Dichotomies and Victimage

Burke develops a lot of binaries with regards to identification and termanistic screens: scientistic versus dramatistic, continuous versus discontinuous. These binaries come about for the same reason that he elucidates when speaking about multiple termanistic screens; it take multiple termanisitc screens to explain all sides of a concept. These dichotomies do not even cover every facet of the subject; there are situations in which the identification of something is neither scientistic nor dramatistic, neither continuous nor dicontinuous. Burke accounts for this somewhat when he points out that the scientistic/dramatistic dichotomy is not mutually exclusive, but there are so many ways these binaries can overlap or rule each other out it’s as though there are more categories than Burke could count.

Burke mentions a “proneness” of people to symbolic language. Equally intrinsic then, it might be said, is people’s proneness to categorization; furthermore, catergorization being necessarily reductive.
 
Just as Burke says there are as many termanisitc screens as people, there are as many categories as there are concepts. Thus victimage comes into language; if you reduce the complexities of a concept in order to categorize it, you exclude some aspects of it. You then have to find a category for the aspects you excluded. But in categorizing them, you exclude some aspects yet again (because categories are by their nature exclusive); so there is further victimage.

People are perhaps categorizing animals as much as they are symbol-using animals. You could argue that symbols are in fact categories; water is water because it is not fire, or the sky is the sky because it is not land. Things are given symbols because it is noted that they are distinct from another thing and do not yet have a symbol attributed to them.

Burke, Kenneth. “Terministic Screens.” In Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966. 44-57.