A rapprochement between dramatism and argumentation.

• Author: Klumpp, James F.
• Position: Special Issue: Dramatism and Argumentation

Nearly all the rhetorical theories that mark the history of human thought snugly fit argumentation (or at least a recognizable reasoning) into a comfortable place within their account of rhetorical practice. Viewed against that background of history, modern study of rhetoric reveals an enigma: two of the most vital strains of contemporary rhetorical study--dramatism and argumentation--proceed with energetic progress and with no apparent influence on each other. Kenneth Burke's dramatistic theory revitalized contemporary American theories of rhetoric into new understandings of the ongoing rhetorical processes of societal construction, yet argument receives scant attention in Burke's work. Argumentation study has been reinvigorated in this century with new frameworks from informal logicians, students of naturally occurring argument, narrative argument, and followers of Perelman, Toulmin and Habermas; yet only narrative among these approaches shows an awareness of dramatism.

With a deep interest in both of these twentieth century movements--the turn toward a social rhetoric and the revitalization of argumentation--I began to find the separation of the two becoming my own schizophrenia. I found that when working in the Burkean tradition, I tended to leave my theoretical work in argument (although not, of course, my skills as an arguer) behind. Similarly, when I worked in argumentation theory I found myself having to forget the lessons of dramatistic theory. In search of the coherence in my own work, and believing that relating the two movements could aid both, a number of years ago I embarked on a project to integrate argumentation theory and dramatism, and the search for the rapprochement began.

The project turned out to be extremely difficult. There were some preliminary attempts in my own work and in the work of colleagues (Klumpp, "Dramatistic" and "Pentad", Kneupper; Madsen, "Alternatives" and "Dramatistic"). I began by attempting to find a definition of "argument" consistent with both traditions. I bracketed assumption after assumption of dramatism and traditional argumentation theory but could never get back to the common concept. Finally, I gave up on this approach and took another--familiar to those in similar quandaries--I abandoned the project.

But it would not stay abandoned. In studying critical pluralism, and particularly the work of Stephen Pepper, I began to identify Burke's work with the intellectual movement broadly known as contextualism, and with the intellectual movement that Pepper calls organicism.(1) I had begun with a belief that Burke's lack of attention to argument was merely a result of his coming to the study of rhetoric from a different disciplinary home, and that a rapprochement would evolve from an extension of dramatism into the merely ignored theory of argument. But as I understood more about the roots of Burke's work in the broad intellectual movements of our time--contextualism and organicism--I began to believe that the unachieved rapprochement would take me toward adapting argumentation rather than dramatism. I decided to approach my search for rapprochement by developing a contextualist perspective on argument and then returning to the rapprochement project.

With that work advanced,(2) I am now prepared to return to the original project and seek the rapprochement.(3) After considering Burke's treatment of argument, I will consider the requisites for contextualist approaches to argument and the characteristics of dramatism which would shape argumentation to its service, ending by illustrating a dramatistic approach to argument.

KENNETH BURKE ON FORMAL ARGUMENT

Burke began his work in rhetorical theory in the 1920s and 1930s. His approach to argumentation grew naturally from the traditional argumentation theory that dominated that era and remains influential today. Traditional argumentation theory is built on analytic and formal procedures. Analytically, traditional theory works by dividing individual arguments into parts--premises and conclusions; evidence and forms; or data, warrant, and claim(4)--and then analyzing each part through a scheme of types, More generally, traditional argumentation theory seeks ideal forms which an arguer can master. With these forms, the arguer can generate sound arguments and can, in turn, critique argument to find fallacies or lines of refutation. The task of theory is the identification and refinement of these forms, the task of pedagogy to teach these forms.(5)

Dramatism has not been kind to this formal theory of argument. Many reasons explain this estrangement. The "new" logics of the time when the formative works of dramatism were being formulated were symbolic logics, the thrust of which was to develop abstract representational forms devoid of content. Burke's initial attack on this formalism appears in his earliest book of critical theory, Counterstatement. Burke defines "form" as "the arousing and fulfillment of desires." This definition stresses a realistic rather than an idealistic basis for form. Consider, for example, Burke's translation he calls "syllogistic progression": the power of form rests in the "mind of the auditor" (31) not in the quality of the form (124). Burke enters the den of the central character in idealistic logic--the classical syllogism--and displaces its central power.

Sometime after Burke's initial attack on formalism, argumentation theory made a similar move from idealism towards realism: tempering commitment to formalism with a skepticism about formalism's idealistic method. Influenced by the growing social science of communication, argumentation theorists insisted on experimental verification of effective forms of argument. On a much broader front, a search for effective strategies replaced the commitment to the presentation of correct arguments. The result was not always consistent; it produced a theory which mixed formal and mechanistic commitments. Even to our own times, argumentation textbooks often mix chapters taking a formal approach to "correct" inference with chapters taking a social scientific approach to effective presentation of evidence.

Because the thrust of Burke's second book, Permanence and Change, was an attack on the evolving extension of science into social analysis, it preempted the changes that were taking place in argumentation and presented an attack that stuck to the assumptions which argumentation theorists had not altered in their evolving understanding. Burke's attack is three fold.

First, he attacks a theory of reasoning derived from formal patterns, even when supplemented with verification by social scientific experiment:

The laboratory method of applied science should not blind us to the fact that most of our significant concerns with basic cultural matters lie in a territory where working models cannot possibly be made. The testing is as vague as with any medieval system of symbolic correspondence. People go on praising the objectivity of science despite the many significant rival analyses in any given branch of science. We usually tend to ignore this Babel of assertions, and to speak of science as though it were one thing rather than an assemblage of widely disagreeing scientists. And the success of science in some categories where analogy can be tested by working models has been permitted by analogical extension to carry over its prestige to categories where its analogies are open only to the vaguest kind of testing. (Permanence 101)

Burke is willing to grant the success of the logic of form and method in some areas, but he objects that the great problems of the day do not lend themselves to such procedure. In an argument which presages Thomas Kuhn's distinctions of a later decade, Burke argues that even science must obscure fundamental conflicts to focus its faith on the successes of formal logic. Burke argues that a logic which alienates the arguer and his/her specific interests from the issues which give rise to argument cannot be a universal logic.

The emphasis on the conflicts of interest in argument become more concrete in his second objection: to the reductionist thrust of formal logic. Argumentative analysis tends to prefer reducing propositions to empirically--materially--testable premises. Thus, for example, argumentation theory reduces policy propositions to material cause and measurable quantification as quickly as it can. This establishes the quality of argumentative forms in the predictive power of material relationships.(6) In the four moves of argumentative analysis, the first move reduces a complex of motives and values to material referents, the second reduces the material content to its abstract expression as form, the third uses the formal patterns to produce inferences which, in the fourth move, can be taken back to material experience as proof. This modus operandi depends on a separation of discourse from referent. Following the Port Royalist separation of dialectic from rhetoric, logic lies in the domain of non-linguistic referent. Argumentation is the study of bringing the logic of the non-linguistic domain to the domain of discourse.

Burke's reinvention of rhetoric is essentially an objection to this referentialism which he calls "information psychology" (Counterstatement 32-33). This logic, Burke argues, authorizes the reduction to method rather than substance: reducing the complexities of social order to forms manageable by a logic of method.

Even in those areas where the tests of success are made possible by experiment, it is only by a deliberate limitation of interests that we can establish such a test. Is the success of nitro-glycerine adequately tested, for instance, when a charge of it blows up an experimental rock, or when it has been distributed throughout the explosive social structure of the world? Are Pasteur's experiments proved "successful" by the prevention of one disease, or by the ultimate pollution of the bloodstream...