Kenneth Burke
describes what he calls “terministic screens” as being the filters through
which humans perceive and know the world. These term/inistic screens are
constructed and maintained, as its title suggests, through terms, language, logos. While this may seem straightforward, it’s
crucial to understand in order to begin a dismantling of the terministic
screen, for if words are the tools that humans use to construct reality, they
are the tools needed to deconstruct it.
To
understand this idea, Burke describes “how fantastically much of our “Reality”
could not exist for us, were it not for our profound and inveterate involvement
in symbol systems” (48). Our own dreams are much more of an immediately real
experience than most things we attempt to conceive of in the ‘natural’ world on
a daily basis. When we watch the news, we attempt to understand the experience
somewhere else through a media of words, images, or more generally, language.
When we are standing in a room, we conceive of its physical and temporal
presence in relation to factors completely created through language: “to
mistake this vast tangle of ideas for immediate experience is much more
fallacious than to accept a dream as an immediate experience” (48). Thus, this
is how we can overcome, or ‘transcend’ our terministic screen. By consciously
seeing our screens through the screen of Dramatism, through the principles of
continuity and discontinuity, we can use this screen to attempt to construct a
language that begins to dismantle certain harmful constructions.
If a group of people is denied this essential life tool, the tool of language, than not only does this indicate the already distorted plane of power, but they will continually be at a disadvantage from those who held the powerful tool. The power of the tool, however, was delegated by language, and by language it can be taken away. Burke argues that in order to transcend language, those with the tools must "speak for Thy creation with more justice--cooperating in this competition until our naming gives voice correctly, and how things are and how we say things are are One" (Burke 56). Thus, the construction of their own voice, "was the millenial instrument of transformation through which the African would become the European, the slave become the ex-slave, brute animal be come the human being" (Gates 11). It is only through words that words may be overcome.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteJacqueline, I thoroughly enjoyed reading your post and it may have caused an epiphany to occur in my head. So, in order to transcend language we must identify the "outside" so to speak, so that we accordingly identify the implications of language in any situation. The example involving race is a "filter" so to speak. It beset a wrongful view on people(s) for many years and to break from that view we must see "how things are and how we say things" and thus, they must be "One." We must view things from that third party perspective because it is an area that is not affected by the implications or filters of language. Then, once recognized, as you said, language is a tool. The voices of many people (as mentioned in the last sentence) was what liberated them. They had been living under oppression done so by language which resulted in not having a voice at all.
ReplyDeleteJacqueline,
ReplyDeleteAs I read your post, I thought of how interesting your vantage point on all of this is. But as I read more, I realized that we wrote about the same thing.
Race is a language that we use as a filter, in your words, to "perceive and know the world." It therefore serves as a terministic screen. One which we use to redirect our attention from the actual reality; the reality of our difference as human beings.We perceive of race as "..a "thing," an ineffaceable quantity, which irresistibly determined the shape and contour of thought and feeling as surely as it did the shape and contour of human anatomy (Gates 3). And it is in this way that we are "symbol-using animals" (Burke 55). Race is a symbol of how we perceive and redirect our attention of what we observe. It is a part of our language system that functions as a part of his reality, which is "necessarily inspirited with the quality of the Symbol...through which he conceives it" (Burke 55).
Race functions as a symbol which represents our terministic screens. The race of an individual is used to represent him as a part of our reality. The race of an individual is the language we adapt and use to understand who he is in our world. Gates points out that "Blacks were most commonly represented on chain either as the lowest of the human races or as the first cousin to the ape" (12). In short, his race is the terministic screen that influenced the "white man" to conceive of him as the lowest of the human races, and as the first cousin of the ape. If we were to remove race as a part of our conceptual system, then he would be perceived him as just another man.
Burke asserts that to redirect our attention from a certain preconception, we have the right to choose our nomenclature, and therefore to choose how we perceive of man. Not by his race but to redirect our attention to some other reality. According to Burke, "All terminologies must implicitly or explicitly embody choices between the principle of continuity and the principle of discontinuity" (50).