Some of you may have been wondering about the inspiration for the new blog name, or have just stumbled upon this site and were curious, either way, I am finally taking the time I should have set aside days ago to write the promised explanatory post. The more and more I think about the best way to explain the comic corrective, or why i think it is such an integral part of rhetorical theory, the more I realized that I’ve already done it, in almost every paper I’ve written in the past year or so. So below, there are excerpts from the final paper I wrote for Modern & Contemporary Rhetoric last semester, don’t worry if the theoretical language is not as accessible as you thought. It took me a while to get to this point. I will explain it in more common terms, but there is no reason to limit the conversation because everyone doesn’t catch on right away.
In “Order and Hierarchy,” Burke discusses the linguistic invention of the negative, which creates polar, dichotomous terminologies that socially define situations, and therein color the attitudes surrounding any particular set of ideas. He writes: “On the side of order, or control, there are the variants of faith and reason. On the side of disorder there are the temptations of the senses and the imagination” (279). This ordering of the world within dichotomies, with reason, faith, and order on one side and imagination, superstition and chaos on the other, not only create but also maintain power structures wherein those who resist dominant ideologies can be easily silenced through the mechanisms of the differend. This is done by valuing the former at the expense of the latter, leaving it as negation of what is ‘right’ or ‘acceptable’. It is this silencing which paves the way for the guilt-redemption cycle of the tragic frame of motivations. Without having a group to scapegoat who do not in themselves have the legitimacy to rebut the guilt being laid upon them as mortification, the tragic frame would be a failure, never achieving redemption…
Burke’s comic corrective provides us with the “equipment” necessary for this task. Rather than viewing the world through a static lens that is constructed upon an objective truth and power structure conveyed through binaries, “a comic frame of motives avoids these difficulties, showing us how an act can ‘dialectically’ contain both transcendental and material ingredients, both imagination and bureaucratic embodiment” (Burke 261). Instead of insisting that there is a wrong and a right, and therein needing to find a single process or protocol by which to judge a situation, “it cherishes the lore of so-called ‘error’ as a genuine aspect of the truth, with emphases valuable for the correcting of present emphases” (Burke 265).
Up to this point, we have continually valued consensus, which the tragic frame utilizes to single out those who oppose the views of the centralized and dominant group. Using them as scapegoats, it creates an ‘Us’-‘Them’ mentality to foster identification between Us against a common enemy—Them.
OK, now in more common terminologies. The basic idea is that on an everyday basis, we operate in a dramatic way: there are characters who play out scenes in a particular setting to be interpreted by an audience. Our normal show, however, is a tragedy. We find problems and faults in people, groups or whole situations and then enter into the “blame game.” The group or individual that the blame eventually sticks to becomes the scape goat, and the easiest way to perceptually rid ourselves of the problem is to rid ourselves of the scapegoat. This applies to a range of communications and situations from an accounting error in a business to a rumor spreading among a group of high school girls, to the situation that Kenneth Burke analyzed for much of his work, The Holocaust. Rather than simply pointing out the tragedy of our lives, however, Burke offers us an alternative: the Comic Corrective.
