Wess Essay
Submitted by Ed Appel on Tue, 2005-08-02 09:08
I want to comment in this post on the first part of Wess's essay, Representative Anecdotes in General, and then get around later to his application in the second half, where he offers Yamashita's novel as an appropriately representative anecdote for Burkean ecocriticism.
Wess is surely right on when he labels dramatism a realism. Walter Fisher and some others published an article in CSSJ decades ago advancing this theme. Bernard Brock modifies that characterization appropriately in his introduction to KENNETH BURKE AND CONTEMPORARY EUROPEAN THOUGHT, where he calls Burke a critical realist. Critical realism adds action, judgment, and interpretation on the part of the symbol-user to the mix, so as to distinguish it from representative realism (ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 7, pp. 77-83). I especially like Wess's reference to the real effects symbols impose on the sheer brute materials of the world as it is (GM), the recalcitrant (P&C) reality Burke emphasizes. I found most congenial, also, Wess's use of the term link[s] to underscore the relationship between the synecdochic part by which language refers to the whole that is beyond the capacity of symbols to represent with any thoroughness. I would interpret the notion of link by way of adjectives like referential and ostensive as fitting descriptives of Burke's philosophy of language (not interlocks with). Languarge directs the attention (Terministic Screens, LASA) of persons, often toward specific phenomena, as well as away from other parts of reality.
I personally prefer to call Burke an interventionist realist, after the distinction Ian Hacking makes in his book REPRESENTING AND INTEVENING. Language intervenes in the real world (take note of artifacts and the morally purposive action that produces them), and, reciprocally, the real world intervenes in language, forcing the symbol-user, often so tardily and reluctantly (PERMANENCE is so darn hard to CHANGE sometimes, if not most times), to modify her or his terminology. Burke's extreme example of the human bird who jumps off a cliff in P&C, then matures his descriptives of himself after the fact, comes to mind.
So Burke is not a constructivist in any pristine definition of the term, nor thoroughly Saussurean, like Derrida, with his dictum that there is nothing beyond the text, or Jameson, whose Prison House of Language metaphor Wess appropriately contrasts with Burke's position. Consistent with Wess's take in this essay, we could, I believe, denominate Burke as proto-postmodern in his early period, or quasi-postmodern, taking into account his career as a whole. Burke serves nicely as a bridge between traditional views of language and the Gadamer types, with, I would suggest, more of a pronounced tilt toward the postmodern than the traditional, much more.
(Parenthetically, I would assert that Burke's philosophy is not only realistic. It is also pragmatic, idealistic, materialistic, and mystical. It is, in my view, a mata-system that encomasses all the philosophic schools Burke teats of in the GRAMMAR.)
To be continued.
Comments
All that having been said about Burke's quite untraditional conception of language and Wess's careful and estimable positioning of Burke's philosophy in the first section of this essay, I still get a little antsy when Burke uses language---like representative anything---that opens him up to charges of being a Cartesian representationalist. That's exactly the claim John Stewart and Karen Williams made in a paper presented at NCA in Atlanta in 1991, later published as a chapter in Stewart's book, ARTICULATE CONTACT (SUNY, Albany). Stewart and Williams were tendentiously selective about what they put into and left out of their Burkean bibliography. The LASA essay What Are the Signs of What was, for instance, nowhere to be found, as I recall. That treatise most surely undermines a case made for Burke as any kind of positivist, empiricist, or scientist. One does not have to lean just on Burke's late material, however, to subvert Stewart and Williams' interpretation.
Even Burke's notions about a positive level of language (GM, pp. 183-184) could be misconstrued by the inattentive. One could easily skim over Burke's part-deconstruction of the concept right near the end of the passage in question in which he propounds the idea: A skeptic might offer reasons to believe that such science is less positive than its apologists take it to be. Particularly one might ask himself [sic] whether the terms for RELATIONSHIPS among things are as positive as the names for the things themselves. But we need not attempt to decide that question here; we need only note that there is a basic terminology of perception grounded on sensation, memory, and imagination (GM, p. 14).
Necessary qualifications being duly made, Burke's offerings about positive terminologies, as well as his inclusion of metonymy among his Four Master Tropes as vehicles for helping us discern the truth about something, should remain readily at hand in our toolbox.
And we note that Burke's theory of the representative anecdote has been put to good interpretive use by exegetes like Barry Brummett, who almost single-handedly spawned a whole subgenre of Burkean criticism. Bryan Crable has even suggested that the representative anecdote forms the very basis of dramatism itself (QJS, August, 2000).
Anyway, as long as we're careful to separate representational realism from the critical realism or interventionist realism that seems to distinguish Burke's take on language, our employment of Burke's representative anecdote as interpretive and critical tool holds great promise. In the LASA chapter, when read side-by-side with the section in P&C on Interrelation of Analogy, Metaphor, Abstraction, Classification, Interest, Expectancy, and Intention, (pp. 103-107), Burke suggests that words are too airy, ethereal, and diaphanous---abstract, that is---to represent any particular thing in the real world, that, indeed, we should reverse the equation (persective by incongruity?) and view the thing as representing the word, rather than vice versa.
We might summarize the relationship this way, using the terminology of P&C:
In the service of a common interest, intention, expectancy, purpose, or value that functions as a unifying, metaphorical, teleological perspective, or by way of analogy between disparate beings, entities, or events (analogy, not synonymy), symbols generate the perception of similar strains in dissimilar events, leading to the classification of those events together in a common, idealized, essentialized abstraction.
On to Wess's use of Yamashita's novel as representative anecdote for Burkean ecocriticism.
To be continued.