Kenneth Burke

Rhetoric and Ideology

Stephen Bygrave

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781134976188
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric and Ideology is a lucid and accessible introduction to a major twentieth-century thinker those ideas have influenced fields as diverse as literary theory, philosophy, linguistics, politics and anthropology. Stephen Bygrave explores the content of Burke's vast output of work, focusing especially on his preoccupation with the relation between language, ideology and action.
By considering Burke as a reader and writer of narratives and systems, Bygrave examines the inadequacies of earlier readings of Burke and unfolds his thought within current debates in Anglo-American cultural theory. This is an excellent re-evaluation of Burke's thought and valuble introduction to the impressive range of his ideas.

1

Equipment for living

When he was 6 or 7 years old Kenneth Burke was kept off school. It was feared that he had become learning-disabled after falling from a second-storey window. One day his mother bought him a dictionary: ‘she gave me the “Good Book”’, Burke has said, ‘but with no instructions on how to figure out what was inside it.’ Curse and blessing are, as he was to show later, intimately related: ‘Lots of kids who learn to read the easy way don't get much out of it, but I had to develop a theory of language!’¹ This is what Burke would call a ‘representative anecdote’ (GM 59–61). The anecdote might recall T.S.Eliot's essay on Blake, describing Blake as having to make up a system out of whatever he had to hand, like Robinson Crusoe, because he was deprived of what Dante was privileged with: the amniotic ‘tradition’ of medieval Catholicism (Eliot 1934). Such reactionary claims of deprivation would of course miss the point. ‘To contemplate our subject’, says Burke, ‘we must have a terministic equipment that lends itself to such contemplation’ (GM 319). This is like the cry of Blake's Los: ‘I must create a System or be enslav'd by another Man's.’ (The analogy of Burke's difficulty or idiosyncracy might be pushed further: where Blake was working with the censorship and repression of the printed word imposed by the ‘gagging acts’ of the 1790s Burke was publishing in the era of McCarthy's House Un-American Activities Committee.) Burke's anecdote functions as a folksy deflection of the charge of megalomania made against a Blake or a Harold Bloom. It also suggests the tendency going all through Burke's corpus to consider phenomena always in terms of the system they serve or recommend: this is what Burke calls ‘motive’.

The term motive connotes activity in a way that, say, context does not. We can follow such connotations by looking at three exhibits, two of them from early on in his Grammar of Motives (1945). In a section there headed ‘Contextual definition’ Burke cites Spinoza, who

explicitly held that all definition is ‘negation’, which is another way of saying that to define a thing in terms of its context, we must define it in terms of what it is not. And with scholastic succinctness, he formulated the paradox of contextual definition in four words: ‘all determination is negation; omnis determinatio est negatio.’ Since determined things are ‘positive’, we might point up the paradox as harshly as possible by translating it, ‘Every positive is negative’.

(GM 25)

Such a harsh translation—every yes a no—is of course regularly performed by Freud; the passage is also a small instance of a large claim, for knowledge being dialectical.

As is suggested by the anecdote with which we began, Burke's love of paradox is not opportunistic but is itself motivated by a thoroughgoing antinomianism. Thus in our second exhibit, the preface to his first published book (1931), Burke explains why he entitled it Counter-Statement:

because—as regards its basic concerns and tenets—each principle it advocates is matched by an opposite principle flourishing and triumphant today. Heresies and orthodoxies will always be changing places, but whatever the minority view happens to be at any given time, one must consider it as ‘counter’. Hence the title—which will not, we hope, suggest either an eagerness for the fray or a sense of defeat.

(CS vii)

This frankly states the paradox of ‘radicalism’ or of the oppositional stance as attitude rather than stance; but by stressing the stating rather than the countering we could see the book as counter-statement; that is, as setting itself against the constatives of received meaning and preparing rather for the theory of language to have been worked out in the so-far-incomplete trilogy On Human Relations in the fifties. Thus Counter-Statement, still much preoccupied with the ‘art-for-art's-sake’ claims of the 1890s,

should serve to elucidate a point of view. This point of view is somewhat apologetic, negativistic, and even antinomian, as regards everything but art. It is not antinomian as regards art because of a feeling that art is naturally antinomian.

(CS viii)

Later we are offered the slogan, ‘When in Rome, do as the Greeks’ (CS 119): what saves this from posturing is Burke's conviction that there is something systematic always there to be understood, or to be imposed. His ‘Program’ extrapolates an aesthetic attitude (essays on Flaubert, Pater and Gourmont and on Mann and Gide) to a political attitude—‘attitude’ being for Burke that which motivates form. Scornful of ‘historical relativism’ Burke explains ‘art for art's sake’ not as an escape from utilitarianism but as its necessary corollary: art is both corrective and subversive; it is indeed corrective by its subversiveness.

We shall return to the way that Burke's writings continue to function as an aesthetic, and continue too to demonstrate a hermeneutic which has powerful applications to literary texts but our third exhibit, which is again from early in A Grammar of Motives, raises a recurrent methodological problem. Contexts define, we have been told, and such definition is always negation. Granting this might mean granting the implication that the work of interpretation is always at an end when this negation has been revealed. In the parodic ‘Prologue in heaven’ which concludes The Rhetoric of Religion (1961) the Lord is given as a tic of speech the demurral ‘It's not as simple as that’. To do justice to any rhetorical situation involves identifying the competing interests in play—involves identifying them in both senses, of describing them and of showing how they co-operate. To understand all is to forgive all. Describing this procedure in the abstract should have shown what the problem with it is. The Grammar is about the ‘ratios’ of such interests. It begins in a lengthy discussion of ‘substance’, that on which acts ‘stand’. Burke shows how to appeal to ‘substance’ (or ‘principles’ or ‘first causes’) is to gesture towards something that cannot be defined: in poetic terms such appeals might be relished as ambiguity, but in most other terms they look like incoherence. Burke wants to cover both cases with the term ‘paradox of substance’. He ends a brief section headed ‘The rhetoric of substance’ with another ‘representative anecdote’:

a list of citizens’ signatures had been collected for a petition asking that a certain politician's name be placed on the ballot. In court it was shown that some of these signatures were genuine, but that a great many others were false. Thereupon the judge invalidated the lot on the grounds that, the whole list being a mixture of the false and the genuine, it was ‘saturated’ with fraud. He here ruled in effect that the list was substantially or essentially fraudulent. The judgement was reversed by a higher court which ruled that, since the required number of genuine signatures had been obtained, the false signatures should be simply ignored. That is, the genuine signatures should be considered in themselves, not contextually.

(GM 53)

The problem here is what this anecdote represents. The two legal judgements show that ‘substance’ (‘grounds’, ‘principle’) can justify contextual and non-contextual versions of interpretation. But which court is in the right? Burke offers us no hint, and the anecdote serves only to repeat the seeming incoherence of the judgements and thus of the criteria (the ‘substance’) appealed to in making them. ‘Substance’, which is that which is held to underlie and to ground the relativism of context, is itself relative to context. We are back to regretting the incoherence, or to relishing the ambiguity. To ask what the anecdote is would be the same as asking what it does. What difference does it make? The only difference would be in the superiority of the interpreter to either of the competing parties, each of whom would presumably feel that they had got the right result when the judgement favoured them. In other words, the anecdote seems to serve only to reinscribe the ‘paradox of substance’ and, by extension, to show that propositions and their negations are in effect the same thing. That effect seems wholly independent of, and prior to, what the interpretation can do. The end of the heavyweight hermeneutics would be a lightweight pragmatism, a prayer: ‘help me to accept—and even celebrate—those things which I cannot change.’ It may be that the end of interpretation is always in something banal or tautologous like this. It may be that it is only contingent variations of context, the way the parties line up differently for any interpretative act, that saves any but the simplest of such acts from this banality or tautology. But this is not what Burke would claim. He would claim instead that the act of interpretation is not relative. These however would not be his terms, In his own universalizing vocabulary his claim would be that it is in the adaptations to contingent circumstances by an invariant or essential principle—the human body itself, man as ‘the symbol-using animal’—that the interpretative work needs to be done. He would deny a determining role to history, which is too weakly relativist an interpreter. Here my argument is with Burke rather than his interpreters, an argument that will run through this book; but, having taken opportunistically some exhibits from the most ‘systematic’ of his works—a work which for Lentricchia ‘is full-blown structuralism’ avant la lettre (Lentricchia 1983:67)—I need to contextualize these exhibits. Burke entitles his 1966 collection of essays Language as Symbolic Action, a title which summarizes the big system he will call ‘Dramatism’.

The introduction to A Grammar of Motives (1945) offers Burke's ‘pentad’. This is the set of ‘five key terms of dramatism’—act, scene, agent, agency, purpose—which correspond respectively to the what, the where and when, the who, the how and the why of all utterances. Utterances are therefore conceived of as ‘acts’, and most are to be accounted for by a ‘ratio’ of two of these terms. They are ‘acts’ in a special sense. In allowing that his five terms are like Kantian categories, Burke also wants to make a distinction: ‘Instead of calling them the necessary “forms of experience” …we should call them the necessary “forms of talk about experience”’, the goal of which is ‘to temper the absurd ambitions that have their source in faulty terminologies’ (GM 317). The last part of this remark is an example of the ‘neo-liberal ideal’ of ‘encouraging tolerance by speculation’ (GM 442) but it is the careful distinction of ‘experience’ from ‘talk about experience’ that is relevant here. To paraphrase this as ‘language’ versus ‘meta-language’ would be to lose this distinction; in Burke's more usual terms the distinction is between ‘action’ and ‘symbolic action’. William C.Dowling has a nice example:

to employ Burke's own stress-shifting technique, the paradoxical fact is that a text is both a symbolic act and a symbolic act: that is, it is a genuine act in that it tries to do something to the world, and yet it is ‘merely’ symbolic in the sense that it leaves the world untouched…. If, having gotten into an argument in a bar in the rough part of town, I enforce my contempt for someone else's point by making an obscene gesture…my act remains ‘merely’ symbolic in that it stands in harmlessly for having punched my adversary in the nose. And yet my gesture is a genuine act nonetheless, or there would be no danger, as there palpably is, of getting my own nose punched in return.

(Dowling 1984:122)

Famously—or as famous as Burke gets—‘the symbolic act is the dancing of an attitude’ (PLF 9), and an ‘attitude’ is an ‘incipient act’ (RM 24, 42). Fundamentally for Burke an act is voluntary, and is thus distinguished from a reflex or an event as well as from all those natural phenomena Burke calls ‘(nonsymbolic) motion’—it is these last which insurance companies categorize as ‘acts of God’. Here is Burke on that fundamental:

the basic unit of action is the human body in purposive motion. We have here a kind of ‘lowest common denominator’ of action, a minimal requirement that should appear in every act, however many more and greater are the attributes of a complex act.

(GM 61)

This will later be codified as a universal dualism: non-symbolic motion versus symbolic action. Here it leads by analogy to the contention that all language, whether as speech-act or as written text, is transitive, instrumental. Language is always, or always potentially, dialogue. Hence Burke returns again and again to drama as a form, most crucially in the long title-essay of The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941). We can see the way the analogy works. The body moves to and from something, performs some action which, in however small a way, changes the world. The problem of the analogy is evident however. The gleeful reduction to a ‘lowest common denominator’ of the body itself leaves out of account the necessity within symbolic actions for a receiver as well as transmitter of symbols: in short for a system, society or economy which would guarantee their efficacy and could decode them. (We might want to argue that even bodily ‘acts’ require as a minimum some material upon which to work.) In other words, Burke's ambitions for a form of analysis which would not be merely retrospective and pragmatic betrays him into the kind of account of origins (or ‘lowest common denominators’) found within the systems whose ‘grounds’ he deconstructs in the same book. In allowing only a binary distinction of ‘experience’ and ‘talk about experience’ Burke is implicitly led towards a third term, a meta-linguistic rider that would go, ‘all utterances are rhetorical [except this one]’. If this sounds like the kind of hostile paradox with which deconstruction was taxed in dozens of journal articles in the 1970s it is as well to be reminded that Burke's founding gesture is a gesture, an act. Jameson cites the proclamation in Goethe's Faust, ‘Im Anfang war die Tat’, ‘in the beginning was the deed’: ‘this place of emergence is that of praxis or, in other words, of a unity in which subject and object, thing and language, context and projected action are still at one in the wholeness of a unique gesture’ (Jameson 1978:513). Jameson's idealist language here is not sure if it is yearning for a prelapsarian ‘origin’ or for the utopia he insists that Marxism must posit, which is at least in keeping with the dichotomy of system and analysis, of prescription and description, which I have just sketched in Burke. He wants his rhetoric to be both.

Burke's insistence on the intentionality of rhetoric—it is the cause in a cause-and-effect model—and thereby on its function as persuasion is of course in line with definitions of rhetoric from the earliest manuals onwards. In his Rhetoric of Motives (1950) Burke adds to the traditional sense of rhetoric as persuasion the sense that it is ‘inducement to action’ (RM 50). Near the beginning of that book Burke can describe a quotation from Milton as rhetorical because ‘It occurs in a work with a definite audience in mind, and for a definite purpose. It was literature for use. Today, it would be called “propaganda”’ (RM 4). The word ‘propaganda’ of course bears peculiar scars from the debates of the thirties and forties; and in this instance Burke is describing a polemically discursive text (Milton's Areopagitica), but similar claims are made about poems in the thirties. I am thinking of those moments in ‘The philosophy of literary form’ when, in appearing to seek rapprochement with the New Critics, Burke actually measures his distance from them. For instance, he says there that discussions of ‘form’ and ‘content’ can be subsumed under a critical pragmatism which ‘assumes that a poem's structure is to be described most accurately by thinking always of the poem's function’ (PLF 89). What's left implicit in such an assumption is that ‘function’ needs to be distinguished from both a formalist and a historicist account of it (CS 77–81; RM 28). This implication would lead us to read the very start of that essay differently: ‘Critical and imaginative works are answers to questions posed by the situation in which they arose. They are not merely answers, they are strategic answers, stylized answers’ (PLF 1). ‘Strategies’ there are clearly determined by context rather than being metaphysical acts. Questions posed by the situation in which the poem arose are ‘outside’ the poem but arise within it, and are opposed to the celebratory tautologies implied by a view of the poem as verbal icon or as well-wrought urn. Later this can become an explicitly historicizing argument. Bourgeois readings could set aside the ‘propagandistc ingredient’ of historical texts. With the war however it becomes evident that even the work of artists who would invoke for themselves a doctrine of art-for-art's-sake becomes consciously political. The observation leads to this programme:

One can readily become so involved in such controversies on their own terms, that one neglects to place them in terms of their underlying grammatical principles. What is needed is not that we place ourselves ‘above’ the controversies. Rather, we should place ourselves within them, by an understanding of their essential grammar.

(GM 268)

Calling for a ‘grammatical’ placing of contingent arguments is not, I think, to call for a universalizing rhetor...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• KENNETH BURKE
• CRITICS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor's foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1   Equipment for living
• 2   A god coming down to earth
• 3   The spiritual counterpart of roadways
• 4   This alchemic centre
• Conclusion: strategies
• Notes
• References
• Index