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
I now turn to the second and climactic section of Wess's essay on Yamashita's novel as an appropriate representative anecdote for ecocriticism in general, and Burkean ecocriticism in particular.
First off, I like Wess's acknowledgment that representative anecdotes for anything are eminently negotiable, that no one exemplar will necessarily stand out from all other candidates as the perfect nominee. I've felt for some time that an excellent representative anecdote for drama---maybe even an ultimate anecdote, if we think of perfection in the sense of Greek philosophy (immanentized) rather than Christian philosophy (transcendentalized)---would be the honor killing in the Muslim Middle East that Nicholas Christoph, for one, has written about recently in the NEW YORK TIMES. So-called honor killings, apparently still very much in vogue in parts of that culture, involve the murder of female rape victims by a brother or some other male relative. Such a sacrificial hit supposedly redeems the family's good name, expiates the guilt incurred by that moral outrage. It makes for such a pristine example of drama, a ritual strategy of sacrifice to redeem sin and guilt, because it is so thoroughly drained of any pragmatic or legal justification whatsoever. It makes no sense at all. The victim is completely innocent. The guilty party goes scott free. The violated family member serves as arbitrary substitute for the criminal aggressor via a most perverted, indeed inverted, logic.
How this ritual might beat child sacrifice as representative anecdote for drama requires futher explanation I don't want to pursue just now.
Anyway, Wess argues for the probable superiority of Yamashita's scenario to Burke's Helhaven essays as a representative anecdote for ecocriticism. It expresses four themes highlighted in Burke Wess says make it so exemplary: technology, apocalypse, creativity, and counter-nature. Wess makes a good case, I believe, and, in the process, explicates these themes with great subtlety and clarity. I would argue that apocalypse in the Yamashita sense is present in Burkie's parable, but only implicitly. Burke foregrounds the haven on the moon, not the hell that presumably exists on earth for the great majority of less-well-healed unfortunates that can't escape to the life of artificial bliss Burke describes. Yamashita appears to focus on the catastrophe the unintended consquences of compulsive technology have produced. Her narrative faces that eventuality head on.
In addition, the metaphorical value of the Matacao plastic, a subterranean substance---generated by the myriad junkyards humankind's throwaway industrialism and cult of new needs has fostered---epitomizes in visual terms the eco in ecology, the innerconnectiveness of all things, artifactual and natural. It ostensibly snakes around the whole wide world, surfacing for further human exploitation, ironically, in the Amazonian rainforest. And its commercial use serves to underscore further the compulsive nature of man and woman's terminological fit: our human tendency to compound our technological depradations via new, resourceful, and naively optimistic technological cures.
Trained incapacity anyone?
I hope to get back to some further themes in Wess's paradigmatic essay later.');
'Wess's Essay', 'In my previous post, I made reference to a column by Nicholas Kristof, not Christoph. And I meant interconnectiveness, not whatever wayward spelling I may have conjured up on the spur of the moment.
There are lots of other neat touches in Wess's superb essay. His follow up on the distinction Burke makes between Christian futurism and scientific futurism, to the benefit of the Christian concept, is so apropos and so Burkean. As Burke says in Why Satire, and Wess reproduces in Note 4, Even now, the kingdom of Helhaven is within you. Yes, that future is already here for me, in miniature, in my bottled water in the cellar way, in my house high on a hill above the flood plain of the Conestoga River, in the distance I've put between myself and Tornado Alley and the Hurricane Charleys of the U.'S. Amerrican Southeast, in the conspicuous absence from my neighborhood of polluting refineries, factory farms, and generating plants. Whatever analogue to Burke's Helhaven actually eventualizes down the line, it will climax an incremental development, not mark a sudden, chasmic leap across some deep divide. It's very much present in our personal lives, for those of us with, or above, a middle-class lifestyle. In addition, we are all complicit in its production and fruition, as we merrily drive our cars, overconsume so-called goods we don't really need, and discard our refuse we don't know where to whatever long-term detriment to the interconnected state of things.