J. Clarke Rountree, III
University of Alabama in Huntsville

Abstract

Kenneth Burke's pentad has been widely applied by rhetorical critics, though its ontological status has not been recognized. This essay argues that Burke conceives of the pentad as a universal heuristic of motives which derives from the very conception of human action. It demonstrates how the terms of the pentad may be exploited by rhetors and analyzed by rhetorical critics, explaining how the grammar of motives underlies the rhetoric of motives.

Introduction

No rhetorical concept in Kenneth Burke's formidable corpus is used more frequently by rhetorical critics and yet misunderstood more widely than the pentad and pentadic ratios. One only needs to survey the mounting collection of pentadic analyses over the past quarter century to establish the frequency of critical usage (Ling; Fisher; Brown; Huyink; Brummett; Blankenship, Fine, and Davis; Peterson, "Will to Conservation"; Birdsell; Kelley; Peterson, "Meek" and "Rhetorical Construction"; Rountree, "Judicial Invention" and "Quintus"; Tonn, Endress, and Diamond; Rountree "Spurgeon"), while bemoaning the divergence between Burke himself and several "Burkeians" over the issue of dramatism's (and the pentad's) essential nature (see Burke et al.; Brock; Burke, "Dramatism and Logology"; Lentricchia, 68-69). Fortunately for rhetorical critics, agreement over the issue of the pentad's status has rarely prevented fruitful analyses of rhetorical acts and artifacts. Nonetheless, a clear exposition of Burke's theory of dramatism and the purposes for which he developed the pentad as a critical tool may help rhetorical critics who wish to apply this powerful rubric to an understanding of the rhetoric of human motives. Such is the purpose of this essay.

Burke's Pentad as a Universal Heuristic of Motives

Burke's seminal 1945 work, A Grammar of Motives, opens with a question which the book seeks to answer: "What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?" (xv). Burke's answer to this question turns on the fundamental distinction that humans make between the motion of objects and the action of humans, investigating the implications of our habit of attributing motives to humans. Notice that the philosophical issue of whether humans really do act (rather than merely move as a bag full of chemicals or genetic programming or neuronal circuits might "move") is not Burke's concern, but only the recognition that we do, indeed, "pragmatically" treat other human beings as if they were acting rather than merely moving (Burke, Language 53). Burke illustrates this distinction:

[A] physical scientist's relation to the materials involved in the study of motion differs in quality from his relation to his colleagues. He would never think of "petitioning" the objects of his experiment or "arguing with them," as he would with persons whom he asks to collaborate with him or to judge the results of his experiment. Implicit in these two relations is the distinction between the sheer motion of things and the actions of persons. ("Dramatism" 11)

But what is involved in viewing, talking about, and treating others as humans engaged in action rather than as bodies in mere motion? An answer to this question, Burke insists, requires a philosophical analysis of the concept and term "action" (Grammar xxiii). For any species of human action to be considered "action" at all, Burke finds, requires (l) an act (2) undertaken by an agent, (3) within some scene or context, (4) through some agency, (5) for some purpose (Grammar xv). Although these five terms--Burke's dramatistic pentad--appear to be positive, they are actually a heuristic of motives, asking of any action: "what was done (act), when or where it was done (scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why (purpose)" (Grammar xv; Conversations 3 53). In a later edition of his Grammar, Burke distinguished "attitude" as a specific form of "incipient" action, which asks the "how" question as "in what manner?" (Grammar 443). (Although the addition of this term technically makes the pentad into a hexad, I will continue to use the more common term "pentad" in referring to the collection of terms that constitutes Burke's heuristic of motives.)

Burke does not claim any originality for his pentad, finding the same heuristic in works from Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics to Talcott Parsons's Structure of Social Action, and noting that it was "fixed in the medieval questions: quis (agent), quid (act), ubi (scene defined as place), quibus auxiliis (agency), cur (purpose), quo modo (manner, 'attitude'), quando (scene defined temporarily)" ("Dramatism" 9). Given the universality of the pentadic terms, Burke asserts, "all statements that assign motives can be shown to arise out of them and to terminate in them" (Grammar xvi), and any complete statement of motives will provide answers to all of the questions (Grammar xv). However, an answer to one of the pentadic questions will have implications for our interpretation of answers to all of the other pentadic questions. This is because the terms of the pentad share "certain formal interrelationships...by reason of their role as attributes of a common ground or substance" (Burke, Grammar xix). Because each of these elements is interconnected in the structure of action, in what Burke calls the "grammar of motives," our understanding of one term necessarily is tied to our understanding of all of the other terms. Thus, whenever we perceive a scene, agent, act, agency, purpose, or attitude as having a given nature or quality, or we accept another's characterization of one of those pentadic elements, we "grammatically" limit potential interpretations of all the other terms.

We see most clearly the connection between terms of the pentad when we take them in pairs or ratios, analyzing thoroughly the implications within particular grammatical relations. The rhetorical power of such grammatical limitations is illustrated in Burke's observation that one's characterization of a given situation "prescribes the range of acts that will seem reasonable, implicit, or necessary in that situation" ("Dramatism" 14). Thus, the movie-goer who screams "Fire!"--a scenic description--implicitly recommends the act of quickly exiting the theater. That is not to say that a fire alert will send everyone scurrying. One's characterization of a room as "ablaze" is not deterministic in dictating the "reasonable" act of fleeing. However, such characterizations are terministic in suggesting how such actions are to be interpreted.

Burke admits that we can and do resist the terministic constraints of grammatical relations, employing what he calls the "nevertheless" strategy (Personal Interview). For example, the movie-goer may state: "Yes, I believe there is a fire in the theater; I believe that if I stay I may be injured or killed; and I believe I can escape now with little or no injury. Nevertheless, I shall stay." Barring some other information concerning the movie-goer's motives, this "strategy" would leave us to interpret his or her decision as foolish or insane. Thus, relations among grammatical terms function as rhetorical constraints that do not dictate action, but shape the interpretation of action. By extension, these constraints function when one attempts to account for any sort of action, whether undertaken by one's self or another.

Just how a given term shapes other terms depends upon their terministic relationships. Those relationships have general and specific dimensions. General dimensions are described and amply illustrated by Burke in his Grammar of Motives: The scene "contains" the act; means (agencies) are adapted to ends (purposes); agents are the "authors" of their actions; and so forth. Differences among cultures, theories of metaphysics or ontology, and philosophies of action may lead to correspondingly different types of understandings of these general dimensions and the relationships between agents and actions, means and ends, and so forth. For example, the Western emphasis on pragmatic, means-ends understanding of "proper" motives may be less prevalent in the East. Nonetheless, all cultures will make general assumptions about how agents are related to their actions, how scenes shape actions, to what extent ends ought to determine means, and the like.

Specific dimensions of terministic relations are normative, established by a discourse community's shared beliefs about "what goes with what" at a given point in time, underlying expectations that one will or should find certain types of agents engaging in certain types of actions, using certain agencies, within certain scenes, for certain purposes, evincing certain attitudes. For example, we might expect to find certain sorts of men drinking, smoking, cat-calling, and stuffing dollar bills into the g-strings of female strippers on a Saturday night. Character types in popular culture rely on such stereotypical relations, encouraging us to make such terministic connections (and applying terministic screens) in sizing up agents. Rhetors may take advantage of such expected relations by invoking them or by allowing an audience to participate in its own persuasion by inferring them. On the other hand, such expected relations create rhetorical constraints for those who would sever presumptive ties between particular scenes and particular acts, particular agents and particular agencies, and so forth. Thus, the man who admits: "Yes, I was drinking, smoking, cat-calling, and stuffing dollar bills into the g-strings of female strippers on a Saturday night," would have a difficult time convincing others he is a "feminist."

The rhetor characterizing action has the greatest inventional freedom when no qualities attach to any terms connected to an act, so that no terministic constraints are operative. However, most actions that are the subject of rhetorical exchange already are tainted by some substantive characterization carrying grammatical implications. Even a statement as generic as "someone did something" indicates individual action and locates it in the past, limiting possibilities for interpreting that action. To name an agent, to describe a scene, to invoke a purpose, to perceive an agency, to attribute an attitude, or to suggest an act is to ratchet up a grammatical logic that undergirds the human ability to "size up" a situation. Rhetorical critics may analyze the implications of such characterizations to understand how the rhetoric of motives operates in a given discourse. Just how they do this is considered in the next section.

Rhetorical Analysis Using the Pentad

Pentadic analysis allows the rhetorical critic to reveal how a discursive text works within the grammar of motives to effectively represent motives for rhetorical purposes. Generally, the strategic representation of motives involves two rhetorical functions: (1) directing the attention and (2) both characterizing pentadic terms and terministic relationships. David Ling's early analysis of Senator Edward Kennedy's speech on Chappaquiddick illustrates these functions: Faced with the act of leaving the scene of an accident that killed Mary Jo Kopechne, Kennedy directed attention to a scene of a narrow, unlighted bridge over cold, dark, rushing water that left him nearly drowned and not thinking straight. That terministic focus attempted to draw attention away from alternative terms, such as agent (Kennedy as irresponsible), agency (driving under the influence), attitude (careless), and so forth. It also sought to characterize a term (the scene, as life-threatening and overwhelming) and to characterize a terministic relationship (clearly implying that the scene controlled the act, as Kennedy staggered away in a daze).

Critics analyzing terministic emphases in particular representations of motives will find that references to scenes, agents, acts, agencies, purposes, and attitudes take a huge variety of forms. Burke illustrates these possibilities with the term "scene":

Besides general synonyms for scene that are obviously of a background character, such as "society," or "environment," we often encounter quite specific localizations, words for particular places, situations, or eras. "It is 12:20 P.M." is a "scenic" statement. Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso are formed about a scenic contrast between morning and night, with a corresponding contrast of actions. Terms for historical epochs, cultural movements, social institutions (such as "Elizabethan period," "romanticism," "capitalism") are scenic, though often with an admixture of properties overlapping upon the areas covered by the term, agent. If we recall that "ideas" are a property of agents, we can detect this strategic overlap in Locke's expression, "The scene of ideas," the form of which Carl Becker exactly reproduces when referring to "climates of opinion," in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. (Grammar 12)

The rhetorical critic must take care to look not simply for terms that are "scenic" (or "purposive" or "agency-related," etc.) on their face, but for those that function within a particular grammar of motives as "scene" (or "purpose" or "agency," etc.). As Burke emphasizes, there is a great deal of overlap between his pentadic terms and pentadic analyses should reveal "the strategic spots at which ambiguities necessarily arise" (Grammar xviii; emphasis in original). So, for example, as Blankenship and her colleagues have shown, Ronald Reagan functioned not as agent, but as scene in the 1980 Republican primary debates.

This study of Reagan as scene also illustrates another point about pentadic analysis: Although, strictly speaking, pentadic analysis is concerned with words for motives, it need not be so limited. Reagan's visual image on television contributed to his "scenic" role in the media's construction of motives during the primary debates. Burke himself has applied the pentad to nonverbal texts such as cartoons (Conversations 4 11) and dreams (Grammar 301). Such analyses of nonverbal texts must take care to identify the "terms" (or "functions") and ratios which a rhetorical text features. Thus, analyses that simply identify the speech as act, the speaker as agent, the speaking situation as scene, and so forth, are unlikely to yield fruitful insights.

As I noted earlier, rhetors not only draw attention to particular terms (and away from others), and characterize those terms, they also characterize terministic relationships, suggesting how scenes relate (or should relate) to acts, agents to agencies, and so forth. The "direction" of terministic relationships can have significant implications for our interpretations of motives, as Barry Brummett shows in his analysis of two gay rights controversies. Pro-gay rights groups insist that people are born gay and this leads them to engage in homosexual acts; thus, agent determines act. Anti-gay rights groups reverse the equation, urging that the choice to engage in homosexual acts makes individuals homosexual (act determines agent).

The direction of terministic influence typically turns on inventional opportunity and rhetorical purpose. If an audience already accepts a particular terministic characterization (e.g., the agent is a "respected orthopedist"), then the rhetor may build on that acceptance by establishing a terministic relationship (e.g., agent-act: "Let her look at your aching foot."). However, if a rhetor has another purpose (e.g., to encourage a friend not to go to that doctor), then he must adapt to such assumptions (e.g., agent-agency: "Yes, she's respected, that's why she can rush so many patients through her office!").

Rhetors can "stabilize" their preferred characterizations of particular pentadic terms by characterizing other, less disputed pentadic terms, "hemming in" preferred characterizations with the threads of terministic relationships. Thus, one might urge a friend: "Don't go to that doctor (agent), she'll rush you through (agency). She works for an HMO (scene) which only interested in making money (purpose), not caring about how patients feel (attitude), and providing minimal quality (act)."

Sometimes characterizations of particular acts influence the interpretations of other acts, crossing pentadic sets. This occurs when pentadic sets share terms (e.g., two acts with a shared scene) or when an element of one act provides a different terministic function in another act (e.g., an agent in one act may be an agency in a second act). My study of the development of American corporate criminal liability in the 19th century is illustrative here: Courts refused to recognize the criminal acts of corporations because they refused to attribute the illegal actions of corporate functionaries to corporations. However, when injured plaintiffs brought civil actions against corporations who harmed them, the courts took pity on them and recognized corporate functionaries as the agencies of harmful corporate action. With this civil precedent establishing that corporations had a means for acting, corporations could then be held criminally responsible, as agents capable of action. Other rhetorical critics have considered the relationships among multiple pentadic sets as well (e.g., Ling; Birdsell).

Finally, the rhetorical critic may consider the rejection of grammatical constraints as a strategy in its own right. In my study of the sermons of Charles Haddon Spurgeon on the Calvinist doctrine of election (Rountree, "Spurgeon"), I considered the London preacher's analysis of God's motives for choosing some to eternal salvation and leaving others to eternal damnation. Spurgeon refused to explain God's motives in terms of an understandable purpose, agency, scene, attitude, agent, or act. The upshot of Spurgeon's characterization of God's motives makes God's elective act appear "wholly without motives" (the same characterization Burke attributes to Augustine's view of God's act of Creation in Grammar 69). This refusal to hold God accountable to notions of human motivation is itself a strategic representation of motives.

In summary, rhetorical critics using the pentad to analyze statements about motives should look for ways in which such statements direct the attention to particular pentadic terms, characterize those terms, and characterize terministic relationships. They will find that terministic references take a wide variety of forms, from very general to quite specific. Critics should look for the actual grammatical functions of terms for motives, not just their superficial connection to a terministic source. Although the pentad is particularly adapted to an analysis of words, it may be applied to nonverbal representations of motives as well. Pentadic critics should be sensitive to the way rhetors construct terministic relationships, by suggesting a direction for terministic influence, "hemming in" particular terms with multiple terministic characterizations, and even crossing pentadic sets by using their rhetorical work on one act to shape the interpretation of another. Finally, critics may even find cases where a rejection of terministic constraints itself serves as a rhetorical strategy.

Conclusion

I have argued that Burke holds that his pentad is not simply a useful critical tool for analyzing human motives, but a universal heuristic growing out of the very concept of action recognized by writers on human motives for over two millennia. This ontological point draws a clear line between Burke's theory and those, like Erving Goffman's, which rely upon drama as a metaphor. From Goffman's perspective, people may engage in "self-presentations" to influence our interpretations of their actions; however, from Burke's perspective, they cannot escape the "grammar" of motives by going "backstage," since interpretations of their motives are "always already" constrained by who they are, what they do, where they do it, etc., even when they reflect on their own motives.

Since the grammar of motives operates in any perception of, interpretation of, or statement about motives, its operation may be evidenced everywhere: "in systematically elaborated metaphysical structures, in legal judgments, in poetry and fiction, in political and scientific works, in news and in bits of gossip offered at random" (Grammar xv). As I have noted elsewhere, "[t]he dramatisic critic may examine what he, she, or others say about his, her, or their own past, present, and future actions, or the past, present, and future actions of others, even if those 'others' and their acts are only proposed, possible, hypothetical, imagined, or generalized" (Rountree, "Judicial Invention" 59-60). Applying this universal heuristic to the vast body of texts about motives should help critics tease out "what is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it."

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