and so i woke this evening wondering about burke in reverse.

in his discussion of "things" (cf his discussion of "positivist" names / acts of positivist naming in Rhetoric), much like heidegger, (though heidegger may take the "nature" of a thing further), burke finds in many things both a positivist reading and a "transcendent" reading. even so, he writes:

in trying to figure how the theme of the upcoming burke conference at villanova plays out--the theme of transcendence as burke wielded the de-termination (stole that from burke's rhetoric)--i am thinking that burke's is a wordplay that appropriates the evocative in order to show that, really, nothing could be more natural. it would appear that transcendence in this burkean application / appropriation is as ubiquitous/ universal as rhetoric or persuasion or identification. to be alive is to be "rhetorically" adapted to the life forces and discourses everywhere around and within.