The last month or so has been crazy and chaotic to say the least. Thankfully, however, I am starting back up with regular attention paid to Comic Corrective and its readers without boring you with the details of why it’s been so long. Now, I’m writing from a classroom in Oglethorpe University’s Robinson hall, listening to Dr. Rosenthal lecture on the hierarchical nature of categorization of language as discussed by theorist Kenneth Burke, the father of the very concept that inspired this blog in the first place.
Hierarchy always creates tension between those who are up and those who are down (an inevitable fact within the nature of hierarchical organization), Burke calls these tensions guilt. We then use language as a tool to decrease that guilt, or “redeem” ourselves. As much as some would like to think this guilt-redemption cycle is some sort of theoretical and mystical thing that real people don’t really think about or deal with in a practical way, it is. It is a part of every instance of interpersonal communication.
In those communications, we create a sense of group identity or commuity by using Burke’s ideas of identification and division, focusing on ways someone (or a group) is the same or simmilar to the audience (or whomever you are communicating with). This strengthens relationships between ‘us’ can redeem out guilt by knowing that we are not ‘them.’ Otherizing is a way that, sometimes without even realizing it we scapegoat, even in the smallest of situations, if we can blame a ‘them’ from our problems, and then cut them out of the party, the event, the conversation…whatever it may be…we can breathe a sigh of relief as if we have gotten rid of “the problem,” whether that individual or group was really at fault at all.
So, how does Kenneth Burke explain that we get rid of this guilt—for better or worse? In those writings I have done work on so far, and the teaching of Dr. Rosenthal, there are three: mortification, victimage, and the comic corrective.
Mortification: Blames the problems on the self or community. It is characterized by a need to take responsibility and step up to the plate. All these kinds of rhetorical themes fall under the umbrella Burke labels mortification.
Victimage: Creates an other, and therein can only solve, or get rid of a problem, by getting rid of that other, or scapegoat. It creates a villain, an enemy for us to triumph over.
Comic Corrective: Redefines. It offers and advocates “humility without humiliation.” Instead of preforming acts of victimage, we can try to humble ourselves, admit errors and work to take a new perspective of error not being clear right and wrong, but rather a learning experience that we can be bettered by, so that it doesn’t need to be destroyed.
