Miller, Burke, and our "Marked Instability"

The issue of our being in an age of “marked instability,” according to Burke, was one of the most striking details I found in Miller’s Genre as Social Action. I found it interesting that, after all of the build up of background information about recurrences, motives, and generalized rhetorical actions, our era seems to have greatly surpassed the topic of using these features as means to describe a culture. It implies that today’s progressive cultures are the most vague, due to the multifaceted nature of our communication systems.  

In his book Permanence & Change, Kenneth Burke argues that today’s world is increasingly individualistic, which feeds the growing instability in discourse within our nation (Burke 33). After generations of society practicing “typical, or recurrent, patterns of stimuli,” Burke claims, the “integration” of cultures over time has complicated the old ways of typifying our rhetorical genres (Burke 32,33). Typical patterns of discourse are being replaced with “marked instability” and “shifting contrasts” (Burke 32). 

The third edition of Permanence & Change was revised by Burke in 1984, just as technology was taking hold of everyday life. He isn’t far from the truth when he claims this instability, but is it a negative progression of societal communication? From a 21st century point of view, there are many sides from which one could answer this question. One could disagree, and see this complicating of rhetorical genre as a positive change, a challenge to the world of rhetoric that prompts theorists to discuss the larger social implications of such a move to individualism and complex genres. One could also agree with Burke, and claim that the problem of “marked instability” keeps potential rhetors at bay, confused and/or ineffective in their attempts to share their intentions regarding a rhetorical situation. 

Although we may be in this era of “marked instability,” it is still true that our way of communicating through typifying and generalizing has not changed much, now the genres have only profusely multiplied. Miller claims there is a sort of pool of rhetorical actions available at any given point in a culture, and they reflect the details of that culture (Miller 158). I believe that our current culture still uses our subjective understandings of genre in order to “fit” our discourse into rhetorical situations, though differently. The rhetorical actions available to us are far too many to begin to list, which only says about our culture that it is diverse, complex, and flexible; it can probably withstand the addition of an infinite amount of sub-cultures with their own rhetorical situations and actions. The fact that all of mankind experiences the same set of generic motives and relationships is not moot (Miller 161).

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Burke, Kenneth . Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. 32-33. print.

Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 70 (1984): 151-169.