King

"MOTIVE"

1. Why Motives are Crucial

The John Knox of American Sociology, the late Hugh Dalziel Duncan, drew a firm distinction between William Howell's notion of motive as "a vector of energy" and Kenneth Burke's linguistic conception of motive. The first conception, Duncan often averred, belonged to the physiologists and psychologists and even more especially to the scholars he called "chemists" (materialists) among his own colleagues in Sociology. The second conception of motive was generative. This featured motive as an act of naming and invention, thus Burke's famous "vocabulary of motives." In Communication and Social Order, Duncan defines the Burkean sense of motive as opposed to more traditional sense of the word:

The basic question for those of us interested in social communication is not the discovery of drives nor the analysis of the individual psyche. The key to understanding one another is not in studying the ways in which we discharge feelings but in how we name them. Feeling becomes emotion because it can be communicated. How it is communicated determines whether we will act together in love, hatred or indifference. Thus, the proper study of motives is not how we discharge feelings, but how we express them.¹

As even the most junior Burke scholar knows, the master divided motive into three parts and arranged the parts in a hierarchy suspended between Heaven and Hell. As always, Burke numbered and named the beast. He called the three kinds of motives, the personal, the categorical and the generic.

Burke uses the work of Milton to cast light on the nature of motive. For Burke, Milton begins in highly personal fury, ascends through party spirit with the cold craft of a warrior chieftain, and finally goes generic in framing his rebuke of Samson as an attack on the wicked principle of monarchy. Murderous hatred is elevated to a ritual purification of the political order. This "slaying in effigy" is not done for revenge, nor yet for the guild, but for a purified vision of England. The poem "is almost a kind witchcraft, a wonder-working spell by an old fighter-priest . . . whose very translation of political controversy to high theologic terms helps, by such magnification, to sanction the ill-tempered obstinacy of his resistance."²
Let us consider Burke's favorite target, a person who dominates every major university at the close of this turbulent century, the entrepreneurial scientist. After the death of his old left idols in the murderous farm collectivization, Burke abandoned his 1930's stereotype of the American Capitalist and found a new and more sinister villain, the Cold War Scientist. In the reverse order of the downward way:

Generic Motive:"I developed the weapon for the freedom and security of unborn generations of Americans."

Categorical Motive:"I developed the weapon for defense jobs and contracts for my consortium of universities."

Personal Motive:"I developed the bomb to enhance my career and to secure a place in military history."

2. The Dynamism of Motives

Burke's motive names the full range of the action. It is not to be confused with the Why or Purpose of an action. Charles Benedictus says that Burkean naming is "an act of aggression."³ Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills "invented" the concept of "Vocabulary of Motive" in Character and Social Structure (1953).⁴ Donald Martindale, the great historian of Sociological theory, had never read Kenneth Burke, and he celebrated Gerth and Mills's "vocabularies of motive" as "their most original conception." Note his exposition of their "big idea" which is a reductive adaptation of Burke's (1950) theory of motivation:

Motives, they observe, are usually thought of as subjective springs of actions lying in the psychic structure of the organism. However, they urge, since persons ascribe motives to themselves and others, motives may be considered "as the terms which persons typically use in their interpersonal relations." Sociologically, they continue, a motive is a term in a vocabulary which appears to the actor and to the observer to be an adequate reason for his conduct. "Conceived in this way," they insist, "motives are acceptable justifications for present, future, or past programs of conduct." Nor is this the end of the matter. "When a person confesses or imputes motives, he is not usually trying to describe his social conduct, he is . . . usually trying to influence others." Vocabularies of motive, they maintain, have histories as their institutional contexts change. While the motives accompanying the institutional conduct of war are not the causes of war, they promote continued participation in warfare.⁵

Martindale does not suspect that it was Burke, not Gerth and Mills, who supplied Symbolic Interactionism with a meaningful theory of motivation. But for Burke, motivation was more than a specialized vocabulary or a unified system of phrases and definitions constructed for purposes of deception. Beyond individual systems of impression management, vocabularies of motive gained the dochastic force of loci. They broke loose from matters of personal conduct, public consensus, and even public spiritedness. They mounted higher above psychic and public structures and assumed a transcendent universalistic power spanning nations, cultures, epochs.

3. Burke and Motive

What Burke says about Motive is scattered, confusing and cryptic. His simplest definition is: The Motive is the name (or naming) of the Act. The name does not describe the conditions surrounding the Act. It does not skewer the essence of the Act. It does not isolate the genetic programming of the Act or explain the physical and material trajectory of the Act. It is not the unverbalized chemical twitch activating the psychic depths. It is none of these things. The Motive is the name that situates the act within the orbit of social communication. Motive is what differentiates motion from action. Motive is what smuggles the divine and the transcendent into the material and the secular. Motive is closely related to Burke's other key ideas, particularly Identification, the Redemptive Cycle, and the representative anecdote.
In effect, Burke says: Human beings are half angel and half ape. They are rooted in a real material environment with real consequences. It does not matter how you construe your situation, if you drink poisoned water you will die. Our so-called moral choices are often biologically based. They are in our genes. But not all of our choices are in our genes. Through language we can deal with the world symbolically, but many of these successful behaviors are not yet in our genes. Thus, they have an external, a transcendent quality.

We are Mezzanine creatures according to Burke. We shuttle between the reeking pit and the exalted view from the balcony. We are constantly serving our biological nature and alternately rebelling against our bodily limitations. Betwixt and between our sizzling gonads and our aching joints on the one hand, and our visions of immortality and transcendent meaning on the other, we are very hardly used. As Burke used to say, "in our black dog times, we need a sky hook." The sky hook is motive. It names our actions. It gives them significant form (or, as Burke used to say, "whatever gods you feel compelled to address.") But motive also expresses our identity for our tribe, our enemies, and for posterity.

4. Motive and Charisma

Burke's most interesting explanation of motive comes from his discussion of courtly and hierarchic motives.⁶ In these arenas, motive represents a temptation to what does not exist. In the Benthamite sense, motive is simply a eulogistic covering for a selfish act such as love for sexual desire, industriousness for greed, or Duty to the Corps for fear of punishment by the commander. But for Burke "naming" is a creative and a disruptive act. Naming alters the condition of action as an explanation; it cannot be exhausted by environment, purpose, economic forces, or any scheme of cause and effect.

A vocabulary of motive is a charismatic corrective. Max Weber noted that the increasing rationalization (secularization) of society created a compensatory need for transcendence. But while Weber associated charisma with founders of religions, great military leaders or world historical personalities, Burke argued that charisma was erupting everywhere. Just as the most secular and material advertisement concealed a divinity, charisma was ready to burst through the despair of the modern wasteland.

Burke's concept of motive is closely related to his central narrative, The Story of the Fall. In Burke's world we experience the fall from Edenic grace over and over and over. The charisma of motive (naming and re-naming) is our skyhook, our deliverance from the chaos of the existential moment.

Notes

1. Hugh Dalziel Duncan, Communication and Social Order (New York: Bedominster Press, 1962), 12.

2. Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University California Press, 1950), 5.

3. Charles Benedictus "Growing Up With KB" Unpublished paper (SCA Convention, Nov.1989), 25.

4. Hans Gerth and C. Wright Mills, Character and Social Structure (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953) p. 253.

5. Donald Martindale, The Nature and Types of Social Theory (New York: Ginn and Co. 1962), 373.

6. Burke, 623-5, 736, 808.