Dramatism
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
Dramatism, an interpretive communication studies theory, was developed by Kenneth Burke as a meta-method for analyzing human relationships. This theory compares life to a drama and provides the most direct route to human motives and human relations. It sets up the Five Dramatistic Pentad strategy for viewing life, not as life itself, by comparing each social unit involved in human activities as five elements of drama - act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose, to answer the empirical question of how persons explain their actions, and to find the ultimate motivations of human activities.
It is possible because Burke believes that Drama has recognizable genres. Humans use language in patterned discourses, and texts move us with recurring patterns underlying those texts. And drama has certain audiences, which means rhetoric plays a crucial role when humans deal with experiences. Language strategies are central to Burke's dramatistic approach.
In this theory, Burke discusses two important ideas – that life is drama, and the ultimate motive of rhetoric is the purging of guilt.
Because of the complexity and extension of Burke's thinking, it is difficult to label the ontology behind his theory. However, some basic assumptions can still be extracted to support the understanding of dramatism.
There are three key concepts associated with dramatism:
The Dramatistic Pentad is an instrument used as a set of relational or functional principles that could help us understand what he calls the ‘cycle cluster of terms’ people use to attribute motive. This pentad is a dissolution to drama. It is parallel with Aristotle’s four causes and has a similar correlation to journalists catchism: who, what, when, where, why, and how. This is done through the five key elements of human drama – act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose.
Any complete statement about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five questions. While it is important to understand each element of the Pentad on its own, it is more important to understand how the elements work together. This is called a ratio, and there are ten possible ratios within the Pentad. Burke maintained that analyzing the ratios of a speaker’s presentation would expose the resources of ambiguity people might exploit to interpret complex problems. The most common ratios used by Burke are Scene-Act and Scene-Agent. When engaged in a dramatistic study, he notes, "the basic unit of action would be defined as 'the human body in conscious or purposive motion'", which is an agent acting in a situation.
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