Sites of Human-Computer Interface
As an extension of the Burkean system of Dramatistic analysis, I have drawn correlations
between each member of the Pentad and a corresponding “site of interface” between the human
user and the computer. The five sections are arranged in the order in which new users first
encounter and experience the rhetorical act of computing, but this is only one of several possible,
rational arrangements. In addition to Burke’s conceptual framework of dramatistic analysis,
various sites of computer-human interaction will be opened up to Burke’s rich and powerful
logological strategies for “cracking” the terministic screens and various textual opacities. In
addition to the broader frameworks of dramatism and terministic screens, online relay chat will
lend itself to insights into user motives when considered in terms of Burke’s version of
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“occupational psychosis,” “perspective by incongruity,” “god-terms,” and the “representative
anecdote.”
Chapter Two: User-Application / User-Machine (Agent-Agency)
This section will work toward developing a critical inquiry of the physical presence of
the machine itself, as well as the “symbolic” presence of the machine as a cluster of terms, as an
agency, and as a cultural icon. In dramatistic terms, the “agent-agency” ratio is considered as a
possible paradigm for critical analysis of texts published in the (relatively) new field of
Computer-Human Interface studies. Included here are questions of physical adaptation, and of
visual and tactile perception. Chapter Two brings Burkean concepts and perspectives to a crossdisciplinary review of selected current literature, including evaluation and synthesis of working
relationships between composition and rhetorical theory and related studies in usability
engineering, ergonomics, and industrial psychology.
In addition to the “hardware” issues, Chapter Two confronts issues and commentary on
motive and the types of software applications used in networked texts. Like the machines
themselves, applications can have a particular kind of symbolic “presence” or iconic meaning in
the lives and texts of computer users, in addition to the visual and cognitive experiences they
create, even as these users engage with the primary tasks of producing their own texts “through”
the software. While a graphical user interface (GUI) creates a spatial experience for gaining
control over the application, it still may be labeled/marked by a cluster of arcane terms which
can bring the visual experience abruptly to a halt, shifting the user from the visual/spatial site of
interaction with the machine, to a temporal, cognitive relationship with the application – time
must be allotted for vocabulary and concept-learning before the user can proceed toward the
completion of a task or set of tasks.
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Chapter Three: User-Screen (Agent-Scene)
Chapter Three engages seriously with issues clustering around graphical user interfaces
and virtual “environments.” Especially crucial in this section will be rhetorical and semiotic
analyses of several example interfaces, most notably the most commonly used IRC application,
Khaled Mardam-Bey’s “mIRC.” This analysis and discussion will be informed somewhat by
psychological and sociological theory and empirical studies, some of which directly discuss the
question of user perceptions of “virtual” places or locations (Turkle; Aarseth; Stone) such as
MOO, chat, interactive gaming, newsgroups, and usenet groups, and also will benefit from
Burke’s discussion of the “agent-scene” ratio in A Grammar of Motives. Other sources inform
(albeit less intrusively) the subject from the perspective of software design, engineering, and the
sociology and psychology (-ies) of interface design (see Wroblewski, Nielsen). A primary goal
of this section is to complicate the term “user interface,” showing how Burke’s ways of
resistance, such as adopting a “perspective by incongruity,” can free users from the smothering
claustrophobia of aesthetically depressing interface designs created by commercial industry
standards and “user-unfriendly” interfaces. The logical starting point will be Wroblewski’s
overarching claim that “every interface is a theory of how a task ought to be supported” (11).
Chapter Four: User-Task (Agent-Act)
In The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (1984) Sherry Turkle gives an
example of the advanced relationship between a task-oriented user and the computer. She
describes a young programmer named Alex, who feels as though he programs “straight from the
mind,” noting that, like other programmers she has talked to, he sometimes works in a
programming language as though it were transparent, and the program itself not external, but an
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inner experience – as though he had somehow managed to “lose track” of the difference
between extrinsic and intrinsic motive, activity, and even existence:
The experience of losing track is captured by Alex's description of the computer as
transparent to his thoughts. So much so that he is aware only of a flow of ideas from him
to the machine. Programming can be a Zen-like experience. We have seen this quality as
the power of the transitional object – the object that is felt as belonging simultaneously to
the self and to the outside world. Such objects can evoke an "oceanic feeling" of fusion
and oneness. And for Alex, the computer is this kind of object. (212)
As computer users become more and more proficient, attaining high levels of performance with
various applications, the need to focus upon the user interface, the virtual details of a MOO, or
the programming language itself can fall away gradually, their familiarity and predictability
making the computer invisible as the user or programmer focuses all attention on the task, or on
multiple tasks. When the computer user reaches a level of confidence in which she spends the
majority of her time focused on the goals, the actual task the computing session is meant to
accomplish, the agency can fall away from conscious thought, and leave her with that feeling
Alex described: the machine disappears. Christina Haas (Writing Technology) cautions that
when the technology becomes too invisible, we can begin to lose sight of its pervasiveness, we
stop questioning its validity/usefulness, and more or less accept all of its versions and designs,
except the most egregious of monstrosities.
Many of the previously difficult and decidedly counterintuitive activities such as
launching, tasking, cascading windows, threading, customizing, deciphering manuals, keying
options, changing and customizing the settings (!), input/output, choosing software for assigned
tasks, and so on, after repetition for months and years, have become second nature to a
35
generation of professionals, office workers, and students. When the users at the other end of
the electronic highway send messages, the machines and the screens in between seem to melt
away. “Invisible Technology” tends to make us task-oriented, and at the same time is evidence
that engineers have been through a number of versions releases on the way to our “zen-like”
experience.
Chapter Five: User-Purpose (Agent-Purpose)
The profound difference between studies of computer chat networks and studies of office
email lists, computer classroom activities, or “dot-com” e-business web culture, is that chatters
are intrinsically motivated to log on and participate in the activity for which the software was
designed. They chat because they want to, not because they are being paid, or graded, or
rewarded in any “material” way (at least in the capitalist sense of “material”). Here we connect
back with our collected data, extending some of Burke’s concepts of Motive and mysticism, of
belief and “logological” perspectives, from his Rhetoric of Religion.
Chapter Six: User-User (Agent-Agent)
The age of internetworked computers has transformed the original computer use analogy,
the premier “representative anecdote” from computer-as-tool to the problematic, broader idea of
computer-as-medium. In Section Five, the motives and implications of internetworked writing
environments are explored. ‘Real-time’ computer networked chat is a hatchling, hardly familiar
to most Americans before America OnLine and the EFnet became widely available through the
internet. Software such as Talk and DIWE, provided in small, isolated (usually universityowned and operated) locations, gave us no preliminary preparation or warning about the strange
and intricate social phenomena that would evolve (and that are still evolving) in the large, bizarre
realms of the internet “chat zones.” According to Burke (GM 376-377), the Agent-Agent
36
address is a constitutional one, implying not only the binding, human-human entailment that
goes along with legalistic constitutionality, but also tending to indicate that there is some
immediate “constitution” or “substance” to the text that might otherwise not be called for. If
Burke is right, and the constitution of things is the same as the motivation for things, then we
may be on our way to drawing a kind of sketch, or portrait of the human need to sit at a keyboard
and “get symbolic” with another, disembodied human.
Significance
In Chapter Seven some of the issues underlying the significance of this line of inquiry are
reviewed, and others are raised. This study seeks to raise important questions and to articulate
substantive issues in the field of computers and writing for rhetoric studies. The framework is
not intended to be prescriptive or definitive, but rather a richly ornamented coat-tree on which to
hang, compare, test, and examine our assumptions as teachers, as writers, and as technology
users. My hope is that teachers will be able to take this set of concepts, and add their own ideas,
theories, teaching strategies and combinations of strategies, and devise new ways of envisioning
and talking about computers and writing for the 21st Century.
Especially our skepticism about technology, the desire to “escape” from technology, our
fear of the panopticon, are deeply woven into Burke’s conception of human life. If man has
progressed in his struggle to control and contain power, Burke reminds us that such power has
always resided to a great extent in language: first couched in early worship of “magic” at the
‘primitive’ stages of Western history, then into an alliance with “religion” and its texts – in
Burke’s view, a medieval concept with which he wrestles in A Rhetoric of Religion – and then
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finally into the current age, one in which the primary ‘god-term’ is “science.” Burke of course
trusts none of it: magic, religion, and science are for him loci of symbolic power-making,
history-writing, and culture-controlling. Among a thousand other things. Joseph Janangelo and
others have written about the Foucauldian experience of various “panopticon effects” of
computer system administration both experienced by, and perpetrated by writing teachers in
secondary and higher education settings. Emails are opened and scrutinized; student records are
examined; web sites are causes for discussion, dissention, protest, plagiarism, intellectual
property lawsuits, even firings and suspension. The idea of identifying “god terms” and
“clusters” of privileged symbols and sets of symbols within computer/internet culture – and these
things are done often and by many, without benefit of Burkean terminology – bolsters my
argument that Burke is not only relevant online: he is online. As Britton points out in “Shaping at
the point of Utterance,” college writing and its tasks may so overwhelm Basic Writers that they
prematurely choke off their fluency in invention stages, by overly concerning themselves with
“academic writing” issues, and with worries about editing/grammar/syntactical errors. With the
advent and growth of synchronous computer-mediated communication, I would argue that some
of this premature stultifying of the invention/exploration writing stages could be remedied, as
students became accustomed to free-wheeling, “conversational,” real-time writing exchanges.
Students cluster terms related to “clarity, precision, elocution, style” around their writing, they
throw up barriers and smash themselves up against cultural and socio-economic sets of these
terministic screens that can (not always, not in every context, but nevertheless can) be stripped
away and made irrelevant in computerized, textual, on-screen, electronic environments.
Burke is alive and well on the internet. He is behind us and at our sides in computer
classrooms and Writing labs. His idea of “terministic screens” informs ways that we can deal
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with factionalizations and conflicts that arise in our “symbol-making” online environments.
His fear of the panopticon, the technology and wastefulness of industrial power centers is alive
as we struggle with our own explorations of “social construction” in writing and the teaching of
writing. Burke’s compromises between our “biological animal” selves and our “symbolic
actions” – in addition to the “non-symbolic motions” of our machines – are sure to serve for a
large part of the next century as heuristic, epistemic, hermeneutic, and …. Perhaps even as
survival skills.
Notes: Chapter 1
1. Feminists often ask, in all fairness, “Is there a woman in the definition of man?”
Because this is a Burkean study of motives and computer-human interaction, it is
important to make a pass – or better, repeated passes throughout this work – at
conceptualizing not only Burke’s understanding of technology, but his understanding of
what it means to be human. For Burkean scholars, the discussion of how Burke
conceptualizes humanity comes with both good news and bad news. The good news, is
that one of his most lucid and mature works, Language as Symbolic Action, opens with
an explosive, benchmark essay in which Burke in a bold voice and intricate web of logic
offers his “Definition of Man.” The bad news, of course, is that there is no accompanying
“Definition of Woman.” I would like to discuss three approaches scholars have used in
gendering, un-gendering, or re-gendering Kenneth Burke.
Burkean scholars are notorious for employing various approaches to the “generic
he” that was until the latter part of the 20th Century an academically sanctioned and
approved mode of discourse. William Rueckert, for example, in his delightful essay
“Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes” (1982), makes no mention whatsoever of Burke’s
use of the masculine pronoun. Yet a stylistic analysis might suggest he is vaguely uneasy
with it. Note how he switches from the masculine “man” to the neuter “one” as best he
can, in an almost athletic feat of pronoun-switching:
For Burke, the capacity for language is prior to the capacity for thought, and
thought is really a function of language. Hence, man is not a rational animal or
even a tool-using animal, but a symbol-using animal. For Burke, then, it is
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language that one needs access to, because all of the most basic and
fundamental human truths can be got at by way of language. (13; emphasis added)
Very clearly, Rueckert is sensitive to Burke’s gendering, yet is unwilling to “unman”
Burke’s own reasoning. Thus he slips tactfully and gingerly between voices: according to
Burke “man is not a rational animal,” but according to Reuckert, Burke’s sense “it is
language that one needs access to,” and so on. While Reuckert prefers nonsexist
language, he at least allows Burke’s own voice to remain gendered.
Another strategy Burkean scholars employ is a feminist reclamation strategy
Phyllis M. Japp (working from the theories of Fiorenza) calls “creative actualization.” In
“Can This Marriage Be Saved?” (1999) Japp defines the critical strategy of creative
actualization as “moving beyond both the text and its interpretive contexts into new and
imaginative worlds of possibility.” In simple terms, this means that, given a text that is
culturally or academically important enough to study, criticize, or in some cases even
hold sacred, a text that that inscribes itself upon a group or upon a culture, a text revered
and studied as an “authority,” women living within that culture have every right to reinscribe, or re-write sections that are not relevant, or are perhaps even seen as damaging,
to their gender.
An example of how this is done with Burke’s masculine-oriented works can be
seen in Jane Blankenship’s wide-reaching synthesis of “Burke on Ecology” (1993). In
“What are the Signs of What?” (LSA) Burke characteristically provides disclaimers and
complications of the spaces between “action” and “motion,” allowing that there may be
an “intermediate realm, as when sheerly physiological processes (properly to be charted
in terms of motion) are affected by men’s attitudes, passions, reasonings, and the like
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(properly to be charted in terms of action)” (366). For some reason not noted,
commented upon, or marked in any way, Blankenship quotes this passage, removing
Burke’s masculine possessive pronoun “men’s” and replacing with a more neutral
possessive – yet conscientiously bracketing the substitution. Her version of the passage
from Burke’s essay reads thus:
Unfortunately, there is an intermediate realm, as when sheerly physiological
processes (properly to be charted in terms of motion) are affected by [humans’]
attitudes, passions, reasonings and the like (properly to be charted in terms of
action). … (366)
On the one hand, we could argue that, since gender is not a paramount issue or even the
point of what Blankenship is getting at, the masculine-to-neuter gender substitution is of
no importance, and I might be inclined to agree, on a case by case basis ( I would
speculate that such bracketed substitutions may even result from an editorial choice made
when the piece was no longer in its author’s hands). However, others have taken the
un(re-)marked substitution approach as well, with less satisfying results. Dale Keller
(1996) takes further liberties than perhaps any 21st Century feminist reader will allow for,
when he discusses “Definition of Man”:
The third clause in that definition states that the human is “separated from his
natural condition by instruments of his own making. …Burke made it clear in the
explanation of his definition of humankind that technology is dependent upon
language” (2)
Here, it can perhaps be argued that postmodernist, postcolonialist, poststructuralist, postfreudian – perhaps all post-20th Century – readers will not be comfortable with such
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blatant un-gendering of the Burkean definition. Burke said “man.” He meant “man” in
all of his 19th-Century phallocentric glory, and most likely the wise Burkean scholar will
take the advice of James Chesebro (1993; xvi) and of Kenneth Burke himself, and work
to enlarge, encompass, extend, flesh-out, and generally improve upon the Burkean
system(s) of critical thought and exploration. Rather than ungendering Burke’s discourse,
some feminists have simply re-gendered Burkean concepts by means of extension –
adding, rather than ignoring or surreptitiously neutering, the dimension of possibilities for
feminine and masculine voices, ideologies, histories, perspectives, and commentaries.
An example of this “re-gendering” of a Burkean system can be found in Karen
Foss and Cindy White’s “’Being’ and the Promise of Trinity” (1999). Their references to
Burke’s ideas do not ignore or excuse the use of his masculine pronoun. Instead, Foss and
White set out to simply expand Burke’s approach to the action-motion dyad: “Our aim in
this essay is to provide a third concept missing from Burke’s fundamental action-motion
continuum by drawing on contemporary work in feminist scholarship” (100).
My approach will be the same as that taken by Foss and White: where Burke
obviously is working to explain the symbolicity of mankind, his discourse is powerful
enough to convey that without mask, substitution, or paraphrase and will be left unneutered. Where he has obviously left some feminine concept or concern behind, I shall
offer feminine extensions within the framework of his system(s), where appropriate.
Therefore, in this study Burke’s “Definition of Man,” will remain a man, and I will
approach this definition by means of testing it against key concepts and arguments made
by Sarah Ruddick (1989) in the realm of political science, and alongside Sarah Blaffer
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Hrdy’s (1999) work in socio-biology to see whether or not Burke has in any satisfying
way also defined Woman.
2. Denise Murray (1995) summarizes (and oversimplifies) one view of the functions of
human communication:
Whether written or spoken, language serves two basic functions: transactional and
interactional. The transactional function is for the transfer of information, while
the interactional function is for the maintenance of social relationships. Of course,
many discourses involve both functions. However, as we examine language and
computers, we will find that these two functions operate differently than in
communication without computers, so, it is important to understand how they
operate. (16)
Murray’s claim loses ground as time passes and computer network software and systems
evolve to accommodate more “natural” seeming uses of symbol-systems. As discussed
farther along in this study, I find Searle’s discussion of speech acts, among other ideas, to
be more helpful in this area.
3. In the realm of computing and in computers & writing, there is now and will continue
to be interesting room for terministic “slippage.” At present, because engineers and
designers recognize the critical importance of metaphoric association in the creation of
terminologies that they can learn and make sense of, computers have been alloted “brain”
status in a largely codified extended analogy that permeates the language for
programmers. Perhaps to early 20th Century scientists, “thought” constituted in large part
the ability to “compute” or “calculate” at impressive speeds. Thus, the language of
computer commands includes terms such as read (move a set of symbols or signals into
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the computer’s “memory” from some other place in the machine), and write (move a
set of symbols or signals out of computer memory intact, in its entirety, to some other
place, such as a file, screen, or printer). Thus, despite its sophisticated level of
technology, the realm of computing leans heavily on over-simplified, metaphorical,
pseudo-scientific paradigms for mental processes. To the machine, “reading” means
memorizing or recording, and “writing” equates with penmanship – copying out symbols.
When a computer reads, it is recording. When a human reads, she is thinking and
learning. When a computer writes, it is scribing. When a human writes, she is inscribing.
4. At the same time they (we) are trying to make some analysis of the internet, writers
are quick to point out that it is a new technology, a new cultural phenomenon, so new that
any analysis or critique may be outdated as quickly as (or more quickly than) it can be
published (Vitanza x). In Technologies of the Gendered Body Anne Balsamo (1997)
characterizes virtual reality as “at the “Kitty Hawk” stage – more PR than VR” (120).
Mark Warschauer (1999) similarly focuses on what he calls “new screen-based literacies”
(9). Meanwhile, David Hakken (1999) cautions that “Computer Revolution” rhetoric
“impedes cyberspace ethnography by presuming that the potential is already the reality”
even though there has been very little meticulous gathering and analysis of empirical
ethnographic evidence to support such a stance (14). In Burkean terms, we might go on to
say that in all the excitement about “new” or “revolutionary” ergodic, cybernetic,
hypertextual, virtual (call them what you will) rhetorical spaces, there has been a rush to
throw up various terministic screens, which has resulted in the risk of prematurely
codifying ways of talking and writing about internetworked social, cultural, and
rhetorical phenomena.
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5. This is an extremely low estimate, calculated from the three major IRC networks
(DalNet, Undernet, and Efnet) and does not include America Online chat servers.