The Perfect Response | EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IN A DISTRACTED AGE

Rarely has a writer so economically represented the forces that act on the mind.

Kenneth Burke was a rhetorician, poet and public scholar. The New Jersey resident had a keen sense of the centrality of language to human thought, making him what W. H. Auden described as “unquestionably the most brilliant and suggestive critic now writing in America.” (1941). To this day the pull of his ideas is still immense.

Cognitive psychologists remind us that consciousness arises from language. Burke went much further. For him, language isn’t the residue of some other experience, it frequently is the experience. If we ask what it means to live as sentient creatures, Burke’s compelling answer is that we are driven by labels used by and applied to us. We live is a sea of verbal constructions. In his words, as laid out in the third clause of his “definition of man,” language is the “instrument of our own making” that separates us from our natural condition. And so it goes in Burke’s evocative five part “definition.” We live the most meaningful parts of our lives in the symbolic world.

This is how he expressed his perspective in Language as Symbolic Action (University of California Press, 1966), 16.

1.Man is the symbol-using (symbol-making, symbol- misusing) animal,

2. Inventor of the negative (or moralized by the negative),

3. Separated from his natural condition by instruments of his own making,

4. Goaded by the spirit of hierarchy (or moved by the sense of order),

5. And rotten with perfection.

There is a lifetime of exploration contained in these five defining features, and even a journal devoted to this prodigious thinker.

Other animals communicate. But they communicate in signs. We connect using a broad mixture of signs and inherited symbols. If you don’t speak Norwegian, the language will be a mystery. Of course, a Norwegian stop sign can still be understood, as can most Norwegian faces. But the linguistic universe that permeates the culture offers few visual clues about what they mean. And since symbol making is a constant human project in any culture, the words we choose are existential. Stories, tracts, reports and conversations define the common boundaries of our world. Think of the descriptors that others have used about you and how deeply some of them have burned into your memory.

Behaviorists in his day sought to de-emphasize what Burke saw as obvious: that symbolic action is the representative human gesture.

The great threshold of language is why schools are structured to advance students mostly on their literacy skills. Language is the gateway to experience. Language shapes perception.

In his first clause Burke was pushing back against the reduction of human “behavior” to what can be physically observed. That was the fools-errand of the behaviorists in his day who sought to de-emphasize the obvious: that symbolic action is the representative human gesture.

The second clause adds a wonderful insight. We are not only symbol-makers and users, but the very act of expression through language makes possible a cognitive life that includes what is not or what should not be. We are the inventors of the negative. Language allows the construction of the past and predictions about the future. It makes it possible to imagine worlds present and missing. Most dramatically, consciousness of the negative means that we are alone in the natural world as creatures who can imagine their past and future. Bless their hearts, our pets live in the present. But our use of language as a tool of consciousness means that we carry the heavier baggage of knowing we have a finite life.

It is a keystone of ordinary language that it does more than name. It often judges as well. And so any practical understanding of our communication essence must include the rhetoric is infused with terms of judgement: words that praise and blame, words that suggest who is up and who is down. Ordinary language is hierarchical in ways that the languages of mathematics or programming almost never are. It would be odd, indeed, if a person “liked” the number 2 more than the number 4. Mathematical terms do not have what rhetoricians call “tendency.” Mathematical terms say nothing about their user’s feelings and attitudes. But my reference to someone I know as a “jerk” or “windbag” represents a hierarchy of preferences that I carry with me. As a symbol-user I cannot avoid marking my attitudes in word choices. Our personal rhetoric leaves impressions as clear as footprints in fresh snow.

As to the odd coda, “rotten with perfection.” The resources of language are equally available to enlighten or deceive, help us ‘know’ or distract us from ‘knowing.’ Our miraculous capacity for language gives us all of the tools we need to be disingenuous. And some of us are far too good at it.

The most ‘social’ of our media now seems to be used too often to keep others at bay.

Portable music has been with us at least since the Sony Walkman introduced in 1979. Forty years later we are completely accustomed to taking a preferred aural environment with us, mostly drowning out the one we are in. Even so, that isolating effect still seems like a peculiar violation of the idea of music.

Recently, in a supermarket I was competing for space in the detergent isle. The challenge came from a tall man, perhaps in his 20s, his earphones leaking out sound like hundreds of little straight pins rolling around in a can. We both wanted to extend our reach to a high shelf blocked by the other. At the same time his eyes seemed to take a cue from his aural isolation; he looked down and away. This shopping trip was strictly a solo effort in his own private space. My friendly glance to him was ignored or not seen; his body and his head were in different places. And so I was both in the way and also not really there. Nothing unusual about this in the 21st Century. We now routinely enter the personal space of strangers without ever acknowledging them. And yet there was this little insight: what is arguably the most ‘social’ of our media is now part of the apparatus we use to keep others at bay.

People who study the history of performance remind us that music-making has almost always been a social experience. Of course the simple idea of “cooperation” does not begin to describe the intense listening and blending that musicians playing together must master. As for the rest of us, in most of the 19th Century families with any disposable income had a piano, and usually enough kids to assure some duty-bound performances to visitors. Performances in private salons and concert halls came even earlier. In England the Hanover Square Rooms holding about 900 people were used in the late 1700s to feature composers such as Joseph Haydn and George Frederick Handel. By the early 1800s halls were built and packed with listeners eager to hear small groups and even full orchestras. To this day avid music fans thirst for “live” performances of a sort in both massive arenas and more intimate clubs.

All of this makes me wonder if music belongs in the detergent isle at all. Is part of its essence violated by a cheap ear-sized speaker competing with the commotion of a supermarket? Is there a sense in which our love of the form has the effect of undermining its traditional powers to foster affiliation?

Communication ‘at a distance’ always exacts a price.

To be sure, isolated listening has increased the time we can spend with this precious art. The mass production of phonographs at the end of the 1800s was only the first step in making music accessible. And who doesn’t cherish the ability to call up a great performance at will that can be rendered in detail on modern equipment? Even so, I still cringe at the idea of stopping Andre Previn in mid-performance, or talking over the perfect phrasing of Ella Fitzgerald. Somehow such interruptions seem like a kind of abuse of the idea of ‘public’ performance.

Communication ‘at a distance’ always exacts a price. When performers and their audiences are separated, something is lost, just as clearly as when a listener is in a reverie that goes unshared.