Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Originally published in 1954.

In its simplest manifestation, style is ingratiation. It is an attempt to gain favor by the hypnotic or suggestive process of “saying the right thing.” Obviously, it is most effective when there is agreement as to what the right thing is. A plain-spoken people will distrust a man who, bred to different ways of statement, is overly polite and deferential with them, and tends to put his commands in the form of questions. (p. 50)

Of course, when used by a fertile and ebullient poet, the business of appeal by the saying of the right things becomes a highly adventurous pursuit. (p. 51)

Disorders in the communicative medium may be met in part by an attempt to overcome them, in part by an attempt to go around them. One will either try to say his say despite his handicaps, or he will say the sort of things that can best be said within the terms of the handicaps. The poets (imaginative authors in general) represent the group who have been trying to persist despite the linguistic disorders, thus tending toward one or the other of two unsatisfactory solutions: either the profound exploitation of a restricted psychosis, or the superficial exploitations of a common psychosis. The scientists, technologists, represent the group that has turned the defect into a virtue. Their language, even much more than scholastic Latin, is devoid of the tonalities, the mimetic re[i]nforcements, the vaguely remembered human situations, which go to make up the full, complex appeal of the poetic medium. To the scientist’s symbols one can respond adequately by looking them up in a book. The very lack of pliancy helps to assist them in avoiding the appeal of pliancy. The language by which the third productive order (the technological) is being rationalized may largely surmount the temptations of the athnropomorphic by reason of its low anthropomorphic content. It is designed for machines. (p. 58)

One cannot long discuss the question of meaning, as applied to the field of art, without coming upon the problem of piety. Santayana has somewhere defined piety as loyalty to the sources of our being. Such a notion should suggest that piety is not confined to the strictly religious shere. It would as well be present when the potter moulds the clay to exactly that form which completely gratifies his sense of how it ought to be. (p. 71)

Furthermore, piety is a system-builder, a desire to round things out, to fit experiences together into a unified whole. Piety is the sense of what properly goes with what. And it leads to construction in this way: If there is an altar, it is pious of a man to perform some ritual act whereby he may approach this altar with clear hands. A kind of symbolic cleanliness goes with altars, a technique of symbolic cleansing goes with cleanliness, a preparation or initiation goes with the technique of cleaning, the need of cleansing was based upon some feeling of taboo – and so on, until pious linkages may have brought all the significant details of the day into coordination, relating them integrally with one another by a complex interpretative network. (pp. 74-75)

I would even go further in trying to establish this notion of piety as a response which extends through all the texture of our lives but has been concealed from us because we think we are so thoroughly without religion and think that the “pious process” is confined to the sphere of churchliness. (p. 75)

Piety is a schema of orientation, since it involves the putting together of experiences. The orientation may be right or wrong; it can guide or misguide. (p. 76)

The question of new meanings or heuristic is confused in its individual trends; and though many men would seem to have merely been breaking down old schemes of orientation, it is probably that with greater or lesser clarity they were doing so in accordance with a new schematization of their own which they were offering as a replacement. In some brands of nonsense humor current today, it is hard to distinguish an informing principle other than a general dislike of our great complexity and confusion and indirectness of values, a dislike which the humorists convey by introducing a kind of artificial blindness, a complete vacuity as their new point of view – and the resuls are often as rich in perspective as are incongruities attained by more systematic methods. (p. 11).

There is, however, even a stage of planned incongruity that goes beyond humor: the grotesque, wherein the perception of discordancies is cultivated without smile or laughter. In comparison with the mechanisms underlying the appeal of the grotesque, even the most destructive nonsense is seen to be an upholder of things as they were. Humor still manifests its respect for our earlier categories of judgment, eve while outraging them. Like blasphemy in the sphere of dogmatic religion, it reaffirms the existence of the old gods once more in the very act of defying them. And humor is most explosive when, besides throwing a shoe among the wheels of our machinery of judgment, it not only leaves one favored judgment completely intact, but deliberately strengthens it. It pits value against value, disposition against disposition, psychotic weighting against psychotic weighting – but it flattens us by confirming as well as destroying. (p. 112)

The grotesque is a much more complex matter, and gradually merges into something very much like mysticism. Humor tends to be conservative, the grotesque tends to be revolutionary. (p. 112)

The gargoyles of the Middle Ages were typical instances of planned incongruity. The maker of gargoyles who put man’s-head on bird-body was offering combinations which were completely rational as judged by his logic of essences. In violating one order of classification, he was stressing another. (p. 112)

We might distinguish two function in the communicativeness of speech. Speech is communicative in the sense that it provides a common basis of feeling – or it communicative in the sense that it serves as the common implement of action. (pp. 175-176)

Human conduct, being in the realm of action and end (as contrasted with the physicist’s realm of motion and position) is most directly discussible in dramatistic terms. By “dramatistic” terms are meant those that begin in theories of action rather than in theories of knowledge. Terminologies grounded in the observing of sensory perception would be class as theories of Knowledge. In the same classification would fall all theories of conditioning (which is the lowest form of learning). (p. 274)

Man being specifically a symbol-using animal, we take it that a terminology for the discussion of his social behavior must stress symbolism as a motive, if maximum scope and relevancy is required of the terminology. (p. 275)

The priestly stress upon Mystery (which attains its grandest expression in the vision of a celestial hierarchy loosely imagined after the analogy of a human social order) becomes secularized and distributed among these other roles, each of which treats the social Mystery after its fashion. Thus, the educator has his testimonials of academic rank; the legislator has ways of identifying respect for himself with respect for the august body of which he is a member; the artist helps surround a system of social values with “glamour,” as he finds tricks that transform the austere religious passion into a corresponding romantic, erotic passion; journalists and advertising men make a good team, since one group keeps us abreast of the world’s miseries, and the other keeps us agog with promises of extreme comfort, the two combining to provide a crude, secular analogue of the distinction between Christus Crucifixus and Christus Triumphans. (p. 277)

In part, the new modes of Mystery are needed because the many new instrument have given the world a strongly secular cast. In part they are needed because the traditionalists of religion come in time to rely upon images surviving from an earlier social order. And while these have their appeal precisely by reason of their remoteness, they must be supplemented by images more in tune with the times. (p. 277)

Though we would stress the element of Mystery arising from the social hierarchy, we must recognize that there are other mysteries, other orders. There are the mysteries of dream, of creation, of death, of life’s stages, of thought (its arising, its remembering, its diseases). There are the mysteries of adventure and love. (p. 277)

As Mystery is the obverse expression of the disrelationship among classes, so the reverse expression is Guilt. (One can most readily realize this fact by considering an attitude midway between: Embarrassment. The specialist in one field is not “guilty” with regard to the specialist in another field; he is embarrassed. He doesn’t know exactly how much to question, how much to take on authority, how much to be merely polite about. (p. 278)

The most perfect reflection of hierarchical embarrassment in the theological doctrine of Original Sin. “Original sin” is categorical Guilt, one’s “guilt” not as the result of any personal transgression, but by reason of a tribal or dynastic inheritance. (p. 278)

It may be thought that, by the “hierarchical motive,” we are merely offering a synonym for some such term as “prestige.” In one sense, yes, any term implying emulation can serve the purposes. But out concern is not so much with any one, term, as with the question of companion-terms. Too often, the argument over some one term conceals the really important matter: the one term is modified by other terms. (p. 281)

The “scapegoat principle”…should obviously have a prominent place in any terminology of social motivation, even if we were but reviewing what is generally known about it. (p. 286)

Along with a search for the modes of vindication by victimage, look for a variant, in possible secularized equivalents of “mortification.” (p. 289)

Most in need of study, but hardest of all to study, or even to discern, are the ways whereby the very existence of a hierarchy encourages undue acquiescence among persons otherwise most competent to be its useful critics. This condition probably results much less from over-caution or obsequiousness than from the network of “proprieties” that spontaneously accumulate about a given order. This explicit and methodical study of the “hierarchical psychosis” is needed, if those in authority would guard against the natural tendency to protect their special interests in ways that ultimately impair those interests by bringing the society as a whole into disarray. (p. 291)

Then, individual acts (“fragmentary acts) can be conceived, not just “after the analogy of such-and-such,” but in terms of a corresponding perfection. (p. 292)