Clarke Rountree and Mark Huglen
Abstract: This essay introduces KB Journal and explains why the teachings of Kenneth Burke are a worthwhile study. We consider Burke's unique life and how it has contributed to the development of his ideas. We characterize Burke's corpora as providing a humanistic paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense of the term) for scholars to use to make the world a better place. Finally, we dedicate KB Journal to fulfilling Burke's goal in "operation benchmark," providing a forum for the exposition of his ideas and for our own interpretations, adaptations, extensions, appropriations, and challenges.
A JOURNAL devoted to the ideas of a single scholar ideally ought to do more than ponder those ideas; it should reflect something of his personality, his spirit, and his motives. We believe this journal can serve those purposes by providing a venue for an ongoing conversation with Kenneth Burke, and we hope to invoke something of his spirit as well. This essay explains why we think that enterprise is worthwhile.
As anyone who knew Mr. Burke can attest, he lived for the engagement of conversation, whether taking on a critic (friendly or otherwise) in print, discoursing while rowing visitors around his pond in Andover, New Jersey (where he would teasingly stop bailing out his leaky boat if you disagreed with him), or creating his own give-and-take exchange through the artifice of a dialogue (as he does so memorably at the end of The Rhetoric of Religion) or through his characteristically dialectical prose. Indeed, Burke himself called for such a dialogue over his ideas at the 1990 Kenneth Burke Conference in New Harmony, Indiana, dubbing it "operation benchmark," which he explained as follows: "I just want to suggest that the way we do it, is that we call it 'operation benchmark' in the sense that we start with what you say, but we only ask that you say, 'Burke says it this way, I say this,' with some reasons" (qtd. in Burks, 5). Following Burke's suggestion, we want this journal to serve as a benchmark to better understand his work and to address problems in our world.
For Burke, the "Unending Conversation" is an almost literal metaphor about human symbol using, language acquisition, the history of ideas, and social interaction. This metaphor has readers joining a party where an ongoing discussion is taking place, listening for a while to catch the drift, and then putting in their "oars" until the hour gets late and they must leave the conversation still heatedly in progress (Philosophy of Literary Form, 110-111). It is a humbling metaphor which reminds us that no one person can know how the conversation begins and ends, that we all enter symbol using midstream, and that none of us will have the final word. Although Kenneth Burke has literally exited the party, he still contributes to our ongoing conversation with a written legacy spanning more than seven decades and tackling some of the most profound ideas, writers, and challenges of the Western tradition.
Putting our own oar in the water of this ongoing conversation, this essay serves to set a tone for the direction of KB Journal, allowing for later editors to point this craft in a new but perhaps not radically different direction. We do so by focusing on the past and the future, asking what Burke has left us and what we hope to do with his ideas in these electronic pages.
Why Do Kenneth Burke's Ideas Intrigue Us?
One reason Burke's ideas have proven so resilient is the extraordinary crucible within which Burke's fertile ideas took shape. The circumstances of Burke's life as scholar and man are unique, quintessentially twentieth-century American (a source of blindness, some would argue), and unlikely ever to be even remotely approximated by any future fellow traveler.
If we work in a shamelessly post hoc fashion, it is easy to connect many dots in Burke's colorful life to show how Burke the man came to develop the corpus of ideas that intrigue us. We begin with an unquestionable raw intelligence that devoured everything, stretched its intellectual legs early, and looked at the world in the unique ways that genius alone permits. We may surmise that his near-fatal accident as a toddler shaped his ideas about fate, the body, and the value of life. Throw in the Harvard professors at Peabody High School, where Burke's six years of Latin and two years of Greek introduced him to language, translation, and classical ideas from the earliest days. Consider the family influences, from his Christian Science mother (who taught him ideas about body-mind and spirit-mind connections at an early age) to his father, the Westinghouse corporation bureaucrat whom Burke describes as having "faith in money" and "living on the edge of a fortune [and yet] broke" (Conversations, 00 10) (a lesson about the symbolic nature of money and the allure of capitalism). And his lifelong love of spirits provided its lessons about body-mind-language connections as well.
Burke's ideas began to take shape while he matured and worked among an amazing collection of brilliant and innovative minds, including Malcolm Cowley, James Light, William Carlos Williams, R. P. Blackmur, Richard McKeon, Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Robert Penn Warren, and many others. Without this fertile intellectual bed, Burke might never have aspired to be the Aristotle, Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud of his day—and we believe he will attain that stature for future generations.
Might we say that a lack of indoor plumbing at his house, yet a tennis court on his property, also contributed to his development of ideas? Is it relevant to point out that his somewhat unusual married life, marrying his first wife's sister, taught him difficult lessons about how body, soul, and symbols interact, working out "the trouble" in his only novel? Might his decision to educate himself rather than complete his last two years of undergraduate education contribute productively to his writing style and lack of respect for traditional disciplinary boundaries? Did it help or hinder him to be credible enough to accept mostly temporary teaching positions that required him to rely on his writing and editing abilities to earn a living? Burke worked more than half the century as a critic of fiction and non-fiction, music, theater, and society for The Dial, The New Republic, and dozens of other magazines and journals starting in 1920. In the spirit of Burke, we might say that his own life's circumstances were near-perfect conditions for his intended and unintended byproducts—his life and corpus.
We cannot measure how much it meant to live through World War I, the Red Scare, the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Perhaps at best it provided him with a lived sense of shattered illusions. "Big Lies" lead to unspeakable horrors, ideas can be pushed to their logological extremes, and old and new schemes can be reformulated for diverse purposes. Burke's decision to function as what we frame as "a language strategy consultant," who was poorly received at the 1935 Writers' Congress, taught him something about the blinders of worldviews. At the least his experiences provided him with a workshop for studied engagement with human symbol using.
And if Burke, like Nietzsche before him, was ahead of his time, unlike Nietzsche, he lived a life long and healthy enough for the world to catch up with his ideas while he could still clarify and extend them. He has become the most important rhetorical theorist of the twentieth century. He has required acknowledgment by those in literary criticism, even if he missed the opportunity to found a "school" with a large following. He has inspired sociologists, feminists, historians, political scientists, philosophers, composition pedagogues, psychologists, Marxists, classicists, structuralists, poststructuralists, pragmatists, postmodernists, and others less easily labeled.
Given the multidisciplinary nature of Burke's ideas, we want this journal to be multidisciplinary as well. We want it to serve as a common meeting ground, where we can gather those who currently utilize the teachings of this remarkable "wordsmith," keeping all of us abreast of the uses to which Burke is put forth in different fields, sharing bibliographies and insights, and enriching our ongoing conversations.
Kenneth Burke's Legacy
There is much to share, for Burke's legacy is great. We might say that Burke has developed a paradigm similar to those treated in Thomas Kuhn's classic work on scientific revolutions (though Burke might call them "orientations"). Kuhn argues that scientific paradigms are versions of reality that are accepted by a group of scientists because (1) they provide a coherent explanation for the results of their scientific experiments and (2) they are sufficiently open-ended to leave problems that are yet to be solved. Just as science moved from believing that the earth was the center of the universe to believing that the earth revolves around the sun, paradigms go through revolutions. Functioning like Burke's orientations, paradigms are worldviews that pare down what one sees so that one can better focus, scrutinize, and analyze that to which it directs the attention, even as one ignores what it draws attention away from. And, like many rich terministic screens, paradigms carry consequences for orienting one's vision. As Kuhn notes, paradigms provide firm answers to questions such as: "What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions?" (Kuhn, 4-5)
When we move from the world of things in motion to the more contested, less recalcitrant world of human interaction (encompassing literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, theology, and other symbolically-grounded endeavors), we have human orientations or paradigms, though they may not meet Kuhn's narrower definitions for science.1 Conceptualized as a series of concentric circles, Burke's "orientations" covers a more encompassing field of study than scientific paradigms. For those of us working in Burke's paradigm, however, our questions are similar to Kuhn's: What are the fundamental entities of which the symbolic universe is composed? How do symbols interact with each other and with symbol-using animals? What questions may be asked legitimately about such humans and their symbols, and what techniques employed in analyzing and evaluating them? And, adding a decidedly moral element (which is not fundamental to Kuhn's view of science): How can we avoid war, undermine demagogues, and arm ourselves against a linguistic slippery slope that threatens to hurt us, our neighbors, and our world? Burke provides initial answers to these questions, while leaving plenty for those who would engage his ideas to appropriate, clarify, elaborate, extend, and apply.
Whether one begins with Burke's most complete and coherent theory of humans as symbol users in his "Five Summarizing Essays" explaining his "Definition of Man" in Language as Symbolic Action, or takes synecdochal representations of his larger paradigm in his "Dictionary of Pivotal Terms," "chart, prayer, dream"; principle of entelechy, four master tropes, theory of entitlement, temporizing of essence, psychology of form, pentad, dramatism, logology, terministic screens, identification, things as signs for words, bureaucratization of the imaginative, or paradox of substance, among others, Burke offers a compelling and productive account of our symbolic world. Because Burke has produced such a treasure trove of new ideas, "we all tend to use bits and pieces of Burke" (Rueckert, 21), though his theory is complete enough to ground a Burkean sociology, literary criticism, and rhetorical theory, among other things.2
If Burke provides an adequate paradigm for accounting for our symbolic world, the breadth and depth of his writing, as well as the complexities of and continual challenges to that world, ensure that his paradigm leaves concepts and positions to be elaborated and questions to be answered, as many writers on Burke have noted: Bernard L. Brock and others have asked "Is dramatism metaphorical or literal?" (Brock et al.). Herbert W. Simons wonders whether Burke's insistence on seeing people as foolish rather than vicious allows for "warrantable outrage" in his system.3 Michael Calvin McGee argues that "ideology" provides a better approach to public persuasion than Burke's "philosophy of myth" allows (McGee, 1 and note 1). Frederic Jameson accuses Burke, surprisingly, of missing "the dark underside of language" (88). Frank Lentricchia tries to square an instance of what he sees as "cold-blooded platonism" with an otherwise postmodern Burke he finds in A Grammar of Motives (133).
In Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought, Brock argues that Burke's corpus can be seen as three distinct phases, suggesting that his later work leaves behind the assumptions and critical stance of his earlier work (1-33). Angus Fletcher wonders why Burke "fails to give us an account of beauty" (173), raising the question of whether the Burkean paradigm might have room for a theory of aesthetics. Celeste Condit suggests that Burke's work, undertaken against the backdrop of World War II and the battle between capitalism and communism, needs to be updated to better mesh with our new "scene," and she calls for going post-Burke (as we have gone post-Marx and post-Freud). James W. Chesebro points out that theories grow out of human understandings and, as a consequence, are inherently limited by their monocentrism, logocentrism, and ethnocentrism; Burke's is no exception.
We can benefit from appropriating Burke critically with old problems and with emerging ones, from Shakespeare's plays to President Bush's "War on Terrorism" to the discourse of global warming. We can compare his work with that of other key thinkers, apply his paradigm to issues of race, class, gender, and the environment; and try to anticipate problems (the qualitative equivalent of social science's efforts at prediction). As experiments challenge and force extensions of or revolutions in the scientific paradigms, so too will our appropriations lead to tweaks, extensions, reformulations, and/or corrections of our theoretical itineraries and their underlying commitments and subscriptions.4 And we hope this work might just make the world a better place.
Making the World a Better Place
We believe that making the world a better place is an appropriate purpose for scholarship—particularly Burkean scholarship, which has been dedicated to such grand purposes as "purifying" war.5 We recognize that this purpose begs the question of what "better" might be. But it also recognizes what Burke long has taught us, that there is no neutral vocabulary for talking about the world and that even the words of scholars select, reflect, and deflect in an inevitably rhetorical fashion. Explicitly dedicating our inevitably biased, value-laden contributions to the scholarly dialectics to some good, at the very least, offers the benefit of frankness. And it puts values on the table, urging us to reflect upon what otherwise might lie more quietly beneath our scholarship.
As Burke has taught us, there is a great need for keeping our eye on the life of symbols in our human barnyard. Understanding the condition of division in the "identification/division" dialectic is a key to addressing our pragmatic scholarly purposes. Individuals and groups of people are in a continuous state of division and, therefore, are incessantly shoring up their situations through a continuous process of persuasion. Burke instructs in A Rhetoric of Religion in his creative dialogue between The Lord and Satan: "Humans live in a world of imperfect successions rather than the perfection of 'divine simultaneity,' where 'all ideas are seen at once'" (282). Burke's Satan states: "I see it! I see the paradox! Splendid! By their symbolicity, they [humans] will be able to deviate. A pebble can't make a mistake; it merely exemplifies the laws of motion and position; but an Earth-Man can give a wrong answer. At least in their mistakes, then, they will be `creative'à" (282). Burke's Lord replies: "Yes, and all sorts of new routes can be found, when you start putting things together piecemeal, rather than having everything there in its proper place, all at once, before you begin. Discursive terminologies will allow for a constant succession of permutations and combinations" (282).
We "shore up" the constant successions, permutations, and combinations to create routes for trajectories and projections—beings and Beings—cosmic, corporate, and personal. Some of our projections are productive and unmistakably beautiful, but others are unproductive and downright ugly. When we say that we can use Burke's teachings to "make the world a better place," we are referring to the initiation of productive projections—projections that will improve the human condition and our "communion" and communication in human relationships. An obvious reminder that some trajectories and projections can move us off course is Burke's famous critique of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Burke's concern was to "discover what kind of 'medicine'" that man had "concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America" (Philosophy of Literary Form 191). Today, the topics of terrorism, the "War on Terrorism," as well as globalization and its implications for cultural conditions and the world economy are intellectual "work zones" in need of further development.
When we say that we can use Burke's teachings to "make the world a better place," we are also referring to the difficulties of communication in everyday activities and encounters that are perhaps less obvious on the world stage but just as important for human relations overall. Carefully think this through: If humans are in an inherent condition of division and continuously shoring up the division for identification, we must understand with Burke that just "getting along with people is one devil of a difficult task, but that, in the last analysis, we should all want to get along with people (and do want to)" (Attitudes Toward History, Introduction). People live their lives in the difficulties of interpersonal contexts and encounters, in family contexts, and in organizational contexts. And the recalcitrant realities of political behavior at the local, state, and national levels are zones of human communication encounter where we need to improve our understanding of the everyday difficulties of communication. Burke's ideas are ready-made for further cultivating interpersonal studies, applied communication studies, gender studies, and family communication studies, and they could be further extended into organizational communication studies (where Tomkins and Cheney have done admirable work) and political communication (where Edelman, Brummett, and others have usefully drawn upon Burke).
Whether used quietly in the less glamorous but, arguably, more important critique of the subtlest forms of communication, or loudly on the visible stage of national and international politics, our hope is that Burke's teachings will be used to initiate productive scholarship and propel new and more beneficial stories in elaborating this grand human drama.
Conclusion
Through "operation benchmark," this journal will follow Burke's lead in encouraging a thorough understanding of our starting points through the explication and clarification of ideas, but we will not shy away from disagreements with those ideas—there are no sacred texts here. Indeed, it would be quite unBurkean and ultimately unproductive for an enterprise of this sort to devolve into hero worship. Nietzsche notwithstanding, we are reminded of a similar challenge faced by the magazines that sprang up to support users of Macintosh computers, which praised heavily the fledgling platform, and its various incarnations, lest criticisms undermine their raison d'etre. But eighty years of challenges to Burke's ideas have not dislodged a core of basic assumptions that have guided his work and have led to their more robust elaboration and extension, giving birth to a well-developed, resilient, and productive paradigm. We will see what develops as we move "toward the next phase." 6
Notes
Clarke Rountree is Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Arts at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Mark Huglen is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Minnesota, Crookston.
1 Kuhn refers to "the mature sciences" as having paradigms, and appears to mean the natural sciences (5).
2 Rueckert mentions Hugh Dalziel Duncan's Burkean sociology in particular at 22. Several textbooks in rhetorical theory devote a chapter to Burkean rhetorical theory. See, for example, James L. Golden, Goodwin F. Berquist, and William E. Coleman, The Rhetoric of Western Thought. Burke's influence over literary criticism has been limited, as Frederic Jameson has noted (70), though he certainly offers a sufficient foundation for his own unique approach to literary criticism, as Stanley Edgar Hyman has shown. Additionally, there are arguably sufficient Burkean foundations for an ontology, an epistemology, and a linguistics.
3 Simons raised the issue of warrantable outrage in "Kenneth Burke, Karl Marx, and the Problem of Warrantable Outrage," a paper delivered to the National Communication Association convention, Chicago, 5 November 1999. More recently he has written about this issue in "The rhetorical legacy of Kenneth Burke," in W. Jost and W. Olmstead, eds., A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004): 152-168.
4 See Gregory Clark for a discussion of transcendence through itinerary rather than teleology (18-25).
5 Burke's dedication in A Grammar of Motives is Ad bellum purificandum, "Towards the Purification of War."
6 This was Burke's inscription in Clarke Rountree's edition of Permanence and Change, indicating Burke's recognition that extension would be forthcoming and, indeed, was welcome.
Works Cited
Brock, Bernard L. ed. Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: Rhetoric in Transition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.
Brock, Bernard L., Kenneth Burke, Parke G. Burgess, and Herbert W. Simons. "Drmatism as Ontology or Epistemology: A Symposium." Communication Quarterly 33 (1985): 17-33.
"Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
---. Attitudes Toward History. 1937, 1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
---. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
---. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
---. A Rhetoric of Motives. 1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
---. The Rhetoric of Religion. 1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.
Burks, Don. "KB and Burke: A Remembrance." The Kenneth Burke Society Newsletter, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 5.
Chesebro, James W. "Extensions of the Burkeian System." Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 356-368.
Clark, Gregory. Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Condit, Celeste Michelle. "Post-Burke: Transcending the Sub-Stance of Dramatism." Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 349-355.
Conversations with Kenneth Burke. [Videotaped Interviews] Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1986.
Fletcher, Angus. "Volume and Body in Burke's Criticism, or Stalled in the Right Place." In Representing Kenneth Burke. Eds. Hayden White and Margaret Brose. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New Series no. 6. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 150-175.
Golden, James L., Goodwin F. Berquist, and William E. Coleman. The Rhetoric of Western Thought. 6th edit. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1997.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism. Rev. edit. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.
Jameson, Frederick. "The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis." In Representing Kenneth Burke. Eds. Hayden White and Margaret Brose. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New Series no. 6. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 68-91.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edit. 1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Lentricchia, Frank. "Reading History with Kenneth Burke." In Representing Kenneth Burke. Eds. Hayden White and Margaret Brose. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New Series no. 6. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 119-149.
McGee, Michael Calvin. "The 'Ideograph': A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology." Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 1-16.
Rueckert, William. "Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes." In Representing Kenneth Burke. Eds. Hayden White and Margaret Brose. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New Series no. 6. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 1-30.
Clarke Rountree and Mark Huglen
Abstract: This essay introduces KB Journal and explains why the teachings of Kenneth Burke are a worthwhile study. We consider Burke's unique life and how it has contributed to the development of his ideas. We characterize Burke's corpora as providing a humanistic paradigm (in the Kuhnian sense of the term) for scholars to use to make the world a better place. Finally, we dedicate KB Journal to fulfilling Burke's goal in "operation benchmark," providing a forum for the exposition of his ideas and for our own interpretations, adaptations, extensions, appropriations, and challenges.
A JOURNAL devoted to the ideas of a single scholar ideally ought to do more than ponder those ideas; it should reflect something of his personality, his spirit, and his motives. We believe this journal can serve those purposes by providing a venue for an ongoing conversation with Kenneth Burke, and we hope to invoke something of his spirit as well. This essay explains why we think that enterprise is worthwhile.
As anyone who knew Mr. Burke can attest, he lived for the engagement of conversation, whether taking on a critic (friendly or otherwise) in print, discoursing while rowing visitors around his pond in Andover, New Jersey (where he would teasingly stop bailing out his leaky boat if you disagreed with him), or creating his own give-and-take exchange through the artifice of a dialogue (as he does so memorably at the end of The Rhetoric of Religion) or through his characteristically dialectical prose. Indeed, Burke himself called for such a dialogue over his ideas at the 1990 Kenneth Burke Conference in New Harmony, Indiana, dubbing it "operation benchmark," which he explained as follows: "I just want to suggest that the way we do it, is that we call it 'operation benchmark' in the sense that we start with what you say, but we only ask that you say, 'Burke says it this way, I say this,' with some reasons" (qtd. in Burks, 5). Following Burke's suggestion, we want this journal to serve as a benchmark to better understand his work and to address problems in our world.
For Burke, the "Unending Conversation" is an almost literal metaphor about human symbol using, language acquisition, the history of ideas, and social interaction. This metaphor has readers joining a party where an ongoing discussion is taking place, listening for a while to catch the drift, and then putting in their "oars" until the hour gets late and they must leave the conversation still heatedly in progress (Philosophy of Literary Form, 110-111). It is a humbling metaphor which reminds us that no one person can know how the conversation begins and ends, that we all enter symbol using midstream, and that none of us will have the final word. Although Kenneth Burke has literally exited the party, he still contributes to our ongoing conversation with a written legacy spanning more than seven decades and tackling some of the most profound ideas, writers, and challenges of the Western tradition.
Putting our own oar in the water of this ongoing conversation, this essay serves to set a tone for the direction of KB Journal, allowing for later editors to point this craft in a new but perhaps not radically different direction. We do so by focusing on the past and the future, asking what Burke has left us and what we hope to do with his ideas in these electronic pages.
Why Do Kenneth Burke's Ideas Intrigue Us?
One reason Burke's ideas have proven so resilient is the extraordinary crucible within which Burke's fertile ideas took shape. The circumstances of Burke's life as scholar and man are unique, quintessentially twentieth-century American (a source of blindness, some would argue), and unlikely ever to be even remotely approximated by any future fellow traveler.
If we work in a shamelessly post hoc fashion, it is easy to connect many dots in Burke's colorful life to show how Burke the man came to develop the corpus of ideas that intrigue us. We begin with an unquestionable raw intelligence that devoured everything, stretched its intellectual legs early, and looked at the world in the unique ways that genius alone permits. We may surmise that his near-fatal accident as a toddler shaped his ideas about fate, the body, and the value of life. Throw in the Harvard professors at Peabody High School, where Burke's six years of Latin and two years of Greek introduced him to language, translation, and classical ideas from the earliest days. Consider the family influences, from his Christian Science mother (who taught him ideas about body-mind and spirit-mind connections at an early age) to his father, the Westinghouse corporation bureaucrat whom Burke describes as having "faith in money" and "living on the edge of a fortune [and yet] broke" (Conversations, 00 10) (a lesson about the symbolic nature of money and the allure of capitalism). And his lifelong love of spirits provided its lessons about body-mind-language connections as well.
Burke's ideas began to take shape while he matured and worked among an amazing collection of brilliant and innovative minds, including Malcolm Cowley, James Light, William Carlos Williams, R. P. Blackmur, Richard McKeon, Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov, John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Robert Penn Warren, and many others. Without this fertile intellectual bed, Burke might never have aspired to be the Aristotle, Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud of his day—and we believe he will attain that stature for future generations.
Might we say that a lack of indoor plumbing at his house, yet a tennis court on his property, also contributed to his development of ideas? Is it relevant to point out that his somewhat unusual married life, marrying his first wife's sister, taught him difficult lessons about how body, soul, and symbols interact, working out "the trouble" in his only novel? Might his decision to educate himself rather than complete his last two years of undergraduate education contribute productively to his writing style and lack of respect for traditional disciplinary boundaries? Did it help or hinder him to be credible enough to accept mostly temporary teaching positions that required him to rely on his writing and editing abilities to earn a living? Burke worked more than half the century as a critic of fiction and non-fiction, music, theater, and society for The Dial, The New Republic, and dozens of other magazines and journals starting in 1920. In the spirit of Burke, we might say that his own life's circumstances were near-perfect conditions for his intended and unintended byproducts—his life and corpus.
We cannot measure how much it meant to live through World War I, the Red Scare, the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War. Perhaps at best it provided him with a lived sense of shattered illusions. "Big Lies" lead to unspeakable horrors, ideas can be pushed to their logological extremes, and old and new schemes can be reformulated for diverse purposes. Burke's decision to function as what we frame as "a language strategy consultant," who was poorly received at the 1935 Writers' Congress, taught him something about the blinders of worldviews. At the least his experiences provided him with a workshop for studied engagement with human symbol using.
And if Burke, like Nietzsche before him, was ahead of his time, unlike Nietzsche, he lived a life long and healthy enough for the world to catch up with his ideas while he could still clarify and extend them. He has become the most important rhetorical theorist of the twentieth century. He has required acknowledgment by those in literary criticism, even if he missed the opportunity to found a "school" with a large following. He has inspired sociologists, feminists, historians, political scientists, philosophers, composition pedagogues, psychologists, Marxists, classicists, structuralists, poststructuralists, pragmatists, postmodernists, and others less easily labeled.
Given the multidisciplinary nature of Burke's ideas, we want this journal to be multidisciplinary as well. We want it to serve as a common meeting ground, where we can gather those who currently utilize the teachings of this remarkable "wordsmith," keeping all of us abreast of the uses to which Burke is put forth in different fields, sharing bibliographies and insights, and enriching our ongoing conversations.
Kenneth Burke's Legacy
There is much to share, for Burke's legacy is great. We might say that Burke has developed a paradigm similar to those treated in Thomas Kuhn's classic work on scientific revolutions (though Burke might call them "orientations"). Kuhn argues that scientific paradigms are versions of reality that are accepted by a group of scientists because (1) they provide a coherent explanation for the results of their scientific experiments and (2) they are sufficiently open-ended to leave problems that are yet to be solved. Just as science moved from believing that the earth was the center of the universe to believing that the earth revolves around the sun, paradigms go through revolutions. Functioning like Burke's orientations, paradigms are worldviews that pare down what one sees so that one can better focus, scrutinize, and analyze that to which it directs the attention, even as one ignores what it draws attention away from. And, like many rich terministic screens, paradigms carry consequences for orienting one's vision. As Kuhn notes, paradigms provide firm answers to questions such as: "What are the fundamental entities of which the universe is composed? How do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions?" (Kuhn, 4-5)
When we move from the world of things in motion to the more contested, less recalcitrant world of human interaction (encompassing literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, theology, and other symbolically-grounded endeavors), we have human orientations or paradigms, though they may not meet Kuhn's narrower definitions for science.1 Conceptualized as a series of concentric circles, Burke's "orientations" covers a more encompassing field of study than scientific paradigms. For those of us working in Burke's paradigm, however, our questions are similar to Kuhn's: What are the fundamental entities of which the symbolic universe is composed? How do symbols interact with each other and with symbol-using animals? What questions may be asked legitimately about such humans and their symbols, and what techniques employed in analyzing and evaluating them? And, adding a decidedly moral element (which is not fundamental to Kuhn's view of science): How can we avoid war, undermine demagogues, and arm ourselves against a linguistic slippery slope that threatens to hurt us, our neighbors, and our world? Burke provides initial answers to these questions, while leaving plenty for those who would engage his ideas to appropriate, clarify, elaborate, extend, and apply.
Whether one begins with Burke's most complete and coherent theory of humans as symbol users in his "Five Summarizing Essays" explaining his "Definition of Man" in Language as Symbolic Action, or takes synecdochal representations of his larger paradigm in his "Dictionary of Pivotal Terms," "chart, prayer, dream"; principle of entelechy, four master tropes, theory of entitlement, temporizing of essence, psychology of form, pentad, dramatism, logology, terministic screens, identification, things as signs for words, bureaucratization of the imaginative, or paradox of substance, among others, Burke offers a compelling and productive account of our symbolic world. Because Burke has produced such a treasure trove of new ideas, "we all tend to use bits and pieces of Burke" (Rueckert, 21), though his theory is complete enough to ground a Burkean sociology, literary criticism, and rhetorical theory, among other things.2
If Burke provides an adequate paradigm for accounting for our symbolic world, the breadth and depth of his writing, as well as the complexities of and continual challenges to that world, ensure that his paradigm leaves concepts and positions to be elaborated and questions to be answered, as many writers on Burke have noted: Bernard L. Brock and others have asked "Is dramatism metaphorical or literal?" (Brock et al.). Herbert W. Simons wonders whether Burke's insistence on seeing people as foolish rather than vicious allows for "warrantable outrage" in his system.3 Michael Calvin McGee argues that "ideology" provides a better approach to public persuasion than Burke's "philosophy of myth" allows (McGee, 1 and note 1). Frederic Jameson accuses Burke, surprisingly, of missing "the dark underside of language" (88). Frank Lentricchia tries to square an instance of what he sees as "cold-blooded platonism" with an otherwise postmodern Burke he finds in A Grammar of Motives (133).
In Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought, Brock argues that Burke's corpus can be seen as three distinct phases, suggesting that his later work leaves behind the assumptions and critical stance of his earlier work (1-33). Angus Fletcher wonders why Burke "fails to give us an account of beauty" (173), raising the question of whether the Burkean paradigm might have room for a theory of aesthetics. Celeste Condit suggests that Burke's work, undertaken against the backdrop of World War II and the battle between capitalism and communism, needs to be updated to better mesh with our new "scene," and she calls for going post-Burke (as we have gone post-Marx and post-Freud). James W. Chesebro points out that theories grow out of human understandings and, as a consequence, are inherently limited by their monocentrism, logocentrism, and ethnocentrism; Burke's is no exception.
We can benefit from appropriating Burke critically with old problems and with emerging ones, from Shakespeare's plays to President Bush's "War on Terrorism" to the discourse of global warming. We can compare his work with that of other key thinkers, apply his paradigm to issues of race, class, gender, and the environment; and try to anticipate problems (the qualitative equivalent of social science's efforts at prediction). As experiments challenge and force extensions of or revolutions in the scientific paradigms, so too will our appropriations lead to tweaks, extensions, reformulations, and/or corrections of our theoretical itineraries and their underlying commitments and subscriptions.4 And we hope this work might just make the world a better place.
Making the World a Better Place
We believe that making the world a better place is an appropriate purpose for scholarship—particularly Burkean scholarship, which has been dedicated to such grand purposes as "purifying" war.5 We recognize that this purpose begs the question of what "better" might be. But it also recognizes what Burke long has taught us, that there is no neutral vocabulary for talking about the world and that even the words of scholars select, reflect, and deflect in an inevitably rhetorical fashion. Explicitly dedicating our inevitably biased, value-laden contributions to the scholarly dialectics to some good, at the very least, offers the benefit of frankness. And it puts values on the table, urging us to reflect upon what otherwise might lie more quietly beneath our scholarship.
As Burke has taught us, there is a great need for keeping our eye on the life of symbols in our human barnyard. Understanding the condition of division in the "identification/division" dialectic is a key to addressing our pragmatic scholarly purposes. Individuals and groups of people are in a continuous state of division and, therefore, are incessantly shoring up their situations through a continuous process of persuasion. Burke instructs in A Rhetoric of Religion in his creative dialogue between The Lord and Satan: "Humans live in a world of imperfect successions rather than the perfection of 'divine simultaneity,' where 'all ideas are seen at once'" (282). Burke's Satan states: "I see it! I see the paradox! Splendid! By their symbolicity, they [humans] will be able to deviate. A pebble can't make a mistake; it merely exemplifies the laws of motion and position; but an Earth-Man can give a wrong answer. At least in their mistakes, then, they will be `creative'à" (282). Burke's Lord replies: "Yes, and all sorts of new routes can be found, when you start putting things together piecemeal, rather than having everything there in its proper place, all at once, before you begin. Discursive terminologies will allow for a constant succession of permutations and combinations" (282).
We "shore up" the constant successions, permutations, and combinations to create routes for trajectories and projections—beings and Beings—cosmic, corporate, and personal. Some of our projections are productive and unmistakably beautiful, but others are unproductive and downright ugly. When we say that we can use Burke's teachings to "make the world a better place," we are referring to the initiation of productive projections—projections that will improve the human condition and our "communion" and communication in human relationships. An obvious reminder that some trajectories and projections can move us off course is Burke's famous critique of Hitler's Mein Kampf. Burke's concern was to "discover what kind of 'medicine'" that man had "concocted, that we may know, with greater accuracy, exactly what to guard against, if we are to forestall the concocting of similar medicine in America" (Philosophy of Literary Form 191). Today, the topics of terrorism, the "War on Terrorism," as well as globalization and its implications for cultural conditions and the world economy are intellectual "work zones" in need of further development.
When we say that we can use Burke's teachings to "make the world a better place," we are also referring to the difficulties of communication in everyday activities and encounters that are perhaps less obvious on the world stage but just as important for human relations overall. Carefully think this through: If humans are in an inherent condition of division and continuously shoring up the division for identification, we must understand with Burke that just "getting along with people is one devil of a difficult task, but that, in the last analysis, we should all want to get along with people (and do want to)" (Attitudes Toward History, Introduction). People live their lives in the difficulties of interpersonal contexts and encounters, in family contexts, and in organizational contexts. And the recalcitrant realities of political behavior at the local, state, and national levels are zones of human communication encounter where we need to improve our understanding of the everyday difficulties of communication. Burke's ideas are ready-made for further cultivating interpersonal studies, applied communication studies, gender studies, and family communication studies, and they could be further extended into organizational communication studies (where Tomkins and Cheney have done admirable work) and political communication (where Edelman, Brummett, and others have usefully drawn upon Burke).
Whether used quietly in the less glamorous but, arguably, more important critique of the subtlest forms of communication, or loudly on the visible stage of national and international politics, our hope is that Burke's teachings will be used to initiate productive scholarship and propel new and more beneficial stories in elaborating this grand human drama.
Conclusion
Through "operation benchmark," this journal will follow Burke's lead in encouraging a thorough understanding of our starting points through the explication and clarification of ideas, but we will not shy away from disagreements with those ideas—there are no sacred texts here. Indeed, it would be quite unBurkean and ultimately unproductive for an enterprise of this sort to devolve into hero worship. Nietzsche notwithstanding, we are reminded of a similar challenge faced by the magazines that sprang up to support users of Macintosh computers, which praised heavily the fledgling platform, and its various incarnations, lest criticisms undermine their raison d'etre. But eighty years of challenges to Burke's ideas have not dislodged a core of basic assumptions that have guided his work and have led to their more robust elaboration and extension, giving birth to a well-developed, resilient, and productive paradigm. We will see what develops as we move "toward the next phase." 6
Notes
Clarke Rountree is Associate Professor and Chair of Communication Arts at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Mark Huglen is Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Minnesota, Crookston.
1 Kuhn refers to "the mature sciences" as having paradigms, and appears to mean the natural sciences (5).
2 Rueckert mentions Hugh Dalziel Duncan's Burkean sociology in particular at 22. Several textbooks in rhetorical theory devote a chapter to Burkean rhetorical theory. See, for example, James L. Golden, Goodwin F. Berquist, and William E. Coleman, The Rhetoric of Western Thought. Burke's influence over literary criticism has been limited, as Frederic Jameson has noted (70), though he certainly offers a sufficient foundation for his own unique approach to literary criticism, as Stanley Edgar Hyman has shown. Additionally, there are arguably sufficient Burkean foundations for an ontology, an epistemology, and a linguistics.
3 Simons raised the issue of warrantable outrage in "Kenneth Burke, Karl Marx, and the Problem of Warrantable Outrage," a paper delivered to the National Communication Association convention, Chicago, 5 November 1999. More recently he has written about this issue in "The rhetorical legacy of Kenneth Burke," in W. Jost and W. Olmstead, eds., A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004): 152-168.
4 See Gregory Clark for a discussion of transcendence through itinerary rather than teleology (18-25).
5 Burke's dedication in A Grammar of Motives is Ad bellum purificandum, "Towards the Purification of War."
6 This was Burke's inscription in Clarke Rountree's edition of Permanence and Change, indicating Burke's recognition that extension would be forthcoming and, indeed, was welcome.
Works Cited
Brock, Bernard L. ed. Kenneth Burke and Contemporary European Thought: Rhetoric in Transition. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995.
Brock, Bernard L., Kenneth Burke, Parke G. Burgess, and Herbert W. Simons. "Drmatism as Ontology or Epistemology: A Symposium." Communication Quarterly 33 (1985): 17-33.
"Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
---. Attitudes Toward History. 1937, 1939. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
---. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966.
---. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
---. A Rhetoric of Motives. 1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
---. The Rhetoric of Religion. 1961. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970.
Burks, Don. "KB and Burke: A Remembrance." The Kenneth Burke Society Newsletter, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 5.
Chesebro, James W. "Extensions of the Burkeian System." Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 356-368.
Clark, Gregory. Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2004.
Condit, Celeste Michelle. "Post-Burke: Transcending the Sub-Stance of Dramatism." Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 349-355.
Conversations with Kenneth Burke. [Videotaped Interviews] Iowa City: University of Iowa, 1986.
Fletcher, Angus. "Volume and Body in Burke's Criticism, or Stalled in the Right Place." In Representing Kenneth Burke. Eds. Hayden White and Margaret Brose. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New Series no. 6. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 150-175.
Golden, James L., Goodwin F. Berquist, and William E. Coleman. The Rhetoric of Western Thought. 6th edit. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1997.
Hyman, Stanley Edgar. The Armed Vision: A Study in the Methods of Modern Literary Criticism. Rev. edit. New York: Vintage Books, 1955.
Jameson, Frederick. "The Symbolic Inference; or, Kenneth Burke and Ideological Analysis." In Representing Kenneth Burke. Eds. Hayden White and Margaret Brose. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New Series no. 6. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 68-91.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edit. 1962; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970.
Lentricchia, Frank. "Reading History with Kenneth Burke." In Representing Kenneth Burke. Eds. Hayden White and Margaret Brose. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New Series no. 6. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 119-149.
McGee, Michael Calvin. "The 'Ideograph': A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology." Quarterly Journal of Speech 66 (1980): 1-16.
Rueckert, William. "Some of the Many Kenneth Burkes." In Representing Kenneth Burke. Eds. Hayden White and Margaret Brose. Selected Papers from the English Institute. New Series no. 6. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. 1-30.
Robert Wess, Oregon State University
Abstract: Why say "representative anecdote" rather than simply "representative"? The addition of "anecdote" follows from Burke’s theorizing of language as "a part of" rather than "apart from" reality. This theoretical model allows Burke to combine realism with linguistic skepticism. This model also suggests how ecocriticism may combine antifoundationalism with a foundational ecological realism. Tentative exploration of the possibilities of a representative anecdote for Burkean ecocriticism considers Burke’s discussions of technology, apocalypse ("Towards Helhaven"), "our biologic genius" (Permanence and Change), and "Counter-Nature," with anecdotal material drawn from Karen Tei Yamashita’s prize-winning, experimental novel, Through the Arc of Rain Forest.
There is one little fellow named Ecology, and in time we shall pay him more attention
--Kenneth Burke, 1937
IN "REVEALING NATURE: TOWARD AN ECOLOGICAL CRITICISM," first published in 1990, Glen A. Love points tellingly to a seeming anomaly in literary studies:
Race, class, and gender are the words which we see and hear everywhere at our professional meetings and in our current publications. But curiously enough . . . the English profession has failed to respond in any significant way to the issue of the environment, the acknowledgment of our place within the natural world and our need to live heedfully within it, at peril of our very survival. (226)
This trio of race, gender and class has even been dubbed the "holy trinity of literary criticism" (Appiah and Gates 625). One effect of this development in literary studies of particular interest to Burke scholars is a blossoming of interest in Burke’s discussions with Ralph Ellison about the representation of race in American culture.1
A common argument against this "holy trinity" is that it politicizes literary studies, deflecting attention away from aesthetic and poetic issues. However common, this argument is an oversimplification. Consider that if politics is the sole motivation involved, then it is difficult to see why literary studies got a trio instead of a quartet that included the environment along with race, gender, and class. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, after all, appeared in 1962, one year before Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, and eight years after the Supreme Court’s historic decision in Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas. The first Earth Day was 1970. In other words, the politics of the environment and the politics of race, gender, and class became prominent during the same period. Love accentuates the point that the neglect of the environment in literary studies during the 1970s and 1980s cannot be attributed to the politics of professors: "most of us in the profession of English would be offended at not being considered environmentally conscious and ecologically aware" (227). Professors attending to race, gender, and class in the classroom often no doubt attended to the environment as well, only outside the classroom. To comprehend the emergence of this "holy trinity," one needs to attend not just to politics but to theory as well. Politics and theory married happily in the areas of race, gender, and class, but in the area of the environment they did not even start dating.
While ecocriticism began during the 1990s to become visible in literary studies, it developed independently of the theoretical developments in the preceding decades that fostered the interest in race, gender, and class; and to this day, it remains relatively marginal compared to the continuing interest in this trio.2 Some argue that ecocriticism, to overcome this marginality, needs ultimately to engage the theory that effectively discouraged attention to the environment:
An ongoing challenge for ecocritical practice is to get critical theory and ecology to address each other in ways they do not now sufficiently do. To pointedly oversimplify the situation, I would say that critical theory, in its fixation on the constructed character of representation neglects ecology; and ecology, in turn, must suffer its embarrassment in employing theory that threatens always to tar it as "foundationalist." (Roorda 173; italics added)The italicized words can help to pinpoint the theoretical ideas that led literary studies to neglect the environment while becoming preoccupied with race, gender, and class.
Take the example of patriarchy. To say that there is a hierarchy of sexes rooted in biology is to "essentialize" and to speak as a "foundationalist." The theory that fostered interest in the "holy trinity" overturned such thinking by uncovering ways that representations "construct" what they represent. From this standpoint, one can "deconstruct" patriarchy by demonstrating that it is a "construct" that emerged in history, not a reality rooted in biology, a demonstration that puts this regressive construct into the memory bank of history and prepares the way for a new construct of gender relations. Such constructs may be called linguistic, cultural, or social, but in all cases the premise is that they are built up through linguistic and cultural practices in society. Constructionism fostered interest in the "holy trinity" because it provided theoretical arguments for overturning regressive essentialisms and foundationalisms. Theory and politics met and married happily.
Things are different when one turns to nature and the environment. Whereas the criticism of race, gender, and class seeks to shift from natural essences to cultural constructs, ecocriticism seeks to go in the opposite direction, from constructs to a nature independent of culture imposing limits and necessities that culture can do nothing to alter. Reduction of nature to the status of a mere construct is a problem rather than a liberation. It is thus easy enough to see why constructionists would attend to race, gender and class in the classroom, while reserving their concern for the environment for activities separate from their academic work.
Fredric Jameson sums up the dilemma succinctly. On the one hand, he observes, "Nature is thus surely the great enemy of any antifoundationalism or antiessentialism. . . . To do away with the last remnants of nature and with the natural as such is surely the secret dream and longing of all contemporary or postcontemporary, postmodern thought" (Seeds 46). On the other hand, the heyday of antifoundationalism and antiessentialism in theory coexists with the emergence and flourishing of interest in nature: "How antifoundationalism can thus coexist with the passionate ecological revival of a sense of Nature is the essential mystery at the heart of what I take to be a fundamental antinomy of the postmodern" (Seeds 46-47). For Jameson, this dualistic conjunction of mutually exclusive categories is a historical phenomenon that can only be explained with the help of historical materialism; integrating the two sides of the antinomy theoretically is impossible.
Jameson notwithstanding, such a theoretical integration is precisely the purpose of the present essay. Burke is ideally suited for this enterprise insofar as his work combines realism with theorizing about language characteristic of antifoundationalism. Burke’s theory of the "representative anecdote" will serve as our focal point: first, we will consider it as a general theoretical model; then, we will offer some "notes" toward the development of an anecdote suitable for a Burkean mode of ecocriticism.
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Representative Anecdotes in General
"The Representative Anecdote," a chapter in A Grammar of Motives, begins,
Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. (59)
Burke’s use of the terms "reflection," "selection," and "deflection" to characterize terminologies is well known, but it is likely that most people know these terms from their appearance in a later essay, "Terministic Screens." The central place of these terms in both texts is a sign of their close connection. If there is a difference between the two, it is because "Terministic Screens" is more abstract, so much so that the theoretical force of the inclusion of "anecdote" along with "representative" may be lost. Whether that is the case, however, is debatable. Consider Burke’s explanation of the source of the term "terministic screens":
One thus may argue that "Terministic Screens" is built around an "anecdote" drawn from photography.When I speak of "terministic screens," I have particularly in mind some photographs I once saw. They were different photographs of the same objects, the difference being that they were made with different color filters. Here something so "factual" as a photograph revealed notable distinctions in texture, and even in form, depending upon which color filter was used for the documentary description of the event being recorded. (45)
Why say "representative anecdote" rather than simply "representation"? What is the significance of the addition of "anecdote"?
If, as Burke theorizes, any terminology is a "selection" and is therefore a "reflection" of some things and a "deflection" away from others, then terminologies do not reproduce reality, as assumed in the naïve verbal realism that foundationalism typically presupposes, but construct it, as claimed in antifoundational theory. In other words, the trio of "selection," "reflection," and "deflection" is enough to produce an antifoundationalist theory of "representation" compatible with one side of Jameson’s antinomy. But Burke also insists that the development of a terminology requires an "anecdote":
Dramatism suggests a procedure to be followed in the development of a given calculus, or terminology. It involves the search for a "representative anecdote," to be used as a form in conformity with which the vocabulary is constructed. (Grammar 59)
It is the requirement of the anecdote that allows Burke, as we will see, to incorporate the other side of Jameson’s antinomy.
In "The Representative Anecdote" chapter in the Grammar, Burke counterpoints dramatism to behaviorism. Identifying the behaviorist’s animal experiments as the anecdote that prompts the "selection" that informs behaviorism’s terminology, Burke faults this anecdote as unrepresentative because it leaves out the linguistic prowess one finds in humans. By including language, dramatism succeeds where behaviorism fails. Such deliberations about whether an anecdote is representative or unrepresentative parallel the Supreme Court’s when it decides whether the factual and legal circumstances of a particular case make it a suitable "test case" for a significant legal issue. In both, a particular part of reality (anecdote, test case) is evaluated on the basis of how well it represents this reality in general, or at least the dimensions of this reality relevant to one’s concerns.
Conceived as an anecdote, a representation is thus "a part of" reality, not "apart from" it, as in the "prison-house" metaphor that Jameson uses in the title of his study of the linguistic theorizing informing the structuralist tradition, The Prison-House of Language, a mode of theorizing rooted in Saussure’s conceptualization of language as a system of "differences without positive terms" (Prison-House 15). John Steinbeck thinks in the spirit of "a part of" in Sea of Cortez, based on his 1940 boat trip with Edward R. Ricketts to study marine life in the Sea of Cortez (i.e., Gulf of California). Steinbeck remarks that while the purpose of their trip was to record empirical observations of invertebrates and their activities, they recognized in advance,
We could not observe a completely objective Sea of Cortez anyway, for in that lonely and uninhabited Gulf our boat and ourselves would change it the moment we entered. By going there, we would bring a new factor to the Gulf. Let us consider that factor and not be betrayed by this myth of permanent objective reality. (3-4).
Similarly, by theorizing ways that words, however antifoundational in functioning as "selections," are nonetheless real and have real effects, Burke’s theorizing is consistently in the spirit of "a part of" rather than the "apart from" of the prison-house metaphor. For example, in the Grammar, Burke counters the positivist argument that would dismiss as nonsense any statement that could not be verified empirically:
So, one could, if he wished, maintain that all theology, metaphysics, philosophy, criticism, poetry, drama, fiction, political exhortation, historical interpretation, and personal statements about the lovable and the hateful--one could if he wanted to be as drastically thorough as some of our positivists now seem to want to be--maintain that every bit of this is nonsense. Yet these words of nonsense would themselves be real words, involving real tactics, having real demonstrable relationships, and demonstrably affecting relationships. (57-58)
In other words, even constructs, however much they may be "nonsense" by positivist standards, are nonetheless a part of reality (like Steinbeck’s boat), involving tactics and relationships, and having effects. Even when Burke deploys his often-repeated distinction between "motion" and "action," he avoids lapsing into a variant of the Cartesian dualism by connecting these two realities. It is conceivable, he suggests, to have "motion" without "action":
if all verbalizingly active animals were erased from the world (as they in all likelihood some day will be) despite the absence of such speech acts there would still be the motions of the winds and tides, of the earth’s revolutions about the sun, the processes of geology, astronomic unfoldings in general, etc., all going their way without the benefit of verbal clergy here on earth. ("Words as Deeds" 160)
But "action" without "motion" is not possible:
For the "act" of speaking (and of interpreting an utterance) is made possible only by its grounding in two aspects of motion; namely: (a) such physiological motions as the neural processes involved in speaking, hearing, interpreting, and the like; (b) such environmental motions as the vibrations in the air which carry the words from speaker to hearer. . . . Written words would depend on visual rather than auditory kinds of environmental motion, Braille on motions involved in touch. ("Words as Deeds" 164)
Language is a part of the reality of the body and its physical situation, not apart from it. As Burke puts it in later writings, in a formulation to which we will return later, humans are "bodies that learn language."
One possible source for Burke’s preference for "a part of" over "apart from" can be found in the way he conceptualizes the term "representative anecdote" in "Four Master Tropes," included as an appendix in the Grammar, but originally published earlier, in 1941. Synecdoche is the trope that frames Burke’s consideration of the problem of "representation" (Grammar 507-11), and the idea of the "representative anecdote" appears at the end of the section devoted to this trope (510-11). The year 1941, moreover, saw the appearance of The Philosophy of Literary Form, where Burke’s consideration of symbolic action encompasses "the matter of synecdoche, the figure of speech wherein the part is used for the whole, the whole for the part, the container for the thing contained, the cause for the effect, the effect for the cause, etc. Simplest example: `twenty noses’ for `twenty men’" (25-26). Burke adds, "The more I examine both the structure of poetry and the structure of human relations outside of poetry, the more I become convinced that this [synecdoche] is the `basic’ figure of speech, and that it occurs in many modes besides that of the formal trope" (26).3 As a formal trope, a synecdoche may, of course, take the form of the whole substituting for the part or the part for the whole, whereas the synecdochic logic of the representative anecdote, because the anecdote is a part of reality, is limited to the substitution of the part for the whole.
Conceived as a synecdoche, a representative anecdote is thus a part (selection) standing for (reflection) but not coinciding with (deflection) the whole that contains the part. "Twenty noses" is a "selection." It "reflects" a part of the reality of twenty people and it "deflects" attention from other parts. The "anecdote" in this example consists of the "twenty noses." Whether it is "representative," suitable as a "test case" for one’s purposes, is a matter for deliberation.
Burke’s core synecdochic assumption is that no selection can reproduce the whole of reality. One’s anecdotal selection is always a part of reality but it can never be the whole of reality. A terminology by its very nature is reductive in its necessary selectivity. Even a cosmology, Burke stresses in the Grammar, is "a reduction of the world to the dimensions of words" (96).
Burke’s "a part of" antifoundationalism needs always to be distinguished from the "apart from" Saussurean antifoundationalism informing the structuralist and poststructuralist tradition. Burke’s synecdochic logic works by presupposing a reality larger than the scope of any anecdote. The premise, in other words, is that there is a containing reality in general as well as contained anecdotes in particular. By contrast, the Saussurean premise that language is a system of differences with no positive terms eliminates even the limited "reflection" that the synecdoche allows. Burke’s "reflection" is always also a distortion insofar as "deflection" is always present. But at least there is the "reflection" of "twenty noses" for twenty people, whereas the Saussurean differential model results in Derrida’s "there is nothing outside the text" (158), which the "prison-house" metaphor captures in visual terms. At bottom, the differential model turns the relation between words and what is "out there" beyond words into a dualism in which one is "apart from" the other, analogous to the way that Descartes conceives mind as apart from matter. Burke’s "a part of" synecdochic logic refuses such dualism, presupposing instead containing whole and contained part, a la Spinoza, the first great critic of Descartes (see Grammar 146-47 for a contrast between Descartes and Spinoza that aligns Spinoza with Burke’s dramatistic orientation). In The Philosophy of Literary Form, while discussing the term "chart," a precursor of the later terms "representative anecdote" and "terministic screen," Burke observes,
Only a completely accurate chart would dissolve magic, by making the structure of names identical with the structure named. This latter is the kind of chart that Spinoza, in his doctrine of the `adequate idea,’ selected as the goal of philosophy. . . . A completely accurate chart would, of course, be possible only to an infinite, omniscient mind" (7).
The whole is beyond our reach, accessible only to "god," but we are a part of it, not apart from it. While we cannot comprehend it absolutely, we can profitably deliberate about which anecdotes provide the most suitable test cases for representing it.
In suggesting, as noted earlier, that the synecdoche is "the `basic’ figure of speech," Burke concludes that "synecdochic representation is thus seen to be a necessary ingredient of a truly realistic philosophy" (Philosophy 26). Offering examples of sensory, artistic, and political representation, Burke insists that in each case there is a real part in a real whole and that the former can realistically serve to represent the latter. In different situations, there may be more or less room for deliberation about which part does the best job of representing the whole, but by virtue of this synecdochic realism there is always a part linked to the whole that contains it. This realism is antifoundational insofar as the part does not reproduce the whole, as naïve verbal realism presupposes, but constructs it, as antifoundationalism insists. But in Burke’s synecdochic antifoundationalism, the constructing part is "a part of" the larger reality beyond human constructions, the ultimate containing whole that may be equated to "nature" (as defined later, in the second part of the present essay). From this standpoint, antifoundationalism and nature are not at odds. Burke’s synecdoche thus displaces Jameson’s antinomy.
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Notes toward a Representative Anecdote for Burkean Ecocriticism.
The term "ecocriticism" implicitly prefers the "eco" of ecology to the "enviro" of environment. Cheryll Glotfelty explains the difference:
enviro- is anthropocentric and dualistic, implying that we humans are at the center, surrounded by everything that is not us, the environment. Eco-, in contrast, implies interdependent communities, integrated systems, and strong connections among constituent parts. (xx)
Insofar as humans see themselves as surrounded by an "environment," they tend to overlook the fact that they are simultaneously the environment for nonhuman organisms. More generally, while living things respond to what environs them, they become, in their responses, that which environs other things. "Ecology" ("everything is connected") captures monistically what "environment" tends to obscure dualistically. This difference is equivalent to the difference between "a part of" ("eco") and "apart from" ("enviro")
In his seminal coining of the term "ecocriticism," William H. Rueckert is on the "eco" side of this distinction. He proposes, "Energy flows from the poet’s language centers and creative imagination into the poem and then, from the poem (which converts and stores this energy) into the reader" (109-110). Textual activity, in other words, involves a process analogous to the transfers of energy that occur within ecosystems to sustain life. Like human activity in general, textual activity is a part of the web of connections sustaining and/or threatening ecosystems. A representative anecdote for Burkean ecocriticism should arguably participate in this web on two levels: (1) it should incorporate the web in its anecdotal model (the "eco" principle of "a part of"); (2) it should itself participate in this web by heightening our awareness of it (as Burke sought to heighten "our consciousness of linguistic action generally" [Grammar 317]).
Deliberations about the choice of a representative anecdote can be lengthy, as Burke shows in reviewing the deliberations that led to his choice of the U. S. Constitution as an anecdote to represent the purification of war (Grammar 323-38). These deliberations, moreover, started Burke down the road from what he originally envisioned as an introductory chapter, "The Constitutional Wish," to what we know as A Grammar of Motives. With this example of how complex such deliberations can become, the deliberations about a representative anecdote for Burkean ecocriticism offered here are conceived as "notes" rather than a final product, an "oar" that hopes to start a "conversation" on this topic in the "parlor" of the KB Journal.
The anecdote I will introduce to start this "conversation" is a plot from a novel, Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. A representative anecdote is in a sense a starting point. As Burke explains:
The informative anecdote, we could say, contains in nuce the terminological structure that is evolved in conformity with it. Such a terminology is a "conclusion" that follows from the selection of a given anecdote. Thus the anecdote is in a sense a summation, containing implicitly what the system that is developed from it contains explicitly. (Grammar 60)
A particularly clear example is the anecdote from photography, cited earlier, that Burke introduces in "Terministic Screens." The "color filters" yielding different photographs provide the anecdotal model for the terminology of selection, reflection, and deflection evolved in conformity with it. Hence, after summarizing Yamashita’s plot, I will turn to Burke to discuss four of its components: (1) technology, (2) apocalypse, (3) life’s creativity, and (4) "counter-nature." In this fashion, Burke texts will provide "the terminological structure . . . evolved in conformity with it [the anecdote]."
Yamashita’s plot is built around the Matacao, a mysterious plastic substance with unusual properties, including magnetism, which begins to force its way through the surface of the earth in cleared areas in the Amazon rain forest. Initially it seems to be a geographical name for the place characterized by this substance but when it begins to be discovered in other places as well, it becomes the name for the plastic substance itself. With the Matacao, Yamashita takes a kind of ecological poetic license. Just as one can take poetic license with science to produce science fiction, Yamashita takes poetic license with dimensions of the ecological crisis to produce the Matacao and to make it the protagonist in her novel, which is essentially about the beginning, middle, and end of the Matacao.
When the Matacao appears, it attracts widespread attention. Numerous characters from three continents, linking the developed north to the underdeveloped south, are drawn to it. There is also worldwide speculation about its origins, which are not revealed until the end, when it is revealed, in Yamashita’s principal exercise of poetic license, that the Matacao originates in enormous landfills in highly developed parts of the earth. Material in these landfills is pressured into lower layers of the earth’s mantle, where it becomes molten enough to be squeezed through underground veins to virgins areas of the earth, where it surfaces.
An American entrepreneur discovers that Matacao plastic possesses properties making it suitable for a myriad of new technologies that make possible the production of new infrastructure and a wide range of products. It even begins to appear possible to use it to make synthetic food as well as other substitutes for natural things. Matacao feathers, for example, prove to be indistinguishable from natural feathers. Near the end of the novel, an amusement park called "Chicolandia" is created entirely out of Matacao plastic:
Everything in Chicolandia was being made of Matacao plastic, from the roller coasters to the giant palms, the drooping orchids and the buildings. . . . The animated animals, also constructed in the revolutionary plastic, were mistaken for real animals until people questioned their repetitive movements. . . . (168)
"Chicolandia" is thus similar to the "Culture-Bubble" in Burke’s "Towards Helhaven" (to be discussed shortly) insofar as each is designed to dramatize a technological remaking of the totality of reality.
As the plot moves towards its conclusion, however, it does not allow us to forget our earthly status in the cosmos. In the plot’s crowning irony, as the characters seem to separate themselves more and more from the earth through their miraculous technological exploitation of the Matacao, these characters remain in fact as embedded as ever in ecology’s web of connections, as they eventually are forced to realize in the plot’s apocalyptic climax.
Yamashita prepares for her conclusion midway through the novel when she underlines the creative dimension in ecology’s web of connections by juxtaposing (1) the multiple cultural uses of the Matacao that flourish when it is first discovered with (2) the diverse animal responses to a mysterious junk yard, filled with abandoned aircraft and cars, in the Amazon forest. Animals, it is discovered, exploit and even feed off this junk in diverse ways.
The ecological value of diversity is dramatized near the end of the novel when an epidemic strikes. Many die, but not all. It is stressed that a certain percentage of the population proves to be immune to the disease. Homogenizing effects of capitalism are part of the reason for the epidemic but an underlying biological diversity based on random genetic variation protects the species from extinction. The homogenizing effects of capitalist exploitation of the Matacao, however, are another matter. These effects, produced in the name of markets and profits, quickly wipe out the cultural diversity that initially flourishes at the Matacao, thus preparing for the catastrophic apocalypse that concludes the novel. Bacteria appear that can feed on Matacao plastic. The homogenizing effects of technological exploitation of Matacao plastic turn out in the end to create conditions allowing these bacteria to flourish as never before. The homogenizing effects of the technological exploitation of the Matacao eliminate the protections of diversity. Destruction of the technological world is total. The corporate chief who spearheaded the technological development of Matacao plastic leaps to his suicidal death. Human survivors are left with ruins.
Technology is the most obvious area of overlap between Yamashita and Burke. Technology becomes particularly prominent in Burke’s later writings. As Burke explains in the "Afterword" that he wrote for the 3rd edition of Permanence and Change,
I need not decide, or ask the reader to decide, whether such a high development of Technology is to be celebrated or to be classed as a compulsion. I am but asking that we view it as a kind of "destiny," a fulfillment of peculiarly human aptitudes. Viewed thus, Technology is an ultimate direction indigenous to Bodies That Learn Language, which thereby interactively develop a realm of artificial instruments under such symbolic guidance. (Permanence 296)
It is hard to imagine that there can be much debate about the inclusion of technology as one of the components in any anecdote for Burkean ecocriticism. Whether the same can be said for apocalypse, the second of the four components I am proposing, is no doubt more debatable. Other "oars" may very well have different ideas.
My principal Burkean justification for including this component is Burke’s Helhaven narrative, which envisions, in Burke’s words, "an apocalyptic development whereby technology could of itself procure, for a fortunate few, an ultimate technological release from the very distresses with which that very technology now burdens us" ("Towards Helhaven" 61). This "apocalyptic development" is "HELHAVEN, the Mighty Paradisal Culture-Bubble on the Moon" (62). Projecting an apocalyptic future goes beyond factual realities like technology, of course, to words that by positivist standards are "nonsense," but as we have already seen Burke insists that such words are nonetheless realities that can produce real effects.
Other "oars" may argue that the Helhaven essays ("Towards Helhaven" and "Why Satire") are so central to Burke’s identifiably ecocritical concerns that they should be the basis for any anecdote for Burkean ecocriticism (that was my own first thought before I decided, at least tentatively, to use Yamashita’s plot instead). The principal reason for my preference is that Yamashita’s plot includes more fully than the Helhaven essays my third component, life’s creativity, as Burke discusses it in Permanence and Change.
Before turning to this third component, however, some consideration needs to be given to an issue relevant to the inclusion of any apocalypse, regardless of whether it is the one in Yamashita or the one in the Helhaven essays. This issue revolves around the relation of the present and the future. Burke defines it in his consideration of the grammar of "present" and "future": "the present forever is, whereas the future forever is not" (Grammar 334). In making this observation, Burke’s concern is that the purification of war not be conceived as a future that, by definition, can never be the present. He contrasts religious and secular futurisms, preferring the former to the latter insofar as the religious strategy projects a future that can be realized in the present:
We might bring out the contrast in doctrinal tactics between religious futurism and secular futurism thus: Whereas both would merge present and future, religious futurism does so by reducing the future to the present, whereas secular futurism reduces the present to the future. That is, the religious tactic says: Find what now is within you, and you have found what you will be. The secular tactic says: Find what will bring you promises, and you have found what is worth doing now. (Grammar 334)
For the purification of war, Burke wanted something realizable in the present rather than in a future that "forever is not." The ecological crisis is a very different context, where one fears ecological catastrophe is realizable in the present, perhaps not immediately, but sooner or later. At the same time, one does not want to project apocalyptic catastrophe into a future that "forever is not," since one then need not worry, since the catastrophe will never come.
Burke indicates how the essence of a present situation may be defined narratively from the standpoint of either the past or the future. In the Grammar, he limited himself to the past, but later, he revised his earlier formulation:
When considering "the temporizing of essence" in the Grammar, we were both put on the trail and misled somewhat by the suggestions in the word "prior." Following its leads, we saw how the search for "logical" priority can, when translated into temporal, or narrative terms, be expressed in the imagery of "regression to childhood," or in other imagery or ideas of things past. This concern with the statement of essence in terms of origins (ancestry) caused us to overlook the exactly opposite resource, the statement of essence in terms of culminations (where the narrative notion of "how it all ends up" does serve for the logically reductive notion of "what it all boils down to"). (Rhetoric 15)
From this standpoint, then, an apocalyptic narrative may be seen not as a future that forever is not, but as a way of defining the present in terms of the logical conclusion (future) of present practices. Such a future would not be a mere "forever is not." Rather it would be like the lung cancer ("how it all ends up") that tells us what smoking at the present time "boils down to."
Burke’s vision of Helhaven is conceived precisely as such a "temporizing of essence" that looks to the future rather than the past. As Burke observes,
There you glimpse the principle behind the vision [of Helhaven]. . . . We need but extend to "perfection" the sort of conditions we already confront in principle when we buy bottled water because the public water supply is swill; or when a promoter, by impairing the habitability of some area (as, for instance, with a smeltery or a jetport), makes profit enough to build himself a secluded, idyllic estate among still uncontaminated lakes, meadows, and wooded peaks. ("Towards Helhaven" 61).
In other words, the "Culture-Bubble" on the moon (apocalyptic future) "temporizes the essence" of present practices such as the substitution of technologically produced bottled water for water polluted by technology. 4
The specific form of Helhaven’s apocalypse (technological production of a "Culture-Bubble" to replace what technology destroyed) appears in Yamashita’s plot in the technological exploitation of Matacao plastic to begin to replace natural objects themselves with Matacao substitutes indistinguishable from the originals, just as Burke’s Culture-Bubble includes things like "an actual manmade shoreline, with waves, and breakers, splendid for surfing, and the best white sand for luxuriating on the beach (though protected from the sun and exposed only to a scientifically designed substitute" ("Towards Helhaven" 62). But in Yamashita’s plot, unlike the Helhaven narrative, such replacements do not themselves constitute the plot’s apocalyptic conclusion, which involves natural processes contrasting the protections of biological diversity (the epidemic) with the absence of such protections (the bacteria eating the Matacao). Other "oars" may cite this difference as a reason for preferring the Helhaven essays to the Yamashita plot.
But before doing that, I would urge looking to Yamashita’s plot for an anecdotal counterpart to Burke’s discussion of life’s creativity, my third component, in Permanence and Change. A principal text that serves as a basis for this discussion is D. H. Lawrence’s provocative claim that "growing crops make the sun shine" (Permanence 222, 231-32, 250-55, 258-61), a claim that Burke subjects to his test of "recalcitrance" (258-61). Ultimately, the core issue boils down to identifying exactly what it is in the present that one wishes to define futuristically. The apocalypse in the Helhaven narrative defines the essence of the present practice of using technology to create replacements for what technology destroyed in the first place. Burke’s discussion of Lawrence offers an orientation that may lead one to wish to foreground different features of our present situation.
Burke concedes that Lawrence’s claim cannot be accepted on its face: "The objection to Lawrence’s statements is that they have not yet undergone the scope of revision required by the recalcitrance of the material which would be disclosed were we to extend them into all walks of investigation" (256). Revising Lawrence, Burke counterpoints positivism to Lawrence:
The positivist, looking upon the universe as created, says that the last chapter [crops] flows inexorably from the conditions laid down in the first chapter [sun]. Lawrence would look upon the universe as being created. He would restore the poetic point of view. Behind the effrontery of his assertions, he seems to be saying simply that the last chapter is not caused by the first, but that all the chapters are merely different aspects of a single process. (231-32)
In other words, the fundamental reality is the totality of interconnections that sustain life. This totality works not by linear causality (the half-truth that the sun makes the crops grow) but by the ecological causality of interdependent parts (sun light is part of the totality of life on earth, whereas on Mars, it is part of the totality of lifelessness). Lawrence, Burke suggests, restores the poetic viewpoint in focusing on the creativity at the heart of life: "the creative, assertive, synthetic act. He [Lawrence] would stress or ignore, in accordance with the authority of our biologic genius as he conceives it to be" (259). (Incidentally, insofar as Permanence and Change is also trying to restore the poetic viewpoint, one may read Burke’s discussion of Lawrence as a roundabout way in which Burke subjects himself to his test of "recalcitrance.")
While one associates creativity most directly with human activity, one needs also to recognize that there is creativity in the evolutionary processes that invent new species, even if they work by way of coincidences of random genetic variation and "natural selection." "Selection" on the side of human reality; "natural selection" on the side of nonhuman reality, which needs to be extended to include the biological level of human life, the "motion" that makes "action" possible. What "natural selection" will do to or for us depends on the "selection" informing our own programs of action.
Life’s creativity makes it impossible to map in terms of mechanistic causality the process whereby organisms respond to what environs them and in doing so produce effects that environ others. Because of the creativity rooted in "selection" and "natural selection" what comes into organisms and what goes out does not move in a straight, wholly predictable linear line. Because of selectivity, there is always a degree of creativity on both human and nonhuman sides in the ecological web of life ("everything is connected").
Nature is today perhaps best defined as equivalent to this open, creative system, which contains human and nonhuman forces, neither of which totally controls the other, as in global warming, an effect of human and nonhuman interaction resulting in a hybrid with human and nonhuman components. As a hybrid, nature is no longer independent in the sense of pure nature (i.e., nature free of human fingerprints), but it nonetheless remains independent in the sense that it is a force that can produce effects that humans can neither anticipate (unintended consequences) nor alter without changing their own practices (e.g., the changes that would be needed to reverse global warming). In this hybrid nature, humankind is a part of nature not apart from it, as modernity, beginning with the Cartesian dualism, has tended to think.
Yamashita’s apocalypse reveals a nature that takes this hybrid form insofar as human selection (technological creativity) interacts with natural selection (bacteria that can feast on Matacao plastic), resulting in a catastrophe that defines the limits of humankind’s control of the Earth’s ecosystem. In other words, this apocalypse defines in futuristic terms the essence of the present in the comprehensive terms one finds in Burke’s discussion of Lawrence. The present practice of using technology to create replacements for what technology destroyed (the Helhaven apocalypse) can still be part of the story, but the Permanence and Change material allows one to tell a larger story, one that both incorporates the ecological web of life and participates in this web by heightening our awareness of it, just as Burke, as noted earlier, sought to heighten our consciousness of linguistic action.
Burke’s "Counter-Nature," the last of my four components, encompasses transformations of the nonhuman like the substitution of a technologically engineered Matacao world for the nonhuman world, but it encompasses much more. As Burke stresses, "Counter-Nature" includes not only "immediate" but also "remote" consequences of human transformations of nature that together "introduce conditions of livelihood (including grave manmade threats to survival) quite alien to the state of nature to which our prehistoric ancestors successfully adapted" (Permanence 296). The technological Matacao world exemplifies the "immediate" consequences that tend to preoccupy us as we consume innovation after innovation in our consumer culture. But the greatest dangers often prove to be unintended consequences of technological innovation (e.g., global warming). These are more "remote," typically making their presence felt long after the introduction of the technologies that produce them unintentionally.
The phenomena that Burke calls "Counter-Nature" prompt Michael Serres to observe, "Global history enters nature; global nature enters history: this is something utterly new in philosophy. . . . [W]e receive gifts from the world and we inflict upon it damage that it returns to us in the form of new givens" (4, 43). Global warming would be an example of a "new given," not a "given" without human fingerprints (the traditional object of scientific study) but a "given" with such fingerprints (which poses for science the new problem of sorting out human and nonhuman causes, as in debates about global warming where one can find different calculations about the roles played by human and nonhuman forces). Yamashita’s Matacao is emblematic of such "new givens," as accentuated in the novel by the debates about its origins that eventuate in the discovery of the human and nonhuman forces that produced it. In such "new givens," as Serres suggests, history ceases to be a purely human story told against an unchanging natural backdrop. Instead, nature and history become inextricably intertwined in the production of "Counter-Nature." Yamashita’s plot thus encompasses both the "immediate" and "remote" transformations of the nonhuman that Burke includes within the scope of "Counter-Nature," which seems destined to replace what used to be nature with the new hybrid nature we are beginning to live within today.
In this fashion, then, Burke texts on technology, apocalypse, life’s creativity, and "counter-nature" can provide a "terminological structure that is evolved in conformity" with the anecdote of Yamashita’s plot. It is hoped that the deliberative "notes" offered here about a representative anecdote suitable for Burkean ecocriticism are enough to start a "conversation" on this topic. To move this "conversation" along, other "oars" may (a) tweak and/or critique my proposal, (b) offer different anecdotes (Burke tells us how he experimented with a number of them in developing his anecdote for the purification of war), (c) propose ideas for different components to look for in an anecdote, or (d) add whatever other thoughts may come to mind. Your "oar" is welcome.
Notes
Robert Wess is Associate Professor of English at Oregon State University.
1 See Albrecht, Arac, Genter, Parrish, Pease, and Scruggs. Going beyond literary studies, see Crable and Eddy.
1 The term "ecocriticism" was coined by William H. Rueckert, the dean of Burke scholars, in an article first published in 1978 and later reprinted in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, but it did not begin to be widely used until the 1990s.
3 As I have suggested elsewhere (Wess 112-17), Burke scholars might profit from attending less to what Burke says about metaphor and more to what he says about synecdoche.
4 Similar examples appear in "Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One," where Burke also includes the following formulation: "Even now, the kingdom of Helhaven is within you" ("Why Satire" 80), a perversion of religious futurism in which the future to be feared is emergent in the present. Note that an ecocritical anecdote may be designed to encourage a present reality insofar as it seeks to encourage the present practices needed to avert ecological catastrophe. From this standpoint, an analogue to religious futurism would be appropriate for an ecocritical anecdote.
Works Cited
Albrecht, James M. "Saying Yes and Saying No: Individualist Ethics in Ellison, Burke, and Emerson." PMLA 114 (1999): 46-63.
Arac, Jonathan. "Toward a Critical Genealogy of the U. S. Discourse of Identity: Invisible Man after Fifty Years." Boundary 2 30.2: 195-216.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds. Identities. Spec. issue of Critical Inquiry 18.4 (1992): 625-884.
Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes toward History (1937). 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
---. A Grammar of Motives (1945). Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.
---. Language as Symbolic Action. U of California P, 1966. 44-62.
---. On Human Nature. Eds. William H. Rueckert and Angelo Bonadonna. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003.
---. Permanence and Change (1935). 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
---. The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941). 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California, 1973.
---. A Rhetoric of Motives (1950). Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.
---. "Terministic Screens." Burke, Language 44-62.
---. "Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision." Burke, On Human Nature 54-65.
---. "Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One." Burke, On Human Nature 66-95.
---. "Words as Deeds." Centrum 3.2 (1975): 147-68.
Crable, Bryan. "Kenneth Burke’s Dialogue with Ralph Ellison." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 33.3 (Summer 2003): 5-25.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.
Eddy, Beth. The Rites of Identity: The Religious Naturalism and Cultural Criticism of Kenneth Burke and Ralph Ellison. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003.
Genter, Robert. "Toward a Theory of Rhetoric: Ralph Ellison, Kenneth Burke, and the Problem of Modernism." Twentieth Century Literature 48.2 (Summer 2002):
Glotfelty, Cheryll. "Introduction: Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis." Ecocriticism Reader xv-xxxvii.
Jameson, Fredric. The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1972.
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Love, Glen A. "Revaluing Nature: Toward an Ecological Criticism." Ecocriticism Reader 225-40.
McKibben, William. The End of Nature. New York: Random House, 1989.
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Jo Scott-Coe, University of California, Riverside
Abstract: The extensive writings of St. Augustine and Kenneth Burke, though partially "canonized," are popularly domesticated by an academic clericism which attempts to divorce each writer’s religious concerns from their literary-critical vocabulary—even if that means disregarding, bracketing, or chopping up the more complex visions offered by whole books or collections. When we re-address intersections between the rhetorical and linguistic, between the secular and theological, we can examine how both thinkers worked inside conventions of their respective times to re-envision—even "convert"—such conventions on their own terms. To read Burke and Augustine in this way means to dislodge a conventional center which seems "obvious" merely because we neglect to examine its history and assumptions.
Men seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality.
—Kenneth Burke, on "Scope and Reduction,"
A Grammar of Motives (1945)
FOR ALL MODERNITY'S OVERT SKEPTICISM about theological doctrine, it is worth noting how dogmatic boundaries have become conventional among the humanities—as if designating secular "denominations" inside the university: This is rhetoric; that is criticism; this is literature; that is theology. By extension, students tend to study this writer as rhetorician, that one as literary critic, and so on, suggesting that genre itself can be equally dogmatic. Further, students and instructors in particular disciplines who choose to "cross over" into other denominations of study or genre can be dismissed as dilettantes or academic "heretics." Even vogues of "interdisciplinarity" suggest that it is certainly a big step to bridge subject-matter bounds.1
Media scholar Marshall McLuhan, theologian and critic Walter Ong, S.J., and Puritan historian Perry Miller have argued that much of the tendency towards academic compartmentalization, quantification, and "fundamentalism" can be traced to 16th century logician Peter Ramus, who effectively advocated a method of student instruction that separates dialectic from rhetoric (Kuhns; Bizzell & Herzberg cited hereafter as RT 557-583). Ramus himself tells us in Arguments in Rhetoric against Quintilian: "I consider the subject matters of the arts to be distinct and separate. The whole of dialectic concerns the mind and reason, whereas rhetoric and grammar concern language and speech" (RT 570). As a key to his distinction, Ramus sought to separate judgment from invention, as if to "purify" logic from Sophistic influence (RT 571-573).
With that in mind, we must acknowledge how inherited and currently accepted conventions for engaging texts are circumscribed by assumptions and traditions which are not merely "neutral" or "descriptive," though they may be habitual—even ritualistic. Well-aware that my own selections of texts and subsequent analysis will inevitably "select" certain angles and "deflect" others, I nevertheless seek to examine how texts written by St. Augustine and Kenneth Burke can be read against the Ramistic scene, even as they have been Ramistically "re-formed" in modern anthologies. I propose that such a reading is necessary in order to expand discourse among disciplines, particularly between the "religious" and the "secular."
The extensive writings of Augustine and Burke, though partially "canonized," are popularly domesticated by an academic clericism which attempts to divorce each writer’s religious concerns from their literary-critical vocabulary—even if that means disregarding, bracketing, or chopping up more complex visions offered by whole books or collections. Yet Burke’s theory of "logology" (words about words) cannot be separated from the language and allegorical structures of Christianity. Likewise, Augustine’s pre-conversion interest in "pagan" philosophy/religion and classical Ciceronian rhetoric ultimately informs not only his critical vocabulary (his own "words about words"), but also his culminating theological interests, arguments, and goals.
Both writers engage and interrogate traditions and vocabularies of their respective times, even as they aim to articulate revised or "new" unifying theories. When Augustine, through painstaking exploration, borrows rhetorical and pagan conventions as a catholicizing strategy towards Catholic theological unity, he rejects any temptation towards "simplification" which Ramus will popularize one thousand years later. But on a more subtle level, in his preoccupation with forming and protecting a canon of Biblical texts, "true" interpretational strategies and doctrine, Augustine anticipates, in a preliminary way, the drives of Ramus’s "method-ism." Unlike Ramus, however, Augustine identifies his rhetorical motives—laying them open to more direct challenge. Burke employs dramatistic strategies which likewise generate alternatives to modes of Ramistic simplification; and, like Augustine, identifies rhetorical motives and certainties of his own. Ironically, in using doubt as a directing principle,2 Burke transforms his own "paradox of substance," so that logology can be interpreted as a "trans-substantiation" of theology for a secular age—a move which deflects typical labels of categorization, challenging university denominalists and theological fundamentalists alike.
Examining the Ramistic "Scene"
First, we should take a brief look at how Ramus’s influence becomes evident in the tendency to accept academic boundaries as unexamined (if not invisible) "givens." Placing Ramus in historical context, McLuhan situates his impact in the context of nascent Renaissance print culture: "The new homogeneity of the printed page seemed to inspire a subliminal faith in the validity of the printed Bible as bypassing the traditional oral authority of the church." He continues, "It was as if print, uniform and repeatable commodity that it was, had the power of creating a new hypnotic superstition of the book as independent of and uncontaminated by human agency" (176; my emphasis).3
Ong’s extensive study, Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue, traces far-reaching implications of Ramus’s work. Ong identifies particular tendencies of Ramism which ring familiar to anyone who has worked in the field of education: favoring textbooks rather than manuscripts; preferring "teachability" and pedagogical efficacy rather than complicated or intricate questions of intellectual depth; advocating quantitative rather than qualitative modes for "assessment" of learning;4 and using monologue rather than dialogue in classroom delivery. Importantly, Ong emphasizes Ramus’s dislike of "doubt" in the educational process. Citing his famous rejection of Aristotle, Ong comments that, for Ramus, "Aristotle is at his worst when he refuses to be dogmatic or magistral, questioning and doubting rather than teaching" (161). Ong attributes Ramus’s tendency against experimental openness to his "horror of ambiguity and abstractionism," no doubt related to "his adulation of mathematics" (205).5
Ong notes that, long before Ramus formally declared his rejection of Catholicism, he had a reputation for being a "secret Protestant" (28). In fact, Perry Miller suggests that Ramism lent itself well not only to pedagogical changes of the 16th and 17th centuries but to theological gestures of early Protestantism, particularly among Puritan groups. For one thing, he points out Ramus’s "dichotomy of invention" between "artificial" arguments (those demonstrable to any direct observer at any time) and "inartificial" ones (which "must be taken on trust, on testimony") (129). Miller notes that New Englanders used this dichotomous doctrine to declare the text of the Bible itself privileged as an "inartificial argument," deriving its testimony from witnesses (130). In addition, New England preachers used Ramus’s rejection of the syllogism ("the student of Ramus was expressly warned to use it as sparingly as possible") to compose sermons from sequences of axioms rather than tracing steps of doctrinal logic from A to B to C (134).6
In the name of both simplification and logic, Ramus sought to eliminate the rhetorical or dialectical need to trace origins of doctrine when preaching, or teaching, or both—thus constructing an approach which tended to rely on the apparently impersonal authority of text and its "self-evident" propositions. Miller writes: "This was a logic for dogmatists; it assumed that decency and order prevailed both in the mind and among things. Therefore, the crowning achievement of the system was its doctrine of method" (138). "Method," even now, retains its blatantly pedagogical overtones but, as Ong points out, the word also was claimed by "enthusiastic preachers who made an issue of their adherence to ‘logic’"—namely, then, "methodists" (304).7
Ong provides evidence that the "seedbed" of Ramist influence following Ramus’s death was Germany (295-298), so it is little wonder that Friedrich von Schiller alludes to the prominence of Ramist trends in section six of his sixth Letter on the Aesthetic Education of Man in 1795. Although he attributes the phenomenon to "civilization" itself and what he calls an "increase of empirical knowledge," he also blatantly refers to "sharper divisions between the sciences," and "the separation of rank and occupation." Most importantly, he states that "The intuitive and the speculative understanding . . . have withdrawn in hostility to take up positions in their respective fields" (Leitch et al. 576). Ong echoes Schiller’s note about empiricism when he points explicitly to "the effects of typography on Ramus’s hardening style of logic" (Kuhns).8
Clearly, Ramism creates an interrelationship among paradigms of textual privilege, pedagogical "methodism," knowledge commodification, and Puritan theology. The absence of Ramus from the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Leitch et al.; henceforth NATC)—his accepted "relegation," ironically, to studies in what is currently termed "rhetoric"—serves as peculiar evidence that Ramus’s influence has been successful, even if it remains unacknowledged. Ong himself characterizes this "curiously anonymous" influence by stating that the very configuration of academic books literally perpetuates Ramus’s impact as part of a "great deposit of textbook literature dealing with the most familiar of our ideas which is rewritten in every generation, while remaining so much a part of the universal heritage that no one can believe it has ever changed or even derived from a particular source" (9; my emphasis).
For our purposes, Ramus’s influence culminates in the NATC’s amazing underestimation of Burke. A self-educated "man of letters" who wrote prolifically from the margins of academe—he attended Columbia but did not take any degree9—Burke tends to be most acknowledged inside the domain of rhetoric and composition. While Burke himself did not address Ramus or his impact on the study of language and text, his early insight that "selections" of terms necessarily "reflect" and "deflect" certain interpretational values seems relevant to a discussion of conventions used to separate literary criticism from rhetoric and theology.10 Like Augustine, the "proto-semiotics" theorist who was equal parts theologian and trained rhetorician, Burke delves into language not merely as an artifact but as a center for meaning and persuasion. For both writers, dialectic and rhetoric may be distinguishable enterprises, but they do not operate in isolation from one another.
Connections: Augustine and Burke
To begin, let us examine the academic ground—a legacy of Ramistic dichotomies and divisions—which domesticates Augustine and Burke, specifically.
One of the most indicative examples of the compartmentalizing trend
to maintain distinctions between "criticism" and "rhetoric," or "criticism" and "theology," can be found in the bifurcation of Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana, or On Christian Doctrine, by two prominent anthologies. The editors of the NATC omit any selections from Book Four—by far the most self-consciously religious section. Similarly, editors of Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press The Rhetorical Tradition (RT) include only Book Four in their pages (although introductory material quotes selections from the first three books). Such dissection of material within a single work tends to simplify Augustine’s wrestlings with problematic intersections among words (signs), eloquence, and meaning—on both religious and linguistic levels. In fact, Augustine’s theological interests inform his definitions of critical terms. While he attempts to distinguish between secular signs and religious purposes for using them, the language of religious allusion and example pervades both levels of his analysis. Augustine’s pre-modern assumptions about authority and order inform all his painstaking ruminations on linguistic convention.
Burke functions as a twentieth century parallel, a modern secular counterpart, to Augustine. Prolific to the extreme, his work is difficult to anthologize, so that isolated and fairly uncharacteristic selections such as what the 2001 edition of NATC includes serves drastically to reduce the complexity of Burke’s writing which, as even the editors themselves admit, tends towards a "Whitmanesque embrace of everything" (NATC 1271). The text selected for Burke, one might say, appears on the surface to be more easily "teachable" than his other texts.11 Titled "Kinds of Criticism," the essay appeals to the Ramistic "eye" in that it proceeds with subdivisions and headings for "types" of critical method, even though the content is much less pedantic than its form suggests. Burke’s ultimate emphasis on merging and interplay among types of criticism in fact parallels his overall emphasis on convergences of terms—particularly in the relation between logology and theology.
In stressing the overlap between the linguistic and rhetorical/religious for each writer, distinct agendas become apparent. Where Augustine seeks to resolve conflict, doubts, and heresies in thoughtfully evolving rules of orthodoxy about exegesis and "God as Word," Burke throughout his career sought a way to "manage" or "read" dissension of all types by analyzing language. If Augustine was a proponent of a theistic, pre-modern Gospel of texts, Burke represents a modern, even post-modern, gospel of experimentation and doubt—a brand of non-theistic metaphysics in the tradition of Nietzsche (Southwell 5-6). Using what he termed "logology," or "words about words," Burke can be read as a kind of linguistic theologian, whose particular evangelism seeks conversions not of souls but of terminologies and social transactions. Burke’s approach highlights the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, as does Augustine’s, but at the same time models a posture of questions rather than certainties. Forms of inquiry thus function as a kind of goal, becoming a new content for constructive dialogue.
Undeniably, Burke’s logological interests are rooted heavily in the language and allegorical structures of Christianity. Similarly, Augustine’s original, pre-conversion interest in "pagan" philosophy and classical Ciceronian rhetoric ultimately informs not only his critical vocabulary (his own "words about words") but his theological interests and goals as well. The dramatic overlap of rhetorical and linguistic, secular and theological terms and complexities create vivid intersections for both writers—intersections which serve as grounds for two different kinds of transformation. In short, Ramistic designations for either writer will not serve.
Language and Theology in Augustine
To read Augustine against a Ramist grain, I must establish that no dichotomy exists between his theological and linguistic concerns—despite
their separation via textbooks. In addition, I must demonstrate that Augustine’s attempts to incorporate pagan-classical rhetoric into his doctrinal (that is, his teaching) concerns represent an intentional blend rather than an accident.
On Christian Doctrine and The Trinity will be our primary focus.
In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine places his discussion of linguistic signs and conventions within an overtly theological framework. Considered historically, as the gospels were yet to be formally compiled together as a set of privileged texts, Augustine’s writing can be seen as the work of "a controversialist, defending the correct doctrine of a young and volatile Christian church against various heresies," and thus "transforming for sacred use his old ambition to be a secular lawyer" (RT 381).12 As a rhetorician, Augustine was well-versed in strategies the new church could employ for reaching nonbelievers and establishing its credibility in a non-Christian world. However, his rhetorical purpose was also bound deeply to a concern for establishing standards of linguistic interpretation.
Augustine is widely known to appropriate or draw from other traditions what he thinks can advance th