Huglen and Rountree: Toward the Next Phase
Submitted by Ed Appel on Mon, 2004-11-01 07:54
I think Mark and Clarke's inaugural, introductory essay is superb. They've touched most, if not all, the important bases. (With Burke, I guess, you can never say anybody's touched ALL the bases, but let's not get picky.) The "benchmark" motif from the 1990 New Harmony conference sounds just the right opening note, along with, of course, the parlor conversation metaphor. This scholarly enterprise will begin with Burke, draw on his thoughts and inspiration, ripple out, we hope, in more applied and theoretical dimensions than we can now imagine, then double back for a "reality check" (loosely speaking) with the master. Interpersonal communication is one domain the authors cite that's been relatively fallow from a dramatistic standpoint. There are others.
If there's one statement in the piece I'd quibble with, it's the expectation that one day Burke will be as famous as "Aristotle, Nietzsche, Marx, or Freud." Burke has, to be sure, something of the breadth of Aristotle, the prescience of Nietzsche, the politically critical outlook of Marx, and the paradigm-shattering potential of a Freud. (Who, for instance, had already set forth the most solid and perdurable contributions of postmodern philosophy of language thirty years before those that Burke's epigone, Harold Bloom, called, with just a bit of disdain, "the Frenchies"?) Burke's cast of mind was too mercurial, his style too elliptical and collage-like, his disregard for academic boundaries, which Mark and Clarke take due note of, too thoroughgoing for popular placement on that kind of pedestal. He'll endure, but as something of an intellectual guerrilla fighter, I believe, hurling thought grenades from the hills as much as the halls of academe
I'm running out of space, I think. I'll have more to say about this well-wrought overview later.\r\n\r\n In the meantime, "Onward, Outward, and Up" toward more impassioned and illuminating conversation a la Burke!
Comments
Thanks for the invitations to conversation, Ed. And thanks to the editors and David Blakesley for a great first issue.
I'd like to respond to Appel's most recent post about Burke's views on the human and the future. Since I focus more on his 1920s and 30s writings, I see the conditions of emergence for his views on the "symbol using animal" as dire, leading to a profound pessimism. But it is exactly pessimism, crisis and the need for political change that should, according to Burke, incite artists and critics to shout back, to issue resolute counter-statements.
It's almost eerie how similar those days of crisis and tumult are to these--I'm thinking here of letters written by Burke that worry about "the bomb" and "the end of everything"--and Burke's call for critics and artists to find other ways of looking and responding to crisis and seeking change therefore seems all the more resonant.
While I wouldn't claim that "pessimism as incitement to change" is the dominant mode in Burke's work, it's certainly an element in his early writings that catches my attention (terministically? psychotically?) from a pre-election vantage point.