Terministic Screens

Defining Terministic Screens

To explain the concept, Burke illustrates the function of terministic screens by describing the effect of seeing different photographs of the same subject (a scene or object of any kind), with the difference created by the photographer’s use of different color filters. Different photographs of the same subject using different filters reveal new textures or details, even though the scene or subject itself doesn’t change. A red filter, for example, blocks all red light so that a subject’s appearance will be altered by the absence of the red that may have previously obscured other aspects of the subject’s appearance. The red in the filter makes the red in the subject invisible. Ultraviolet or UV sunglasses, likewise, block ultraviolet light and can make the subject appear more vivid. Even though the subject itself doesn’t change, it may take on a new, perhaps more textured appearance. Change the filter, and you’ll see something different. In the same way, terms filter reality by placing some aspects in relief and by obscuring others.

Origins of the Concept

The idea that language plays a fundamental role in shaping understandings of the world did not originate with Burke and may be traced back to classical times and forward to social-constructionist and social-epistemic rhetorics. However, more than any other rhetorician, Burke elaborates the significance of the idea for questions about the nature of the universe, human relations, and the products of human thought—from philosophy to religion and science. The concept behind terministic screens appears in Burke’s earlier work, such as 1935’s Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, where it is aligned with his ideas about [Page 1746]secular piety (a sense of what goes with what), naming and renaming the world to suit our interests (exorcism by misnomer), the deliberate creation of new meaning (perspective by incongruity), and blindness and insight (ways of seeing and not seeing). Philosophers like Ludwig Wittgenstein alluded to a similar function in science and logic, where descriptions of the physical world depend on (1) how it is represented geometrically (an image can be represented as a collection of squares, dots, triangles, etc., with each representation only approximating the original) or (2) on the precise network of logical assertions about its nature. In this view, the laws of nature are really laws about how the network (the representations, the logic) functions internally. In other words, mathematics, as a symbol system, has no necessary relation to reality but it may predict nevertheless quite accurately how parts of it function. For Burke, the concept of terministic screens has even greater presence in the everyday perception (or construction) of the world. He uses the concept as a methodology for critiquing philosophies, a machine for interpreting literature as an act, or as an art of elaborating multiple perspectives on any given subject (i.e., as rhetorical invention).

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