I am working my way through old thumb drives and came across this introduction to Kenneth Burke’s work that I wrote for some sort of Blackwell Companion. I do not know if it ever was published. But the essay strikes me as a useful overview of Burke’s work. So I offer it here for what it’s worth.
Kenneth Burke is an American polymath whose work offered an alternative to the New Criticism by focusing on the pragmatic ways that literature serves as “equipment for living.” His resolute refusal to understand the literary as a distinctive use of language or literary criticism as a discipline separate from wider sociological analyses anticipated the move away from formalism and return to context characteristic of literary theory in the 1980s and 1990s.
Ever the maverick, Burke never graduated from college. He quit Columbia after a year and took up residence in Greenwich Village in the early 1920s, where he associated with American modernists such as William Carlos Williams. He served as editor of the important modernist little magazine The Dial, wrote poetry, novels, and criticism, and also took up various social science research jobs to pay the rent. His work is influenced by such an eclectic assortment of figures—from medieval theologians like Duns Scotus through to Nietzsche and the social psychologist G. H. Mead—that it comes as no surprise that he has proved uncategorizable. He belongs to no discipline and founded no school, even though his books are endlessly suggestive and have proved particularly important to academics in rhetorical and communication studies. Burke never held a formal academic position although he did teach for many years at Bennington College and lived long enough to bask in the acclaim when a new generation of literary theorists discovered him at the end of the twentieth century.
Burke’s work relevant to literary theory is best divided into three phases. This division is somewhat artificial, but it helps to organize an overview of his long career. The first phase encompasses his work during the 1920s and 1930s, particularly the key texts Permanence and Change (1935) and Attitudes Toward History (1938), as well as the essays collected under the title The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941). During these years, Burke did not offer a handy name for the kind of work he was doing, but he can be seen groping toward a dynamic account of literature that can do justice to its expressive and social power. On the expressive side, Burke argues that literature allows for the hypothetical examination of “attitudes,” of possible ways of relating to the self, to others, and to the world. Attitudes, Burke insists, are “incipient actions.” To take a stance toward the world is to relate to it in a particular way and, subsequently, to act on the premises embedded in that relation. Literature offers the fullest possible play for an imagination of possible actions and their potential consequences. What particularly catches Burke’s attention—and defines his genius as a literary critic—is the way literary texts “convert upwards and downwards” by changing names and contexts. Hence, for example, by conversion downward, Aschenbach’s desires in Death in Venice can be rendered as the lust of an old man for a young boy. But conversion upward would read his desire as a love that opens up to him realms of insight previously unavailable.
Crucially, the “logic” of literary texts is never straightforward, but rather tied to the development of tropes, doubling of fictional characters, associations triggered by puns, and flights of fancy that often defy explanation. Thus, literature illustrates the ways humans create values and “reasons” (motives) for action, while also providing the means foe personal and social transformation. The various metamorphoses and associational pairings in texts extend outward from the author or the protagonist to include the audience and, through them, the social. Partly through his affiliations with “Popular Front” leftists who were trying to forge mass political movements in the 1930s, Burke becomes interested in “rhetoric,” in the ways that artistic works can serve to constitute communities. Literature has real-world impacts both by priming selves to act and by creating groups that cohere through “identification” with the same goals, same leader, or same overarching vision (ideology). By 1941, partly through his famous essay, “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle,” on Mein Kampf, Burke had become fascinated by the plot and figurative dynamics through which a text identifies (produces) a “foreign” element, a scapegoat, and sets about to purge it. This interest in scapegoating persists throughout the rest of Burke’s career.
The second phase of Burke’s career sees him attempting to systematize his insistence that “literature is symbolic action.” Following in the footsteps of pragmatist social theorist George Herbert Mead, Burke tries to develop a full-scale philosophy of the act. (The parallels to the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin are striking, but Burke, like others in the West at the time, did not know Bakhtin’s work.) Burke calls his theory “dramatism” and planned to expound it in a trilogy: A Grammar of Motives (1945), A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), and A Symbolic of Motives. This last work was never completed, although pieces of it were published in a volume entitled Essays Toward a Symbolic of Motives (2006) after Burke’s death. By “motives,” Burke means the attitudes, values, and beliefs that move a person to act. His “grammar” attempts to identify the necessary conditions of any action, of which there are, he says, five: the act, the agent, the scene of action, agency (means), and purpose. A Grammar of Motives offers what amounts to a history of philosophy in terms of which of the five elements a particular philosophy emphasizes. To take “the scene” as most crucial, for example, leads to naturalism and other kinds of determinism that view the environment as dictating what actors do. To place the greatest emphasis on the agent would mean the kind of voluntarism we associate with certain extreme versions of existentialism. The “ratios” that try to weight the different roles played by the five elements can be quite complex and Burke traces out these intricacies through commentaries on a dizzying array of figures from the history of Western thought.
Presiding over the whole enterprise, although this is never explicitly acknowledged, is Hegel, partly because Burke in this middle phase aspires to the kind of all-encompassing system that Hegel also strives to produce. But most importantly because the mode of thought is relentlessly dialectical. For Burke, any philosophy that highlights one element of the pentad at the expense of another will inevitably produce a reaction, a new theory or philosophy that picks up the neglected item. His philosophy, by way of contrast, will try to be inclusive, to do justice to the roles played by all five elements. I think it fair to say that Burke’s does not realize his systematic ambitions. A Grammar of Motives is usually accounted Burke’s masterpiece, but that is for the wealth of insights it offers on an astounding range of topics and figures, not because he constructs a grand synthesis. In fact, despite his aspirations, Burke is not a systematic thinker. He is constantly chasing side thoughts. His digressions are famous and his distinctive style—full of italics, scare quotes, and parentheses—reflects the almost manic quality of his thinking, always on the edge of skittering completely out of control.
A Rhetoric of Motives then considers “the use of words by human agents to form attitudes or induce actions in other human agents.” Rhetoric is the social component of language, focusing on its use to form communities and foster action in concert. It involves “the use of language as a symbolic means of inducing cooperation in beings that by nature respond to symbols.” Burke especially emphasizes “identification” of a recognizably Freudian sort. The rhetor aims to get his audience to identify with, to feel themselves “consubstantial” with a group or an ideal. One effective way to achieve this goal is by processes of association that link the group or ideal the writer wishes to promote to already cherished values. So, for example, I might try to liken the effort to combat global warming to the program that sent human beings to the moon. I would try to transfer the positive feelings about the mission to the moon to a willingness to get enthusiastically involved in this new effort.
Presumably, the final volume of the trilogy was going to examine the specific symbols that language utilizes as human agents form their motives. The reasons Burke failed to complete that third volume are unknown. Obviously, he struggled with it since he went over ten years before publishing his next book, The Rhetoric of Religion (1961). And that new book introduced another shift in his work, from “dramatism” to “logology,” Burke’s third phase. This new vision picks up a major theme in A Rhetoric of Motives and pushes it to its logical conclusion. Burke argues that any linguistic account that aims to describe a scene comprehensively will inevitably produce a hierarchy of terms that leads from the smallest particular up to the highest, most inclusive term, which Burke labels a “god-term.” For example, physics moves from sub-atomic particles up through atoms and molecules to something called “matter.” For Burke, “matter” is physics’ god-term, which functions, crucially, both as the motive of the whole enterprise (to offer an explanation of matter) and to exclude certain considerations (physicists do not acknowledge spiritual causes). “Logology,” then, would be the analysis of any system of linguistic ordering that details its hierarchy and thus understands what it aims to achieve and what it serves to exclude. The problematic claim is that every use of language, no matter what the field or the occasion, has precisely the same structure. Burke appears, in his final works, to adopt a tragic determinism. Humans are always and everywhere addicted to hierarchy and to monistic, mono-theological, modes of thought that always produce excluded victims, punitive orthodoxies, and the conflicts generated by various heresies. The essays collected in Language as Symbolic Action (1966) reinforce this tragic vision by offering sweeping definitions of “Man” and of “Language.”
Paradoxically, Burke’s vision narrows as a result of his attempt to be all-encompassing. The universalism of the claims made during his “logology” phase makes everything look the same—and this from a writer whose greatest strength was his unsystematic, even chaotic, enchantment with particular cases. Seen this way, Attitudes Toward History becomes Burke’s strongest book since it focuses on their being plural possibilities, a variety of different attitudes (with an “s”) that humans might adopt as they face the world and decide how to act, how to live, within it. Similarly, the resources upon which humans can call as they take up this task are many. The book offers a catalogue of those resources without ever claiming that any must be chosen or that any choice has inevitable consequences. Not surprisingly, in surveying this open field, Burke comes to announce that his own perspective is “comic,” a perspective, he claims, that “by astutely gauging situation and personal resources . . . promotes the realistic sense of one’s limitations” yet does not succumb to a “passive” fatalism. Human action cannot carry all before it, but it is not utterly futile as well. Learning to roll with the punches is the great comic virtue, an adaptation of attitude to circumstance. Burke at his most magnificent awakens us to full glory of human resourcefulness—and highlights how literature especially puts that ingenuity on display while also putting it through its paces.
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