Radical Conflict by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Burkean Framework for Analysis

of the Bangladesh Conflict

Kenneth Duva Burke (1897–1995) developed a detailed body of innovative interdisciplinary rhetorical criticism that demonstrated ways the human mind translates innate urges or “motives” into symbol systems that literally create the world we perceive and in which we operate. Summarizing his first thirty years of theorizing about human symbolizing, Burke’s essay “Definition of Man” (1966) embodies the germs of his most important ideas. Despite cultural differences and numerous postmodernist critiques of Burke’s ideas, I argue here that these insights can offer guidance for interpretation of the rhetorical foundations and likely outcomes of intractable conflict among human beings generally. These ideas will be applied here to understand the dangerous and tragic situation in Bangladesh.

Humans create symbols for experience, and these instruments embody motives and aim to achieve objectives. Burke coined the term logology for his method for studying symbol systems, especially as these are expressed in religious form. The term is introduced in The Rhetoric of Religion, a text that describes how words are First Cause in the human conception of “reality.” Human symbols reflect the “reversed anthropomorphic tendency to conceive of God in man’s image” (Burke 1961/1970, 1). In the way that theology speaks of God, then logology speaks of Words in the same sacred, generative sense. Logology is the secular version of theology. This approach is “designed to uphold the position that, in the study of human motives, we should begin with complex theories of transcendence (as in theology and metaphysics) rather than with the terminologies of simplified laboratory experiment” (Burke 1961/1970, 5). His “Definition of Man” offers a rich condensation of Burke’s (1966) major theses:

Man is

the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol-misusing) animal

inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative)

separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making

goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order)

and rotten with perfection (16; italics in original).

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