ACJ Special: Brock

Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2001

Andy King's "Disciplining Burke": A Perspective by Incongruity
Bernard L. Brock
Wayne State University

Andy's "Disciplining Burke" is quintessential Andy King! His statement is poetic, creative, and very strategic. I'm afraid that Andy is one of the last of the great orators. I wish this dialogue could have been held as originally planned, as a program at the combined meeting of the Southern and Central States Communication Associations. Then I could have heard Andy present his argument orally, but I'm also glad I had a written text in advance, because I would have been held spell-bound by his words and would have been unable to respond.

Andy's postmodern position that Kenneth Burke moves from duality to difference" is paradoxical -- he privileges earlier Burke while paying deference to later Burke. Andy sounds as if he wants it this way, unity and division (difference), but in actuality he favors division. With identification, Burke argues for simultaneous unity and division with one or the other being stressed strategically. By focusing on "difference" or division, Andy's Burke becomes postmodern. Yes, I heard echoes of the Burke from Andy's postmodern debates when he referred to Burke 's attack on the logical positivists in the early writings.

I feel that Andy wants it both ways. First, he admits that after Burke "had been out in the cold too long" he became a "tribal elder" by creating a unified system. Yet, Andy longs for the more heuristic Burke where the critic can "cherry pick" from among Burke's many ideas -- words, phrases, or metaphors. Andy's early Burke is the more exciting than the later Burke who lays out a rhetorical system.

Andy executes a brilliant strategy to accept early Burke without appearing to reject his later positions. He introduces Chateaubriand who says, "our ends are present in our beginnings" and these can be found one's "formative years." Andy then uses Jack Stelzer to establish 1925-35 as Burke's formative year, which he labels as the "Core Burke."

This process of reasoning allows Andy to analyze Burke's work Ausculation, written in 1933 but not published until 1993, sixty years later, as the representative anecdote for Burke's entire career. Ironically, Andy's sole source for his argument also embodies his strategy of unifying old and new. Through this strategy, Andy has brilliantly essentialized Burke in his early writings. Burke would probably praise Andy for his excellent strategic reduction.

In the "Core Burke" Andy argues that in "this mezzanine decade Burke served three failed gods: Art for art's sake, literary criticism as social healing, and a Savian version of Communism." He then describes Burke as pained, lamenting and confused over his losses. However, what's most important is that Andy's analysis of "Core Burke" is void of the methods Burke is most well known for creating -- the pentad, identification and terms for order.

These ideas were products of Burke's middle period in his books A Grammar of Motives, Rhetoric of Motives, and The Rhetoric of Religion. Could it be that Chateaubriand and Stelzer led Andy astray? I think a stronger argument can be made for the decade of 1945-55 as Burke's "core" years. I've even argued that concepts from his middle period ambiguously function epistemically with his early and ontologically with his later writings. This interpretation presents a very different Burke from Andy's postmodern one.

In two short sections, "Healing the Dichotomy" and "From Duality to Difference," Andy completes his analysis that essentially presents Burke as a classical postmodernist (perspective by incongruity). Andy recognizes that Burke presents most ideas as paired opposites and then argues that Burke doesn't collapse his dualities but maintains them in tension as "difference." This emphasis echoes postmodern Derrida, but instead of making that comparison he goes back to Abelard's "Yes and No."

Andy argues that the tension in "difference" enables both "Reason and Revelation" to be seen as "paths to truth." The result is a "practical-esthetic merger." Having established this Andy is able to conclude:

Although Burke's practice would not begin to change for nearly four decades, . . . [his] passage from the practical to aesthetic frame was the beginning of his grand system. Burke more closely resembled the neo-classical system builders of the 17th and 18th centuries than the 19th century romantics, Kant, Hegel, and Fictie.

In response to Andy's conclusion, I find myself shouting Abelard's "Yes and No." Yes, I agree with Andy that we can reject Burke as a 19th century scientist, but, No, I disagree that we must go back to the 17th and 18th centuries to accept Burke as a synthesis or merger of scientist and artisan.

To understand how we can go forward, not backward, all we have to do is turn to Burke's writings. In Permanence and Change and Attitudes Toward History, using the concept of "orientation," Burke provides a model for the evolution of Western thought. He describes successive paradigm shifts from magic, through religion, and to science. He then explains why "science" is breaking down as a pattern of thought and projects poetic humanism as the new paradigm and I have argued that implementing this shift to poetic humanism is the challenge of the 21st century.

Burke presents humanistic, subjective, spiritual, pluralistic, and egalitarian as the main characteristics of poetic humanism. These qualities suggest poetic humanism provide a much looser unity (tension between unity and division) than found in science or even than in Andy's 17th and 18th centuries which were dominated by the paradigm of religion.

Burke wrote during the period of scientific dominance as he foreshadowed the shift to poetic humanism, which would be more spiritual and poetic. Could it be that both Burke's early and later writings provide models for 21st century symbol using? As writers and critics, the full range of Burkean concepts are available, as they always have been, depending upon the desire to stress either unity or division. What's important is that people realize that they are only speaking from a perspective and that their position does not represent the "truth." I have grown to feel that "perspective" is the key term in understanding Burke's writing -- old and new. Isn't presenting our perspective the only thing we can do as we employ rhetoric to construct our individual and group realities?

Maybe this what we can learn from Burke, old and new, more than anything else can. That any example of symbol using is simply a perspective competing with other perspective to be accepted as reality. It may be beautiful. It may be extremely logical. It may have tremendous amounts of either evidence or authorities to back it up. Or it may sound like or be represented as being the word of God. But it is only and can only be a single perspective seeking acceptance as a statement in the creation of "reality."

It may be that Andy and I don't really disagree. However, rather than look back to the 17th and 18th centuries, I prefer to see Burke as looking forward into the 21st century of poetic humanism or possibly we could call it humanistic pluralism which I see as essential for our move into a multicultural society. Maybe we can say for Burke, in the words of Martin Luther King, "I've been to the mountain top." Maybe Burke isn't going with us into poetic humanism, but he has been there. All we need to do is follow his example, and, Andy, you're certainly one of the leaders.