"We Write for the Workers"
Submitted by Ed Appel on Tue, 2005-10-04 13:43
I want to take up now John Logie's article, "'We Write for the Workers': Authorship and Communism in Kenneth Burke and Robert Wright." This essay, like the other two in this spring 2005 issue of the KBJournal, is a worthy treatment of an important theme in Burke studies, deserving of attention and comment. I'll get to some of its salient features as a critique in later posts. I want, first of all, to play devil's advocate for those who censured Burke for his Marxoid "sins" at the 1935 American Writers Congress in New York City. Burke's (in)famous speech at that conference plays an important role in Logie's treatise, as well as in the lore and mythology of Burke's life and ideological development.
Burke's speech to that gathering of largely recognized and established authors and left-leaning intellectuals was entitled "Revolutionary Symbolism in America." In it, Burke proposed, as you'll recall, that the key term in Marxist propaganda in the U.S. be changed from "the workers" to "the people." Following Burke's address, Allen Porter "argue[d] that Burke's proposed substitution of 'people' for 'worker' has 'historically . . . been the ruse of the exploiting class to confuse the issue.'" More pointedly, Friedrich Wolf complained that "'substitution of the symbol "people" confuses the interests of this fundamental and all-important class and renders a picture of society that is not merely un-Marxian but one which history has provern to be necessary for the continuation of power of the exploiting class.'"
Porter and Wolf had, it seems to me, something of a point. The implied dialectic of the symbol "the workers," in opposition, of course, to capitalistic owners and management, gets blurred and fuzzed up with substitution of the term "the people," an "inclusive" terminology as Logie makes clear---this at a time when the working class was still battling for the right to organize, let alone reap the monetary benefits that later became standard in the labor contracts of the '50's and beyond.
Plumping for the term "the people" reminds me of Rush Limbaugh's recurrent charge in our day that "Liberals and Democrats want to divide us," talking all the time about Blacks against Whites, poor against rich. "We're all Americans," Limbaugh assures us. Yes, and when we think of ourselves as all in one homogenized category of that kind, the corporate interests and the wealthy in general can make off with everything in the store. The ruling class does so via the Republicans' tax cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy, and the postponed payment for the war in Iraq, the bill for which won't come due for them or us, but rather for a later generation, realities this administration hides behind its obfuscating rhetoric.
The same kind of generalized obfuscation infuses Bush's recurrent, all-embracing, globally-explanatory declaration, "WE are at war." As James Fallows pointed out on C-Span a week ago, "WE" are not all at war. Our troops are at war. Their families and loved ones are at war. But the rest of us aren't being called on to sacrifice ANYTHING, especially the well-to-do, who are profiting in spades from the policies of the Bushies.
Burke took note of this same kind of rhetorical sleight-of-hand in his reproof of the wealthy profiteer who says, "We're at war, you know," lumping himself or herself in with the soldiers dying at the front. "Implied identification": The "we" will do it every time, sometimes to a good end, other times not.
Burke, of course, seems to be working toward what in his 1935 speech? "The purification of war," n'est pas? It's a noble goal, but a distinction has to be made between justified self-assertion where injustic reigns, and a program of non-confrontation implicit in a one-term-fits-all rhetorical approach that "euphemistically" (see ATH) glosses over unacceptable realities.
What say you, devotees of a once-Marxist literary critic, philosopher, rhetorician, and placard-carrier?
Ed
Comments
My thanks to professor Blakesley for bringing professor Logie’s article to my attention, with its complex historical framing of the imbricated scenes (aesthetic and political) we share with Burke. Even now, the symbolic actor must cow to the resentment of the chorus. This camp of resentment holds there is no “firstness,” know “originary scene,” in Eric Gans sense. To be sure, the first can only be the first through being imitated/repeated, then ontologically substantised, by what Burke calls a “temporizing of essence” - where narrative succession expresses an (atemporal) logical priority. Burke’s political and theoretical heirs fail to prevent the foreclosure of ethical “autonomy,” which Burke’s redefinition was careful to guard against. I wonder whether the later Burke, as he turned away from centralizing socialist gestures, placed less emphasis upon social stability – perhaps indorsing individual institutional critique in times of stability as well as crisis?
I argue that Burke’s definition of autonomy and the conditions for the possibility of aesthetic composition/critique is a matter of ontological firstness that is imitated, when what Adam Katz calls *iconic intelligences* emit signs which redefine the larger social scene. ‘“Identification”’ Burke writes, “is a word for the autonomous activity’s place in this wider context, a place with which the agent may be unconcerned.”
The means of identification is the individual’s symbolic property of firstness, which acts to provoke what René Girard calls mimetic desire. The symbolic actor’s successful appeal for identification has an aura of firstness, of ontological plenitude, a mystery born of hierarchy, “what Burke refers to as “cultural glorification“: “Let one encompass as many desirable features of our cultural heritage as possible, and let him make sure that his political alignment features prominently among them.” (“Revolutionary Symbolism in America”)
Burke’s scene of firstness is more neo-classical than classical: his theory of aesthetic form thematises the scene, like Hamlet’s mouse trap or play within the play. By contrast, the romantic/modern defines value on a personal imaginary scene. The idea of iconic intelligence may appear romantic, but incarnate in Burke, its neo-classical ethical grounding in the social center maintained its attachment to aesthetic universalism.
Marxism is a displaced theology, having its roots in Judeo-Christian victimary rhetoric. Its romantic stance of agonistic oppositionality requires an historical subject, but it compromises this subjectivity -- the victimized working class -- betrayed by recruiting an external voice in the literary bourgeois vanguard. When asked to provide support for the workers, simultaneously through ethical, aesthetic and political representations, the (exceptional) composer (irregardless of class), marked by the asymmetry of firstness, must either shoot there (aesthetic) selves in the (political) foot as sacrificial offering, or vice versa. For if the means to political, that is, synecdochic, identification are to be sought in what Girard understood as mimetic desire/glorification, as Burke similarly argued, aesthetic representation will seek strategic grounds (conscious or unconscious) for an appeal to motives as universal (though not necessarily as ethically inclusive) as possible. But what ever the model for identification, “the worker” or “the people,” the artist can never represent the victimized class as political synecdoche without being sacrificed, if not by social resentment, which crystallizes around the always inadequately representative figure of identification/imitation, then by an always already castrated/castrating envious super ego.,
I suggest that it is the temporary break in reciprocity to be found in the idea of generative firstness that is the scandal for theory today, forcing as it does an ethical asymmetry – that between model and disciple. Burke’s symbolic actor is a mimetic model – one open to positive or negative imitation. Even at the minimally contrastive/homeopathic level, his performance may produce a temporary lag in reciprocity, inciting rivalry, or even face the ultimate charge of hubris.
Rene Harrison