Language as Sensuous Action: Sir Richard Paget, Kenneth Burke, and Gesture-Speech Theory
2006; Routledge; Volume: 92; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/00335630601080393
ISSN1479-5779
Autores Tópico(s)Discourse Analysis in Language Studies
ResumoAbstract This somatic genealogy of Dramatism's core terms—symbolic action, attitude, identification—argues for the importance of keeping rhetoric, rhetorical theory, and rhetorical pedagogy more closely tied to bodies that generate, induce, and respond to rhetoric. It does so by examining Burke's use of Sir Richard Paget's theory that spoken language derives from the use and development of bodily gestures. An examination of Paget's theory in Burke's early work serves as a jarring reminder that rhetoric is always a joint performance of body and mind. Keywords: BodyPerformanceGestureSir Richard PagetKenneth Burke The author wishes to thank Cara Finnegan, David Henry, John Marsh, Ned O'Gorman, Spencer Schaffner, and the anonymous QJS reviewers for providing just the right mix of excitement and critical engagement. This piece is so much better for all your labor. Notes 1. A. T. W., "Review of Human Speech," Quarterly Journal of Speech 16 (June 1930): 364. Richard Paget, Human Speech (Some Observations, Experiments, and Conclusions as to the Nature, Origin, Purpose and Possible Improvement of Human Speech) (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1930). 2. For Lucretius detail, see George Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 36. The most recent resurgence of this theory is discussed in a 1999 issue of American Scientist which describes "manual gestures" as "'behavioral fossil' coupled to speech" (138). Kennedy's treatment is interesting for its overt attempt to connect glossogenetics and even animal communication to Aristotelian categories of rhetoric. See also Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance (New York: University of Cambridge Press, 2004), especially pages 35–61, for a review of glossogenetics from the point of view of gesture studies. 3. Paget's training in multiple fields is discussed in A. T. W.'s QJS review, 364. He was a fellow of both the Physical Society of London and the Institute of Physics. 4. A.T.W., 368. 5. "The Progress of Science: Voice and the Telephone. Mechanism of Speech," The Times, September 13, 1926, p. 10 col. D. 6. I hesitate even to footnote the phrase "body as discursive formation" since it is so widely used, but, for an example, see Gerard Hauser's "Incongruous Bodies: Arguments for Personal Sufficiency and Public Insufficiency," Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (Summer 1999): 1. 7. Kevin DeLuca, "Unruly Arguments: The Body Rhetoric of Earth First!, Act Up, and Queer Nation," Argumentation and Advocacy 36 (Summer 1999): 20. 8. Hauser, 2. In this, his introduction to a two-part special issue on body argument, Hauser writes, "The body is an ambiguous form of signification. Arguments are warranted assertions. They are claims supported by evidence and reasoning. But the body, as a corporeal entity, is an organism; its biological status is not symbolic." 9. Melissa Deem, "Stranger Sociability, Public Hope, and the Limits of Political Transformation," Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (November 2002): 450. 10. Sharon Crowley, Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006); Phaedra Pezzullo, "Resisting 'National Breast Cancer Awareness Month': The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances," Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (November 2003): 345–65. For a sustained, productive emphasis on the body's capacity for movement and the resulting connections to life and energy, a major focus of the present article, see two articles by Mindy Fenske: "The Aesthetic of the Unfinished: Ethics and Performance," Text and Performance Quarterly 24 (January 2004): 1–19; and "The Movement of Interpretation: Conceptualizing Performative Encounters with Multimediated Performance," Text and Performance Quarterly 26 (April 2006): 138–61. 11. My book Bodily Arts: Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005) in fact argues that rhetoric has long been intertwined with bodily matters; it's just that our Aristotelian commitments to thought and reason have historically produced trained incapacities, most notably our difficulty theorizing the body's relationship to rhetoric. See also James Fredal, Rhetorical Action in Ancient Athens: Persuasive Artistry from Solon to Demosthenes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006). 12. Paget shows up in almost as many of Burke's books as do Nietzsche and Marx, and in fact Paget's book Human Speech is shelved in the core of Burke's home office between Capital and the Modern Library's The Philosophy of Nietzsche. And yet to my knowledge not a single Burke scholar has given Paget so much as a mention. His theories were folded into Burke's early rhetorical theories at such an early point that they are both formative and forgotten; even, in one notable instance that I will discuss later on, cut out between the first and second editions. (Thanks go to Burke's sons, Michael and Butchie, for allowing me the chance to visit Burke's fully intact study.) 13. See Jeff Bennett's review of an article on Burkean attitude, which aptly characterizes this "flatness" phenomenon from another perspective: "It is no small irony … that Burke's many writings are often utilized in pedagogy and research as a systematic approach to criticism, not as a rhetorical heuristic for inspiring invention" (http://kbjournal.org/node/48). 14. Daniel O'Keefe, "Burke's Dramatism and Action Theory," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 8 (1978): 8. 15. Dana Anderson, "Questioning the Motives of Habituated Action: Burke and Bourdieu on Practice," Philosophy and Rhetoric 37, no. 3 (2004): 255–74; Sarah E. Mahan-Hays and Roger C. Aden, "Kenneth Burke's 'Attitude' at the Crossroads of Rhetorical and Cultural Studies: A Proposal and Case Study Illustration," Western Journal of Communication 67, no. 1 (Winter 2003): 32–55. 16. Anderson: "[T]he preparation for action that Burke signifies through attitude here refers to conscious preparation." This reading of course is fair enough, and much more understandable given the Grammar passage than the version of attitude offered by Mahan-Hays and Aden, which I believe goes too far. O'Keefe's earlier piece is interesting because it grapples with the "troublesome" difficulties posed by Burke's formulation of dramatism (10), and hints that Burke may have gotten it wrong. Later writings by Burke, as I'll demonstrate—including Burke's article "(Nonsymbolic) Action/(Symbolic) Motion," published in the same year as O'Keefe's article, corroborate O'Keefe's hunch. 17. For Burkeans, this argument also helps distinguish between structuralist or poststructuralist theories of language, where Burke's theories are so frequently slotted, and Burke's lively, robust, and, importantly, materialist theory of dramatism. See Celeste Condit, "Framing Kenneth Burke: Sad Tragedy or Comic Dance?" Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1984): 79. What's more, in assuming dramatism, identification, and symbolic action's complete commensurability with structuralist or even poststructuralist linguistics, rhetoric scholars commit an act of anachronism, an act that continues to ignore the body's importance for Burke's subsequent theories, as well as—more broadly—the body's crucial poetic role in communicative activity. For a structuralist Burke, see Joseph Gusfield, "Introduction," in Kenneth Burke on Symbols and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989): 2–3; and William Rueckert, "Kenneth Burke and Structuralism," Shenandoah 21, no. 1 (Autumn 1969): 19–28. For poststructuralism, see Cary Nelson, "Writing as the Accomplice of Language: Kenneth Burke and Poststructuralism," in The Legacy of Kenneth Burke, ed. H. W. Simons and Trevor Melia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989): 156–8; Barbara Biesecker, Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997): 2–23; and Robert Wess, Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, Postmodernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Wess's book actually links Burke to postmodernism, which I take to be distinct from and yet frequently amenable to poststructural theories of language. Condit, "Framing," 79, also bristles at attempts to characterize Burke as a poststructuralist—"The blending of human linguistic prowess with our animality is Burke's unique strength"—and warns that "effacing any material component … requires one to ignore the ties to history and physicality that are implicit in Burke's notions of 'familial' and 'geometric substance.'" 18. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976): 167. For a terrific model of such sorting that happens along the lines of neurology rather than glossogenetics, see Elizabeth A. Wilson, Psychosomatics: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), which follows the biological models of Darwin, Freud, and Sacks, and ultimately offers biology as a surprisingly productive venue for feminist theory. Celeste Condit's 2004 lecture—"How Should We Study the Symbolizing Animal?" NCA's Carroll C. Arnold Distinguished Lecture (Boston: Pearson, 2004): 9—works through the risks and rewards of integrating biology into humanistic work, with frequent reference to Burke. 19. This quote about Kennedy's "deanship" is from Wilfred E. Major's review of Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction, in Argumentation and Advocacy 35 (Summer 1998): 33. 20. Kennedy, 29. 21. Kennedy, 39–41. 22. Kennedy, 3, 4. See also Victor Vitanza, "Editor's Preface, Dedication, and Acknowledgments," in Writing Histories of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994): ix, for an account of rumorous reception of Kennedy's piece: "I had heard through the grapevine that Kennedy had written a 'wild,' perhaps savage, article. And indeed, he has." 23. It's a bit surprising that Kennedy's survey of glossogenetic theories does not include Paget's. Paget wasn't, after all, a little known figure, though his development of the Paget-Gorman system of signed speech may have eclipsed his earlier work in glossogenetics. For a critique of neocartesianism in regards to gesture studies, see Brenda Farnell, "Developments in the Study of 'Gesture' in Language," Anthropological Linguistics 46 (Spring 2004): 100–15. 24. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966): 67. For more on Burke's counter-relation to abstraction, see William Rueckert, Kenneth Burke and the Drama of Human Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963): 136, where Rueckert rightly observes that the separation between humans and biology occurs, in Burke's scheme, by dint of what Rueckert calls "a movement to abstraction." Celeste Condit's rejoinder to Phillip Tompkins and George Cheney offers Korzybski as a useful point of contrast in regard to the usefulness of abstraction. See Condit, "Framing," 78. 25. "Origin of Human Speech: Combination of Two Arts. Sir R. Paget's Theory," The Times, September 7, 1928, p. 17, col. G.; Paget, Human, 133. See also Charles Darwin, Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 40. 26. Darwin, Expression, 40. In a footnote, Darwin even broadens the mimetic, responsive sympathy to more collective scenarios, such as when audience members begin to clear their own throats when the singer they are observing sounds hoarse, or when his American physician friend while assisting childbirth "finds himself imitating the muscular efforts of the patient." Expression, 40–41. 27. Darwin, Expression, 37. 28. As well as others' body parts. See footnote 26. 29. Saussure refers to that "staying power" of language as stability. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally, Albert Sechehaye, and Albert Riedlinger, trans. with an introduction and notes Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1966): 72. 30. The habit here of course is on a phylogenetic rather than an individual scale, and this set of Darwin's theories closely approximate Lamarck. Paget's explicit crediting of Darwin with his insights about gesture, and Burke's subsequent engagement with Paget's theories, challenges Adam Kendon's view that "Darwin had little direct bearing on the development of gesture studies" until the latter half of the 20th century (44). 31. Paget, Human, 174. 32. Paget, Human, 133. 33. Richard Paget, This English (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Turbner & Co., Ltd., 1935): 2. 34. Paget, This English, 2. It is important to note that Paget's theories are not drawn exclusively from English or even Indo-European languages, but from a variety of Eastern and ancient languages as well, with a strong leaning toward Polynesian languages. 35. E. L. Thorndike, "The Origin of Language," Science 98 (July 2, 1943): 1, 3. In this article, Thorndike surveys the various by then "dishonored" glossogenetic theories of the 1930s and 1940s. Paget's theory was considered by many (including Thorndike) to be the new replacement for origin theories already in circulation. First there was the "ding-dong" theory, wherein certain things mysteriously elicited certain arbitrary human noises that thus came to serve as names. The second theory is the well-known "bow-wow" theory, wherein "men formed the habits of using the sounds made by animals," and then there's the even more opprobriously named "pooh pooh theory," which posits a set of instinctual interjections. Thorndike ultimately calls Paget's theory "ingenious." 36. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, 2nd ed. (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1897): 87. 37. Darwin, Expression, 356: "It is a curious, though perhaps an idle speculation, how early in the long line of our progenitors the various expressive movements, now exhibited by man, were successively acquired." 38. Darwin, Expression, 359. 39. It's worth noting, too, that Kennedy's theory of rhetoric as energy derives neither from his extensive and monumental research on the history of rhetoric, nor from translating Aristotle, but from his observation of crows calling to each other on his campus in Chapel Hill. See Vitanza, ix. 40. This is also the section of Burke's copy of Human Speech that is the most marked up and worked over. Thanks (again) go to Michael and Butchie Burke for allowing me the chance to examine Burke's copy of Human Speech. 41. Paget, Human, 126. 42. Paget, Human, 126. 43. Paget, Human, 126–7. 44. Paget, Human, 127. 45. Paget, Human, 127–8. 46. Paget, Human, 128. 47. Paget, Human, 127. 48. Paget, Human, 128. 49. Paget, Human, 128. 50. Paget, Human, 132. 51. Paget, Human, 132. 52. Paget, Human, 36. 53. James Chesebro, Extensions of the Burkean System (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993): 46. Chesebro places the composition of ACR between 1930 and 1934, although since this piece precedes Burke's writing of Permanence and Change, which was happening in 1933 (cf. Debra Hawhee, "Burke on Drugs," Rhetoric Society Quarterly (2004): 17), I would narrow Chesebro's estimation by a year. 54. Kenneth Burke, "Ausculation, Creation, and Revision," in Chesebro: 61. 55. Burke, "Auscultation," 126. 56. Burke, "Auscultation," 124. 57. See also Burke, "Ausculation," 53–4, which indicates a possibility that Burke is responding to his own dog, Ping (whose brother's name is Pong), who gets an explicit reference earlier in ACR, when Burke describes how Ping taught him an important lesson about anthropocentrism: Gathering up the family, including the pup, who was small enough to be transported in a cardboard box with square holes cut here and there for ventilation, I started off on a slow train which—it being early spring—was heated both by steam from the engine and by slanting sunlight. The pup … in his eagerness to see, would stick his nose into one of the holes, thus blocking his vision and leading me to realize that had he been less eager he would, by not pressing so tensely forward, have avoided plugging the hole with his nose, and so would have seen much better. I thought of calling the attention of all my daughters to this parabolic fact, but I was not quite sure of what it was parabolic, and insofar as dogs recognize by scent rather than vision, his nose was exactly where it should have been. 58. Burke, "Auscultation," 124. 59. Burke, "Auscultation," 124. 60. Paget, Human 61. All quotes in this sentence are from Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 1st ed. Vol. 2. New York: The New Republic, 1937. 62. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 92. 63. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 92. 64. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 83. 65. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 83. 66. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 83. 67. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 84. 68. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 84 69. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 84. 70. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 84. 71. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 84–5. 72. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 85. 73. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 85. 74. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 86. 75. Sociologists like Gusfield, 18, are particularly keen on identification's social, persuasive functions. 76. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 110. 77. Kenneth Burke, Counter-Statement 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968): 140: The appeal of form as exemplified in rhythm enjoys a special advantage in that rhythm is more closely allied with "bodily" processes. Systole and diastole, alternation of the feet in walking, inhalation, and exhalation, up and down, in and out, back and forth, such are the types of distinctly motor experiences "tapped" by rhythm. See also Hawhee, "Burke on Drugs," 16. 78. Paget, This English, 101–2. 79. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 249. Readers might recognize the rudiments of speech act theory in the passage preceding: In names, there are implicit the act and the command (Piaget shows us the child picking up a block and saying: "This is a boat." The child next moves the block, commanding itself: "Now, make the boat go across the ocean." In time, name and command become inextricably intermingled, the command being implicit in the name.) To name various manifestations by the same name, is to organize a strategy with reference to these manifestations. 80. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 249. 81. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 249–50. 82. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 250. 83. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 250. 84. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 110. 85. R. R. Marrett, Tylor (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1936): 60. 86. Burke, Attitudes, 1e, 2: 256. 87. Kenneth Burke, Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973): 1. 88. Burke, Philosophy, 1. 89. Burke, Philosophy, 1. Emphasis in original. 90. Burke, Philosophy, 1. 91. Burke, Philosophy, 3. 92. Philosophy of Literary Form marks, as best as I can tell, the first time Burke uses the phrase "symbolic action," and he of course uses the phrase in PLF's subtitle: Studies in Symbolic Action. To be sure, he's circling "symbolic action" in Attitudes Toward History, 1e, 22 and 2e, 194 when he discusses symbolic kinship. 93. Burke, Philosophy, 9, emphasis in original. 94. Burke, Philosophy, 9–10. 95. Burke, Philosophy, 11. 96. Burke, Philosophy, 13. 97. Burke, Philosophy, 13, emphasis in original. 98. Burke, Philosophy, 13. 99. Burke, Philosophy, 16–17. 100. Paget, Human, 154. 101. Paget, Human, 154. 102. Burke, Philosophy, 13. 103. Kenneth Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 2nd ed. (Hermes: 1957): 238. 104. Burke, Philosophy, 103. 105. Burke, Philosophy, 103. 106. Burke, Philosophy, 103. 107. Burke, Philosophy, 103, n. 23. 108. Burke, Philosophy, 116. 109. August 1955 is the date of his new preface to the second edition, which appeared in 1957, and so that year, I assume, is roughly when he made the revisions. Burke, Attitudes, 2e, "Introduction," unnumbered pages. 110. Burke, Attitudes, 2e, 238. It is telling that the conclusion of Attitudes Toward History, so inflected by Paget's theories, as I demonstrate in "Attitudes I" above, can be left fully intact and unrevised for the second edition. 111. A. T. W.'s QJS review, which opened this essay, also foreshadows the possibility of poetic implications when A. T. W. suggests that Paget's theory offers speech "as the basis of the arts of literature, poetry and song," 365. 112. Kenneth Burke, Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969): 14. 113. Burke, Grammar, 20. 114. At the very least this genealogy troubles the recent assertion of Mahen-Hays and Aden, 35, that Burkean attitude is "a strategy of interpretation and thus more of a cognitive activity that is then reflected in one's symbol use." Mahen-Hays and Aden's error is their assumption that interpretation—especially Burkean interpretation—is necessarily and wholly cognitive. 115. Burke, Grammar, xviii, emphasis in original. 116. Burke, Grammar, 276. 117. Burke, Grammar, 443. 118. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, Latin Dictionary Founded on Andrew's Edition of Freund's Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). 119. Burke, Grammar, 443. See also Burke, Attitudes Toward History, 3rd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 394. Here, in the "Retrospective Prospect," Burke writes: But, whereas the quo modo of the medieval formula was originally treated as but a figurative variation on the theme of "agency" ("he did the job with hammer and saw, with alacrity"), in time the strategic role of the term began to become apparent. For it designates the point of personal mediation between the realm of nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action. Its "how" refers to the role of the human individual as a physiological organism, with corresponding centrality of the nervous system, ATTITUDINIZING in the light of experience as marked by the powers of symbolicity (both in themselves and in the realm of the Counter-Nature that has developed as the results, intended and unintended, of those powers). 120. Kenneth Burke, "A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language, Part One," Quarterly Journal of Speech 37 (1952): 254, note 2. This piece is the first in a series of three articles which are most useful for Burke's account of negative, which is why I don't focus on them more here (this despite their title, "A Dramatistic View of the Origins of Language"). This series is reprinted in Burke, Language as Symbolic Action, 419–69. 121. Burke, "Dramatistic View," 254, note 2. 122. For the dance point, consider Burke's rejoinder to Wayne Booth, "Dancing with Tears in My Eyes," Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 (September 1974): 1–31, and Booth's meditation in Critical Understanding called "The Dance as Cure." In Wayne Booth, Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979): 124–6. 123. Cf. Anderson, 259, and J. Clarke Rountree, III, "Coming to Terms with Kenneth Burke's Pentad," American Communication Journal 1, no. 3 (1998): http://www1.appstate.edu/orgs/acjournal/holdings/vol1/iss3/burke/rountree.html (accessed February 13, 2006). See also, of course, the Critical Inquiry exchanges between Burke and Jameson, beginning with Burke's article "Nonsymbolic Motion/Symbolic Action," Critical Inquiry 4, no. 4 (1978): 809–38. 124. Bryan Crable, "Symbolizing Motion: Burke's Dialectic and Rhetoric of the Body," Rhetoric Review 22, no. 2 (2003): 121–37. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDebra Hawhee Debra Hawhee is Associate Professor in the Departments of English and of Speech Communication at the University of Illinois
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