Synthetic Tensions:
Kenneth Burke’s Pentad
Meets
Mary Douglas’s Grid/Group Cosmology
Presented at the Conference on College Composition and Communication
March 2004, San Antonio, TX
In “Cultural Bias” Mary Douglas comments on her goal as an anthropologist
of discerning meaning:
We also believe that our work is to understand how meanings are
generated, caught and transformed. We also assume that meanings
are deeply embedded and context-bound. We are also stuck at the
same fence that he balked. Like him, we cannot proceed very far
without incorporating real live cultures into our analysis. For
the cognitive activity of the real live individual is largely devoted
to building the culture, patching it here and trimming it there,
according to the exigencies of the day. In his very negotiating
activity, each is forcing culture down the throats of his fellow-men.
When individuals transact their medium of exchange is in units
of culture. (189)
Douglas is referring to Aaron Cicourel, but she might as well
have been referring to Kenneth Burke, for whom communication is
always a part of the perennial social dialogue, demanding an analysis
of context and motive. For both Douglas and Burke, context, motive,
and purpose are often obscured for the communicator and receiver.
Understanding our own social contexts and the implications of our
communications is often counterintuitive, a situation that creates
great potential for social violence. A synthesis of their common
interests, reflected in Douglas’s Grid/Group typology of social
cosmology and Burke’s concepts of scene, consubstantiality, and
the social implications of discourse, reveals the dangers of our
present social-rhetorical situation in which the threat of the
violent dissolution of any social stability is all too real.
First, Scene:
We know what Burke means by scene: the context of the act, which
may spread out to include the whole present social milieu and the
past from which it extends, but what does that mean? The context
of culture is ill-defined. Douglas argues that this has led many
theorists to give up “the sociological enterprise altogether” and “turn
to a literary mode for thinking more profoundly on the human estate,” resulting
in a “shift of sociology as a rigorous explanatory discipline into
a richly evocative literary mode” (“Passive” 2). Douglas is not
minimizing the humanities; she just wishes to remind us that this
shift away from a social-sciences model “shirks the initial project
of discovering and estimating the power of social pressures upon
individual belief” (“Passive” 2). Douglas brilliantly accomplished
a return to the original program of the social sciences with the
creation of her Grid/Group typology, allowing a rigorous analysis
of the “scene” of social cosmology that includes the personal level
of individual will.
Scene becomes difficult as we enlarge the potential context.
Discussing Burke’s analysis of “Road to Victory,” David Blakesley
wonders if Burke was interested in a greater context than he initially
reveals.
As is turns out, Burke was especially interested
in the mural’s
context. In “War and Cultural Life,” an as yet uncollected
essay . . . he comments on this mural’s placement in the exhibition.
[. . .] Formally, that mural comments dialectically and ironically
on the other murals and on the wider social scene. [. . .] (20-21)
That “wider social scene” can be rather complex. The further back
we pull our focus to take in more context, the more difficult it
becomes to grasp that context in any rigorous way. The program
of analysis is potentially overwhelming, and yet, the framework
of possibilities is not infinite, since communication comes down
to the individual at the moment. Douglas writes:
We will pick from the coral-reef accumulation
of past decisions only those which landscape the individual’s new choices: the action
is this afternoon, the context was made afresh this morning, but
some of its effects are long, slow fibres reaching from years back.
With such a view of the social environment we can try to make allowance
for the individual’s part in transforming it, minute to minute.
(“Cultural” 190).
Individuals would not be able to make any sense of the context
of their communications without principles that guide behavior “in
the sanctioned ways” and are “used for judging others and justifying
[themselves] to others. This is a social-accounting approach to
culture; it selects out of the total cultural field those beliefs
and values which are derivable as justifications for action and
which [are] regard[ed] as constituting an implicit cosmology.” (“Cultural” 190).
Douglas creates, then, a matrix corresponding to the basic boundaries
of the social scene of cultural production, adjudication and change.
It starts from plausible assumptions about
the sociological effects of arguments going on in social gatherings
of all kinds. In families,
in churches, in boardrooms, in sports committees, there
are discussions of what should be done, and allocations of responsibility.
Such
argumentation defines social categories. Its outcomes are
enforcements or suspensions of rules. The method tried out is
devised to trace
these arguments to the fundamental assumptions about the
universe which they invoke; its objective is to discover how
alternative
visions of society are selected and sustained. Its first
simplifying assumption is that the infinite array of social interactions
can
be sorted and classified into a few grand classes. (Douglas, “Introduction” 1)
Once basic choices about group and constraint have been made,
they naturally produce “a package of intricately related preferences
and secondary moral judgments” (“Introduction” 6). Hence, cultural
bias can be predicted for the various extremes of the matrix, giving
boundaries from which to map and analyze contexts.
Decisions to stiffen the conditions of entry
inevitably result in strengthening social compartments, just
as the alternative decision
to waive admission requirements results in free flows
of people and free flows of wealth. Decisions to delegate result
in hierarchy;
decisions to separate result in fission. . . . Hierarchy
once installed develops self-reinforcing moral arguments that
enable more unequal
steps in status to be tolerated. Fission breeds. If the
swirling movements of individual choices were entirely haphazard,
all institutions
would long ago have become more and more alike. There
would be no scope for recognizable typology. Yet one of the claims
in favour
of this form of analysis is that in any period or place
the four extreme types in the corners of the grid/group diagram
are recognizable,
with their particular rules and justifying cosmologies. (“Introduction” 6-7)
The natural polarizing between individualism and group behavior
in social transaction gives rise to the boundaries of local cosmology,
analyzable along two interacting dimensions, one labeled Group,
the other Grid. The Group line maps one’s dependence on the local
group, and the ease of negotiating group membership. In High Group,
one is completely dependent on group membership, so much so that
exile becomes the greatest fear. In Low Group, one’s resources
come from many sources and group membership is highly negotiable,
making changes in affiliation easy. The Grid line maps to what
extent social transactions are predetermined by social authorities
in the form of hierarchies, roles, rules, customs, norms, and so
on. High Grid is highly structured; in Low Grid all status is potentially
negotiable in any social transaction. (Douglas, “Cultural” 190-2)
These are the extreme defining parameters of cultural context,
the implications of which are outlined in Douglas’s “Cultural Bias.”
Second, Consubstantiality:
When we attempt to communicate, we hope our context is consubstantial
enough to the receiver’s that something like our intended communication
occurs. My research students often have trouble with understanding
the task of looking for assumptions in texts, or what Douglas would
call, implicit meaning. Douglas argues that much more of cosmology
resides in implication than in what is directly said (Implicit 3-4).
All communications have assumptions. The assumptions with which
one disagrees are the ones likely to be noticed. Failure of identification
is the flag indicating differing cosmological assumptions, potentially
mappable as relative points on the Grid/Group matrix.
Social transactions are mediated through symbols; meaning is
always suspect, an attempt to represent with which others may or
may not identify. In “Introduction to Grid/Group Analysis,” Douglas
argues that one way or another, meaning comes down to our functioning
typologies:
A famous social psychologist, when I mentioned
the word typology, shrank in dismay. He sought to defend methodological
purity against
my concern to make sense of the larger scene. Typologies,
he said, allow anything to be fitted into their boxes; they become
an over-powerful
interpretative tool. Wondering how one is even to make
the smallest progress without developing any typology, I could
have quoted from
Katrina McLeod the Confucian rebuke to those who shirk
their obligations in the name of purity. [. . .] If we eschew
explicit typologies which
can be criticized and improved, we may stay in a celestial
harmony and escape from having to deal with the relation between
mind and
society, but the cost of our private purity is to expose
the whole domain to undeclared, implicit typologies. Either way,
behavior
is going to be fitted into boxes. (2)
In a similar defense of the uncomfortable but necessary demands
of relativism, Clifford Geertz in Local Knowledge warns:
But a serious effort to define ourselves by locating ourselves
among different others . . . involves quite genuine perils, not
the least of which are intellectual entropy and moral paralysis.
(234)
Nonetheless, he argues, we cannot escape these difficulties:
The double perception that ours is but one
voice among many and that, as it is the only one we have, we
must needs speak with it,
is very difficult to maintain. [. . .] But however
that may be, there is, so it seems to me, no choice. (234)
What Geertz says about intercultural perceptions is also applicable
to the individual’s messy but unavoidable striving for identification
in any social context. Blakesley comments:
The problem we face everyday is that we cannot
be consubstantial. We cannot identify with one another in a absolute
sense [. . .] since
we are distinct bodies animated in our own ways
even as we share some common sensations and experiences (Blakesley
16)
The social nature of human life makes the struggle for identification
inevitable. We must interact, participating in social exchanges
as complicated as buying real-estate or as simple as polite conversation.
Herein lies the perennial tension in social cosmology identified
by both Burke and Douglas. In A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke
says:
In pure identification there would be no strife. Likewise, there
would be no strife in absolute separateness, since opponents can
join battle only through a mediatory ground that makes their communication
possible, thus providing the first condition necessary for their
interchange of blows. Put identification and division ambiguously
together, so that you cannot know for certain just where one ends
and the other begins, and you have the characteristic invitation
to rhetoric. (25).
Identification and division, in the Burkean sense, can potentially
be mapped on the Grid-Group matrix. Burke’s “characteristic invitation
to rhetoric” is the perennial tension between competing cosmologies
on the Grid/Group matrix. Persuasion entails movement along one
or both axes. One’s relative movement in the matrix may be a free
act, or it may result from external force or trickery.
Third, Social Implications:
Douglas asserts that down-grid societies, such as our own, are
especially prone to contradictions: “The two worst are the dehumanizing
(mechanizing) of personal relations and the disparity of status
. . .” (“Cultural” 238). The enshrining of competitiveness in Low
Grid drives discourse. The powerful hide behind smokescreen appeals
to fairness and attempt to push others up-grid toward atomized
subordination. Failure in the social market often leads to calls
for more down-grid push, exacerbating the very problems that induce
failure, driving a down-grid spiral toward the potential disaster
of meaning negation and up-group factionalizing by the disenfranchised.
Grid/Group reveals the problems associated with various cosmologies
and offers strategies either for success in one’s chosen social
sphere or methods to change the social contexts. Douglas notes
that what “this analysis can do is . . . expose the normally invisible
screen through which culture lets options be perceived” (“Introduction” 7).
For example:
[D]own-grid rules [. . .] are designed not
to segregate, but to give each individual a fair turn. These
fair-comparison
rules,
as distinct from insulations, render their
own segregating effects invisible. (“Cultural” 193)
These down-grid dilemmas can more easily understood by looking
at the correspondence between the line of
stable social cosmology (running diagonally from Low-Grid / Low-Group
to High-Grid / High
Group) and a parallel epistemological dynamic
answering to what extent truth is either circumscribed by established
authority or
open for negotiation through logic and argumentation.
These extremes define a dynamic tension because each approach
produces the opposite
problem cured by the other approach. High
Grid social cosmology ignores social dissent, as High Grid epistemology
ignores logical
dissent from established authority. But move
too far down-grid and epistemology becomes sophistry, either
deceptive or ridiculous.
Likewise, Low Grid cosmology can become
a sophist ‘smoke
screen’ for the powerful, who use its worship
of equality and fairness to ignore any responsibility
inherent in their stations of power
and, further, to justify their abuses of
public power for private ends. This appeal
to fairness and open competition inevitably
must
claim that there exist natural superiors
and natural inferiors; as a result, those
in power often violently impose definitions
of inferiority on the powerless, driving
them up-grid into the
Atomized Subordination of High-Grid / Low
Group (Douglas, “Cultural” 225).
As Low Grid epistemology hides qualitative
semantics in favor of quantitative logic,
so Low Grid cosmology hides real social power
behind a simplified rhetoric of equality
and fairness defined by
the powerful for the powerful. However, if
one is cosmologically astute, one can refuse
to accept these impersonal pronouncements
on fairness and push one’s way into the VIPs’ private
space (since insulation is not a cosmological
right in Low Grid) and force them
to face up to their real power and its implied
social stewardship, a movement toward group
stability in the High Grid / High Group
corner of the matrix (Douglas, Cultural 198-99).
This, however, is counterintuitive and must
be understood to be pursued.
Hence the worship of individualism in Low Grid allows secret
insulation for power structures rarely challenged by the vast majority
of the powerless, who, being pushed up-grid accept powerless insulation
without group protection. The powerless who see the contradiction
in Low Grid appeals to fairness must either accept groupless insulation
or move up-group toward the factionalized small group arenas of
Low Grid / High Group. A perfect example is the movement of the
powerless into gangs in urban areas or survivalist militias in
rural areas. For both, group identification is the only clear social
marker, and the result is the perennial paranoia and betrayals
of head-hunter culture. Similar failures can be seen in the factionalizing
of the former Yugoslavia or in the violence afflicting much of
Africa today. In general there is a tendency over time for societies
to move counterclockwise on the matrix as High Grid / High Group
societies increasingly find excuses for limiting power sharing
and group protection for more and more of the population. Those
forced into atomized subordination will in time clamor for the
individualism and freedom of Low Grid. Low Grid / Low Group societies
over time increase invisible segregation resulting in a factionalizing
move up-group. We must be careful, then, with our rhetoric. The
insistence on individualism, fairness and a level-playing field,
so prevalent in modern Western society, is often most pushed by
the struggling masses who are most punished by the down-grid spiral
it creates (Douglas, Cultural 239). Reversing the spiral
is counterintuitive and takes a tremendous amount of rhetorical
sparring to educate people to the basic truth that power will be
insulated, whether in secret or openly. We must understand the
greater scene of discourse more clearly if we are to avoid the
temptation of the prevailing down-spiraling cosmology and have
any chance of avoiding the disasters of up-group movements toward
factionalizing that loom as a perennial threat in Low Grid societies,
a threat that is already setting much of the world ablaze and that
threatens our own society with violent dissolution in the foreseeable
future.
Blakesley, David. The Elements of Dramatism. New York:
Longman, 2002.
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. 1950. Berkeley:
U of California P, 1969.
Douglas, Mary. “Cultural Bias.” Occasional Paper no. 34 of the
Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland. London, 1978. Rpt. in In
the Active Voice.
Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. 183-254.
---. Implicit Meanings; Selected Essays in Anthropology.
2nd ed. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1999.
---. “Introduction to Grid/Group Analysis.” Essays in the Sociology
of Perception.
Ed. Mary Douglas. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
---. “Passive Voice Theories in Religious Sociology.” Review
of Religious Research 21.1 (1979): 51-61. Rpt. in In the
Active Voice.
Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. 1-15.
Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge. New York: Basic Books,
1983.
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