Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2001

Disciplining The Master: Finding the Via Media for Kenneth Burke
Andrew King
Louisiana State University
andyk@lsu.edu

Foucault gives rhetoric a huge role, but delegitimizes all of its products. Burke gives rhetoric a paramount role, but legitimizes everything done in its name. Is there a via media?

Burke may best be described as a literary/ political scientist who continued a tradition of debate that included discourse about alternative communities, radical schemes of order and experimental political arrangements. He belonged to the tradition of William Morris, John Ruskin, Samuel Butler, and Edward Bellamy. While the literati were turning inward upon their sacred texts, Burke remained a social theorist. He was a traveler like Bellamy's Mr. West and Samuel Butler's Van Damen Voyager. His method of search was an imaginative juxtaposing of the word that is and the world that ought to be.

Burke's "utopianism" contrasted sharply with that of Marx and the Bad Bears of Communism. Marx condemned utopian socialism as something excessively rationalistic, imposed from the top, and innocent of the struggle to remove the very things that stood in the way of social liberation. Marx and Engles believed that all utopias were reactionary except their own, a socialist utopia that deliberately lacked a blueprint. The actual content of their utopia would be determined by the concrete conditions of the class struggle. Thus they truly believed that all other utopian schemes were unhistorical, unrealistic, and even reactionary.

Burke followed the sociologist Karl Mannheim in the belief that art had a powerful social role. Mannheim believed that the arts were a vast laboratory in which aesthetic solutions to actual problems could be tried out without the horrific consequences that attend concrete state policy. For both Mannheim and Burke the arts could articulate all "unfulfilled ideals of the age" allbeit in a simplified and fearfully vivid manner.2

Burke moved to his Jersey farm seven years before the publication of I'll Take My Stand: The South and The Agrarian Tradition.3 He was in the vanguard of a whole generation of people who tried to renew themselves on small farms. He corresponded with Andrew Lytle, Robert Penn Warren, John Bishop Peale, Richard Weaver, Alan Tate, and the other fugitives and agrarians. He believed in their ethic even if he did not join their program.

As the 1930's wore on, Burke witnessed the failure of the great 20th century utopias. Really dystopias, the Fascist and Communist regimes had begun by strangling the very utopian aspirations that had funded them. Stalin's dystopic regime slaughtered four million kulaks while Hitler's Reich turned ordinary people into criminals. In the discontented 1930's, Burke became enamored of the work of another utopian, Louis Mumford. Mumford saw America as a Utopia that had gone off the rails. Mumford believed that under the medieval raiment of the perfect commonwealth an iron robot had begun to replace individual dignity and autonomy with the mechanical shuttle of organized society. Mumford's lost promise of America gave Burke the ironic hell heaven, a paradise subverted by unintended evil consequences.

The word Utopia had connoted shared work, shared land and shared resources; by the late 1930's it came to mean a realization of the ideals of technical reason. Burke's last thoughts on Utopia were uttered at New Harmony, Indiana in 1990. By that year utopian literature lived on only in a moronic underworld of high tech advertising. Burke told us that the "progress" of technology had moved utopia from the realm of contemplation to the realm of action, from literature to programmatic planning. Burke worried that the success of technology in the eyes of ordinary people had turned 'agents' into 'agencies.' That is human beings have come to view their needs as historical and mutable and now regard human beings themselves as something that must be surpassed, a mere way station in the endless progress of life forms.

Indeed Burke's broken ideals made him stronger, more tenacious. Only those who have been broken understand how precious and fragile civilization is. Thus, Burke left the 1930's with a deepened sense of the quest for community. He never abandoned his ideals of a humane world, but he came to respect the complexity of analysis and the deep study required to bring such a community into being. Soren Kierkegaard speaks of three stages of belief. First the believer lives in the world where myth and reality are not distinct, but all fused together in the faith of his or her early morning years. In stage Two the former believer discovers the worlds of practical wisdom, scientific norms of evidence, and historiography. Often the second stage believer rejects the old faith and embraces the new languages of reality. In Stage Three the seeker returns to the myths of his early years, and discovers that they contain foundational "emotional" and "moral" truths. He now understands that the world is populated by several universes of discourse, and his faith is deeper and more profound than before. Stage Three suggests the environmental 'utopian' Burke of his final three decades.

Bernard Brock's well known article, "The Evolution of Kenneth Burke's Philosophy of Rhetoric: The Dialectic Between Epistemology and Ontology" is a brilliant record K.B's long journey from epistemology to ontology, from metaphor to literalism, from dualism to coherence and from the adjudication of distinct art objects to system building. Brock's article has been widely and justly praised. Yet Brock's words were painful to many of us. We have been using Burke as an inexhaustible resource for so long that we no longer like being questioned about the practice. A man who began as a writer, then became a critic of particular literary works, later a social theorist, and finally a great system builder had something for all of us. He became our pythian oracle and we the high priests of his enigmatic yawp. Burke's greatest sayings were culled so that they could be passed through our expert filters. Of course there were some doubters and scoffers. A cynical Dale Leathers once claimed to read passages from Burke "nine different ways" and more than once accused his expositors of charlatanism.4
In the 19th century, writers like Chateaubriand popularized the 'formative decade' method of biography. In this view, the key to understanding any great thinker was found in careful scrutiny of the years between 18 and 28, the years when many individuals have their greatest share of vigorous experience, form their most intense bonds with others and adopt their ruling ideas.

Jack Selzer argues that Burke's formative decade came late, probably 1925-1935, Selzer has asserted that in the course of this mezzanine decade Burke served three failed gods: art for art's sake, literary criticism as social healing, and a Shavian (deluded) version of Communism.

Much of the pain of that terrible decade is distilled in Burke's Auscultation, Creation and Revision,5 a work originally published in 1933 but not published by Chesebro until six decades later in 1993. Here Burke discussed the aesthetic and practical frames and in the course of this discussion he was dogged by two ideas: (1) the seeming irrelevance of the artist and (2) the barbarities of his old Stalinist friends. His friends would not hear a word against the man they called 'The Little Father' (Lenin) and asserted that Stalin only killed thousands, not millions of Kulaks. But what most surprised Burke was that these tyrannous and exclusionary frames were always unaccountably metamorphosing into each other. Thus the business man's practical frame was formerly an aesthetic frame emphasizing character, but now it is heading toward a visionary and poetic exultation of charismatic commerce.

Likewise Burke hated mass production and materialism. His revulsion at mass consumption had a religious intensity. The revolt against "Profit thinking" was compared to religious reformation in that all humane persons should be "united as allies in the same protestant campaign."6

And what of his concern for the Poet as a failed priest? The retreat of the poet from all social movements except the Arts and Crafts Movement and the Medieval Revival since the Mauve decade of the 19th century infuriated Burke. He regretted the Art for Arts Sake afterglow of the 1920's and 30's: "This whole dilemma of the Poet who was born into the tradition of protest against the authority of the practical frame, but who now finds his patterns of protest invalidated"7 The poet's mission is to heal the breech between the aesthetic and the practical frame. No more "contemplating dead swans."8 This was Burke's most valuable insight. He noted although the businessman professed to hate all poetry, in fact all language that called attention to itself, the flannel mouthed Dale Carnegies and Henry Fords were in fact the poets of the new age. At the clapped out little Elks Club and Commerce Club luncheons, the American businessman celebrated his vision and his audience cried: SUBLIME!

But let us take off the gloves and get down to the bare knuckled truth. I see that I have been too polite and too circumspect. I really believe that Bill Bailey and I are the only persons on the planet to really understand Burke.

Burke is not about tools. He was not about ideology or political systems. Despite his opaque manner of expression, his project was simple and straightforward. Burke was worried about our over-rhetoricized world. According to KB we entered the world of virtual reality long ago with the invention of writing. Ever since that time we have become ever more adept at building symbol systems. In fact, we have been piling symbol upon symbol and setting system over and against system ever since.

At the same time that we have been developing our symbolic conceptions of the world, we have been increasingly walling ourselves off from nature with technology. The effect has been to isolate us from the consequences of our actions over the short term. Technology delays the consequences of our assaults on our nature and symbolic systems mask our failures until it is too late. Nature is recalcitrant and it will have its revenge, but not until it is too late for us to repair the results.

Burke worried that we could go on increasing short term yields of grains and corn while the soil blew away, and that increasingly efficient technology could make our fossil fuel supply seem infinite over the short term. He lamented that our technical prowess and our symbol systems had so isolated us from the immediate data of brute reality that we were able to delude ourselves that our resources were actually growing and that a new technological fix would solve all of our problems. On Burke's primitive farm a dry summer meant that corn plants had to be watered by hand, or a freak wind storm could sweep away an entire flax crop. Even a sick cow threatened the whole food chain, from the humans to the pigs who depended on the extra cow milk.

Burke knew that only a world that increasingly resembled a very comfortable hotel. Only a world in which we could go for decades believing and practicing nonsense could have produced post modernism. Only homeless ungrounded intellectuals could formulate the belief that they constructed reality through language. But Burke was not isolated from the results of his actions. Burke watched his cows and chickens die and thought about the recalcitrant reality that was waiting to take revenge on a world of wasteful consumers and delusional dreamers. As Bill Bailey has often pointed out, Burke believed that the present world was world of sentimentality, a world in which people invested their feelings in material objects, and believed that their wishes and their hopes would transform the universe.

Burke was not focused upon system building or tool making or any of the other things most Burkeians value. As Bill Bailey has so often noted at our conventions, KB admired Freud. Just as Freud wanted to discover the motives of individuals, Burke wanted to discover the social motive. He attempted to do this by describing the cultural discourse of the nation. And as every good Burkeian knows, cultural discourse was not about the explicit forms of argument, issues or topoi; on the contrary, it was the unconscious set of beliefs that lie too deep for explicit examination. It was the basis of what he meant by identification.

And Burke found that our cultural discourse, the axiomatic core of our weltanschauung, was so pervasive, so perfected and so isolated from the corrective of brute data that its weaknesses were greatly exaggerated. For Burke, our cultural discourse elevated feelings to data, mass sentiment to evidence, and equated security with growth.

Burke's "tools" were simply methods of unmasking and making visible this discourse. He was never a post modernist and always a realist. He pleaded with us to touch the data. As for the earth and the ecosystem, Burke stressed that it did not matter what or how we thought about it, we would either learn to live in cooperation with nature or we would die. Our symbolic hymns about transcending the limitations of the planet were really dirges that prepared the human race for its shroud. Burke loved fluency and metaphor, but he also profoundly mistrusted it. He was man of strong feelings who hated sentimentality. His so-called relativism was merely a description of our present verbal weltanschauung; it was never an article of his creed or a part of his doctrine.

There! I have done it. I have presented the real Burke, an angry, scared, bio-rhetor who cautioned us against getting high on our own metaphor and drunk on our own syntax.

1. C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination (New York: Harper and Row, 1959): 17.

2. Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia (New York: Pocket Books, 1960):77.

3. This agrarian classic fell dead born from the press because of other Utopians who believed in the new collective strategies of the New Deal. Its small fame is due to it "rediscovery" by conservatives in the 1970's.

4. The late Dale Leathers' analysis was hugely popular at the SSCA convention 1991-1995.

5. James Chesebro, "Auscultation, Creation and Revision," Extensions of the Burkeian System, ed. By James Chesebro (Tuscaloosa, Alabama: U of Alabama Press, 1993).

6."Auscultation, Creation and Revision" 156.

7. "Auscultation, Creation and Revision" (157-58)

8. "Auscultation, Creation and Revision" 158.

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