Oh my goodness, I didn't understand Burke at all, but here's what I think he says...

I’d like to start out by saying, I truly do not understand the intent of Kenneth Burke in writing On Symbols and Society. He attempts to define man and has all sort of philosophical explanations behind his definitions. Honestly, I was confused 90% of the time. I will try to emphasize the 10% that I did understand. He has five clauses to define man. 1. “Man is the symbol-using animal”(56). He talks about the system of language, talking about the difference between a thing, such as a tree, and the symbol used to signify the tree (the actual word “tree). He uses Freudian terminology such as “condensation” and applies it to language. For example, abbreviations of proper names and using the title of a book to refer to the whole novel are examples of “condensation”(61). 2. Man is “inventor of the negative”(62). He is basically saying that where you have a positive you also have a negative. He uses polar terms as examples of positives with negatives, such as “peace-war” and “true-false”. He mentions positive terms that do lack negatives counterparts, as Weaver mentioned before. 3. Man is “Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making”(67). (I was totally confused by this part and will need some further explanation.) 4. Man is “Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy”. This reminds me of Weaver talking about the hierarchy of man in society with the people closest to being the “ideal” on top and the ones furthest away from it on bottom. 5. Man is “rotten with perfection”(70). I’m not sure about this one, but I think he is telling us that we are constantly aiming for perfection, even if a “good perfect” isn’t the goal. For example, we aim to establish a “perfect enemy” in drama (72).

Contemporary Perspectives on Rhetoric helped me to understand Burke a little bit better, but not much. From what I got out of the reading, Burke is unique from the others who talk about rhetoric in the fact that he stresses the idea of identification. People are unique, different from each other, and they use rhetoric to unify society. I’m still unsure about the idea of negativity, except that language introduces the idea of it. (A word is a symbol- NOT the actual thing)-hence the idea of negativity is realized by a person. Hierarchy and perfection work together in that everybody works to reach the idea of perfection that is at the top of the structure. (It puzzles me that it states some don’t have to reach perfection to be satisfied. Doesn’t this go against what is stated in the perfection section?) The definition of a human is clarified better in CPoR. The third clause, which confused me in the first reading, I can understand better that by the “natural condition” Burke talks about, he means man in the most primitive state, talking about natural “biology, sense perception, and motion”(212). When language is introduced, we are introducing something that is not natural. Once it is introduced, it is always there and we cannot go back to that primitive, completely natural condition. If I touched on everything Burke said, my blog would be as long as a research paper. I am sure what I tried to summarize doesn’t come close to what Burke actually means, but I gave it my best shot. This is probably completely WRONG but it’s the best attempt I could make to try and make sense of it all…..