ACJ Special: Williams

Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2001

"Requiem for Antithesis": Burke, King, and the Politics of Art
David Cratis Williams
University of Puerto Rico, Rio Piedras
davidcratiswilliams@worldnet.att.net

In "Disciplining the Master--Finding the Via Media for Kenneth Burke," Andrew King gently probes in a grandiloquent style all his own Burke's "system-building" trajectories. He looks specifically at Burke's virtually life-long search for a "middle way," a median between (oppositional) extremes which both preserves the extremes and transforms them from rigid antitheses into "molten" differences (see Burke, 1945, xiii); not a "Golden Mean" but, for instance, an unending oscillation between words and the Word, between the material and the spiritual (Burke, 1961, 7-42; Hartman 90-91; Williams, 1989, 214). King positions Burke's quest as an outgrowth of his experiencing of the economic, political, and intellectual upheavals of the 1930s. Burke's charting of a middle way is both a critique of the dominant views of dialectics per se and an analysis of the dialectical enactments of art and politics both in general and in 1930s New York in particular. Each of these themes may be read as a variant of King's "unifying" notion of the "via media," a notion which Burke himself occasionally developed as a "middle voice." I will begin by offering a few thoughts on Burke's "middle voice," and then proceed through the themes of dialectics and the relation between art and politics; in each instance, I will follow Andy's lead in attempting to indicate Burke's quest for a via media which preserves in dialectical simultaneity "opposing" tendencies, such as merger and division.

I do not want to reduce Burke's "via media" to his discussion of the metaphorical reach of "the middle voice," but I do think that the latter is an important dimension to Burke's work, and it is one which points toward yet another "God" of Burke's formative years: psychology. Inclined toward an idiosyncratic pantheism, Burke operated under the influence of many "Gods." Art and Marxism--the two that King discusses--are vital to Burke's development, but alone they capture only a portion of Burke's pantheism. For the context of this discussion, I would propose the following liturgy: dialectical philosophy (Plato and Marx) and dialectical psychology (Mead and Freud) as well as a pantheon for diviners of art for art's sake, including not only the literary arts but music as well. These provide an orientation to Burke's construction of "form," which in turn disciplines art in its relation to politics. The "middle voice" offers a constructive way in to this matrix of concerns.

Literally a construction of Greek grammar, the "middle voice," according to Burke's citation of the definition in the "good book" (dictionary), is "that form of the verb by which its subject is represented as both the agent, or doer, and the object of the action" (1973, 379). Burke uses the "middle voice" to articulate George Herbert Mead's interpretation of the "self": at the moment of the middle voice, "the subject can see itself as object" (1973, 380); neither purely object nor purely subject, at the moment of the middle voice, it is both, yet neither. In a paper at the Southern States Communication Association's annual conference in 1992, I suggested the following about the middle voice:

The dialectic inaugurated at the moment of the middle voice is not a dialectic of oppositional pairs, nor is it a spiraling dialectic methodically, or methodologically, elevating humanity toward the telos of ultimate synthesis; rather, the middle voice enacts the transformational possibilities between subject and object, enacts them not as a duality of opposites (indeed, how could opposites be simultaneously enacted in one voice?) but rather as a murky dialectic in which the demarcations of difference disappear even as we would bring them into focus. (4)

Burke's formulation of dialectics is as a psychologically involved process. The "betweenness" of Burke's dialectic--here the middle voice--is not something "out there" but rather something "in here," part and parcel of the psychology of being, of being human. Burke's psychologizing influences both his conceptualization of dialectics and his orientation toward art and politics.

Most directly, Burke's "middle way" is charted through his understanding of dialectics, which he tends to view as much as an agency for transformation as a means for opposition (or as an agency for evolutionary "progress" in human intellectual, spiritual, or moral development).

In A Grammar of Motives, Burke begins the unit entitled "Dialectic in General" with the following words, "By dialectics in the most general sense we mean the employment of the possibilities of linguistic transformation. Or we mean the study of such possibilities" (402; see also Crusius 182-186). Burke's understanding of dialectics is not designed as a contrast to or in opposition to any particular alternative version of dialectics, or any given dialectic (see Crusius's discussion of Burke's dialectical pluralism, 182-191), but rather as an encompassment which both preserves the other as other and transforms it as an instantiation of Burke's own formulation: these alternative constructions are "variants or special applications" (403) of the "possibilities of linguistic transformation" (or "the study of such possibilities"). In many respects, Burke's approach to dialectics encapsulates most directly his "via media," or what following Burke's lead we may also call his "middle voice."

Although I freely admit to a bias in my assessment, I nonetheless do think that one of the most informative examinations of Burke's approach to dialectics came in a seminar on "Kenneth Burke as Dialectician" held at the Second Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society, May 1993.1 My bias derives from the fact that I was "coordinator" of the seminar and author of the seminar report, but the ideas and insights generated in the seminar were certainly not mine alone; indeed, my own thinking has been deeply enriched by the various contributions and insights of all of the other participants in the seminar. One central finding of the seminar was the location of Burke's dialectic as somewhere between the oppositional polarities of antithesis, as operating in the "margins of overlap" between dialectical distinctions, as being "in the slash" of such dialectically-based constructs as the pentadic ratios. The dialectic operates, for instance, "in the slash" of a scene/act ratio. Moreover, the dialectic operates indeterminately, unceasingly but without telos. The point here is not to explicate Burke's theory of dialectics in full, nor is it to differentiate Burke's approach to dialectics from those of, for instance, Plato, Hegel, or Marx; rather, for current purposes it is sufficient to suggest that the "requiem for antithesis" which King notes in Burke's work is captured directly in Burke's theories of dialectics.

In a related manner, literary art for the mature Burke is neither detached from lived experience (it does not exist for its own sake) nor confrontational- oppositional--to the established order but rather modulates dialectically between sharing common words, images, values, experiences, etc. with an audience and transforming those images/values/etc. toward an alignment with a 'pre-political' ideal, which could later be activated through direct political appeals (a process Burke called 'pamphleteering'). Art, in other words, names a 'middle voice' between a past held ambiguously in collective memory and a future posed at the brink of possibility. From a historical perspective, Burke's positioning of art in this manner was a product of his work in the late 1920s and early 1930s, a time during which two dominant orientations toward art were the detached art for art's sake school and the new champions of art as a political weapon (often former champions of art for art's sake), represented most fully by the proponents of the proletarian novel. Many of the more strident proponents of a "pure art" in the teens and twenties became sudden converts to social and political programs in the thirties--notably, of course, communism. With the conversion came a redefinition of art: to take a literary example, the Communist Party-supported John Reed Clubs blossomed, particularly in New York and Chicago, rallying around slogans such as "Art is Propaganda" and "Art is a Class Weapon." The bohemian aesthete transformed into a politically charged activist (see Williams, 1991)

As King notes, Burke represents this transformation of the aesthete into the literary soldier as a "Saul/Paul conversion." In a 1932 manuscript variously titled "Auscultation, Creation, and Revision, or The Rout of the Esthetes," or, perhaps more telling, "Literature, Marxism, and Beyond" (eventually published in Chesebro under the "Auscultation" title), Burke examines this Saul/Paul conversion dialectically, often treating of Marxist dialectics along the way, and focusing specifically upon the relation between art and politics.2 In the "Introductory Note" to "Auscultation" Burke writes,

This book considers, among other things, the factors behind that somewhat remarkable phenomenon, the "rout of the esthetes." Here was the case where an entire literary generation, as soon as the word 'esthete' was leveled at them, promptly "cleared out." It was generally felt that the exigencies of the times made such a move advisable. Before "clearing out" myself, I thought I would take one last look around, to see if anybody had left anything of value in the hastiness of departure--and sure enough, I discovered lying about unclaimed, a Philosophy of History, a Psychology, an Apologia for Art, a Methodology of Art, a Theory of Criticism, some valuable Archives on the trends of Modern Literature, and a number of devices for relating the whole to the contemporary scene (1).

These things of value might be understood as margins of overlap between "pure art" and art which can argue at least incipiently in favor of a particular political program. Burke, in other words, found in the confluence of his understanding of form, dialectics, and psychology a "betweenness" to the increasingly strident schisms within the literary world (among others) in the turbulent 1930s. Refusing to accept at face value "antithetical" extremes such as orthodox Marxism and the worship of art for art's sake, Burke again charted a middle course, one which did not deny extremes but rather encompassed them.3

"Margins of overlap" such as those Burke identifies in "Auscultation" allow for transformations between orientations. Within Burke's theory of "form," these ambiguous areas of overlap figure into the constitution of the "psychology of the audience" (Burke, 1931, 30-31); from an argumentational perspective, the psychology of form may function as a "warrant" for specific claims (Jasinski). The notion, then, as I see it, which grew from this portion of Burke's work in the 1920s and 1930s is that literary form functions in these social, historical, linguistic, psychological, etc., margins of overlap as a variant of the "middle voice," instantiating Burke's understanding of dialectics as transformational and without a necessary telos of its own. Burke's perspective becomes one which transforms dialectics from oppositional contestations in a grand progressive struggle toward a telos--whatever it may be--into transformational agency itself. Yet in Burke's requiem to antithesis, antithesis is alive and well as a part of the transformational cycle.

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. "Auscultation, Creation, Revision." In Extensions of the Burkeian System. Ed. James W. Chesebro. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. 42 172.

--- Counter-Statement. 1931. Los Altos: Hermes, 1953.

--- A Grammar of Motives. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945.

--- The Philosophy of Literary Form. 1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.

Chesebro, James W. ed. Extensions of the Burkeian System. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993.

Crusius, Timothy W. Kenneth Burke and the Conversation after Philosophy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

Hartman, Geoffrey. Criticism in the Wilderness. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Jasinski, James. "An Exploration of Form and Force in Rhetoric and Argumentation." In Argumentation Theory and the Rhetoric of Assent. Ed. David Cratis Williams and Michael David Hazen. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1990. 53-68.

Williams, David Cratis. "Argumentation and Aesthetic Form: Burke and Marxism in the Early Thirties." Argument in Controversy. Proceedings of the SCA/AFA Summer Conference on Argumentation. Ed. Donn W. Parson. Annandale, VA: SCA, 1991. 374-379.

--- "Enacting and Encompassing Dialectics: Kenneth Burke's Theory of Dramatism." Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Argumentation. Ed. F.H. van Eemeren, R. Grootendorst, JA Blair, and C.A. Willard. Amsterdam: Sic Sat, 1999. 872-876.

--- "'Psychologizing' Dialectics: Kenneth Burke's Dramatism." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern States Communication Association. San Antonio. 1992.

--- "Under the Sign of (An)nihilation: Burke in the Age of Nuclear Destruction and Critical Deconstruction." In The Legacy of Kenneth Burke. Ed. Herbert W. Simons and Trevor Melia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. 196-223.

Williams, David Cratis et al. "Kenneth Burke as Dialectician: Seminar Report." The Kenneth Burke Society Newsletter 9 (December 1993): 17-18, 20.

1. This seminar report, along with the reports of other seminars from not only the Second Triennial Conference of the Burke Society but the other conferences as well (1990 in New Harmony, Indiana; 1996 in Pittsburgh; and 1999 in Iowa City), are available from the Kenneth Burke Society. Procedures for ordering newsletters are explained on The Kenneth Burke Society Website. Click under "Publications."

2. The tensions on the 1930s (repeated with variations on the themes in the 1950s) not only among artists themselves but also between artists and the government were felt deeply by Burke. Burke often lurked around the edges of highly charged leftist politics, but in his own description he was never a joiner. Nonetheless, in addition to his celebrated squabbles with fellow writers (and leftists) such as Granville Hicks, Sidney Hook, and the entire staff of the journal Burke called "Phartisan Review," Burke also came to the attention of the subversives hounds of the U.S. government. For instance, portions of Burke's FBI files are just now coming to light; they are available in the "Virtual Burke Parlor". Click on "The FBI Files." The Virtual Parlor contains a wealth of Burke information, including a searchable bibliography, guides and/or originals of correspondence between Burke and Hugh Dalziel Duncan and between Burke and William H. Rueckert, and some conference papers about Burke or influenced by Burkean ideas.

3. The via media suggested in "Auscultation, Creation, and Revision" probably explains why Burke was unable, despite many efforts, to find a publisher for the manuscript in the 1930s: in an era of tightly guarded ideological camps, Burke's pantheism, his mode of inquiry without borders, found no audience. See Williams, 1991.