Burke, Kenneth. Dramatism and Development. Barre, MA: Clark University Press with Barre Publishers, 1972.

Basically, the concept of “perspective by incongruity” embodies the assumption that certain clusters of terms spontaneously exclude certain other clusters of terms; and these clusters tend to be kept apart, as though in different bins, unless a thinker who is in some respect “perverse’ suddenly bridges the gap. For instance, we tend to think of “training” and “incapacity” as mutually exclusive, until we run across Veblen’s ironic bridging of the gap with his ironic expression, “trained incapacity,” to designate a situation where, in being fitted for one thing by the same token a person is made unfit for something else. If such spontaneous, mutually exclusive groupings are a kind of “piety,” then a “planned incongruity” that violated such uncriticized assumptions would be a kind of “impiety” that produced a new perspective by joining the “naturally” disjunct. It would jolt our expectations. (18)

Attitudes Toward History, which tried to develop a comic theory of human relations, was itself built around a perspective by incongruity, “the bureaucratization of the imaginative,” a notion strongly affected by Spengler’s version of Western civilization’s unwieldy decline. It is analogous to such a formulation as “the rigidifying of pliancy.” Our vast technologic clutter, with corresponding scientific, political, and commercial nomenclatures, would thus be likened to a hardening of the arteries, rather than to the realm of springlike promises dear to the rhetoric of the typical promoter. (18-19)

The expression, “scene-act ratio,” refers to modes of response that are viewed as motivated by the situation in which they take place. An “agent-act ratio,” on the other hand, would refer to respects in which an act is viewed as characteristic of the character who enacts it. (24)

The term “identification” can be applied in at least three ways. The first is quite dull. It flowers in such usages as that of a politician who, though rich, tells humble constituents of his humble origins. The second kind of identification involves the workings of antithesis, as when allies who would otherwise dispute among themselves join forces against a common enemy. This application also can serve to deflect criticism, as a politician can call any criticism of his policies “un-patriotic,” on the grounds that it reinforces the claims of the nation’s enemies. But the power of “identification” derives from situations in which it goes unnoticed. My prime example is the word “we,” as when the statement that “we” are at war includes under the same head soldiers who are getting killed and speculators who hope to make a killing in war stocks. Often “we” must feel quite mean, when introducing discriminations into identifications of that sort. (28)

As regards The Rhetoric of Religion, despite my hankering after a comic perspective on human affairs, when working out a “cycle of terms implicit in the idea of ‘Order’” I became more and more convinced of the tremendous pressures toward a sacrificial motive which the nature of human congregation builds up. Hence the constant incentive to victimize, the dialectic of which adds up to a design that could be called “congregation by segregation.” Trying to be as cheerful as possible, one might say that victimage is not inevitable. But the temptation to victimage is every born anew. There are also comic victims, the “butts” of humor – but will things stop there? (29)

A Dramatistic terminology of motives, based on a generating distinction between action and motion, would not look for the ultimate roots of freedom in either physicist or biological notions of indeterminacy. (30)

Nomenclatures are formative, or creative, in the sense that they affect the nature of our observations, by turning our attention in this direction rather than that, and by having implicit in them ways of dividing up a field of inquiry. In this respect, on can in effect “prophesy after the event” by “generating” the nature of the observations from the nature of the terms by which those observations were guided. (33)

The distinction between the tragic imitation of victimage as a source of poetic pleasure and the engrossment with actual victimage would be the difference between the Athenian theatre and the Roman gladiatorial contest. Newspapers and documentary broadcasts appeal in a kind of intermediate realm by a record (thus a symbolizing) of real victimage. The thought suggests why the poetic imitation of imaginary pitiable situations involves in itself a certain degree of “purgation.” All told, we encounter here some tangled relationships among the actual, the documentary copy, and the artistic imitation (38).

Be that as it may, the issue comes to a focus in questions about the recipe for perfect victimage – and by “entelechy” I refer to such use of symbolic resources that potentialities can be said to attain the perfect fulfillment. (38-39)

“Technologism” itself would be a term provided by its Humanistic opponent. As distinct from mere technology, “Technologism” would be built upon the assumption that the remedy for the problems arising from technology is to be sought in the development of ever more and more technology. (53)