Burke’s Metaphor for the “Unending Conversation”
“Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”
(Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action 3rd ed. 1941. Univ. of California Press, 1973)
Taking this analogy a step further, I suggest that we are not only entering the parlor, but we are also bringing along our friends, other researchers who we have discovered that support our own claims and ideas, or others whose ideas we respectfully dispute.
Who shows up at a party of familiar faces and drops off a new friend right in the middle of the action without an introduction?
“Who’s that guy? What is he doing here? Who brought him? Does he belong here?”
It is likely that if someone did this to us, we would not care to attend another social gathering with this person.
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Don’t leave Bob hanging at the party. Give him a proper introduction. Make sure we know who he is, what makes him special, and most importantly, what he has to contribute to the conversation.
Further, don’t bring the wrong guy to the party. Bozo the clown is very entertaining at a children’s party, but he is probably not your best choice for a sidekick at a convention of brain surgeons. When I have a medical condition, I want the opinion of an expert, not a clown. That is why it is important, in most cases, to avoid sources from unreliable or unknown authors. Bozo’s blog might be very interesting and enlightening, but for serious academic research, let’s stick with the experts.
The bottom line is that we want our research and our sources to pass the CRAP test. Sources need to be current, relevant and reliable, authoritative and accurate, and finally we want to be certain that the author’s purpose and intentions are in line with sound, scholarly research. A person selling a product is more likely to tell you only the good about that product when in research, we want more objective and unbiased analysis.
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