<html><head></head><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:13px"><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3109"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3110">Burkophiles,<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3111"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3109"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3112"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3113"> Ann
George’s edifying address at the 10<sup id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3114">th</sup> Triennial was, in particular,
an exegetical examination of <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3115">Permanencew
and Change</i>, interlaced with narrative sections on her participation in the
worldwide “Women’s March” that took place the day after Donald Trump’s
inaugural, in her case in Austin. George thus probed theory and application of
theory, with its attendant problems of “bureaucratization,” one might say. How
does a responsible member of a society in manifestly dire straits take seriously
Burke’s “Art of Living,” or “poetic orientation,” and then effectively protest
against a Trumpian take-over of U.S. and world leadership? George “whooped” it
up like the rest of them on the bus ride to the city. There she turned into the
“zestfully antagonis[tic] . . . counterproductive . . . rhetor Burke complained about so bitterly.” <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3116"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3112"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3117"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3118"> (This
is the general quandary Greg Desilet and I confronted in “Choosing a Rhetoric
of the Enemy: Kenneth Burke’s Comic Frame, Warrantable Outrage, and the Problem
of Scapegoating,” <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3119">RSQ,</i> 2011. Herb
Simons was the first to challenge Burke on the question, at the Temple
Conference in 1984. Burke’s reply: “This guy is on to me!”)<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3120"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3117"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3121"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3122"> You
will not find, I don’t believe, a better explanation of what Burke meant by the
“poetic concept” as informing an effective “art of living” than George offers
in her speech. Hers is an exceptionally rich and eloquent treatment. Her probe
of Burke’s complementary concept of “style” helps especially to unpack the
poetic as “propitiation.” The poetic serves well in <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3123">P&C</i> as preparatory offering for Burke’s intro to “comedy” as
preferred dramatic frame two years later.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3124"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3121"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3125"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3126"> (I’m
hoping both George’s and Jim Klumpp’s excellent keynotes get published in a
future edition of the <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3127">KBJ</i>. They
deserve to be part of our patrimony of Burke scholarship.)<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3128"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3125"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3129"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3130"> Here,
I read George’s take on Burkean “agency” in relation to Elizabeth Weiser’s in
“Technological Devolution, Social Innovation: Attitudes Toward Industry,” in
the current <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3131">KBJ</i>. Weiser’s article takes
up the rhetoric of museums. She first compares industrial museums in two towns
hit hard by globalization, Newark, Ohio, and Norrkoping, Sweden. A subsequent look at America’s National Museum
serves as additional commentary on the other two. What stands out, Weiser
relates, is the stark dramatic disparity between the two presentations, first,
Newark, with a focus on the technology itself as tragic-frame agent that’s
worked its will on the community in ways that seemingly can’t be altered, then,
Noorkoping’s comic-frame invitation to dialogue and exposition of a
trial-and-error tinkering, from a “City
of Tomorrow” theme (1960s), to “a Friendly Town” (1980s) and “The Bombed Out
City” of the 1990s, to, finally, “The City of Knowledge and Culture” of the 21<sup id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3132">st</sup>
century. Noorkoping sees itself, it seems, as a community in composition, to
borrow a Burkean image, a “rough draft” that invites constant editing and
revision.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3133"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3129"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3134"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3135"> The
National Museum underscores the Noorkoping way of constantly “muddling
through,” via an ongoing conversation in which everybody is invited to
participate.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3136"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3134"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3137"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3138"> Weiser’s
reading of the times is a hopeful one, a qualified optimism of the kind I, too,
found and find in <i id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3139">P&C</i>. George
seems a trifle more ambivalent on the matter. She notes, and laments, her
“outrage at someone else’s outrage,” yet acknowledges “the complexities of this
[namely Burke’s] position.” <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3140"></o:p></span></div><div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3137"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3141"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3142">George concludes her
address in the way Weiser describes, approvingly, as the Noorkoping way, with
an invitation to dialogue: “How do we enact ‘open conflict’ [George is quoting
Burke here] via ‘mutual ingratiation’; what might that look like?” Especially
when Burke himself, in confession in “Ausculation, Creation, and Revision”
acknowledged, “’Then again, I have wanted to be nothing more than a bullet, or
a tiger’s claw, sent suddenly against the pink flesh . . . [of some] liar . . .
.’”<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3143"></o:p></span></div><div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3141"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3144"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3145">Didn’t Burke once say
his writing often started out in a fury that would turn to equanimity as his
thoughts progressed?<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3146"></o:p></span></div><div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3144"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3147"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3148">Next: What George and
Weiser teach us about Burkean agency in constructive service to the task ahead;
what Burke’s assessment seems to be on the efficacy of his comedic
prescriptions for action, early and late career; and whether such human agency
is, or is not, likely to save us, whatever Burke’s view.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3149"></o:p></span></div><div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3147"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3150"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3151">Oh yes, forgot: Ann
would put on her white knitted cap during her speech each time she turned in
her talk to the raucous, in-your-face protest in Austin. She apparently wore it
that day. It had the shape of two cat’s ears on each side.<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3152"></o:p></span></div><div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3150"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div><div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3150"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif""><br></span></div>
<div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3153"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3154">Ed<o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3155"></o:p></span></div>
<div style="text-indent:.5in" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3156"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3157"> <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3158"></o:p></span></div>
<div id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3159"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3160"> <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3161"></o:p></span></div>
<div dir="ltr" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3162"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;font-family:"Times New Roman","serif"" id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3163"> <o:p id="yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500593697523_3164"></o:p></span></div><div class="qtdSeparateBR"><br><br></div><div class="yahoo_quoted" style="display: block;"> <div style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 13px;"> <div style="font-family: HelveticaNeue, Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif; font-size: 16px;"> <div dir="ltr"><font size="2" face="Arial"> On Thursday, July 20, 2017 5:49 AM, Edward C Appel <edwardcappel@frontier.com> wrote:<br></font></div> <br><br> <div class="y_msg_container"><div id="yiv1157994729"><div><div style="color:#000;background-color:#fff;font-family:Helvetica Neue, Helvetica, Arial, Lucida Grande, sans-serif;font-size:13px;"><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2633"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2634">Burkophiles,</span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2633"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2636"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2637"> My
first contact with Burke in print was an independent study course 40 years ago
this summer at Temple U. I don’t remember everything I read, but I do recall
something of a concentration on <i id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2638">P&C</i>.
When I reported to my monitor, Jim Chesebro, at the end of the summer, one
thing I said was, according to Burke, human beings would rather love than hate.
This somewhat positive interpretation seems congruent enough with Burke’s
“Anatomy of Purpose” as ultimately distilled at the end of the communication,
cooperation, participation trajectory:</span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2636"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2640"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2641"> “Here,
in all its nudity, is the Jamesian ‘will to believe.’ It amounts in the end to
the assumption that good, rather than evil, lies at the roots of human purpose.
And as for those who would suggest that this is merely a verbal solution, I
would answer that by no other fiction can men [sic] truly cooperate in historic
processes, hence the fiction itself is universally grounded.</span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2640"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2643"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2644"> “If
one says that activity is merely a neutral quality rather than a good, I should
answer that inactivity is categorically an evil, since it is not possible to
the biologic process. To acquiesce in the methods that preserve humanity is per
se to concede that life is a good, however perversely one may choose to
verbalize such implications. Life, activity, cooperation, communication---they
are identical; and even the Schopenhauerian philosopher inevitably proclaims
their goodness by the zeal with which he [sic] frames his message” (see pp. 235
and 236).</span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2643"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2740"> </span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2646"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2647"> Note
beginnings and endings, Burke has admonished, and here we’re pretty close to an
ending.</span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2646"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2649"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2650"> More
steeped in Burke’s total corpus than I, Chesebro cautioned me: Don’t stint on
the power of the polar dialectics that can erode an overarching incentive to universally
cooperate, a god-term or its motivational equivalent, as it were. There’s
always a tension there between those hierarchal forces.</span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2649"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2652"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2653"> Almost
half a century after he wrote P&C, I was corresponding, and arguing, with
Burke on my Burke-as-coy-theologian theme.
Burke, of course, demurred. Among other things, he warned, “I ‘gin fear
that, in o’er-desecularizing my logological involvements with the negative, you
will ‘prove’ me to be a Manichee, with Mephisto as real as the Logos.” I later said, in the piece that came out of my
back-and-forth with Burke, “Unlike the Manichaean he claims to be, Burke views
dialectic as ultimately culminating in a title-of-titles that unites the oppositions
and the disparate particulars of the polar and ‘positive’ levels of language”
that lie below. </span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2652"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2655"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2656"> A
triumph of the “god-term,” right?---of that communication, cooperation,
participation incentive on the broadest scale. Burke, the quasi-Gnostic
UNIVERSALIST friendly to process theology, I concluded. In Manichaeism, the
powers of good and evil hold equal sway. The battle goes on eternally. That’s
not Burke’s notion, it seemed to me. Do symbolizers get more or less
permanently stuck along that great “Upward Way,” that Yellow Brick Road of love
and comity? Tell me, Joe, it ain’t so! </span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2655"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2658"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2659"> I’m
beginning to wonder. Is it time to distinguish between what Burke may have
taught and enjoined, and what Burke came, in his late stage, at least, to
expect and prophecy? </span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2658"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2661"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2662"> Last
winter, I gave my take on this list on the evolution of Burke’s thought from
“dramatism: to ”logology.” I saw it as a further working out of implications,
not a jarring dislocation. Whether I got
that unfolding of thought right or not, could there not also be another axis of
evolution, that from a qualified optimism to a qualified pessimism? I ask.</span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2661"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2664"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2665"> Two
recent and powerful papers have, for me, brought this Burkean quandary to the
fore. I speak of Ann George’s Friday Keynote at East Stroudsburg, “The ‘Art of
Living’ in An Age of War,” and Elizabeth Weiser’s article in the current KBJ,
“Technological Devolution, Social Innovation: Attitudes Toward Industry.” Directly or indirectly, both documents touch
on the issue, and Burke’s mercurial take on it, that’s front and center in our
time: technology, climate change, and the survival of humankind in something
close to a livable global order.</span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2664"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2667"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2668"> An
op-ed by Michael Mann of Penn State and Susan Joy Hassol of Climate Communication LLC last week
in the <i id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2669">Washington</i> <i id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2670">Post</i> can be a jumping off point for a
discussion. </span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2667"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;"><br></span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2672"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2673"> </span></div><div id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2529">
</div><div dir="ltr" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2675"><span style="font-size:14.0pt;line-height:115%;" id="yiv1157994729yui_3_16_0_ym19_1_1500543805996_2676"> Ed </span></div></div></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>KB mailing list<br><a ymailto="mailto:KB@kbjournal.org" href="mailto:KB@kbjournal.org">KB@kbjournal.org</a><br><a href="http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org" target="_blank">http://kbjournal.org/mailman/listinfo/kb_kbjournal.org</a><br><br><br></div> </div> </div> </div></div></body></html>