Burke's Dramatism: Guilt, redemption through victimage

"Guilt is Burke's catchall term for tension, anxiety, embarrassment, shame, disgust, and other noxious feelings intrinsic to the human condition" (Griffin 292). According to Burke, there are two ways to redemption from the guilt, mortification and victimage. 

Mortification is the confession of guilt and request for forgiveness. Victimage on the other hand is placing the blame, or scapegoating, on someone else for everything that is going wrong (Griffin 293).

The video above shows clips of former President Bush addressing the current economic situation along with our need/demand of energy. While Bush does not hold congress responsible for all of our nation's problems, he does blame it for our most current and prominent issues. Having watched the video, I can see that Bush's choice of redemption was through victimage. 

Not once in his speech does Bush acknowledge any fault or wrong doing on his part, and maintains that he has made multiple attempts to right the wrongs of our country. It is evident that guilt(Burke's definition) was present in his speech through the tone and use of words. This reluctance to confess his guilt and take responsibility as the nation's leader (at the time), tells me that mortification is not a possibility here.

Burke believed that getting rid of guilt is the basic plot of the human drama and that rhetoric is searching for a perfect scapegoat at its root (Griffin 293). If that is the case, is Bush or anyone else for that matter, justified at all for seeking redemption through victimage? Or is this pattern throughout history enabling or encouraging people to follow others in placing blame rather than taking responsibility?

Aristotle's Rhetoric

Martin Luther King Junior's "I Have a Dream" speech clearly exemplifies Aristotle's theories of rhetoric. Rhetoric can be defined as "a searching study of audience psychology." Aristotle closely studied "the effects of the speaker, the speech, and the audience." Aristotle also believed that "rhetoric is the art of discovering ways to make the truth seem more probable to an audience that isn't deeply convinced."

"...The available means of persuasion are based on three kinds of proof: logical (logos), ethical (ethos), and emotional (pathos). Logical proof comes from the line of argument in the speech, ethical proof is the way the speaker's character is revealed through the message, and emotional proof is the feeling the speech draws out of the hearers" (Griffin).

The "enthymeme" is noted as the "strongest of the proofs." Aristotle stated that "...because they are jointly produced by the audience, enthymemes intuitively unite speaker and audience and provide the strongest possible proof...The audience itself helps construct the proof by which it is persuaded." After watching the "I Have a Dream" speech by Martin Luther King Junior, one can hear examples of the "logical" proof Aristotle spoke of with King's overall theme and that King obviously knew his audience quite well. King hinted in his speech that "God will reward non-violence," the civil rights movement must continue and that it also must continue to happen non-violently, and that "God will grant us our dream."

Aristotle believed that the speaker must also be credible, as "many impressions are formed before the speaker ever begins." Three qualities Aristotle wrote that help build credibility were "intelligence, character, and goodwill." In the example of Martin Luther King Junior, during the "I Have a Dream" speech, most would agree he exemplified all three of Aristotle's credibility traits.

"Pathos," another one of Aristotle's theories on rhetoric, describing how a speaker can get the audience to feel a certain way. Aristotle cataloged emotions and how to move and audience to feel these, just as Martin Luther King Junior did in 1963.

Aristotle also came up with the popular theory of the "five canons of rhetoric." The five canons are invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery- which are all shown in Martin Luther King's speech, and can be found my exact example in Griffin from pages 325-326.