Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion 1611179319, 9781611179316

Table of contents :
Cover
Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change
Title
Copyright
Dedication
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Series Editor’s Preface
Preface
Abbreviations
Introduction A Reshaping of the Terms
Part I. Translating Burkean Terms
One. Pieties, Perspectives, and Incongruities
Two. Metabiology as Purification of War
Three. Enacting the Poetic Orientation
Part II. Archival Interventions
Four. Caught in the Act A Writer in the Archives
Five. Archival Recalcitrance The Ins and Outs of Communism
Six. Finding the Time for Burke
Conclusion A New Rhetoric and Civic Pedagogy (to Save the World)
Appendix A Toward a P&C Chronology
Appendix B Works Referenced in P&C
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change

Studies in Rhetoric/Communication Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor

Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change A C r i t i c a l C o m pa n i o n

Ann George a

The Universit y of Sou th Carolina Press

© 2018 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/. ISBN 978-1-61117-931-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-932-3 (ebook)

For David, my truest companion

What Burke offers—and it is the reason why so many of us turn to him for help—is a methodology, a way of thinking, and of testing our thinking, about how we act as human beings. We leave Burke’s wonderful books in sadness, but in this sadness is hope. If, in the suffering and horror of our time, we can develop a method for the analysis of what symbols do to us in our relations with each other, we may yet learn to lead a better life. Such is Burke’s message to our time. Hugh Dalziel Duncan, “Introduction,” Permanence and Change, 1965

Contents List of Illustrations ix Series Editor’s Preface xi Preface xiii Abbreviations xvi Introduction A Reshaping of the Terms

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Part I. Translating Burkean Terms One. Pieties, Perspectives, and Incongruities Two. Metabiology as Purification of War Three. Enacting the Poetic Orientation

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Part II. Archival Interventions Four. Caught in the Act A Writer in the Archives Five. Archival Recalcitrance The Ins and Outs of Communism 164 Six. Finding the Time for Burke

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Conclusion A New Rhetoric and Civic Pedagogy (to Save the World) 206 Appendix A Toward a P&C Chronology 225 Appendix B Works Referenced in P&C 227 Notes 231 Works Cited 249 Index 263

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I l lu s t r at i o n s Toward Los Angeles, California. Dorothea Lange. March 1937 First edition title page

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Burke’s Latin and Greek transcriptions of Matthew 16:18 “Perspective by Incongruity” notes #6 and #11 “Perspective by Incongruity” numbered outline

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Draft page from “Perspective by Incongruity”

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Hermes Scroll #7. Hermes Publications, 1953

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March 1935 New Republic ad for Permanence and Change

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S e r i e s E d i t o r ’ s P r e fa c e Ann George’s Kenneth Burke’s Permanence & Change: A Critical Companion provides beginners and senior scholars with a guide and a fresh historical, theoretical, and archival reading of what George claims is the foundational book for a framework that later came to be called the New Rhetoric. Burke’s Permanence & Change (1935) created a new vocabulary for rhetorical studies, placing civic participation, George argues, squarely at the center of rhetoric and an expanded notion of rhetoric at the center of both personal and public life—and aimed at developing a way of imagining, perhaps even calling into being, a healthier, fairer, more humane society. To accomplish this, George maintains, Burke needed not only a new theory but also a new set of terms for talking about how human beings describe, interpret, experience, and attempt to change the world through symbols. Her critical companion provides her readers with the tools to understand Burke’s key terms—orientation, piety, perspective by incongruity, metabiology, purification of war. Among leftist thinkers and activists in the 1930s, in the midst of the cataclysm of the Great Depression and with the rise of fascism threatening another world war, Burke’s claim for the foundational power of symbols was unorthodox and suspect. Among rhetorical theorists who were rediscovering Aristotelian rhetoric as the foundational theory for rhetorical study in universities’ English and speech departments, Burke’s theory was slow to take hold—but take hold it did. Professor George guides her reader through Burke’s theory, giving careful attention to Burke’s context and to the scholarly literature on Burke, though her aim is not to press Burke back into his time so much as to use the context to understand the theory and suggest its nuances. A special feature of George’s book is her story of the archives she explored in her search for Permanence & Change, archives based at Penn State’s library and in other special collections. Her detailing this archival venture shows something of her own search for the emerging meaning of Permanence & Change, as well as of Burke’s earlier search for those meanings and the invention of a language to describe his developing theory. In the archives George discovers Burke as a theorist and as a writer—composing drafts on cheap paper in nearly indecipherable handwriting worked over with

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revisions and crossed-out text, eventually drawn together into a manuscript shared, edited, produced—all that is suggested by “written.” Ann George’s Kenneth Burke’s Permanence & Change: A Critical Companion is a fascinating reading experience and will be an essential companion to Burke’s work for a long time to come. Thomas W. Benson

P r e fa c e I first read Permanence and Change in 1992 as a nondegree student at Penn State, taking Theory and Teaching of Composition. Like many graduate seminars, this one included an oral presentation on an important book that was not a required course text. We chose titles during the first class meeting from a list on the syllabus. P&C was my book. I was utterly lost reading it and so green I did not know how to look up secondary scholarship for help. (In my own defense, there was not much available in 1992.) The only point that stood out clearly was that someone named Jeremy Bentham wanted to remove ambiguity from language, and Burke did not think that was possible. Precious little to go on. I got a B+ on the report and this comment: “Good job; a little too many trees and a little too little forest on a difficult topic. It was a difficult assignment, wasn’t it?” Yes, Jack, it was. (Smile.) The memory of how hard Burke was for me the first (and second and third) time through has stayed with me. It makes me a humble reader of Burke and a patient teacher and coach, eager to welcome newcomers to Burke studies generally and to P&C particularly. It was one of my motives for writing A Critical Companion: I wrote in memory of the bewildered reader I once was. I hope inexperienced Burke students will read my volume alongside P&C. This first-of-its kind Burke companion is designed to make this increasingly significant but difficult text accessible for first-time readers and a richer, more nuanced resource for established Burke scholars. As it opens up the text for readers, A Critical Companion makes an original contribution to Burke scholarship by framing P&C as the first full-blown example of New Rhetoric; as an important modern rearticulation of epideictic theory; and as a critical, civic pedagogy. A Critical Companion helps readers new to P&C navigate the text by identifying, explaining, and concretely illustrating concepts central to Burke’s argument; chapters 1–3 also function as a literature review, incorporating significant scholarly discussions of key terms. Such in-depth analyses provide a muchneeded handle for beginners overwhelmed by the rush of names, terms, and out-of-field references. At the same time, this detailed unpacking of terms offers Burke scholars an archival etymology and an uncommon reflection on the terms’ purposes and functions—not just what they mean but what they do. The new archival material I present here rewrote my understanding of a book I thought I knew well; A Critical Companion tells the story of my rediscovery of P&C. xiii

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This book, of course, has a larger agenda: to multiply and complicate our representations of Burke to include (at least) writer, marketer, methodologist, civic activist, critical teacher—and human being. These different ways of seeing Burke, in turn, suggest different ways of reading P&C—as theory written not for theory’s sake but as a political, cultural, and pedagogical intervention—theory with which to build a civic art of living. I am indebted to my Burke teachers, inside and outside the classroom, especially (and always) Jack Selzer, who set me on this path, Greg Clark, Bob Wess, Bryan Crable, and a host of talented Penn State colleagues, including Dana Anderson, Jess Enoch, Debra Hawhee, Jordynn Jack, Dave Tell, Scott Wible, and Janet Zepernick. Without the expert, ever-patient advice and unstinting support of my writing group members—Betsy, Charlotte, and Theresa—this book would be greatly diminished. And I feel myself fortunate, indeed, to work among talented and generous colleagues at Texas Christian University and elsewhere, especially Rich Enos, Jason Helms, Charlotte Hogg, Melanie Kill, Carrie Leverenz, Brad Lucas, Joddy Murray, Sarah Robbins, and Liz Weiser. Reviewers for the University of South Carolina Press, Greg Clark and an anonymous reader, helped me greatly improve the structure and thoroughness of this book. I thank, too, TCU’s exceptional graduate students, who continue to teach me so much. I have been supported by the excellent research and editorial assistance—much of it generously provided by the English department graduate program director, Mona Narain—of Tim Ballingall, Brian Bly, Jim Creel, Josh Daniel-Wariya, Sue-Jin Green, Angelica Hernandez, David Isaksen, Amy Milakovic, Angela Moore, Terry Peterman, Megan Poole, Chase Sanchez, and Robert Tousley. I am blessed, indeed, to have Katie George’s painstaking editing and proofing skills at my disposal. I am especially grateful for the unflagging encouragement and insight of two students turned colleagues—Sharon Harris and Michelle Iten—who responded to drafts and helped me work through repeated organizational gridlock. For their generous support of my travel to archives, I thank Dean Andrew Schoolmaster and TCU’s Office of Research and Sponsored Projects. And I am endlessly grateful for the expert advice and ongoing financial, research, and (especially) moral support of my department chairs, Brad Lucas and Karen Steele. This book would not have been possible without the expert assistance and good cheer of Penn State archivists Sandy Stelts and Jeannette Sabre. Quotations and images from the Kenneth Burke Papers are reproduced with the permission of the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries. I use Horace Gregory’s letters with permission from the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries; Burke’s correspondence with James S. Watson with permission from the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations; Allen Tate’s letters with permission of the Department of

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Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; and Morton Dauwen Zabel’s Papers with permission of the Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. I also acknowledge use of archival collections at the Beinecke Rare Book Room and Manuscript Library at Yale University (Southern Review Papers and Matthew Josephson Papers), the Newberry Library (Malcolm Cowley Papers), and the Van Pelt Library at University of Pennsylvania (Waldo Frank Papers). Finally I want to thank and acknowledge those individuals who generously gave me permission to reprint or quote from archival material: Anthony and Michael Burke, Trustees of the Burke Literary Trust, for permission to quote Kenneth Burke’s works and letters and to include images of his manuscripts; Robert Cowley, for permission to quote from Malcolm Cowley’s correspondence; Brenda Toomey for permission to quote from James Daly’s correspondence; Lindsay and Timothy Crouse for permission to quote from John Erskine’s correspondence; Jonathan W. Frank for permission to quote from Waldo Frank’s correspondence; Kenneth Scott Ligda for permission to quote from Mildred Ligda’s correspondence; Judy Agee, Peter and Stephen Gessner, Patricia and David Leonard, Larisa Lindemann, Bonny O’Neil, and Peter and Jill Sanford for permission to quote from Eduard C. Lindeman’s correspondence; Robert Wojtowicz for permission to quote from Lewis Mumford’s correspondence; the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company for permission to quote from Charles A. Pearce’s correspondence; and Helen Tate for permission to quote from Allen Tate’s correspondence. Finally—and always—I am tremendously grateful for the love and support of my family, David, Katie, my brother, and my mother.

A b b r e v i at i o n s ACR ATH CS GM LSA MOL P&C PLF RM ROP RPP

Auscultation, Creation, and Revision Attitudes toward History Counter-Statement A Grammar of Motives Language as Symbolic Action “Men of Leisure” (archival manuscript) Permanence and Change Philosophy of Literary Form A Rhetoric of Motives “Range of Piety” (archival manuscript) “Religious and Poetic Piety” (archival manuscript)

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Introduction A Reshaping of the Terms One can imagine wiseacres saying that the meanings of words are funny things to be fooling with while millions are in danger. . . . These same objectors will, if they are “practical agitators,” go forth to plead with people, . . . attempting nothing other than the reshaping of the terms in which people consider their situation. Kenneth Burke, “Poets All”

In February 1933 the thirty-five-year-old leftist writer and critic Kenneth Burke met James Abell, also a writer, and over the next few months—and just as Burke was gearing up to draft Permanence and Change—the two made plans to start a magazine Burke tentatively titled the New State (likely a riff on the New Republic, which published much of Burke’s 1930s work). Burke, along with many other cultural critics, saw a “new” America, a people who had finished pioneering and could now afford to—indeed, must—turn their attention to governance, to “matters of human welfare and cooperative enterprise” (“New State” 2, encl. Burke to Abell, 7 Apr. 1933; emphasis added). Politics, Burke argued, is not something to be cynically despised or shrugged off. “Politics is the most dignified concern possible” for Americans; it “has to do with nothing other than the normalizing and regulating of the social relationships of our people” (“New State” 1). New State was designed to prepare Americans for political participation by training them in the “criticism” and “judgment” of institutional behavior. The New State should, Burke suggested, “get [people] to thinking in terms of health, happiness, nutrition. . . . We should keep them ever mindful of ‘tests,’ of ‘rules of thumb,’ of standards by which they can judge for themselves of the value of any proposed local, state, or national measure” (“New State” 3). The correspondence between Burke and Abell abruptly ended in July, and the New State never materialized. But Burke did not abandon the New State’s agenda. The same civic spirit and public pedagogical mission pervades the powerful

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rhetorical theory and critical methods he offers in his 1935 Permanence and Change. That is, in P&C, Burke did not write theory for theory’s sake but theory for everyday use—theory as political and pedagogical intervention. In P&C Burke sought to “reshap[e] . . . the terms in which people consider[ed] their situation” and, thus, themselves (“Poets All”). Against the existing scientific orientation’s definition of life as a perpetual struggle for domination in which humans are either predators or prey—or worse, high-functioning bots—Burke defined individual and collective identities as poems or texts that humans collaboratively compose and revise in response to material and social needs. Thus I contend that Burke’s primary purpose in P&C was not, as some have suggested, to nurture an aesthetic culture but to build productive, humane communities and mutually satisfying social relationships. Indeed A Critical Companion underscores how the New State’s vision of an engaged and “properly equipped citizenry” (3) is the cornerstone of the poetic orientation Burke advocated in P&C to cure America’s social ills. In so doing this book seeks to reshape the terms with which readers consider Burke in general and P&C in particular. As the New State anecdote suggests, the Burke presented here is first and foremost a “civic theorist” (Clark, Civic Jazz 11; emphasis added) who strove to define sources of human health (body, mind, and spirit) and happiness and to articulate the attitudes and behaviors needed to achieve them. That is, Burke is a public rather than a narrowly disciplinary figure, his rhetorical theory fundamental to advancing his civic pedagogical agenda rather than an end in and of itself. The New State story is revealing in other ways that become a refrain of this volume: Burke was full of plans and projects, not cloistered but eager to act and interact, a teacher by nature—one whose work was produced, as all work is, with others. It follows that P&C offers more than a theory of rhetoric, as stunning as that theory is. Over the course of this book, I explain how and why P&C develops and models what he called a “‘workable’ ethics” (“Metabiology, Outline for a Minimized Ethic” 2) for public life (à la the New State’s proposed tests and standards for critical judgment). Burke’s vision of “an art of living” (P&C 66) that lies at the heart of P&C, I argue, is this: the communal practice of the critical and communicative—that is, rhetorical—skills and the embodied moral philosophy needed to pursue (and persevere in the pursuance of) human welfare and cooperative enterprise. In developing and explaining this civic art of living, Burke inaugurated the twentieth-century body of theory known as New Rhetoric. The New State anecdote serves one other important function in introducing A Critical Companion: to highlight the centrality of archival research to my understanding of P&C as a civic rhetorical pedagogy and an ethics for human relations. My study is distinctive in its close attention to P&C’s development, publication, and reception, for Burke left an astonishing archive of book notes,

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outlines, and drafts. I offer a sustained and nuanced analysis of this recently acquired archival material that affords compelling new ways of representing Burke and of redefining and remapping the cultural work of his theory—material that, in fact, profoundly reshaped the terms through which I now approach P&C. Thus A Critical Companion offers readers a new understanding not only of Burke himself (as an admired and publicly engaged theorist, teacher, and writer) but also of how P&C, as a New Rhetoric text, aims to equip citizens properly for group life in ways that are as applicable now as they were in the 1930s. However, A Critical Companion does more than simply present archival research. It reflects upon my own archival methods and learning, using what I call archival interventions to foreground the rhetorical, which is to say constructed, nature of all archival accounts. Specifically I examine the rhetorical power of archival researchers in assigning meaning and value to the artifacts they use to create historical accounts. For no matter how readily scholars intellectually acknowledge that writing history is an interpretive act, researchers can underestimate the compelling rhetorical presence of archival artifacts—“the capacity of material evidence to create and sustain tests of verifiability” (Burton 5). Our very susceptibility to archival authority, Antoinette Burton argues, necessitates that researchers tell archival stories, like the ones I tell throughout this book, to foreground the rhetorical construction—the how and why—of archival accounts. “In th[e] endeavour of writing history,” historical sociologist Harriet Bradley asserts, “we also inevitably rewrite history, that is, re-create the past in new forms” (109). The histories—the archival interventions—presented in A Critical Companion are designed to foreground both my agency as archival storyteller and my purpose in using particular archival documents to interrupt and reinvent traditional accounts of Kenneth Burke and P&C. S i t uat i n g P & C i n 1 9 3 0 s A m e r i c a Because Burke wrote P&C to intervene in 1930s American culture, it is important to know a bit about that historical moment. Though we may look back on the Depression era and see it as a glitch (albeit a large one) in an otherwise workable economic system, many intellectuals of the period experienced this time as an absolute rupture. The statistics are truly appalling: in the year after the 1929 crash, eight hundred banks failed (by 1933 five thousand had failed, taking $7 billion of savings down with them), half of all mortgages were in default, and four million people were unemployed—a number that rose by 1933 to sixteen million, 25 percent of the workforce. By the time Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in 1933, most industries had been devastated: business investments were down from $24 billion pre-Crash to just $3 billion; car, iron, and steel production was down by 60 percent; construction was down by more than 80 percent. Agriculture

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took an even heavier beating, with farm income falling from $6 to $2 billion in three years; “net receipts from the wheat harvest in one Oklahoma county went from $1.2 million in 1931 to just $7,000 in 1933” (Century; Kennedy 162–63). On March 4, 1933, Inauguration Day, every bank in the country was closed to prevent total depletion of their reserves. The year following the passage of the National Industrial Recovery Act in June 1933, an act that gave workers the right to unionize, was the most radical year in US history as revolutionary fervor led to more than eighteen hundred strikes nationwide (Century) and culminated in general strikes (in which entire cities shut down as local businesses were shuttered in solidarity with the strikers) in Toledo, Minneapolis, and San Francisco. A national strike of textile workers in the fall of 1934 “became the largest strike in a single industry in American history, involving 400,000 workers” (Denning xiv). As cultural historian Michael Denning remarks, everywhere were the “signs of the disintegration of the old order” (22–23). Leading intellectuals, including some of Burke’s colleagues, lined up to condemn capitalism in no uncertain terms. Their books of probing economic and cultural analysis often bore withering titles: Gilbert Seldes’s The Years of the Locust (America, 1929–1932) (1933), George Soule’s The Coming American Revolution (1934), and Theodore Dreiser’s four-hundred-plus page Tragic America (1931), the chapter titles of which formed a checklist of (eerily familiar) failures: “Exploitation—The American Rule by Force,” “Our American Railways—Their Profits and Greed,” “The Supreme Court as a Corporation-Minded Institution,” “The Constitution as a Scrap of Paper,” “The Growth of Police Power,” “The Abuse of the Individual,” “Who Owns America” (n. pag.). Lewis Corey declared a “crisis of the American Dream” (515); New Republic editor Soule thought the American Dream a “delusion” (169). Burke’s lifelong best friend, Malcolm Cowley, remembered the novelist Robert Cantwell’s cheerfully predicting that March 4 “would be celebrated in future years as the last day of capitalism all over the world” (Dream 166). Burke himself remembered the decade as “a time when there was a general feeling that our traditional ways were headed for a tremendous change, maybe even a permanent collapse” (P&C xlvii). He was not alone. Voices and images from the 1930s are, if anything, more disturbing than the statistics. John Kazarian wrote of “the Starvation Army” of migrants (472), “shabby [men] out of work” on street corners or tramping down dirt roads, arrested in many towns for vagrancy, fingerprinted, and “mugged” (photographed); or in southern Florida, given electric shocks; or in Corpus Christi, jailed three weeks for sleeping in empty Southern Pacific Company boxcars (473)—then, on the road again, mocked by the company’s billboard image of a carefree businessman comfortably reclining in his seat, under the headline “Next time try the train. Relax.”

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Toward Los Angeles, California. Dorothea Lange. March 1937. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8b31801.

John Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies, a collection of his 1936 San Francisco News articles, laid out in heartbreaking detail migrant families’ almost inevitable descent into hell: one family shelters under willow branches, tin, and carpet strips; a three-year-old clothed in a gunnysack sits in the dirt as “little black fruit flies buzz in circles and land on his closed eyes and crawl up his nose until he weakly brushes them away. . . . He will die in a very short time,” as did his sibling born a year ago, who lived only a week, and another born dead four days ago, after which his mother “rolled over and lay still for two days.” His father “has lost even the desire to talk. He will not look directly at you for that requires will, and will

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needs strength” (30). Dorothea Lange’s accompanying photos captured the gritty texture of the migrants’ poverty. Their attempts to protest individually or collectively were met, Steinbeck claims, with a “vigilante terrorism and savagery unbelievable in a civilized state,” courtesy of the Southern California Growers’ Association (54). Workers in mills, mines, factories, and docks often fared little better, even when their strikes were successful. Hence Tillie Lerner Olsen, typing up her Partisan Review story on July 5, 1934—“Bloody Thursday,” when police opened fire on striking San Francisco longshoremen (killing two and wounding thirty), “when guns spat death at us that a few dollars might be saved to fat bellies”—recorded her desolation working “in [union] headquarters, racked by the howls of ambulances hurtling by. . . . Outside the sky a ghastly gray, corpse gray, an enormous dead eyelid shutting down on the world. . . . And I sit here, making a metallic little pattern of sound in the air because that is all I can do, because that is what I am supposed to do” (249). Those Americans who could afford to look beyond their own and their country’s financial problems were appalled to observe that more than just the economy was in free-fall. The Japanese invasion of China in 1931 created an international crisis that brought the world to the brink of war. Newspaper headlines blared bad news from Europe: arguments over settling World War I debts, increasing rearmament and international aggression, and then, of course, Hitler’s rise to power. (Hitler seized the chancellorship of Germany in 1933.) As Burke drafted P&C in 1933 and 1934, newsmagazine columnists reported what seemed like unmistakable signs that the world was readying itself for a second world war, and writers were already starting to imagine, with distressing accuracy, the horrors that war would produce. Burke and his family rode out the Depression in cheap New York City apartments, summering in the Spartan comfort of his Andover, New Jersey farm: their house had no electricity or indoor plumbing but did boast a large garden and woodpile (Burke chopped his own wood) as well as a self-made tennis court and dammed lake for swimming, and it was an easy commute to the city for his frequent meetings or research at the New York Public Library. Most of all Andover provided Burke, who loathed the city’s noise, fumes, and endless pavement, with the rural retreat suited to his simple lifestyle and writing schedule—and to the Burkes’ frequent weekend parties attended by some of the city’s most notable artists and critics.1 Burke eked out a living on the rather slim royalties from his first critical book (Counter-Statement, 1931) and novel (Towards a Better Life, 1932) and by publishing essays, reviews, and poems in magazines such as the New Republic, Nation, New Masses, and Southern Review. Despite his relative financial security, Burke’s correspondence and book notes nonetheless reveal his anguish and anger over the widespread suffering and injustice, his frustration with the government’s indifference or ineptitude in addressing that suffering, and

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his dismay at the increasing likelihood of another world war. In an unusually despairing letter to his friend Cowley in August 1931, Burke wrote, “Each weekend there are boisterous throngs about. Rice wine is cheap but effective. The pond continues to flourish. Seven oil lamps in one room give the illusion of blazing splendor. Thus do we, by going through the motions, conceal from ourselves the steady march toward zero” (P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 195). Despite President Roosevelt’s famed reassurance to the contrary, it seems that, in the 1930s, Burke and many other Americans were learning that there were, indeed, things to fear besides fear itself. For politically minded intellectuals such as Burke, then, the decade seemed a time of both unparalleled opportunity—the chance to build a more just society— and unparalleled danger from increasing militarization and the rise of fascism. Artists, activists, politicians, workers, and intellectuals argued violently about whether to shore up the structure or build something better out of the rubble— and if so, on what design. At stake for Burke and others was nothing less than the fate of America. A bewildering array of groups—anarchists, socialists, Marxists (orthodox and independent), Trotskyists, Stalinists, Lovestonites, undefined collectivists, New Dealers, technocrats, populists, Southern Agrarians, fascists— battled over questions not only of what direction the country should take and how “the good life” might be defined, but also what kind of action (political, economic, military, rhetorical, artistic) would help bring this good life into being. As Jack Selzer and I have explained, critics we call cultural historians (John Dewey, Van Wyck Brooks, and William Carlos Williams, among many others) looked for cultural revitalization in the artist, traditionally figured as having the “special sensibility required to see deeply and to think outside conventional lines” (135). Helen Keller, a pacifist in all other things, believed that only a violent, Soviet-style revolution would enable the necessary changes (Keller 334–35). Huey Long’s pseudo-populist Share the Wealth plan—“Every Man a King (but No One Wears a Crown)”—called for guaranteed family incomes, old age pensions, and free education, all paid for by heavily taxing the rich. The Southern Agrarians, for whom Burke had great sympathy and friendship, produced two anticapitalist manifestos, I’ll Take My Stand (1930) and Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence (1936), extolling the virtues of decentralized political and economic power as well as the individual yeoman farmstead. The plans and schemes were legion. A F i r s t L o o k at P e r m a n e n c e a n d C ha n g e a n d I t s S i g n i f i c a n c e Permanence and Change, written against this backdrop and published in 1935 by the New Republic, was one of Burke’s answers to the burning questions of how to

Permanence and Change title page, first edition. Reproduced with the permission of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust and the SpecialCollections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

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define and achieve “the good life”2—a provocative attempt to theorize the ethical ends and the rhetorical means for cultural transformation. Like scores of early twentieth-century cultural critics, Burke railed against the materialistic, mechanistic texture of American society, and like many of them, he proposed a communal, creative life—a “poetic orientation”—as a corrective. What distinguished Burke’s work then (and what makes it so useful now) was his recognition that no radical program could succeed without a rhetorically sophisticated account of why people, individually and collectively, resist change. P&C provides such an account. In it Burke traced the process of social change through the stages of “orientation,” “disorientation,” and “reorientation.” Part 1, “On Interpretation,” theorizes how culture maintains and is maintained by what he calls piety. All interpretation, he argues, is necessarily embedded in and thus limited by the prevailing orientation (or ideology). When an orientation is breaking down, as Burke believed was then the case, people become “dis-oriented,” but their cultural ideology has become so naturalized that they cannot recognize it as either a cause of their problems or something that might be changed to solve them. It follows, Burke argues, that how people respond to the world is controlled less by their rational self-interest (the psychology behind Marxist rhetoric) than by established cultural values and “the language of common sense” (109), which constitute piety—the unquestioning devotion not to religious faith but to a way of being in the world. In part 2, “Perspective by Incongruity,” Burke analyzes the process of collective transformation by paralleling it to individual transformations—psychotherapy and religious conversion, both of which work, he concludes, by giving people new language for, and hence new ways to interpret, experience. That is, people gain new understanding of events by (re)naming them using unfamiliar or unexpected terms; this perspective by incongruity becomes the methodological centerpiece of Burke’s proposal for change—a program of defamiliarization, or rewriting cultural scripts, designed to expose the constructed nature of experience and enable people to consider alternative perspectives. Part 3, “The Basis of Simplification,” outlines the ethical grounding for Burke’s proposed poetic orientation. Searching for “one underlying motive . . . that activates all men” (221), Burke finds constancy in “the biologic purposes of the human genus” (234); “a point of view biologically rooted,” he claims, “seems to be as near to ‘rock bottom’ as human thought could take us” (261). Guided by the mind-body interaction he calls metabiology, Burke identifies action as the fundamental human purpose (a motionless body is dead), which he then links to cooperation and community (which enable action), civic participation (group action that creates a healthy state), and, ultimately, to poetry, broadly conceived— communication that works stylistically to do the “‘right’ thing” (269n2). Metabiology thus functions as a universal ethic that transcends other shifting, partial

10 Introduction

perspectives: the good life is the communicative and collaborative life, and a society is sound to the extent that it fosters participation as its principal value and purpose. Burke argued emphatically in the first edition of P&C that communism is the system most conducive to communal cooperation, to “an art of living” (66). As this outline suggests, the book has a tremendous scope. Part rhetorical theory, part psychology, part philosophy, part sociology, part cultural criticism, part ethics, part political tract, it has defied easy categorization and often proves a difficult text for readers to handle. Burke’s friend poet James Daly described P&C as “a book whose violent reasonableness is . . . charged with crystalline densities, luminous bafflements and circuitous short-cuts. . . . (Obfuscation by congruity?)” (19 Feb. 1935). Why, then, take up P&C? In an introduction added to the 1965 reprint of the second edition, Hugh Dalziel Duncan maintains that readers interested in studying Burke should start with P&C: “Burke must be read as a whole; it is impossible to understand what he says about language without knowing what he says about society. It is because of this that Permanence and Change serves as an introduction to all of Burke. For here in this book he talks about the reciprocal effects of language and society” (xliv). Agreed: P&C serves as an excellent introduction to Burke. If, as Greg Clark asserts, “the primary lesson that Burke’s work on rhetoric has to teach” is that “the experience of the rhetorical is much more pervasive and penetrating in our lives than we think it is” (“Aesthetic Power” 106), then the place where Burke first teaches us that is P&C. Certainly, as Clark demonstrates so eloquently in Civic Jazz, the theory of aesthetic form Burke introduced in Counter-Statement (form as the creation and fulfillment of audience expectations) offers great explanatory power in understanding how people are moved by the rhetorical experience of the aesthetic, but it is in P&C where Burke made the claims fundamental to his life’s work: • •

• • • •

that all language and texts are rhetorical, embedded in and laden with ideology; that humans understand themselves and their worlds via interpretative networks that are constituted by social exchange and are thus rhetorical, embodied, and experienced; that individual and collective identities are rhetorically—and mutually—constituted; that such identity creation and transformation involve psychic, bodily, and material pieties that resist change; that some of the most powerful rhetorical effects are created at the micro level, without an identifiable agent or deliberate persuasive intent; that because humans are by nature embodied symbol users, their central purpose is to build participatory communities that value and perform

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both collaborative composition and revision as well as incisive critical practices. Burke’s theory in P&C is also stunningly interdisciplinary, drawing upon not only history, literature, sociology, psychology, and anthropology but also cuttingedge scientific research in optical science, endocrinology, biology, astrophysics, and neurophysiology. Consequently it is broadly applicable. In a stroke Burke authorized or laid groundwork for cultural studies, rhetoric of science, materialist rhetorics, and rhetorics of the body, to name a few. Indeed, as Timothy Crusius observes, “One cannot take the rhetorical turn any further or more seriously than Burke had already taken it by 1935” (460). The theory and critical methodologies Burke presented in P&C have tremendous range and power: for him rhetorical processes are the fundamental building blocks of our selves and our experience of the world, and he offered unparalleled means with which to articulate, analyze, and take the measure of those processes. In fact, given P&C’s scope and sophistication, one of A Critical Companion’s central arguments is that Duncan’s claim does not go far enough: P&C does more than introduce readers to Burkean theory; it introduces us to modern rhetorical studies. P&C, I contend, is the foundational text for modern rhetoric and, in particular, for the twentieth-century body of theory called New Rhetoric. That is, as Burke developed his critical civic pedagogy—as he worked to theorize the rhetorical and ethical practices that would “properly equip[]” Americans to enact the “good life”—he constituted an agenda for New Rhetoric, profoundly reshaping existing definitions of what counts as rhetoric and how and why to study it. It is precisely this dual nature of P&C—theoretical and methodological innovation yoked to, or even in the service of, a civic pedagogy for cultural reorientation—that makes it both a landmark in the history of rhetoric and yet still so provocative and relevant today. What this means is that if we read P&C only for the rhetorical theory and methods—if we strip the rhetorical apparatus away from the civic mission it was designed to enable, if we scorn the attempt to become “a propounder of new meanings” (272) and to embody an art of living—we cut out the beating heart of the book. We should take up P&C, then, I argue, for two reasons. First, because, as the earlier historical overview suggests, Burke’s world is very much still our world; the problems he addressed in the 1930s are, heartbreakingly, still very much our problems. Second, because P&C changed how rhetoricians approach the study of human symbol use and showed readers how to reshape the terms in which they understand themselves and their experience. In other words P&C gets us— readers and rhetoricians—to think beyond narrowly defined occupational concerns, “to thinking in terms of [the civic] health [and] happiness” that Burke called the art of living.

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P&C as a New Rhetoric f o r C i v i c P e da g o g y So what does it mean to define P&C as a New Rhetorical text that functions as a critical civic pedagogy? I explore this question in depth in the conclusion, but here I briefly give an overview of New Rhetoric, then outline how identifying P&C as a New Rhetoric highlights four aspects that I argue are central to understanding the book and that drive A Critical Companion’s analysis: (1) an antiviolence agenda that Burke later called the purification of war, (2) an insistence on the primacy of human symbol use and the social production of knowledge over and against positivism, (3) a greatly expanded scope for rhetoric that stresses the importance of epideictic rhetoric—the arena of community values and identity construction—and (4) an attempt to define an antifoundational ethics. Finally I show how the concerns of New Rhetoric, in Burke’s hands, feed into—indeed, constitute—a critical pedagogy and discuss P&C as a kind of civic tutorial as Burke models throughout the book the critical methods he theorizes. To call P&C a “New Rhetoric” that functions as a critical civic pedagogy means that rhetorical study, as Burke defined it, is not just about communication per se but also fundamentally concerns the imperative to use and teach communication in ways that foster cooperative enterprise. As Clark maintains, Burke offered “a rationale and method for a kind of civic interaction that would counter a practice of American civic life” characterized by “the ‘manipulation of men’s beliefs for political ends’ [RM 33]” (Civic Jazz 89; emphasis added). I have dubbed twentieth-century New Rhetoric, which spanned roughly the 1930s to the mid-1970s, “save-the-world rhetoric” because it constituted a body of psychologically sophisticated, dialogic, antifoundational rhetorical theories designed to counter increasing international tensions and the cultural dominance of positivism as well as the loss of moral certainty following World War I —a sense of crisis the Depression brought to a fever pitch. In other words the project of New Rhetoric intensified but was not, as commonly understood, called into being by World War II and the onset of the nuclear age and the Cold War. For instance when discussing Burke’s contribution to New Rhetoric, scholars (Crusius is a notable exception) typically point to his wartime and post–World War II books Grammar of Motives (1945) and Rhetoric of Motives (1950). However, New Rhetoric is more properly dated to the early to mid-1930s, when Burke, I. A. Richards, and, soon after, Susanne Langer went to work explaining how human experience is mediated through symbols and, in so doing, challenged the prevailing positivist mentality and greatly expanded the scope of the rhetorical. In addition to Burke, Richards, and Langer, its major contributors include Wayne Booth; Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca; Richard Weaver; and Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike. Together these theorists

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reinvigorated, updated, and/or revised classical rhetoric, which they often saw as too agonistic or too rationalist or too limited in scope to handle effectively the dangerous, fractured, mass-mediated world they lived in. To talk about P&C as New Rhetoric is to reassert the rhetorical nature of theory by foregrounding how cultural conversations and exigencies motivate theoretical acts. In other words reading P&C as New Rhetoric foregrounds how well it is fitted to the times—how fully Burke addresses felt civic, cultural, epistemological, psychological, and ethical needs—and to appreciate the enormity of his undertaking. To talk about it as New Rhetorical critical pedagogy is to argue for its continued relevance today. P&C’s Antiviolence Agenda Like other New Rhetoricians, Burke was appalled at the seemingly endless destruction unfolding around him and so designed a rhetorical theory he hoped would lead to communal cooperation. When he says that P&C was written in a time when things were falling apart, I have, until recently, understood that primarily as a reference to the Great Depression. But studying Burke’s planning notes for P&C, I was struck by his repeated articulation of war as the central exigency for the book. Burke saw a culture saturated with violence, saw the language of war written into the fundamental stories people told themselves: in definitions of humans as inherently aggressive, in scientific and social Darwinism, in capitalist competition and class struggle, in vocabularies of heroism and moral outrage, and, of course, in the seeming inevitability of a second world war. Metabiology, Burke’s notes indicate, was initially developed to counter this cult of violence. Hence, I argue that P&C, like A Grammar of Motives, should be read as an effort toward what Burke called the purification of war—a rechanneling rather than elimination of aggression. Here, as Greg Clark observes, is “the essence of Burke’s civic project: to teach people how to render their conflicts productive rather than destructive” (Civic Jazz 63). P&C’s Antipositivism While for New Rhetoricians violence constituted a singular, existential threat to humanity, positivism seemed only slightly less menacing, especially because it was so often hailed as the solution for, rather than the cause of, many of the world’s ills. These theorists railed against narrowly defined rationality and against understandings of knowledge limited to what is scientifically verifiable and the resulting refusal to value anything outside that realm. Burke’s lifelong struggle against positivism and its dangerous progeny, technology and capitalism, is well documented. In his book notes, he critiqued at length the dehumanizing effects of positivist ideology and the psychic devastation wrought by commodification, the machine, and “technological man.” In P&C Burke rarely discusses positivism

14 Introduction

explicitly; rather he decries mechanization, utilitarianism, the widespread assumption that science constitutes a neutral, objective realm that produces the only true knowledge, and science applied as the sole means to fathom what it never fully can—the human heart and mind. To counter positivism Burke and other New Rhetoricians argued for the centrality of human symbol use; they insisted that humans create and interpret their understandings of themselves and their world through symbols. It follows that all knowledge, including science, is socially constructed. P&C’s Expanded Realm of Rhetoric: Epideictic If, as New Rhetoricians argued, all meaning is constructed through symbol use (rather than, say, discovered in nature or the lab), then the realm of rhetoric has been utterly expanded to include just about everything that we know, feel, and do. Our experience of the world, Burke and the others asserted, is mediated through symbols; in short, experience is itself rhetorical. That is a game-changer worth pondering. As Burke later asks, Can we bring ourselves to realize just how overwhelmingly much of what we mean by “reality” has been built up for us through nothing but our symbol systems? Take away our books [or Internet] and what little do we know about history, biography, even something so “down to earth” as the relative position of seas and continents? What is our “reality” for today (beyond the paper-thin line of our own particular lives) but all this clutter of symbols about the past, combined with whatever things we know mainly through maps, magazines, newspapers, and the like about the present? . . . And however important to us is the tiny sliver of reality each of us has experienced firsthand, the whole overall “picture” is but a construct of our symbol systems. To meditate on this fact until one sees its full implications is much like peering over the edge of things into an ultimate abyss. (LSA 5) New Rhetoric texts, and P&C in particular, were designed to reveal and explore the implications of the fact that the way we think (the terms we use, the ways we sort and interpret experience) and what we value are not natural or universal essences but are rhetorically constituted. This view of New Rhetoric as a movement that expanded the scope of rhetoric is familiar to scholars, but what has not been said (or not said enough) is that, by foregrounding constitutive rhetoric and the social construction of knowledge, New Rhetoric’s expansion was largely in the theory and criticism of epideictic rhetoric. Indeed I maintain that New Rhetoric carved out epideictic as its special domain—and that P&C stands as a stunning, and perhaps the earliest, modern rearticulation of epideictic theory.

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For Aristotle (to temporarily oversimplify), epideictic was the ceremonial rhetoric of praise and blame (think eulogies, graduation speeches, inaugural addresses). Today’s rhetoricians typically define epideictic more broadly, as Jeffrey Walker, following Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, does by identifying it as “that which shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives” (9). When understood this way, it is clear that epideictic rhetoric is precisely what Burke investigates through his analysis of how orientations, as interpretive networks, train people to accept certain ways of knowing and judging experience. Note, for example, how closely Burke’s definition of orientation as “the entire scheme of judgments as to what people ought to do, how they proved themselves worthy, on what grounds they could expect good treatment, what good treatment was” resembles Walker’s definition of epideictic (P&C 25). By analyzing the creation, maintenance, and disruption of cultural value systems, naming and categories, language as a force of social cohesion or disruption, and piety and impiety (which are, after all, simply another way to say praise and blame), Burke claimed the vast realm of epideictic for rhetorical inquiry. It is important to note that Burke’s epideictic is not necessarily intentional or the product of a specific agent: we cannot identify any one individual who created the rhetoric of the American Dream, but no one doubts its power in shaping American culture. Indeed Burke marked epideictic as the realm in which the most important enculturation occurs. “The truly effective work,” he asserted in 1937, “is not done by some crude blast in an editorial by Hearst” but through the “merest commonplaces of language” that shape us unawares (“Reading While You Run” 37, 36). Hence I argue that in P&C Burke proved himself to be an epideictic theorist extraordinaire for mass-mediated society. P&C as a Postmodern Ethics Burke and other New Rhetoricians typically saw their culture as morally bankrupt (saturated with positivism) or morally adrift (dislocated by war and financial turmoil, disillusioned by World War I’s shattering of ideals and faith). Thus Crusius rightly observes that a central question for Burke in P&C—and, I would add, for most New Rhetoricians (though not Weaver)—was this: “in the absence of foundations, without master narratives or theoretical certainty, can we live meaningfully?” (456). In other words is it possible to theorize ethical grounds for humane social interactions—those that allow people to reason together well and to sustain thriving communities—without resorting to some sort of absolute truth (religion, science, Marxist dialectical materialism, etc.), either because no such truth exists or because people cannot agree on which truth is “real”? New Rhetoricians generally said yes: humans can, in Crusius’s words, “drop the foundationalist aspiration; we can cease doing metaphysics . . . and yet continue

16

Introduction

to create philosophies” (454)—Langer’s philosophy in a new key, for instance, or Booth’s rhetoric of assent. Burke’s answer was also clearly yes: in P&C he creates “a ‘workable’ ethics” (metabiology) and articulates a vision of “the good life” (poetic orientation and the art of living). P&C as Critical Civic Pedagogy New Rhetoric, then, developed in response to an era of unchecked violence and positivism, attempting to reorient culture by redefining humans as symbol users who, by collaboratively composing inclusive communities, fulfill their inherent purpose. Like most traditional rhetoric billed as education for citizenship, New Rhetoric has a significant pedagogical bent: many of its theorists were university professors; two central New Rhetoric texts were originally presented as academic lectures (Richards’s 1936 Philosophy of Rhetoric at Bryn Mawr College and Booth’s 1974 Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent at the University of Notre Dame) and another (Young, Becker, and Pike’s 1970 Rhetoric: Discovery and Change) as a groundbreaking composition textbook. Burke, too, thought of himself as a teacher long before he stepped into the college classroom. As his P&C notes and his musings on the New State magazine indicate, however, he self-identified primarily as a public intellectual, engaged in a program of “adult education” (“Approaches to Project” n. pag.) that aligned him with critical pedagogy, although Burke scholars have been oddly reluctant to categorize him as such. Although critical pedagogy has roots in early twentieth-century progressive education, the radical pedagogies theorized and practiced today in education departments and in rhetoric and composition programs are most directly inspired by Brazilian literacy educator Paulo Freire, whose 1970 Pedagogy of the Oppressed prompts teachers to help students develop both conscientização, or critical consciousness—the ability to identify and analyze the economic, political, and cultural forces that shape their lives—and the tools to challenge the status quo. Initially American critical pedagogies focused on the unequal power relations and capitalist ideology built into public education, but more recently critical pedagogues such as Henry Giroux, arguably the foremost American theorist of radical education, have broadened their scope to include a culturalstudies-style critique of America’s mass-mediated “public pedagogy” of neoliberalism and militarism (“Public Pedagogy” 14). Like critical pedagogy, the New Rhetoric Burke developed in P&C aims to create a citizenry “properly equipped” to work against such public pedagogy: to awaken them to the violence and dehumanization surrounding them; to enable them to analyze and question cultural pieties, understanding the constitutive power of epideictic rhetoric and imagining alternative perspectives; and to instill in them a vision of, and ethical commitment to, civic well-being. In short, like critical pedagogies P&C hopes to inspire Americans to assume the responsibility

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for collectively re-creating public life. What makes P&C such a stellar critical pedagogy is that Burke, as Duncan argues, “is a methodologist seeking always to develop tools for demonstrating the effect of symbols on human motivation” (xiv). In P&C Burke presented culture as a text to be read and developed a critical vocabulary (orientation, piety, perspective by incongruity, metabiology, etc.) with which to interpret and evaluate it. It is important to note, however, that he took his critical civic pedagogy one step further: he spent a good deal of time modeling the critical and rhetorical methods he theorized. He enacted cultural critiques via perspective by incongruity, demonstrated the rhetorical power of graded series and stylistic ingratiation, and tutored readers in the workings of recalcitrance. Method olo gy: Archives as Equipment for Criticism The primary purpose of A Critical Companion is to illuminate the arguments, methodologies, and pedagogy Burke advanced in P&C, but in light of Burke’s own emphasis on methodology and knowledge construction, a second and nonetheless vital purpose is to account for how I came to the understanding of P&C outlined above—to reflect upon, theorize, and illustrate how my archival research reshaped the terms through which I read P&C. The first “historian” to consult Burke’s archives was quite likely Burke himself, when, preparing to write his vaguely autobiographical novel Towards a Better Life in June 1931, Burke asked his friend Cowley to return his early letters: “I am interested in looking over my story,” Burke wrote, “to see whither I am, or was, going” (P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 193). Two years later, while writing Exile’s Return, his memoir of the literary “Lost Generation” (including Burke), Cowley asked for those letters back, and Burke agreed, as long as Cowley promised to return them: “They are most useful to me,” he explained, “in that they provide something which seems to me an unending source of marvel: documents for revealing the discrepancy between what one once deemed important and what one now remembers. My forgettery being the most distinctive thing I have, I am eternally entranced by its workings” (P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 205). As I argue throughout this book, archives enable scholars to recognize, inquire into, and diminish our own “forgettery”—to become curious about the gap between Burkean lore and Burke’s (and his contemporaries’) vast documentation of his life and work. Moreover, in A Critical Companion I use what I call archival interventions not only to expand and complicate traditional understandings of P&C and Burke but also to offer a compelling case for the archive more generally as a powerful site for re-creating, redefining, and remapping the cultural work of theory and the agents who produce it.

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In what follows I analyze current historiographic theory and reflect upon archival learning in general and my own practices in particular. Because archival research, in and of itself, is not a research method any more than library research is (the archive or library being an inquiry site rather than a methodology), I begin by introducing the feminist rhetorical research methodology I employed—Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch’s strategic contemplation— and the new histories I created using it: archival interventions. Second, I briefly preview my work with Burkean archives in light of historiographic theory. Finally I problematize recent characterizations of archival study as largely serendipitous, emphasizing instead the constructed nature of archival histories and the need for researchers to acknowledge inevitable, unserendipitous archival breakdowns. Strategic Contemplation and Archival Interventions As a feminist rhetorical inquiry tool, Royster and Kirsch’s strategic contemplation encourages “researchers . . . to stop for a time and think multidirectionally . . . not just about the subject of study but also about themselves as the agents in the process, as well as about the process itself, that is, what is going on in the studying” (86). It prompts scholars to attend to “how they process, imagine, and work with materials” (85), including their embodied, affective responses to those materials. Performance studies scholar Helen Freshwater warns researchers to resist the archive’s “voyeuristic” (735), “insidious” (737), and “seductive charms” (729) and “the subtle arousal experienced upon immersion in the archive” (735). But what Freshwater, following Benjamin and Derrida, sees as “the distorting, destructive pressures of ‘Archive Fever’” (740), Royster and Kirsch see as a powerful resource to be tapped for its potential to make visible unsuspected meaning and significance. Strategic contemplation is a particularly fitting historiographic approach to Burke’s archives, because it so closely connects to and formalizes his own habit of “ceaseless indwelling” in ideas and texts (CS 118) and taking into account “all that is there to use” (PLF 23). Debra Hawhee observes that Burke embraced a “counter-efficient style of scholarship” (Moving Bodies 74)—an approach that is not inefficient but that runs counter to Taylor’s scientific management and assembly-line thinking. Though not as insistently interdisciplinary as Burke’s approach, strategic contemplation nonetheless describes “a recursive practice of thinking, writing, thinking, writing, thinking as the research spirals towards ever more fully rendered understandings and intellectual insights,” helping scholars “look beyond typically anointed assumptions in the field in anticipation of the possibility of seeing something not previously noticed or considered” (Royster and Kirsch 86, 72). As such it aligns well with Burke’s “ever-complicated, multidirectional, extended, mystically open and thorough consideration of the subject

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at hand, which produces . . . unfamiliar, sometimes strange ways to formulate a situation” (Hawhee, Moving Bodies 58). Strategic contemplation was essential to my creation of the curious, sometimes startling, always revelatory stories that constitute what I call archival interventions. The archival interventions in A Critical Companion highlight my belief in the epistemological power of archival methods to produce provocative perspectives by incongruity that disrupt conventional, often unexamined or unsupported, assumptions about Burke’s goals, methods, and texts. Archives encourage scholars to reimagine what we might be curious about and other questions we might ask, to reconsider which Burkean documents and activities we might productively study. My archival interventions demonstrate the value of archival material to provide more perspectives or lenses through which to understand and engage with Burke. I seek to multiply, complicate, and humanize scholars’ representations of Burke—to offer fuller, often unfamiliar accounts of his acts, to create a “3-D” Burke. Specifically I argue for the value of representing Burke as a civic-minded, engaged, and deliberate writer, who responded to public exigencies as a critical educator and hence paid careful attention to the rhetoric of his rhetorical theory. It follows that the Burke I present in these pages did not build theory for theory’s sake; he built theory for everyday use. Burke’s plans for the New State magazine and the “Men of Leisure” documents I examine in chapter 4 exemplify his understanding of theory as cultural and pedagogical intervention —theory as equipment for living. My archival interventions, then, reemphasize rhetoric’s function as social engagement. A Note on Using Burke’s Archives “The main ideal of criticism,” Burke famously argues in Philosophy of Literary Form, “is to use all that is there to use.” Indeed he “consider[ed] it a kind of vandalism” not to take full advantage of all available resources (23). The folders that make up the Kenneth Burke Papers at Penn State were largely created, arranged, and maintained by Burke himself (with help from his second wife, Libbie, and his son Anthony)—a working archive that he used regularly. The amazing archival equipment Burke bequeathed scholars enables us not only to study his life and works but to do so using Burkean methods: historicizing, rhetoricizing, using everything. Although Burke stopped short of claiming that critics must bring in outside information to understand texts, he did claim that using all there is to use gives critics the necessary tools to discuss “the full nature of [an] act” (PLF 73). Two caveats are in order, however. First, using all there is to use in Burke’s case is a daunting task. The archives help scholars reimagine how and what to study (correspondence; notes and drafts of speeches, reviews, articles, poems, fiction, and books; unpublished manuscripts; teaching notes and student papers;

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photographs; clipping files; music journals; his personal library; etc.), but the Burke Papers at Penn State alone, the largest institutional collection, contains more than fifty-five linear feet of documents spanning the years 1906 to 1993 (the year of Burke’s death).3 And Penn State is only one of many sites that house Burkean archival documents. Much material remains at Burke’s Andover home, and there are uncounted files of Burke’s correspondence and papers housed at archives nationwide, including the New York Public Library, the Newberry Library, Princeton, Yale, Syracuse, Stanford, and the University of Pennsylvania, among others—and including, no doubt, many sites yet to be discovered. It is a monumental amount of data, useful for any number of projects but also sometimes nearly useless because Burke’s working documents, unlike the correspondence, are often undated or unidentifiable or unreadable (his handwriting is execrable). The difficulty of securing copyright permissions can additionally hamper scholars’ ability to use—that is, to quote for publication—some particularly fascinating or illuminating archival documents, summary or paraphrase oftentimes proving wholly inadequate to capture the wit, spirit, or nuanced language of Burke’s correspondents.4 A second caveat concerns Burke’s attempt to account for an act’s “full nature.” Until fairly recently historians from many disciplines might have trusted archival records to authenticate just such complete accounts of past acts—to enable them to recount fully and objectively “what happened.” But in the wake of what Charles E. Morris calls the field’s “archival turn” (113), researchers in rhetoric and composition have begun to reflect more critically on their methodologies, acknowledging that archives cannot provide unmediated access to the past or authorize their attempts to re-create it. “History,” Barbara Biesecker insists, “is what is not in the archive, not in any archive, not even in all the archives added together” (127). Archival artifacts, however “real” or “true” they seem, cannot be treated “as material, given, able to speak for [themselves] with the authority of evidentiary status” (Morris 114); rather they function like all other kinds of data: they are selected and interpreted by particular agents, who—however carefully and thoughtfully they work—have their own agendas to advance. There is nothing necessarily scandalous about that. Rather, as Morris concludes, it simply acknowledges that “the archive . . . should rightly be understood not as a passive receptacle for historical documents and their ‘truths,’ or a benign research space, but rather as a dynamic site of rhetorical power” (115)—“as an invitation not to recovery or authentication, but rather to the art of persuasion” (114). And that is precisely the kind of invitation historians of rhetoric and students of Burke are best equipped to accept. As a novice archival researcher, I was motivated by a desire “to get Burke right” (Anderson and Enoch 4). But trying to get Burke “right,” like trying to explain the full nature of an act or use all the archival material available to use,

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is theoretically and practically impossible—and not, I have come to believe, the point of working in Burke’s archives. The real power of archival research is not to produce the accurate reading of, say, P&C but to open up Burke studies—to give scholars access to more texts, more versions of texts, more perspectives (and perspectives by incongruity) on Burke, more to work (and play) with. Hence, Selzer notes, “we treat the letters and documents in the archives as another set of Burkean texts, fully as authoritative and as worthy of analysis and interpretation (and fully as elusive and stimulating) as anything Burke ever published” (“Afterword” 216). Archival material gives scholars multiple P&Cs—or, at the very least, a multilayered text. Early P&C notes linking metabiology to purification of war, for instance, offer new ways of reading P&C. Hitherto unknown contemporary reviews of the volume allow scholars to reconsider traditional understandings of Burke’s reputation and impact. Following Burke’s dictum to use everything might prompt researchers not to study archival materials exhaustively but to value the mundane details (Osborne 54) and “merely” quirky stories and to ponder the cumulative insight produced by a series of short, unconnected documents. Thinking of Burke as a different kind of agent can yield different readings of P&C, and different readings of P&C encourage us to invent and argue for unfamiliar representations of Burke, creating a cycle of rediscovery and new invitations for persuasion. After Serendipity: Archival Construction and Breakdown The recent uptick in the amount of, and the academic prestige afforded to, archival research—as well as its traditional rituals—have lent it a nearly “sacral character” (Burton 5). Hence Dana Anderson and Jessica Enoch note the pious attitudes clinging to archival research as scholars undertake sometimes difficult and costly “pilgrimage[s]” (2) in an “act of faith” (3) that they are following the one true path to knowledge, that the archives hold the answers they seek. Working in hushed rooms full of ornately bound books and rare manuscripts, heads bent in sober contemplation over carefully preserved and guarded texts, tends to “inspire a certain reverence” for the archive and its holdings (3). As Burke would say, it is tempting to make an “altar” of archival work—to become, as archaeological theorist Michael Shanks observes, “captivat[ed] by the consecrated object” (qtd. in Freshwater 735). Attempting, perhaps, to offset the archive’s devotional aura, two recent collections on archival research emphatically note the role of serendipity in successful archival work. Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan’s suspicion that archival scholars might “censor” unmethodical—and hence, profane—practices leads them to foreground, in their introduction to Beyond the Archives, aspects of archival work that “seem merely intuitive, coincidental, or serendipitous” (4). Employing

22

Introduction

strategic contemplation encourages researchers to acknowledge that it “helps to have serendipity on one’s side” (Kirsch 20). Thus Lori Ostergaard tells “seven tales of serendipity” (40), asking interviewees to “discuss their more serendipitous moments in the archives” (40). The researchers in these collections recount “serendipitous,” “golden moments” (Gold 42). They “stumbl[e]” into archives,” “discover[ing] research areas serendipitously” (Mastrangelo and L’Eplattenier 163, 162); they “quite by chance” “happen[] upon” (Sutherland 29; Gaillet 149) research sites and caches of eighteenth-century letters; make “fortunate connections” (Buchanan 253) and “accidental discoveries” (Gold 43); follow a “hunch” (Gaillet 150; Mortensen 47; N. Johnson, “Autobiography” 290). It is the “unexpected find,” observes Lynée Lewis Gaillet, the “instances of serendipity . . . just being in the right place at the right time,” that she considers her most “excit[ing]” and most professionally rewarding archival experiences (150–51). Nan Johnson agrees with “most archival scholars . . . that there is a great deal of serendipity in archival research” (“Autobiography” 291). I concur. Paradoxically, though, these stories of serendipity, intended to push back against traditional notions of scholarly devotion, of researchers’ meticulous planning, scientific precision, and intellectual detachment, may also reinforce both the devotional nature of archival work and the positivist assumption that archival artifacts provide unquestionable grounding for historical claims: accounts of the accidental “big find” imply that meaning and value inhere in the artifact itself. Treating archival research as a treasure hunt obscures, first of all, what Thomas Osborne calls “the explanatory relevance of the mundane” (59). Archival methodologies that celebrate primarily discoveries of the oldest, rarest, most complete—in short, the extraordinary—undervalue the usefulness of the ordinary artifact. Finding a letter in Burke’s correspondence files from an average guy in Montana who admired P&C is unlikely to strike researchers as a big score or even especially noteworthy. But combining such fan mail with other rather routine documents—say, a report from Burke’s editor that Macy’s sold five copies of P&C—encourages scholars to recalibrate their sense of Burke’s audience and of what counts as valuable information. As Osborne maintains, the archive promotes “a style of memory that contains within itself the assumption that the everyday is a particularly revealing level on which to pose the question of memory” (59). Indeed, Osborne argues, “that we can see the import of the everyday . . . is itself an effect of archivality” (60). Second, tales of serendipity, perhaps unwittingly, also suggest that finding inherently interesting or valuable archival documents is the central part of the archival research process and, hence, that the researchers’ role is merely to present what she has found: a document that speaks for itself. But just as “history is not merely a project of fact-retrieval” (Burton 7), archival research is not merely document retrieval. Finding useful archival material (useful for whom and for

Introduction

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what purposes?) is often not the hardest and rarely the first or final stage of archival work. Jean Pfaelzer’s concept “informed serendipity” (141; emphasis added) —the archival scholar’s equivalent of “the more you practice, the ‘luckier’ you get”—reminds readers that it can take years of study before the researcher knows enough to recognize an item’s potential value. The process of archival research, in other words, typically begins before she or he even enters the archive. Overemphasizing serendipity also masks the crucial work that goes on after leaving the archive, for it is the story the researcher tells—what she or he does with the material rather than “the find” per se—that makes for useful research. Hence Gaillet notes that even though her hunch enabled her to “str[ike] gold” in the archives, ideas about how to use or interpret what she found often emerge only after she has had “time to mull over [her] finds” (150). In other words it is what happens after the find that matters most. “It is never,” Osborne insists, “a matter of just revealing a given truth that is to be found [in the archive]” (55). “The archive is like a raw material, which is not the same as saying that it is an originary material or an unworked-upon material” (Osborne 57). Assigning meaning and values to archival artifacts—determining where, how, and for what purpose to use them—takes all a scholar’s imagination, insight, and rhetorical skill. I spent four years constructing the “Men of Leisure” story and seven on the account of Burke’s writing process presented in chapter 4. Finding archival material to study, Anderson and Enoch conclude, is not “the end of interpretation, but . . . one more beginning” (6). If, then, it is essential to acknowledge archival researchers’ agency in making meaning—to foreground what happens before and after serendipity—we might do so in two ways. First, as Dave Tell has argued, archives are not found; they are created by researchers—an act that profoundly affects the histories scholars construct. Burke largely created the archive housed at Penn State, which is curated by an expert staff, but I created—and I curate—my own Burkean archive in my Fort Worth study that consists of roughly three linear feet of documents stored in binders and file cabinets of color-coded folders and, now, a Dropbox of several thousand digital scans. My archival collection contains correspondence and Burke’s working materials from P&C, primarily from the 1930s and the early 1950s—documents I have amassed from nearly a dozen institutional archives, mainly on the Eastern Seaboard. Unlike Tell’s digitized, searchable archive, mine consists largely of photocopied documents bearing highlighting, handwritten marginalia, colored sticky notes, and some cross-references. Once embarrassed by my low-tech curation, I have recently come to appreciate its significance in my process. My archive encourages relatively “inefficient,” or strategically counterefficient, research in the form of slow, recursive reading; it encourages visual recall of the page, succumbs to spotty memory, and produces panic when I fail to return pages to their folders. In other words the knowledge I create and the

24

Introduction

archival stories I tell have everything to do with the way I store, organize, label, and use my archival collection. Similarly in “Autobiography of an Archivist,” Nan Johnson recalls “visit[ing] the archive of [her] own for the first time” (292)—that is, the archive she initially collected and arranged in boxes on her study sofa. When she insists upon “the heuristic force of the archival” (296), Johnson refers not only to insight provided by information available in archival documents; she more particularly refers to insight gained by physically manipulating her collection. She explains how sorting materials into subcollections that she stacked on the floor in a giant “Archival Wheel” enabled her to look “at all the ‘collections’ in [her] archive with new eyes” (296). She suddenly saw patterns and interrelationships that had long eluded her. “Acts of collecting and the formation of the collection,” she concludes, “epistemologically constructed [her] argument” (294). A second form of researchers’ agency in making meaning is, of course, shaping archival artifacts into certain kinds of knowledge or arguments and assigning them value. For instance, since archival correspondence is normally housed with the papers of the letter recipient rather than the letter writer, many of Burke’s correspondence files at Penn State contain only letters others wrote to him, leaving the archival researcher in the position of attempting to reconstruct an epistolary dialogue, imagining what Burke might have said to provoke letter writers’ comments or how he might have responded. In the archival intervention presented in chapter 5, I explore some of these epistolary gaps—places where letters stop or places beyond which my imagination cannot reach. For, as Hawhee reminds us, researchers’ attempts to construct archival histories lead, almost inevitably, to decidedly unserendipitous collapses and maddening dead ends. Although many researchers experience archives as sites of serendipity, they are also, Hawhee asserts, “records of breakdown and failure. . . . Archives are furtive things. They blurt and withhold; they offer information that directs, redirects, perplexes” (“Historiography” 197). Hawhee thus argues for scholars to practice “historiography by incongruity,” to complicate “tidy narratives” by acknowledging “the necessarily messy, incomplete, surprising, and often stubbornly befuddling nature of archival work” (198). Chapter 5 presents one such historiography, the story of my mostly failed attempt to understand Burke’s advocacy for communism in the first edition of P&C and its subsequent deletion in the second. Ov e rv i e w o f T h i s Vo lu m e This critical companion, which capitalizes on nearly twenty years of study, offers a sustained exploration of P&C’s development, theoretical arguments, critical methodologies, and civic pedagogy. It is designed to offer simultaneously fundamental guidance for readers new to Burke and added insight for experienced

Introduction

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Burkeans through a thorough discussion of P&C’s concepts and argument, often via analysis of Burke’s understudied book notes and letters. A Critical Companion’s primary goal is not historicizing or contextualizing; while attentive to P&C’s cultural scene, this volume foregrounds how the book’s New Rhetorical theory functions as a civic pedagogy that is as applicable now as it was in the 1930s. It also features theorized reflections on the archival practices that enabled this reading of P&C. The book, then, is divided into two parts: “Translating Burkean Terms,” which elucidates P&C’s argument and purpose through careful consideration of key concepts, and “Archival Interventions,” which examines P&C’s production and contemporary reception in order to complicate conventional readings of both P&C and Burke. However, the parts share two common elements. First, both draw upon a wealth of archival material, albeit for different purposes. The archival documents introduced in part 1 directly illuminate P&C’s argument; in part 2 they engage, in a less direct but no less revealing manner, the book’s central concerns by exploring conventional scholarly orientations and methodological pieties in our representations of P&C. Second, both parts further the core claim that P&C’s significance lies in its dual nature as New Rhetorical theory and critical, civic pedagogy. Together these two parts reframe P&C as a project of civic engagement and Burke as a public intellectual.

Part I Translating Burkean Terms

One Pieties, Perspectives, and Incongruities Such considerations take us from the realm of social engineering pure and simple, into the realm of psychology, where the non-rational factors in human conduct necessarily loom large. Burke, “Foreword [b]” 5

Burke’s penchant for coining peculiar or hard-to-pronounce terms is well known; readers often find them by turns intimidating or ridiculous. It is helpful to keep a few things in mind when dealing with Burke’s vocabulary. First, Burke took his terms seriously, but part of that seriousness meant acknowledging, even embracing, their inherent ambiguity. His terms, that is, often do not—and are not meant to—stand still. In addition some of these terms were not Burke’s creations but circulated in Depression-era culture and, hence, were familiar to contemporary readers. That having been said, his terminology often is strange, because the critical vocabulary he needed to address the knotty rhetorical and psychosocial problems of radical social change largely did not exist; hence part of his task in developing P&C was to find or invent a vocabulary that both prompted and named the new insights and tools with which to theorize and enact change. Given this goal, he needed terms for these interrelated concepts, structures, and processes: 1. individual and collective identity formation and the interrelationship of those two (psychosocial behavior), particularly how people make sense of experience and why they resist change (in other words, how ideologies are maintained): orientation, piety, trained incapacity, technological psychosis; 2. cultural transformation—specifically a critical methodology and rhetorical strategies to foster social change: perspective by incongruity, graded series, translation; 3. a definition of the “good life”—the goal of social change, a restorative orientation to replace the existing one: poetic orientation, art of living, recalcitrance; 29

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Part I. Translating Burkean Terms

4. an ethical system to authorize the proposed new orientation: metabiology, philosophy of being, philosophy of becoming. For Burke piety is a central means of identity formation; indeed he argued that the power of piety is the primary rhetorical problem that activist rhetors face, because it both blinds citizens to the need for change and creates such stubborn resistance to it that people hold onto their pieties long after they have outlived their usefulness (the condition Burke labeled trained incapacity). Perspective by incongruity was Burke’s answer to the rhetorical problems of piety and trained incapacity—an overarching term for a series of critical methodologies and rhetorical strategies designed to overcome pious resistance to social change. Burke’s development of piety and perspective by incongruity, I argue, marked a major advance in rhetorical theory by offering critics and rhetors sophisticated tools with which to analyze individual and cultural stagnation and to promote radical change. For Depression-era leftist critics attempting to persuade Americans to embrace wide-scale cultural reorientation, a central problem was figuring out why people—individually and collectively—clung to a way of life (capitalism) that was so obviously (at least to Burke and many others across the political spectrum) unjust, unhealthy, and just plain unworkable. Orientation and piety were Burke’s answers to that question, and, as such, they are pivotal terms in the cultural criticism and revolutionary project he articulates in P&C. Indeed analyzing orientations and pieties—how they form, how (or why) they cohere or crack, how they might be changed—is one of the book’s central concerns. Before I examine orientation and piety individually, let me briefly explain their interrelationship. Because orientation and piety are both terms that Burke used to denote a way of “reading” the world—a perspective or interpretive lens that provides values, motives, and goals (that tells us what to do and why)—the terms necessarily overlap. Hence Burke defines orientation as a “conception as to how the world is put together” (81)—a “framework of interpretation” (35) through which people view and process experience. Piety, which Burke secularizes beyond the religious realm to include the entire range of human behavior, is similarly defined as a set of “linkages” that brings “all the significant details of the day into coordination, relating them integrally with one another by a complex interpretative network” (75). The two terms are clearly bound together in Burke’s mind: in an early draft of part 1, for instance, Burke writes that “piety, orientation, interpretation are now intermingled concepts” (ROP 9); similarly, he claims, “piety is very much the same as orientation. It is a Weltanschauung as observable in one’s conduct” (ROP 7). Sometimes he even defined them in terms of each other, as when he discusses piety as “a schema of orientation, since it involves the putting together of experiences” (P&C 76).

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So why did Burke need two terms that can seem interchangeable? Although he often defined them similarly, as Burke typically uses them in P&C, he emphasizes their difference in scope and affective dimension, differences that have much to do with their function in Burke’s argument—and in culture. Burke typically talked about orientation as an interpretive lens functioning at a macrolevel. Ideology is a fairly close synonym,1 but he most often used orientation as a broad term, denoting a Weltanshauung or zeitgeist or, as Phillip K. Tompkins notes, a Kuhnian paradigm (124–25)—a perspective so large that Burke, following James Frazer’s The Golden Bough, found only three in all of recorded history: magic, religion, and science. He discusses piety, however, primarily at the personal level: drawing from George Santayana, he initially defines it as “loyalty to the sources of our being”—the traditions we have grown up with or grown into (71). Although people in the same society share some pieties—gender roles, loyalty to a local sports team, professional behavior—piety is composed, felt, and enacted by individuals through the choices, both conscious and unconscious, they make. Hence Burke notes in the second edition that “we might now describe P&C dialectics-wise as an individual’s approach to motives in terms of the collectivity” (274n; emphasis added). Taken together, then, piety and orientation might be thought of as a set of concentric circles of identify formation—individual, family, community, nation, race, economic system—that are connected and interactive, with influence moving in both directions to form a web or network of interpretative systems. People have individual pieties, but those are formed within and constrained by larger, cultural pieties such as etiquette, nationalism, and gender roles.2 However frustrating this blurring may be for readers, it is part of Burke’s point: it reflects his understanding that no sharp line can be drawn between the individual and culture—that individual and collective identities are mutually constitutive. As Greg Clark explains, “Burke defined identity, both individual and collective, as ‘the complex of attitudes . . . that constitute the individual’s sense of orientation’ (P&C 309), an orientation that is itself ‘not individual’ (ATH 263) but shared among those with whom an individual lives” (“Child” 253).3 Three overarching points are important for readers to understand about orientation and piety: (1) they describe interpretative networks, providing a sophisticated reading of the interaction between individual and cultural identities that acknowledges ideological constraints yet leaves spaces for human agency; (2) they are embodied and experienced, not just mental constructs, and, as such, are exceedingly difficult to change; and (3) they are embedded in—even constituted by—language and social exchange and are thus rhetorical. Together these three factors account for the scope and power of Burke’s rhetorical theory: for him rhetorical processes are the fundamental building blocks of our selves and our

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Part I. Translating Burkean Terms

experience of the world, and he provided exceptional means with which to identify and analyze those processes. O r i e n tat i o n In part 1 Burke discusses the interpretative act (or criticism as he often calls it) in general and establishes the fact that humans interpret all experience through an orientation. For although advocating communism and a cooperative, participatory lifestyle was no easy feat, Burke faced a more fundamental, more formidable rhetorical task in P&C: convincing Depression-era readers, most of whom could be considered positivists or foundationalists, to accept his more postmodern epistemology. That is, before he could persuade readers to adopt a new orientation, he needed to persuade them that their current understandings of the world “are not realities, they are interpretations of reality—hence different frameworks of interpretation [i.e., different orientations]—will lead to different conclusions as to what reality is” (35). Thus he argues repeatedly in part 1 that “stimuli do not possess an absolute meaning. . . . Any given situation derives its character from the entire framework of interpretation by which we judge it” (35). “On Interpretation” explains how such a “framework of interpretation” functions—why we interpret as we do—and highlights a culture’s collective sense of how and what things mean. In other words Americans are not the independent thinkers they believe themselves to be: an orientation is a relatively stable cultural given that people are born into, and individual interpretations are formed within this overarching framework shared by others. Working with orientation at this macro-level also allowed Burke both to theorize the historical process of ideological transformation, in which each new orientation serves as the “philosophic corrective” to the existing one (61), and, ultimately, to justify his proposal for a new poetic orientation to replace the current scientific one.4 Burke asserted that an orientation defines humanity’s relationship to the universe. Hence in the three orientations identified by Frazer and Burke, the first, magic, emphasizes humans’ attempts to “control . . . natural forces” (59), to ensure bountiful harvests and ward off disease; the second, religion, stresses humans as supplicants, who serve God and beg his blessing; and the third, science, stresses “control of the . . . technological” (59) as humans “attempt to reshape [their] psychological patterns in obedience to the patterns of [their] machines” (63). As a systemic lens through which people view and process experience, an orientation shapes their knowledge, values, and behavior. Thus people understand human motivation in general via the explanations available to them within the existing orientation. Earlier cultures talked of fate or spirits or God’s will; in today’s scientific orientation, neuroscientists explain human responses by mapping electrical patterns in the brain.

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An orientation functions rhetorically in culture in much the same way as genre functions in texts. (Indeed one of P&C’s most significant innovations is Burke’s theorizing the idea of the social text.) As Carolyn Miller observes, “Genres help constitute the substance of our cultural life” (163). From genres people learn not only how (in what forms) to enter particular conversations or to achieve certain ends; they learn “what ends [they] may have” (165). In Miller’s understanding of genre, the motive to write or speak is never simply personal and never simply a reaction to a material event but rather is the result of the rhetor defining exigencies in terms made available by the culture; it is “a form of social knowledge—a mutual construing of objects, events, interests, and purposes that not only links them but also makes them what they are: an objectified social need” (157). Like genres, orientations “help constitute the substance of our cultural life” by providing more or less prepackaged forms of “social knowledge.” Like genres, orientations come with built-in epistemology, cosmology, assumptions about human nature and behavior, and judgments of the beautiful, the good, and the true. Genres and orientations authorize certain acts, subject matter, means of expression, and kinds of agents and agencies; they create the conditions for and constraints within which meaning is made. As Jane Blankenship, Edward Murphy, and Marie Rosenwasser explain, “Our orientation helps us ‘locate’ a situation, adopt a role with relation to it, ‘gauge’ our activities, derive a vocabulary of motives and thus implicit programs of action and attitudes” (6). Given Burke’s goal of reorienting American culture, he is particularly interested in understanding why people behave as they do and why they think they should behave this way—as individuals, members of society, and members of the human race. (After all, the book is subtitled “An Anatomy of Purpose.”) The rise of the social sciences during the early twentieth century brought forth a welter of competing explanations of human motives from Freudians, Marxists, and behaviorists, among others. Although each group claimed empirical proof for its theory, Burke argues adamantly that a motive “is not some fixed thing, like a table, which one can go and look at. It is a term of interpretation, and being such it will naturally take its place within the framework of our Weltanschauung as a whole,” within “the entire scheme of judgments as to what people ought to do, how they proved themselves worthy, on what grounds they could expect good treatment, what good treatment was, etc.” (25). Industrial capitalism, for instance, comes with such ready-made rules and values. Americans “know” that they ought to be competitive, productive multitaskers; they “know” their success will be based on social status, power, and the number and size of bank accounts, houses, and cars. Businesses are judged by their profits, not, say, by the size of their carbon footprint nor by their employees’ health or happiness—criteria that, in other circumstances, might be deemed perfectly reasonable but which, judged by the current orientation, seem ludicrous. This is not to say that everyone

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accepts—or has the opportunity to achieve—current cultural definitions of success. But to resist those definitions is to work against the American grain. Burke’s intent in P&C was to show that orientations are not natural or inevitable; they are constructed.5 And whatever is constructed can be reconstructed by “welding new associations and unwelding old ones” (ACR 90). Piet y If, as Burke says, P&C addresses the dialectical relationship between individual identity and culture, piety describes their interinanimation. Simply put, if orientation is an overarching collective ideology, piety is people’s intense psychic and physical attachment to that ideology. But piety is theoretically and psychologically more complicated and rhetorically more troublesome. Although in the published version of P&C, piety does not appear until part 2 (logically it makes sense to establish orientations as interpretations first), Burke’s early drafts begin with piety, foregrounding “the importance of ‘piety’ in the acts of orientation” (RPP Outline 1). That importance lies in piety’s multiple functions. Burke’s definitions, Thomas Rosteck and Michael Leff argue, suggest that piety is both a process and a product—a “system builder” and the system created by that building.6 Burke discusses piety as both a quasi-religious devotion to a habit of being and the creative power of that devotion. Piety drives us to create a structure, directs our selection of building materials, and glues it all together. How? Piety, Burke says, is a sense of appropriate relationships, the making of symbolic linkages, “the sense of what properly goes with what” (74).7 Blankenship, Murphy, and Rosenwasser explain that piety “operates as a guide for establishing our system of Orientation” (5). An orientation, they continue, “is developed by a sense of ‘piety’” (6). Similarly Rosteck and Leff suggest that piety “functions to sustain the coherence of a perspective” (327). It is pious to associate hearts and flowers with love, to make cartoon villains ugly, to set horror stories on a dark and stormy night. But like an orientation, piety is not just a sense of a few scattered relationships: it is “a system-builder, a desire to round things out, to fit experiences together into a unified whole” (P&C 74)—that is, piety is a motive. Piety names the force that drives people to create coherence in their lives, to form a unified identity as supermom or computer nerd or obsessive cat lover. The idea of an orientation—an ideology—was a 1930s commonplace; piety was not. As such it is one of Burke’s distinctive contributions to Depression-era leftist rhetoric—the very heart of the matter. For if left-wing social activists have failed to persuade Americans to abandon capitalism, it is because piety is, as Burke claims in the headnote to part 2, “a much more extensive motive”—both broader and deeper—“than it is usually thought to be” (69). It is so broad, Burke argues, that “piety as a response . . . extends through all the texture of our lives

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but has been concealed from us because we think we are so thoroughly without religion and think that the ‘pious process’ is confined to the sphere of churchliness” (75). Burkean piety is also “extensive” by virtue of its intensity; more than just an allegiance to an identity or ideology, piety is a deep psychic and bodily drive, a “yearning to conform with the sources of one’s being” that is “guided by a scrupulous sense of the appropriate” (69, 77; emphasis added). A pious person, Burke explains, may build an “altar” (75) to a chosen characteristic and, with single-minded devotion and thoroughness, sacrifice everything to it. For Burke the term captures the often inexplicable or unarticulated (“It just isn’t done!”) intensity with which people bind themselves to, and are bound by, beliefs or behaviors—exercising religiously, worshipping a musician, making a religion out of neatness. Such devotion is a matter not of goodness but of completeness or thoroughness, taking an idea or role to the nth degree; when we tag someone with the label real or true—a real American, a true patriot—we are in the realm of piety. And this more personal, emotional slant that Burke gave to piety is keyed to its role in his overall project. He introduced the term in part 2, “Perspective by Incongruity,” in which he theorizes the process of conversion from one orientation to another. His point here—one particularly aimed at Marxist activists—is that persuading Americans to reject capitalism will be far messier and more difficult than they have imagined because Americans have tremendous psychic and physical as well as financial investments in the system. (Think of his welding metaphor.) Indeed Burke argues, via piety, that most Americans do not experience capitalism primarily as an economic system; rather it is a way of life, deeply embedded in their identities and behavior. Despite the religious overtones of the term, Burke showed how completely he had not only secularized piety but also unbuckled its connection to traditional moral judgment in his two most extended and memorable examples of pious behavior: a street gang’s code and drug addiction. He asks readers to imagine the great arbiter of taste Matthew Arnold “loafing on the corner with the gashouse gang” (77). “Everything about him,” Burke claims, “would be inappropriate” (impious); he imagines “the crudeness of [Arnold’s] perception” about the proper etiquette of swearing, spitting, and whistling at women. In contrast he “observe[s] with what earnestness, what devotion” the gang members “act to prove themselves . . . true members of their cult” (77). Vulgarity, he concludes, can have a piety all its own that requires a discrimination as finely tuned as that demonstrated in Arnold’s circle. Ii is important to note, then, that Burke separated piety from the dominant ethical code but not from the realm of ethics itself: the gashouse gang does not lack ethics or taste; they simply have a different set of ethics, as in the proverbial “honor among thieves” (or the not so proverbial refrain “keep to the code” bandied about by Captain Jack Sparrow and his pirate crew). Hence Rosteck and

36 Part I. Translating Burkean Terms

Leff observe that piety “retains an ethical valence, since it represents a principle of coherence, a standard against which to judge all aspects of speech and behavior” (327). Similarly Burke argues that a criminal or drug addict reveals “great conscientiousness,” “piously taking unto him all other traits and habits that he feels should go with his criminality” (77). He completely severed readers’ culturally pious linkage of drug use with immorality—and, more important, their linkage of piety with goodness. He was, in effect, attempting to reorient readers’ accepted ethical judgments. The gashouse gang example clearly links piety and identification: as individuals “act to prove themselves . . . true members of their cult,” they identify with the group both by recognizing their common pieties and by further developing attitudes or behaviors that the group holds pious (refining spitting techniques, for instance). Identification is created via piety: to say that Person A identifies with Person B is to say that they share pieties. As Debra Hawhee’s and Jordynn Jack’s insightful studies argue, the drug addict and gashouse gang examples also demonstrate how completely Burke’s notion of piety is wrapped up with bodily movement and habits. It is Arnold’s inept spitting and catcalling—his inability to mimic the gang’s body language and assume the “proper” positions—that Burke emphasizes. And as Hawhee and Jack argue, Burke became thoroughly acquainted with the workings of drug addiction while researching criminal behavior for Col. Arthur Woods at the Bureau of Social Hygiene from 1926–30.This work, in Hawhee’s words, underscored for Burke that “bodily learning and habit formation” are “the very means of creating and solidifying ‘pious linkages.’ . . . Bodily repetition and knowledge of propriety are so reciprocal as to become almost identical. That is, action is molded by repetition, whereby the body falls in sync with the ‘contingencies’ . . . [P&C n269] in a way that, through repetition over time, equips a body with the ‘right’ mannerisms and actions for the situation.” Hawhee concludes that, for Burke, “bodily habits . . . and manners are looped into identity” (“Burke on Drugs” 23, 24)—or, as Greg Clark observes, that “identity is experienced rather than conceptualized, inhabited rather than proclaimed” (“Child” 253). By the time he began writing P&C, then, Burke understood well “that habits and beliefs created in the body through sustained repetition are tenacious, relentless, and, most of all, impervious to reason” (Hawhee, “Burke on Drugs” 18)—and that understanding had important consequences for Burke’s rhetorical theory and practice. Burke makes one final important point about piety: it is subject to both internal and external policing. At some point, he explains, “certain of one’s choices become creative in themselves; they drive one into ruts, and these ruts in turn reënforce one’s piety” (78). The sports fan or rock-star groupie or “real” man may wish to change pieties, but someone who eats, sleeps, talks, walks, and dresses Phillies baseball or Lady Gaga or machismo will have an exceedingly hard time

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undoing all the pious linkages that hold his or her identity together. Thus, Burke observes, when someone’s pious dedication wavers, “he is kept under discipline by the walls of his monastery (that is, by the ruts which his experience itself has worn)” (79). The religious language in Burke’s discussion of piety’s sticking power is striking: “He can no longer retract his vow—hence, he is spared the trivial lapses that might otherwise have interrupted his devotion” (78). Similarly Burke maintains that others’ expectations will reinforce an established identity, deviations from which may provoke anything from comments (“that outfit just isn’t you”) to ostracism or punishment as “other people . . . help[] [someone] to continue in the same direction” (78). T r a i n e d I n c a pa c i t y a n d T e c h n o l o g i c a l P s yc h o s i s Orientations and pieties are essential means by which people navigate experience. But Burke’s description of their power—addictions, ruts—also suggests how piety and orientation lock individuals and cultures into unproductive, even counterproductive, mental and bodily habits, creating what Thorstein Veblen called trained incapacity.8 Ideologies train—or, as Michel Foucault would say, discipline—people to think, feel, and behave in particular ways, but that training precludes developing or valuing other habits of being; the training, in other words, incapacitates them: “one adopts measures in keeping with his past training—and the very soundness of this training may lead him to adopt the wrong measures,” Burke writes (10). In the 1930s people’s training under industrial capitalism, Burke thought, had made them “fit in an unfit fitness” (10): they had become experts at cutthroat, bottom-line business. Trained to value work and to define success in terms of consumption, trained in a bootstraps mentality, people were bewildered when the wheat dried up or the business failed, leaving them with no work and no straps on their boots—if, indeed, they were not left barefoot. And their early training in competition and consumption blinded them to the possibility that a more cooperative, less materialistic life might save them: “the very authority of their earlier ways interferes with the adoption of new ones” (23). The stock-market crash left them “unfitted” to continue that way of life or to imagine an alternative. In this, Burke argues, they were not stupid: “they were obeying the only realities which their scheme of orientation equipped them to recognize” (23). Burke named the particular ideological complex of scientific positivism, capitalism, and mechanization afflicting Depression-era culture the technological psychosis, a term adapted from John Dewey. He notes that, for Dewey, psychosis means only a “pronounced character of the mind” (40), but Burke clearly saw the technological psychosis as a sickness. The upshot of his cultural criticism and

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theorizing of orientation and piety is that he saw the pious linkages within the current orientation as akin to an addiction—and as difficult to break. Jack sums up nicely: “Just as drug addicts or criminals have difficulty rejecting the social settings, physical habits, and emotions that make up their orientation, so, too, societies have difficulty rejecting economic arrangements, lifestyles, and values” —their addiction—“that make up a capitalist orientation” (453). I m p o rta n c e o f O r i e n tat i o n and Piet y for Rhetoric So far I have discussed orientation and piety as terms denoting integrative processes of individual or collective identity formation and the resultant interpretative frames through (or within) which people experience the world. So what makes P&C a book of rhetorical theory rather than, say, psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, or sociology? Because an important part of the book’s work is to argue that constructing identity (that is, composing) and interpreting experience (that is, reading) are rhetorical processes, embedded in and constituted by language and produced via symbolic exchanges between individuals and cultures. If identity and culture are constituted by rhetoric, then rhetoric is fundamental and ubiquitous; it is the very stuff of our lives. Hence in P&C Burke expands, utterly, our understanding of rhetoric’s scope and function. In ways few other theorists have, he illuminates how our lives are shot through with rhetorical processes. That Burke’s account of those processes is informed by individual and social psychology, philosophy, sociology, etc., gives his understanding of rhetoric its interpretive range and power. Rhetorical Construction of the (Social) Self Burke argues in P&C that orientations and pieties, with their attendant accounts of motives, “are distinctly linguistic products. We discern situational patterns by means of the particular vocabulary of the cultural group into which we are born. Our minds, as linguistic products, are composed of concepts (verbally molded) which select relationships as meaningful” (35). In other words symbols are produced and read within interpretive vocabularies developed through social interaction: symbols come to mean within systems. So Burke’s claim that people “obey[] the only realities which their scheme of orientation equip[s] them to recognize” (23) is another way of saying people are “simply interpreting with the only vocabulary [they] know[]” (21). Language, Burke argues here, is inextricably tied up with people’s knowledge about and experience of the world—and of themselves.9 Changing the orientation of the interpreter changes the meaning of human action—changes, in effect, the action itself. Or, more to the point for

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Burke’s rhetorical theory, changing the language available for the interpreter to name that action changes the action itself. (With all due respect to Shakespeare, Burke suggests a rose by any other name may not smell as sweet.) If orientations and pieties are “linguistic products,” then it is a short step to Burke’s claim that identities, individual and collective, are composed rhetorically via symbolic linkages. Just as writers integrate image, rhythm, and sound to create a poem, so, too, people piously integrate their beliefs, experiences, occupations, behaviors, and appearance to create a self.10 Burke’s pious drug addict, for instance, “will add one cell upon another, constructing an integer of wickedness. . . . He puts himself together by the social recipes all about him” (78; emphasis added). Thus Burke argues that “we are all poets. . . . Indeed, all life has been likened to the writing of a poem, though some people write their poems on paper, and others carve theirs out of jugular veins” (76). Creating and experiencing our individual selves via “social recipes”—that is, acting, living—are rhetorical processes. Burke’s theory in P&C, then, opens up individual and social identity for rhetorical analysis, offering the notion of the social text—another reason the book stands as a landmark in modern rhetoric. Rhetorical Problems of Social Change How people respond to the world, then, is controlled less by their rational selfinterest than by the established cultural values and vocabularies that constitute piety. For Burke piety was the missing element in most Depression-era analyses of human behavior: it explains why the Depression had not been enough to awaken the whole country to the exploitative nature of capitalism and why Marxist rhetoric so often failed. Burke pointedly explained this to his 1930s Marxist readers: “when an average compatriot expresses his allegiance to capitalism, . . . the symbol also includes for him such notions as family, friendship, neighborliness, education, medicine, golf, tools, sunlight, future, and endless other sundries. When the orator shouts, ‘Down with capitalism!’ the auditor resists because he is countering in secret, ‘I love the memory of the river bank where I lolled in the sun as a boy’” (ATH 99). As Burke notes, “the ethicizing of commercial methods”—the pious connection of profit and competition to goodness and success—“has become so profoundly ingrained in our people that, even during the worst calamities of our national history, we try to distinguish between ‘good’ men and ‘bad’ men in business, rather than questioning business enterprise itself ” (P&C 206). And this is why Burke’s multidimensional account of piety is so important to rhetoric: it more fully describes the complicated rhetorical situation faced by radical rhetors “where the non-rational factors in human conduct necessarily loom large” (“Foreword [b]” 5). As Jack observes, “The integrative function of piety explains why it is difficult to persuade people to change simply

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by telling them they are acting inappropriately” (455). Shifting someone’s piety is as difficult, Burke suggests, as asking an addict to give up drugs. The persuasive power of piety will almost always trump rational appeals for change. More generally orientation and piety explain why people do not always do what is in their best interests, why factual evidence does not always convince them, why their attitudes or actions do not always “make sense,” why they often cannot articulate reasons for their beliefs, why they are not always sure why they believe what they do. What Burke teaches us, Clark argues, is that “the process of influencing people . . . operates in ways that reach well beyond our traditional and conventional assumptions about rhetorical meaning. . . . The transformative power of rhetoric is encountered . . . in an experience of a kind of alternative rationality—where emotion and cognition are not only inseparable, but are finally indistinguishable” (“Aesthetic Power” 97). Orientation and piety name “a moral”—and material—“network, complex beyond all possibilities of charting” (P&C 238). And yet to be successful, rhetors must chart and tap into some of this network, appealing to their audience’s pieties, which, Burke argues, “are like little kegs of powder, and the artist [or rhetor] seeks to light the fuses that will set them off ” (40). At this point the difficulties of Burke’s revolutionary, reorienting rhetoric become apparent. An effective rhetor appeals to her audience’s pieties, drawing upon established beliefs, framing her arguments with existing vocabulary; yet the revolutionary rhetor, inherently impious, would overturn her audience’s pieties. The rhetorical dilemma then becomes how to advocate impiety through pious vocabulary (remembering that vocabularies are “not words alone”) —a problem Burke called the “piety-impiety conflict.” The effective rhetor of social change resolves the piety-impiety conflict this way: “we invent new terms, or apply our old vocabulary in new ways, attempting to socialize our position by so manipulating the linguistic equipment of our group that our particular additions or alterations can be shown to fit into the old texture” (36). This “manipulation of the linguistic equipment” to invent new terms or apply existing terms in new ways is what Burke referred to as perspective by incongruity. P e r s p e c t i v e b y I n c o n g ru i t y It is hard to overstate the importance of perspective by incongruity in Burke’s plan for social change. If, as Burke argues, “an orientation is largely a selfperpetuating system, in which each part tends to corroborate the other parts” (P&C 169), there would seem to be little room for change in the Burkean universe. “However,” he continues, “for all the self-perpetuating qualities of an orientation, it contains the germs of its dissolution. . . . The ultimate result is the need”—and, importantly, the opportunity—for “a reorientation, a direct attempt

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to force the critical structure by shifts of perspective” (169). This forcing of the critical structure, or “social engineering” (“Foreword [b]” 5), is precisely Burke’s goal. And perspective by incongruity becomes the methodological centerpiece of Burke’s proposal for change—a program of defamiliarization designed to expose the constructed nature of experience and enable people to consider alternative, culturally impious ways of understanding the world and themselves as actors in it. As he wrote to James Sibley Watson, a dear mentor from his days at the Dial, perspective by incongruity is the “counter-process” to piety, a means of “breaking up these linkages” (10 May 1933). As such, perspective by incongruity is the engine that enables and drives change. It is, as Burke later claimed, “the essence of the whole business” (Skodnick 10), for this technique enabled him to dismantle the two foundational assumptions of the prevailing technological orientation he sought to replace: (1) the belief that ways of interpreting experience are natural (and hence absolute) and (2) the belief that science inhabits an ideologically neutral space. If, in part 2, titled “Perspective by Incongruity,” he can thus “liquidate belief in the absolute truth of concepts” (ATH 229)—perhaps the piety of all pieties—he will have gone some distance toward creating the psychological conditions needed for readers to accept the new, poetic orientation that he presents in part 3. Part 2 is where the real work of Burke’s project begins (part 1’s cultural critique and general introduction to orientations as ideology, though crucial, account for less than 25 percent of the book)—where Burke operationalized the theory and began the hard work of explaining and modeling for readers how one goes about “forcing” a critical structure. The incisiveness of perspective by incongruity as a tool for analysis and social change has been borne out by the many scholars in rhetoric who have turned to it in their studies of political critics and activists ranging from the anarchist Emma Goldman to Texas tycoon and independent presidential candidate Ross Perot to comedians Jon Stewart and Sarah Silverman. Burke initially defines perspective by incongruity as “the use of a term by taking it from the context in which it was habitually used and applying it to another” (89). His application of piety to sociopsychology is a clear example of such a move. As with many of Burke’s terms, however, definitions of perspective by incongruity shift or broaden, often imperceptibly. Because perspective by incongruity is so fundamental to P&C and such a major methodological contribution to rhetorical studies, it is worth following these shifts to tease out its mechanics and emphasize its central role as a means of social change. I take my cue, in part, from Paul Jay’s definition of perspective by incongruity as a “punning strategy meant to constitute both a methodology and an epistemology. . . . [It is a] non-linear styl[e] of writing raised to the instrumental level of method and grounded in a recognition of the inherent metaphoricity of all philosophical and critical discourse” (“Modernism” 351).

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First, then, I discuss perspective by incongruity as a methodological term for four more-or-less distinct heuristic strategies that break down established verbal linkages—“the language of common sense”—and produce new interpretations of experience. Second, I examine how Burke sees perspective by incongruity functioning on an overarching ideological or philosophical level to reveal the partial and interested nature of all perspectives and discourses, including those of science. However, for Burke the destructive or disorienting work of perspective by incongruity is not its sole purpose; ultimately it is a constructive force as well. As one P&C reviewer noted, perspective by incongruity produces “a set of mental explosions . . . which break down old combinations without a sense of loss, since the explosions themselves synthesize one’s previous mental content in new and more dynamic configurations” (Eliot 115). The reorienting power of perspective by incongruity is so great, Burke argues, that it can serve as a means of effecting social cure. Third, shifting from Jay’s focus on critical analysis, I discuss perspective by incongruity not so much as a style or form of meaning making, but as a set of rhetorical strategies (graded series and translation) that Burke identified as particularly suited to converting the resistant audiences leftist rhetors faced in Depression-era America.11 I argue, that is, that part 2 should also be read as a piece of Burkean pedagogy in which he teaches readers how to employ perspective by incongruity in persuasion. Perspective by Incongruity as Critical Heuristic Burke most often discusses perspective by incongruity as a verbal heuristic—as a method that provides people new language for, and hence new ways to interpret, experience. He establishes in part 1 that language is socially constructed and ideologically laden; as such it helps maintain the status quo. Disrupting the language of common sense, then, is one way to disrupt the prevailing orientation. But how, exactly, do shifts in vocabulary create new ways of understanding? For Burke the answer lies in the nature of the universe and in human cognition— specifically that, as I. A. Richards notes in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, “all thinking from the lowest to the highest—whatever else it may be—is sorting” (30). Following the French philosopher Henri Bergson, Burke claims that there are no natural categories: “the events of actual life are continuous, any isolated aspect of reality really merging into all the rest” (P&C 92). The human mind creates—rather than directly perceives—categories and relationships as “a practical convenience” that enables us to process the welter of experience (92).This was certainly an unfamiliar concept for Burke’s 1930s readers, so in “Perspective by Incongruity,” he was at pains to help them reexamine what it meant to sort and name. Vision is, in fact, interpretation, and “the business of interpretation,” Burke explains, “is accomplished by the two processes of over-simplification [or abstraction] and analogical extension” (107). Humans know things—they come

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to have meaning for us—Burke instructs readers, because the mind creates relationships; specifically it abstracts, compares, lumps together necessarily dissimilar experiences, defines something in terms of something else. In short the mind works by creating analogies or metaphors. Thus for Burke analogy, metaphor, and perspective are words for the same mental process—a process that all humans use all the time. “Perspective by incongruity,” he observes, “is both needed and extensively practiced” (119)—extensively practiced because it is a basic cognitive process but needed because the average person creates linkages unaware. As an analytical method, perspective by incongruity raises this classification process to a conscious level, coaching people to create new analogies or relationships in order to expose the artificiality of existing classifications. Hence, as Fredric Jameson observes, perspective by incongruity prompts “the reinvention of possibilities of cognition and perception” (qtd. in Wolfe 87). Language is implicated in this process, Burke explains, because individuals typically do not do their own sorting and naming—they are born into a culture whose existing pieties include ways of organizing and naming experience, and this, too, was news to most of Burke’s contemporaries. If those pious linkages and interpretative frames are embedded in conventional language, disrupting that usage should help break them down. It is useful to think of Burke using perspective by incongruity to name four often overlapping ways of disrupting accepted vocabularies in order to promote reinterpretation: (1) verbal “atomcracking” or fission; (2) verbal “fusion”; (3) “dissociation of ideas”; and (4) “methodological misnaming,” which he calls “planned incongruity” (112).12 Most commonly perspective by incongruity suggests a “methodology to ‘coach’ the transference of words from one category of associations to another” (ATH 230). Burke sometimes describes this transference as “a method for gauging situations by verbal ‘atom cracking’” to suggest how words can be “wrench[ed] . . . loose” from their conventional context and “metaphorically appl[ied] . . . to a different”—and necessarily atypical or impious—“category” (ATH 308). Second, perspective by incongruity describes an unconventional juxtaposition or fusion of two terms—in Burke’s words “putting the wrong words together”— “wrong” here meaning culturally inappropriate (what Burke calls “organized bad taste” [P&C 133])—to gain “new insights by such deliberate misfits” (91). Cyborgs such as the Terminator or the Borg and Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation are embodied examples of deliberate misfits that offer, at least within their fictional worlds, new perspectives on human nature. Burke’s example of incongruous verbal fusion is trained incapacity: people generally assume training “goes with” capacity not incapacity. Such “methodic merger of particles that had been considered mutually exclusive” (lv) is, of course, one way of defining metaphor, which Burke notes “always has about it precisely this revealing of hitherto unsuspected connectives” and “appeals by exemplifying relationships . . .

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which our customary rational vocabulary has ignored” (90). Given Burke’s immersion in modernist literary culture (and his epistemology), it is unsurprising that metaphor appears frequently in the book’s middle section or that Burke titled one chapter “Perspective as Metaphor.” Third, Burke’s use of perspective by incongruity sometimes parallels Remy de Gourmont’s “dissociation of ideas,” a method Burke says is designed “to show that a concept which we generally take as a unit can be subdivided” (CS 22).13 Granted there is only a fine line separating dissociation from the atom-cracking method described above—a line that his language does little to clarify. But it is useful to distinguish between “atom-cracking,” which he usually describes as dividing a word from its traditional context, and dissociation, which divides a single word or concept into two or more components. Burke illustrated this dissociation of ideas in a 1937 New Republic article “Reading While You Run: An Exercise in Translation from English to English.”14 In this essay he rhetorically analyzed New York Herald Tribune articles “to show how . . . capitalist propaganda is so ingrained in our speech that it is as natural as breathing” (36). This sample headline seems harmless enough: “Nation’s Manufacturers End Convention Ready to Fight for a Return to ‘American System.’ ” Burke argued, however, that the word manufacturer fails to distinguish (and perhaps even deliberately fuses and, hence, confuses) two concepts—business and industry—a distinction he saw as imperative to attack capitalist greed and power: “It is a vital boon to capitalism that delicate usage (graceful and tactful) whereby the man who operates a manufacturing machine is not a manufacturer while the man who does not operate a manufacturing machine but juggles the dividends for himself and his kind is a manufacturer” (36). By dissociating the concepts of business and industry, he illustrated how manufacturer naturalizes the discourses of business and industry currently in play. That is, he shortcircuited readers’ automatic assumption that what is good for business (and, by extension, the “American system”) is good for industry.15 “The real confusion,” Burke explained, “is kept alive by . . . this gentle, almost imperceptible choice of words. The surest way to balk action”—for example, protests against enormous business profits or support for workers or voting for Socialist Party candidates— “is to choose words that draw lines at the wrong places” (37). As Burke proceeds in P&C, he quickly moves away from his initial formulation of perspective by incongruity as specifically verbal transference toward a fourth heuristic that he calls “planned incongruity,” a more general upside-down, through-the-looking glass, deliberate miscategorization. Inspired by Bergson, planned incongruity is a “methodical misnaming” (69), a “systematic reshuffling of the categories of ‘what goes with what’ in the search for ‘new perspectives’” (“Outline of Main Theses” n. pag.). “By making new patterns, new sortings,

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new identifications,” Burke argues in ACR, one “is—to all practical purposes— making new things” (101). He explicitly advocated a program of what we would now call defamiliarization—studying something very familiar “precisely by depriving yourself of this familiarity,” programmatically foregoing “available knowledge in the search for new knowledge” (P&C 121)—or even intentionally “adopt[ing] a postulate known to be false” to exploit the “heuristic value of error” (121–22). For example, in the section “An Incongruous Assortment of Incongruities,” Burke recommends that “one should study one’s dog for his Napoleonic qualities, or observe mosquitoes for signs of wisdom. . . . One should establish perspective by looking through the reverse end of his glass, converting mastodons into microbes, . . . writing a history of medicine by a careful study of the quacks” (119–20) or “altering the scale of weeds in a photograph until they become a sublime and towering forest” (122). In this case, as with all uses of perspective by incongruity as heuristic, the point is to “violat[e] the ‘proprieties’ of the word” (90) or concept in order to “violate the tenor of one’s own culture as the members of [that] culture know it” (107). Such repeated explanations, promptings, and illustrations, I argue, indicate that Burke was presenting here a public pedagogy of perspective by incongruity—one that he hopes individual readers will practice and that rhetors/critics will teach to others. It is within this broader area of “planned incongruity” designed, as Bonnie Dow says, to “de-naturalize[]” cultural pieties (229) that recent rhetorical critics have been especially productive, analyzing activists’ use of this strategy and, in the process, enriching our understanding of the many specific forms planned incongruity might take. Burke observes that perspective by incongruity grants “insight of a quasi-mystical nature by permitting us to consider the same thing in two vocabularies at once” (ACR 102)—metaphor being his prime example— but these scholars have identified a variety of double-voiced or dual-vision strategies used by activists and cultural critics, including parody, satire, mimicry, hyperbole, trivialization or minimalization (what Burke calls in P&C “conversion downwards”), punning, role-playing or role reversal (retelling a story through the villain’s eyes), and juxtaposition. Mari Boor Tonn and Valerie Endress offer an excellent analysis of this doublevoiced incongruity in their study of Ross Perot’s 1992 independent presidential campaign. Examining both Perot’s debates and voters’ responses to his campaign, Tonn and Endress observe how the candidate’s homespun stories, puns, and folksy humor violated voters’ expectations of presidential campaign discourse, encouraging them to reexamine politics as usual and revalue their own political understanding and authority. Perot’s impious, incongruous campaign modeled a new commonsense perspective of policies that, Tonn and Endress argue, demonstrably reduced voter cynicism and reinvigorated their political engagement:

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“for portions of even the relatively politically contented, the oddball Texan reawakened a dormant, more fundamental democratic ideal of government as a partnership of co-agents” (301).16 Tonn and Endress’s portrayal of Perot as a “political court jester” (299) points to a hallmark of recent studies: for today’s rhetorical critics, the most effective users of perspective by incongruity are cartoonists and comedians. Denise Bostdorff, for instance, analyzes political cartoons censuring former interior secretary James Watt, heavily criticized for opening up enormous tracts of public land for drilling, mining, and logging. Bostdorff specifically explores the cartoons’ “formal strateg[ies]” (44) that produced incongruity, namely Burke’s four master tropes (metaphor, irony, synecdoche, and metonymy), all of which function by creating two ways of talking about a thing. Similarly Don Waisanen analyzes how Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s political critiques voiced multiple personae (concerned citizen, conservative pundit, and other stock characters). Stephanie Young as well as Lacy Lowrey, Valerie R. Renegar, and Charles E. Goehring focus their studies of comedic perspective by incongruity on images and performativity, juxtaposing good-girl/bad-girl verbal and visual discourses. Young, for example, analyzes Anne Taintor’s feminist critique of representations of women created by overlaying images of model female domesticity from 1950s magazines (the stereotypical beaming housewife showing off her new refrigerator’s stuffed shelves) with snarky text (“make your own damn dinner”). Lowrey, Renegar, and Coehring demonstrate how stand-up comedian Sarah Silverman, in her Jesus Is Magic video, performed social criticism via the incongruity of blatantly racist and antifeminist remarks voiced by a pretty, sweet young woman seemingly oblivious to the sensitivity of these topics. In both cases the incongruity makes audiences “do a ‘double take’”—literally, then mentally (Young 79).17 Perspective by Incongruity as Epistemology Although Burke’s examples are often characteristically playful (“one should discuss sneezing in the terms heretofore reserved for the analysis of a brilliant invention” [P&C 120]), the play has profound epistemological implications— namely that all experience is interpreted, all classification and, indeed, all knowledge constructed. “Once you take words as mere symbolizations, rather than as being the accurate and total names for specific, unchangeable realities,” Burke argues, “you have lost the criteria of judgment which will tell you that it is ‘wrong,’ say, to describe a bullfight as a love encounter between the male toreador and the female bull, with the audience perhaps as peeping Toms” (110). At this point Burke is well on his way to his goal of “liquidating belief ” in the absolute truth of concepts. Hence, one reviewer, Charles Glicksberg, commented that, via the “process” of perspective by incongruity, Burke “demonstrates that a statement may be both true and false at the same time. Its ‘truth’ depends on the frame of

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reference within which it is situated, the point of orientation from which it is viewed. By means of this method he is able to puncture the pretensions of many a vested critical system” (74). What we “know” about objects or people or events changes with our angle of vision, with how we name and categorize them. As Rosteck and Leff note, perspective by incongruity “aligns and re-orders entire domains of experience, not just word meanings” (331). “As we alter our frameworks of interpretation,” Burke argues, “the very nature of ‘reality’ changes accordingly” (“Foreword [b]” 7). And he devotes an enormous amount of space (most of part 2) to exploring and reinforcing his argument that “classification system[s] [are] not an objective report on the state of the world” (Rosteck and Leff 330). Burke concludes, “The universe would appear to be something like a cheese; it can be sliced in an infinite number of ways—and when one has chosen his own pattern of slicing, he finds that other men’s cuts fall at the wrong places” (P&C 103). And, in fact, Burke was convinced that one particular cut made within the current orientation falls disastrously at the wrong place: the artificial separation of scientific method and logic from other forms of knowledge production. This cut is a major stumbling block to his reorientation project because it grounds the technological psychosis and its ideological partner, capitalism. So he repeatedly hammers the point that all knowledge is constructed and, thus, interested— including science. He knew full well that most readers, even those who admit that certain areas are subjective or who privilege the truth claims afforded by metaphor (including, for instance, I. A. Richards, proto–New Critics such as Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and many reviewers of P&C), nevertheless bracket off science as a neutral and, hence, universally valid epistemological method.18 So in P&C Burke reslices the universal cheese, launching an all-out assault on scientific exceptionalism by “deliberately [and] indiscriminate[ly] . . . scrambling magical, religious, poetic, theological, philosophical, mystic, and scientific lore” in his explanations and examples (P&C 159).19 Beginning with “The Function of Metaphor” and continuing throughout the chapter “Argument by Analogy,” Burke insists that conventional distinctions between logical and metaphorical thinking are untenable: “when we describe in abstract terms we are not sticking to the facts at all, we are substituting something else for them just as much as if we were using an out and out metaphor” (95). In other words scientists and poets use the same basic cognitive process to create new knowledge: “the heuristic value of scientific analogies is quite like the surprise of metaphor” (96); both, that is, “discuss something in terms of something else” (104). Subsections of chapter 4, so often seen as irrelevant to the book’s argument (and hence so little discussed), continue to erode science’s claims to objectivity. In “Analogy and Proof,” Burke argues that the scientific method is never purely inductive—that “the conclusion had led to the selection and arrangement of the

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data” (98) rather than the other way around. To contest assertions that the scientific method produces absolute proof of its claims, he argues in “Tests of Success” that the tests themselves reflect values about what deserves study and how results are measured. At an even more fundamental level, in “Interrelation of Analogy, Metaphor, Abstraction, Classification, Interest, Expectancy, and Intention,” he references Dr. Hermann von Helmholtz, who demonstrated that human senses actively filter or process rather than simply record sensory data. Over the course of these sections, Burke reaches stunningly incongruous, impious conclusions about knowledge production. Not only do poets and scientists think via perspective by incongruity—analogy—but also, he argues, “the course of analogical extension is determined by the particular kind of interest uppermost at the time” (104). Science, in other words, is “interested,” as ideologically driven as poetry. Both make arguments. This claim not only challenges the cultural conception of science as neutral; it also challenges the aesthetes’ core belief that art functions in a separate, “pure” realm of its own. Burke then pushes his argument one impious step further: to the extent that science and art ask audiences to reinterpret experience, they are seeking to convert those audiences. They, in fact, function as types of evangelism: “any new way of putting the characters of events together is an attempt to convert people, regardless of whether it go by the name of religion, psychotherapy, or science. . . . It attempts . . . to alter the nature of our responses” (86–87). Perspective by Incongruity as Social Cure Altering the nature of response was Burke’s goal, but he sought to disorient in order to reorient response. As Rosteck and Leff observe, the “rhetorical action [of perspective by incongruity] is at once subversive and constitutive” (329). Burke would replace old, unhealthy linkages with new ones in order to rebuild a more wholesome society—in Anne Teresa Demo’s terms, to “remoralize” it (139). For Demo, Dow, and Tonn and Endress, this reconstitutive function creates a “symbiotic relationship” between incongruous perspectives and Burke’s comic frame (Demo 134): as rhetors lead people “to abandon the position they currently occupy, the audience must have a place to go, and a means to get there. This is what makes perspective by incongruity a comic strategy for Burke; it assumes that we can learn from exposure of mistakes” (Dow 238–39). That is, perspective by incongruity moves audiences beyond cynical debunking to a charitable effort to address newly revealed contradictions in the social order. Burke signaled perspective by incongruity’s restorative function early in his notes, titling some (or all) of part 2 “Meaning and Cure”—or, as one titled note more pointedly indicates, “On ‘new meaning’ as ‘cure’” (n28).20 Matters of meaning and cure, or “interpretation and therapy[,] most clearly converge” (P&C 125), Burke explains, in psychoanalysis, so he turned to the

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individual “secular conversions” (125) of psychotherapy as a model for his project of cultural reorientation. Here too he found that perspective by incongruity is the operative method: psychotherapy “effects its cures by providing a new perspective that dissolves the system of pieties lying at the roots of the patient’s sorrows or bewilderments” (125). The psychoanalyst does so by providing new vocabulary for talking about human behavior, “chang[ing] the entire nature of [the patient’s] problem, rephrasing it in a form for which there is a solution. . . . In the secular rebirth engineered by the psychoanalytic seer, the processes of recovery from one’s effective disorders are closely interwoven with a shifting of one’s intellectualistic convictions, one’s terminology of cause, purpose, and prophecy” (125). It is easy for readers to get bogged down in the seemingly irrelevant details Burke presents from the case files of William McDougall, Alfred Adler, and W. H. R. Rivers; the point, as he explains, is that “the study of psychoanalytic cures offers an especially good instance of the effects which new meanings, or perspectives, can have upon us” (“Foreword [b]” 8). It seems likely that these cases served as a source of invention as Burke pondered the problem of new meaning and cure.They certainly are meant to serve as illustration and proof for Burke’s readers—the “patients” and the “analysts” (rhetors, artists, critics) who will teach the method of perspective by incongruity to others: “A cure,” he explains, “is permanent insofar as the critical device is creative, i.e., insofar as the analyst need not go on digging until he has [reworded] each of the patient’s judgments, but has given the patient a method which the patient proceeds to apply for himself, digging into subtleties which the analyst could probably never unearth” (“Meaning and Cure” n6)—or, as he more explicitly notes, a “cure is ‘creative’ insofar as it provides a principle whereby the patient himself can complete the processes of perspective by incongruity (“Meaning and Cure Outline” n. pag.; emphasis added). Perspective by Incongruity as Rhetorical Strategy: The Rhetoric of Conversion However, as Burke’s often violent language—violation, cracking, wrenching— suggests, perspective by incongruity, like psychotherapy, can be an emotionally devastating process. “The attempt to teach people an interpretation . . . counter to their early training,” he observes, “involves nothing short of conversion—and the history of religious conversion bears evidence that a radical shift in one’s central unifying beliefs is not accomplished without considerable psychic disturbance” (“Foreword [b]” 4–5). Burke’s understanding of the psychic cost of reorientation distinguishes him from other radicals, especially Marxists, whose rhetoric assumed that rational economic self-interest would motivate workers to reject capitalism. Instead he argues that “even though the group’s orientation were thoroughly inadequate”—as he believed capitalism to be—“their natural

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loyalty to the ways they had been taught would cause trouble for the propounder of the new message, unless he were exceptionally gifted in the arts of translation and conciliation”—that is, in the art of rhetoric (“Foreword [b]” 6). “A new set of meanings is in a sense impious,” he cautions, “unless a man can find ways of integrating it with the roots of his past character” (“Foreword [b]” 7). It is the rhetor’s job to enable this integration. So, I argue, it is crucial to distinguish, in a way Burke scholars have seldom done, between his general description of the mechanism of perspective by incongruity and specific rhetorical strategies for social change.21 Or, perhaps, to imagine different levels of perspective by incongruity for different rhetorical situations: a freewheeling, outrageous cultural critique by an “analyst”/artist/rhetor or an individual who is already alienated from the dominant culture versus the more conciliatory rhetorical means by which piously reluctant audiences can be led to new ways of seeing—outrage being, in the latter case, exactly the wrong move rhetorically. Indeed Burke often bemoaned the audience blindness of much 1930s leftist rhetoric, with its stark antitheses. As he put it in a 1931 New Republic article, “Zestful antagonism has been the bane of radicals in America. They court resentment” (“Boring from Within” 327).22 Over and over again in his 1930s writing, Burke stressed the need for a pious path toward impiety, laying out a series of rhetorical moves with which to proceed with the business of “secular conversion.” One such strategy he recommended is “boring from within”: “to be immediately effective, we must promote changes which can be put into effect by utilizing the mentality”—the piety— “already at hand” (327).23 Or, as he famously asserted in his later discussion of identification, “You persuade a man only insofar as you can talk his language by speech, gesture, tonality, order, image, attitude, idea, identifying your ways with his” (RM 55). In P&C Burke discusses such rhetorical difficulties as a “piety-impiety conflict” facing an artist or radical rhetor, who can recommend “the problematical new . . . only by utilizing the unquestioned old” (87). “Any new rationalization,” he argues, “must necessarily frame its arguments as far as possible within the scheme of ‘proprieties’ enjoying prestige in the rationalization which it would displace” (66). He presents one rhetorical solution in the section “Conversion and the Lex Continui.” The lex continui or law of continuity is a phrase from seventeenth-century German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, who posited that natural entities are continuous rather than discrete. Steam, water, and ice, for instance, seem distinct, and a thermometer will register the point at which one changes to another, but they are all forms of H2O. Burke applies Leibniz’s law to human thought, devising a rhetorical strategy for change that he calls a “graded series”: “Conversions are generally managed by the search for a ‘graded series’ whereby we move step by step from some kind of event, in

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which the presence of a certain factor is sanctioned in the language of common sense, to other events in which this factor had not previously been noted. The thinker attempts to establish a continuity for arriving at conclusions which might seem abrupt and paradoxical if the two ends of his series were juxtaposed abruptly” (142). This step-by-step technique for achieving perspective by incongruity is rhetorically suited to Americans who have shown themselves resistant to socialism.24 Although such gradualism may initially seem antithetical to the radical juxtapositions Burke typically turned to when discussing perspective by incongruity, the end result is the same: audiences are left with a new sense of reality and a new sense of themselves acting within it. Burke’s rather elaborate example of a graded series begins with two definitions of philosophy—one by Alfred North Whitehead, who writes that “philosophy is the product of wonder,” and one by Veblen, who aligns philosophy with “idle curiosity” (qtd. in P&C 144). He first moves from idle curiosity to curiosity, then proceeds to “key up” curiosity to interest, interest to wonder, and from there to reverence, awe, fear, dread, and terror. “Thus, by conversion upwards,” he explains, “we can modulate from Veblen’s formula, through Whitehead’s, to an assertion that ‘Philosophy is the product of terror’” (144). Those who would automatically reject that final assertion if it were presented in isolation, Burke suggests, may find it, if not reasonable, at least not outrageous when presented via a graded series. Each jump is rather easily made, but at the end, the mind has traveled quite a distance. His example “illustrate[s] the full scope of the choices which the principle of the lex continui can place before us” (144). In other words a graded series is a rhetorical strategy by which social activists might lead audiences to new understandings by degrees, by “a careful introduction of novelty” (Pruchnic 131). It affords rhetors a range of options, encouraging them to avoid effrontery and allowing them to convert upward or downward or to pause at any point according to the audience’s receptivity.25 A second rhetorical technique for producing perspective by incongruity is what Burke calls “translation from English into English.”26 At its most basic, this phrase simply means rewording arguments into language that audiences understand or identify with or, as in the case of his “Reading While You Run” analysis, redefining familiar terms to reveal their ideological agenda. Thus in his “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” speech, Burke argued that in order to “sell” communism, Marxist terminology needs to be Americanized; “translating” the Marxist symbol of “the worker” (not a term middle-class Americans identify with) into the American symbol of “the people” (a term that resonates within America’s founding documents) may help US audiences align communism with their existing pieties. In P&C the translator—the expert in verbal incongruity and rhetoric—finds pious language for impious ideas, again, by “attempting to socialize [his or her] position [so] . . . that . . . particular additions or alterations

52 Part I. Translating Burkean Terms

can be shown to fit into the old texture” (36). As this passage suggests, translation functions for Burke as a synecdoche for rhetoric itself.27 We are left, now, with the question of agency: how does the translator/rhetor/ artist get far enough outside a given orientation to recognize opportunities to “force the critical structure” (169)? Burke suggests that the source of agency lies somewhere in the nexus of orientation and agent. The orientation, remember, contains the “germs of its dissolution,” and, “as some people may not prosper by its own tests of prosperity, the orientation itself gives them grounds to question its validity” (169). “Historical conditions”—the stress of industrialism and the Depression, for instance—produce or reveal fault lines, and, Burke argues, “one sees perspectives beyond the structure of a given vocabulary when that structure is no longer firm” (117). The orientation, in other words, creates opportunities for change. He frequently suggests, however, that there are always outliers— individuals, different by birth or experience, who interpret differently. Burke, like so many modernist cultural critics, endows artists with extraordinary powers of perception: “there is always some quasi-mystical attempt being made to see around the edges of the orientation in which a poet or thinker lives” (117). But as this passage also indicates, an even more potent source of agency for Burke is mysticism, “the farthest reach of the search for new perspectives,” which he says “may be expected to flourish at periods when traditional ways of seeing and doing (with their accompanying verbalizations) have begun to lose their authority” (223). In P&C Burke’s innovator or translator par excellence—the ultimate revolutionary rhetor that Depression-era activists might imitate—is Jesus. After reading George Berguer’s Some Aspects of the Life of Jesus, Burke concluded that Jesus “seems to have developed into a slowly increasing mastery of a method. . . . He was concerned with matters of strategy, of presentation, apparently being certain from the start that his point of view was ‘correct’” (155). Jesus’s method of choice? “The analogical extension provided him by the parable” and paradox (155). Jesus illustrates the most extreme—and most effective—use of perspective by incongruity as a rhetorical strategy, Burke claims, because he “offers a basic conversion concept for a total transvaluation of values whereby the signs of poverty were reinterpreted as the signs of wealth, the signs of hunger as the signs of fullness. . . . By this translating device, danger-situations were not merely converted downwards: They were rephrased precisely as comfort-situations. Berguer singles out, as the unusual feature of Christian exhortation, ‘the affirmative character of his manner of teaching.’ Jesus phrased his admonitions as invitations” (155–56).28 And it is just such a “total transvaluation of values” that Burke hoped to promote with his proposal for a new poetic orientation whereby the signs of economic collapse are reinterpreted as the conditions for cultural rebirth.29

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Ultimately, Burke argues, “rebirth and perspective by incongruity are thus seen to be synonymous, a process of conversion, though such words as conversion and rebirth are usually reserved for only the most spectacular of such reorientations, the religious” (154n). I would argue, though, that shifting America from capitalism to socialism would count as a rather spectacular collective reorientation and that talented rhetors—poets, psychologists, evangelists, mystics, teachers all wrapped into one—will be needed to help with the difficult (re)birthing process. Hence, at the end of P&C, Burke summons his ideal revolutionary rhetor—not a fiery agitator who spews venom but one whose “peaceful work as a propounder of new meanings” requires her or him to “cultivat[e] the arts of translation and inducement” (272).

Two Metabiology as Purification of War I was concerned with the subject of “moral values” as they equip us for living. I knew that “absolute values” equip us best, since they afford us the maximum strength behind our movements. Burke to Matthew Josephson, 29 March 1933 Surrounded by a world of controversies, a world crying for enlightenment, I thought vaguely of rebuilding more in accordance with the fundamental dogmatisms of the body. For a man so skeptical that he would not make one statement without adding “maybe,” “possibly,” or “perhaps” is nonetheless a citadel of unquestioning faith—viz. the myriad of correct decisions that go to make up his body, the unwavering cellular discriminations of metabolism, the acceptances and rejections of his organs. Burke, Auscultation, Creation, and Revision, 50 (emphasis added) Meanwhile, we shall probably continue to combat old ghosts with new ones, ever fighting wars henceforth in the name of peace, fantastic wars-to-end-war, and adulating such jungle ways of thought as might serve us better if we were trying to rip live meat with our claws than for properly apportioning the national income. Burke, “Poets All”

So where are we now in Burke’s argument? The previous chapter explains how, in parts 1 and 2, Burke lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for reorienting American culture. His discussions of orientation and piety show that existing cultural values and understandings of reality are not natural but constructed—and hence can be changed. And in part 2 he models rhetorical strategies (perspective by incongruity, graded series, translation) by which to enact social change. To guide this change and to provide a sturdy ethical basis

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for the new society he envisions, it remains for Burke to argue in part 3 for “absolute values”: metabiology and the poetic orientation (the subject of chapter 3). But here he faced a serious theoretical and rhetorical problem: he has argued in part 2 that the universe is “something like a cheese . . . [that] can be sliced in an infinite number of ways”—ways that, he notes, will usually seem wrong to other slicers (103). If that is true, how could Burke persuade readers that his particular way of cheese slicing is preferable? Remember that he was engaged in a hotly contested cultural struggle over the questions of how people might build a better world. His proposal competed with many others—most notably the liberals’ New Deal, the Southern Agrarians’ return to the yeoman farmstead, and the Marxists’ classless society. On what could Burke base his argument? As he wrote to Waldo Frank, “a sound system of exhortation cannot be based upon anything short of ‘first causes’” (23 May 1934). In other words he seemed to need precisely the kind of foundational ethics that he does away with in parts 1 and 2 by arguing that all perspectives are partial and interested. One goal of my analysis, then, is to examine how, and to what extent, Burke resolved this difficulty through his theorizing of four central concepts: metabiology, poetic orientation, art of living, and recalcitrance. Metabiology is a perplexing concept. With a few notable exceptions (Crable, “Ideology as ‘Metabiology’”; Thames, “Nature’s Physician”; Wolfe), Burke scholars have not had much use for it. However, based on extensive study of archival materials, I argue that metabiology lies at the very heart of Burke’s project and was designed, along with the poetic orientation it prompted, as a powerful intervention in cultural politics. Indeed Burke’s early notes stated that “we are concerned . . . with nothing other than a ‘workable’ ethics” (“Metabiology, Outline for a Minimized Ethic” 2)—one that would, he told Austin Warren (of Wellek and Warren fame), “serve as a basis of Politics” (25 Apr. 1933). That is, metabiology and the poetic orientation are first and foremost civic projects aimed at purification of war. Burke sought to develop an ethical system that would compel activism, particularly in the name of social justice and improved human relations. My reading of metabiology thus highlights how Burke developed and explicitly framed the concept in direct response to political debates and cultural exigencies and, hence, cannot be fully understood outside them. I will situate metabiology as a response to five interrelated problems stemming from existing “unworkable” ethics: • • •

complicated, confusing value systems create unwholesome culture; philosophical, scientific, and political narratives emphasize change and, thus, contingent demands or uncertainty; truncated accounts of human motives create a mind-body split, diminishing the body’s importance;

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• •

the technological orientation fosters a destructive mechanism and attenuated sense of agency; increased violence threatens to engulf the world.

To address these problems, Burke created a “workable” ethical system that is (1) simple, (2) permanent and universal, (3) holistic (addressing mind-body), (4) humanistic, and, above all, (5) conducive to cooperation. The problems feed into and upon each other, culminating in systemic cultural violence. So too all Burke’s metabiological solutions fed into his overarching goal of creating a nonviolent culture, the solution on which all the others depend. In this chapter, then, I present metabiology as the foundation of Burke’s project in P&C: it is both the origin of and ethical grounding for his proposed cultural reorientation. In a nutshell metabiology is what Burke found in his search for “first causes” or “absolute values”—or as close to absolute “as human thought could take us” in an antifoundationalist world (261). As the title of part 3—“The Basis of Simplification”—suggests, Burke explored a human being’s essential nature (motives, needs): if he stripped away cultural accretions, what is at the core? Or, as he says repeatedly in P&C, what is “rock-bottom”? Metabiology names that understanding, a definition of humans as symbol-using animals or, as he argues later, “Bodies That Learn Language” (295).1 At base he saw humans as bodies, which he foregrounded as biology. But for Burke humans are never merely bodies —hence the term metabiology, where meta points toward (but does not equal) humans’ ability to create and respond to symbols. Through this term Burke articulated a mind-body interaction captured in the term symbol-using animal: as Bryan Crable explains, we are neither merely symbol users nor animals but, always, both—always “embodied actors” (“Ideology” 308). Two notes before I begin: first, metabiology and poetic orientation are theoretically interconnected concepts. An early draft indicates their interinanimation in Burke’s thought—“the centre of authority must be situated in a philosophy, or psychology, or ‘metabiology’ of poetry” (ROP 67)—and his discussions of them in P&C are interwoven. I have addressed them in separate chapters not to demarcate the two sharply but to allow for their clear, fine-grained analysis. Second, metabiology, poetic orientation, art of living, and recalcitrance can be difficult because the concepts are foreign to readers today in ways they would not have been to Burke’s contemporaries, who might have encountered similar ideas in the work of Dewey, Lewis Mumford, the Southern Agrarians, and other cultural critics. Additionally, as Burke remarks in the headnote to part 3, he expected to frustrate some readers by foregoing the usual strategy of “driving toward his conclusion with the pointedness of a lawyer defending a case in court” (168). Instead, he warns, “the thesis continues to burden itself, even to the extent of

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casting doubt upon the motives of someone who thus cultivates the burdensome” (168). So it is easy to lose the thread of Burke’s argument, to miss certain nuances and emphases. The questions and answers in the following table outline the logical progression of Burke’s argument for a poetic orientation and an art of living grounded by metabiological ethics.

The Logic of Burke’s Argument for Social Change in part 3 Q1 What is wrong with the current scientific orientation? A1 Its mechanistic account of human motives and causality denies “the most characteristic pattern of individual human experience” (218): our sense of ourselves as purposeful actors. Q2 What is the strongest ethical grounding for a cultural reorientation that restores purpose? A2 Something permanent: “one underlying motive or set of motives that activates all men” (221). Q3 What has remained constant throughout history and across cultures? A3 The needs and purposes of the body (162, 228–29, 234, 261). Q4 What is the ultimate good or purpose in terms of the body? A4 Action, vocation (236). Q5 What is the quintessential human action? A5 Either participation (also called cooperation, communication) or war (235). Q6 What justifies this choice of participation? A6 “The assumption that good, rather than evil, lies at the root of human purpose” (235). Q7 If the fundamental human purpose is participation or communication, what metaphor best guides social change? A7 An “art of living” (66); poetry is the “ultimate metaphor” (263) Q8 The state should foster the poetic orientation. Which economic system best lends itself to this task? A8 Communism, which encourages cooperation and participation, is a first step.

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I n v e n t i n g P & C v i a M e ta b i o l o g y The fascinating archival record of metabiology’s development that Burke left behind fundamentally reshaped my understanding of the term and the text by suggesting, first, that metabiology was his starting point for P&C and, from there, that his intervention into 1930s cultural politics began as an attempt to develop a system of practical ethics based on the principle of moral simplification (hence his early references to P&C as the “Ethics book” [A. Burke and K.  Burke, “Inventory for the Kenneth Burke Papers, Third Collection, 1915– 1969” 1]).2 Although these may not seem like startling claims, their ramifications have become central to my conception of the book, reframing and repurposing Burke’s argument so that I will never read P&C the same way again. Jack Selzer and I have argued that P&C can be read productively as his intervention into the 1930s literary wars, and I stand by that claim. But since reading his metabiology notes (newly available in 2008), my experience of the book has changed in two profound ways. First, I now view Burke’s motives as essentially civic, and I have come to see as highly significant his goal of articulating a workable ethics—that is, an ethics designed as a practical tool that both prompts and enables work in the world by providing sufficient moral grounding while still acknowledging what we might now call the postmodern condition (and it is this oscillation between foundational and antifoundational stances that serves as Burke’s “resolution” of the philosophical contradictions noted by contemporary critics and current scholars). Second, after reading these documents, I was startled to realize I had not understood metabiology as a means of ethical simplification despite the fact that part 3 is titled “Basis of Simplification.” I had emphasized basis—that is, I read metabiology solely as foundation rather than simplification, which, frankly, I could not connect to the rest of his argument. Thus metabiology seemed less a simplification than a shift in values from mechanism to humanism. And, perversely, I thought of metabiology as an additional value—an argument that we should include the body in our judgments—rather than a stripping away of counterproductive, wildly proliferating ingredients in our moral evaluations. In what follows, then, I analyze some of the documents that changed my understanding of metabiology and P&C, tracking the term’s sources and implications. Experience has taught me that examining metabiology’s development deepens readers’ insight, partly because Burke’s notes offer vivid, concrete explanations and partly because knowing where terms come from allows us to hear resonances the language likely had for Burke, increasing our sensitivity to the layers of meaning embedded in his vocabulary. Early in his invention process for P&C, Burke explained why he explicitly tied his ethical system to the biological: “fundamentally, to base a value upon a

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body need would seem perfectly sound, since the human physiology is a ‘tyrant,’ its demands are ‘imperative,’ hence any notions of ‘goodness’ based upon the satisfying of these demands have as sound a ‘rock,’ as near to a ‘metaphysical sanction,’ as one could ask for. A biological imperative is the best of all ‘categorical imperatives’” (“Metabiology” 3). A metaphysical sanction without metaphysics —that is a revealing statement. To reiterate an earlier point, Burke attempted to create a secular ethics that has the moral authority the church once had. And as the archives show, the rock-church connection served as a source of inspiration, which he then exploited rhetorically in P&C. Tucked in Burke’s notes immediately before an early overview of part 3 are fragments, containing two versions of the same famous biblical passage—one in liturgical Greek and one in liturgical Latin. Above the Latin text, Burke penciled in: “Perhaps for device quote: Matthew 16:18—‘and upon this rock I will build my church’” (n. pag.).

Burke’s Latin and Greek transcriptions of Matthew 16:18. Reproduced with the permission of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust and the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

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Burke echoes this language in P&C when he argues that during times of cultural crisis, “people naturally begin to look for some immovable ‘rock’ upon which a new structure of certainties can be erected” (173). Although he did not use the Matthew quote, the biblical overtones linger around the edges of the “rock-bottom” certainty. In other words metabiology is meant to have the stability, and to function as the affective equivalent, of religion. One early draft spoke of “readapt[ing] the vocabulary of the great religious psychologists,” particularly the understanding of the spiritual-physical (i.e., mind-body) connections emphasized by the early “great monastic orders” (ROP 72). More tellingly Burke wrote Austin Warren that “it is only an ethical psychology . . . which can provide an adequate unifying attitude for solving our great social problems. And this can only be reaffirmed with authority by a return, through poetry, to the psychology of the Church” (7 Oct. 1933). The title of an early one-page fragment, “The Living Rock—a ‘System of Metabiology,’” shows Burke playing with the term living rock as a way to suggest biology, religious appeal, and ethical foundation rolled into one. The amount and character of Burke’s writing at this early stage in P&C’s development during the spring and summer of 1933, its seeming self-containedness, also suggest that metabiology was likely the original kernel of his invention. That is, metabiology may not be just the “rock” upon which Burke the theorist built his ethical system; it may be the rock upon which Burke the writer built P&C. Indeed it is possible that metabiology may have begun as a project in its own right. In his early notes, metabiology was not tied to any of P&C’s other central terms such as piety, perspective by incongruity, or even the poetic orientation. Metabiology as a stand-alone project is further suggested by his inclusion of possible subtitles (“The Avoidance of Malnutrition,” “The Negative as Guidance,” “An Attempt at a Physiological Perspective” [n. pag.]). References to “the Metabiology” with an article and capital M point to an individual project rather than a concept, a conclusion explicitly reinforced in one “Metabiology” subtitle, “Project for an Ethic by Elimination”(“Metabiology” 1; emphasis added). In what follows I examine how Burke saw metabiology functioning as (1) simplification; (2) permanence, certainty; (3) a holistic view of humans; (4) restoration of human purpose; and, above all, (5) purification of war—and how those elements constituted, for Burke, a “workable” ethics. M e ta b i o l o g y a s S i m p l i f i c at i o n As the terms of some draft titles—“Ethic by Elimination” and “Minimal Ethic”— indicate, Burke’s goal was a simplified morality. It is not just that people are using the wrong values, but that they are overwhelmed or misled by too many choices —like too many varieties of toothpaste on the store shelf. He claimed, perhaps

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counterintuitively, that too-refined judgments distort moral vision. He wrote of his proposed metabiology project: “consider also the rank growth of psychological differentiations through which we must make our way. . . . We propose to ‘blunt’ the distinctions again—to see how few we need rather than how many we can discover. . . . The argument itself is centered around our conviction that the world needs a minimal morality rather than the welter of maximal moralities which are showered upon us from every side”—what he called “a great ideological clutter” (“Procedure” n. pag.). Burke wrote elsewhere “that ‘values’ . . . as a practical ruel-of-thumb [sic] guidance, should be of only the crudest sort. . . . ‘guidance of the negative.’ ‘is an apple better than an orange?’—‘Don’t know— but I do know that a toothache is worse than no toothache.’ ” He argued for “a criticism roughly based opon [sic] a few underlying negative assumptions of this sort,” which he called “‘negative’ absolutes” (“Metabiology” 4): hunger, for instance, pain, and extreme cold or heat are all “bad” things to be avoided or eliminated. So he gave himself instructions: “In the body of our text, follow the main lines of our doctrine, the need of simplification, the ways of simplification, the basic processes of thought and understanding, the definition of the ‘good life,’ the evidence that a clear definition is needed for the guidance of the state” (“Outline [a]” n. pag.).3 Readers will not go amiss by channeling Thoreau’s “simplify, simplify, simplify” (something, as I have noted, that I do not hear as clearly in the published text). In keeping with his turn to the body for an ethical foundation, Burke’s early writing often figured simplification in terms of nutrition. For instance, one document set up a “Schema: The Biological Ought, the Avoidance of Malnutrition,” explaining that “basically, it is but another way of applying the utilitarian test of pain-pleasure. It shares with this test the function as a complete secularizer of morals (there being no transcendental sanction left in it, no revelations from God, . . . no attenuated religion under the esthetic survivals, good taste, decorum, etc. . . . [People] may the more readily evaluate this [pain or] pleasure . . . by our negative rule of thumb, the Biological Ought, the sine qua non of existence. Insofar as the given organism is undernourished, it is leading a ‘wrong’ kind of life. Insofar as it is nourished, it is leading a ‘right’ kind of life” (“Metabiology, Outline for a Minimized Ethic” 1; hereafter I cite this as “Minimized Ethic” to avoid confusion with similarly titled documents). Because this is metabiology, not biology, it is a test of human nourishment writ large, including, Burke says, “all sorts of cultural acquisitions which we must have if we are not to become ‘Undernourished’” (“Outline material [from letter to Watson]” n. pag.). In other words “‘cultural pursuits’ may be considered as extensions of appetite” (“Minimized Ethic” 1).4 A handwritten addition to another document reinforces the civic nature of Burke’s “nutritional” agenda: “We mean: one must know all these things if he is to be properly equipped to so assist in the conduct of the State that

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the basic cultural processes are not denied him” (“Outline material [from letter to Watson]” n. pag.). “And we would particularly attempt the use of ‘coarseness’ in our ethical perceptions where we have reason to believe that much ‘spiritual refinement’ has greatly concealed from our view the full extent of the political coarseness all about us. We may also . . . guaranty ourselves against too strenuous a call upon man’s ‘virtue’—unless it is even over-exacting to ask of people that they give great thought to seeing that they are properly fed (demanding that the institutions of the state and the pursuits of its citizens be shaped primarily with this end in view)” (“Minimized Ethic” 2). Here Burke emphasizes using “coarse” or simplified ethical criteria for evaluating public policy: does it promote physical and mental health? Safety? Meaningful employment? Thus, for Burke, metabiology is a beneath-which-not—a nonnegotiable standard enabling Americans to insist that their basic needs are met. By the time Burke completed his May 1934 draft, however, he had abandoned most of the language of nutrition and the Biological Ought to figure moral simplification.5 We know from the second edition prologue that Burke worried about suggesting too direct of a correspondence between body and mind, so it seems plausible that he rejected much of this early language from similar concerns that it overemphasized the biological, that his nutritional vocabulary might be too evocative of plates of food and of well- or ill-fed bodies, too literally suggestive that you are what you eat, to directly equate proper diet and proper morality. Instead in P&C Burke primarily discusses metabiology using the language of nudism and the rock. This idea of clarity via ethical simplification appears as a rather puzzling reference to “thinkers [going] nudist” in “The Rock of Certainty” section (172). Here is his fuller explanation in his planning notes: “My concern primarily, then, is with the systematic denudation of our moral arcana. I would wish to throw out enormous areas of ethical evaluation” in favor of “an almost hysterically quick means of telling weeds from crops” (“Minimized Ethic” 2). His nudist impulse, then, “represents an attempt to return to essentials, to get at the irreducible minimum of human certainty” (172)—to simplify ethics by supporting only the most basic human needs or motives. M e ta b i o l o g y a s P e r m a n e n c e In business, Burke’s notes explain, “one’s belief, credit-giving, trust, is founded upon some rock of judgment or expectation: in this case some judgment as to the fact that the borrower’s promise to pay is backed by some evidence of an ability to pay . . . analogous situation in our beliefs. What is the collateral, or ‘backing’ of our beliefs?” (“Metabiology” 1). Metabiology, Burke wrote his mentor James Sibley Watson, is this “Basic Undeniable Certainty” (10 May 1933). Looking for

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the strongest possible backing for his proposed cultural reorientation, he sought “definitions of human purpose whereby the whole ailing world of contingent demands can be appraised” (P&C 223)—something akin to the golden rule, which functioned as the “lowest common denominator of appeal. It was a truly ‘catholic’ basis of reference, or sanction for human values. . . . It formed a rock-bottom of communication, having about it sufficient self-evidence as a desirable end to gain it at least acceptance in principle among people of many sects and cultures with wholly distinct systems of piety or customs” (160). In short Burke sought a universal constant. Because Burke scholars routinely describe him as a “both/and” thinker who rejects (or dialectically transcends) binary terms such as permanence and change, they often claim that he does not choose one over the other. That is an accurate reading insofar as humans experience both permanence and change in their lives. But, as Wess observes, Burke explicitly asserts—in this book, for this project —that he chooses permanence, what he calls a philosophy of being, a choice he announces in the section “Towards a Philosophy of Being” (Kenneth Burke 74). He works to identify universals underlying shifting cultural symbols and pieties, which he does via another perspective by incongruity: reversing the nineteenthcentury trend of writing histories of evolution or revolution (think Darwin, Hegel, and Marx). Looking for metanarratives of progress or change, those philosophers and scientists found just that—and called them truth, reality, or the shape of history. Burke calls such narratives, which “emphasize the shifting particularities[,] . . . philosophies of becoming” (163). He argues instead that we might justifiably emphasize the commonalities: “Might the great plethora of symbolizations lead, through the science of symbolism itself, back to a concern with ‘the Way,’ the old notion of Tao, the conviction that there is one fundamental course of human satisfaction . . . forever being restated in the changing terms of reference that correspond with the changes of historic texture?” (183–84).6 M e ta b i o l o g y a s H o l i s t i c View of Humans Searching for this “fundamental course of human satisfaction,” for “one underlying motive . . . that activates all men” (221), Burke finds constancy in “the biologic purposes of the human genus” (234). Humans derive their most fundamental sense of who they are and what they should do from the body: “insofar as the neurological structure remains a constant, . . . the essentials of purpose and gratification will not change” (162). What he describes, then, is literally the anatomy of purpose posited in P&C’s subtitle. Biology has the requisite “nudist,” lowest-common-denominator quality: “a point of view biologically rooted,” he claims, “seems to be as near to ‘rock bottom’ as human thought could take us”

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(261). Thus instead of metaphysics Burke offered metabiology as his golden rule, a value he hoped was similarly “self-evident.” As Burke wrote to Allen Tate, like the early mystics, he located “in the body-processes the undeniable point of reference outside the system [of contingent values] whereby sturdier and more accurate moral exhortations could be built up” (19 Aug. 1933). Metabiology is the fundamental ethic that, for Burke, underlies other shifting, partial perspectives.7 In a search for a stable, universal aspect of human experience upon which to reorient culture, the body may seem an unlikely choice, but given Burke’s goal of restoring the human perspective displaced by machine culture, it is an essential part of his holistic axiology. His notes from fall 1933 highlighted how the human necessarily begins with the biological: part 3 “considers the fundamental problems which must be considered in any attempt at a ‘rebeginning.’ It holds that the entire reconstruction [of culture] must be undertaken from the standpoint of an ‘anthropomorphic’ genius rather than a ‘technological’ genius. That is to say: the ethical approach must be material, bodily” (“Arrangement of the book” n. pag.). ATH’s definition of “Good Life” similarly calls for a “maximum of physicality” to counter an orientation that regularly encourages, even requires “people [to] outrage the necessities of the physical economic plant”—the body (256). For all the culture’s commodification, in some senses materiality is fading from American culture: Burke saw greater separation from the land, increased valuing of mental labor, disregard for factory workers’ and miners’ welfare, and even business—seemingly the core of materialistic values—dealing increasingly in “immaterial” transactions (speculation, investment, credit) (P&C 41–43). And because of their humanist agendas, plenty of his contemporaries were reaching the same conclusions.8 “The importance of Marx’s materialistic emphasis,” he argues, “is precisely the fact that it admonishes us against” exalting mental processes (ATH 257). However, although Burke’s choice for a “first cause” is the “true body absolutes” (“Metabiology” 4), his axiology is not biology but metabiology or “mindbody” (P&C 229). Metabiology, he says, “transcends biology in the strict sense of the term, in that men’s social motives are not mere ‘projections’ of their nature as animal organisms” (168). That is, he insists that the strongest possible ethical base for a renewed culture must take humans whole—must account for their nature as symbol users and, because humans are “generically . . . biological organism[s], . . . must present [their] symbolic behavior as grounded in biological conditions” (275). Hence perhaps the most important but, for today’s readers, initially least helpful definition of metabiology is “dialectical biologism” (229)—a term that Burke added for clarification late in his writing process (late summer or fall 1934) and that serves two essential purposes in his argument. First, it describes precisely how he understood the relationship signaled by “mind-body”—itself a late

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addition to the text. Second, it indicates that Burke explicitly framed metabiology in response to dialectical materialism and, thus, as an intervention in philosophical and cultural debates raging between proponents of idealisms and materialisms. So what does dialectical biologism reveal about metabiology (mindbody)? It signals that metabiology is not mind plus body, which suggests two distinct entities sitting side by side. The relationship is not additive; it is dialectical. And because the relationship is dialectical, several other important premises follow: neither element is more important than the other. As Timothy Crusius observes, metabiology does not posit a “‘mind,’ our supposed essence, which happens accidentally to be ‘embodied’” (457). Metabiology is not an intellectual’s mere nod to the body. For Burke symbolic behavior is grounded in, not reducible to or even caused by, the biological. And neither mind nor body act alone. Metabiology describes an interactive, mutually constitutive relationship. Dialectical biologism, Crable explains, “involves a fundamental reciprocity between our embodiment and our symbolic capacities” as the core of human life (“Ideology” 308). That we are embodied language users shapes and constrains our symbol use. Sounds are created by certain interactions of mouth, tongue, teeth, tubes. We are not telepaths. We cannot hear above a certain pitch or see the entire color spectrum. Bodies, Burke argues, respond to formal patterns such as rhythm (CS 140).9 That we are embodied language users means we are hardwired for symbol use; we are “beings that by nature respond to symbols” (RM 43). We construct our understandings of ourselves (including our bodies) and our world through symbols. We eat to satisfy a biological need but also for reasons—depression, boredom, communion, itual—unconnected to physical hunger but that paradoxically may register as if they were. What and how much we eat are affected by a tangle of cultural, psychological, economic, and geographical factors. When Burke writes that he “tak[es] the human body as the ‘natural’ starting point,” his scare quotes indicate his awareness that although the body itself is natural, “taking”—talking about, theorizing from—the body automatically moves it into the symbolic realm (P&C 298). Thus he observes that “the literature of verbal contexts in themselves is not reducible to a sheerly sociological dimension, but doubtless is grounded in our sheerly biological nature as bodies, albeit as bodies whose experience even of themselves as bodies is modified by the sociological setting” (330).10 Second, dialectical biologism explicitly frames Burke’s discussion of metabiology as a counter to Marx’s dialectical materialism and hence an intervention in contemporary debates over materialism and idealism—debates that concern “first causes.” It may be hard initially to connect metabiology and materialistidealist debates, so I think of it this way: questions about how we behave (purpose) and what we should value (ethics) start with definitions of humans and their place in the universe. An admittedly oversimplified version of dialectical

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materialism, for instance, sees people defined by and acting within their roles in the centuries-old class war. Dialectical materialism(s) establish a dialectic relationship between means of production and culture; they posit human society as moved by environmental or material forces as history advances inexorably toward the establishment of world socialism. In contrast Burke’s proposition of metabiology establishes a dialectical relationship between body and mind and assigns humans a very different role in a different scene—that of actors in a stillunfolding universal drama they help compose. In other words metabiology, idealism, and materialism all explain the “prime mover” of human behavior and history. As Selzer and I have observed (72–73, 128–30), in P&C (“The Basis of Reference,” “The Part and the Whole,” and “Outlines of a ‘Metabiology’”) Burke continued ACR’s critique of influential accounts of the systems most needing refutation in the 1930s: materialist philosophies (positivism and dialectical materialism, among others). For although Burke appreciated Marx’s crucial “admonition” against ignoring the material, he nevertheless rejected any causal chain that, like Marx’s, posits “material, or non-biological factors, as the determinants of human conduct” (224). “Materials may determine the forms our enterprise takes,” Burke maintains, “but they can hardly explain the origin of enterprise” (226). Such causal systems, he concludes, “are prime examples of ‘truncated thinking’” (letter to Waldo Frank, 23 May 1934): they “stop[] at a convenient point, and interpret[] this convenience as a cosmic reality” (231). Indeed in “The Part and the Whole,” he notes the methodological problem of choosing any point as a first cause: “The procedure would be somewhat like that of a man who, noting that lungs, heart, kidneys, liver, and stomach all function together, attempted to decide which of these organs is the cause of all the others” (230).11 Burke further cites scientists (Charles Scott Sherrington, M. H. Woodger) whose work demonstrates that “the entire attempt to distinguish between organism and environment is suspect” (232).12 The upshot is that metabiology “dialectically dissolve[s]” contemporary materialist-idealist quarrels: “Whether you call the fundamental substance matter or idea seems of no great moment when you talk of mind and body with a hyphen, as mind-body. . . . In this respect, materialism, idealism, and dialectical materialism merge into a kind of ‘dialectical biologism,’ framed in keeping with the hyphenated usage, mind-body” (P&C 229). That is, rather than locating himself entirely in the materialist or the idealist camp, Burke simultaneously falls into both partially but neither fully. Metabiology is a significant instance of his penchant to fall on the bias. As M. Elizabeth Weiser explains, falling on the bias is decidedly not a mealymouthed compromise position (“As Usual”); rather it is a gridlock-busting move. In Burke’s terms it “dissolves” opposing positions, creating a third location that includes parts of both. With metabiology Burke rejected Marx’s economic determinism but kept Marx’s vital emphasis

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on people’s material lives: “In a world where food and shelter are the obvious prerequisites of adequate biologic functioning, a philosophy of ‘dialectical biologism’ would emphasize, quite as dialectical materialism does, that food and shelter in both their primitive forms and their cultural projections are necessities of the ‘good life’” (230). “With the introduction of ‘metabiology’ as a stance of mind-and-body,” Crable concludes, “we are no longer concerned with either the material or the ideal (either mind or body), but with the human—which necessarily involves both (mind-body)” (“Ideology” 307). M e ta b i o l o g y a s R e s t o r at i o n of Human Purpose It is this concern to restore the human perspective that drives Burke’s “search . . . for arguments . . . whereby Purpose may be restored as a primary term of motivation” (P&C 168). It is easy to miss how crucial this is to Burke’s argument, how precisely it pinpoints the way metabiology corrects the technological orientation. The point is not just what Burke identified as the primary human purpose (action) but that he identified a purpose—an occupation or, as he often says, a vocation—at all, since scientifically reductive understandings of human behavior eliminate intention. In the technological pathology of the scientific orientation, humans are defined as bundles of reflexes or machines that do not purposefully act; they are stimulated or switched on by outside forces. Burke takes aim here at causal or motivational theories such as dialectical materialism, which posits the world inevitably moving toward a predetermined end, and positivism, which sees human behavior motivated by pure rationality (233), but also Freudianism, which depicts individuals compelled by subconscious drives. In the “Statistical Motives” section, Burke challenges the existing orientation’s mechanistic account of human motives “(the vis a tergo causality of machinery) for the shaping of our attitude toward the universe and history” (261). Literally a force acting from behind—or as Burke jokes, a “kick in the rear” (230)—vis a tergo signals compulsion, people pushed along by powers outside their control. Thus, Burke argues, “the student of scientific causality”—for him that includes Marxists— “considers [the universe] solely as having been created” (218), “a vast and complex structure, acting without a single error, and without a creative purpose, a machine permanently in order” (257n2). At this point let me pause briefly to clarify Burke’s position on science. Despite his critiques of “scientific causality,” he took great pains to establish the scientific validity of metabiology. Readers often see metabiology and the poetic orientation as diametrically opposed to the technological orientation—a new perspective that is everything the old perspective is not—but Burke’s discussion of piety and revolutionary rhetoric underscores how ineffective such a proposal

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would be. Instead he bores from within, “fram[ing] [his] arguments as far as possible within the scheme of ‘proprieties’ enjoying prestige in the rationalization which it would displace” (66). In the homeopathic language Burke uses in P&C, his proposed poetic cure contains some of the “poison” of the technological orientation: “one can cure a psychosis only by appealing to some aspect of the psychosis. The cure must bear notable affinities with the disease: all effective medicines are potential poisons” (126). Thus metabiology, aimed at displacing the scientific orientation, nonetheless is biologically grounded. And Burke’s perceived antiscience bias makes it easy to overlook the astonishing amount and range of often cutting-edge science Burke uses to give his ideas cultural, and hence rhetorical, cache. Witness appearances by English astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington; physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, innovator in optical physiology and sensory perception; psychiatrist Ernst Kretschmer, who conducted a data-driven study of the way body size and shape influence character; mathematician Gottfried Leibniz; the Nobel Prize–winning neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington; experimental psychologist John B. Watson; and biologist M. H. Woodger.13 Thus Burke rejected scientific or mechanistic understandings of human behavior not because he was against science per se and not because those understandings are inaccurate but because they are incomplete. Humans certainly can be understood as sacs of chemicals or bundles of reflexes, but those kick-in-therear definitions do not fully capture what it means to be human (261). “The most characteristic pattern[] of individual human experience,” Burke asserts, is “the sense of acting upon something rather than of being acted upon by something” (218). To be human is to have a purpose—what we might now call agency. But what kind of purpose? Agency to do what? What is the quintessential human “vocation” (235)? In the section “Outlines of a ‘Metabiology,’” Burke answers using his graded series methodology, creating a continuum of motives, with cruelty and vengeance at one end and sympathy at the other (sometimes alternatively designated as war and action/participation). He claims, “Man is essentially a participant,” which, for him, subsumed action, cooperation, and communication (235). Here Burke acknowledges that he, like Nietzsche, might have chosen violence as the essential human purpose. And he clearly admits that it is a choice: a graded series, by definition, has no “natural” essence. I often expect theories to be . . . well, theoretically driven, each claim necessarily leading to the next. But Burke demonstrates that theories are constructed, that metabiology turns out the way it does because he wants it to be this way—he wants it to support particular ethical choices and to do particular work in the world. He argues, in fact, that his theorizing is unusual only in his open acknowledgment that he made “a deliberate selection of alternatives” (235), an “act of faith” (235), a “Jamesian ‘will to believe’ . . . that good, rather than evil, lies at the root of

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human purpose” (236). However his choice of action as the primary human purpose, although not theoretically necessary, is not arbitrary: biologically, “inactivity is categorically an evil,” leading inevitably to death (236). As Burke claimed in an early outline of “The Basis of Simplification,” “We call our system a ‘metabiology’ because we go back to the nature of life itself as the rock that supports the turtle that supports the universe of our argument. We hold that life means activity, that activity is impossible without cooperation, and that cooperation is the material basis of communication” (“Outline of Main Theses in P&C” n. pag.). M e ta b i o l o g y a s P u r i f i c at i o n o f Wa r So far I have discussed four interconnected ways metabiology provides a workable ethics, designed to mitigate problems with contemporary contingent value systems that undermined “the good life”: • • • •

metabiology simplifies complex, confusing ethical systems; metabiology, as a philosophy of being, values permanence and thus offers needed stability for an unstable culture; metabiology, or dialectical biologism, defines humans holistically as embodied symbol users; metabiology restores human purpose (action, participation) denied by mechanistic, scientistic ideologies.

Here, I address Burke’s final exigency—the violence of contemporary culture— and discuss how he explicitly theorizes metabiology as an ethics designed to help deescalate what Jeremy Bentham called the “war of words” (210) and rechannel violent tendencies sufficiently to avert total war. I discuss this exigency last because the first four exigencies culminate in this overarching problem of systemic cultural violence. That is, overly complex, shifting values; lack of moral stability; and mechanistic views of humans and history together created and maintained a culture so saturated in violence that another, ghastlier world war seemed imminent. This section, then, makes two arguments: first, using archival material, I demonstrate how metabiology, and P&C more generally, began as an attempt to purify war; second, I maintain that purifying war remains a vital purpose for the current edition. Although scholars such as William Rueckert have rightly observed that P&C’s poetic orientation is partly designed to derail the world’s seeming race toward a “universal holocaust” (Drama 63), I argue that it was metabiology per se that constituted the heart of Burke’s effort to purify war, and I specifically analyze the mechanics of purifying war—where and how this motive works—to reveal another vital reading of P&C—one for a world still drenched in violence.

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But first, what did Burke mean by “purification of war”? Not the elimination of war. Burke was no pacifist, if by that we mean someone who seeks peace by outlawing war or removing peoples’ combative impulses. He did not believe violence can be outlawed or repressed, because it is woven into human biology, psychology, and, importantly, language. But violent impulses can be counterbalanced or rechanneled into more productive forms of power-building. As he explained to his former Columbia professor John Erskine, “My present work . . . deals with little else than ways of redirecting our ‘competitive’ equipment into non-competitive channels, sterilizing our natural militancy by a cultural code which deflects it from the jungle conditions of conquest into the channels of biological gratification” (24 Aug. 1933). Given Burke’s remark in RM that war, waged by immense collective effort, is “the ultimate disease of cooperation” (22), sterilizing it might seem to suggest an attempt to cleanse it of its violent means and ends, leaving only the “pure” essence of cooperation.14 But in P&C Burke seeks not to erase humans’ natural aggression (an impossibility) but to redirect it toward constructive ends. Let people compete to find a cure for cancer (race for the cure!), battle poverty, conquer on the baseball field, debate public policy, use physical muscles to build homes for the homeless and mental muscles to build critical methods or theories. Purification of war engaged Burke in a project of providing equipment for nonviolent living. But because he sought a workable ethic, he did not imagine a universal singing of kumbaya so much as enacting a new moral code that renders cruel violence (bullying, domestic abuse, sweatshops, police brutality, international aggression, etc.) unacceptable, that creates productive outlets for combative energy, and that fosters tolerance and respect for others.15 I begin my analysis of P&C’s purification of war by describing five “war” scenes that Burke identified in early writing as contributing to violence and hence requiring metabiological clarification and reorientation: (1) human biology, (2) cultural lag, (3) false notions of utility, (4) economic warfare, and (5) rampant international militarism. Scene of War: Human Biology As Burke worked out moral simplification through his study of the “anatomy of [human] purpose,” he hit a snag: his research on the work of neurophysiologist Charles Sherrington showed him “a basic inconsistency” programmed into human behavior (letter to John Erskine, 24 Aug. 1933), which he sometimes called the “Biological or Neurological Basis of the Doctrine of Original Sin,” because it is an “original division” within human biology (“Outline material [from letter to Watson]” n. pag.). That human biology contains both passive and aggressive elements is an argument he rehearsed in several working documents and in P&C. People are equipped with “organic weapons” to obtain essentials

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(food, shelter, and sex), which then lull them into passive contentment. “Hence, the basic division: in fighting [for biological necessities], we exercise our equipment but violate the ends for which this equipment was developed; in relaxing, we attain the ultimate end of ‘happiness’ but let our competitive equipment fall into corruption through lack of purpose” (“Outline material [from letter to Watson]” n. pag.). The upshot for Burke: “we must make ourselves [at] home in conflict” (“Outline of Main Theses in P&C” n. pag.)—must learn, that is, to purify or “harness[]” conflicting impulses because we cannot eliminate what is hardwired into our biology: “their irrepressible genius,” he wrote Erskine, “must be acknowledged, and acknowledged in such a way that the result is serviceable rather than disserviceable” (24 Aug. 1933). Burke’s claim, pitched at the level of biological systems, is not quite the same as Nietzsche’s psychological/ethical claim that humans are essentially violent beings—although he addressed that claim, too, as he argued for the poetic orientation.16 Scene of War: Cultural Lag The second “war” scene Burke addresses is the current “cultural lag” whereby modern Americans cling to—even glorify—“Jungle values” that were once essential to survival but, in outlasting the jungle itself, have become a “menace.” Attachment to this outmoded “‘exaltation’—certitude, unquestioning drive, ripping of the enemy, necessarily without stopping to ask why”—encourages people to war against themselves, others, and nature (“Metabiology” 7, 5). People now battle the environment as if they have not developed technologies to live securely (in the main) and compete for resources as if they are still scarce. Metabiology, Burke claims, is an ethics for the world we really live in: a “principle . . . to make tolerable the Garden of Eden (where acquisition grew on trees),” “an adjustment to the ‘rigors of plenty’” (for there is plenty when fairly distributed) (“Metabiology” 7). Moral simplification via metabiology is designed to help people abandon what Burke once called “slaughter-virtues” (“Disposition of the Arts” numbered outline, n. pag.), to identify true needs for “the good life,” and then to realize how much they already have or that lies within their grasp if they only knew what to reach for. “The business of thought”—and clearly the business of P&C—is “to ‘catch people napping’ (showing their unconscious Jungleisms)” in hopes of establishing a more contented, nonviolent way of life (“Metabiology” 6). Scene of War: False Utility and “Realism” As Burke worked out, in early notes, how to construct ethical grounding for a world without stable values, particularly belief in divine revelation, he wrote a thumbnail history of ethical systems, from the “transcendental” to the human, arriving at utilitarianism or, more generally, belief in the “‘economic’ origins” of

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values (“Metabiology” 1). In a Veblen-inspired analysis, Burke pondered the perversely cruel behaviors borne of too-narrow definitions of utility. I quote at length here because paraphrase is no match for Burke’s uncensored thought, which is so often funny or moving and always instructive: People seemed to feel, without bothering much about the matter, that such an attitude wholly justified them in being “hard-boiled,” in dealing only with “realities.” . . . What kind of “reality” is a man dealing with, for instance, who lets his body rot while mulcting a corporation? Who can imagine a life more “unreal,” more positively fantastic in its asceticism as regards human joyousness (is not delight a reality?) than the secularmonkish plottings of a Rockefeller? . . . Roughly, their “realities” got down to something like this: an elevator, a subway, a building were “real,” hence to be engaged in marketing such was to be engaged with “realities.” Any concern with a final utilitarian judgment as to the value of these “realities” themselves was mere “theory.” . . . (If one had reason to believe that, by digging a pit in his back yard, he would thereby induce a thousand people a day to come and pay him a dollar each for the privilege of jumping into it, one had a “realistic” justification for digging a pit. Make it, instead of a suicide-pit, a tuberculosis-tenement, add the fact that the economic system already required certain members of the community to do precisely such an outlandish thing as move into this dismalness-trap “of their own accord” and insofar as possible pay for the privilege—and you have a “utilitarian test of value” which happens to be based upon “realities” and happens also to outrage some of the “realest” requirements of the bodies of the human tenants). (“Metabiology” 2) Thus, defined solely in economic terms, such hard-boiled “realism” encourages people to destroy their own and others’ health and happiness and, as Burke’s description suggests, often replicates or maintains brutal domination and winnertake-all competition. Scene of War: Capitalism and Economic Combat Capitalism’s paradoxical requirement that workers choose to move into “tuberculosis-tenements” illustrates not only Burke’s well-known critique of capitalism but also his deeply felt outrage at its economic injustice and its “financial Genghis Khans” (“Nature of Art” 676)—outrage he often frankly expressed: “I have wanted to be nothing more than a bullet, or a tiger’s claw, sent suddenly against the pink flesh of some damned liar . . . who fattens while his damned lies contribute to the wretchedness of millions” (ACR 49). In the 1930s that outrage manifested itself in several wicked economic satires published in the New Republic (“Waste—The Future of Prosperity,” “For Bond Money,” “Preserving

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Capitalism”) and at least one unpublished piece, “Principles of Wise Spending,” which satirizes Edward Bernays’s 1936 Economic Forum article “How to Restore Public Confidence in Business and Finance.”17 In his 1928 blockbuster Propaganda, Bernays bluntly explained how “the public mind” is “manipulated” (18). Business, in particular, he argued, needs finely tuned PR to create “the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable” (63). By 1936, given what Bernays saw as unmerited public “distrust and hatred” of big business (“How to Restore” 273), he advised CEOs and bankers to use “specialists in symbols” (280)—he recommended Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin as models—to “sell[] the whole idea of business to the public,” “so that from now on business and finance will receive the credit due to them as the central forces that make the wheels of our present civilization revolve” (273, 282). Burke’s “Principles” took the form of an address by an oily PR man who praises wise corporate spending that “engineer[s] . . . public response” (“Principles [b]” 8) and assures business leaders that economic recovery is under way despite “mean-minded persons who cannot see a thing until it is painfully obvious, so that the clear fact of recovery is hidden from their blunt discernment by the mere cultural lag of eleven or twelve million unemployed” (“Principles [b]” 11). Soon, the speaker promises, “every wheel [will be] singing the wholesome song of industry. . . . Our steel mills will have countless laborers toiling ferociously on a . . . sixteen hour day. Every sewer will have its contented sewer cleaner, . . . every child will have its opportunity to help father and mother at the loom” (“Principles [a]” 2–3). Burke’s satire condemned big business’s cynical manipulation of consumers and voters through “educational coercion” (“Principles [a]” 8) designed by PR councils, who manage “the delicate work of holding together two [classes] that might otherwise fly apart” (“Principles [b]” 6). Indeed, as Burke observes in “My Approach to Communism,” under capitalism “the powers of muscle and mind, the ‘combative’ or ‘competitive’ tendencies, are simply fitted into a system of organized ‘economic warfare’” (19). In an early P&C draft, Burke lamented that “the present purely dominating concept of distinction, in accordance with which one can distinguish himself only by placing his foot upon the neck of others, is wholly inadequate as the foundation stone of a humanistic culture. Man must be re-endowed with a categorical value, an innate dignity, a worth simply as man, not being driven to feel that dignity resides solely in the rewards of military or economic conquest” (ROP 71). Unless some form of socialism can be established, Burke argues, America’s economic elite “will continue to degrade people, and to contemn them for being degraded” (P&C, first ed. 347). The Depression, of course, only exacerbated class tensions. “Such humane sentiments as goodwill,” Burke remarks, “were becoming forbiddingly expensive” for the millions struggling to keep body and soul together: “If they ceased to

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be fierce or designing, they were threatened with extinction. . . . Many luxuries had become necessities—but conversely the most basic necessity, the necessity of kindness, honesty, tolerance, had too often become a luxury” (P&C 174). Such good will was in short supply internationally too—a point forcefully brought home to New Republic readers such as Burke (then busy drafting P&C) via dismal reports from the World Economic Conference meeting in June and July 1933, when delegates attempted financial recovery and “economic disarmament” among the Great Powers (particularly England, France, Germany, Japan, and America) via banking and trade reform and currency revaluation, attempts doomed from the get-go by delegates’ hypernationalism (“Sweet Nothings” 114). Negotiations on the volatile issue of war-debt forgiveness, separated from the conference proper, proved equally fruitless, demonstrating Burke’s contention about hard-boiled realism writ large. Furthermore Burke repeatedly wrote about how easily capitalism’s economic warfare turned into armed hostility. “Orthodox capitalism,” he argues, “is so well suited to expansion that it cannot survive without expansion. Hence its great aptitude for inducing military and economic conquest, and its bewilderment when, for one reason or another, the processes of military and economic conquest are stalled” (“Approaches to Communism” 2).18 Burke wrote in the Nation that the economic frustration of humans’ “cooperative genius” impels society toward war as one sure way to satisfy the deeply felt ethical need for community: people “are still ‘moral’ enough, still alive enough to the feeling that in working together lies virtue, for war to recommend itself to them in its best guise” (“Nature of Art” 677). Scene of War: World War II That war was once again recommending itself to nations was clear even in 1933, when Burke began work on P&C. American public memory associates the onset of World War II with Hitler or Pearl Harbor, so, like me, many readers may not realize how perilously close the world came to war in 1932–33. The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in September 1931 sparked a crisis in the feeble League of Nations. A League commission, led by Lord Lytton, was dispatched to investigate China’s claim that the attack was unprovoked and Japan’s counterclaim that it was merely restoring order. The situation was dire: a March 1932 New Republic article reminded readers that if any member nation committed an act of war against another—as did Japan against China—“it shall ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all other Members of the League” (“Boycott Leads to War” 58). Shying away from that horrific prospect, the League debated, instead, an economic boycott—itself a risky proposition. A Nation column argued that a boycott “is an act provocative of war” (Borchard 332); indeed even the “suggestion of an economic boycott . . . is an explosive device, capable of

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doing irreparable damage” (333). New Republic agreed: “Boycott Leads to War.” Although not a League member, by the terms of League covenants, America would inevitably become involved. Thus, the New Republic concluded ominously, “We are drifting toward a war with Japan” (59). New Republic reports from a concurrent Disarmament Conference were equally bleak: the League’s unwillingness to punish Japan made those negotiations “an empty farce” (Murphy 340). Disarmament, the New Republic writer concluded, “will become the coldest and stiffest cadaver that ever graced a mortuary slab” (341). One week after “Boycott Leads to War,” New Republic editor Bruce Bliven (whom Burke knew personally) published “The Second World War,” an imagined account of the devastation wrought by the war’s end disguised as news reportage. Bliven “remembers” that it was the League’s decision to blockade Japan that provoked the war. Bliven’s description indicates that informed Americans could well envision the prosecution of a second world war: “all the forbidden forms of warfare were utilized; all the new inventions which had been worked out since the last struggle . . . were employed. The cities of Europe, bombed from the air, became an unspeakable desolation. Civilians were killed in much greater numbers than soldiers. Economic paralysis . . . soon became so complete that all the orderly processes of civilization were suspended” (94). It was another year—March 1933—before the League voted to condemn but not act against Japanese aggression, prompting Japan to withdraw from the League but not from China. Meanwhile Burke likely saw a Nation report documenting Japan’s massive imports of “war essentials.” “Purveyors of war materials,” the article asserted, “will continue to enrich themselves by means of mass murder . . . so long as the leading Powers lack the courage to suppress their bloodthirsty trade” (“Preparing for War” 307). By the end of April, the Nation concluded that the Japanese “are apparently prepared . . . to risk . . . a possible world war in order to gain their end” (“Editorial Paragraphs” 458). As Burke read about these preparations, he was also writing to Watson, outlining P&C’s argument and structure, book ideas and threats of war occupying his thoughts together: “Flags—slaughter-virtues—Jungle-necessities erected into vast ‘cultural’ judgment-systems, and so remaining to blast us by explosive ‘ideals’—and covertly, under the aegis of uplift, of grandeur, of moral resurgence, serving simply as a basic factor in maintaining the Jungle-situations out of which they arose. . . —this, good doctor, is to be our text.” The letter’s final line reporting Burke’s progress suggests that he was racing to finish before war erupted: “we have a little more this time; but we also have the shouts of ‘heroism’ on all sides. It is a fifty-fift [sic] shot” (21 Mar. 1933). As 1933 wore on, news coverage shifted to Germany. In April the Geneva Disarmament Conference temporarily adjourned, shocked by Hitler’s “primitive barbarism[,] unchecked by any of the restraints by which the conduct of

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civilized people is regulated” (Dell 497). As Burke continued drafting P&C that summer, a New Republic headline warned that Europe was on “the brink of catastrophe”: if stories about Hitler were true, the editorial concluded, “then there is indeed no hope for us. . . . Another war is inevitable, and will not be long in coming” (“Europe: the Brink” 31). Burke must have feared so, too, for after outlining P&C to Watson in May, he added, “We sincerely hope that our book will earn us enough for us to protect ourselves and our family when the next great organized protest against the burdens of original sin (called heroism) sweeps hysterically across our continent” (“Outline Material [from letter to Watson]” 2). Burke took all this in from favorite periodicals, and it impressed (or depressed) him greatly. In the final paragraph of his 1933 overview of “Metabiology,” he wrote about seeing a “challengelike magazine, calling upon Modern Youth to arise” in the name of “ideals, ideals of justice, fortitude and freedom,” the “spirit of self-sacrifice,” and the “strength of a new day.” He continues: “Well, I thought this had all been used; I thought it was the thing we had always fought our wars with. . . . I had not known that this was something to get so exalted about. It looked to me like the first step in the coming war with Japan. For it is hard to fight without ideals—and with them it is hard to keep from fighting. Heroisms and indignations are the explosive sentiments which usually preceed [sic] the exploding of shells. They are the springs behind the man behind the gun. That they must arise ever anew is hardly something to get uplifted about— it’s something to feel very old-and-worn about. . . . For those who are determined to be exalted, and who know that no words of any other sort are relevant to them, the present work is not written” (“Minimized Ethic” 3). This passage illustrates that a central question Burke wrestled with in developing metabiology was this: if exaltation is our stock response, and if it unfailingly leads to war, why is this pattern not recognizable—and hence avoidable? Burke’s answer was twofold. First, exaltation is a trained incapacity; once necessary for survival, it now threatens human existence. “What mental delicacy,” Burke observes, “is required if you would train yourself, by rage and vindictiveness at the latest ‘news’, to assist in the murder of millions whom you have never seen” (“On Interpretation” 5; emphasis added). And what critical and rhetorical strategies, he must have wondered as he drafted P&C, are needed to undo such thorough training? Second, Burke argues that impulses toward exaltation are so deeply embedded in the human organism as to disappear into our DNA; they cannot be rooted out, but we can learn to identify and manage them, in part by not calling them heroism. How Metabiology “Purifies” War That Burke early envisioned metabiology and P&C as a way to address war is clear. He described his ethical project to Watson as a “‘practical necessity,’ if man is to handle his ‘original sin’ (i.e., division of purpose) in such a way that he

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neither ‘decays’ nor maintains his ‘sturdiness’ by the destruction of other people” (10 May 1933). But what connection did Burke see between metabiology and purification of war? I quote at length from archival documents to show how clearly this motive drove his work and to convey his palpable sense of trepidation and dread. First, metabiology reestablishes in accounts of human behavior and in worldviews the centrality of human purpose (agency). If those accounts have it that people are victims of universal determinism(s) or their own inherent violence, then war is “natural” and beyond human control. If, however, people are agents, whose primary purposes are participation and cooperation, then humans are responsible for building relationships and social structures that redirect destructive energy toward constructive ends. Watching the world descend again into world war in 1939, Burke insisted that definitions of human purpose have tremendous consequences: “Who said ideas were weak? Why!—a few bad ideas on the nature of human purpose have proved strong enough to rip and tear and squander a continent, to throw its richness down the sewer, while millions skimp” (“Embargo” 2). Second, metabiology ethically grounds the critique and replacement of the scientific orientation “developed” and “fortifie[d]” by technology. Although positivism and mechanization may seem unrelated to war, Burke suggests that the failure to see their connection renders them dangerous: the technological psychosis does have its “inhuman” aspect, at the very basis of its interests. The hideous chemical and bacteriological wars which sometimes seem to threaten our entire civilization may, after all, have their grounding not in mere “capitalistic rivalries,” but in the very essence of our ‘master’ psychosis, the technological. When values so “anthropomorphic” as those of poetry and style are pushed lower and lower in the hierarchy of our concerns, we need not be surprised to find “inhuman” acts arising as though they had come out of nowhere. The scientific rationalization, the point of view out of which technology developed and which technology now fortifies, is demanding its psychotic parallels in the patterns of man’s thoughts. (ROP 50–51) Third, Burke realized how easily a war of words could become a war of bullets and bombs. He argued that the ethical complexity and loaded language that metabiology was designed to cure provoke conflict by encouraging self-righteous judgments and, hence, division—an “us” versus “them.” “So rich has our moral vocabulary become,” he wrote in early notes, “that man is now the proud possessor of a noble reason for anything (which he does) and a withering reason for anything (which his enemy does). Our moral gardens,” he continues, “are thick with the weeds of heroism and indignation” (“Minimized Ethic” 2). Backed by

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this ready arsenal of highly charged judgments, Burke argues, nations inevitably approach “cultural problems with the most ‘explosive’ words in our vocabulary, and we need not be surprised that there are continually occurring frightful accidents which rip out half a continent and maim the lives and bodies of millions” (“Procedure” n. pag.). Scientific pretensions to apply neutral vocabularies to human activity merely aggravate matters by ignoring the escalation of symbolic warfare. “Science . . . can advocate the adoption of a neutral, rational vocabulary for the adjustment of social problems,” Burke writes. “Meanwhile, commingling in the very echoes of its words, there are the rumblings of envy, malice, hatred all about us—the preparations for an explosion of fury which will be consummated solely with the help of our finest scientific developments in both technology and the mechanization of the populace. While science states its preferences, the vocabulary of the sentimentally laudatory and the hysterically vituperative continues to tighten its grip upon the nations. The apostles of peace resort simply to bogeyman pictures of war as a deterrent of war—and then fall into the same vocabulary of moral indignation by which wars have forever been nurtured” (ROP 73). That is, by claiming to have a rational approach and a neutral vocabulary, positivism denies the very tools—tolerance, empathy, art, rhetoric—with which people might defuse tensions. The step away from “explosive words” and our “vocabulary of moral indignation” is, Burke claims, “the step which mankind has never been able to take. . . . This is the crux—can we make this change, from which all else would radiate” (“Metabiology” 7). Enabling humans to take that step is metabiology’s purpose. It is Burke’s mechanism for countering goads to war. It enabled him to define a central human purpose (action) that recognizes violence without glorifying it. By providing the ethical basis for Burke’s reorientation of the existing mechanistic, grasping American culture, metabiology undergirds new definitions of “the good life.” From it sprang Burke’s arguments for communism and for the poetic orientation, which broadens concepts of utility and occupation, redirects destructive energy toward constructive ends, and foregrounds communication and propitiation. P u r i f y i n g Wa r i n P & C In this section on P&C as a text that works to purify war, I examine how Burke took up these scenes of war and their metabiological purification, specifically through his discussions of philosophies of becoming, Bentham’s analysis of language as “symbolic warfare,” Nietzsche’s understanding of human nature as essentially violent, mystics as role models, and, of course, his choice of the poetic orientation as cultural cure.

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Philosophies of Becoming As I explained earlier, Burke designed metabiology to be a philosophy of being (a stable sense of human purpose that grounds his program for social change) and rejected philosophies of becoming that reify contingent values and understandings of human beings. But there is another reason he rejects philosophies of becoming, especially the nineteenth-century philosophies of Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Nietzsche: their emphasis on false utility, progress, and competition (think class warfare, survival of the fittest) “led many thinkers to situate the essence of human relationships in the sphere of the brutal. . . . Philosophies of becoming made life look like a perennial battlefield” (P&C 172). Or, rather, certain readings of those philosophies made life look that way. Burke notes, for instance, that although Darwin stressed altruism as a highly effective survival strategy, he was “interpreted in a bluntly militaristic sense. As a result, the world seemed to be composed simply of harsh antitheses, impossible choices, like the choice between conquest and surrender. Happiness became associated with the search for prey, or with the feeling of triumph which an eagle must feel in swooping down upon a lamb.” To not be an eagle was to be “a weakling, unfit for the rigors of life’s glorious combat” (174). “This attitude,” Burke argues, “amounted to a simple declaration of war” (172) that seeped into other aspects of life, creating a network of mutually reinforcing values and behaviors, as, for instance, when capitalism wedded Darwinism to produce social Darwinism. Hence “empirebuilding (of either the national or purely commercial sort), war, capitalism, positive science, . . . the belief that the ‘good life’ resides in the acquisition of commodities, . . . individualism, . . . laissez-faire, and progress all seem to be of one piece, different words for the same process as named in different areas of our vocabulary” (173). And by choosing a philosophy of being—metabiology—over a philosophy of becoming, Burke rejected the brutality in all of them. Bentham and Language as Symbolic Warfare Burke’s lament about “the explosive sentiments which usually preceed [sic] the exploding of shells, . . . the springs behind the man behind the gun” refers directly to Jeremy Bentham’s provocative 1815 “A Table of the Springs of Action.” Bentham, a brilliant mid-eighteenth to early nineteenth-century legal philosopher and radical social reformer, is best known for founding modern utilitarianism (“right” action creates the greatest happiness for the greatest number) and, among poststructuralists, for designing the panopticon prison prominently figured in Michel Foucault’s study of institutional disciplining. However, as part of his reformist agenda, Bentham also studied—and hoped to eliminate—opaque, deceptive language used to praise and blame motives, particularly, Burke notes, in the “pivotal [areas] of ethics, politics, and law”—high-stakes areas especially

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susceptible to corruption and conflict (“Poets All”). In a 1933 review of Bentham’s work, Burke praised his rhetorical insight that the most powerful, and hence most potentially dangerous, language is often ordinary, unmarked. Bentham’s rhetorical analysis demonstrated how labels contain implicit evaluations and how easily such highly charged language lends itself to ennobling “us” and condemning “them” and, from there, to symbolic or actual war. That is, Bentham understood language’s role in stimulating or lessening violence. Bentham thus modeled for Burke a program of ethical simplification and linguistic clarification to limit conflict (in Burke’s terms, to purify war) that Burke developed into metabiology. Specifically in “Table” Bentham charted the unrecognized proliferation of “neutral,” “eulogistic,” and “dyslogistic” terms for motives or “springs of action.” For instance, motives “derived from the matter of Wealth” are phrased neutrally as “desire of the means of subsistence”; eulogistically as economy, frugality, or thrift; dyslogistically as stinginess or miserliness (198). Then Bentham explained how such “censorial” terms so often and so deceptively exhort people to unjust action. According to Bentham people assume that words name actual entities (including motives)—and that the names “certif[y]” an entity’s existence (209). For Bentham this assumption that ethical terms (miserliness or frugality, for instance) name real things is wrong on two counts, both of which inform Burke’s argument. First, he accepted only pain and pleasure as “real [entities] . . . the existence [of which] is a matter of universal and constant experience,” hence the only “real” motives are avoiding pain and obtaining pleasure. They are, Bentham argued, “the roots,—the main pillars or foundations of all the rest” (211). The moral terms built up around pain and pleasure are “psychological entities, mostly fictitious, framed by necessity for the purpose of discourse” (205) but otherwise “so many empty sounds”—though not the less dangerous because of that (206). Hence Bentham stripped away psychological clutter to discover permanence, just as Burke later did in simplifying ethics to hit the “rock bottom” of human motivation in his metabiological ethics. Second, Bentham declared that the language of motives does not name; it judges, often falsely, since censorial terms “cover[] and ke[ep] out of sight” any contradictory or ambiguous consequences (209): they are used, Bentham elsewhere averred, as “‘fig leaves’ for the ‘unseemly parts of the mind’” (qtd. in Burke, “Poets All”). “From th[ese] delusion[s],” Bentham argued, “endless is the confusion, the error, the dissension, the hostility, that has been derived” (205). “Under the direction of sinister and interest-begotten prejudice,” he concluded, “they have been employed in the character of fallacies, or instruments of deception, by polemics of all classes” (210). The extent of Burke’s indebtedness to Bentham in analyzing linguistic goads to war and prompting metabiological purification is demonstrated by the short step from Bentham’s “Table” to Burke’s notes to P&C:

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Bentham writes, “Applied to the several springs of action, and in particular to pleasures and to motives, these censorial and impassioned appellatives form no inconsiderable part of the ammunition employed in the war of words” (210). Burke freewrites, “‘Moral judgments’ are hardly more than the ideological barrage which is laid preparatory to the advance of troops—‘sentiments’ and ‘values,’ readily converted into ‘indignation’ at ‘outrage,’ are simply the vast ‘cultural’ preservative of the conditions of Jungle warfare” (“Procedure” n. pag.). Burke writes in P&C, “Morals, shaped by the forms and needs of action, become man’s most natural implement when exhorting to action. As implicit in censorial words, they are the linguistic projection of our bodily tools and weapons. Morals are fists. An issue, raised to a plane of moral indignation, is wholly combative in its choice of means. From this point of view, the moral elements in our vocabulary are symbolic warfare” (192).

In P&C Burke salutes Bentham’s program of linguistic disarmament by devoting an entire section to “Table” and presenting major rhetorical insights through Bentham, giving him the floor, so to speak: “Bentham has analyzed speech to the extent of showing that in the most ‘righteous’ aspect of our vocabulary, the moral or censorial, there lurks the stimulus to make action combative or competitive” (193). Following Bentham, Burke explains that language is “not a naming at all, but a system of attitudes, of implicit exhortations. To call a man a friend or an enemy is per se to suggest a program of action with regard to him” (177). Burke also observes that Bentham “sought to perfect a methodology which, by greatly increasing and documenting our linguistic skepticism, might give us better control at the ‘narrows’ of human relationship, the communicative medium itself ” (193). Burke, of course, had no illusions about the possibility or even desirability of “purifying” language, stating flatly, “speech in its essence is not neutral” (176). He nevertheless concedes that it might be possible to develop a “conscious dialectic discipline for playing moral weightings against one another” and limiting their power in particularly dangerous situations—such as the world war threatening to erupt as he began writing P&C (193). Ultimately he hoped to impress upon readers the urgency of understanding that “a ‘dyslogistic’ adjective is the equivalent of a blow—and enough of them can lead to one” (250). Burke sums up what he elsewhere calls “the Benthamite revolution” (“Poets All”) this way: “since the combative quality is ingrained in speech, and since speech is basic to social relationships, we may realize how essentially radical Bentham’s philological proposals were” (192). The Burkean revolution springing from metabiology was, I think, also “essentially radical.” He, too, sought to “perfect a methodology,” a “conscious dialectic discipline”—perspective by incongruity

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and graded series—illustrated, for instance, in his analysis of newspaper headlines in “Reading While You Run,” instructing readers how to reveal the symbolic warfare being waged in their everyday lives. Through the moral simplification of metabiology, Burke hoped to illuminate the “springs behind the man behind the gun,” those explosive sentiments and words that would lead to World War II. Nietzsche’s Morality of Combat and the Mystics’ Solution If Bentham helped Burke understand language as symbolic warfare, Nietzsche helped him see how all action, to some extent, is warlike and, paradoxically, how to resist Nietzsche’s conclusion that violence is the primary human motive. In “The Peace-War Conflict,” Burke acknowledges, à la Nietzsche, that “there is the same fanaticism, tenacity, and even pugnacity, observable in the efforts of the scientist, artist, explorer, inventor, teacher, or reformer. . . . All cultural activity as we know it is erected upon them” (198). But such an acknowledgment, Burke argues, “do[es] not thereby obligate ourselves to glorify a philosophy of combat. Action can be something qualitatively very different from combat” (198n1). As I have mentioned, Burke created a graded series (a continuum) of human motives, from violence to participation or action. But whereas Nietzsche chose the former as humans’ essential purpose, Burke chooses the later. Since it is possible to move toward either end of the continuum, he asks, “who would feel logically obliged to select the direction which implied the destruction of human society?” (235). And because in a graded series, the two poles and all the steps in between (including war and participation) become dialectically connected, Burke can admit militarism into his theory of human motives but prioritize other ways of expressing it—the very essence of purifying war. In thus merging combat and cooperation, Burke likened himself to mystics, who practice the controlled release and “harmonization” of warring aggressive and passive instincts (ROP 73)—what he calls in P&C a “sterilization of combat”: “The mystic, it seems, has often attempted to find disciplines whereby the combative aspect of action may be completely sterilized”—that is, purified—allowing the mystic to “enjoy the gratifications of attainment without the by-product, conquest” (247). This form of “develop[ing] ‘muscle’” (“Metabiology” 7), Burke argues, “would be both complete and noncombative.” That is, this “assertion in vacuo” would exercise humans’ violent impulses without harming anyone or anything (P&C 248). It is a workable practice of rechanneling aggression. The Poetic Orientation Burke’s primary move toward purifying war in P&C is advocating a poetic orientation, “the ultimate goal” of which “would be a society in which the participant

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aspect of action attained its maximum expression” (269–70). As Rueckert observes, he “asserted that [the poetic orientation’s] ideal was peace rather than war, action-without-combat instead of physical violence” (Drama 50). In P&C Burke explicitly connects the poetic orientation not only to cooperation and community but also to decreased violence. To describe human behavior, for instance, Burke suggests drawing upon the language of rhetoric—a word freighted with connotations of manipulation or battle (and that he later called Aristotle’s “manly art of self-defense” [RM 52]), but which he defines in P&C as “the ‘art of appeal’” (266), an antidote for the scientific orientation’s indifference to style that has “reinforced in the psychological plane the competitive emphasis that has plagued the Western world with increasing violence. For style is an elaborate set of prescriptions and proscriptions for ‘doing the right thing’” (268). Harking back to part 1’s “Style” chapter, Burke here argues that the manner of our communication affects the manner of our behavior. The “low anthropomorphic content” (58) of scientific prose sustains impersonal, even inhuman, social exchange: toneless, tone-deaf language begets a toneless, tone-deaf manner of communication begets behavior in which humans and humane codes of conduct are irrelevant. Style as both individualized expression and verbal good manners presupposes fully engaged human authors and audiences communicating by “mutual ingratiation,” appealing to one another (51). In the current orientation, “success becomes identical with conquest—but in an era greatly marked by style and rite” —that is, the poetic orientation—“we ‘succeed’ by acquiescing to its many noncompetitive ways of being ‘right’” (268). Burke argues that as the poetic orientation redefines success and doing the right thing, so, too, will cultural understandings of utility and propriety be broadened beyond those of “the industrial economists[’] . . . cult of dominance” (269). Activities once deemed unproductive —gardening, learning Sanskrit, becoming a potter—become useful “in the poetic or humane sense” (269), and the “merely” participatory and cooperative, Burke suggests, will become the truly active, rewarding, and rewarded. In a passage from the fall 1933 draft, we hear Burke’s desperate plea that P&C’s purification of war can prevail: Science attempts to handle this complicated business by admonishing us to be more reasonable, to stop and think. One may as properly beat a man and appeal to his good judgment not to fly into a silly rage. We are being beaten, forever being beaten—and there is a silly rage burning within us. And it can be extinguished in but one way—by violent burning, by methodical fanning oven, until it has consumed itself. . . . The vituperative, laudatory, combative, vindictive, acquisitive, envious promptings that lie at the basis of our vocabulary cannot be eliminated by the mere hypocrisy of a rationalist decree. . . . True: our machines are not evil; they are merely sometimes wrong—but

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that is no ground for believing that a mental and neurological equipment radically shaped for the purposes of fighting and conquest can bring us to anything but the battlefield if we have spirit. . . . The propitiatory, sacrificial, tragical emphasis of the Poetic concept, if truly understood, offers us the only possible devices whereby such malign powers can be harnessed, turned from the socially disintegrative channels of overt and covert competition into the socially integrative channels of the cooperative. Perhaps this change cannot be accomplished. There are many signs abroad to indicate that we must go through a drenching of fire and plague which will come as near as human ingenuity can come to wiping out the miraculous cultural acquisitions of many centuries. But if the change is accomplished, it will surely be accomplished by our focusing the next rationalization upon the control of the communicative medium. The fourth productive order to be harnessed to the purposes of man will be that most vital to all human relationships: the medium of communication, the “master” social enterprise. (ROP 73–74) M e ta b i o l o g i c a l M o t i v e s for Activism This chapter has argued that Burke theorized metabiology to create a simplified, stable, holistic, humanist ethics that channels innate and cultural violence toward more constructive ends. I have also explained that metabiology plays a pivotal role in Burke’s argument: it grounds his proposed poetic orientation. But I want to emphasize the significance of metabiology in its own right. What is metabiology for? What can readers do with it or because of it? Like Crable and Wolfe, I argue that metabiology motivates rhetorical criticism and political activism, authorizing—indeed, requiring—instantiation via resistance to an existing unhealthy orientation and active work to reorient culture. In other words metabiological ethics establish nonnegotiable criteria for Americans to evaluate cultural pieties, government, and their own and others’ participation in group life. Burke’s early notes illustrated his goal to create baseline standards below which humans should not descend: “I am not eager to distinguish man from some pissy toad except insofar as a distinction forces itself upon us. . . . Rather we think that, by stressing always man’s analogies with lowly things, we shall make it the clearer where man has not even procured for himself the cultural advantages which these lowly things sometimes enjoy. We would not have his humanism drop so far beneath that of the coelentera as it sometimes appears to do” (“Minimized Ethic” 2). Metabiology provides the warrants for arguments that the needs of humans as embodied symbol users are met. As his concluding paragraphs explain, based on metabiology, readers may argue that particular “institutions interfere with the establishment of decent social or communicative

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relationships, and thereby affront the permanent biological norms. . . . And since we insist that a point of view requires . . . adequate embodiment in the architecture of the State,” Burke further acknowledges the potential need for “open [nonviolent] conflict” with those who uphold “socially dangerous institutions” (P&C 271–72). I will return to the philosophical and political implications of P&C’s argument in chapter 3, after I have added the crucial concepts of the art of living and recalcitrance to the mix; putting those terms together with metabiology, we will see what that gets Burke—and us.

Three Enacting the Poetic Orientation Distrust hypertrophy of art on paper. More of the artistic should be expressed in vital social relations. . . . Let [the artist] “release” his artistry through a total social texture. Let it take more “ecological” forms. Burke, Attitudes toward History, 259 I have chosen action or participation as the word that shall designate the essence of this series. Or we might choose such words as cooperation and communication. Burke, Permanence and Change, 235

If P&C argues for the rhetorical means and ethical ends of social change, then the poetic orientation is the goal of that change—a view of humans and their relation to the universe and each other based on metabiological ethics that identify action as the central human purpose. The poetic orientation, Burke wrote Cowley, defines “the universe as Being-Created,” which calls for an “ethicalpoetic-‘mystic’ approach,” as opposed to “the Universe as Having-Been-Created (like moving wheels),” a “scientific-logical” approach to “people and purposes” (16 Aug. 1933). In other words the poetic orientation asks people to see the world as a work-in-progress to which they contribute and, hence, to see themselves as composers rather than a passive audience or, worse, the proverbial cogs in wheels moved by various determinisms—historical, economic, and behavioral. Looking closely, however, it is apparent that Burke’s discussion of the poetic orientation makes two arguments: an argument to change how we interpret existing human behavior and an argument to change that behavior based on this new interpretation. That is, Burke argues for a change in vocabulary that then prompts a change in behavior. This two-pronged argument parallels his approach to perspective by incongruity, which, remember, Burke says “is both needed and extensively practiced” (P&C 119), because it is a fundamental cognitive process

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everyone uses but also one that needs to be explicitly employed as a method of cultural criticism and a rhetorical strategy. Likewise the poetic orientation renames humans as beings whose defining purpose is symbol use. Specifically humans participate in the communal building of the good life—the art of living—by using what Burke identifies as the fundamental poetic method: “fusion” of disparate elements (267) to construct new knowledge and new identities, both individual and collective. (Just as fusing disparate words creates metaphor, so fusing disparate interests and behaviors creates identity and fusing disparate people and viewpoints creates community.) But, Burke argues, this new way of interpreting existing human purpose should motivate a cultural shift to align people’s pieties and sociopolitical institutions with the values implicit in the new identity of poet/actor/communicator: creativity, mysticism, cooperation, civic participation, collaboration, nonviolence, inclusivity, ingratiation, and, implicitly, democracy. Thus Burke’s new orientation established the “poet” as both the quotidian and the model human: who we always already are—“we are all poets,” Burke famously observes (76)—and the identity we should endeavor most fully to inhabit. But what exactly did Burke mean by poet—or, since it is not a stable term in the text, what is the range of operative meanings presented? Burke seldom used poet literally to mean a writer of verse, often using it interchangeably with imaginative writer (P&C 58) or artist; sometimes he seems to mean a creative thinker more generally. But scholars disagree about whether, or how far, he broadens the term and, hence, just what kind of social relations or cultural values he advocates via the poetic orientation. Some view the poetic orientation as “an argument for social conditions that foster cultural stability for art’s sake” (Sheriff 285). Rueckert goes further, reading the poetic orientation as “one of the most extreme defenses of poetry as knowledge and as a rhetoric of rebirth to be found in contemporary American literary criticism” and calling Burke’s poet “a superior man . . . with superior knowledge of the psychological universals and superior powers of articulation” (Drama 49).1 My purpose is less to challenge these readings than to foreground neglected elements of Burke’s argument: drawing, in part, on an analysis of his revisions and P&C’s rhetorical strategies, in what follows, I argue for an expansive definition of poet as agent or maker, particularly a communicator whose primary purpose is to build social relationships and inclusive, participatory communities. Like Hawhee, I demonstrate mysticism’s importance to Burke’s reorientation, highlighting the central role played by two mystical figures, Jeremy Bentham and D. H. Lawrence, in his argument—a role that has gone unmarked by Burke scholars—and argue that Burke himself functions as both mystic and civic rhetor in the text. I further read the poetic orientation not as a potentially

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elitist bid to make the world safe for art, but as a democratizing civic project that offers citizens rhetorical techniques to foster the good life—the art of living. Finally I analyze the importance of recalcitrance (a natural and/or social stimulus for correcting or buttressing claims) in encouraging citizens to adjudicate and refine knowledge collaboratively and, in so doing, to revitalize their culture continually. I begin this chapter discussing Burke’s first argument for the poetic orientation as an interpretive lens for fully understanding human activity, then explore the more contested second argument in which Burke moves from a claim of what is to a claim of what ought to be—specifically an art of living. “We Are All Poets” Burke’s repeated claims that all people are poets have their source in two observations about human behavior: first, like poets, we communicate with audiences via symbolic appeals, and, second, we construct identities through “fusion” of experiences and beliefs (pious linkages of what goes with what)—for Burke the poetic method par excellence. These poetic acts of symbol use and composing identities via fusion are not new things people will do once the poetic orientation is established; they are quintessentially human behaviors, hardwired into our systems, so that even those saturated with the technological psychosis constantly act as poets. In a letter to Cowley, written as he drafted P&C, Burke described how a new interpretative frame—an approach in terms of communication— shifted his study from primarily verbal symbols to symbolic action (“signs”) more generally: “As you approach experience from the standpoint of communication, you get to the study of symbols. And as you carry out your study of symbols, you find that not merely words and pictures, but tonalities, gestures, postures are also involved in the question of signs. You then . . . find yourself concerned not only with the symbolism of speech, dance, etc., but also with symbolic acts in every category of expression, including the ‘practical.’ And by then you have reached the jumping-off place—the world is a mass of beckonings, grins, scowls, billboards, and the like. . . . The vocabulary which one had invented to describe the writing of poetry of a sudden becomes usable to describe the construction of one’s life” (31 Aug. 1933). Two things are worth noting here. First, Burke marked his shift to a communicative or poetic perspective as a shift in vocabulary: viewing human behavior through a different lens produces a different interpretation, in this case a world shot through with symbolic use, so that he now sees even the most prosaic activities as rhetorical. Second, his unwillingness to delineate “communication,” “categories of expression,” rhetoric (“beckonings,” “billboards”), and “poetry” should make readers wary of understanding poetry and the poetic orientation in narrowly literary terms.

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For most readers today, gesture as symbolic is a given (grimaces for pain, listlessness for depression) as are modes of social interaction (invasions of personal space, a shy person’s hanging at a party’s edges). It is also easy to see symbolic elements within institutional structures and architecture. “Even the most external manifestations of purpose,” Burke notes, “must be symbolic of such purpose. A sense of order, for example, is as clearly symbolized in financial and military organizations as in a play by Shakespeare” (P&C 254). But by virtue of his redefining humans as poets/communicators, Burke argued for a broader, and less familiar, understanding of symbol use that goes well beyond individual, visible actions or structures to include the devices at work both in piety and orientations—those complex networks that frame meaning making and constitute our identities. Burke laid out this more expansive understanding that identity construction is a poetic act in enthymematic fashion, based on the striking parallels between his descriptions of pious and poetic processes. Piety, remember, is “integration, guided by a scrupulous sense of the appropriate” (77), “a desire to . . . fit experiences together into a unified whole” (74). Similarly, he claims, “the poem is a sudden fusion, a falling together of many things formerly apart—and the very force of this fusion leads one to seek further experiences of the same quality” (158). Given these two claims, Burke concludes that “life itself is a poem in the sense that, in the course of living, we gradually erect a structure of relationships about us in conformity with our interests. As Rothschild would say, all acts are ‘synthetic,’ each being a new way of putting things together, quite as each line of a drama is” (254). Like poets, people piously select and synthesize elements of their experience in ongoing acts of identity creation. In addition Burke saw people as poets because they shape the world in their own image; they imbue events with symbolic significance, projecting their interests and values onto a scene. He claims this interpretive process “is assertive, it is productive or creative. . . . Rockefeller’s economic empire is as truly a symbolic replica of his personal character as Milton’s epic was a symbolic replica of Milton. In both cases, the men ‘socialized’ their specific patterns of interest by the manipulation of objective materials in a way whereby the internal and the external were indeterminately fused.” Hence, Burke concludes, “all action is poetic” (215), all living an “expressive process” (253). By using an aesthetic vocabulary to describe human behavior, Burke reclassifies people as inherently poetic beings, who use symbols and poetic methods (synthesis) to construct pieties, identities, and communities. But intertwined with this descriptive claim is a second, hortatory claim about how people should live. Hence, Burke asserts, “by viewing all men’s conduct as the writing of poems, it will make more clear the sort of poems which people might properly prefer to make of their experience” (ROP 68). By arguing for

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a poetic orientation to life, he hopes to (a) persuade others to adopt his new perspective, (b) encourage reflection about the type or quality of lives they are composing, and (c) insist upon material conditions to support more humane individual and collective compositions. That is, Burke hoped readers would explicitly acknowledge poetic acts, broadly defined, as their fundamental purpose, “erect[ing] a structure of relationships”—values, personal interactions, cultural practices, occupations, institutions, political and economic systems—that piously “go with” fully living as poets. This is what he means by a “philosophy, or psychology, of poetry” or, more famously, “an art of living,” which, he asserts, is not “a performer’s art, not a specialist’s art for some to produce and many to observe, but an art in its widest aspects” (P&C 66).2 H o m o P o e ta vs . T e c h n o l o g i c a l M a n To explain the poetic orientation more fully, I return to archival material, particularly “The Range of Piety,” an early version of part 1, which more vividly contrasts the technological and poetic orientations via a face-off between “the technological man” (51) and “homo poeta” (67). In these passages, mostly deleted before publication, Burke identified three overarching problems with the “scientific-logical” approach to life: (1) it relies upon an inaccurate, and hence dangerous, account of human psychology, treating people like machines; (2) its presumptive neutral vocabulary does not enable people to handle persistent threats to social harmony; and (3) its ethics of domination cannot sustain a humane culture. As he complained to Tate, “Mechanical invention, the work of extreme genius, serves in the end but to multiply a hundredfold the power of gluttons and fools.” Grudging acceptance or accommodation will do nothing to prevent the enslavement of people to their technology; the only effective response to machine culture, Burke argued, is an “attitude of refusal” (19 Aug. 1933). The poetic orientation prompts such a refusal; the art of living enacts it. In ROP Burke bemoans the extent to which human bodies and minds, language, and culture are being molded to the factory model. “Obedient to the authority of our machines,” Burke writes, “we have piously attempted to explain the workings of our own minds by the metaphor of the machine. Machines, we know, either ‘go straight’ or ‘get out of order.’ Applying the same perspective to himself the technological man assumes that there is no intermediate process: that people cannot go crooked and yet be in order[,] . . . that we have only a choice between ‘rationality’ and break-down’” (51). For Burke this is an inadequate understanding of the range of human response. Such a “rational mechanistic psychology” (71) is reflected in science’s search for a vocabulary that “will eliminate emotional weightings, handling events from a purely ‘objective’ or ‘impartial’ point of view” (70). A scientific, rationalist vocabulary—“designed,”

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Burke says, “for machines” (60)—is unsuited for persuasion, for appealing to virtue, for addressing the widespread fear and anger in the wake of economic crises or unprovoked aggression or mass-media propaganda, and thus it cannot help people handle their most pressing social problems: “No wonder it has failed where the attitude of inducement or propitiation must be stressed. . . . It can ‘appeal to reason.’ It can plead for ‘justice,’ or ‘impartiality,’ or ‘disinterestedness.’ But it is fundamentally inhuman, or non human, since it offers absolutely nothing in its rationalization whereby we may feel charitable towards the injustice, partiality, and ferocity which are at the very base of human ethics. In accordance with the scientific rationalization, such turbulent qualities are condemned with horror, they are ruled out of existence by fiat; so far as possible, their existence is denied, and when it cannot be denied it is considered simply a problem for the clinic” (70–71). Because mechanistic psychology represses or rejects normal human responses, seeing them as signs of mental illness, technological man has no means of understanding or handling the problems that beset humans and nothing to aspire to that would save more power. “What a shell the entire scientific rationalization becomes when transferred from the proper region of technology into the region of complex human response,” he protests. “What a sorry ideal it offers us” (71). What sheer insanity to imagine the rationalist system that serves technological man—one designed by and for machines—can offer a moral vision for human society. And, as Burke warned Cowley, at the time a more active Communist Party supporter, simply changing economic systems will not solve this problem, for communism (15 June 1933a [unsent]) is as consumed by what Rueckert calls the “mechanistic monomania” as American capitalism (Drama 38). Thus, Burke wrote Cowley, “My book is an elaborate plea for the poetic metaphor, as against the mechanistic metaphor, in the interpretation of human purpose” (9 June 1934; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 209). Burke’s turn to poetry for rescue was spurred in part by I. A. Richards’s 1926 Science and Poetry—in particular his claim that “we shall be thrown back, as Matthew Arnold foresaw, upon poetry. It is capable of saving us” (95). Although Burke rejected parts of Richards’s argument, he latched on to the notion of salvation through poetry, reporting to Cowley, “Here will be the centre of the change: the idea of escape or flight to poetry will change to the idea of poetry as bulwark. (Not poetry as retreat—but poetry as basis of protest. . . . Poetry as the campaign base from which to organize one’s forays)” (8 Sept. 1933). Burke had been stung by recent criticism from literary Marxists and close friends, suggesting that his celebration of a modernist aesthetic in Counter-Statement and more so in his experimental novel Towards a Better Life amounted to a head-in-the-sand reaction to the deepening political and economic crisis. Countering this charge, he now argues that poetry, in fact, drives social activism—though not in the way Richards and most of Burke’s contemporaries imagined: “Richards has suggested that Poetry

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be cultivated as bulwark, to back us in the many sociological and ideological bewilderments which still seem in store for us. . . . But were we to accept his advice, how should we go about it? Not merely by reading books of poetry, more and more of them—and most assuredly not by writing them” (ROP 69–70). Poetry, Burke argues, can best serve as bulwark in the form of a psychology or philosophy—that is, an approach to life, an orientation. Such a poetic psychology or orientation supplies the missing human element in the existing orientation’s approach to motives, language, and ethics. Every orientation, Burke claims, seeks to control a particular productive order—and to do so with a particular attitude. The scientific orientation, “fundamentally a system of coercion, of dominance” (50), produces technology with which nations seek to control their citizens and each other. In stark contrast the poetic orientation redefines and develops “the basic ‘productive force’ of mankind, the sovereign instrument of human relationships: the medium of communication” (70). Burke also reoriented the industrial (and Marxist) emphasis on work and occupation to a focus on human purpose and vocation. Thus, he argues, “since the reliance upon the communicative medium is the trait most distinctive of Homo sapiens, we arrive through the concept of Homo Poeta at the Vocation of Man as Man” (75). So while the scientific orientation produces workers and technology for economic or military conquest, the poetic orientation “produces” composers whose “occupation” is building and sustaining relationships, striving to live harmoniously with nature and each other; and because these communicators (“poets”) have a richer account of human psychology and language, they also understand the effective rhetorical strategies of style and ingratiation needed to appeal to and move audiences during personal or cultural crises. Burke thus describes his agenda for reclaiming an ethically sound, humanistic cultural foundation this way: “The essential tactics [for providing stability] requires [sic] the massing of evidence to prove that homo poeta is the concept of man’s manness which best serves as a point of reference for evaluating our institutions and purposes” (ROP 67). The poetic orientation, Burke concludes: will be farthest from the positivistic emphasis upon the direct dominance of nature (which flowers in the business man’s vision of a building tight shut, without openings, its sunlight, temperature, and rainfall provided by machinery from within). . . . Instead of interpreting man’s actions by the approved factory model, wherein things either “go straight” or are “out of order,” it will entertain the thought of processes whereby people’s minds might act deviously and still be in order. It will observe the “poetry” in thieving, in crooked politics, in commercial ambitions, in murder, in malice, in family brawls, in warfare, science, anger, forgiveness, bodily posture— and, yes, in poems themselves. It will seek to extend its rationalization

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into the very structure of the universe, noting how much there is to be discovered from the Poetic standpoint of a Universe Being Created. . . . It will look forward to the day when the canons of poetry are written even into the architecture of the State. (67–68) It is important to note that, when Burke revised “Range of Piety” for publication as “On Interpretation” in Plowshare, he deleted the language (if not the idea) of homo poeta in favor of the more generalizable phrase art of living; he also removed much of the overblown phrasing (canons of poetry in the architecture of the state, for instance)—revisions that point readers toward an expansive reading of the poetic orientation. (Re)Imagining the P o e t i c O r i e n tat i o n In P&C’s final section, “Conclusions,” Burke offers the fullest descriptions of the poetic orientation as the “ultimate metaphor” for defining and guiding human relations—descriptions that illustrate the poetic orientation functioning on philosophical, political, and social levels and that are marked by superlatives and imperatives. He begins by affirming “the ultimate metaphor for discussing the universe and man’s relations to it must be the poetic or dramatic metaphor. Many metaphors are possible. . . . We suggest that the metaphor of the poetic or dramatic man can include them all and go beyond them all” (263–64). Here Burke emphasizes, as I noted earlier, that the poetic orientation requires two moves in tandem: reconstituting not only humans as poets (rather than machines) but also the universe as a work-in-progress (rather than a finished product; 266). Here, too, he harks back to earlier claims that there are always multiple, competing perspectives: the poetic is not the only valid orientation, but it is the best because it provides the fullest, most accurate understanding of human purpose. But P&C is not just a philosophical treatise; it calls for the “political activation of the esthetic” (Frank 69). On the political plane, the poetic orientation establishes the goal of social change: “If there are radical changes to be made in the State,” Burke argues, “what metaphor can better guide us than the poetic one as to the direction in which these changes must point?” (P&C 267). Instantiation of the poetic orientation within political and economic institutions requires, for instance, provisions for basic human needs; greater income equality; adjustments in labor relations; new foreign policy priorities; even, Burke suggests, environmental protection. And finally, at the level of social norms, he argues that “once a coöperative3 way of life were firmly established in human institutions, I  believe that the poetic metaphor would be the best guide (indeed the only conceivable guide) in shaping the new pieties of living” (268). Within the poetic

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orientation, the power of domination gives way to the art of appeal. Finally he explicitly argues that the poetic orientation encourages active civic participation by all its citizens. Burke’s vision is relatively straightforward as visions go, but as I have suggested, as scholars attempt to trace its implications, they disagree about the expansiveness of definitions of poetic and, hence, about his ultimate goals. Traditional readings of the poetic orientation have featured almost hagiographic discussions of the power of art and artists and have emphasized his desire to create a culture that supports artistic production. Wess argues, for instance, that his proposed cultural transformation is “depicted as necessary to make things better for literature” (Kenneth Burke 58) by creating the kind of stable, cooperative, culturally rich society that, as Burke claims in “Nature of Art under Capitalism,” enables “pure” art to flourish (677). Wess further argues that in restoring the value of style, Burke valorized “ideal poetic communication—the will to eloquence—holding it up as a beacon for the culture, and generalizing it to everyday life, so that all human relationships have the potential to approximate the ideal” (78). Wess rightly notes Burke’s desire to democratize rich communicative practices as part of a program of “cultural humanism” (78), but reading P&C as a text that attempts to purify war suggests, as I argue in my coming analysis of the art of living, that Burke is less interested in promoting a highbrow standard of eloquence or ideal communication than in reasserting style’s importance as an essential survival tool: the technological spirit of dominance must give way to audience appeals—finding common ground, respecting others’ pieties—if humanity hopes to survive. Similarly, although Rueckert claims that Burke’s understanding of the poetic was a broad one, like Wess his explanations sometimes suggest Burke’s interest lay in art per se. “Clearly,” Rueckert says, “symbolic action includes much more than poetry; and clearly almost anything from the full range of human action could be a symbolic act” (Drama 60). Rueckert further insightfully observes that Burke “makes his theory broad enough so that it will cover almost everything and permit repeated excursions away from and back to a fixed point” (60). Even as he acknowledges the elasticity of Burke’s definition, however, Rueckert’s analysis often hovers around the “fixed point”—a more literal understanding of Burke’s use of poetry. Witness this series of claims: poetry is “the balm which heals [the world]” (50). Poems are charts, maps, routes of the self, “superior solutions to the problems of living” (61). It is hard to know what these claims could mean if Rueckert is not literally referring to literature, especially given their resonance with Burke’s later claim that literature is “equipment for living” (“Literature” 10). Granted, too, as Rueckert rightly notes, Burke’s 1930s work often rang with “hyperbolic assertions,” which, he argues, “illustrate the thoroughness with which [Burke] developed the Romantic belief in the superiority of the poet and poetry”

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(Drama 50). But it sometimes seems as if Rueckert indulges in some hyperbole of his own, as when he writes that “Burke studies poetry both for a knowledge of how it functions as a rhetoric of rebirth, and so that he may, priest-like, disseminate the good word” (56) or when he concludes, “As wise man, prophet, and medicine man, the poet will perform those charismatic symbolic acts which are the means of man’s salvation; priest-like, the critic will mediate between the redeemers and those seeking redemption, interpreting the holy texts and preaching the gospel of the new secular religion” (63). Burke’s engagement with poetry and the insight of Rueckert’s argument are undeniable: he often frames his cultural reorientation in religious terms.4 But this implied image of him as the singular visionary is both inaccurate and counterproductive for rhetorical scholars. Further, in P&C his move is not so much to raise “the Poet” on high as to bring the poetic, broadly defined, into people’s everyday lives (I take that as the import of his claim that the art of living is “not . . . a performer’s art, not a specialist’s art for some to produce and many to observe”)—in other words to restore human agency, rechannel energies into community building, “socialize” knowledge production, and enrich language practices to the extent that community members become rhetorically sensitive critics and activists. As Burke presents it, this cultural reorientation moves far beyond literal artistic production, becoming a broad program of civic participation, and he becomes what Gregory Clark calls a “civic theorist” and teacher (Civic Jazz 11). A Counterstatement If, as Rueckert observes, Burke designed a theory of symbolic action that “permit[s] . . . excursions away from and back to a fixed point”—that permits an expansive reading of poet and poetic orientation—in P&C Burke insists that we define those terms broadly, both when he chooses a philosophy or psychology of art rather than aesthetic artifacts as social cure and when he argues that “the methods of poetry ha[ve] been too rigorously restricted to the printed page” (P&C 267). My discussion of the poetic orientation and art of living, then, moves away from the “fixed point,” examining the broader ramifications of Burke’s poetic metaphor often obscured by the image of Rueckert’s uber-poet or by standard readings of P&C that so amplify Burke’s aesthetic language that first-time readers typically miss the explicit mystical, rhetorical, and civic strands running through the text. My reading serves as a counterstatement to existing scholarly interpretations, intended to stand beside rather than cancel them. The poetic orientation, I argue, names a cultural scene—and hence a set of motives—that are creative, mystical, and civic. That we do not typically put those three terms together is both a sign of the radical nature of Burke’s proposal and the source of its reach and power. As he discusses them, the creative, mystical, and civic vectors certainly overlap, but I parse them to examine each more fully.

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Similarly it is helpful to tease apart the interwoven concepts of the poetic orientation and the art of living if only because, again, scholars say little about the latter directly. The poetic orientation is the cultural scene within which Americans can build the “good life”—an art of living. Put another way, the art of living is an enactment of the poetic orientation in everyday life. The goal of the poetic orientation—what it enables and produces—is communal construction of an art of living, one part of which is creative expression in the forms of poetry, music, quilting, gardening, and so forth, but the overarching experience of which is participation in communally creating a functional, inclusive civic body. The good life, Burke asserts in 1937, is “a project for ‘getting along with people’” (ATH 256). When he designates action or participation—or, alternately, cooperation and communication—as “the essence” of human purpose (P&C 235), Burke puts front and center the primary ways by which people get along. Unlike many Burke scholars, then, I argue that the primary concern of Burke’s poetic orientation and art of living is not art or aesthetic culture; it is people, and particularly their social relationships. Certainly other scholars have attached these six words (creative, mystical, civic, communication, cooperation, participation) to the poetic orientation and art of living. Rueckert, for instance, notes that Burke clusters terms such as creative, poetic, cooperative, action, communication, and participation (Drama 48). But with a few notable exceptions, scholarly discussion seldom goes beyond such clustering, as if the terms, their interrelationships, and, most important, how they are enacted were self-evident. For Burke things are rarely self-evident— or, as I have only recently realized, he rarely assumes readers will find them so. What I offer here, then, are detailed analyses of six key terms, their relationships, and their enactment as they pertain to the poetic orientation and art of living and to P&C’s larger civic project, which rarely gets the attention it deserves. The poetic orientation is most easily understood as a source of, or the scene that fosters, creative motives. Reading etymologically, as Burke so often did, we get poetry via the Greek poesis, the term for making, doing. Through his poetic orientation, Burke emphasized agency and production—“the creative, assertive, synthetic act” (259). This phrase, Hawhee argues, “suggests an act of becoming— not just becoming one, as Rueckert might have it, but becoming something else, even becoming many—perpetually. In short, creation, assertion, and synthesis are means, not ends” (“Burke and Nietzsche” 138). Via the poetic orientation, Burke encouraged people to think of themselves—and to become—knowledge makers, just as he did in Auscultation by broadly defining the aesthetic to foreground the creation of new meanings and, ultimately, new identities: “the esthetic then—in science, in art, in philosophy, in criticism—is a process of naming, and of naming in such a way that one seeks to go beyond the points of reference which one finds already available around him” (ACR 146–47). This definition is

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striking for its lack of field dependence and any reference to aesthetic artifacts. As Selzer and I argue, “No longer specifically and narrowly linked with art or the imaginative, the aesthetic becomes a general habit of mind that creates new vocabulary and the new perspectives that permit a culture to move forward” (84). And, as Hawhee suggests, when people go beyond established ways of naming and interpreting experience, they simultaneously understand themselves differently—become different people. For Burke the poetic orientation’s creative motives are closely linked with its mystic motives. If, as he says, the poetic orientation defines people as “the inventors of new solutions” (P&C 267), then for him the inventor par excellence is the mystic, until recently, the missing figure in studies of P&C, which Hawhee calls a “markedly mystical” book (Moving Bodies 31). Hawhee thoroughly details Burke’s connections to mysticism via 1920s New York literary circles, including their involvement with the famed Russian mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, but scholars have yet to appreciate the extent of P&C’s explicit engagement with mysticism as a particularly potent form of creative insight and invaluable (because unexpected) knowledge. Indeed in part 3 the mystic is a recurring figure, appearing in “Secular Mysticism in Bentham,” “Variants of the Ethicizing Tendency,” and “Where Scientists and Mystics Meet” and starring in the penultimate chapter “The Poetry of Action” via “Mystic’s Sterilization of Combat” and two other subsections revolving around the “contemporary secular mystic” D. H. Lawrence. In these discussions Burke defines, illustrates (via Jeremy Bentham and Lawrence), and himself acts as a mystic. As he presents it, mysticism is neither an otherworldly, disembodied state nor an inward-looking isolation; rather, as Hawhee observes, in P&C he “offer[s] mysticism as a poetic”—that is, productive —“corporeal style of engagement” (Moving Bodies 31). Mystics make ideal guides in times of cultural crisis because they train themselves to dwell in liminal spaces: in and out of body, in peace and conflict, situated and free-ranging, active and passive, in touch with ultimate reality by being so fully grounded in this one. Unfazed by confusion and unbound by conventional pieties, mystics can play a key role in reorienting culture by helping people find their moorings. For Burke mystics have two extraordinary ways of seeing that enable them to offer fresh interpretations. First, they expertly employ—indeed inhabit— perspective by incongruity, “seeing around the corner” (P&C 222)” or seeing beyond accepted understandings: the mystic in effect reclassifies things, sorting them into different categories and creating altogether new ones. The result is that “by making new patterns, new sortings, new identifications, he is—to all practical purposes—making new things” (ACR 101). As Burke describes them, mystics are fiercely, fearlessly impious, mentally cracking commonsense notions of what goes with what and fusing concepts traditionally separated. Second, mystics look to the past, retrieving useful knowledge left behind. Significantly Burke’s original

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version of the famed “rhetorical parlor,” written in 1932, specifically describes how “new” ideas are (re)introduced into cultural conversation—by mystics: “To the mystic, then, history becomes the following-out of one line of thought, where other lines of thought might just as ‘reasonably’ have been followed. . . . The ‘innovator’ is a man, who, after a certain trend of conversation has been going on for some time, goes back a few sentences to some point that was made and partially neglected—and from this partially neglected point he develops a line of thought somewhat different from that which the subsequent course of discussion had taken” (ACR 102). P&C is full of examples of Burke’s retrieving knowledge from the past. As he wrote his trusted mentor Watson, “I have gone to the Archives and dug up all sorts of things. . . . So—we have a little more this time”— a little more “substantiat[ion] by a corpus of historic and psychologic documentation” (21 Mar. 1933). One of the many things Burke retrieved from the past is, of course, mystical practices themselves. Thus among the alphabetized list of core tenets he sent Allen Tate are these: “(v) . . . I begin to find that, at other periods of human history, when other systems of ethics were coming into disrepute . . . , people were given to a similar habit of seeking in the body-processes the undeniable point of reference outside the system whereby sturdier and more accurate moral exhortations could be built up; (w) I discover that such people were called mystics; (x) I look longingly and respectfully into their works” (19 Aug. 1933). And what is it that mystics seek as they look around corners or into the past? The same thing Burke seeks and theorizes in P&C: a rock-bottom ethical foundation on which to reorient culture and build the good life. “The mystic,” he writes, “attempt[s] to define the ultimate motivation of human conduct[,] . . . seek[ing] a sounder basis of certainty than those provided by the flux of history” (222). As I have shown, like the mystic, Burke found that ultimate motive in human biology. In seeing around corners, searching for permanence amid shifting cultural vocabularies, and identifying action as the fundamental human purpose, he himself acts as a mystic. Theorizing metabiology and advocating the poetic orientation are highly mystical acts. P&C began as—and to a significant degree remains—a mystical project. But it is a particular kind of mysticism—an engaged or civic mysticism. Just as advocating a poetic orientation and art of living is a political intervention, so, too, is Burkean mysticism. Burke further emphasized mysticism’s value by presenting as role models two figures (Bentham and Lawrence) who exemplified mystical ways of seeing. Earlier I discussed how Burke drew upon Bentham’s insight into the violent potential of highly charged language. Here I show how Burke saw Bentham’s linguistic insight as a form of mysticism—one that Burke also practiced. In “Secular Mysticism in Bentham,” Burke argues that Bentham’s “Table of the Springs of Action” shows an irreverence toward traditional (pious) understandings of language, which Bentham categorizes not as naming but as incipient action—“the

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exhortation and threat which guide and stimulate action” (P&C 192). Bentham’s rhetorical analysis, Burke observes, “brought him into a realm of conceptual relativity which is usually the property of mystics” (193), a point he quickly reinforces by noting that Bentham’s “almost anarchistic indifference to traditional linguistic categories [suggests] the kinds of confusion in which the mystic appears to be at home” (194). Burke is equally at home—even revels—in such confusion. He is nothing if not indifferent to traditional linguistic categories, translating terms such as piety from religion to psychology and culture. And much of P&C’s theory, particularly perspective by incongruity, inhabits “the realm of conceptual relativity.” By presenting his work as a continuation of Bentham’s secular mysticism, Burke defined himself as a mystic. Although Burke scholars seldom write about Burke’s interest in Bentham, most would acknowledge the connection readily enough. The same cannot be said, however, for the other figure Burke presents as a mystic in P&C: Lawrence, who plays such a pivotal role, philosophically and rhetorically, in part 3 and whose approach to the universe and human purpose is mirrored so clearly in Burke’s own. Indeed although Burke claims to defend (albeit with qualifications) Lawrence’s antipositivism (he claims that crops make the sun shine), he seems less a disinterested defender than an admiring student, who takes up his teacher’s project and, by resituating, completes it. So it is surprising that so little has been written about Burke’s use of Lawrence. One sign of this scholarly neglect is our curious habit of attributing to Burke assertions that Burke explicitly attributes to Lawrence. Witness the passages that scholars (myself included) discuss as emphatic expressions of Burke’s beliefs rather than his summaries of Lawrence’s: •

•

•

• •

“He [Lawrence] would stress in the biologic pattern the productive or creative element, and would have all else flow from it. If life is the ultimate, the universe becomes teleologically involved as an instrument for the sustaining and expression of life” (222). “Not content to adopt a point of view which would allow the genius of industry to shape the patterns of the state, Lawrence would emphasize biologic factors by which the genius of industry might in turn be tested” (224). “If we discount the picturesque element of his [Lawrence’s] strategies, what we have left is an insistence that a purposive or teleological factor must be reaffirmed in our attempts to understand man’s relation to his environment” (230). “Lawrence would look upon the universe as being created. He would restore the poetic point of view” (231). “Insofar as all men are poets, . . . he [Lawrence] is selecting as his starting point our ultimate motive, the situation common to all, the creative, assertive, synthetic act” (259).

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Clearly these are Burke’s claims about Lawrence, but scholars often put these words directly into Burke’s mouth. This reattribution is especially striking in the final passage above—one of the book’s most famous lines, repeatedly quoted as Burke’s quintessential argument for metabiology and the poetic orientation. Scholars’ erasure of Lawrence is telling. It indicates how Burke is often read for theoretical content, not for rhetorical strategies. (For surely it is an odd move, rhetorically, for Burke to make Lawrence his mouthpiece in the book’s final sections.) In another sense, however, it is understandable that scholars miss or ignore Lawrence’s presence in Burke’s arguments for a poetic orientation: readers see Burke in Lawrence because Burke saw himself in Lawrence. That scholars so readily substitute one for the other signals just how closely Burke identified with Lawrence’s perspective—and in so doing identified himself as a mystic. In rejecting positivism and industrialism, in championing a poetic perspective grounded in humans’ biological need to act, Burke followed Lawrence’s mystical path. However, he diverged from Lawrence in how that perspective is communicated, how it is placed (or not) in relation to other perspectives. An individual, Burke writes, “is necessarily talking error unless his words can claim membership in a collective body of thought” (ATH 172). In Burke’s eyes Lawrence erred by scorning collective opinion, refusing to account for or appeal to others’ pieties and to imagine collaboratively reshaping his vision. Lawrence, as Burke saw him, thus dismisses the very actions Burke prized—those that he advocates and models in P&C as central to the communal good life: communication, cooperation, participation. Unlike Lawrence’s, Burke’s mysticism was ultimately a form of civic engagement: a commitment to both seeing around corners and to expressing those new perspectives in ways that invite response and revision. T h e C i v i c A rt o f L i v i n g : C o m m u n i c at i o n , C o o p e r at i o n , Pa rt i c i pat i o n The poetic orientation’s creative and mystical motives thus merge with, and, are completed by, motives for civic engagement. For the poetic orientation in and of itself does not establish the good life. As a scene with a set of motives, as way of interpreting experience and defining human purpose, the poetic orientation is an essential condition for bringing the good life into being, but a way of life is built by human actions—or, more precisely, human interactions. So what kinds of interactions create and sustain the good life? That is, what constitutes the art of living? Surprisingly, because the art of living is typically subsumed under the poetic orientation, scholars have said little about this fundamental question. My answer: people create and sustain Burke’s art of living through rhetorically

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sensitive communication that enables social cooperation and encourages civic participation. Indeed Burke explicitly identifies humans’ fundamental purpose, our truest vocation, as action—variously articulated as participation, cooperation, and communication (235). It is important to note that Burke does not present these as distinct purposes; rather they are different names for the central purpose or motive, the source of humans’ greatest fulfillment—hence the source of the good life. But because each term offers a different way of seeing that fundamental purpose, examining the terms separately affords the greatest insight. In what follows, I argue that communication highlights symbol use as the means to create human relationships. Cooperation foregrounds the importance of style, understood as the art of appeal or doing the right thing, in communal life. Participation emphasizes the need for active, collaborative involvement in the larger civic project of getting along. And because so many readers miss the rhetoric in P&C, I particularly emphasize the rhetorical nature of this activity. The civic art of living, in other words, is a rhetorical art—one that ultimately functions to purify war. Communication: The “Sovereign Instrument of Social Relationships” P&C is shot through with rhetorical theory and Burke’s own rhetorical strategies. Students, however, are often confused and frustrated that Burke rarely uses the word rhetoric in P&C. They argue that he seems more interested in art and culture than rhetoric per se. There are several (rhetorical) ways to understand this lack of overt reference, not least of which is that P&C is so thoroughly rhetorical that expecting to find rhetoric or rhetorical theory in its pages is a bit like expecting a Chinese restaurant menu to describe its offerings as Chinese egg rolls or Chinese wonton soup. More important, however, Burke’s rare use of rhetoric reflects his audience accommodation and his move to subsume rhetoric and poetics under the broader heading of communication, which serves as his approach to his ultimate subject matter: human relations. Thus Burke’s arguments for a poetic orientation do not signal a limited focus on nurturing “aesthetic communication” (Wess, Kenneth Burke 79); rather, as Burke’s future Bennington colleague Stanley Edgar Hyman astutely observed, P&C concerns “society and social communication” (349). Choosing to use primarily aesthetic rather than rhetorical vocabulary is partly a rhetorical decision on Burke’s part. By advocating a poetic orientation and an art of living, he describes symbol use and cultural behavior in terms familiar to his contemporary audience, especially his large readership of informed, literary-minded people, who were well versed in arguments about the cultural or political role of art and who, as Selzer and I have shown, had likely read (or read about) any number of books promoting art or “the poet” or specific poets

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as cultural healers. For Depression-era readers, poetic orientation and art of living immediately locate P&C in a particular cultural conversation. Rhetorical terms, however, would dislocate those readers, confusing rather than clarifying Burke’s argument. Rhetoric would have had either little cultural resonance or all the wrong kind (“mere” rhetoric; didacticism, especially in works by literary Marxists). And with so much else to teach readers in P&C, Burke had no time to explain or justify rhetorical terms. As he wrote to Cowley, “Rhetoric? Having given up the attempt to save the word, I offer my new work [ACR] as an example of ‘linguistic.’ That is, I try to make prominent the verbal aspect of verbal thinking” (28 Sept. 1932). Burke’s aesthetic vocabulary and focus were effective for his contemporary audience, then, but may be less so for today’s readers without a process Burke called “discounting”—making allowances for the source of and circumstances surrounding claims—that is, for a given rhetorical situation: “We do not get the full meaning of a . . . statement,” Burke warns, “until we ‘discount’ it by considering its behavior in a social historical texture” (ATH 245). Without such discounting for Burke’s rhetorical situation, today’s readers may be misled or dislocated by interpreting Burke’s aesthetic terms too narrowly. My point in “discounting” his aesthetic emphases is not to suggest that Burke did not really mean what he says about the poetic perspective’s power or that he was not deeply invested in art or that his language is rhetorical rather than aesthetic. My point is that he keeps both aesthetic and rhetorical vocabularies in play to a greater extent than readers may realize. For instance the concepts Burke used in his concluding description of the poetic metaphor (style, tropes and schemes, composition) are discussable as rhetoric (as both Aristotle and, later, Burke in “Four Master Tropes” did) and as poetics. Burke freely shifted between the two vocabularies because, for him, they are part of the same vocabulary: communication. In other words he did not emphasize the poetic as opposed to rhetoric; rather he discussed poetics and rhetoric as forms of communication, which he called his “central concern” (ROP 75). And communication is central to Burke’s art of living, because it is “the basic ‘productive force’ of mankind, the sovereign instrument of human relationships” (ROP 70; emphasis added). Communication is our quintessential act, and in that sense it is an end in and of itself. But communication also enables humans to create something very specific and of utmost importance to Burke: it is our primary tool for forging human relationships. Communication, he wrote in a draft passage deleted for the first edition, is “essentially a process of active cooperation, a union through doing” (“Basis of Simplification [Andover draft]” 11). Two other archival documents illustrate how Burke’s shifting vocabulary and movement from communication to social interaction discounted his apparent preference for aesthetics. The first is an undated foreword draft in which Burke

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explained that his argument proceeds “by indicating the significant respects in which poetic or creative concepts can be extended to cover all forms of human activity—an effort which is obviously assisted by the fact that I have approached the subject of human relationships with communication as my pivotal concern. Poetry is above all a communicative act—even when a man writes ‘for himself alone’ he is obviously employing a linguistic equipment inherited from his group. And by noting the social or communicative element in all forms of conduct, I can claim some validity for the attempt to consider men as essentially poets, or at least poetasters” (“Foreword [a]” 9). The logic of this argument is clear: if all poetry is communication and all human action has a communicative element, then all human action is to some degree poetic. But another logic runs implicitly through his argument: if all poetry is communication and (from the previous paragraph) communication is the primary tool with which we develop and maintain social relationships, then the poetic is the stuff of which social relationships are made. Traditionally scholars have emphasized the pivotal role of the poetic over the social in this argument, and I by no means want to minimize the importance for Burke of the poetic orientation as the necessary scene for establishing the good life. But we truncate Burke’s argument if we do not acknowledge that it is what happens within that scene that matters. Communication thus becomes a central agency, or means, to the end of vibrant human communities. Indeed in this passage Burke explicitly names communication as an approach to his subject: human relationships. A passage from the first edition’s intended introduction, cut at the page-proof stage, similarly discounted the aesthetic emphasis via Burke’s free movement between rhetorical and poetic terms as well as their connection to social interaction. In it Burke explained his discovery that “I could simply extend the area of the writer-audience relationship until it covered all aspects of sociality. . . . such as belief, work, piety, property, interpretation, evangelization, and a hundred other manifestations of the ways whereby men attempt to ‘set themselves right’ with one another. All social activities—commerce and invention as well as formal art—now seemed capable of discussion in terms of rhetoric, the ‘strategy of appeal.’ In contrast with the attempts to treat men as mechanisms, organisms, economic integers, or whatever else (all of which methods have elements of validity) I found reason to believe that the most inclusive approach would be by considering men as poets, or at least as poetasters” (letter to Horace Gregory, 28 Jan. 1935; emphasis added). This is a revealing passage, not least because Burke expressed particular regret over cutting what could have been an effective distillation and framing statement for readers. Likely written after the first quoted passage, this second one showed a greater reliance on rhetorical rather than poetic vocabulary, a move consistent with the general direction of his revisions to tone down his most passionate claims about homo poeta. More striking still is

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Burke’s sudden, unmarked shift from declaring all social acts as rhetorical to defining all humans as poets, which indicates that these two claims were equivalent for him. Tellingly both passages end up in the same place, suggesting that rhetorical and poetic terms are simply two routes leading to Burke’s conclusion that humans are best understood as symbol users. Equally telling is that both passages also clearly point toward the larger categories of communication and the social, emphasizing human relationships, especially how people “set themselves right” with each other—or, to use another key P&C term, how they cooperate. Burke’s shifting terms enable scholars to “discount” his explicit poetic focus, broadening our claims about the program Burke advocated via the poetic orientation, and so to mark P&C more clearly for new readers as a rhetoric text, written by a theorist invested in communication broadly conceived, not by a literary critic paying lip service to rhetoric. Nowhere is this interplay of rhetorical and poetic terms—and the move to general terms of communication and human interaction—more visible than in P&C’s conclusion. There Burke argues that using the poetic metaphor allows people to borrow wholesale the language of classical rhetoric: “with such a word as composition to designate the architectonic nature of either a poem, a social construct, or a method of practical action, we can take over the whole vocabulary of tropes (as formulated by the rhetoricians) to describe the specific patterns of human behavior” (264). Likewise the social activist whom Burke describes in the penultimate paragraph is teacher, rhetor, evangelist, mystic, and marketer rolled into one, whose means are “education, propaganda, or suasion”; this activist is not a poet per se but a “propounder of new meanings” who “cultivat[es] the arts of translation and inducement” (272). Burke thus moved from the more narrowly defined homo poeta of his early drafts to something akin to “homo loquax” (PLF 112) (literally, “the talkative man”; more loosely, word-using human) or, simply, human “as communicant” (ROP 75), with its deliberate religious resonance—one who takes communion, one who makes community. Communication, Burke writes, is “the sharing of sympathies and purposes, the doing of acts in common” (P&C 250)—an essential component of the art of living. Cooperation: Style as Social Glue Burke argues that a second way to name humans’ fundamental purpose is cooperation (235). And it is clear that he intends the poetic orientation—a means of purifying war—to foster the cooperative motives that the scientific orientation continually outrages by perpetuating the dog-eat-dog behaviors he describes so poignantly. But how to create a society that fosters cooperation? Burke insisted that communism is a necessary though insufficient means to that end. Thus in the first edition of P&C, he maintains that “a sound system of communication, such as lies at the root of civilization, cannot be built upon a structure of economic

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warfare. It must be economically, as well as spiritually, Communistic—otherwise the wells of sociality are poisoned” (213). But he also argued explicitly for another means of achieving cooperation and community—one that has received little scholarly attention and that deserves discussion if we would more fully understand the art of living: style. Here, too, he employed an expansive definition of what readers may take to be strictly an aesthetic term: style as a manner of interaction that emphasizes human connections. Burke first addresses issues of style in part 1 (pp. 50–58) where he defends the “style, beauty, form” (54) that he sees being undermined by toneless scientific and journalistic prose, which, he argues, satisfies only the desire for information (57). His primary purpose in this section, however, is to broaden readers’ definitions of style beyond its common associations with aesthetic taste or elite culture. Instead he argues that style “is ingratiation. It is an attempt to gain favor by the hypnotic or suggestive process of ‘saying the right thing’” (50). That is, style is not a strategy to separate or elevate oneself (style gone bad) but a means to conform and connect. For Burke effective style is “a way of establishing mutual ingratiation” (51; emphasis added), a two-way interaction in which people both attempt to please and are willing to be pleased in return. Style is, thus, less something one has than something one does and is primarily judged not for its intrinsic beauty (art for art’s sake) but for its effectiveness as social “glue”—for the work it allows humans to perform together. As Burke concludes his argument for the poetic orientation in part 3, he returns to this central point: if communication is “the sovereign instrument of human relationships,” then style, understood as an art of appeal, is the rhetorical strategy by which productive relationships are built and maintained. In Burke’s words style has a “fusive purpose” (270n). He asks Americans to attend to style not as artists per se but to bring artists’ keen attention to style to the work of forming communities. This, then, is the art that he famously claimed is not “a performer’s art, not a specialist’s art for some to produce and many to observe” (66); it is the everyday art of living together well. Style—appeal—is the social glue that binds humans together and helps them cooperate in building a bulwark against war. It is a cure for the fractured culture in which, Burke noted, “splinters of splinters of a splinter [group] . . . were taking things apart instead of putting them all together” (qtd. in Woodcock 708). In advocating a poetic (i.e., communicative) metaphor, Burke took the writeraudience relationship as his model for individuals in group life (265). He posited “writerly” citizens who are attentive to the needs, knowledge, and attitudes of audiences—what rhetoricians commonly call audience accommodation. Similarly he posited audiences of what we now call active readers, fully engaged cocreators of meaning who are open to change and willing to question the author and themselves but who do so with an attitude—a style—marked by empathy,

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curiosity, and skepticism rather than disrespect or hostility (what Burke calls a comic rather than debunking attitude in ATH). It is essential to note, however, that Burke’s concluding comments on style address not just how people write or speak but, more broadly, how they treat each other—an enlarged scope indicated by Burke’s revision of his earlier definition of style as saying the right thing to this: “Style is a constant meeting of obligations, a state-of-being-without-offense, a repeated doing of the ‘right’ thing” (269n; emphasis added). “Distrust[ing] hypertrophy of art on paper,” he pleaded for “express[ing]. . . artistry through a total social texture. Let[ting] it take more ‘ecological’ forms” (ATH 259); Burke advocated “the ample practice [of style]”— doing the right thing—“in social relationships” (P&C 269n). His 1938 Southern Review essay “Semantic and Poetic Meaning” further illuminated the relationship between style and an art of living as well as the urgent need for people to “do the right thing” in wartime: If a dismal political season is in store for us, shall we not greatly need a campaign base for personal integrity, a kind of beneath-which-not? And I wonder whether we might find this beneath-which-not in a more strenuous cult of style. . . . Style for its own sake? Decidedly, not at all. Style solely as the beneath-which-not, as the admonitory and hortatory act, as the example that would prod continually for its completion in all aspects of life, and so, in Eliot’s phrase, “keep something alive,” tiding us over a lean season. . . . I am asking simply that the temper of our enlistment undergo a change of emphasis. That the norm of our tone cease to be the insulting tone that “talks down” to people. Nor would it be a presumptuous tone, that laid claim to uplift them. But rather a tone that would plead with us all, with the writer-to as well as the written-to. (PLF 161–62) Let me emphasize three things here. First, Burke defined personal integrity not as faithfulness to an inner moral code but as right treatment of others. Integrity, in other words, was a civic virtue for him. Second, style constituted as not giving offense, like metabiological ethics, would establish a new behavioral baseline (a stylistic “beneath-which-not”): the worst kinds of condescending or rigidly righteous tone in words and deeds would become unacceptable or, in the language of P&C, impious. Finally, Burke asserted, this tone is a plea not only to the audience/community but also to the writer/citizen. That we can plead with ourselves—that the rhetoric explicitly directed toward others also works on ourselves—is a central Burkean insight: style is one of the ways, he later suggested, “in which the members of a group promote social cohesion by acting rhetorically upon themselves and one another” (RM xiv). As an admonitory and hortatory act, style functions as a gentle reproof or warning when we give offense and as a reminder of our obligations not just in the tone of our language use

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but in all aspects of social life. Further, every enactment of stylistic appeal reinforces to ourselves and others the value of creating and sustaining community; every stylistic appeal renews our commitment to a cooperative way of life. Thus the style Burke advocated at the end of P&C is not so much the unique expression of individual personality but “a socialized product” (20), embedded in cultural forms of vocabulary, etiquette, and customs: “Style (custom),” he writes, “is a complex scheme of what-goes-with-what”—that is, a scheme of piety—“carried through all the subtleties of manner and attitudes” (269n2). In arguing that style should be expressed in every aspect of behavior, Burke was not advocating punctilious observance of formalities (using the proper fork for the fish course) that have no value as social cohesives. Indeed such superficial niceties often serve to demarcate and perpetuate class boundaries. Burke saw such stylistic markers of privilege as “boastful,” intended to intimidate. “As style assumes this invidious function,” he insists, “its congregational qualities are lessened, its segregational qualities are stressed” (270n). Nor was Burke imagining a society in which people do the right thing—do not discriminate on the basis of race or gender, for instance—merely because they are legally compelled or socially pressured, for, he argues, “no gratifying social relationships could be constructed upon such a basis. Friendship,” for example, “does not enjoy the protection of the courts—it is upheld by styles dictating the obligations which friends feel toward each other” (269n2). Instead he sought a society in which people will treat each other justly because it feels like the right thing to do. Social justice—treating each other without offense—will become embedded in cultural values and customs as an ethical and behavioral norm, an established standard for the way people interact. In other words social justice will become a style of communal living. Within the poetic orientation, everyday citizens become “artists” who create functional (hence fulfilling) relationships by adopting and adapting a keen writerly attention to audience psychology, piously appealing to or playing upon others’ existing attitudes (76). Burke was not suggesting that artists simply maintain the status quo; rather he reasserted the traditional rhetorical principle that establishing common ground is the only way to move others to a new position. Pace Allen Tate and the art for art’s sake crowd, Burke asserts that “the artist is always an evangelist. . . . He wants others to feel as he does” (154). While Tate maintained that “a great poem is great whether anybody reads it or not” (letter to Burke, 30 Aug. 1933), Burke insisted that art that does not reach an audience —that does not communicate or intend to—remains incomplete or fails. Art may not have the intended effect; it may not fully convince the audience, but it cannot deliberately bore or ignore them. So, too, citizens do the right thing by their neighbors through empathy, invitation, courting, and respect, imagining a human being on the other end of the line and working to engage him or her.

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Hence Burke argues that “since social life, like art, is a problem of appeal, the poetic metaphor would give us invaluable hints for describing modes of practical action which are too often measured by simple tests of utility and too seldom with reference to the communicative, sympathetic, propitiatory factors that are clearly present in the procedures of formal art and must be as truly present in those informal arts of living we do not happen to call arts” (264). Three things are worth emphasizing here. First, although Burke used the language of poetics —the language that had most meaning for his contemporary audiences—his planned introduction would have linked aesthetics with rhetoric, which he defined, remember, as the “strategy of appeal.” Second, Burke foregrounded elements of audience appeal in modes of practical action—that is, how we treat each other in everyday life, from most the mundane interaction with sales clerks to high-stakes diplomacy. Third, Burke’s sense of urgency continued here in his claim that the sympathetic, propitiatory elements must be truly present in all aspects of life. Why? The alternative is war. Burke’s concluding assertion that the poetic orientation’s focus on “the cultural value of style . . . can lead toward the construction of a world based primarily upon the devices of ingratiation and inducement” (268) indicates that the new world he envisioned is not primarily about ideal poetic communication, as Wess and Sheriff would have it, but about people appealing to rather than bullying each other—getting along rather than continuing attempts to dominate that only hasten the onset of ghastly global warfare. Would such a world likely include, for Burke, a culture in which art thrives? Certainly. But given his deep despair over the prospect of a second world war, he likely had a more urgent, more fundamental goal: creating a world in which human communities thrive—or even simply survive. And in P&C it is not art per se that Burke pins his hopes on but an art of living. My reading in this section highlights how Burke scholars have employed an unnecessarily narrow understanding of the poetic orientation. Reading P&C as a project to purify war, I argue there was more at stake for Burke than improving the state of literary culture. The poetic orientation is not centrally about making the world safe for art (although that might be one welcome effect). It is about saving the world—coaching people to see themselves as agents who communicate and cooperate, who create and sustain community by becoming rhetorically sensitive communicators, using stylistic appeals—“the devices of ingratiation and inducement”—to develop an art of living. Thus, as I will demonstrate in the next section, the art of living is not a “high culture” project but a civic, democratic one. Participation: Art of Living as a Civic Art The third way Burke named humans’ fundamental purpose is participation. Because this aspect of the art of living receives so little scholarly attention, it is

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worth returning to passages that illustrate his emphatic identification of participation as the highest use of human agency. Burke wrote, “I have chosen action or participation as the word that shall designate the essence” of human purpose (235). If people are beings whose main purpose is to read and write their worlds, the poetic orientation both enables and insists upon their actively doing so— together: “the ultimate goal of the poetic metaphor,” he asserts, “would be a society in which the participant aspect of action attained its maximum expression. By its great stress upon the communicative, it would emphasize certain important civic qualities” (269–70). That is, isolated individuals cannot fully enact the art of living; at heart it is not a self-improvement, consciousness-raising project. The art of living requires people to work together to form and maintain communities that are as inclusive as possible. Thus, for Burke, the primary poetic act is a civic act, and as Greg Clark, the scholar most responsible for reanimating Burke’s civic agenda, argues, “the primary civic act [is] getting along” (Civic Jazz 21). Like Clark, I believe readers do not fully understand Burke’s work until they engage his civic mission. This “art of getting along,” Clark’s apt encapsulation of Burke’s lifelong project, is not as simplistic as it may seem, so it is worth lingering over the argument. It is important to distinguish “getting along” from “going along,” which often signals a superficial chumminess or, worse, a constricting move toward consensus —not rocking the boat. Indeed in P&C’s final pages, Burke insists the poetic orientation, undergirded as it is by metabiological permanence, is not an excuse for passive acceptance of inhumane institutions and behavior. For Clark, as for Burke, getting along requires fully engaged participants who bring their particular talents and perspectives to the work of communal living. Clark finds Burke’s art of getting along—the art of living—most clearly exemplified in jazz. Beginning with agreement on song, chords, key, and rhythm, jazz musicians—each with his or her own style and experience to express—commit, for the duration of a set, to work together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. They play together not in the absence of conflict but, says jazz legend Wynton Marsalis, with a “willingness to work things out with other people” (qtd. in Clark, Civic Jazz 13). “To make jazz,” Clark observes, “musicians must change and adapt to each other, making judgments all along about what is and is not good for the music they are making” (3–4). That is, jazz is “enacted in a willingness to confront tensions and conflict together and then transcend them by finding ways to expand the boundaries of identity, individual and collective” (80). Furthermore, Clark claims, echoing other jazz greats, the power of jazz as an exemplar of the art of living is that audiences, too, become engaged in this enactment. “The rhetorical effect of art,” Clark argues, “is in the experience it offers of inhabiting an identity” (61), and the rhetorical effect of jazz in particular is that it “brings to life in [listeners] the idea that, in the face of constant fragmentation

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and creeping incoherence, people can bring order and purpose to their life together” (20). Clark describes this rhetorical effect as time-bound, lasting for the duration of the aesthetic experience—the time it takes to walk through an art exhibit, watch an opera, or read a novel—with some lingering afterglow. I have come to understand the art of living as an attempt to prolong these rhetorical effects into a way of life—or, at least, to multiply, or create the conditions for multiplying, the types and frequency of experiences that produce those effects. Put another way, if the rhetorical experience of art is the experience of inhabiting another identity, through the art of living, Burke seeks to create (or reaffirm) a particular kind of identity for Americans to inhabit—to live in and through every day—that is shot through with aesthetic—read communicative, cooperative, participatory—values. In this (re)constituted identity, people work together as poet-communicators to build and sustain the good life. And just as people persuade themselves and others through acts of stylistic appeal, so every collective action reinforces for the whole community the value and satisfaction of participating in group life. There are, Burke later wrote, “cohesive motives implicit in the thought of oneself as a participant in [society]” (“On Persuasion” 336), and those motives intensify when acted upon. So taking part in community singing or municipal construction, where the immediate purpose is practicing for a concert or building a playground, simultaneously serves the larger goals of (1) instilling or reinforcing a motive for communal identification and (2) feeling oneself participating—being part of a larger whole or, as Clark puts it, “experienc[ing] . . . the process [of coming together]” (Civic Jazz 134). Clark further argues that such civic engagement in community building is essentially democratic: “[a] democratic way of life constitutes individuals as, among other things, citizens who join with others”—who participate—“in sustaining civic life” (Civic Jazz 85). Through the art of living, Burke argued for Americans to accept and enact fully this civic identity. If this all seems hopelessly naive, remember that Burke’s engagement in Depression-era culture wars, his biting economic satires, and his keen cultural criticism in P&C all indicate that he well understood the realities of American politics and culture. He nevertheless offered his vision of the good life, insisting that “it should be serviceable if it did no more than force those who reject it to examine and specify for themselves and others the basic assumptions of the ‘good life’ which motivate their choices, [unreadable: ideology or idealisms], patterns of conduct, etc. The value of a suggestion does not arise solely out of its acceptance. It can arise also in its ‘fertility,’ in the counter-suggestions or complimentary suggestions which other people may be stimulated to build upon it” (untitled 3; folder P9c). Judged by its fertility, Burke’s vision of the poetic orientation and the art of living are, indeed, rich sources of inspiration and provocation. Some forty years later, Burke told an interviewer, “You do have an idea of

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wanting things to be better, but on the other hand I think the longer you fool with things like that the more range you allow for the recognition that things can’t be that way” (Woodcock 717). But to give up attempts to improve is to open the way for war (military and otherwise) and isolation. To conclude my discussion of the art of living, underscoring its importance for Burke’s rhetorical and civic agenda, I turn to Timothy Crusius’s remarkable study “The Question of Kenneth Burke’s Identity: And Permanence and Change.” Like Clark, Crusius argues that cultivating the art of living became Burke’s lifework. Pointing to P&C as the pivotal moment in Burke’s development, Crusius argues that “Burke explains and justifies a choice decisive for his entire career: the turn from literature in the narrow sense to philosophy. From this book on to the end of his . . . career, he is primarily a philosopher whose critical work is subordinate to developing an art of living” (456). Crusius’s assessment of P&C’s centrality, and the centrality of the art of living, to Burke’s lifework is also my assessment, with one vital alteration: the art of living is not a philosophical concept opposed to—or developed in lieu of—Burke’s critical project. Rather articulating and eloquently advocating for an art of living is his critical project. His philosophical/theoretical work and his critical/civic work are one and the same. Burke’s theory was built for practical use. His understanding of humans as embodied agents (although not “free” agents—Burke is not returning to the liberal humanist subject), as symbol users who compose individual and collective identities, who seek new perspectives, who establish social relationships by acknowledging others’ pieties and communicating through “the devices of ingratiation and inducement” (268), and who actively participate in civic life, constituted a direct intervention into Depression-era culture. The art of living is not just a philosophical concept; it is meant to be enacted or, at the very least, discussed and argued over—which is, after all, a form of civic engagement. As Clark argues, “However diverse the interests of people who find themselves together, they share the necessary purpose of getting along. . . . To get along, individuals must change in response to each other, must listen as well as speak, and must learn as well as teach. They must revise and adapt” (Civic Jazz 3). Burke had a name for the force that requires people to revise and adapt: recalcitrance. In the final section, I explore the productive potential of recalcitrance to constitute humans as co-composers, revisers, and audiences for each other and, in doing so, to make culture thrive. Recalcitrance Burke ends “The Poetry of Action,” the penultimate chapter of his argument for a new orientation, this way: “The exclusively mechanistic metaphor . . . is truncated, as the poetic metaphor, buttressed by the concept of recalcitrance, is not”

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(261). Burke’s italics highlight a crucial element of his proposed reorientation: by itself the poetic metaphor cannot effectively guide individual behavior or the state. Without recalcitrance it might be read (indeed it was read by some of Burke’s contemporaries) as radical relativism or solipsism. But Burke insists that his perspective of human beings as symbolic creators of their experience “does not imply that the universe is merely the product of our interpretations. For the interpretations themselves must be altered as the universe displays various orders of recalcitrance to them” (256). So what is recalcitrance, and why is it essential to Burke’s argument? It is tempting to read recalcitrance (as Burke scholars, including myself, often have) simply as physical resistance to a perspective. If someone says “I am a whale” or “I can swim like a whale,” upon diving into the depths, she will soon encounter the recalcitrance of oxygen deprivation. And Burke certainly had this kind of physical resistance in mind. As Wess argues, recalcitrance is a “realist principle” (Kenneth Burke 75). Burke, no social constructionist, insisted there is a tangible world “out there.” However, his mention of various orders of recalcitrance suggests the need for a broader understanding of the concept: what the universe “says back” to someone trying to live out an interpretation, including responses from nature, cultural pieties, audiences with other perspectives, political and economic institutions, and, Burke insisted, “factors favorable and unfavorable to the point of view” (257n2; emphasis added). In other words recalcitrance is both natural and social; it both corrects faulty interpretations and coaches effective ones. Furthermore recalcitrance is not just something that reveals extreme or overly personalized points of view. For years I misread Burke’s comment that the poetic orientation needed buttressing by recalcitrance as his admission of its built-in subjectivity that, unlike other orientations, required an objective counterbalance. But he clearly argues that all perspectives necessarily encounter recalcitrance because their selectivity ensures an imperfect fit for all situations. Taking my cue from Lawrence Prelli, Floyd Anderson, and Matthew Althouse’s excellent study of recalcitrance,5 I explore two primary overlapping “orders” of recalcitrance—natural and social—which I argue are best understood as critical and creative heuristics motivating people to revise existing perspectives or develop new ones, collaboratively creating improved knowledge about themselves and the physical world. Furthermore I offer an original analysis of the rhetorical and pedagogical moves Burke made discussing the term. Recalcitrance is rendered more difficult (recalcitrant) than it might be for readers because Burke approached the concept circuitously via a detailed analysis of I. A. Richards’s criticism of D. H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious (1922). In Science and Poetry (1926), Richards accused Lawrence of undermining poetry’s status by

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passing off scientific nonsense as poetic truth. It is an odd moment in P&C: just as Burke neared the book’s climax, he veered into what feels like an arcane literary dispute about pseudo-statements. Earlier, remember, Burke warned readers he would not proceed “with the pointedness of a lawyer defending a case” (168); nevertheless this unusual move should make readers ask why Burke seems to digress at this particular point to discuss this particular topic. The answer, I contend, is that although he may not argue like a lawyer, Burke was very much defending his case by anticipating readers’ objections—that is, addressing the recalcitrance he expected his own claims to encounter as they go public, taking advantage of that recalcitrance to further validate the poetic orientation, and doing so with precisely the material he needed given his intended audiences. Thus I argue that, like so much of P&C, Burke’s discussion of recalcitrance both theorizes and models a key concept. Specifically, in the sections “In Qualified Defense of Lawrence” and “Recalcitrance,” Burke uses Richards’s critique of Lawrence as a vehicle to return to the pivotal epistemological argument undergirding P&C, addressed at length in part 2: that science cannot be bracketed off as a neutral and thus universally valid epistemological method. His repetition of this argument just as he concluded his case against the scientific orientation suggests that his theorizing of recalcitrance may have stemmed from—and, as Wess briefly notes, certainly functions as—his attempt to address the recalcitrance of his poetic orientation (“Representative Anecdotes”). Hence these sections not only explain recalcitrance; they also illustrate—and teach—how to handle recalcitrant factors, here in the form of Lawrence’s personalized poetic and Richards’s dangerous (and unnecessary) surrender to positivist epistemology. Richards, Lawrence, and Burke on Poetry and Science To understand how and why Burke used Richards and Lawrence to introduce and teach recalcitrance, a brief summary of the Richards-Lawrence conflict is in order. In Science and Poetry, Richards, like Burke, strived to define a significant role for poetics in a culture dominated by positivism. For Richards, however, science was the sole rightful creator and controller of knowledge, so he packed up poetry and headed for the hills, abandoning arguments for the aesthete’s utility in practical affairs. Richards writes, “It will be admitted—by those who distinguish between scientific statement, where truth is ultimately a matter of verification as this is understood in the laboratory, and emotive utterance . . .—that it is not the poet’s business to make true statements” (67). Richards worried that poets and readers do not understand this distinction and mistakenly look to poetry for knowledge about everyday life. “Misunderstanding and under-estimating of poetry,” he claims, “is mainly due to over-estimation of the thought in it” (34).

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Poetic discourse masquerading as realistic truth, Richards continued, only further erodes poetry’s status. Instead he created a category he calls “pseudo-statements,” poetic claims “to which we attach no belief ” and that stand in contrast to scientifically verifiable “statements” (72). Poetry’s purpose and value, for Richards, are to “give order and coherence . . . to a body of experience” (66), which Burke dryly dismissed as “mental prophylactics” performed in a “haven of make-believe,” removed from the realm of ideological conflict (252). When Lawrence asserted in Fantasia of the Unconscious6 that “growing crops make the sun shine” (qtd. in P&C 259), Richards attacked this claim as a dangerous instance of “introduc[ing] illicit beliefs into poetry[,]. . . giv[ing] to them the kind of unqualified acceptance which belongs by right only to certified scientific statements” (73). In P&C, of course, Burke dismantled Richards’s distinction between scientific statement and poetic pseudo-statement. He painstakingly established the interestedness of science and its reliance on the same epistemological methods as poetics; P&C’s argument depends on readers’ acceptance of science as a perspective (not truth) and, hence, a domain that can legitimately be challenged. As Prelli, Anderson, and Althouse observe, “Burke saw a rhetorical problem for poetics with Richards’s distinction. If all ‘real’ discourse is founded on scientific tests, there is no place for poetic participation in political and social situations” (108). The conflict between Richards and Lawrence thus provided a provocative, concrete instance of the larger ideological struggle Burke was engaged in. More important, Burke used Richards’s and Lawrence’s conflicting perspectives to demonstrate how recalcitrance functions heuristically to prompt revisions of both Richards’s unlikely defense of positivism and Lawrence’s overly personalized perspectivism. In so doing Burke validated the poetic orientation, demonstrating that, bolstered by recalcitrance, it has the needed realism and adaptability to make it a viable approach to living. Richards and Lawrence were admirably suited for Burke’s purpose. Most obviously both were prominent figures whose work Burke drew upon in P&C (it is no grudge match); additionally Burke’s literary-minded readers were likely familiar with Science and Poetry or, at least, with Richards’s general line of argument and the larger debate over art’s utility and epistemological status. More important, however, are the readers and perspectives Richards and Lawrence represent. Despite some infighting among the art-for-art’s sake crowd, Richards fairly stands in for those aesthetes and proto–New Critics who maintained separate epistemological realms for poetry and science, ceding practical affairs to the latter. Additionally Richards’s alignment with positivism made him a useful predictor of responses from other readers trained (incapacitated, Burke would say) by the scientific orientation. And Lawrence? Positivists, much of Burke’s audience, would find absurd Lawrence’s claim that crops make the sun shine. Burke shared Lawrence’s commitments to a mystical, poetic worldview, so to the

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extent that he aligned himself with Lawrence, Richards’s critique of the latter was de facto a critique of Burke. But by explaining how—via recalcitrance—even Lawrence’s highly personal poetic claim can—and should—be revised into an acceptable claim, Burke attempted to dispel the perceived relativism of his art of living. In rehabilitating Lawrence’s assertion, then, Burke was, in essence, redeeming the poetic orientation from the implied attack by Richards and others, suggesting that it, too, benefits from the realistic correction, confirmation, and social revision that recalcitrance prompts. After explaining the two orders of recalcitrance, physical and social, I will analyze the function Richards, Lawrence, and recalcitrance serve in Burke’s argument for the poetic orientation and in P&C’s rhetorical pedagogy. Recalcitrance as Realistic Corrective The most common understanding of recalcitrance is a “reality check,” physical resistance to human interpretations from the natural, or nonverbal, realm—a realm Burke decidedly believed in even as he acknowledged that human experience of it is mediated. In this sense, as Crable explains, recalcitrance “both limits our ability to construct ‘reality’ and motivates us to change our existing interpretations and constructions” (“Ideology” 311). As such a corrective, recalcitrance acts as a heuristic by showing people where and how to revise their readings of experience. The diver will “discover” a need for oxygen; someone who wants to fly should have a glider or plane ticket to offset gravity. For Richards, and by extension other positivists, recalcitrance in the form of unquestionable scientific knowledge rendered Lawrence’s “emotive utterance” about sun and crops untenable (i.e., a pseudo-statement). Recalcitrance understood as a corrective has proven a valuable critical tool for Burke and Burkean critics. Burke diagnosed the culture’s technological psychosis, which he hoped to cure, precisely because it cannot recognize people as embodied symbol users nor adequately respond to the recalcitrance of starving or homeless masses, violence, inequality, and psychic illness that it produces. Indeed one purpose of P&C is to train critics to identify and oppose practices or institutions that “interfere with the establishment of decent social or communicative relationships, and thereby affront the permanent biological norms” (271). Following Burke, Crable yokes metabiology with recalcitrance to develop a “metabiological rhetorical criticism,” a normative rhetorical/cultural criticism based on humans’ experience as embodied actors that gets its “critical edge” from the baseline standards recalcitrance establishes (“Ideology” 314, 313). Similarly Burkean ecocriticism (Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology”; Thames, “Nature’s Physician”) uses recalcitrance to protest the anthropocentric assault on the planet: they argue, for instance, that global warming acts as a physical corrective to humans’ unchecked use of fossil fuels that will force us to alter our energy use

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one way or another. “The recalcitrance of your material,” Burke argues, “may eventually compel you to revise” assertions or behavior (258; emphasis added). In other words there exist absolute physical limits to human power, points at which biology or chemistry or physics just says “no”—points at which the universe refuses to bend. However, reading recalcitrance only as a material corrective to interpretative acts does not account for Burke’s claims in P&C and ATH that recalcitrant factors not only correct but also confirm or create interpretations. For example, recalcitrance in the forms of unexplained fossil evidence and the variation among, and geographical distribution of, species led Darwin to propose a theory of evolution based on natural selection. Darwin’s work and the discovery of a fossilized birdlike dinosaur, Archaeopteryx, in turn prompted Thomas Huxley to propose a seemingly improbable evolutionary link between birds and dinosaurs; since then paleontologists have uncovered further fossil evidence confirming that birds are avian dinosaurs. Additionally Burke saw recalcitrance (i.e., necessity) as the mother of invention. NASA scientists, motivated by the recalcitrance of space travel, have invented, among other things, memory foam, water filters, and insulin pumps (though not, as widely believed, Velcro, the brainchild of a Swiss engineer inspired by “recalcitrant” burrs stuck to his clothes and dog’s coat after hiking). Writers of formal poetry know that those forms produce surprising and creative results precisely because they constrain or redirect initial intentions or habitual approaches. Recalcitrance, that is, provokes new insight and aids problem solving by suggesting unimagined solutions or by reframing the problem; it indicates where and how ideas need to be revised and helps suggest opportunities for development. Burke’s verb use repeatedly signals this broader understanding of recalcitrance as more than a corrective force: recalcitrance is something the universe “displays” (256), “disclose[s]” (256), or “manifest[s]” (263); something humans “meet” (255) or “discover[]” (258) or which our purposes “reveal” (263); something that matter-of-factly “arise[s]” (257), “flows from” (257), or “goes with” human purposes (255); something we “must take . . . into account” (255). Burke’s language thus depicts recalcitrance as something routine, an unavoidable aspect of interpreting experience rather than solely as resistance to faulty readings. Despite the negative connotations of recalcitrance, Burke insists that it can be “opportunistic” (257), a challenge (“order of difficulty” [255]) that in his words buttresses interpretations. Hence I find it helpful to think of recalcitrance as a response to claims that serves a heuristic function as it prompts discoveries as well as revision, refinement, and development of existing perspectives. Moreover, understanding recalcitrance solely as a material corrective to interpretations can be misleading if it implies an objective reality exists that simply overrides subjective belief. Such an understanding fails to account for the full

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scope of Burke’s realism in two ways. First, if human views of physical reality are always mediated, then physical recalcitrance is itself an interpretation of experience. “Objective” recalcitrant factors do not exist independently of human interpretation. Thus what we identify as an objective corrective appears, Burke argued, only because our worldviews reveal particular forms of recalcitrance: “recalcitrance requires specific points of view before it can be disclosed, and alters its nature when the point of view is altered” (263). Second, and more radically, Burke insisted the perspective “from which one approaches the universe is itself a part of the universe” (256): orientations are real, and they enable real, if incomplete, information about objective reality. Likewise “our ‘opportunistic’ shifts of strategy, as shaped to take this recalcitrance into account, are objective” (257). In other words orientations, recalcitrance, and responses to recalcitrance are paradoxically real factors that we perceive via interpretative lenses. As Prelli, Anderson, and Althouse explain, “For Burke, the close relationship between terminological revision and situated recalcitrance was informed by a kind of new realism that did not privilege ‘objective’ situations as ‘more real’ or even ‘more objective’ than the perspectives and terminological strategies used to assign their meanings” (104). Burke’s example of such “new realism,” which defines reality by “consider[ing] the entire ‘arc’” of experience (260), is human perception of the color green, which (as anyone who has watched The Matrix knows) is an “illusion” created by “electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” The new realist, however, “accepts as one event the external vibrations, the nervous response, and the resultant sense of green,” concluding that greenness is real, “an actual part of the universe” (260).7 Because people determine the boundaries of “the entire arc,” Burke notes a resulting “liquidity in the description of an event” (260)—one that affords rhetors a valuable resource in defining reality, including identifying and responding to recalcitrance, in ways not limited by positivism’s narrow parameters. Another way of saying this is that the social bleeds into the physical because we can only read, not directly experience, reality and recalcitrance. Take the woman claiming to be a whale: swimming underwater for prolonged periods, she encounters very real lightheadedness and pain, so she surfaces to breathe, but that does not mean her need for air is “more real” than her whale-thinking. For Burke her whale thoughts are real enough; they have, after all, created effects: they have taken her to the ocean and plunged her underwater. Her response to the recalcitrance of burning lungs and faintness is both real (because she reacts) and interpretive: she may abandon her whale thoughts as unrealistic (corrected by recalcitrance); she may revise them by acquiring scuba gear; or, remembering that whales surface to breathe, she may simply continue her whale-like swimming, belief intact (confirmed by recalcitrance).

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Recalcitrance as Social Heuristic As important as physical recalcitrance was to Burke in the 1930s (as a warrant to demand that people be fed, communism established, war avoided), he identified other, arguably more important, verbal or social sources of recalcitrance that act as heuristics by enabling or requiring rhetors to reframe, to explain and support better, or to revise an interpretation in conversation with others. Sometimes, as Jeffrey Murray observes, recalcitrance comes from a specific audience who does not understand or resists a claim until it is corrected or rephrased. “One strategically alters his statements,” Burke argues, “to shape them in conformity with the use and wont of his group” (258). Hence the rhetorical strategy of translation is one response to social recalcitrance. From there Burke broadened recalcitrance, as Prelli, Anderson, and Althouse observe, to include the need for collaborative knowledge construction. In contrast to Richards, Burke distinguished pseudo-statement and statement by their degree of social rather than scientific verification; for him a statement is a pseudo-statement that has been completed or “socialized by revision” (265)—a process of communal user-testing and corroboration (the lack of which made Lawrence’s claim dubious). In this sense recalcitrance functions heuristically by revealing how and why assertions need to “mature” (“On Dialectic” 444), prompting conversation to identify more examples, clarify terms, revise claims, address counterarguments—all those forms of invention and revision suggested by Burke’s term buttressing: reinforcing, supporting, strengthening, justifying, defending, undergirding, sustaining. Burke has illustrated this process, beginning with the metaphorical claim (pseudo-statement) “oceans are clocks.” This claim, Burke explains, will be “taken up and variously reworked by many different kinds of men” who will “fit[] it to the recalcitrance of social relationships, political exigencies, economic procedures, etc., transferring it from the private architecture of a poem into the public architecture of a social order” to produce the completed statement “Oceans have periodic movements” (P&C 258). Burke’s emphasis on the revision process involving different kinds of people and varied contexts (social, political, economic) is central: collective revision should incorporate as many perspectives as possible, each one providing vision for another’s blind spot, “disclos[ing] how meanings and ‘realities’ revealed by the terms of one perspective remain concealed by the terms of the others” (Prelli, Anderson, and Althouse 117). By 1939 Burke referred to such “socialization” as dialectic, which, he insisted, “absolutely must be unimpeded if . . . society is to perfect its understanding of reality by the necessary method of give-and-take (yield-and-advance)” (“On Dialectic” 444). Recalcitrance, then, is multilayered, “refer[ring],” Burke writes, “to the factors that substantiate a statement, the factors that incite a statement, and the factors that correct a statement” (ATH 47n), a passage that brings to mind Burke’s

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earlier Auscultation, Creation, and Revision: recalcitrance asks and sometimes compels people to listen and diagnose (“auscultate”), to create, and to revise— even assertions such as Lawrence’s, which seems worthless, or Richards’s, which seems unassailable. As Burke later noted, “The magical decree is implicit in all language. . . . What we may need is correct magic, magic whose decrees about the naming of real situations is the closest possible approximation to the situation named (with the greater accuracy of approximation being supplied by the ‘collective revelation’ of testing and discussion)” (PLF 4; emphasis added). That collective revelation through testing and discussion—like Wikipedia’s collaborative knowledge-making or cloud-based problem solving—is the opportunity created by, and the vital outcome Burke envisioned from, recalcitrance. It explains why Hyman calls P&C an argument for the “greater democratization of criticism” (349). It explains why Burke claimed that the poetic orientation buttressed by recalcitrance is not mere relativism. It also demonstrates the centrality of rhetoric to his argument and his plan for cultural reorientation. Despite his rare use of the word, rhetoric lies at the heart of his project: it is through rhetoric that people create, debate, and refine their identities and knowledge. Hence Burke signaled the importance of recalcitrance and the need for effective rhetorical strategies in his program for reorientation and political activism in P&C’s conclusion: as he envisioned sending “the propounder of new meanings” out to educate or convert others, he insisted that, to guide his relations with others, the activist rhetor “will accept it that the pieties of others are no less real or deep through being different from his, and he will seek to recommend his position by considering such orders of recalcitrance and revising” (272)—as Burke demonstrated with Richards, Lawrence, and the readers they stand in for. Burke’s Recalcitrance Tutorial How does the conflict about knowledge, reality, and recalcitrance play out in Burke’s discussion of Richards and Lawrence? How did Burke use it to support his argument for a poetic orientation? Burke’s analysis of Richards and Lawrence made explicit a process of addressing recalcitrance that he does implicitly throughout P&C. He considered writing P&C with few outside sources in the main body of the text, but given his insistence upon the need for communal corroboration of ideas and creating the most inclusive exchange possible—even in his notes, Burke kept running dialogues with his sources—it is likely that he decided to include so many sources from so many disciplines (anthropology, biology, history, literature, mathematics, music, neurophysiology, philosophy, physics, psychology, religion, rhetoric, sociology) as a way of enacting the very collective testing he argued for. In the case of Richards and Lawrence, both are sources of recalcitrance, challenging his argument—Richards by acting as a mouthpiece for positivist ideology and

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Lawrence by advancing an unnecessarily weak argument for a poetic perspective, making it an easy target for positivist thinkers, proof that their disdain for “emotive utterance” is well deserved. By its nature as a heuristic, the recalcitrance of the Richards-Lawrence case prompted Burke’s response and revision, and, thus, created a space for him to buttress further, via new realism, his argument for the poetic orientation as a valid, viable cultural orientation—and to demonstrate to readers how addressing recalcitrance calls forth new arguments, new approaches, new rhetorical resources. His discussion of Richards and Lawrence is, thus, both summative and pedagogical. Recalcitrance’s heuristic function is reflected in Burke’s rhetorical moves, specifically his attention to audience and structure. He began the “Qualified Defense” section, summarizing his views on the ethical nature of human action, then unceremoniously shifted to a claim that Richards’s critique of Lawrence was unjustified for failing to recognize this basic point (250). Here he aired recalcitrant material the poetic perspective has already encountered (via Richards’s implicit criticism of his argument) and anticipated the likely skepticism of many readers. Such resistance required delicate rhetorical handling by Burke. By qualifying his defense of Lawrence from the get-go (in the section title), he both identified with Richards and likeminded readers and began to clarify his position on the epistemological status of science and poetry: Burke immediately distanced himself from Lawrence, adamantly rejecting Lawrence’s claim as stated and labeling it “distorted” and “bad astronomy” (251). By sympathizing with Richards’s perspective, even if only temporarily, Burke signaled to readers that he shared some of their realism. Structurally the Richards-Lawrence conflict framed Burke’s general discussion of recalcitrance so that the unfolding of his argument parallels the recalcitrancerevision process itself. Ideally, as readers move through the text, he pauses the defense of Lawrence, inserts the “Recalcitrance” section, then returns to the Richards-Lawrence analysis. Immediately following that discussion, Burke presented a newly buttressed advocacy for metabiology and the poetic orientation that sets up P&C’s conclusion. His organization, then, showed the RichardsLawrence case “prompting” (leading to) recalcitrance that prompted his revision of both Richards’s and Lawrence’s claims into the more expansive new realist position; he emerged from this discussion with a strengthened, definitive declaration of the poetic perspective’s superiority as a guide to individual and collective behavior. In short recalcitrance leads to discussion, which leads to a revised and/or enhanced claim. Burke’s discussion of Richards’s and Lawrence’s recalcitrance ultimately demonstrated that without “collective revelation,” no perspective will be fully developed. He accepted much of Lawrence’s apparently ridiculous claim that growing crops make the sun shine because it stems from an understanding of the

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universe and human purpose that “definitely fit[s] our poetic needs” as creative agents (259). So from Burke’s perspective, Lawrence’s interpretation was effectively grounded but ineffectively—because incompletely—expressed: it “ha[s] not yet undergone the scope of revision required by the recalcitrance of the material which would be disclosed were we to extend [it] into all walks of investigation. [It] ha[s] not been socialized, as the cooperation of an entire historic movement might have caused [it] to be in the past” (256). But—and here is Burke’s crucial message to Richards and other culturally pious, positivist readers—the same is true of a positivist revision of Lawrence’s claim: the sun makes the crops grow. It, too, “is at best a partial one” (259)—not yet a statement as defined by Burke and therefore no more realistic or objectively true than Lawrence’s original. For sun is only one of many things needed for crops to grow, including seed, water, good soil, and even, Burke wryly notes, mortgages. Burke’s wry tone belies the significance of his observation about mortgages, which can stand in for the host of economic, political, psychological, and cultural factors that positivism never accounts for: making crops grow in America requires, among other things, governmental price supports and ethanol incentives, lobbyists, stable markets, drought- and disease-resistant plants, cheap migrant labor, farmers’ judgment and resilience, and, apparently, agribusiness. In essence Burke here called the positivist position “bad science” or, at least, incomplete science. Indeed for him Richards’s view is more flawed than Lawrence’s, who at least had the more capacious understanding of human purpose grounding his claim. Taking advantage of the “liquidity” of event definition afforded by new realism, Burke concluded that a completed (read “realistic,” communally approved) statement transcends both Lawrence’s and Richards’s claims: “crops and sun alike may be considered different manifestations of a larger event encompassing them both. . . . Who, after all, decrees what we shall call a separate event? Why must I call crops one thing and sunlight something essentially different, particularly when I have so much evidence to indicate that one can become the other?” (260). These rhetorical and pedagogical moves combine to buttress not just Lawrence’s sun and crops claim but, more broadly, Burke’s poetic orientation. Working through Richards’s critique of Lawrence, Burke showed that positivism’s apparent strength—its objective realism—is actually its greatest flaw. Positivism itself encounters recalcitrance because it cannot fully account for human experience, but, Burke implied, it has no tools to deal with such resistance. Inviting other voices and viewpoints to participate is something positivism has no desire or mechanism for. Indeed he suggested one great benefit of the poetic orientation over the scientific is that the former invites revision in the face of recalcitrance whereas the later resists revision, believing its claims are objectively true. By showing how even Lawrence’s apparently absurd claim can be reframed, revised,

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and socialized, Burke simultaneously demonstrated that the subjectivity some readers will see in the poetic orientation will be addressed, and in the process the poetic orientation will continue to develop. Burke’s “new realist” position, then, is a central element in his discussion of recalcitrance and his argument for a poetic orientation. It pulls together earlier arguments from part 2 on perspective by incongruity (drawing upon Bergson, Leibniz, Helmholtz, and Schoenberg)—that science and art use identical cognitive processes; that all experience is interpreted; that systems of categorization (remember Burke’s cheese slicing metaphor) are not naturally ordained but matters of custom and convenience—with arguments from part 3 on metabiology (drawing upon Sherrington, Woodger, Rothschild) that individuals cannot be clearly separated from their environment. Those earlier arguments challenged commonsense notions of where we draw lines and how we categorize experience. In his discussion of recalcitrance, Burke went further, extending readers’ definition of reality. If a real “event” is defined by the whole arc of experience, and if the boundaries of that arc are not natural but constructed, then experience and knowledge cannot be so easily or definitively divided into statement vs. pseudo-statement, into the objective/real/true vs. the subjective/symbolic/false —and thus the poetic orientation is valid (read: objective, real, true) despite (or rather because) it includes “emotive utterance.” At this point, I am also struck by the elegance of Burke’s “ethical universebuilding” (251)—the symmetry between the poetic orientation, the art of living, and the collective revelation required by recalcitrance. In “On Dialectic,” a 1939 response to the educator Dr. Kilpatrick in The American Teacher, Burke wrote: “I take democracy to be a device for institutionalizing the dialectic process, by setting up a political structure that gives full opportunity for the use of competition to a cooperative end. Allow full scope for the dialectic process, and you establish a scene in which the protagonist of a thesis has maximum opportunity to modify his thesis, and so mature it, in the light of the antagonist’s rejoinders” (444). The poetic orientation, grounded on metabiology and buttressed by recalcitrance, I argue, functions similarly, establishing a cultural scene that gives full opportunity for citizens to develop their lives and their communities by defining humans as composers who collectively create, test, and refine new knowledge. Like the democratic dialectic Burke described (or in tandem with it), the poetic orientation and recalcitrance together function to purify war by authorizing an agon in which citizens argue and compete over how to best envision and enact an art of living. And because the poetic orientation prioritizes symbol use (communication), stylistic appeal (cooperation), and participation, by definition, it motivates people to collaboratively invent and revise well, and equips them to do so. It was designed to foster precisely the values, attitudes, and skills required to sustain an art of living in the face of inevitable recalcitrance.

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C o da : A Ta l e o f T wo A d j e c t i v e s Debates about recalcitrance and Burkean realism bring us squarely back to the question I posed at the start of chapter 2: if, in part 2, Burke argues that all perspectives are partial and interested, how does he theoretically justify grounding his ethics on “permanent biologic norms” (271)? To what extent does Burke’s theorizing of metabiology and recalcitrance resolve this apparent contradiction? As Wess remarks, “There is no alternative to perspectivism even on a biological level” (Kenneth Burke 74). So where does that leave Burke—and us? Tracking Burke’s language and structure closely, I have noticed him tucking in small but crucial hedges about his ethical foundation. In his early notes, he explained that “we call our system a ‘metabiology’ because we go back to the nature of life itself as the rock that supports the turtle that supports the universe of our argument. We hold that life means activity” (“Outline of Main Theses” n. pag.). No equivocation or hesitation there. But in P&C Burke foregrounded several admissions that his grounding is substantially softer than rock—and he did so at absolutely critical junctures in his argument. For instance, he  announced his decision to choose action as humans’ quintessential purpose (235)— one of the book’s central claims—then immediately plunged into a four-paragraph justification (a “Jamesian ‘will to believe’”) of that decision (236). Similarly, having just declared that defining humans as actors or poets is backed by “an undeniable point of reference,” he backpedaled in the next sentence: “The preference for the poetic metaphor over the mechanistic one is admittedly a matter of choice” (261). But Burke inserted some smaller hedges, too, and as I have worked on this book, I have come to attach considerable importance to two adjectives with which he described his ethical system: human and workable. Metabiology, he wrote, “seems to be as near to ‘rock bottom’ as human thought can take us” (261; emphasis added). He outright refuses “revelations from God”: metabiology, he wrote, is a “complete secularizer of morals” (“Minimized Ethic” 1). Burke’s ethics are “man-made,” as near to absolutes as humans ever get. They take us—or seem to—near to rock bottom, but not all the way there. Here Burke struggled to get as close to a foundation as an antifoundationalist can get. And as my discussion of recalcitrance demonstrates, working at the level of human thought did not leave Burke with the merely personal or unverifiable. He simply sought—asked readers to seek—a different form of verification, one neither wholly divine or personal or empirical but rather communal. Such “collective revelation” (PLF 4), he argues, is very close to rock bottom—close enough, certainly, to make the kinds of normative judgments that drive his argument and that Crable argues today’s rhetorical critics should make too. Close enough to act upon.

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I’ve also come to see the significance of Burke’s seeking a workable ethics: “We are concerned . . . with nothing other than a ‘workable’ ethics” (“Minimized Ethic” 2). In chapter 2 I explained how metabiology constitutes a workable system because it is simple, permanent and universal, holistic, humanistic, and conducive to cooperation. But Burke’s ethics are also workable because they are not naively foundational; they are designed not as unreachable, unearthly ideals but as practical tools that enable work in the world by balancing the need for moral certainty with a realistic acceptance that perspectives—interpretations— are the best humans can do. The poetic orientation, grounded by metabiology and buttressed by recalcitrance, is a perspective—a very good perspective, the most thoroughly grounded that a deep thinker such as Burke could devise (and offer for collective testing and revision)—but a perspective nonetheless. And that may be the most important way in which Burke’s ethics are “work-able”—they are able to be worked on, indeed demand to be worked on. Absolutist systems such as positivism or a personalized Lawrentian mysticism admit no possibility of error and hence none of revision and growth. Absolutist claims about “the real” or “the true” give rhetors little opportunity to define events, to make claims, to let recalcitrance do its necessary work. In the long run, Burke may have built into his system something more valuable than truth or solid ground, as comforting as those both are and as much as we sometimes long for them. He built in a need for communication, cooperation, participation—a need for humans to exercise their considerable powers as symbol users. A need for people to work together at getting along, at setting ourselves right with one another.

Part II Archival Interventions

Four Caught in the Act A Writer in the Archives Batted out a first draft of 46,000 words since the day, exactly one month ago, when [I] first sat down to buttonhole that Quantity X which is [my] suppositional public. That comprises “Religious and Poetic Piety” and “Perspective by Incongruity.” Today we have done the first three thousand of our closing number, “The End and Means of Simplification.” Burke, letter to Malcolm Cowley, 20 July 1933

This chapter demonstrates how archives enable us to reexamine what we “know” about P&C and Burke by reexamining how we come to this knowledge. Archives change what we study (his rhetorical strategies as well as his theory, how he wrote as well as what he wrote, his relationships with unremembered editors as well as famous friends), and they change how we study, enabling us to employ Burke’s methodologies in our histories and interpretations—to read dramatistically (analyzing an act and agent within a scene), to use everything. And then archives help us begin to define what “everything” means in each case. To illustrate this claim, I present three sets of documents—“archival interventions”—which I argue are noteworthy for their illumination of Burke’s rhetorical planning and revision; his eagerness for public engagement; and his working relationship with editors, including his shrewd maneuvering to place and market P&C. I use the term archival intervention to highlight my use of archival documents to interrupt traditional representations of Burke: in this chapter I challenge our habit of seeing him as a brilliant theorist but not as a writer and, hence, of approaching P&C as abstract theory rather than a material artifact that was written and produced. My interventions function as perspectives by incongruity: I have chosen these particular archival materials because they help us imagine (“catch”) Burke performing acts we seldom consider (planning, revising, marketing manuscripts) with coagents (editors) we rarely name. However, documents by themselves do not constitute an intervention; they serve as the agency (means) by which an agent—me—intervenes in scholarly conversations. Archival 127

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intervention foregrounds my role in choosing and shaping these understudied accounts of Burke’s writing and publishing—how I have inserted myself in the meaning-making process. All archival researchers do. Cameras that purport to catch someone in the act do not offer unmediated views of “what really happened.” They are carefully positioned and their images interpreted, used by particular agents for particular purposes, and sometimes are unfocused or incomplete. The archival interventions I present here, like others in this book, similarly reflect my goal to create certain kinds of knowledge: to shift or multiply the ways we represent Burke and his work. These interventions, however, highlight my use of what Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch call “strategic contemplation,” a feminist rhetorical inquiry tool that encourages “researchers . . . to stop for a time and think multidirectionally” (86). As a method of archival research, strategic contemplation prompts scholars to attend to “how they process, imagine, and work with materials.” I narrate the “inward journey” (85) I have taken to produce these archival accounts, not only to remind readers of their inevitable constructedness but also to mark my reflection on this construction as an integral part of scholarly knowledge creation. My archival interventions, arranged roughly in chronological order, demonstrate that one way to get a fuller account of Burke’s work is to view it as a work in progress rather than a finished product—to shift our image of P&C from a gold-covered paperback with underlining and marginal comments to folders of notes and drafts—and hence to view Burke as a writer: someone who had a writing process and access (or not) to production technology, supplies (he often worked on cheap paper, even backs of forms), and reference books; someone who might hand his manuscript to colleagues and editors with trepidation. My first archival intervention examines evidence of Burke’s writing process, asking what we might make of his notes on rhetorical strategies and the extensive record of his planning, outlining, drafting, and revising. My second intervention examines a folder of materials written in late summer 1933, as Burke completed a first draft of P&C. In response to the formation of a National Recovery Administration (NRA) Committee on the Use of Leisure Time, he first proposed to “translate” P&C into a series of interviews or lectures, reevaluating the ethics of work and leisure, then drafted an essay, “Men of Leisure” (MOL), that redefined leisure as an important human activity. My third intervention uses his correspondence with editors to highlight the messy material realities of how he navigated the fraught process of getting P&C published and sold. Together these archival interventions illustrate P&C in both molten and “solid” states, work in progress and published product, allowing scholars to examine more fully the complexity of both text and writer. They demonstrate the power of archival research and strategic contemplation to help researchers “look beyond typically anointed assumptions in the field in anticipation of the

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possibility of seeing something not previously noticed or considered” (Royster and Kirsch 72). The Burke who emerges from this study is not the godlike theorist; he is decidedly more human, a painstaking writer, shrewd marketer, and committed educator-activist. A Writer in the Archives The writer in my chapter title, of course, is Burke. The folders that make up the Kenneth Burke Papers at Penn State were largely created, arranged, and maintained by Burke, who kept correspondence files as well as folders containing notes and drafts for his books—a working archive that he used regularly. Researchers typically consult archival material for clues about where Burke was or what he wrote. But those thousands of archived pages also bear witness to how he approached writing tasks, how he planned, how he moved from notes to outlines to drafts. One purpose of this chapter is to ask what the documents he preserved reveal about Burke as a writer. But my title also refers to the other writer in these archival interventions— me—for a second purpose of this chapter is to emphasize rather than erase my presence as a writer creating an archival record, telling a particular archival story. Like any type of evidence, archival documents do not speak for themselves. They offer opportunities for new meaning making, but writers decide what they mean; we shape them into a certain kind of knowledge or argument and assign them value. As Nan Johnson insists, historical research is an “archaeological and rhetorical activity” (“Octalog” 9)—a painstaking unearthing, sifting, deciphering that researchers evaluate and make meaning from. This is especially true in the case of Burke’s archival material because of its size and the diversity and condition of the documents. I have not read every page related to P&C or the 1930s. Of necessity, I have decided what is worth reading (I long ago vowed not to transcribe Burke’s often execrable handwriting, although it is a vow I have trouble keeping), what is worth including and where, and, more broadly, the role archival material plays in my argument; I have interpreted and used those archival documents in particular ways. And that meaning making is saturated with emotion developed over the twenty years I have worked on P&C in Burkean archives. Ann’s Archives Traditionally archives are figured as dark basements where solitary scholars search wearily through dusty papers. But though my archival trips invariably produce aching shoulders, bleary eyes, and frustrating dead ends, I find archives, especially those at Penn State, warm, lively places—so much so that I am sometimes astonished that more Burke scholars are not there. My attachment to

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these archives is powerful. I came to Burke and the archives together: in 1993 I took the first of Jack Selzer’s Burke seminars, which included archival research projects. Right from the start, I was hooked, not least because the archives provided a lifeline as I felt myself floundering in the Burkean depths. But there was also the intoxicating richness of his correspondence, the anticipation of discovery, and, as I became more involved, a growing wonder at his depth of feeling and the extent to which he opened himself up in his letters—a sense of open access to this brilliant, moody, hilarious, flawed individual who poured himself onto the page. Burke’s presence in the reading room is palpable. There are other presences too, for as Selzer observes, the most precious catch we make in the archives is people (“Afterword” 211)—for me a generous mentor; the archivists Sandy Stelts and Jeannette Sabre; Penn State colleagues; and the Burke family. Those presences and relationships, the reading room, and Burke’s documents are all bound together and suffused with the glow of a formative moment in my life: the rich satisfaction of finding a scholarly identity, grad school comrades, a visit to Burke’s Andover home, my daughter’s birth in a hospital on the edge of campus, our first house, and Penn State’s deep green lawns (grown deeper and cooler in my imagination during my years in Texas). Those memories, relationships, presences have become embedded in the documents so that even now, I find reading archival files or writing about them powerfully moving. There is a lessening of scholarly distance that, Royster and Kirsch suggest, sharpens rather than distorts interpretive acts; it coaches patient indwelling and motivates writing, for my warm attachment to and gratitude for the scholarly and personal fulfillment they have enabled drives me to commemorate these documents. Sometimes—as with “Men of Leisure”—my determination to make them meaningful for others because of the meaning they hold for me long preceded any intellectual sense of what that scholarly significance might be. It feels rather like paying back a debt (to Burke? to the archive?)—or paying it forward. This strategic contemplation—“recognizing the dynamic intersections between the fact of intellectual discovery and the [bodily] experience of it as a credible strategy in the rhetorical act of knowledge creation” (Royster and Kirsch 87)—has, for me, been as startling as it has been illuminating. One other thing immediately became clear from the start of my archival work: a disjunction between the Burke represented in the scholarship—isolated, beleaguered, the guy who never quite fit in—and the one I met in the archive, endearing for all his eccentricities, wickedly funny, sometimes touchy, engaged in lively correspondence with an all-star roster of American literary and cultural critics (William Carlos Williams, Van Wyck Brooks, Marianne Moore, Robert Penn Warren, Hart Crane, and Ralph Ellison, among others). “A way of seeing,” Burke remarked, “is also a way of not seeing” (P&C 49), and I was forcibly struck by just how much archival work changes what (and how) we see, what we can

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know of him and his work. The memory of that “blow” propelled me to share not only the fascinating documents I found, but also, more important, the Burkes I was coming to know—all the more so because such accounting for “the bodily effects, the visceral changes in mind, heart, backbone, and stomach that the discovery process occasions” (Royster and Kirsch 87) is, for me, bound up in Burke’s understanding of humans as bodies that learn language. Strategic contemplation enacts his understanding. Looking back, I realize that my first semester in the archive sparked a lifelong research agenda: to multiply the ways we can see and represent Burke, the number of acts we can catch him in. Ultimately my archival agenda is to humanize Burke so that we can begin to see him three-dimensionally, to identify with rather than simply idolize or be intimidated by him. Like us, he had financial worries, sick children, and parents; felt humor and despair; juggled too many commitments. There was an ebb and flow to his relationships, even with his closest friends; he swam and played tennis (granted, most of us do not build our own courts); he had trouble with deadlines and word limits, had work sessions that felt like “disaster[s]” (letter to Cowley, 18 July 1933). Additionally I hope to present a more activist Burke, someone who wrote theory not for theory’s sake but for everyday use—theory as equipment for living, as public pedagogy. The archival interventions presented in this chapter (indeed the whole book) forward that agenda. I n t e rv e n t i o n 1 : Bu r k e ’ s W r i t i n g A c t s In June 2008 I returned to the Penn State archive for the first time since the purchase of the Burke-3 collection earlier that year. Among other things Burke-3 contains Burke’s notes and drafts of P&C. Having access to them was, for me, a researcher’s dream come true—and, as it turned out, my worst nightmare. For of course there is a catch to catching Burke in the act of writing, a point where researchers run up against the material conditions of his papers: illegible notes seemingly written with the same dull pencil, undated documents, general disorder. Or, rather, order enough for the writer who created and used the material but bewildering to me, flipping through the pages seventy-five years later. I was quickly captivated by Folder P9c, roughly thirty pages of typed and handwritten documents in a folder labeled “‘Outline Material for Metabiology’ Notes.” The first page is a scrap of handwritten notes on P&C’s central topics, followed by a torn-out New York Times letter to the editor about why people typically turn to the left when they do a double take, on which Burke had written “Attendant Conditioning.” A partial list of other documents includes • •

handwritten scraps listing chapter orders; page-long overviews of all five parts (yes, five) of P&C;

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Greek and Latin translations of Matthew 16:18; a seven-page typed overview titled “Metabiology”; a typed page beginning “Procedure: quote Nietzsche on perspective”; a scrap containing metabiology subtitles beside another scrap quoting Hitler on the need for heroic art; a typed half page labeled “Outline”; a three-page typed précis titled “Metabiology, Outline for Minimized Ethic,” beginning with the subheading “Schema”; another typed page labeled “Schema”; a page titled “Key Values”; a handwritten page with arrows pointing to the “Outline” title, presumably to distinguish it from the handwritten page labeled “Outline” that follows or the two-page handwritten outline after that or the final handwritten “Outline,” which is not an outline at all but rather Burke’s notes to himself on style.

I was simultaneously bewitched and overwhelmed by these documents and just a little miffed that, having left behind so much, Burke still had not provided a clear record of metabiology’s development. If only I could transcribe his handwritten notes, I thought, I might piece it all together (even as I knew that was a rabbit hole I should not go down). Two things about P9c were clear, however: (1) it contains some of the earliest P&C documentation extant, probably dating from spring 1933, and (2) this provocative material significantly alters scholars’ understanding of Burke’s project. So, working with the typed pages and whatever handwritten passages I could decipher, I plunged in, reasonably sure I could make some sense of Burke’s invention of metabiology, despite the incompleteness of the record and my occasional discomfort at the amount of assembly required. And I did create an account of metabiology’s development (chapter 2). But seven years later, I am still entranced with folder P9c and still, as Royster and Kirsch suggest, finding new meaning there. “Strategic contemplation,” they write, “opens up spaces for observation and reflection, for new things to emerge, or rather, for us to notice things that may have been there all along but unnoticed” (90). And indeed when I stop trying to piece together the contents of P9c, I find they nevertheless add up to something worth exploring: handling the paper scraps, flipping through outline after outline, weighing the writing Burke amassed in producing P&C, it strikes me that this folder shows him in the act of writing. In other words I realize that P9c resembles the bulging, nolonger-orderly working folder I am using to write this chapter—notes written on the back of page-a-day calendar sheets and dropped into the folder, ideas scrawled so quickly even I cannot read them the next day, false starts and do-overs, chunks of conference papers I plan to incorporate—a mess of incompletely

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articulated or indecipherable intentions. My drafts are usually dated but only on page one, so the four or five or six iterations of mid-chapter sections I have printed out to revise are undated, stuffed higgledy-piggledy into the folder. I have come to accept P9c’s messiness, because messiness is only to be expected and, in fact, is a necessary part of—rather than a hindrance to—the new meaning I am creating. My realization was an “aha” moment—or maybe just a “duh”—because it goes without saying that Burke was a writer. But that is precisely why I want to say—contemplate—it here: to remark upon what usually goes unremarked, except, perhaps, when we discuss Burke the creative writer or Burke the letter writer. Most of us, most of the time, define him as a theorist or critic. We do not picture him outlining or jotting reminders or repeatedly revising passages. What do we miss as a result? My first archival intervention looks at Burke as writer to challenge assumptions that his dense, nonlinear syntax and structure result from an indifference to style, unwillingness to edit, or inattention to audience. It demonstrates instead his careful attention to the rhetoric of his rhetorical theory, and by doing so gives a fuller representation of him and, more important here, changes the way we approach P&C. Writing P&C Burke’s work often feels as if it sprang full-blown from the head of Zeus or was written in an insomniac haze, without preparation or revision. But in fact Burke labored over P&C, filling page after page with notes, writing and rewriting detailed outlines, planning rhetorical strategies, and revising—a lot. By showing him as someone (we can catch) in the act of composition, folder P9c offers insight into three areas of his writing: rhetorical strategies, writing practices, and revision. Before turning to documentary evidence of Burke’s writing process, however, it is useful to frame P&C’s production within a larger picture of Burke as a writer in the 1930s. At this point in his career, he basically worked as a freelance writer (not an identity often attributed to him), which shaped both his writing process and the content of P&C. Unlike many of his friends and colleagues, he was neither a full-time editor nor (yet) a professor, so he kept his family afloat by cobbling together projects: bombarding New Republic editor Cowley with his “yearn[ing]” to become a regular columnist (Burke to Cowley, 14 Dec. 1934) and with article proposals until Cowley became exasperated and Burke resentful;1 peddling articles to New Republic or the Nation for one or two cents per word;2 working as a music reviewer, researcher, and ghostwriter. In order to juggle multiple writing tasks while clearing space to write five books, Burke became something of a double-dipper, reusing content or language from letters or magazine articles in the longer works.

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So Burke rehearsed arguments in his letters, copies of which sometimes appeared in his notes, as does for instance, a two-page document “Outline material (from letter to [Sibley] Watson).” Additionally, with little money for books, Burke asked to review titles that might prove useful for his own projects, and material from those reviews showed up in his books. For example, comparing P&C with his 1930 review of Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty indicates how much of the thought and language of that review he incorporated into P&C. He echoed Dewey’s title in his section “The Rock of Certainty,” but, more notably, the opening sections of the “Argument by Analogy” chapter (and the chapter title itself), particularly his argument in the subsection “Tests of Success,” replay his central concern in the review: “How do we test the success of a value?” (“Intelligence” 78). Even more obvious is the carryover from Burke’s January 1933 review of C. K. Ogden’s Bentham’s Theory of Fictions. He devoted an entire page of P&C to quoting Odgen’s book (P&C 209–10). His review not only laid out the main arguments for the P&C chapter “Secular Mysticism in Bentham” but also set up some of P&C’s language in lines such as “By the Bentham teaching, all men are poets”; readers will even find the “wily old trout” (“Poets All”), which famously distinguishes bait from food on P&C’s first page. In addition to showing Burke’s double-dipping, these examples—the earliest from 1930—show that he had been “writing” P&C for several years before he formally began drafting in June 1933. That, in turn, problematizes claims that there is a clear demarcation between Burke’s aesthetic and political “periods” and may be one reason he could draft P&C so quickly: he had lived with these ideas a long time. It also seems likely that P&C’s extended accounts of psychotherapy cases and discussions of language development stem from a ghostwriting job Burke undertook in mid-1932 for Elizabeth Parker, widow of New York psychiatrist George M. Parker, who hired him to finish her husband’s book. Although Burke apparently abandoned the project, Parker’s topic—“what basic mental processes there may be corresponding to basic physical processes”—is clearly connected to metabiology (Burke to Cowley, 2 June 1932a), and in developing P&C he used books Mrs. Parker sent him, including two by Veblen, two by Jean Piaget (one was Le langage et la pensée chez l’enfant), Bertrand Russell’s Analysis of Mind, and W. H. R. Rivers’s Instinct and the Unconscious (Parker to Burke, 23 May 1932, 1 June 1932).3 Burke’s comments to Cowley about the ghosting job also illustrate his strategic scheduling: Parker’s two-hundred-dollar advance, he wrote, “permits me to devote my summer to my book [ACR] with equanimity. The day of [financial] reckoning is thus moved ahead, into a future sufficiently vague and remote” (2 June 1932a). Burke, was, in short, a capable, resourceful manager, albeit an increasingly overcommitted one, of the competing demands of financial security and the need for extended writing time.

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Rhetorical Planning Burke’s immense productivity in the 1930s, the speed with which he drafted P&C—“batting out” nearly two hundred pages in one month (June 20–July 16) (Burke to Cowley, 18 July 1933), including three thousand words on a hot July day in 1933—and his texts’ difficulty often lead readers to conclude that he was not much of a planner or reviser or that he only cared about what he said, not how he said it. For years the standard take on his prose was that of Rueckert, dean of Burke studies, who found his style a “terminological underbrush” and praised critics who “have recognized this underbrush for what it is—an irritation, a distraction, the rank growth of a fecund mind—and have been able to hack through it—which is all one can do—to Burke’s ideas and methods” (Drama 5). But folder P9c challenges that lore. Indeed, looking at P9c, I am struck by the considerable attention Burke gave to the how of his book, commanding himself to compose a coherent, appealing argument: “Make this book not . . . an exposition; make it a literary event. To write such a work with dead correctness is to betray your subject, and incidentally, to give yourself a dull summer” (“Outline [e]”). Here he reminded himself that a fully realized argument for an art of living would exemplify the restorative value of full-bodied prose, not the flat “newspaper English” or technologists’ information-based language “designed for machines” (P&C 57, 58). “On the other hand,” his notes continued, “the logical progression must be strictly correct. The march of your topics must be obvious and ‘organic.’ No Sibylline meanderings here” (“Outline [e]”). As I so often am when reading Burke’s unpublished material, I am charmed by his language (“Sibylline meanderings”) and touched by his writer’s sensibility not to betray his subject stylistically. I have a similar response to his multiple plans for appendices. I smile and shake my head. There he goes again, this wacky Burke I am so fond of, with some modernist formal experimentation.4 So ingrained is the image of him as eccentric thinker that it took me five years to understand that something else may be going on (a trained incapacity if there ever was one). And I begin to feel the power of strategic contemplation’s “specific commitment to look and look again, listen and listen again, think and think again recursively” (Royster and Kirsch 77). For if folder P9c is about Burke as a writer, what it shows me is that he was in unfamiliar territory: he had never written such an extended critical argument before (CS is an essay collection; ACR only about 120 pages), and although he understood the rhetorical challenges posed by P&C, he was struggling to handle them. Take, for instance, the passage quoted in the previous paragraph: create a logically correct structure without resorting to correct, but lifeless, prose. That Burke framed these as competing imperatives suggests he was unsure how to pull this

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off—a concern heightened, perhaps, by the critical failure of his most recent “literary event,” his highly experimental novel, Towards a Better Life. TBL’s lush style is “eventful,” but the novel’s lack of a strong narrative arc makes it difficult to follow and interpret. These notes also show Burke’s concern about how readers will experience his prose, about how best to lead them through his argument, and about his tendency to (appear to) wander. Burke’s multiple plans for an appendix provide even more striking evidence of his struggles to make his argument sufficiently straightforward for readers to track without sacrificing its complexity. His subject matter is difficult, his thought wide-ranging, and he had taken, he said, “copious notes” (letter to Cowley, 20 July 1933). Burke’s planning materials show him searching for a structural mechanism that would allow him to provide maximum detail without bogging his readers down—or even to accommodate a dual audience of public and more specialized literary or philosophical readers. An appendix is one way to solve these rhetorical problems. One document thus imagined a two-part appendix with a “Special Problems” section keyed to numbers in the main text and another section presenting “little essays on Crime, Law, Art, Propaganda, Minimal Virtues, Rudiments of Education, etc.” that would function like CS’s “Applications of the Terminology” (“Outline [a]” n. pag.). Burke also considered a more radical arrangement to render his argument “as smoothly a progressing thing as one can” (“Schema” n. pag.): a relatively short main essay of thirty thousand words supplemented with an appendix of alphabetized, self-contained essays on keywords where “we could be exhaustive to our heart’s content,” fleshing out explanations and presenting outside source material (“Schema” n. pag.). Concerned, like today’s website designers, to keep readers on the page, he considered reversing conventional notation systems by locating superscripts in the appendix to refer back to the main text (“Schema” n. pag.). In fact he was so intent on creating an uninterrupted reading experience that, at one point, he even wondered if superscripts in the main body of text would be too disruptive and pondered using small capital letters to signal terms expanded in the appendix (“Schema” n. pag.). While Burke does not appear to have tried implementing any of these plans (he resorted to footnotes), they clearly demonstrate his attention to how readers would experience P&C and to the varied rhetorical effects he might create. Burke’s rhetorical strategizing also included plans for substantial metadiscourse to guide readers. He considered, for instance, brief chapter headnotes, outlining the role of each topic in his argument (“Outline [c]” n. pag.). And in notes to himself, he was a harsh taskmaster, barking out orders for something like a rhetoric of clarity: “Remember always: the best way to tell what you are doing is to tell why you are doing it”; “each step in the logical progression must be completed” (“Outline [e]” n. pag). I find this last especially surprising given

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scholars’ repeated testimonies to Burke’s nonlinear thinking (that is what I tell students too). And yet there is a clear logic to his argument. I found more of his rhetoric of clarity in yet a third document: “Note also: we must keep it in mind that this book is to be replete with signposts. We shall always, when discussing something, clearly state why it must be discussed, what bearing it has on the matter, in what order we shall proceed, etc. And then, heigh-ho, at the end we shall summarize what we have been saying, why we had to say it, etc.” (“Outline [a]” n. pag.). I am reminded of similar orders I printed at the tops of drafts (“don’t shift tenses!”) because, of course, I repeatedly shifted tenses. I suspect Burke’s reminders were so emphatic because he often did not use enough signposts. But all the more reason for scholars to take seriously his attention to readers’ needs. Finally folder P9c reveals Burke’s equally strict self-commands for a lucid, engaging style: “Do not formalize. Use our epistolary style. Interpret examples. Say ‘why this?’ and then tell why. Write to make the book as salient as possible. . . . For authoritativeness quote your authorities; there be abrupt, epigrammatic, pointed. And for cogency, gruffly summarize the steps of your argument” (“Outline [e]”). By the time he had drafted two-thirds of P&C, Burke wrote Cowley, he had assumed the role of chatty (perhaps loquacious?) narrator, leading readers through his theory even as he downplayed his own authority by presenting his arguments through others such as Bentham or Lawrence: “When one writes a book of his opinions, one adopts a character just as truly as when one figures out sentences for the hero or villain of a play. And I this time seem to have adopted the character of a somewhat garrulous old fellow, so eager to make himself unmistakably clear and to distribute as much of his doctrine as he can among ‘authorities’” (20 July 1933). Whether or not Burke succeeded in writing clearly is an open question. But I am convinced that he understood his own writer’s foibles and was thoughtful about P&C’s rhetoric as well as its rhetorical theory. Writing Practices Burke was a fast drafter, completing his first P&C draft in two months. For some scholars that stunning feat may serve merely to confirm his image as a genius able to spin out brilliant theory and analysis effortlessly. But in folder P9c and other Burke-3 documents, I again found a very different writer from the Burke of lore, someone who could draft quickly in part because he was a highly disciplined, even driven, writer and in part because he spent many hours preparing to draft and many hours revising. Burke, as I learned, employed a range of invention strategies, a more methodical approach to drafting than we might have expected from the famously nonlinear thinker, and recursive revision. Some P9c materials show Burke’s invention functioning on something of a hunter-gather model, with him the voracious, keen-eyed, and wide-ranging

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collector of potentially useful ingredients. It is the kind of collection I and other Burke readers might anticipate, given P&C’s assorted references to Shakespeare, cutting-edge scientists, and Emily Post. Burke assembled biblical passages, sections from letters, scraps of quickly scrawled notes, and the article on double-takes on which he wrote “Attendant Conditioning” and next to which he typed the following suggestive note: “in physics they are trying to decide whether light is undulant or corpuscular: it is one or the other, according to their way of studying it. be not surprised to find a similar concern in something so unphysical as ‘meaning’—between the ‘atomistic’ and the ‘functional’ or ‘contextual’” (n. pag.). Open other Burke-3 folders, and the sense of assemblage increases. For instance folder P5 (Miscellaneous.—“Unused material of Ethics Book”), contains everything from a half page labeled “Footnote A” to a quote from Encyclopedia Britannica on pragmatism and religion to a page titled “on classification, interest,” which quotes and discusses the passage from Alice in Wonderland in which Alice tries to convince the pigeon that she is not an egg-eating serpent. Three separate pages are titled “on recalcitrance. “ Burke also collaged quotes and ideas: a passage labeled “James on ‘rational’” is followed on the same page by “James ridiculing absolutism.” Another page contains notes beginning “of Lawrence,” “of logic,” and “the fundamental wisdom underlying religion.” “When discussing the ‘perhaps’ of Richards” is paired with “when discussing Valery on materialism of the Church.” And folder P31 shows that Burke clipped from newspapers, including one New York Times article, “‘More Masculine’ Pictures of Christ Urged; British Prelates Deplore Usual Meekness.” Equally striking in folder P9c, however, are more structured approaches to research and invention. The seven-page “Metabiology” document, for instance, shows double-column typing, with main text on the right and added notes on the left. So at this early stage (and long before computers made inserting text simple), Burke left room to add information, often from outside sources (for instance “note also Darwin’s distinction between ‘motives’ and ‘standards’” or “note also ‘occupational insanities’—as Rivers found certain kinds of mental breakdown more common of officers in the army”) (3). His working files also include a polished, passionate three-page manifesto, “Metabiology: Outline for a Minimized Ethic.” Other archival folders show Burke creating dialogues (his word) with source material; so, for instance, his notes include a six-page analysis of John Strachey (probably The Coming Struggle for Power in P&C 225–26), which alternates between quotes from “Strachey” and response from “KB” (“Strachey: ‘It is possible’” folder P9.5a). Burke constructed similar dialogues with Veblen (folder P14f) and, very early in his process, a “‘Dialogue’ with Rivers” (“Meaning and Cure” n15). These dialogues do not surprise me, for if there is one thing I can easily imagine Burke doing, it is talking back.

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But the major, and for me the most unexpected, method Burke used to construct P&C was outlining and piecemeal assembly. As later archival folders show, for each of P&C’s parts, he composed numbered lists of subtopics, corresponding to numbered pieces of paper that range from palm-size, roughly torn scraps of handwritten notes (or, oddly, sometimes polished prose) to two-inch strips containing a dozen typed lines of notes to several typed, single-spaced pages of prose. So, for example, folder P9d contains an early iteration of “Perspective by Incongruity” with twenty-three topics. Topic 4 on the list reads “Saint Philip Neri (we use Brémond’s statements, to let us see humor by seeing dead humor)” and corresponds to Burke’s handwritten page of Brémond quotations—in French— on Saint Philip Neri, patron saint of humorists. Topic 15, “naming in Nietzsche, etc.,” references two typed pages with several handwritten additions (so even his notes show layers of composing) of Burke’s take on Nietzsche that begin “as for pronounced ‘naming’ in Nietzsche. we called it dartlike, salutatory, gamesnatching” (“Perspective by incongruity” numbered outline n. pag.). This construction method seems so pedestrian (this is how I learned to write a research paper in eleventh grade: write one piece of information on an index card, then arrange those hundreds of cards by topic) that it is startling. I cannot help thinking of a jigsaw puzzle, especially since some numbered pieces seem to have been written on a full-size sheet, then torn apart. Then I realize I had expected a more spontaneous, fluid process from the brilliant Burke—though realistically I cannot imagine any writer composing a 350-page theoretical text by simply threading paper in a typewriter and spinning out profundities. Revising P&C The Saint Neri example above is typical of many of Burke’s numbered topics because it illustrates the writing practice he relied on most heavily: revision. In fact ten of twenty-three points on this P9d “Perspective by Incongruity” outline have been scratched out. The P9d outline was actually Burke’s second for this section (folder P9f contains the first under the title “Meaning and Cure”), and he wrote at least one other complete outline (in folder P5) consisting of seventyseven topics that correspond closely to the published text. Burke-3 files show that he wrote three or four whole or partial numbered outlines for each part of P&C, with varying degrees of stable content and correspondence to the first edition. His first outline for “Simplification,” for instance, included seventy-one topics (folder P31) compared to his “final” outline of one hundred topics (folder P5), many of which were cut. There is no doubt, in short, that P&C was a carefully constructed text. Or rather, given the layers of revision Burke’s archival folders demonstrate, a carefully reconstructed text, as he cut and consolidated, revising globally

Reproduced with the permission of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust and the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

“Perspective by Incongruity” notes #6 and #11 keyed to numbered outline.

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Early draft of numbered outline for “Perspective by Incongruity.” Reproduced with the permission of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust and the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

(moving from five to three parts) and locally (reworking paragraphs and line editing even on page proofs). Folder P9c indicates that he originally envisioned a five-part book, consisting of “Religious and Poetic Piety,” “Perspective by Incongruity,” “Ends and Means of Simplification,” “Economic Authority,” and “Disposition of the Arts”—as in “art as use of dispositioning,” appealing to existing

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pieties (Note 57, “Disposition of the Arts,” folder P31). In this incarnation “Simplification” dealt with Bentham on motives, genealogies of morals, and simplifying ethical terms; “Economic Authority” discussed Veblen, Dewey’s occupational psychosis, and the Biological Ought; and “Disposition,” recommending through tragedy, among other (illegible) points. But by late April, when Burke wrote to Austin Warren, he described a four-part book; the “Economic Authority” material was eventually, and inexplicably, subsumed into other parts of P&C (25 Apr. 1933).5 The fate of “Disposition” is less puzzling. Burke had developed a seventytwo-point numbered outline (including recognizable items such as the Way and Richards on Lawrence) (folder P31) but never drafted it as a separate section, and that decision seems to have been as much psychological or logistical as theoretical. The clue lies among some of my favorite Burkean archival documents: his unsent letters, among which I find an earlier version of the exultant July 20 letter quoted as this chapter’s epigraph. Unlike the crowing missive Cowley received, the unsent letter describes “my morning’s disaster”: Burke admitted to Cowley that the extraordinarily productive month in which he had written fortysix thousand words left him feeling “flat” and unable to start drafting the final two parts (18 July 1933). Burke’s fatigue may explain his decision to combine “Disposition” and “Simplification,” for two days later, when he wrote (and sent) the second letter, he announced plans to tuck material from part 4 (“Disposition”) into “Ends and Means of Simplification” (20 July 1933). Burke’s pleased-aspunch tone in the sent letter no doubt stemmed from having jump-started work on part 3 (remember, he had written three thousand words that day)–and possibly his relief at having one less part to write. Even so, part 3 either proved difficult or Burke never regained his early momentum (or both), because he spent as long on part 3 as on parts 1 and 2 combined. “My book is getting stringy,” he complained to Cowley. “For the last fifteen thousand words, I have each evening found myself exactly where I was in the morning, and I am getting sick of that” (31 Aug. 1933). Burke, it seems, like every writer I know, sometimes got the writer’s block blues. Given his extraordinary drafting speed and his determination to keep moving forward without rereading pages, Burke expected to do significant revision that fall and winter to polish his “uncouth words” and “to bolster [his draft] up at every point by extensive references” (letter to Cowley, 18 July 1933). He planned to treat the draft, he told Cowley, like a “chambered nautilus” to which he would “patiently add[] confirmative matter” (15 Sept. 1933). And revise he did, completing one revision of part 1, retitled “Range of Piety,” by October and another by year’s end, when he sent it for publication to the journal Plowshare under the title “On Interpretation,” having by then moved his discussion of piety to part 2. Parts 2 and 3 were probably revised to ready a complete manuscript for a planned May or June 1934 submission, and parts of the book were revised at least once

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more before it went to press in December. (See Appendix A for a possible chronology of Burke’s drafts.) Many writers I know, including myself, revise this heavily. But because scholars seldom picture Burke in the act of writing (Hawhee is a notable exception)— or, if they do, assume that he was unconcerned with audience or style—it is unlikely they would expect Burke to revise as extensively as one page from a “Perspective by Incongruity” draft shows. Burke wrote P&C deliberately. The structure and style of P&C may be difficult, but archival documents suggest readers should assume they are purposeful.6 I n t e rv e n t i o n 2 : “ M e n o f L e i s u r e ” The history of leisure is brief. In the Garden of Eden there was a state of chronic unemployment, which seems to have been alright in itself but to have led indirectly to the Fall of Man. Whereat, the honeymoon stage of leisure was over: we were henceforth never to forget that Satan finds work for idle hands to do. (“Men of Leisure” 1) In late August 1933, having just finished a first draft of P&C (Kenneth Burke to John Erskine, 24 Aug. 1933), Burke spotted an article in the New York Times announcing the formation of a National Recovery Administration (NRA) Committee on the Use of Leisure Time. The committee was charged to “consider ways and means by which the people of New York . . . might pass their leisure time,” which, thanks to massive unemployment and the newly established fiveday work week, New Yorkers had more of than ever (“Fosdick”). The committee included representatives from the American Association for Adult Education, the American Recreation Association, and the Workers Education Council as well as several professors, one of whom was Burke’s former Columbia professor John Erskine. The next day Burke fired off two letters—one to Erskine and one to Col. Arthur Woods, his former boss at the Bureau of Social Hygiene—stating that his manuscript “concerned precisely a philosophy and methodology of leisure” (letter to Woods, 24 Aug. 1933) and proposing to “‘translate’ it into other levels of discourse”—perhaps a series of radio interviews or lectures to be given at welfare centers nationwide (letter to Erskine, 4 Sept. 1933). Burke, for his part, was eager that his work “might in some way be of service” (letter to Erskine, 24  Aug. 1933). Although his letter to Woods was a dead end, Erskine initially appeared optimistic that he might appeal to a wide audience—“if you can bring yourself to hit out your ideas simply and plainly for the benefit of those who most need them” (Erskine to Burke, 25 Aug. 1933). Burke apparently felt that he could and went so far as to draft a dozen pages of notes toward such a project and a short essay called “Men of Leisure,” which was rejected by both New Republic

Draft page from “Perspective by Incongruity” showing Burke’s extensive revision. Reproduced with the permission of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust and the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

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and the Nation (editor Henry Hazlitt found its irony too complicated for readers [Hazlitt to Burke, 29 Sept. 1933]) before Burke incorporated parts into his Symposium essay “War, Response, and Contradiction.” I came upon the MOL file in spring 2011 while preparing to conduct an archival seminar at the Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society. I worked with Jeannette Sabre at Penn State to identify understudied archival documents for seminar participants to discuss; MOL was one. The file (folder P14e, “Notes, Typescripts, etc. Apparently ca. 1933”) includes twenty pages of notes, Burke’s correspondence with Erskine and Woods, a clipping from the New York Herald Tribune, and the eight-page “Men of Leisure” article draft.7 MOL quickly became one of my favorites among the many gems in Penn State’s archives for its showcasing of Burke’s lively wit. I capitalized on its entertainment value, taking it to the Burke conference and, later, my graduate seminars, where we chuckled at his wacky plan to turn P&C into a lecture series on hygiene, scratched our heads (what was he thinking?), and moved on. In short it did not seem the stuff from which “serious” scholarship is made. And yet MOL had hooked me, and I became determined to do something with it, though I had no real idea how it would ever be more than a curiosity. This second archival intervention, then, illustrates how archivists give value and meaning to documents, which usually are not inherently valuable. Archival novices often wonder—as I once did—“How do I know if I’ve found something ‘good’?” Working with MOL taught me that a better question is “Can I use this document to make a scholarly significant argument?” Here I use MOL to provide a new take on the writing and theoretical acts that formed P&C, particularly to highlight Burke’s eagerness to enter public conversations, to create a civic critical pedagogy. As he explained to Williams, Burke saw himself as “one who would talk to his fellow-countrymen” (21 Dec. 1937; East 70). As a result this intervention also argues for the archive as a site from which to reevaluate theory as a form of social engagement. I was not making something out of nothing, of course. MOL clearly had potential—it was, after all, a complete, if brief, manuscript that, as I later learned from correspondence, Burke had submitted for publication. Also the essay came with some dated, contextualizing documents. I knew from the date and Burke’s terminology that the unnamed manuscript he described to Erskine and Woods was P&C. And I knew enough about Burke and the 1930s to connect MOL to other Burkean texts (CS and his satire of Fordism “Waste—The Future of Prosperity”) and to groups he was involved with, notably the Southern Agrarians. It was crucial, too, to reframe my purpose from “this is a hilarious document I want others to see” to “this is a Burke I want others to see,” unlike the disengaged Burke of lore—an insight I felt rather than knew. When I developed a conference presentation on MOL, which I was determined to make more than show-and-tell,

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articulating that “so what?”—barely one page—marked the start of a three-yearlong learning process that I now recognize as strategic contemplation. As Royster and Kirsch argue, “A key factor in embracing strategic contemplation as an inquiry strategy becomes a recognition of it as a recursive practice of thinking, writing, thinking, writing, thinking as the research spirals towards ever more fully rendered understandings and intellectual insights” (86). Now I can say that I have an archival agenda—to multiply scholarly representations of Burke and P&C—that MOL helps me advance: the Burke I see in these documents is a networker, an activist, a teacher; a Burke who is less commanding, more complicated, more human. Here is how the MOL story unfolded. Burke’s first letter to Erskine was part sales pitch, part critique of American culture’s mechanistic rather than humanistic perspective. His enthusiasm was obvious: news of the leisure committee, he told Erskine, “maketh my eyes to light up” (24 Aug. 1933). He reminded Erskine that he had written about leisure before, notably in Counter-Statement, where he argued that it is essential “‘to convert technological unemployment into technological leisure,’ and that cultural emphases must be . . . reordered . . . to take this problem into account.” His new manuscript, P&C, Burke said, addresses how “technical efficiency”—Taylorism and automation, for instance—“may interfere with the ‘orthodoxies of the body,’ causing us to forget that there is an anthropomorphic or ‘psychological’ efficiency of a totally different order. My present work is written for the direct purpose of saying what this ‘psychological efficiency’ really is” (24 Aug. 1933). He must have been gratified by Erskine’s response, sent the very next day, which noted his admiration for Burke’s “penetrati[ng]” thinking and assured him his new book was well suited to the committee’s purpose (25 Aug. 1933). By early September Burke sent Erskine his proposal to “translate” P&C into a series of lectures (4 Sept. 1933)—in Burke’s words a “Schema of Adult Education . . . to ‘ethicize’ leisure” (“Approaches to project” n. pag.). Burke went out of his way to address Erskine’s fears that he would wax too philosophical, promising that his lectures “would handle only the most obvious and most easily illustrated educational points” (4 Sept. 1933). In fact he had worked out a plan for pulling this off: he would “write such a work by speaking it” before committee members, who “could object when anything seemed to them unclear or irrelevant” (4 Sept. 1933). If the committee hired a stenographer to record his remarks, Burke proposed to create his lectures from the transcript.8 He ended his letter to Erskine with an apparently heartfelt appeal: “the fact is that the field allotted to your Committee seems to me by far the most adventurous and organic part of the entire reorganization program. And my desire to contribute in some way to its functioning is especially keen because of my conviction that, for once in my life, a ‘key’ concern of my own happens here to parallel a key concern of the nation” (4 Sept. 1933). At this point, however, Erskine put on the brakes, writing Burke

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that “I will keep in mind your idea, and if [the committee] can work in the series of lectures at any point, there is no one I would rather see do them” (6 Sept. 1933). There the correspondence ended. Nevertheless Burke followed the committee’s work through an unflattering September 22, 1933, New York Herald Tribune article, “Fosdick and 7 Toil over Code on How to Loaf,” included in the archival folder. The Herald Tribune reported that after an hour-and-a-half meeting, committee members emerged shamefaced and tight-lipped. Erskine himself, whom the Herald Tribune writer called “one of the most fluent persons in the country in the presence of the press,” reportedly claimed that “he had absolutely nothing to say” (“Fosdick”). The committee chair, Raymond Fosdick, issued a press statement conveying the committee’s reluctance to dictate what people should do in their free time and promising merely to provide a list of recreational facilities. Then, Fosdick said, “the people should be . . . left to do as they please. I shall insist,” he concluded, “that this committee shall not become one of the uplifting type” (“Fosdick”). When it became clear that Burke would not be doing the lecture circuit, he contented himself with writing an article critiquing the committee’s narrow interpretation of their charge. In “Men of Leisure,” Burke asked, “Might not the proper function of a Committee on the Use of Leisure Time be not to tell people what to do, but to tell them what attitude to have towards what they do?” (5). “For if people are ever to reorganize their occupational structure in the service of humane living, instead of attempting to reorganize their humanity to meet the demands of the occupational structure,” they need “a critical perspective” to help them determine “what the human vocations of man are” and, more radical still, “what opportunities of exercise and adventure and security they should demand of the state” (7). (I am amazed at Burke’s proposition that Americans demand exercise and adventure from their government.) “Men of Leisure” outlined this “critical perspective”—a Burkean perspective by incongruity—redefining and revaluing leisure as an opportunity for people to engage in the very uplift Fosdick dismissed—the development of their physical and mental powers. Like P&C, MOL “attac[ks] the [pious] linkages already established . . . [in order to] . . . alter the nature of our responses” (P&C 87). Thus Burke proposed “a new set of meanings whereby hours formerly thought dangerous are thought advantageous” (“Approach” n. pag.). Burke argued that Fosdick’s committee had both underestimated the scope of, and misidentified, the problem of leisure. Leisure, as Burke saw it, is a massive problem: “In addition to that portion of our population who enjoy leisure by divine right (‘sanctity of contract’), there are some twelve million who enjoy it by necessity. . . . There are also many millions more who are partially leisured— rich in free hours and poor in ideas as to what one should do with them” (MOL 2). More important for Burke, leisure is not so much an economic or logistical

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problem as a moral one. The American work ethic, that firmly entrenched cultural piety, binds work together with duty, success, strength of character, selfworth. But if, for Americans, work piously “goes with” virtue, then, logically, not working (leisure) “goes with” vice. Not to work is to be suspect, to be weak, worthless, perhaps even wicked. Idle hands are, after all, the devil’s playground. Burke wrote Erskine that he “doubt[s] whether people really do understand how deep the ‘technological psychosis’ has gone, how obedient man has been in attempting to so alter his values that he may make himself the fit servant of his inventions. . . . As a result, he has suffered a kind of ‘Faustian’ split between . . . the ‘vocational’ and the ‘vacational,’ between ‘work’ and ‘relaxation’” (24 Aug. 1933), or, as he explained to Colonel Woods, between “work-man” and “loafman” (24 Aug. 1933). Thus, Burke dryly observed, “it is ‘serious business’ to outwit one’s competitor in a sale of garters—and it is a mere ‘diversion’ to speculate upon the nature of the universe” (MOL 6). This problem was compounded, because the split between the “vocational” and the “vacational”—between “work-man” and “loaf-man”—had become an opportunity for capitalist exploitation. Simply put, “there is a big investment in amusements” (4). During the Depression, Burke quipped, “the ideal homo economicus would employ his leisure by eating too much, drinking too much, spending too much, smashing too much, and round off his day by calling in a doctor” (4). A new perspective on labor seems unaffordable, he asserted, when so many “‘industr[ies]’ [are] waiting to be buoyed up by our excesses” (5). So “‘uplift’ is to be avoided,” Burke sighed: “The people shall be spared a technique for criticizing their institutions from the standpoint of leisure and its humane uses. They may then simply continue in their old duality of ‘serious work’ and ‘dissipation,’ the dissipations ever making them ashamed of themselves and prepared for the next day’s work as penance” (7). Burke’s move in MOL is to heal that duality, to draw the line between virtue and vice in another place—not between work and play but between beneficial work-play and harmful work-play. Thus when a member of the Leisure Committee reportedly claimed, “lots of work is good for people,” Burke responded that lots of some kinds of work is good for people. “It is questionable,” he writes, “whether work in a subway booth is as good for people as work on a ballfield, or work in a chessgame, or work on a glass of beer” (3). When playing chess and drinking beer are considered forms of work, we are clearly in a place where traditional borders between work and leisure have been redrawn, and when beer drinking is considered good work, we have moved still further away from traditional linkages of virtue and paid, productive labor. Similarly, in his press release, Fosdick conceded that “idleness and loafing have a legitimate part in the art of living. It ought not to be assumed that a person doing nothing is wasting his time” (“Fosdick”). Well, yes and no. Burke argues that leisure is a vital part of

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the art of living, but he does not equate leisure with idleness and loafing. Indeed for him leisure is the opposite of doing nothing: “one must be made to know that he is acting—one must be made to know that he is accomplishing” (notes beginning “when a nation” n. pag.), even if one’s “labor” is unpaid or requires sitting quietly in a theater. What emerges from MOL, as from P&C, then, is a broadened perspective on the meaning of human occupation, moving beyond the “vocation of man as jobholder” to the “vocation of man as man” (6): “if one is occupied primarily with being a human being, and bringing to the fore the powers that characterize him as such” (“when a nation” n. pag.), that person will value “the exercise of muscles, the employment of the senses, the upbuilding of orientative imagery, the courting of risk, the curious, the adventurous, the speculative, the inventive— the intensification and extensification of all those organic devices and potentialities which the human organism developed and perfected in its contacts with primitive environment” (MOL 5).9 These fundamentally (“neurologically permanent”) human activities and gratifications are what Burke called “the Darwinian equipment” or “the Darwinian vocation” (6, 5). Some uses of the Darwinian equipment might look like what we typically think of as work—paid physical and mental labor; some might resemble Rodin’s The Thinker; some, like mountain climbing or training for the Olympics, might be inextricable combinations of work and play. In his notes Burke mentioned “community singing [and] unpaid municipal construction drives” as possible leisure activities (“when a nation” n. pag.), while in MOL, he settled the Darwinian vocation “in the region of ‘the arts,’ ” “among which,” he interestingly added, “games and sports should certainly be included” (6)—further evidence of his expansive notion of art. Leisure, broadly conceived, thus becomes, in MOL, a quintessential human activity— part of the job of being human. Not the devil’s tool but the way “one would ‘work’ in Paradise” (5). Through strategic contemplation’s “recursive practice of thinking, writing, thinking, writing, thinking,” I have come to see the “Men of Leisure” documents as highly instructive, helping to reframe our understanding of Burke as a flexible writer eager to engage not just in literary debates but in public ones, willing to reconceive his work, and unsettled in his political alliances. Moreover, documents such as these help to make a compelling case for the archive as a site from which to reassert the rhetorical nature of theory and to foreground how cultural conversations function as motives for theoretical acts. Below I offer four reasons why MOL matters to our understanding of P&C. First, the MOL documents show Burke behaving not as a stoic sage or aloof theorist, but as a writer very much like many of us—eager (or perhaps, given the disappointing reception of his two previous works, desperate) to get another book out, busy networking, ready to seize a kairotic moment to circulate his

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work. And like us, although he may have hoped for enduring renown, he wrote for contemporary readers. This is a Burke who approached newspapers like calls for papers. MOL documents, like his P&C planning, show him reaching out for public audiences and developing rhetorical strategies to accommodate them. As he noted, “It is no simple matter to change an attitude so deeply ingrained” (“Approach” n. pag.). Because the technological psychosis runs deep and because, Burke argued, “virtue and uplift are [so] out of fashion[,] . . . you may as well appeal to Zeus,” “the people must be given poetry—and it must never be called poetry” (“Approaches to project”). Or, as he explained to Erskine, “One cannot simply recommend one attitude when the ‘genius’ of our environment calls for another,” one reason, Burke would say, that so much Marxist and religious rhetoric fails. Indeed his understanding of what he calls “the natural recalcitrance of the material”—audience resistance—is one assurance he offered Erskine that he could shift his level of discourse (24 Aug. 1933). In his notes he rehearsed arguments to show Erskine his skill in identifying with the diverse audiences he might encounter on a lecture tour or in radio broadcasts: “one’s exhortations must be framed differently in approaching different groups. . . . I try continually to warn myself against assuming that the auditor agrees with my premisses [sic]. . . . What I wish to do is restate my position in keeping with his premisses [sic]” (“Approach” n. pag.). So, again, archival documents show Burke coaching himself on how to identify with his public audiences to help foster social change. Second, although P&C offers many examples of perspective by incongruity, “Men of Leisure” shows Burke using this translation method on his own work. While his pitching P&C as a treatise on leisure might seem like quite a stretch— little more than a strategic (or shameless) maneuver to circulate his ideas and earn money—his reinventing P&C appears sincere. And although for months I could not get past the seeming incongruity of Burke’s lecturing at welfare centers to see the deep connections between the two texts, it is now hard for me not to read MOL as the flip side of P&C: MOL says in the language of leisure and sport what P&C says in the language of metabiology and art. Indeed Burke’s MOL notes called for a “lecture on art (music, etc.) from the athletic angle” (“Approaches to project” n. pag.). Hence his explanation in a May 1934 foreword that the P&C “treats of the basic relationship between work and the ethical, but greatly widens the concepts of work beyond utilitarian limits” also accurately describes MOL (“Foreword [Andover draft]” 2). Both texts were pitched as programs of “adult education,” proposing to reorient cultural values around new understandings of human purposes or vocations with the goal of establishing more humane living. They show the same critique of machine culture; the same impulse to hit rock bottom, to strip away contingent cultural accretions in order to ground an ethical system on fundamental human purposes and bodily needs

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(MOL’s “Darwinian equipment”); the same commitment to political action based on those rediscovered purposes and needs. Nevertheless the Homo poeta that Burke celebrated in his original P&C draft gave way in “Men of Leisure” to a related but decidedly distinct being: Homo ludens.10 These differences throw into high relief some key emphases of P&C. MOL has philosophical underpinnings, and P&C plays with words and perspectives, but MOL’s athletic angle tilts it more toward individual physical bodies than to communal bodies and civic engagement (despite Burke’s passing reference to community singing and construction drives). Starting from leisure (and working with the confines of eight pages), it was harder for him to pull his argument in the direction of communication and composition. Aimed at a broader audience, MOL is more accessible to the average American and its plea for “humane living” less likely than P&C’s “art of living” to be read as a call for highbrow culture. For me, MOL, interesting in its own right, has also become an important companion text to P&C, as each comments on the other. Third, if we freeze the frame at “Men of Leisure,” we glimpse a 1930s Burke of a somewhat different political stripe than the one seen in P&C, with its explicit advocacy for communism. MOL’s diatribe against machine culture and its attendant hymn to a prelapsarian unity of work and play is not a Marxist argument; it is the argument of Southern Agrarians, especially as expressed in their 1930 I’ll Take My Stand, in which Andrew Lytle pointedly has asked, “Industrialism saves time, but what is to be done with this time?” (223). John Crowe Ransom’s chapter argues that “industrialism is a program under which men, using the latest scientific paraphernalia, sacrifice comfort, leisure, and the enjoyment of life to win Pyrrhic victories from nature at points of no strategic importance. . . . Industrialism is rightfully a menial, of almost miraculous cunning but no intelligence” (15). Burke’s MOL writing echoes Ransom, bemoaning “the Enslavement of Machinery” carried out “under the aegis of Science” (Burke’s notes on envelope, Erskine letter to Burke, 25 Aug. 1933) and warning Erskine that “unless man’s technique of rebellion is cunningly planned, the culture of the machine will continue to thrive on the slavery of man” (24 Aug. 1933). Like the Agrarians’ manifesto, MOL cut across the early 1930s divide between Marxists/leftists and New Dealers: MOL’s “Revolt against the Machine” (Burke’s notes on envelope, Erskine to Burke, 25 Aug. 1933) made it both anticapitalist and anticommunist. This political positioning is all the more striking because, as I explain in the next chapter, the 1933 P&C draft did not contain the arguments for communism that appear in the first edition. Finally there is a larger lesson here about the archive as a powerful site for re-creating, redefining, and remapping the cultural work of theory and the agents who produce it. The “Men of Leisure” file exemplifies how archival methods

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allow us to situate individuals’ rhetorical agency in their networks of textual exchange and to reemphasize rhetoric’s function as social engagement. I n t e rv e n t i o n 3 : T h e A rt o f S e l l i n g Preparing to write this chapter, I reviewed what I thought I knew (what Selzer and I had written) about P&C’s publication. It is a simple story: Burke submitted the manuscript in May 1934 to Harcourt Brace, which had an option on P&C but rejected it, after which Burke slunk off to the less prestigious New Republic Dollar Series, where it was accepted. I have always wondered, though, why Harcourt rejected P&C. In the absence of a formal rejection letter in Burke’s papers—not unusual in and of itself since the New York literary scene was small enough that business could be handled in person—I have itched to know what had happened. Granted Burke’s most recent Harcourt title, Towards a Better Life (1932), had not sold well or been well received, but Counter-Statement (1931) had some critical success. The Depression had surely dampened publishing ventures, and that might be explanation enough. But was that the whole story? What might the rest of Burke’s correspondence with Harcourt editor Charles A. Pearce reveal about P&C’s fate? What had they said about the book in spring 1934? The letters I found, the first of which indicates that, by the end of May, Pearce had not even seen (let alone rejected) P&C, took me by surprise. Pearce wrote, “Unless arrangements have already been made, I’d like to see the new book, if only for the very great interest that I naturally have in it myself ” (29 May 1934). Clearly Harcourt did not have an option on P&C; indeed Pearce half expected Burke to be working with another press already. Moreover the request feels carefully worded, as if Pearce was tiptoeing around some tension between them, wanting to show his interest without presuming interest on the part of Burke (or Harcourt’s board) or trying to spare each the awkwardness of being rejected by the other. And although Pearce’s request ended with a promise to read quickly so as to “not hold [him] up” (from Burke submitting elsewhere?), later letters show that by June 20 Pearce still had not finished reading. In short there was no rejection letter because there was no rejection. The story I thought I knew had unraveled, leaving me with new questions: How did P&C end up at the New Republic Dollar Series? And what difference did that make? This archival intervention retelling the story of P&C’s publication, then, has two purposes. First, when we view Burke within this unfamiliar scene of book submission and production, our understandings of him shift, too. My intervention presents a Burke readers rarely encounter: not the consummate theorist but an anxious, scrappy writer caught in the act of salesmanship, for if Harcourt did not have an option on P&C, Burke was “free” to take the riskier, more difficult route of finding a publisher himself. Along the way he displayed surprisingly

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shrewd sales maneuvers to get the book accepted as well as keen attention to its marketing. This account also shows Burke working with seldom-acknowledged coagents—his two primary 1930s editors, Pearce and New Republic’s Daniel Mebane, who managed the book’s acquisition, production, and marketing. One caveat: archival collections typically contain only letters the subject received, not those she or he wrote. Hence Burke’s letters to Pearce and Mebane are housed wherever their papers are archived; if such sites exist, I have not found them. My story is, thus, based on half a conversation—letters from Pearce and Mebane to Burke—so I must listen to unseen words, straining to catch Burke’s ideas and tone via his editors’ responses. Second, this archival intervention asks readers to consider P&C not only as rhetorical theory but also as a material artifact, something produced, acknowledging how the material conditions of its production shaped the content and readers’ response to the book. When we study theory as theory, we remove the work, its author, and ourselves from the messy processes whereby theory becomes one particular book resulting from specific decisions about publication venue, title, cover, length, scale and quality of marketing, and so forth, all of which significantly affect readers’ engagement with the book—how often, by whom, and for what purposes the text gets taken up. That is, P&C would have come to contemporary readers as a different text without this title or this cover or from another publisher. It would be different and would mean differently. It would not be—or since most readers do not use the first edition, was not—quite the book twenty-first-century readers know. Burke and Harcourt The story of P&C’s becoming a New Republic book really began at Harcourt, where Burke’s relationship with Pearce and the reception of his two previous books set the scene for P&C’s publication. Pearce and Burke seem to have established a good relationship, even a friendship, as they worked on Burke’s Harcourt books: the two collaborated on smaller projects, Pearce sent extra paid work his way, and their letters throughout the decade were filled with planned visits to Andover and invitations to Pearce’s home in town.11 Nevertheless correspondence and events suggest that Burke likely experienced his last year with Harcourt as one of eager anticipation followed by acute disappointment and eventual resentment as Harcourt wooed Burke, then rejected or failed to pursue his work. Burke’s contract for Counter-Statement gave Harcourt first option on his next two books. Harcourt consequently published Towards a Better Life in 1932, and Pearce wrote him repeatedly throughout that year, eager for him to finish his next book, Auscultation, Creation, and Revision (30 Mar. 1932; 8 Jun. 1932; 22 Jun. 1932). When Burke submitted the manuscript in early October (Burke to Cowley,

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3 Oct. 1932), Harcourt must have rejected it fairly quickly.12 That rejection may have been particularly hard for Burke, who, as Selzer and I note, felt alienated from friends and colleagues “defecting” to literary Marxism and who would have seen ACR’s publication as an endorsement of his more aesthetic bent (66–86). That keen disappointment was undoubtedly exacerbated by Burke’s financial distress.13 It is hard to say how much consolation Burke felt in the fact that Pearce liked ACR and/or him enough to look privately—though unsuccessfully—for another publisher (Pearce to Burke, 6 Feb. 1933). Having rejected ACR, Harcourt had used up its options on Burke’s future projects, and although he and Pearce continued to correspond and to work and socialize together, Burke’s relationship with Harcourt was fraying. Even before ACR’s rejection, correspondence reveals a kerfuffle over his TBL contract, which led him to expect a larger firstquarter royalty check than he received (Pearce to Burke, 2 Mar. 1932). Later letters indicate some disgruntlement on Burke’s part, that Pearce admitted, was not without cause (10 Apr. 1933), and early 1934 brought the bitter news that Harcourt was letting CS and TBL go out of print (Margaret Cuff to Burke, 22 Jan. 1934).14 Pearce, however, continued to be interested in Burke’s work, closely following his progress on P&C, pronouncing himself “very keen to read it when it’s finished” (16 Aug. 1933), and writing Burke that he found “On Interpretation” (part 1 of P&C) “extraordinary” when it appeared in the journal Plowshare (29 Mar. 1934). When the manuscript was nearly complete, and Pearce himself had asked to see it, Burke sent the manuscript to him apparently not as a formal submission, for a letter to Cowley in early June shows Burke “hurriedly clicking off the last section,” eager to capitalize on the buzz created by Cowley’s unflattering portrayal of him in Exile’s Return to attract a publisher: “Perhaps the adventitious stir accruing to me through your book may give some assistance in getting a publisher interested—so I must speed, before the stench has all been wafted away” (9 June 1934).15 Pearce wrote Burke twice more in mid-June to say he had not yet finished part 3 (18 and 20 June 1934),16 but by then Burke was busily pursuing another publishing option: the New Republic Dollar Series. Selling P&C to the Dollar Series I can easily imagine the sensitive Burke feeling unappreciated at Harcourt, but I do not typically think of him as a savvy networker. But how else to describe his apparent next moves in placing P&C? For his correspondence indicates that he did not submit his manuscript to the New Republic directly but rather, as he later wrote Waldo Frank, “showed it to a social psychologist” (16 July 1934), Eduard Lindeman, a prolific author and professor who pioneered the field of adult education at what became the Columbia School of Social Work—and not coincidentally, I think, a contributing editor at the New Republic and cofounder of its

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Dollar Series. Given Burke’s close personal and professional ties with the magazine, Lindeman was likely familiar to Burke, as illustrated by the warmth of his letters and his “My Dear Burke” salutation (letter to Burke, 19 June 1934). Burke’s move proved shrewd for another reason: influenced by Emerson (whose thought also runs through P&C) and his Columbia friend and colleague John Dewey, Lindeman was committed to social justice, lifelong learning, and progressive education’s role in promoting democratic culture and thus was a well-informed and sympathetic reader. His responsive was swift and effusive: he was “convince[d] . . . of [the book’s] worth and timeliness” (19 June 1934). Indeed he thought the work superior to Dewey’s in Nature and Experience and to Ogden and Richards, whom he found too theoretical. He especially approved of Burke’s approach to communism and his focus on communication, which Lindeman called “the most significant of all categories for human affairs. . . . I am so excited [about P&C]—as I always am when I find someone who recognizes this essential in the human equation.” He then proposed what Burke may have been hoping for: “Do you have any objections to the New Republic Dollar Series?” Lindeman admitted that the series was neither tremendously prestigious nor profitable for authors, but, he added, “the funny thing about these N.R. books, some of them, is that they go right on selling for years”—soothing words for a writer whose Harcourt books had so quickly gone out of print—and to sweeten the deal, Lindeman offered to write an introduction if New Republic accepted P&C (19 June 1934).17 So a well-pleased Burke reported to Watson: “I got an encouraging letter, a proposal to write an introduction, and an offer to attempt placing [the book] for me” (6 July 1934). Lindeman made good on his offer, forwarding Burke’s manuscript along with a letter of recommendation to the press, where it was received on July 9 (Mebane to Burke, 9 July 1934). Lindeman was thus a major, and heretofore unrecognized, player in P&C’s placement at the Dollar Series. Digging through more of his correspondence, I have found repeated evidence of Burke’s considerable salesmanship and his ability to work the system to get P&C accepted—evidence that challenges traditional representations of him as a hapless figure in the literary marketplace. Within a few weeks, editor Daniel Mebane reported that although the editorial board felt P&C had “real importance,” they doubted it would sell; since Burke had asked (via Lindeman) for a quick response, the board initially rejected the manuscript, and Mebane advised him to send it elsewhere. The board left the door slightly ajar, however, telling him to check back with them if he had not placed the book by fall (Mebane to Burke, 27 July 1934). Perhaps anticipating just such hesitation, Burke had already sent the manuscript to two other New Republic contributing editors, Waldo Frank (16 July 1934) and Lewis Mumford, for possible endorsement. Both responded favorably, Mumford, for instance, remarking that he read P&C “with pleasure

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and admiration” (11 Oct. 1934). To Frank, Burke suggested that “should you find the book disappointing, then tell me in a furtive whisper, and I promise that I shall protect your secret scrupulously. But if you think of anything encouraging you can say for it, anything that I might add to my Suasive Exhibits to bring before Mebane, I do hope that you will blare forth full and strong” (19 Sept 1934). Meanwhile Burke continued sending what Mebane called “interesting” letters, and Mebane warmed to the idea of publishing P&C: “It is a book capable of provoking intelligent discussion on a very high plane” (letter to Burke, 6 Sept. 1934). After another anxious six weeks passed for Burke, Mebane reported that the board agreed they “ought to publish the book” and that they simply needed to steel themselves to accept the financial risk (16 Oct. 1934), which they shortly did—after “an extra-large sized kick” from Lindeman (letter to Burke, 22 Oct. 1934), whom the frustrated Burke had asked to intervene once more. Reporting his latest conversation with Mebane, Lindeman wrote Burke, “I said I was more anxious than ever to print it; [Mebane] agreed and said he’d go ahead. I am to go over the galley-proofs with an eye to minimum alterations and then write my introduction. I can’t understand what keeps him from telling you” (22 Oct. 1934). Mebane’s next letter announced, finally, that “the decision to publish your book was formally arrived at today at luncheon” (23 Oct. 1934). Contemplating Burke’s insider knowledge and proactive, behind-the-scenes power plays to move the New Republic board from doubters to willing risk-takers, I have sensed for the first time something of the fierceness hidden beneath his rather shy demeanor. Although some of Burke’s friends (particularly Cowley and Josephson), hoping for a more prestigious press, advised him to use New Republic only as a last resort (Matthew Josephson to Burke, 29 Aug. 1934), Burke rightly saw the Dollar Series as a good fit for P&C. As he wrote to Josephson, “The imprint of the series would place the work clearly in the educational field, where it belongs (I have always tended to consider myself a kind of free-lance schoolteacher)” (7 Sept. 1934). In the series Burke joined celebrated authors such as Freud, John Dewey, and John Maynard Keynes, as well as those working at various intersections of education, sociology, psychology, progressive politics, and public policy, whose titles included The American College and Its Rulers (John E. Kirkpatrick, 1926); The Students Speak Out! (1929); Education, the Machine and the Worker: An Essay in the Psychology of Education in Industrial Society (Horace Meyer Kallen, 1925); and The Child, The Clinic and The Court (with an introduction by Jane Addams, 1925). Burke further saw the advantage of the low price tag: “the modest asking price of one dollar,” he wrote Josephson, “should make it easier to seek out those earnest indigent readers whom one would most like to think of himself as addressing” (7 Sept 1934).18 That the Dollar Series, according to both Lindeman and Mebane, could not— and never intended to—compete with larger commercial presses worked both

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for and against Burke (Mebane to Burke, 30 Oct. 1934). The series was profitable enough to solidify the magazine’s financial base, but the editors were also committed to publishing serious books that other presses would not touch—books that, Lindeman wrote, “should be read by intellectuals who can scrape together one hundred cents” (19 June 1934); books such as Burke’s. Still I imagine Burke felt somewhat deflated reading Mebane’s comment that “I have never regarded our books as financially important to the author. . . . The things we have done were books in which both the author and publisher cared more for circulation and reaching people than financial reward” (30 Oct. 1934). While Burke certainly belonged to the latter category, his books were also an important source of income. So he was disappointed that the series did not offer advances, and the low cover price could potentially make for low royalties—just ten cents per book under the series’ standard terms of 10 percent on first the 2,500 copies sold, compared to the twenty-five cents Harcourt gave Burke for TBL (Mebane to Burke, 30 Oct. 1934; Pearce to Burke, 2 Mar. 1932). The Selling of P&C To my twenty-first-century sensibilities, the Dollar Series P&C is a singularly unimpressive, even ugly, book. Measuring approximately five by seven inches, it is smaller than conventional volumes, and its green-gray oilcloth cover with red lettering and cross-stripes does not beckon “buy me” or even “look inside.” Because I cringe inside whenever I see the book, I have wondered how P&C materialized into this particular artifact during its four months in production. Correspondence between Mebane and Burke provides insight into three of the many editorial and design decisions notable for their potential impact on P&C’s appeal, accessibility, and, hence, readership and reception. I discuss these choices because, although no one today would deny their importance, scholars habitually treat theory books as purely theoretical rather than material artifacts (with particular covers, fonts, page designs, etc.), as, for instance, when we make claims about a book’s reception based solely on the content—as if its materiality does not signify. Our habit of ignoring the material book is a way of not seeing that we should acknowledge. I am not claiming that a differently produced P&C would have been a smash hit—although one bookseller did make that claim; I am claiming that a book’s material matters. So it is important that my account of P&C’s publication acknowledge some of the material decisions and constraints that shaped the first edition, specifically, title, cover, and length, as they unfolded in the production process, beginning with the title. It was at Mebane’s urging that Burke titled the book Permanence and Change. Burke explains in the second edition prologue that its original title was Treatise on Communication, but the archival record is confusing on this point. The manuscript that Burke was finishing typing when he wrote Cowley on June 9 is very

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likely one still kept at the Burke homestead in Andover, which includes a preface dated May 1934 and which is titled Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose.19 Given the labor involved in typing such a long manuscript, it seems reasonable to assume that this was the manuscript Burke submitted to Lindeman in late June and the Dollar Series in early July, and indeed Mebane says “Permanence and Change” was the book’s “first title” (Mebane to Burke, 4 Dec. 1934). However Burke’s correspondence consistently referred to the book as Treatise on Communication or simply Treatise (Burke to Watson, 6 July 1934; Cowley to Burke, 20 Aug. 1934; Burke to Cowley, 27 Oct. 1934), and Lindeman’s praise for Burke’s emphasis on communication may suggest that the manuscript he read bore the Treatise title. What does seem clear is that Treatise on Communication was Burke’s preferred title: a revised foreword he sent to Mebane for publication, dated November 1934, was titled “Treatise on Communication: An Analysis of Purpose.” Also Burke had written Waldo Frank in September that this would be “the best title for the work (so far as indicating its nature is concerned). . . . And I shall probably call it such, if I can find a publisher who will allow me” (19 Sept. 1934). Mebane was not that man. As the book approached the galley stage (mailed out 12 December), he queried, “Do you feel absolutely certain of your preference for the title: ‘Treatise on Communication?’” (4 Dec. 1934). Burke later remarked to Cowley that Mebane “thought [that] sounded like a report on telephone and telegraph” (3 May 1950; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 291). Mebane felt Permanence and Change was more appealing, and Burke bowed to potentially better marketability. In addition to pushing for an appealing title, Mebane chose a distinctive cover: a modern greenish-gray Permatex binding (an oilcloth that made book jackets unnecessary) of which he was enormously proud. He thought it “elegant” even if the red type was not as stunning as he expected (Mebane to Burke, 10 Jan. 1935). Mebane had taken great pains with the binding; before settling on Permatex, he “experiment[ed] . . . with fabrikoid and semi-stiff boards,” which offered customers durability (Mebane to Burke, 28 Nov. 1934), and new upholstery fabrics, which he thought had more character than standard book cloth (Mebane to Burke, 4 Dec. 1934). (Mebane’s letters about bindings never discussed cost, but surely money factored in Dollar Series production decisions.) When the PR manager for an upscale New York City real-estate firm asked Mebane for copies of a book with “a distinctly modern character” to display in his model “Motohome” in White Plains, he sent P&C, its washable cover making it, he pronounced, “the book of the future” (Mebane to Bercovici, 18 Apr. 1935). Mebane also received inquiries from several university presses, asking where to purchase Permatex. He joked with Burke that “oil cloth books for the bathroom as well as the kitchen may be turned out by the enterprising publishers of the future” (26 Apr. 1935). However, retailers experienced in marketing to general audiences

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advised Mebane that neither durability nor novelty attracted customers. A Chicago branch manager of the fashionable Kroch’s Bookstores suggested that a color dust jacket could make P&C a bestseller (Joseph Kreloff to New Republic, 25 May 1935), and Macy’s and Baker & Taylor requested dust jackets for their books (Mebane to Burke, 4 June 1935; 14 June 1935).20 Probably the “intellectuals” targeted by the Dollar Series and Burke’s admirers did not miss the book jacket, but since many people do judge books by their covers, potential P&C readers likely faced an aesthetic hurdle rather than an attractive invitation into a difficult text. Finally, length—and its effect on page design and planned introductions— became a critical production issue when, at the last minute, Mebane discovered they had underestimated P&C’s length, which was coming in at 350-plus pages— above the series’ “optimal limit” of 320 pages. Mebane asked Burke to suggest some cuts (28 Dec. 1934), and one very late draft that includes printer’s numbers stamped in the corner and marginal notations for galley numbers shows significant, if not extensive, deletions, especially of long footnotes;21 the first edition, nevertheless, contains 351 pages. Mebane felt the resulting “struggle[s] . . . to squeeze the book in” created an unattractive layout—an opinion seconded by Pearce, who, Mebane reported, thought the “make-up and layout was pretty bad” (Mebane to Burke, 19 Feb. 1935)—and oddly, the New Republic ad for P&C mentions its “closely printed pages”—an attempt, perhaps, to present it as an especially good value. Burke also lost the opportunity to frame P&C’s project for readers when the planned introduction by Lindeman—something, he promised, that would “tempt peoples [sic] appetites” (letter to Burke, 31 Dec. 1934)—and Burke’s own foreword were likely casualties of the space crunch (Burke to Horace Gregory, 28 Jan. 1935).22 Thus the material considerations of publishing P&C hindered Burke’s efforts to make the book more widely accessible. As chapter 6 shows, scholars often make claims about P&C’s popularity or contemporary impact—or about Burke’s inability or unwillingness to appeal to broader audiences—without considering the impact of some of publishers’ most potent marketing tools (covers, titles, press reputation). We know that books are material artifacts produced by writers, editors, designers, and marketers and that a book’s material aspects (even texts produced or read digitally) necessarily signify, though not in ways that are completely predictable or stable across readers— so much so that there is an extent to which today’s readers of the third edition P&C are not reading the same book as Burke’s 1935 contemporaries. Correspondence shows that sales of P&C were less than Burke and Mebane hoped for, but for most of us, the numbers are enviable: 250 copies sold in the first five days, and more than 1,300 within six months; by April 1936 the book had gone into a second printing, with sales hitting 1,809 by that August. By September 1936, Burke’s royalties came to $151.20, roughly $2,700 in 2018 dollars

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(Mebane to Burke, 19 Feb. 1935; 10 Aug. 1935; 29 Apr. 1936; 21 Oct. 1936; 25 Sept. 1936).23 These sales figures and archival correspondence suggest that Mebane was a capable marketer. He distributed 109 complimentary copies to reviewers and influential others who might spread praise (letter to Burke, 21 Oct. 1936), and he once reported to Burke that he had written 69 bookstores in one day, “telling them that we had hold of the tail of a best seller and would they like to take 5 copies on consignment and give their customers a chance to get in among the first hundred thousand” (14 June 1935). Mebane also tried to get Burke a gig to lecture at a local school, hoping to sell books to some of the faculty (letter to Burke, 9 Apr. 1935). He even went so far as to peddle the book to the Ohio Teachers’ and Pupils’ Reading Circle; the chairman replied that although he personally found P&C the most stimulating book he had read lately, he doubted it would be a good fit for his readers (W. S. Coy to Mebane, 3 Feb. 1936). Mebane also attempted to sell P&C abroad through Curtis Brown International Publishing, for he forwarded a letter (on which he had drawn a frowny face), explaining that they had ceased marketing, P&C having been refused by Allen & Unwin, Routledge, Faber & Faber, and Rider (Mebane to Burke, 14 June 1935). Despite Mebane’s efforts, Burke watched sales figures anxiously and sent ideas to Mebane eagerly and often “on the bright subject of Come-and-Buy”—ideas that demonstrated Mebane’s limitations and/or Burke’s shrewdness (24 Apr. 1936). For instance, he suggested marketing to professors, only to have Mebane retort, “I estimate that five years must elapse after the publication of a book that says anything before colleges will find out about it” (26 Feb. 1936)—which, in light of Lindeman’s enthusiasm for P&C and Columbia University Bookstore’s unsolicited order of ten copies, seems particularly shortsighted (Mebane to Burke, 19 Feb. 1935). Burke also made the prescient—or, perhaps, simply logical—suggestion to target sociologists, which Mebane did successfully, crediting Burke’s personal efforts (Mebane to Burke, 2 Mar. 1936). (It is easy to imagine Burke’s viewing every party, lecture, and letter as an opportunity to slip in a few words about P&C.) And when the book approached a second printing in April 1936, Burke offered copy for the New Republic ad: now that the returns are in we offer these excerpts from reviews to indicate why permanence and change, by Kenneth Burke has already gone into a second printing. Below the copy he suggested that Mebane “simply reproduce, in strict telephonedirectory style, the enclosed material.” Since the Penn State archive contains only Burke’s file copy of the letter, it is not clear what those enclosures were. Burke

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seems to have had in mind not only actual reviews, but also (or instead) blurbs by Waldo Frank, Matthew Josephson, and Eduard Lindeman that Mebane already had; he also asked Mebane to solicit statements from Horace Gregory and Newton Arvin, “who have both testified to me very graciously in private (and unsolicited)” (24 Apr. 1936). He then offered a “prayer” that Mebane would run an “announcement of billboard proportion” (24 Apr. 1936). Burke also wrote Cowley, urging him to run his two recently accepted poems (“Lullaby—for Oneself as Adult Male,” “Uneasy Thought of Peace”) in the same issue as the ad to give it more punch (1 May 1936). In the end Mebane admitted that he may not always have aggressively marketed P&C, and Burke acknowledged his anxious overreach. Mebane apparently received Burke’s suggestions with good humor and some gratitude: “Your impatience, as contrasted with my oriental calm, with respect to the speed at which the truths contained in P. and C. shall become universally accepted, is understandable (and also useful)” (26 Feb. 1936). Burke, in turn, apologized for being overzealous (even as he slipped in one more suggestion), resolving that “following the announcement of [the second] printing, I shall pester you no further, not even mentioning again (Ciceronian praeteritio) my fond notions about a circularization test among the profs. . . . and so leave you content and in peace” (24 Apr. 1936). Mebane’s reply: “You have several times noted my agility in avoiding action: if you leave me in peace how will I sufficiently exercise this highly developed talent?” (29 Apr. 1936). Mebane was clearly fond of Burke, whose worries and doubts sometimes got the better of him, and he proved to be an enthusiastic cheerleader for P&C, countering Burke’s occasional gloom by reassuring him, for instance, that “we will bankrupt the [New Republic] rather than let P. & C. go out of print” (undated [1935]). On the occasion of the second printing, Mebane wrote Burke prophetically (except perhaps about the money): “Being plated the work now takes its place among the perennials of publishing: we’ll dash off another thousand every couple of years. See if we don’t. And when you become the lion of the sociologists, philosophers and phds [sic] of pedagogy some big publisher will buy these plates from us and we’ll make a lot of money. Such is my fair dream on this bright morning” (undated [early May?] 1936). Burke, for his part, was grateful for Mebane’s role in getting P&C published: “I shall never forget my debt to you for publishing a book that might otherwise still be lying about the house in manuscript. And when a writer sees others nibbling at the fringes of his own concerns, while his own work lies in limbo, that, I tell you, is such a drastic state of affairs as can make jerky the muscles, make dizzy the eyes, and make sour the stomach. There is no punishment worse than the punishment of silence, and you spared me that punishment” (24 Apr. 1936).

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C o da : T h e o ry H e a d Burkean theory is heady stuff. Literally. Just look at his book covers. The walletsize formal studio portrait of the white-haired Burke on current editions of P&C and ATH swells on GM’s cover—magnifying Burke’s penetrating gaze (or glare?)—then turns into the awkward profile on RM. That formidable head looms large over and through our reading. It is often the only image of Burke readers know. Even the entrance to Penn State’s archives is adorned by Virginia Burks’s magnificent sculpture of Burke’s head. These images reinforce a onedimensional representation of Burke—as disembodied sage, as theory head. And within academic hierarchies, it is a short distance from theory head to godhead. Removing Burke from material realities of writing and production, we bestow upon him an unhelpful mastery or power. Burke as eccentric genius. Theorist as Romantic hero. This persistent image of Burke has everything to do with, and is more troubling because of, his status as a canonical white male author. It is worth asking what purposes this figure has served—and for whom? It gives rhetorical studies (and, hence rhetorical scholars) claim to a bona fide genius, increasing the academic prestige of rhetoric generally and elevating the study of Burke specifically. I am not sneering at the disciplinary importance of this move, from which I, and programs I have worked in, have materially benefitted. This figure also begets specialist knowledge, for it often seems to follow that only a similarly brilliant (and, for too long, usually male) mind can understand Burke’s genius. And this figure inspires worship.24 This is not the only Burke twentyfirst-century rhetoricians need. I seek to multiply and complicate our representations of him, to produce a usable, flesh-and-blood Burke—someone who, like us, lived and worked in “the Scramble.” Taken together, the archival interventions in this chapter illustrate one such 3-D Burke, specifically arguing for the value of representing him as a civicminded, engaged, and deliberate writer who responded to public exigencies as a critical educator; who planned, revised, and shrewdly navigated publication networks; and who encountered writerly problems: accommodating multiple (and public) audiences, handling recalcitrant material, getting stuck, managing time and emotions over the long haul of book writing, working with (and sometimes bowing to) editors while his ideas are packaged and sold. Burke as writer is no less brilliant for all of this mucking about in material processes, just more approachable, more human—and whole, a man with head and heart and body. How does creating a three-dimensional Burke contribute to A Critical Companion’s purpose? Complicating, multiplying, and humanizing representations of him indirectly but inescapably alter the way readers understand and respond to P&C. For instance a writer who conceives his work directly responding to current events—as Burke did in the “Men of Leisure” essay—will produce a very

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different text than someone who retreats to an isolated farmhouse to think deep thoughts. Or, rather, readers trained to see Burke in one of those ways will approach the text differently, some looking for a work of civic engagement, others looking for philosophical or theoretical profundities. This is not to suggest that Burke was not a profound thinker or that readers must choose to read P&C as either a civic or a philosophical project. Rather archival interventions reveal the extent to which P&C as high theory has, particularly within English studies, become the default approach—which is to say a trained incapacity. Similarly, scholars have shown little interest in Burke’s publishers, but he chose to submit P&C to the Dollar Series, thereby aligning his book with other works on education, sociology, and public policy and distinguishing it from the offerings of more traditional presses where his friends typically published their literary criticism and histories. Knowing this allows readers to appreciate the decidedly different tack he made via P&C, addressing different audiences with different—more civic, more pedagogical—motives. Archival interventions thus provide more perspectives or lenses through which to understand and engage with Burke. Finally, although “humanizing” Burke through archival interventions might seem a simplistic, sentimental goal that does little to illuminate P&C, such humanizing is important because traditional representations of him too often abstract him and his theory from context. But Burke did not write theory in the abstract, and the figure of him as iconic theory head serves primarily to intimidate readers new to him. Instead readers who are encouraged to see Burke and his theory as approachable—even to identify with him, I argue—are more likely to engage P&C’s civic mission fully and to carry that mission forward.

Five Archival Recalcitrance The Ins and Outs of Communism Scholars have long struggled to define adequately Burke’s understanding of, and commitment to, communism and the Communist Party in the 1930s. Burke, a lifelong socialist, has been described by Don Burks, following Burke’s own labeling, as an “Agro-Bohemian ‘Marxoid’” (219). The ins and outs—the nuances—of Burke’s position are fascinating,1 but this chapter’s archival intervention concerns the more literal ins and outs of Burke’s position: the way his arguments for communism appeared, expanded, shrank, and disappeared in successive revisions of P&C. Specifically I recount my attempts to track and explain why Burke included arguments for communism in drafts leading up to the first-edition text and then removed them for the second edition published in 1954. At first glance the reasons for both moves seem obvious. During the 1930s Burke saw communism, as he explicitly stated in the first edition, as a necessary first step in reorienting American culture: “So far as I can see, the only coherent and organized movement making for the subjection of the technological genius to humane ends is that of Communism, by whatever name it may finally prevail. For though Communism is generally put forward on a purely technological basis, . . . we must realize the highly humanistic or poetic nature of its fundamental criteria” (93). A cooperative culture will only flourish, he maintained, if it is based on a cooperative economic system, which he, along with many of his contemporaries, took communism to be. Burke’s deletion of that argument in McCarthy-era America seems similarly straightforward, especially following the University of Washington’s 1952 refusal to appoint him as an endowed lecturer due to his 1930s leftist activities. After being called out as a potential threat to students by the university’s president—and after seeing friends fired or hauled before congressional committees because of alleged ties to the Communist Party—Burke might understandably have been wary of explicitly advocating communism. However, as so often happens, the archival material I studied complicates these easy explanations. Hence my belief in communism’s importance to Burke’s

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first-edition argument was shaken when I discovered that his original P&C draft never mentioned communism. In a draft written two or three months later, explicit arguments for communism were in place. What prompted him, rather suddenly, to add them? Likewise Burke’s correspondence does not directly support scholarly lore that, when working on the second edition in 1953, he deleted the most extensive arguments for communism in direct response to his lost University of Washington position. So what did prompt him to remove those passages? To find some answers, I did what I have always done: packed my bags for Penn State and scoured his correspondence, which surely (or so I thought) would help explain his major revisions to P&C around the touchy subject of communism. What I came home with instead were brand new (and equally frustrating) questions, answers to questions I had never thought to ask about P&C’s communism and publication history, and the most fascinating and baffling archival story I have ever encountered: Burke’s relationship with Mildred Ligda and Hermes Publications, which was one of his primary publishing venues in the 1950s, responsible for releasing his poetry collection Book of Moments and the second editions of CS, P&C, and ATH. Such breakdowns and dead ends, Hawhee observes, always hinder researchers’ attempts to construct archival histories, and she urges scholars to come clean on this score—to practice what she calls “historiography by incongruity,” complicating “tidy narratives” and acknowledging “the necessarily messy, incomplete, surprising, and often stubbornly befuddling nature of archival work” (“Historiography” 198). Researchers familiar with Burke’s archives can predict some of the likely difficulties they will encounter: the one-sided conversations recorded in much of his correspondence, the undated documents, the illegible handwriting. But perhaps because Burke carefully documented so much of his work, sudden archival silences seem all the more frustrating—seem, at times, almost deliberate. The archive, thus, sometimes has an agency of its own, refusing to cooperate, derailing projects, dictating which stories can be told—and how. As Hawhee asserts, archives “offer information that directs, redirects, perplexes” (“Historiography” 197). Like an insistent GPS, archives are forever “recalculating” researchers’ routes as we take wrong turns or short cuts, come upon closed roads, or lose our way. And in this sense archives function as a type of recalcitrance—the material and social forces that prompt revision of all perspectives or claims. Adapting Burke’s notion of recalcitrance, I define archival recalcitrance as what the archive “says back” to a researcher seeking specific answers or trying to compose a particular historical narrative. Like Burke’s notion of recalcitrance in P&C, archival recalcitrance describes the ways archives resist a line of argument—the road blocks and gaps and bewilderments that compel scholars to abandon or revise

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existing assumptions or research questions. But archival recalcitrance, like Burke’s recalcitrance, also names the ways archives support claims, encourage researchers to push ideas further, and create unsuspected opportunities for new knowledge. “The archive,” Hawhee concludes, “does not make scholarly works, it remakes them” (207). What follows is a historiography by incongruity—an untidy, inconclusive account of my attempt to understand P&C’s unstable arguments for communism. In fact my search for such understanding becomes a case study in archival recalcitrance: it illustrates how archives sometimes not only refuse to clarify but often obfuscate, offer perspectives so incongruous that they disorient without reorienting, insist that a story is flawed or fragmented but offer no revision suggestions, reveal fascinating hints of an entirely different but potentially more important story, then create a trail too rough and too narrow to follow. In other words, in the end this is a story about the ways archival recalcitrance remade the account I had hoped to create about the ins and outs of communism. The story I tell instead, despite its embarrassments, nevertheless illuminates Burke’s work on P&C’s first and second editions: archival recalcitrance prompted me to take a less abstract approach to understanding P&C’s communism and, by rerouting me to Burke’s correspondence with Ligda, demonstrated a persistent blind spot in Burke studies—our lack of attention to his books’ material production. This archival intervention unfolds in three parts: (1) the shifting appearances and representations of communism as Burke worked toward the first-edition text; (2) the role of his lost University of Washington job—what Cowley called the “Battle of Puget Sound”—in his decision to delete communism from the second edition; and (3) his often inexplicable but enormously influential collaboration with Ligda and Hermes Publications. The documents I introduce here suggest that difficulties defining Burke’s take on communism are not merely a function of his idiosyncratic position. (It was idiosyncratic, but no more so than that of many other independent leftists such as Sidney Hook and William Carlos Williams.) Burke’s position is difficult to articulate because it was a moving target, shifting, as Selzer and I discuss, in response to current events and Communist Party policies, but also in response to his own changing priorities and audiences, his indecision about how best to position his civic agenda politically, and his tacks between fear and patriotic fierceness in the 1950s. And like the archival material presented in the previous chapter, these documents also illustrate the important ways the P&C we study today has been shaped by particular publishers—in this case Ligda, who, at a time when all but two of Burke’s books were out of print, helped create the conditions that made the second edition of P&C possible and who has been an unacknowledged figure in Burke scholarship.

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Pa rt 1 : S h i f t y C o m m u n i s m In 1935 Permanence and Change was widely regarded as Burke’s “coming out” book—a logical follow-up to what seemed to be a full-throated endorsement of communism in his 20 March 1934 New Masses essay, “My Approach to Communism.” Yet some of Burke’s contemporaries and many Burke scholars argue that his attitudes toward communism are not so easily defined. In the late thirties, for instance, New Masses reviewer Groff Conklin compared his approach to communism to “that of a dog gingerly flirting with a porcupine” (26). More recently Stacey Sheriff has argued that even “My Approach to Communism” is better read as advocacy for a reorientation that fosters artistic culture than as a commitment to communism as a political and economic system. Archival documents indicate that Burke’s approach to communism as he was writing P&C was even more complicated than Sheriff and others suggest. Here I trace some of the ins and outs of communism in the four documents in the chart below: Ins and Outs of Communism: Four Documents Document

Date

Relative Commitment to Communism

“Range of Piety” (ROP), an early version of P&C part 1

October 1933

None

Plowshare “On Interpretation”

January 1934

Extended but mixed

Andover draft, still kept at Burke’s Andover home; includes only parts 2 and 3, which together with the Plowshare “On Interpretation,” made a complete manuscript

May 1934

Further extended but mixed; ominous final note on revolutionary violence

First edition P&C

1935

Abridged but more positive

This material shows Burke’s uneven approach toward communism, a kind of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t act. The 1933 “Range of Piety” (ROP) contained none of the first edition’s famous arguments for communism; P&C’s communism debuted in the February 1934 Plowshare publication of “On Interpretation,” which contained extended advocacy for communism—advocacy Burke

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then further extended but qualified for the May 1934 Andover draft and shortened for the 1935 first edition. Through examining these shifting appearances of communism, I argue, first, for a broader understanding of communism’s role in Burke’s argument—specifically that it serves theoretical and rhetorical purposes as a psychological equivalent of religion in addition to the obvious political ones. Second, I contend that, given Burke’s unwavering commitment to a morejust distribution of wealth, P&C’s shifting advocacy for communism most often reflects his uncertainty about the practical means of establishing a civic art of living—to wit, where did his plan for cultural reorientation fit in the 1930s political landscape? “Range of Piety” I began my study of P&C drafts believing that the first edition’s advocacy of communism is central to understanding the “full nature of [this] act” within its original scene (PLF 73). So I was disconcerted, to say the least, to find no mention of communism in the October 1933 draft of part 1 (ROP), which in the published first edition contains one of the most sustained arguments for communism.2 For instance in the first edition, Burke introduced his proposed poetic orientation with the unequivocal subheading “Communism a Humanistic, or Poetic, Rationalization.” By comparison ROP labeled the poetic rationalization merely as “anthropomorphic” (66). Additionally, as I observed in chapter 3, “Homo Poeta,” as Burke calls him, is the star of ROP: Burke announces almost immediately that “we are all poets” and that “all life may be likened to the writing of a poem” (2). ROP ends with an extended discussion of the poetic orientation in which Burke argues that humans’ truest vocation is best summed up not as Homo economicus nor Homo faber nor Homo politicus, but as human as poet or creator and, hence, that cultural life and political institutions should be judged by how well they enable people to fulfill this purpose. And although he joked in one set of notes that Americans are unlikely to form a “Poetry Ticket” with a slate of Poetry Party candidates campaigning against Democrats and Republicans, it is telling that the thought would even cross his mind, for it suggests that Burke had not yet accepted communism—or any other established organization —as his project’s political home or its instrumental necessity. Rather than yoking the poetic orientation to communism, ROP most clearly connected poetry with religion. Unlike the P&C we read today or even the 1935 first edition, ROP wove religious language through the argument to a stunning extent. For instance its title and opening section resound with religious language: “Range of Piety” has obvious religious overtones that “On Interpretation” lacks, and rather than open with the concept of orientation or the famous remark that all living things are critics, as all published versions of part 1 do, ROP began with another famous passage—“By ‘piety’ let us mean: the sense of what properly goes

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with what” (1)—and presented much of the discussion of piety that readers now find in the opening section of part 2. Indeed throughout Burke’s early outlines and drafting, ROP was titled “Religious and Poetic Piety,” linking not only religion and poetry but also emphasizing how a “rationale of art will naturally bear striking analogies to distinctive traits of the religious orientation” (ROP 67) and quoting I. A. Richards (quoting Matthew Arnold) observing that “the strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry” (69). Finally, in the extended argument for the poetic orientation that ends ROP, Burke argues for “readapt[ing] the vocabulary of the great religious psychologists” of the earliest monastic orders (72), for mining the lore of “either . . . the great Churches themselves or . . . the . . . unavowed Churches of the Arts” (72). So when and why did communism get added into the mix? Plowshare “On Interpretation” By 4 January 1934, when Burke submitted part 1, retitled “On Interpretation,” for publication in Plowshare, he included explicit, extended arguments for communism, although his language nevertheless revealed a certain wariness toward connecting his civic project with communism—and, by extension for many 1930s readers, with the Communist Party. On the one hand, the Plowshare “On Interpretation” removed the explicit—although certainly not the implicit—argument for Homo poeta and replaced the extended discussion of religion and poetry with an extended discussion of communism. In Plowshare Burke appeared decisive or, as Daniel Aaron says, “committed” (290) to harnessing his civic agenda to a communist program: the author’s note asserted that the economy “requires for its completion the championing of Communistic ideals, as the only ideals which can adapt the modern productive plant to humanistic ends” (n. pag.). On the other hand, note that what he was committed to are communist ideals—the “highly humanistic or poetic nature of its fundamental criteria” (76)—rather than a communist economic system or political party per se. And although the Plowshare “On Interpretation” offered a somewhat longer argument for communism than the 1935 first edition, it was compartmentalized as purely instrumental: Burke argued for an “art of living” (76), then began a new paragraph to launch his plea for communism, in terms that may suggest he accepted communism as something of a last resort: “So far as I can see, the only coherent and organized movement making for the subjection of the technological genius to humane ends is that of Communism” (76). However, one of the final Plowshare paragraphs, deleted before the first edition, repeated Burke’s reasons for the turn to communism, exhibiting unusual confidence in the communist solution: “we can count upon a marked stabilizing of expectancy, with a corresponding stabilization of the communicative medium. At such a time, the poetic medium . . . may be expected to gain the ascendancy which it has largely lost” (78; emphasis

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added).3 Plowshare’s 1934 “On Interpretation” thus committed Burke to communist ideals of cooperative enterprise while simultaneously displaying varying degrees of comfort with or enthusiasm for communism as a political means to establish his poetic reorientation. But as I tried to explain why—in the course of two or three months—Burke decided to explicitly advocate for communism in the Plowshare, archival recalcitrance reasserted itself. For instance he wrote Horace Gregory shortly before the first edition publication that “the book was not designed as an argument for Communism at all. It was written simply because, as a critic, I wished to train down the nature of my judgments. . . . So I made the machine, and when I started it going, out came ‘Communism’” (28 Jan. 1935). Burke’s explanation to James Sibley Watson was equally unrevealing and even more flip: “My book is not designed as a barrister’s plea for communism. It is a treatise on communication. I simply carried my interest in the poet-audience relationship into an analysis of society itself, and communistic conclusions popped up of themselves” (19 Nov. 1934). Arguments for communism just popped up? Granted, because writing is a heuristic process, ideas often do seem just to pop up. I certainly cannot adequately account for the sources of my thinking. Still I am reluctant to let Burke off the hook, perhaps because I am unaccustomed to his so glibly eliding his own authorial agency. What could have been going on? I wondered if Burke further emphasized communism to accommodate Plowshare’s audience. But while New York City leftists certainly read “On Interpretation”—Burke received a number of congratulatory letters and a glowing New Republic review—Plowshare was not a radical publication by any means. It was produced by Maverick Press, an outgrowth of a socialist, bohemian art colony called the Maverick—think Greenwich Village in rural New York (Woodstock, in fact). The inaugural issue of the Plowshare (1916) declared: “We are not revolutionaries; we are but harmlessly tinged with radicalism” (“Editorial and Comment”; qtd. in A. Smith 104). Then I wondered if the change was prompted by the writing or the warm reception of his December 1933 Nation essay, “The Nature of Art under Capitalism.” All I can offer is a highly suggestive letter Burke wrote, but likely did not send (another archival mystery), to literary critic Austin Warren in early October 1933, in which he explicitly yoked communism, piety, and poetry—that is, he found a way to integrate communism with his thinking on poetry and religion and hence felt comfortable committing at some level to communism’s political role in his civic project. Exhausted from a summer of drafting P&C, Burke wrote Warren that “just as I was about through with it the damned thing began opening up a whole set of new possibilities to me—so I have started buzzing all over again.” He found himself “astound[ed]” to realize “that the psychology of the religious mystics is the only adequate account of the working of the human

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mind. . . . I believe that a merger of Religious and Communistic purposes is the only solution open to a man of conscience. . . . Only an ethical psychology . . . can provide an adequate unifying attitude for solving our great social problems. And this can only be reaffirmed with authority by a return, through poetry, to the psychology of the Church.” Burke had worried to Warren that communism might be dangerous because it relies solely on “rational assumptions” about human behavior (7 Oct. 1933). Thus, as he explained to Malcolm Cowley, “Only if [Communism] can be placed in some sentimental, non-rational framework does it seem to me adequately pointed” (30 Mar. 1934). Burke’s letter to Warren shows his realization that religion provided this “non-rational framework,” an emotional, “ethical psychology.” Aaron says that “[Burke’s] Communism, if you could call it such, was not deeply or religiously felt” (307). But this letter suggests that it was precisely religiously felt. Or felt as a religion. But religion, as I showed earlier, was bound up with poetry in the previous draft. Burke’s revisions suggested that as he wrote communism into the book, he wrote religion out—or, rather, translated it into piety and poetry. Andover Draft and First Edition What happened to the ins and outs of communism by the time Burke arrived at the Andover draft of May 1934—a “final” P&C that was not final at all? As he made the last push to ready his manuscript for submission, Burke’s messages became increasingly mixed as he struggled to position his civic agenda politically: the seeming increase in his explicit advocacy of communism as a necessary element of cultural reorientation was matched by a parallel increase in his misgivings about the movement.4 Four things distinguish the Andover draft from earlier ones (and from the first-edition text) even as it continues to demonstrate Burke’s difficulties positioning his civic art of living in contemporary political discourse. First, communism seems more thoroughly integrated into this version. Indeed, in the preface Burke listed the four orientations as “magic, religion, science, and communism” (2)—without the added tag of “poetic” or “humanistic” to qualify his communist stance. Second, although Burke explicitly identified communism as the political means to forward his agenda—the preface claimed that “in the field of practical exhortation, our position is Communistic” (2)—communism was sometimes presented as a last resort rather than a chosen path: “the choice,” he acknowledged, “seems to be a choice between Communism and collapse” (“Perspective by Incongruity [Andover draft]” 115). Third, in a long footnote (about 425 words), Burke argued that communism was not radical enough for him rather than the other way around (as many of Burke’s contemporaries thought). Although he surely knew this would be read as a stinging slander, he called communism a “‘reform’ movement,” not a revolutionary one, because it maintained the capitalist

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emphasis on work and commodities as central to human happiness (“Basis of Simplification [Andover draft]” 6). As he wrote his close friend Matthew Josephson, “Though I agree that no decent human society is possible, over a long period, without the socialization of wealth as its cornerstone, were world communism established tomorrow, it would be but the first step towards solving the essential problems of ‘vocation’ and ‘burden’ that plague us” (11 Sept. 1935). However Burke also argued in this footnote, significantly omitted from the first edition—yet another in-and-out move—that a communist culture can move beyond its commodification, can overcome its own trained incapacity. Communism, he claimed, has enough “pliancy” to lower production radically without creating an economic crisis when, at some point in the future, “people lose interest in commodities,” which he seemed certain they will do (“Basis of Simplification [Andover draft]” 6). Fourth, unlike the first-edition text, the Andover conclusion foregrounded communism but did so with a sober awareness of the violence that might accompany its establishment in the United States—surely another reason for Burke’s reluctance to yoke his civic agenda to communism: people in power, he argued, will not “peacefully relinquish [their] control”; that control, the Andover draft’s very last sentence ominously warned, will have to be “taken from them” (“Basis of Simplification [Andover draft]” 104). In contrast the first-edition conclusion softened this tone by adding another three pages in which Burke envisioned not a revolutionary army storming the White House or Wall Street but an activist rhetor whose “natural mode of action will be that of education, propaganda, or suasion” and who used violence only in self-defense as he undertook “his peaceful work as the propounder of new meanings” (350). Although the first edition ended “at the edge of an abyss,” the people there are “huddling together” and “loquacious”—still communicating (351). Pa rt 2 : T h e Bat t l e o f P u g e t S o u n d Although I have been able to offer only an incomplete, if suggestive, account of when, where, and why Burke inserted explicit arguments for communism into P&C’s argument, when I began writing this archival history, I felt certain that I would be able to construct a fuller account of his decision to remove those carefully inserted arguments when he revised the book in the spring and summer of 1953. My initial archival study of his correspondence had been limited to the 1930s, so in 2014 I returned yet again to Penn State to search for 1950s letters to Cowley or Watson or anyone else that would explain Burke’s motives. After all, changing the politics of an important book seemed pretty serious business— something that he would at least have discussed with his closest correspondents or an editor. Indeed Edward Schiappa and Mary F. Keehner describe Burke’s revisions as a “rhetorical transformation,” in which P&C shifted from being a

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“revolutionary” text advocating “specific agendas of political action” to one that is “a more purely contemplative (theoretical) text,” aligning it with “a late-twentieth century Ivory Tower Marxism” (196). And while it is a central claim of this volume that P&C is never merely contemplative—that for Burke there was no sharp line between theory and action and that his civic agenda remained clear—Schiappa and Keehner are right that Burke’s revisions significantly altered the tone and erased much of his initial exigency to an extent that Burke might be expected to comment upon his uncoupling of P&C’s project from an explicit politics. Or so I thought. Four days and twelve lithium batteries later, however, I caught a flight out of Happy Valley with some notes and several thousand digital images of documents, none of which contained the clues I sought. The archival recalcitrance I encountered on this trip—some resistant, some heuristic—suggested a possible need for a revised story about the second edition even as the archives “withheld” the documentation to guide those revisions. In the prologue added for the second edition of P&C, Burke himself explained that, although he still believed that effective communication is best fostered by conditions of “material cooperation”—that is, communism—“under present conditions, the [arguments] could not possibly be read in the tentative spirit in which they were originally written.” “Omissions,” he continued, “help avoid troublesome issues not necessary to the book as such. There is even a sense in which the omissions could be called a kind of ‘restoration,’ since they bring the text back closer to its original nature” (xlix). Burke’s sense of McCarthy-era readers was spot on: most undoubtedly would have found P&C’s advocacy of communism “troublesome” in a way it had not been for his Depression-era readers. But as I have noted, Burkean lore suggests that Burke had another, more powerful motive—that he was, if not scarred, at least chastened, by the snub, in late summer 1952, from University of Washington president Henry Schmitz, who blocked his appointment as the English department’s Walker-Ames Visiting Professor due to his earlier leftist activities. It is a good theory and very likely true, at least in part. It was a difficult, scary time for state universities and for left-leaning, even liberal academics (and, of course, for many others), and a number of Burke’s close friends, including Cowley and William Carlos Williams, lost or nearly lost their jobs. Their experiences might make anyone think twice before advocating communism in print. Here is the catch: the only mention I found of Burke’s revision plans appeared in a mid-January 1953 letter to Cowley—written one week before Burke hoped to begin revising P&C and nearly five months after he learned that his Washington appointment had been blocked—a brief, rather cryptic pronouncement that he planned “to make only a few stylistic changes, and to leave the ideationally problematical statements,” which might have included arguments for communism, untouched except for “a semanticist twist by footnotes” (P. Jay,

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Selected Correspondence 314). That summer, when Burke had finished revising, he wrote to one friend that he was “reprinting P&C this fall (with some revisions!)” (letter to Francis Ferguson, 23 July 1953) and to a second that he had “patched up P&C somewhat, for redoing by Hermes” (letter to Tom Cochran, 15 Aug. 1953). When the new edition appeared in 1954, there had indeed been “some revisions”: P&C had been “purged” of its communism. There is nothing unusual, of course, about writers changing their minds as they work. But Burke so thoroughly documented some of his decisions and textual arguments that archival researchers want—or, rather, come to expect—explanations. Instead I faced more archival recalcitrance. What follows, then, is a second inconclusive episode of the ins and outs of communism in P&C: the story of Burke’s blocked appointment at the University of Washington—“the battle of Puget Sound,” which unfolded fairly straightforwardly, if incompletely, in Burke’s correspondence with Cowley and with Robert Heilman, chair of the University of Washington’s English department, who sought to attract America’s best writers and critics, including luminaries such as Northrop Frye, I. A. Richards, Theodore Roethke, Robert Penn Warren, and William Carlos Williams (8 Oct. 1952; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 313). The story of Burke’s lost position really began in late 1948, when Heilman invited Cowley to be a Walker-Ames Visiting Professor (the same position Burke was refused), igniting Cowley’s own battle of Puget Sound. His appointment was approved by the university’s Board of Regents in May 1949 despite, as he told Burke, his voluntary preemptive disclosure of his 1930s leftist activities, which were decidedly more radical than Burke’s (5 Jan. 1950; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 287). However, as Edward Alexander reports, one disapproving board member, working with area newspapers and veterans’ groups, whipped up enough public outrage between May and December over Cowley’s left-wing politics that a public hearing was scheduled and the appointment seemed in jeopardy (22).5 But, as Cowley explained to Burke, his opponents changed tactics when they failed to find anything politically subversive in his early poetry; they claimed instead that his work contained “dirty passages,” pointing to a line describing the East River filled with “used condoms, turds and grapefruit rind” (5 Jan. 1950; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 287). This line proved so ridiculously inoffensive that Heilman easily allayed public fears (E. Alexander 22). In fact the scandal, which had blown over by the time Cowley arrived in Seattle in January 1950, backfired rather badly on anti-Cowley protestors: his books were in high demand, and as he wrote Burke, he had become a “cause celebre” at Washington, popular on and off campus, with 150 students enrolled in a course meant for 50 (5 Jan. 1950; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 286–87). Later, in October 1950, Cowley received a well-paying offer to be a visiting professor at the University of Minnesota; again he sent the English department

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a full disclosure of his leftist activities, and again they seemed happy to accept him. Minnesota’s president, however, blocked the appointment. Responding to a sympathetic and embarrassed Minnesota faculty member, Cowley wrote (and repeated in a letter to Burke) that it was not so much the case that “liberties are . . . being eroded” as that “they are being atrophied by failure to exercise them” (1 Nov. 1950; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 299). Commiserating with his friend, Burke wondered if Cowley should have been less forthcoming about his past: “Helndamnaysh. . . . [In] hindsight, maybe you shouldn’t bring up all the untoward possibilities when such matters are under consideraysh” (3 Nov. 1950; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 300). Burke’s part of the story began in early 1952, when Heilman invited him to Washington as the Walker-Ames Visiting Professor for one quarter during the 1952–53 academic year; the stipend was three thousand dollars (28 Feb. 1952).6 Burke’s response was immediate: he proposed to teach during the winter quarter (January–March 1953) and to offer at least three public lectures; he requested an extra five hundred dollars to bring his wife and their two sons along (3 Mar. 1952). Despite the national mood, Burke may have felt himself fairly safe since Cowley’s more radical past had not been a deal breaker at Washington. Cowley, however, clearly shaken by his treatment at Washington and Minnesota, warned Burke, then writing introductory notes for his Book of Moments: Poems, 1915– 1954, to consider carefully what he put in print from, and about, his early years: “There, on account of the academic situation, I would be most discreet. . . . Don’t give the bastards anything. They are maneuvering for control of American education. They are bastards. Don’t give them anything” (20 Feb. 1952). By mid-April Heilman telegraphed Burke with the good news that the university’s Walker-Ames committee had approved his appointment at his requested salary (17 Apr. 1952), and Burke accepted that very day. His application then entered what Heilman called the “red-tape” phase: he was required to submit some paperwork, including a sworn statement that he had never belonged to the Communist Party (about which Heilman expressed some “embarrass[ment]”) (22 Apr. 1952; Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 249); the appointment also still required the approval of the dean, the university president, and, finally, the Board of Regents—all of which, Heilman remarked, was usually pro forma (9 May 1952; Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 251). In the meantime Heilman and Burke arranged for Burke to teach a graduate seminar, open to a few advanced undergraduates, titled Language as Symbolic Action (Heilman to Burke, 9 May 1952; Burke to Heilman, 2 June 1952; Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 251, 253). Three months later Burke reported to Cowley that his appointment had been approved by faculty committees but had stalled when it got to the upper administration. The sticking point, it seemed, was Washington’s new president, Henry Schmitz. Despite his earlier advice to Cowley not to volunteer too much

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information, Burke had listed off every leftist activity he could remember for Schmitz. Burke became increasingly frustrated and nonplussed about the delay, especially since, as he wrote Cowley, he had recently worked for three major public universities, teaching a summer course at the University of Chicago and lecturing at Ohio State and Indiana. So Burke “wonder[ed] how in the hell anybody could make out a case proving that a turndown at the U. of Wash. would be in the interests of Academic Freedom (which is, perforce, the slogan of the unhappy and hard-pressed Administraysh)” (8 Aug. 1952; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 306). Nevertheless on August 19 Schmitz officially notified Heilman that he had withdrawn the recommendation to hire Burke before the Board of Regents even met to consider it (Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 257). Burke fumed to Cowley when he got the news: he simply did not understand how they could make a case against him without the help of “professional perjurers who will swear by the rood that they saw me in bed with Uncle Joe [Stalin].” Burke was truly disappointed to lose the opportunity to teach: the classroom had become a crucial element in the working out and testing of his ideas, and he found “the sight of the new Hopefuls . . . one more visible reason to hang on[,]. . . to take heart” (6 Sept. 1952; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 308). Determined to fight back, he wrote Cowley with a rarely expressed depth of patriotic fervor: it was, he felt, a “dingy issue,” but he was determined to carry on as though it were a monumental, divinely appointed endeavor: “I love my country with a fury that farts cannot deny me. And I thank God there is amply much of democracy left” to provide him an opportunity to protest. Burke also felt reassured that Heilman had sent “some pretty good letters” to the upper administration (6 Sept. 1952; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 308–9).7 By early October Burke informed Cowley that, despite Heilman’s appearance on his behalf before the board, his application to teach at the University of Washington had been officially rejected. As it happened, it was not just Burke but the entire English department that was under the board’s scrutiny: “The matter of either my political purity or my pedagogic competence did not come up. The squeezing was apparently done, for the most part, via the fact that there are three ex-CPUSAans in the department,” and adding one more leftie to the bunch, the reasoning went, would unbalance the department politically (3 Oct. 1952; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 312). Unfortunately the account of the hearing Heilman sent to Burke (24 Nov. 1952) is apparently lost—another moment of archival recalcitrance; Burke’s reply, which does survive, thanks Heilman for providing “further data on Burke’s Disease” (2 Dec. 1952; Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 267). Interestingly Burke’s letter suggested that one item discussed at the board hearing was Sidney Hook’s scathing review of Burke’s 1937 Attitudes toward History, a review that, as Selzer and I observe, not only questioned Burke’s intellectual rigor and methodology but—more important for the Board of Regents—accused

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him of being an unrepentant Stalinist (170–80). “These old haggles are fun to look back on, and to discuss as part of the human comedy,” Burke wrote Heilman. “But they’re damned dismal, if rehashed in the atmosphere of spy scares and treason trials. And fantastically unreal” (2 Dec. 1952; Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 268). Schmitz’s scuttling of Burke’s appointment did not go public until midNovember (nearly three months after the fact), when he released a brief statement, reported in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and, secondhand, in the WallaWalla Union-Bulletin. The Union-Bulletin noted that Schmitz refused to state his reasons for blocking Burke’s appointment, but Burke was more forthcoming in a phone interview with the Post-Intelligencer, from which the Union-Bulletin quoted. According to Burke, Schmitz said he would take his word that he had no connections to the Communist Party, but Schmitz remained concerned about “possible repercussions” from his leftist past. (Burke had disclosed to the university’s vice president, H. P. Everest, that he had been a member of the League of American Writers and an editor of the journal Direction, both of which had, in Burke’s words, “leftist leanings.”) The article cited an unnamed university official who stated that Schmitz worried Burke’s appointment might lead the state legislature to reduce school funding. Burke’s comments were restrained: he called Schmitz’s decision “unjustified on purely educational grounds, but understandable administratively” (“Appointment Blocked by Dr. Schmitz”).8 As for Cowley, his letters from fall 1952 documented the increasing national anticommunist hysteria, particularly the chilling effect it was having not just on their friends’ careers but on universities, academic freedom, and, perhaps most important, on Americans’ willingness to push back against the madness. Thus, he wrote to Heilman, venting his outrage at the administration’s handling of his friend’s case, that the Board of Regents did not realize or care that Burke was “irreplaceable; he has something to give . . . students that no one else in this country or the world could give them” (24 Nov. 1952; Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 266). To Burke, Cowley both offered empathy, sighing that Washington’s treatment of him was “bad for you, bad for me, bad for the University of WashedWhite-as-lamb’s wool,” and expressed alarm that the fearmongering had escalated so sharply in the three short years since Washington had hired him (4 Sept. 1952; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 307). He encouraged Burke to look past his own trouble and read the signs around him: “So you lost the battle of Puget Sound without even a chance to engage the enemy,” he shrugged. They both still had satisfying work and sufficient income—unlike their mutual friend Harry Slochower, who had been fired by Boston College after invoking the Fifth Amendment when asked if he were a communist at a US Senate Security hearing. Cowley also mentioned the University of Tennessee’s recent canceling of Charlie Chaplin films at the insistence of the local American Legion. “Bad times here.

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Worse times coming,” Cowley warned (8 Oct. 1952; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 313). Even more ominously, Cowley, who two years earlier had scolded liberals at Minnesota for not standing up to the red baiting, wrote that there were ideas and sentiments he could no longer express publically and that “the silence infects me and keeps me from speaking easily about anything.” Others, he suspected, may have felt the same way (4 Sept. 1952; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 307). Was Burke, as scholarly lore insists, one of those infected with silence as he revised P&C? The University of Washington episode and the worsening political climate may well have been contributing factors in Burke’s decision to remove P&C’s arguments for communism, but is that all that was going on? If we were talking about a book Cowley was revising, the answer seems clear: his letters show that he wanted to avoid any more entanglements. It is not clear to me that the same is true for Burke, who in his correspondence seems somewhat less demoralized than his friend and, perhaps, more stubborn. But recalcitrant archives offer evidence of his shifting mood. In a midsummer letter to Watson (9 July 1952), Burke, peacefully lecturing in Bloomington, seemed hopeful that the red baiting ultimately would not work. By summer’s end he gloomily worried that the Washington controversy might doom his teaching career and chances for publication in academic journals (letter to Watson, 31 Aug. 1952). That dismal prospect may well have encouraged him to proceed cautiously in the rest of his work. But if that is true, why did he write Cowley the following January—just as he was preparing to start revisions—that he did not plan to change much? The following spring of 1953, Cowley, understandably a bit gun-shy by that point, wrote Burke that he had refused recent job offers from Cornell and University of Michigan despite the latter’s relatively good salary: “I’d be cracked in the head,” he told Burke, “if I accepted the offer, which would simply lead to a scandal in the Detroit papers and another fiasco like the one at Minnesota. . . . This year one should stay away from state universities except for single lectures” (29 Apr. 1953).9And Burke did. The winter that he had intended to spend working with graduate students in Seattle he spent instead with his family in Los Altos, California, as the guests of Mildred and Ted Ligda, owners of Hermes Publications, which during the 1950s published Burke’s Book of Moments as well as second editions of his stellar early work: Counter-Statement, Permanence and Change, and Attitudes toward History. Pa rt 3 : M i l d r e d L i g da a n d H e r m e s P u b l i c at i o n s Appropriately enough for a historiography by incongruity, the final episode about the ins and outs of communism in P&C is not about communism at all,

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exemplifying Hawhee’s claim that the archives remake our scholarship: “that which is not used forms the very contours of that which is” (“Historiography” 198). Searching for documents from the early 1950s to explain Burke’s secondedition omissions of communism, I found, instead, correspondence concerning things I had never thought to wonder about: the identity of Hermes Publications and how four Burke titles came to be produced there. Here I encountered archival recalcitrance that helped reveal and began to overcome what I have come to see as a serious trained incapacity. As I argued in the previous chapter, scholars too often approach theoretical texts as bodies of theory rather than as material objects produced by particular agents under particular circumstances. This third episode in my recalcitrance-driven story illuminates the agents and acts involved in producing the second edition of P&C. In this incongruous history that formed at the edges of the story I thought to tell about P&C’s communism, I explore Mildred Ligda’s personal and business relationship with Burke and his family10 and the work of Hermes Publications, a homegrown business that the Ligdas’ son, Alan, once described as “probably the smallest publishing company in the State, if not the Nation” and which appears to have been developed specifically to circulate Burke’s work (qtd. in P. Ligda).11 It is impossible to understate the importance of Burke’s collaboration with Ligda: most obviously she provided the means for recirculating his work when six of his eight books (all but Grammar of Motives and Rhetoric of Motives) were out of print.This is not to say that the Ligdas were singlehandedly responsible for jumpstarting his career or to assert that without Hermes there would not have been a second—or third—edition of P&C (though that is a possibility). Burke lectured extensively at universities nationwide, published in reputable journals, and even received several other offers to reprint his books.12 However there is no doubt that Ligda’s faith in and understanding of Burke’s work; her determination to see it widely distributed; and her personal devotion to him contributed substantially to his broadening 1950s readership. Furthermore Ligda’s possessiveness and the size and character of Hermes Publications—its ability (or lack thereof) to mass-produce and widely market the second edition—ensured that, without her, the P&C we read today would be a different book and Burke himself might be differently received.13 And yet Burke scholars are either unaware of the part Ligda played in P&C’s publication history or have chosen to ignore her. This archival intervention also illustrates the workings of archival recalcitrance due to the particular nature of its gaps, which, as a writer of a historiography by incongruity, I openly explore as part of my meaning-making process. First, like so much early correspondence in the Kenneth Burke Papers, the LigdaBurke letters are often one-sided; the collection contains many more of Ligda’s letters than Burke’s, especially in the early stages of their acquaintance. Constructing “whole” conversations from one person’s letters is a common enough

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practice, but Ligda’s first letters are among the most overt examples I have ever read of what Rueckert calls “Burke-sickness” (Drama 4) and Hawhee (among others) calls “Burkophilia” (“Purging”)—devoted fandom bordering on worship —and her mystical attachment to Burke created a second gap for me: I cannot imagine his response to the breathtakingly explicit religious terms by which she addressed him. Burke and Ligda’s correspondence has become the ultimate example of the archive’s tendency to, as Hawhee puts it, “blurt and withhold” (“Historiography” 197). Ligda’s unexpected existence and the equally unexpected intimacy of her letters felt like nothing so much as a “blurt” that left me squirming in the quiet archival reading room, and Burke’s unimaginable response became an almost painful absence. This archival intervention, then, formed around two layers of archival recalcitrance: the archives first presented a new avenue of research and then turned it into a blind alley. Ligda and Burke apparently met in Gambier, Ohio, in late July 1950, when Burke was teaching a summer course at Kenyon College (Burke to Cowley, 2  June 1950; 16 July 1950). According to her grandson, Kenneth Scott Ligda, Ligda had read Burke and so admired his work that she drove from California with her eight-year-old son, Alan, for the specific purpose of persuading him to let her publish his books. Ligda’s early letters to Burke, written on behalf of herself and her husband, Ted, suggest nothing so much as someone offering her spiritual testimony—and a life of devoted service—after a profound conversion experience. Writing near the end, or shortly after, Kenyon’s summer term, she explained: “We have no choice but to follow you because you are the only one who speaks the truth; who knows how and when. And if one has started on that path, even at first as a semi-whimsical self-indulgence, it can become first a taste, then a sort of avocation, and in the end an impregnable necessity” (5 Aug. 1950). Ligda beseeched Burke to test their worthiness, then accept them as disciples in his mission to help Americans build strong communities that strive to treat each other, and the planet, well. I quote here at length to reveal the power and tone of Ligda’s writing: We hope to be fitted into your pattern, at least for a trial period; not to change or distort or impede, but perhaps later when we have learned, to contrubute [sic] some kind of amplification or growth according to your own will. If your provisional acceptance of us has already, by some miracle of intuitive permissiveness on your part, reached the stage at which you can indicate tasks or even kinds of tasks that relate to your purposes, we could thus show obliquely what our resources, limitations and conditions may be, and so avoid the irrelevant intrusion of them. We hope you will consider seriously the generality that, by making use of our time, motility, energy and loyalty, you might be able to accomplish

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some slightly amplified part of your own purpose, ro [sic] do so a little earlier, or make some obstacle more pliant, or some instability more rigid; could determine for yourself when you could safely use our eyes, mind, presence in another place, or simultaneous time, to the end of whatever conjury you’re working on. . . . Would not this tentative stage be the period during which an indispensable testing is done?—hastened the more as you become convinced that our motives are sufficiently ingrained and seasoned to guarantee that we were at all moments not “giving” but very profoundly receiving benefits—in spite of any apparent direction of overt giving. As a sign of her intent to promote Burke’s message via some official entity, Ligda’s stationery bears the letterhead “Human Relations, Inc., Gambier, Ohio”—“On Human Relations” being Burke’s overarching tagline for his Motives trilogy (Ligda to Burke, 5 Aug. 1950). Ligda sent Burke three long letters and a postcard over five days as she and her son headed home to California via Boston, where she attended some sort of military conference with her brother-in-law (Ligda to Burke, 23 Aug. 1950) and where (coincidentally?) Burke was giving a talk. The tone of these letters shifted between an awed reverence for “one whose mastery is unquestioned and increasingly triumphant” (14 Aug. 1950) and the intimate newsiness of longtime friends, both of which unsettle my midwestern reserve. Later letters show that Burke tried to distance himself from Ligda, but she nevertheless presented herself in Boston “since you did not explicitly forbid it.” She first wrote to arrange a meeting of the “operating committee” and to show Burke her ideas for “possible functioning forms for H.R. [Human Relations] Letter,” which initially suggested something akin to Pauline epistles (14 Aug. 1950). The second letter was an awed recounting of an evening event she attended, possibly Burke’s Harvard talk, the language of which was so metaphorical and overblown—full of heroic battles and triumph and Virgil—that it is difficult to tell what she was describing (17 Aug. 1950). Ligda wrote again the next morning from a “Corner Drug Store in Pittsburgh,” where, she noted beneath the date, “Goodnight Irene” played on the jukebox; this third letter recounted for Burke a conversation with a New Jersey gas station attendant, who had given her a map and sound advice not to speed and to pull over if she felt sleepy. Which, she told Burke, is what she did (18 Aug. 1950). At home in California at last, Ligda wrote—on newly designed Human Relations, Inc., letterhead, listing branch offices in Andover, New Jersey (where Burke lived); Bennington, Vermont (where he taught); and Palo Alto, California, and to which she had stapled a pine sprig from a Colorado mountain pass—that Ted Ligda had officially signed on to Burke’s program (arriving there via Dianetics since he had not yet read Burke). She and Ted, she reported, had toasted “in the

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spirit of decision to embark upon an expedition that may well take the rest of our lives” with the same glasses she used when toasting (Burke?) at a July 30 event at the Kenyon Alumni House (she kept the glasses for their sentimental value). She also shared her latest thoughts about what Human Relations, Inc., might be or do as a legal and/or pedagogical entity—perhaps some kind of laboratory for research in criticism? Ligda described herself to Burke “as one who has drawn more subsistence from [his work] than from all other works together . . . . even though not so much as scholar . . . as the ‘discoverer,’ hoarder and possessor,—in pride both secret and proclaimed—of a very special ‘affect’ with all the other things that such a possession can be: springboard, consolation, monitor, revelation, chart of a private island of order and delight. Be sure that there is no danger of premature or unsanctioned outward forming of any of this.” Yet despite the thrilled, even obsessive language of ownership that ran through this passage, Ligda hurried on to assure Burke that “I hope that you will feel that . . . there is something real here”—that is, Human Relations, Inc.—“that completely belongs to you; and that it will be sound, durable and good, even though faulty in the sprawling ways of the unformed; that it will be in a way subject to evocation, and although cumbersome, still responsive to orders.” She also noted that she would change the Human Relations letterhead if he wanted her to (23 Aug. 1950), and he apparently did, for her next letter was headed simply “Mildred Ligda” (12 Oct. 1950). For the next year and a half, Ligda and Burke’s correspondence seems to have followed a pattern: she offered him something—time, money, labor, organizational skills, ideas—he refused, and she responded with some form of “I know you told me not to, but . . .” So when he asked her to stop all plans for Human Relations, Inc. (she had apparently approached a Boston businessman with ideas for the H. R. Letter), she agreed: “in compliance with instructions I’ve dismissed all beginnings and speculations on ways of meddling, however indirectly, with public opinion. . . . I give you back H.R. Inc. unharmed. . . . This was too ambitious an assignment for me to ask of you as a beginning, in any case, was it not?” Nevertheless she assured Burke she could have it—whatever it was—up and running again if he changed his mind: “As salvage from the assets, if called for in some other time, there is filed among unused possibilities, a basic Rx for a circulation that could begin in a modest way, with potentialities for growing large.” And whatever Burke said in reply apparently left enough of an opening for her to keep hoping that he would reconsider: “But, you are not asking me, besides, to give back your assent to keeping an open file entry on possibilities for other applications that you might make of our time and resources?” (12 Oct. 1950). In the meantime she offered Burke her services as proofreader, entertainment director, vacation planner, and financial investor,14 warning that his insistence that she

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desist is “unnecessarily wasteful, an affront to the ingenuity of all concerned. . . . Might even provoke mild insubordination” (12 Oct. 1950). Two weeks later she wrote that a venerable and well-equipped local printing business was up for sale at a bargain price and that buying it would enable the Ligdas’ existing Palopress publishing company to incorporate most of the printing process under one roof. “This is not to suggest,” she insisted, “that I am unmindful of the injunction to do nothing, or careless of the values of re-examining one’s premises. Just noting such opportunities as happen by. Of course we know that, as the Huckster man said, what is not worth doing at all is not worth doing well. Yet, since the inclination seems incurable, the quest to find what is worth doing . . . persists” (25 Oct. 1950).15 This late October letter also contained an enclosed handwritten note from Ted, formally inviting Burke to spend that winter (January and February 1951) with them—an offer he refused. Later still Ligda sent Burke paper samples and debated the merits of linotype versus monotype for a possible craft edition of his Book of Moments, “to which,” she hastened to add, “you haven’t yet said yes or no, of course, but I’m proceeding hypothetically. . . . May we not, at first, produce, even if no more than two hundred copies, a book that makes no concessions to expediency? That is what I hope these papers will say persuasively to you”—but “you will tell me frankly, will you not, if this is more detail than you care to consider?” Ligda bemoaned the pitifully small circulation of Burke’s recent article “Ideology and Myth” in the journal Accent, wishing his work could find a larger audience—an audience she clearly believed Hermes Publications could provide (28 Aug. 1951). Some people, she told him, find religion; others—and clearly she was one such—“come to the conviction that it is the Kenneth Burke party or nothing” (25 Oct. 1950). Her belief in his message was too powerful for her to resist, and Burke was too . . . what? Polite? Flattered? Impressed with her intelligence? Sympathetic to her artisan printing? Fond of her? Frustrated that all but two of his books were out of print? This last point was a source of continual frustration for him, not so much due to lost profit as to the lack of circulation for his work, especially when there was a considerable secondhand market for some of his early titles. A manager from Gotham Book Mart, for instance, reported such demand for CS and P&C that he had repeatedly lobbied Burke’s current publisher, Prentice Hall, to rerelease those titles, and he encouraged Burke to do the same (Francis Steloff to Burke, 5 Sept. 1951), which he later reported doing, to no effect (Burke to L. H. Christie, 11 Oct. 1953). It is hard to say what finally convinced Burke to agree to reprint his early titles with Hermes. Something persuaded him to continue responding to her letters, but there is a gap here that neither the archives nor my imagination can fully bridge. One possible answer comes by way of Robinson Jeffers scholar

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Tyrus G. Harmsen, whose study of Jeffers’s printers led him to famed San Francisco printer and book designer Adrian Wilson. Wilson, as it turns out, produced a limited craft edition of Jeffers’s Meditation on Saviours in 1951—commissioned by the Ligdas. As Wilson explained: This extraordinarily limited edition was issued by Hermes Publications to convince Kenneth Burke . . . that it should publish his work. The book was to demonstrate the high standards of quality of its editions. When the publishers, Mildred and Theodore Ligda, commissioned me to design and print the five copies, I thought mistakenly that they intended to assume the publication of Jeffers’ entire works, which I would then print. No effort on this project could have been too great. I chose a Tuscany handmade paper, Centaur headings and initials in red, and a binding of gray Roma paper over boards with a terra-cotta cloth spine and a pasted label. The design delighted the Ligdas. I discovered then that Theodore was a professional linotype setter, and that he had already set the whole poem in 14pt. Granjon. . . . The composition was excellent and I incorporated it into the book. This promotional gambit was successful to the point that Hermes did publish some of Kenneth Burke’s books. (Wilson qtd. in Harmsen 13–14) It could be that the Ligdas—and Mildred in particular—waged a kind of war of attrition, offering Burke material evidence of their good will, resources, and publishing ability, chipping away at his resistance or wariness at a time when he was actively seeking a way to rerelease his early books. By March 1952, having already discussed reprint options with the Ligdas, he contacted Harcourt Brace to inquire about the cost of buying the rights to Counter-Statement and Towards a Better Life (24 Mar. 1952), adding in a follow-up letter, “May [the terms] be gentle! For there is no great hope of profits in this project. The main concern is simply to get the titles back into circulation” (14 Apr. 1952). By that October, his Walker-Ames appointment effectively thwarted by University of Washington’s president (and already reading Hermes proofs of CS16), Burke was on a plane to California to “see about possibilities of all the Burkes’ spending some months there soon” as the Ligdas’ guests while Burke worked on P&C revisions (Burke to Cowley, 3 Oct. 1952; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 312). For Burke and his family, the months in Los Altos appear to have been something of a lark. He worked five hours every morning and spent the afternoons napping, walking, and “punish[ing] [the] piano.” The Burkes also enjoyed some sightseeing, touring missions and wineries—“Pappy has been drinking,” he admitted— and traveling to San Francisco and Monterey (Burke to Cowley, 16 Jan. 1953; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 314). For Ligda those months enabled her, finally, to assume the coveted role as Burke’s media missionary, proselytizing on his behalf, spreading the Word of

“From Time to Time.” Hermes Scroll no. 7. Hermes Publications, 1953. Reproduced with the permission of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust and the Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

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Burke by reissuing his out-of-print books, publishing Book of Moments, and finding a form for the “H.R. [Human Relations] Letter”—the nearly forgotten Hermes Scroll series, described on the second-edition book jacket as “an informal bulletin,” available free upon request. The scroll, entitled “From Time to Time” and printed on a 34 by 16 centimeter leaf suggestive of an ancient scroll, was clearly designed to advertise Burke titles and Hermes projects: scroll number 7 not only announced the new edition of Counter-Statement and plans for a reissue of Jeremy Bentham’s “Table of the Springs of Action” (with a long introduction by Burke) but also implicitly looked ahead to the new P&C edition, noting that readers “interested in interpretation, orientation, communication, linguistics, semantics, problems of symbolic analysis—in the pathos of transformation” (key P&C terms) should receive the bulletin to keep abreast of Hermes’s forthcoming publications (“From Time to Time”). But Ligda likely also used the scroll series to showcase Burke’s writing and criticism more generally—perhaps to maintain public interest between major publications and to demonstrate the range of his interests and talents. According to the terms of Burke’s “legally loose but gentlemanly binding agreement” with Hermes (Burke to L. H. Christie, 11 Oct. 1953), he contracted to provide content for the scrolls four times each year (Burke to Ligda, 7 July 1953), and scroll number 7 included Burke’s poem “Compliment, in Passing” and “A Moral Made Manifest”—a brief (and belated) comment upon the 1949 hit documentary Savage Splendor, about Armand Denis and Lewis Cotlow’s twenty-two-thousand-mile African expedition. Indeed that Ligda thanks scroll readers, on the book jacket of the second edition, for their “spontaneously active interest” and “invites new comment always” suggests that she may ultimately have envisioned the Hermes Scroll as a kind of Burkean parlor where members of the “Kenneth Burke party” could congregate and exchange ideas. Ligda thus proved to be, for a time at least, a powerful ally in advancing Burke’s work. A Pa rt i n g G l a n c e at A r c h i va l R e c a l c i t r a n c e This chapter enacts historiography by incongruity, arguing by example that archival researchers should become increasingly conscious of how we construct historical narratives, particularly our tendency to hide the evidence of that construction by tidying up loose ends, inconsistencies, and inconvenient gaps. My experience suggests that this may prove a particularly difficult trained incapacity to undo: left with so many unanswered questions and an account that in many ways felt incomplete, I very nearly omitted this chapter entirely. I nevertheless included this archival intervention—or rather argue that it genuinely

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constitutes an intervention into both Burkean scholarship and archival practice more broadly—for several reasons. First, being redirected by recalcitrance is not the same thing as being defeated by it. Defining archival documents as recalcitrant material means that they act as a critical and creative heuristic, correcting faulty interpretations and coaching more convincing ones in scholars’ ongoing task of collaboratively writing and rewriting P&C’s story. And as I have slowly come to realize, I can more fully account for the ins and outs of communism in P&C in spite (and because) of archival recalcitrance. Hence the presence of documents explaining Burke’s realization that he could psychologically move from poetry to communism via religion helps explain why he added communist advocacy to P&C in late 1933. However, it is the absence of explicit explanations about his shifting comfort level with that advocacy in his correspondence and book notes that led me to take a different tack: I took my own advice to treat P&C as a real-world project rather than a piece of abstract theory. Or put another way, I began to imagine the poetic orientation and art of living as practical, albeit tremendously difficult, civic goals. And I began to feel my way through the shifts in his drafts as he worked his way to the first edition. I am explicitly not claiming to know what was going on in Burke’s mind as he revised his manuscript, but his changing attitudes and varying degrees of optimism made sense when I imagined him thinking, “How can I actually make this happen?” Within the political landscape of the 1930s, to whom could he entrust his save-the-world civic art of living? What group would serve as its rhetorical advocates? That is, I stopped thinking of Burke’s complicated relationship to communism as merely idiosyncratic and began to see it also as an extremely difficult practical decision in a fractured, unstable political scene. Similarly this archival intervention unsettles easy assumptions about the second edition P&C and about Burke as the sole and masterful producer of the text. Glimpses into his relationship with Ligda help to demythologize him, for regardless of how, or how well, we imagine his reactions to her, it is impossible to read their correspondence and not see a very real human being receiving those letters and, eventually, forming a partnership with this complicated individual, whom Burkeans have managed not to notice. Archival recalcitrance and the small size of Hermes Publications hinder efforts to get a clear picture of Ligda, who seems to both epitomize and resist gendered stereotypes of 1950s women. In some ways she provides an extreme example of the pious Burke fandom that still troubles Burke studies. Ligda was also someone—not coincidentally a woman— literally to mind the store as Burke wrote. But we might also understand her as entrepreneurial, her gumption and tenacity a necessary part of establishing herself in a predominantly male publishing world, which she did with some success.

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A letter to Ligda from Pieter Milton Van Vloten, who handled the production end of her business, revealed that Ligda also published under other imprints, including Hermes Enterprises and Round Table Books, and in the mid-1950s had contracted to publish Western Speech (13 Feb. 1956). At the very least, her presence is a vivid reminder that P&C is a material artifact produced by several sets of hands under very particular circumstances, not, as one of my colleagues remarked, a book sitting on a shelf with a halo around it. And those particular circumstances of P&C’s production created a particular kind of book that, in turn, shapes the text we study today. Consider, for instance, how P&C’s history would have changed—as it surely would have—if Burke’s University of Washington appointment had been approved, if he had spent two or three months teaching graduate students in Seattle rather than revising P&C in California at the Ligdas’ hilltop house. Burke and Ligda’s correspondence suggests that she would not have directly influenced the book’s content; it seems unlikely that she convinced Burke to delete communism from the second edition. But the location, size, financial stability, and quality of Hermes Publications; Ligda’s tradecraft and her interest in P&C’s materiality (the paper, font, the kind of typesetting); her obvious devotion to Burke and his work; and the timing of her arrival on the scene—just as his publication efforts had stalled—unmistakably shaped the book and its reception. What would have happened if, for instance, P&C had been a cheap, mass-produced paperback or if Viking Press had bought all Burke’s outof-print titles, as Cowley may have urged them to do? (His letter to that effect may not have been sent.) Such questions, I argue, are not idle speculation even if they are unanswerable, because they highlight our particular ways of seeing— and not seeing—P&C. My other reasons for including this story as an archival intervention despite its incompleteness have to do with the ways we theorize archival research and knowledge production. First, it serves as a reminder that all archival stories are, by definition, incomplete—the past and human behavior being precisely what we cannot fully retrieve or quantify. Hence, as Hawhee’s conceptualization of historiography by incongruity suggests, a historical account with loose ends that suggests intellectual laziness to some might, instead, signify intellectual honesty. What archives and archival recalcitrance demonstrate is this: if we assume the archive can solve any puzzle, we will be disappointed. Archives do not provide easy answers, and sometimes their only answer is that we can never know the answer. Second, scholars’ desire for complete archival accounts assumes that only answers constitute “real” knowledge; however this archival intervention shows how questions, even unanswered or unanswerable ones, can count as valuable, scholarly forms of knowledge: they reveal the boundaries of what we think we know and the habits of mind that have created those boundaries. We learn, too, from paying attention to the questions we never ask and the ways we choose to

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search for answers. Finally, Burke argued that recalcitrance prompts continual, collaborative revision as communities work to hone their understanding of, and responses to, their experience. The same is true of archival recalcitrance: the more we acknowledge it, the more opportunities we have to do something about it. In other words, hiding incomplete stories we have been taught to disdain actually hinders our continued learning.

Six Finding the Time for Burke I can still remember the effect [P&C] had on me in 1936. I often wonder if you realize how much you stimulate all the rest of us, how much you mean to us as a friend and as an example of total dedication. Wallace Fowlie, a Bennington colleague thanking Burke for sending him the second edition of P&C, to Burke, 12 Oct. 1953

If there is one thing rhetorical scholars have agreed upon, it is that Kenneth Burke was ahead of his time. As Gregory Jay observes, “It seems that the uncanny Burke is always one step ahead of his fellow critics” (169). Burke, we have been told over the last thirty years, “anticipate[d] so much of what is considered avant-garde today” (Fish 500); “anticipated . . . what have become the most stylish paradoxes in the post-structuralist armory” (Harris 455); “anticipate[d] the critique of nature and totality developed by the Frankfurt School” (Wolfe 67); “anticipate[d]” the “resolutely skeptical . . . postmodern/poststructural project” (Carmichael 144); “anticipate[d] both Thomas Kuhn and Gramsci” (Tompkins 124); “[is credited with having] anticipated . . . the ‘rhetorical turn’ in the human sciences” (Simons and Melia vii). Burke is a theorist “who knew too much, too soon” (Lentricchia 86), who “pointed out” language’s instability “decades before today’s critical theorists” (Brummett xv), and whose “notion of the symbolic act is an anticipation . . . of current notions of the primacy of language” (Jameson 508). New historicist and cultural materialist critics are his “progeny”; media and cultural studies critics his “legatees” (Holbrook 11, 12). Wayne Booth demurs only slightly when commenting that “I would not want to claim that Burke foreknew everything that Barthes, Derrida, de Man et cie have shocked the academic world with, but I am sure that, if they ever get around to reading him, they will be tempted to moderate their claims to originality” (Critical Understanding 361n10). But what do we mean when we say that Burke was ahead of his time? Certainly it is a way of acknowledging his brilliance and importance for rhetorical studies. We might wonder, though, about scholars’ determination to replay this litany of Burke’s prescience, which surely says as much about us as it does about Burke. It points to a certain way of using and valuing theory, a way of doing—or 190

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not doing—history. The Burke-ahead-of-his-time theme conjures an image of him waiting all these years to be understood—or, more pointedly, to be understood by us. Indeed Rosalind Gabin argues that once European structuralist and Marxist theory of the 1960s “fertilized” American thought, Burke became both more acceptable and accessible, prompting her to claim that “Burke has found, finally, the rhetorical moment for his message” (198). But surely the pressing economic and political exigencies of, say, the 1930s constituted a significant “rhetorical moment” for Burke’s message. Burke, at least, seems to have thought so, judging by his amazing productivity (five books, countless essays and reviews) during this period. Claiming that his rhetorical moment is here and now makes sense only if what we mean by rhetorical moment is a time when scholars agree with him—as if theorists’ success is to be measured by their academic uptake. Such a claim also implies that Burke belongs not in “his” time, but in “our” time—or that he belongs in no time—which is to say that he belongs in every time or that he is outside of time altogether. He has, in our account of things, become unmoored in time—a troubling limbo for a theorist who insisted that all acts occur within specific scenes. Finally the depiction of Burke ahead of his time suggests how invested scholars have become in the image of him as marginalized or misunderstood by his contemporaries, particularly in the 1930s. We see him “stand[ing] on the fringe” (Wolin 221) or locked in heroic struggle, a Depression-era David pitted against the Goliath of positivism, orthodoxy, and narrow estheticism. Burke, we assume, was not read or appreciated by his early contemporaries because of his unique understanding that all experience is ideologically constructed;1 this line of thinking often leads to the conclusion that he left no mark on his contemporary scene; that rhetorically “Burke’s adaptation to his milieu was largely ineffective” (Wolin 39). Of course in the 1930s Burke was dismissed, embattled, misunderstood. Sometimes. But might not the story be more complicated? As Ross Wolin has observed, with a few notable exceptions, Burke scholars have not been especially curious about how his books were understood and evaluated in their immediate rhetorical moment (xii). This chapter seeks to reopen the question of Permanence and Change’s contemporary reception. It capitalizes on three kinds of archival materials to provide a fuller account of Burke’s interactions with his contemporaries: his correspondence with friends, editors, and admirers; a newly acquired folder of unrecorded reviews of P&C; and his planning notes for the book. These archival materials show that, contrary to Burkean lore, Burke’s contemporaries typically did not perceive his work as irrelevant or inscrutable; indeed they often praised it highly. There is no doubt that his 1930s work was contested, but far from signaling ineffectiveness, this controversy reflected instead his considerable cultural power. The Burke who emerges from this study, then, is not the out-of-step, inconsequential figure we have come to expect. This Burke

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mattered—to his time as much as to ours. Critical to my reexamination of contemporary responses to P&C is an assumption that we will not fully understand what the reviews signify without first getting some perspective on his involvement in the 1930s culture wars. Jack Selzer and I have provided one such perspective in Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. Here I focus more narrowly on the role of book reviews in 1930s literary culture. Bu r k e a n d t h e “ Bat t l e o f t h e B o o k s ” Scholars’ image of Burke in the 1930s is typically defined by two moments. The first, a prime source of our perception of him as a loner, is an oft-cited line from one of his letters to Malcolm Cowley. Asked at a party why he did not support communism, he reported that, while he supported communism’s goals, “I am not a joiner of societies” (4 June 1932; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 202). But as Selzer and I have argued, this is a fitting description of Burke only if joining is understood as official, card-carrying membership. The record shows that he was part of many formal and informal political and literary circles (2–3). The second of these defining moments is his supposed ostracism at the First American Writers’ Congress in response to his “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” speech. However, although Burke was certainly hurt by the response, evidence suggests that it was probably less harsh than has been thought (George and Selzer 12–29). In Burkean terms, then, scholars have traditionally embraced two unrepresentative anecdotes, concluding “that despite great praise, Burke was largely misunderstood and misused” (Wolin xiii). Burke himself, of course, often promoted this image. He famously—and vividly—remembered the night of the Writers’ Congress speech, when, half asleep, he heard his name called out like “a dirty word” and imagined “that excrement was dripping from [his] tongue” (“Thirty Years Later” 507). Likewise Burke’s letters repeatedly registered “considerable disgruntlement or dismay” (letter to Robert Penn Warren, 26 Feb. 1938), even “sleepdestroying fury,” over friends and critics whom he felt had misread his books (Burke to William Carlos Williams, 21 Dec.1937; East 71). To his dear friend Watson, he wrote that “reviews make one clasp one’s book the way the wind in the fable made the man clasp his coat. When, alas! shall I be disarmed by nice, warm sunlight!” (24 Apr. 1935). And Ross Wolin is certainly correct in arguing that Burke was often motivated by a determination to clarify his positions. But this image of Burke ahead of—and hence unappreciated during—his time is, as I’ve suggested, based on the stories scholars have chosen to tell (or not) and how those stories are contextualized (or not). So, for example, while it is fair to say that Burke’s Writers’ Congress speech met some resistance, his experience at the congress could be put into different perspective by juxtaposing it with that of Edmund Wilson, Max Eastman, and Sidney Hook, who, because

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they openly criticized Stalin and the Communist Party, were not even invited to attend. Burke, on the other hand, had not only been invited to speak; he had helped plan the event and, even after his provocative speech, was elected to the League of American Writers executive board. Compared to Wilson, Hook, and others, then, he was not marginalized; he was an insider. Similarly when scholars (myself included) discuss Burke’s reception, we often emphasize reviews that provoked rebuttals from him, and understandably so: these exchanges are tremendously interesting and revealing. But in doing so we reinforce our image of the embattled Burke, losing sight of more positive contemporary representations. To give just one example, Granville Hicks’s attacks on Counter-Statement (“In Defense,” “Response”) gets more attention than Isidor Schneider’s glowing review, which proclaimed Counter-Statement “a work of revolutionary importance introducing . . . a new”—and much needed—“vocabulary of rhetoric” with which to talk about how texts affect readers (4). Scholars can also gain perspective on Burke’s 1930s reception by reading reviews as part of what Walter Kalaidjian calls the “super-charged ambiance” of Depression-era culture wars (161). It was, Burke remarked in 1932, “a kind of ‘open season’ for criticism,” when a writer could “shoot arrows . . . into the air with perfect confidence that, wherever he turns, he will find them sticking in the hearts of his friends” (ACR 97). Seen in this light, the martial language of his well-known rhetorical parlor, written during the 1930s, is quite telling; in this parlor people are “engaged in a heated discussion”: “someone . . . comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance” (PLF 110–11; emphasis added). The Left was particularly fractured; leftists, Jay Franklin quipped, “have their isms and their spasms” and “pigheadedly refuse” to collaborate (34, 33). This “Battle of the Books,” as Burke called it, was waged ferociously in literary essays and book reviews (“War, Response, and Contradiction” 235).2 If we read reviews only of Burke’s work, it is easy to conclude that he was being uniquely vilified. But during the 1930s culture wars, there was plenty of criticism to go around. For instance in “New Voices: The Promise of Our Youngest Writers,” C. Hartley Grattan did indeed relegate Burke to membership in “the Fastidious Movement, which is attempting to make a last stand for leisure class dilettantism” (285). But Burke was in good company: Yvor Winters, Kay Boyle, John Crowe Ransom, and Robert Penn Warren rounded out this group. Tate criticized Burke in “Poetry and Politics,” but he criticized I. A. Richards in the same breath. Tate also savaged midwestern poets Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, and Carl Sandburg for their “slovenly verse” and “poverty of thought” (309), then turned on Robert Frost for his “average and toneless sensibility” (309). The Southern Agrarians revered T. S. Eliot, but William Carlos Williams later claimed

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that the publication of The Waste Land “wiped out [his work toward ‘the essence of a new art form’] as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it” (174). So much criticism was directed at Eliot, in fact, that when Tate reviewed Ash Wednesday, he felt obliged to spend half his time chiding critics for dismissing Eliot’s poetry because they disliked his religion (Poetry Reviews 105–6). Archibald MacLeish’s repeated reversals of fortune marked him as “something of a lightning rod for the period’s turbulent intellectual tempests” (Kalaidjian 160), and Muriel Rukeyser’s poetry sparked a feud—dubbed the “Rukeyser Imbroglio”—between Partisan Review editors and F. O. Matthiessen (161–62). Burke himself was “annoyed particularly” by what he saw as critics’ tendency to latch onto one point and ignore the rest. “Irony: one tries to put a lot together —and the reviewers, thinking primarily of their own comfort and convenience, take it all apart, isolate one part, and play it up as a totality. Heck” (Burke to William Carlos Williams, 21 Dec. 1937; East 71). In his correspondence Burke figured his disagreements, especially over Marxist criticism, as being “unseasonal” (Burke to Waldo Frank, 16 July 1934), as using a metaphor that was “in very bad repute. . . a sea-metaphor . . . spoken to a farmer” (Burke to Josephson, 29 Mar. 1933), or even as speaking a different language: “Two lengvich. You spick one lengvich, ah spick nudder lengvich,” he wrote Cowley (4 June 1933; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 204). Perhaps most galling to Burke was feeling misunderstood by some of his closest friends. Burke had long, tense exchanges over politics and poetics with Cowley and Tate as he was drafting P&C during the summer of 1933. At one point he simply threw up his hands: “You are right: our points of view are so damned different that there is just nothing else to it. The points of view do not even have the translatable feature of being ‘opposed.’ They just lie across each other on the bias” (Burke to Cowley, 15 June 1933b). Burke sent repeated, lengthy letters to Tate, trying to persuade him that literature was rhetorical. So convinced was he of his rightness that he seemed unable to account for a genuine disagreement except as a misunderstanding by Tate. His frustration with Tate was palpable as he searched for the source of his friend’s misinterpretation: “Maybe Allen read the article by Hickville Grannie [Granville Hicks]. Hickville Grannie said that I said that ‘literature should make the reader go out and do some specific thing.’ If Allen got his interpretation . . . from that source, then oh my God, for the same man who said that I said that literature should make people go out and do some specific thing also informed us in the same article that my esthetic system divorced literature from life” (27 Sept. 1933). Stung by Tate’s refusal to change his mind, Burke wrote to Cowley, “maybe if this present book [P&C] gets published, I shall have made my stand clear enough for those things not to occur so easily any more. At least, I am making myself so painfully clear that if any intelligent

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man misunderstands me I can know it for a wish-fathered thought” (31 July 1933).3 But Burke was not the only one who felt misunderstood. Sidney Hook spent much of the 1930s arguing (unsuccessfully) that he, not the Communist Party, correctly interpreted Marx. Tate felt the Agrarians were consistently misrepresented—even by their close friends; he and Cowley battled intermittently for more than half a decade, with Tate accusing Cowley and other leftists of “manufactur[ing] [a position] for me”: “You say I advocate the feudal virtues of the Old South. I advocate nothing of the sort: you simply long ago made up your mind to something like that” (26 Apr. 1936). Into this “super-charged,” politically and aesthetically fractured climate came Permanence and Change, launched with a full-page announcement in New Republic’s March 27 issue. The April 1 announcement that Burke had won a Guggenheim, along with the splash made by his Writers’ Congress speech, delivered exactly one month after P&C’s release, only served to increase interest in the book.4 In short this was a moment when Burke was at the top of his game, addressing the most pressing issues of the day. And despite conventional representations of him as a marginalized figure, reviews of P&C indicate that it was typically read in his time with interest, sophistication, and clear understanding of its contribution to discussions of the means and ends of social change. C o n t e m p o r a ry R e v i e ws Central to my reexamination of P&C’s reception5 is a recently acquired file of reviews collected by Burke (Folder Q11)6 containing nine pieces that, to my knowledge, are not listed in Burke bibliographies—increasing the number of known reviews from twelve to twenty-one. It is immediately clear, then, that P&C was reviewed more often and more widely than scholars have previously realized. Sixteen reviews appeared in publications with national circulation or big-name contributors, including four newfound reviews by Lionel Abel (Modern Monthly), John Chamberlain (New York Times), Herbert Lamm (Mosaic), and Philip Wheelwright (New Democracy). Reviews appeared in the expected places7 —the New York Times Book Review, the Nation, the New Masses—but also in publications as diverse as the American Review,8 the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Poetry,9 and the American Journal of Sociology. That the book found a wide audience is also indicated by the fact that reviews were carried by the Midwestern Observer, based in Chicago; Reader’s News out of Hollywood;10 and two college papers (the Daily Cardinal from the University of Wisconsin11 and the Northwest Viking from Washington State Normal School). Additionally R. P. Blackmur’s “A Critic’s Job of Work” (1935), although not technically a review, discusses the

Full-page advertisement for P&C in New Republic, March 27, 1935.

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book at length;12 hence I include it in my discussion of P&C’s reception but not in the review tally. Perhaps surprisingly, given our image of the hostility or indifference of Burke’s contemporaries, the response to P&C was predominantly positive (overwhelmingly so in the newly found reviews):13 some reviews were mixed, but seven of the sixteen major reviews praised the book, some extravagantly, while only three flat-out panned it (those by Abel, Ernest Bates, and Joseph Wood Krutch). Edgar Johnson, writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, for instance, applauded P&C as “one of the important books of our day,” and Blackmur praised the “sheer remarkableness of [Burke’s] speculations” (392). Many reviewers explicitly admired the range and power of Burke’s analysis; brilliant is the word that kept popping up: Burke used his resources with “brilliance, virtuosity, grace” (Eliot 114); the book is “brilliant” and “illuminating” (Hazlitt), “studded with brilliant definitions” (Chamberlain), and “brilliant in detail, constantly exhilarating” (Warren 201). Even a reviewer as hostile as Bates, writing for the New York Herald Tribune, noted the book’s “amazing intellectual fecundity.” Readers today, used to jokes about Burke’s dense style and nonlinear argumentation, might be surprised to find that although some reviewers note the difficulty of the prose, or what Bates calls his “godlike disregard for the pedantries of logical classification,” fewer than one third made more than a passing comment about this difficulty, and two of those (Krutch and Hazlitt) proceeded to give accurate accounts of the book.14 In fact a number of critics remarked upon Burke’s “rationally organized language” (Rosenberg 348) and approach. Wilson Waylett, writing for the Northwest Viking, described Burke’s style as “pellucid” and “smooth flowing.”15 The South Atlantic Quarterly reviewer, Charles Glicksberg, an English professor at Brooklyn College, even called Burke’s style “logical, compact, almost wearisome in its insistence on defining terms and clarifying meanings,” which, he said, rendered the book too hard for the general public but made Burke “the critic’s critic par excellence” (71, 74). In fact, Glicksberg asserted, “There are few critics writing at the present time who are exerting a more pronounced, though subterranean, influence than Kenneth Burke. If in the future American criticism moves in the direction of increased clarity, precision, and understanding, it will be due in no small measure to the important contributions made by this comparatively young critic” (75). Current scholars might also expect Burke’s politics to have been a flashpoint, but despite the book’s explicit advocacy of communism, reviewers were more alarmed by his perceived relativism than by his politics; only two (Bates and Glicksberg) raised serious objections to his “militant Marxist gospel” (Glicksberg 78).16 Both the Nation and New York Times reviewers (Krutch and Hazlitt, respectively) found Burke’s arguments for communism not so much wrongheaded as odd or, in Hazlitt’s case, “irrelevant”: Burke’s alignment of communism

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with poetry (not, as expected, with science) would, they claimed, baffle readers. But if reviewers did not talk much about Burke’s politics, what did they talk about? Two topics: methodology and epistemology. Perspectives on P&C’s Method olo gy The reviewers most interested in large-scale workings of society, the Marxists and social scientists, dominated the discussion of methodology. Their responses were mirror opposites—the Marxists approved Burke’s ends but not his means, and the social scientists approved his means but were almost indifferent to his ends. Because Depression-era leftist intellectuals regarded Marxism primarily as a method of social analysis, Marxist reviewers were keenly interested in, but extremely wary of, any method of sociological criticism launched, as Burke’s was, under a communist banner. John Chamberlain’s17 prediction that “Marxists of the world-bound variety will not like Mr. Burke for his constant redefinition of terms” or for his rejection of the materialist dialectic proved to be accurate: the Marxist reviewers criticized Burke’s method for not being sociological enough (something, interestingly, the sociologists never did). New Masses18 reviewer Norbert Guterman, for instance, while pleased that Burke advocated communism “in most noble and eloquent language,” disapproved of his “having taken insufficient account” of orthodox Marxist analysis. (Burke gloated to Watson, “The book was quite favorably reviewed in the New Masses, despite its Marxian heresies” [24 Apr. 1936].) Abel, in Modern Monthly,19 was even more disturbed that “with all the advantages of the immense instrument of Marxian social analysis at his disposal,” Burke instead employed “a curious method of his own” (187)—namely, perspective by incongruity. The social scientists, on the other hand, had only praise for Burke’s “apparatus for socio-economic criticism” (Lee). Not intent on measuring Burke’s Marxist orthodoxy or the waywardness of his critical theory, the social scientists wanted to use his methodology not so much to remake society as to understand it, particularly, as Louis Wirth noted, “the role of symbols in social life, especially in creating and maintaining loyalties, integrating groups and cultures, facilitating and hindering rationality” (485). Hence Northwestern University professor Irving Lee, writing in the Quarterly Journal of Speech, praised the book for “establish[ing] . . . a ‘unitary’ critical perspective by means of which to analyze the disorders in our social structure”—a tool by which “anyone is able to subject not only discourse, but all social achievement to criticism.” And in light of Burke’s claim that perspective by incongruity is “the essence of the whole business” (qtd. in Skodnick 10), his ideal reader may have been the sociologist T. D. Eliot,20 who actually experienced the book as a series of perspectives by incongruity: “[Burke] is able to apply with great effectiveness the very techniques he proposes: the

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stimulus got by the slight distortions of meaning which occur when concepts are juxtaposed in more or less incongruous perspectives. Species of ideas are to be deliberately and experimentally cross-bred, profitable mutations selected, and the cultural stock improved. This is poetry in the original Greek sense of the verb; viz., creation” (115). This comment also indicates that Eliot registered Burke’s argument for action/creation as the fundamental human purpose. The Marxists and social scientists, however, were not the only critics to identify perspective by incongruity as the methodological heart of the book. Edgar Johnson admired this “technique” that enabled Burke to reveal the dominant ideology as just that—an ideology (“Society”). Similarly Glicksberg argued that perspective by incongruity was a singularly valuable critical tool that “is wielded like a surgical knife cutting away diseased or superfluous tissue” and “punctur[ing] the pretensions of many a vested critical system” (76, 74). Whether reviewers read Burke’s methodology as an incisive critical tool or a suspicious deviation from Marxist analysis, however, it is clear that they understood Burke, that they seriously engaged his work, and that many agreed with it. That is, their responses do not support current assumptions that Burke was consistently misread, embattled, or marginalized. Bu r k e : E p i s t e m o l o g i c a l S k e p t i c o r F o u n dat i o n a l i s t ? The second—and most contested—issue was one that has often dogged Burke: to what extent is he a relativist—or, in the terms of 1930s readers, a skeptic? While some reviewers saw his purpose as establishing a “new [system] of values” based on metabiology (Waylett), half of them read P&C—disapprovingly—as an expression of “radical skepticism” (Krutch 453), a denial of any objective ground, including science, from which to understand and evaluate experience. Thus Austin Warren, whose review was ironically titled “The Sceptic’s Progress,” lamented Burke’s shift from Counter-Statement’s productive questioning to P&C’s fruitless claim that “anything may be true” (204).21 The Marxist Abel objected to the political quietism he saw as the inevitable consequence of Burke’s relativism: “if every type of human thought is a type of perspective by incongruity, . . . how after all, can it be objected to?” (189). The most virulent attack on Burke’s perceived relativism, however, came from the Herald Tribune’s Ernest Bates. Bates opened by remarking that initially P&C seemed to provide exhilarating, albeit dizzying, “mental intoxication.” “On a reperusal, however,” Bates continued, readers “will discover an underlying philosophy of a most devastating character”—a “nihilistic metaphysics.” Bates positively sneered at Burke’s argument that there are no ideologically free zones: “‘The universe,’ he tells us, ‘would appear to be something like a cheese: it can be sliced in an infinite number of ways.’ . . . Since

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there is, at worst, to be expected only some slight recalcitrance of nature to a few of our more outlandish ideas, why not will to believe what we most desire to believe?” By the end Bates’s sarcasm had turned to contempt: “It is a brilliant essay of ratiocination in behalf of irrationalism. It is, in the last analysis, another selfcontradictory expression of . . . modern madness.” That Burke had anticipated such resistance to his “cheese slicing” is indicated by a passage from an early 1934 version of part 1, in which he defended his method against critics who may “fail to understand the purpose of suspended judgment. Suspended judgment is absolutely worthless except insofar as it eventually assists in the formation of judgments” (“On Interpretation” 18). Because ideologies appear natural, the only way to puncture them, Burke argued, is “by bringing ourselves to question the obvious” (19). His instincts were sound—his “suspended judgment,” read as absolute relativism, was the biggest sticking point for those who wrote negative reviews.22 But if Bates and others saw only the suspension and not the formation of judgments, an equal number of reviewers read P&C (correctly, I would argue) as theorizing a universal ethics built upon the basic human motive to act. Blackmur observed that Burke “uses literature . . . as a . . . home for a philosophy or psychology of moral possibility” (392). These reviewers not only discussed Burke’s call for a poetic orientation but also followed the more difficult—and more important—step in which he identified metabiology as the basis for judging cultural health and, hence, directing social change. Glicksberg, for instance, saw Burke’s goal as the “development of a norm based on . . . a universal biologic constant” (79), and Wheelwright claimed that Burke’s “poetic metaphor gives rise to an ethics based not on rules nor on authority, but on the socio-biological genius of man” (195). Such sophisticated readings suggest that it is an oversimplification to say, as Burke lore has it, that few of his contemporaries understood his work. In keeping with this traditional view, for instance, Wolin argues that P&C “was by and large misunderstood” (86), noting reviewers’ resistance to Burke’s dismantling of scientific neutrality. And there is certainly evidence to support that claim. Hazlitt, for one, conceded that perspectives are often ideological but maintained that “to argue . . . that because we cannot entirely rid ourselves of metaphorical and poetic interpretations . . . we must . . . prefer them to ‘scientific’ interpretations, seems like contending that because we cannot entirely rid ourselves of prejudice we should deliberately embrace it.” Warren was more blunt: human progress, he claimed, depends upon “the denuded language of reasoning” (210); to doubt reason is nothing less than “intellectual suicide” (213). And yet Krutch, bristling at Burke’s skepticism, nonetheless understood his purpose as teaching readers “to think in a different way about the nature and functions of the perspective itself ” and so realize “that no [perspective] is true or

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false in an absolute sense” (454). Similarly Glicksberg, who rated Burke’s attempt “to overthrow the Goliath of science” as “the least convincing” part of the book (78), provided this masterful encapsulation of P&C: “In an age of disintegrating faith, when all of man’s knowledge and belief is undergoing a searching reexamination, he has taken upon himself the enormously difficult task of tearing down the whole cumbersome critical structure and building anew on a firmer and more lasting foundation” (75). As with the critical debate on Burke’s methodology, then, these passages suggest that it was not so much that Glicksberg and others did not get Burke’s point as that they did not buy it.23 In fact we can learn a lot from their perceptiveness—and even, I would argue, from their questions and criticisms. Studying how and why they reached their conclusions helps us hone current thought and question our assumptions. I am particularly struck, for instance, by Glicksberg, who, as I indicated, articulated Burke’s methodology and argument clearly and fully. What, then, do we make of the fact that he nevertheless concluded that P&C is “the breviary of skepticism” (84)? For me Glicksberg’s reading foregrounds the huge, abrupt shift in Burke’s argument from the constructivist epistemology (interpretation as necessarily ideological, perspective by incongruity) of parts 1 and 2 to the foundational ethics (metabiology) of part 3. Indeed Krutch’s criticism of P&C hinged precisely on his sense that Burke’s argument for a universal ethic was undermined by his initial, “profoundly skeptical” argument that all interpretations are partial. Krutch maintained that “it is doubtful whether the transition from such skepticism to affirmation can possibly be made without a long leap across a chasm which no intellectualizing can bridge” (454). Considering that the 1935 text contained no introductory headnotes to sections, it is understandable that some readers did not make the jump. What was Burke up to here? Happily this is no longer a rhetorical question, for Burke’s planning notes indicated that this chasm was actually part of his rhetorical strategizing: “One can use this formula [perspective by incongruity] . . . in such a way as to leave the field of ‘logic,’ ‘judgment,’ ‘taste’ a glorious wreck. . . . Why all this? Simply that, if one could, by a ranging back and forth, really get the whole field of so-called ‘orientation’ into a total muddle, would one not have the scene all set for the salvational uncorking of his ‘way out’? Would one not then be fallen-upon-the-neck-of, by his distraught reader, if he now released his Biological Ought [metabiology]?” Burke imagined “[reader’s] eyes . . . filled with tears of gratitude” for being so rescued (“Outline material [from letter to Watson]” n. pag.). Judging from the reviews, however, he succeeded so well at creating the ideological muddle that instead of gratefully embracing his poetic orientation, his “distraught readers” concluded that no such permanent perspective could exist (and then, perhaps, felt a bit testy at his having pulled the epistemological rug out from beneath them). In that sense reviewers who complained

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about his relativism may have been quite sensitive to his rhetorical emphasis or philosophical bent. Indeed Burke wrote Cowley while drafting P&C that “I believe in the necessary triumph of skepticism” (15 June 1933b), and his book notes demonstrate his desire “to enshrine the skeptical, the critical, as having first place in human interests” (“Metabiology” 5). So we might say that contemporary reviewers, who have been represented as misreading, often emphasize what we now value most in P&C—analysis of the ideological nature of language and interpretation. The chief difference between us and them is that we agree with Burke, and many critics then did not. In fact there is considerable symmetry between 1930s reviewers’ claims about Burke’s relativism and claims by our own contemporary scholars. Rueckert, for example, is sympathetic to Warren’s 1936 reading of P&C as an argument for skepticism, claiming that a “transient skepticism” runs throughout Burke’s early work—“a form of openness” clearly evident in dramatism’s emphasis on ambiguity and “suspended judgment” of dialectical transformation (Critical Responses 60). Crusius similarly sees Burke as “a skeptic in the original meaning of the Greek skeptikos—i.e., an inquirer. . . . He was not a ‘dogmatic skeptic,’ a person who believes that there is no good reason to affirm anything. Rather, in affirming (and Burke was never without a thesis), he remained open to the challenge, responsive to the question” (451). Likewise Warren’s claim that Burke’s “dialectic of motivation lands him at no terminus of conviction” (205) initially suggests that he had missed Burke’s explicit choice of metabiology as a universal ethics and action as the quintessential human motive. A more generous reading, however, might see Warren’s comment as recognizing the same tension in P&C’s model of historical change noted by Robert Wess and by George and Selzer: on the one hand, Burke posits an “opened ended” history in which every orientation, inevitably incomplete, is replaced by a new one—a history, that is, “without a telos” (Wess, Kenneth Burke 68); on the other hand, Burke’s claim that “the ultimate metaphor for discussing the universe and man’s relations to it must be the poetic or dramatic metaphor” suggests that Burke sees the poetic orientation as complete and permanent (P&C 263; emphasis added). Put into conversation with archival materials, contemporary reviewers’ responses to P&C enlarge and sharpen our understanding of Burke. Finally, any attempt to reevaluate Burke’s position among his contemporaries is incomplete, I would argue, without taking into account an unexpected, undervalued kind of archival evidence: fan mail. Some letters came from Burke’s friends and acquaintances, including Bob Coates and Lewis Mumford, who read P&C in manuscript form and praised the book highly, Mumford noting, for instance, that the Plowshare “whetted my appetite” for P&C, which he was reading “with pleasure and admiration” (Coates to Burke, 1 Sept. 1934; Mumford to

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Burke, 11 Oct. 1934). Frank was even more extravagant in his praise: “It is a remarkable book. I have not read in any language so adequate an essay on the aesthetic equivalents of our transitional-revolutionary age; not anywhere a more precise analysis of what every serious artist for a hundred years has known to be almost our basic need: a new language. . . . You have written lucidly, brilliantly” —there is that word again—“and even when one disagrees with you, it is a genuine pleasure to read you.” Frank was particularly struck by Burke’s “extraordinarily eloquent . . . case for Communism, as the cultural imperative for survival” and found that the book’s “creating of new perspectives and simplifications and combinations for the language of communistic-culture-building is remarkable” (30 Sept. 1934). Leftist critic and Smith College professor Newton Arvin agreed that Burke’s argument was illuminating: Burke had, he claimed, lucidly explained things that Arvin had not been able to articulate. And like Frank, Arvin found Burke’s contributions to leftist criticism compelling (18 May 1935). Such affirmations might be dismissed as biased or unrepresentative, but there is no denying the strength of these recommendations nor the fact that Burke’s friends rarely hesitated to express their reservations about his work—even in print, as evidenced, for instance, by Cowley’s dubious review of TBL and his mockery of Burke when he reviewed John Dos Passos’s 1919 (George and Selzer 67–70). However, much of the fan mail came from complete strangers. A Chicago branch manager of the fashionable Kroch’s Bookstores wrote to say that sales were brisk and suggested that, with a color dust jacket, P&C could have been a bestseller (Joseph Kreloff to New Republic, 25 May 1935). Philanthropist Ethel S. Dummer24 congratulated the New Republic editors on “the brilliant formulations of Kenneth Burke,” expressing her “delight” in the book and ordering extra copies for friends, one of whom was future reviewer T. D. Eliot (10 Aug. 1935). I find particularly compelling evidence that “ordinary” people read and appreciated his work. P&C was sold in Macy’s (Mebane to Burke, 14 May 1935); New Republic readers bought it via an order form accompanying an ad for the book (Mebane to Burke, 29 Mar. 1935). Leif Larson of Fair View, Montana, reported feasting on the book (17 Apr. 1935); Abe Mechlowitz, representing Brooklyn College’s chapter of the National Student League, invited Burke to lecture on the recommendation of members who had read P&C (6 Mar. 1935);25 Billy Justema made his thirtieth birthday the occasion to write Burke (also Eliot, Pound, Wallace Stevens, and Edmund Wilson) that he had found Burke’s work indispensable during the preceding fifteen years (7 Dec. 1935). We do not know, of course, what these readers made of the book, but their letters matter. That we likely find their existence surprising indicates how completely we have internalized the image of an inscrutable, ignored Burke. They demonstrate, too, that Burke had a larger, more varied audience than we typically assume—and that we underestimate Burke’s impact if we examine only published reviews by professional critics.

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R e c o n s i d e r i n g Bu r k e i n t h e 1 9 3 0 s That Burke felt misunderstood is fairly certain. That he actually was misunderstood is much less so. Casting him as the heroic underdog makes an attractive story, to be sure, but our attachment to the unappreciated, out-of-sync Burke in the face of evidence to the contrary raises questions about our historical practice —about scholars’ slowness in consulting the records of personal and intellectual relationships that Burke himself so assiduously preserved. So I propose a little perspective by incongruity to suggest how we might acknowledge him as exceptional (a brilliant, invaluable theorist for his time and ours) but not necessarily an exception (not part of his time). Perspective one: Gauging a writer’s position among contemporaries requires a nuanced appreciation of the critical climate. Today effusive blurbs are the mark of a book’s success. Reviews from the 1930s signified differently—incongruously. As Kalaidjian explains, “In the divisive milieu of the Great Depression, the sign of a [text’s] cultural power lay not in its widespread acclaim . . . but instead in the critical conflict it provoked. . . . What signals cultural power in the 1930s is a work’s localized and contentious interpretive productivity” (160–61). By these standards P&C was indeed powerful: the fan letters and conflicting reviews demonstrate that readers deemed the book worth writing about and fighting over. Convincing or not, P&C was effective—that is, it created effects. As Colleen Reilly and Douglas Eyman note, “To be cited—even as a negative or oppositional example—means that an . . . author[’s] . . . work matters, in every sense of the word: It is . . . part of the conversation, and it is visible and needs to be acknowledged as belonging to the foundation for building new ideas” (355). In Burke’s words, “The ways of influence are devious”; texts work on audiences in complex ways (letter to Cowley, 2 June 1932). Burke actively participated in 1930s conversations, and Selzer and I have examined how his work grew out of those discussions. But if we take seriously our theories about rhetoric as epistemic and knowledge as socially constructed, it is fair to push that claim further: Burke’s work was not only created by the 1930s; his work created the 1930s. Archival material provides opportunities to trace Burke’s “devious” influence even as it reminds us how partial accounts of that influence will necessarily be, dependent as they are on what materials others have deemed worthy of preservation and what we deem worthy of study. Burke’s impact on his time—so much wider than just his critical reception—is literally incalculable, but it is also unquestionable. Perspective two: Responding to a comment that Burke had habits of mind that bucked trends, Steven Mailloux once remarked that Burke would not have had those habits if he had not been so immersed in cultural trends. That is, there is no separating habits of mind from culture: even Burke’s seeming contrariness —or the particular forms that contrariness took—was a sign of his belonging to

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his time. As one 1930s reviewer claimed, “[P&C] is very much a book for our own time, and Kenneth Burke was the man to write it” (Rev. of Permanence and Change). If we take Burke seriously, we will acknowledge the necessary dialectic between intrinsic and extrinsic, between agent and scene, the theorist never completely apart from—ahead of—his time. The archives, prompting relentless contextualization, keep us grounded in a particular time and place even as they urge us to keep reconfiguring those rhetorical moments. Ultimately Burke himself helped explain this paradox of a theorist who seems both in his time and ahead of it. It is in P&C, after all, that he theorized “language and thought [as] a socialized product” (20). Let me return, then, to a passage I quoted in chapter 1. In what sounds like self-description, Burke explained the coexistence of the old and new: “We learn to single out certain relationships in accordance with the particular linguistic texture into which we are born, though we may privately manipulate this linguistic texture to formulate still other relationships. When we do so, we invent new terms, or apply our old vocabulary in new ways, attempting to socialize our position by so manipulating the linguistic equipment of our group that our particular additions or alterations can be shown to fit into the old texture” (36; emphasis added). Burke’s additions and alterations, his new terms and relationships (ahead of his time), nevertheless fit the old texture into which he was born (in his time). We can take the full measure of one only in light of the other. To do otherwise would be decidedly un-Burkean. In the conclusion I examine P&C’s impact—what the book accomplished theoretically and practically. Specifically I highlight the book’s significance for modern rhetorical theory, particularly as a pioneering volume of twentieth-century New Rhetoric, as a reinvigorated theory of epideictic rhetoric, and as a pedagogy of sophisticated critical tools for reading and revising the social text. Burke’s theory in P&C, I argue, was intended for use by everyday people in their everyday lives. The latter point is especially important for our particular cultural moment, in which many readers are rejecting poststructuralist theory’s seemingly relentless critique (Burke called it debunking) and vacating of human agency. These readers increasingly look to Burke for nuanced theorizing, and practical means, of creating change. P&C offers, in short, a critical, rhetorical pedagogy— equipment for living today.

Conclusion A New Rhetoric and Civic Pedagogy (to Save the World) An adult textbook series seems to me the place where [P&C] belongs. Burke to Waldo Frank, 19 Sept. 1934

In April 1935 at the first American Writers’ Conference, Kenneth Burke delivered his famous “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” speech, arguing that leftist propaganda would elicit more support from a wider range of Americans if built around the symbol of the people rather than the worker. With this move, Michael Denning claims, Burke “inadvertently became the foremost rhetorical theorist of the Popular Front” (124). While Burke would, I think, be delighted with the title, it is easy to imagine him replying tartly that there was nothing inadvertent about it—that, in fact, much of his writing in the 1930s, and Permanence and Change in particular, was designed with that very goal in mind—to theorize language’s role in motivating people to accept or resist social change and to imagine how, together, they might enact an art of living. I would go further still to claim that P&C is the foundational text for New Rhetoric—indeed the first fully developed New Rhetoric written as theory.1 In some senses this is hardly a controversial claim. After all, as early as 1952, Marie Hochmuth Nichols included P&C in her groundbreaking introduction to Burke’s theory, “Kenneth Burke and the ‘New Rhetoric,’ ” and by 1957 she called Burke the “fountainhead” for New Rhetorical theory (“Burkeian Criticism” 91). Roughly thirty years later in his article on P&C, Timothy Crusius asserted that “Burke is indisputably one of the very few original contributors to the New Rhetoric” (449). Nevertheless P&C has not figured significantly in traditional accounts of New Rhetoric. Although Nichols’s 1952 introduction of Burke treats all of his theoretical texts beginning with Counter-Statement as New Rhetoric, it is A Rhetoric of Motives that she most closely associates with New Rhetoric, and most scholars follow suit. Thus Douglas Ehninger marks the period of contemporary rhetoric as beginning in the 1930s but points to Richards’s 1936 Philosophy 206

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of Rhetoric as “epochal” (“Synoptic View” 449), rounding out his list of significant New Rhetorical theory with texts by Susanne Langer, Richard Weaver, Richard McKeon, Stephen Toulmin, and Wayne Booth—and Burke’s RM (451–52). Tracing parallels between ancient Sophistic and modern rhetorical theory, Bruce McComiskey refers to RM and Language as Symbolic Action. And Arabella Lyon identifies Langer as “the mother of contemporary rhetorical theory” (266), arguing that “prior to Langer, no one coherently, clearly, and consistently” “demonstrate[d] the primacy of symbols to knowledge and . . . represent[ed] meaning as both constructed within culture and the individual” (265–66). Dismissing P&C, oddly enough, as promoting a traditional, agonistic rhetorical theory, Lyon claims that it was not until the 1950 RM that Burke’s theory of symbol use and collaborative knowledge construction approached the sophistication of Langer’s 1942 Philosophy in a New Key (280).2 I conclude A Critical Companion, then, by (re)claiming P&C as the inaugural New Rhetoric in order to illuminate Burke’s P&C program further and understand better a tremendously important but ill-defined body of modern theory. Crusius’s location of Burke’s work as part of a postmodern philosophical tradition provides an extraordinarily revealing account of P&C. But his philosophical emphasis, understandably enough, prevents Crusius from more fully contextualizing P&C within its rhetorical tradition—a robust body of theory that addressed a specific historical and cultural scene by reinventing or replacing classical rhetorics. Examining P&C as part of New Rhetoric foregrounds the book’s civic and pedagogical agenda, distilling four key elements of New Rhetoric: (1) its advocacy of communication and cooperation as an antidote to systemic violence; (2) its insistence on the centrality of human symbol use and the social construction of knowledge as a counter to positivism; (3) its attempt to theorize ethical norms for a postmodern world; and (4) its expansion of rhetoric’s domain, particularly the realm of epideictic rhetoric. I further argue that Burke’s New Rhetorical theory, developed hand in hand with his explicitly political plan for cultural reorientation, constitutes a critical, civic pedagogy. A New Rhetoric Between 1931, when Burke used the term new rhetoric in Counter-Statement, and 1974, when Wayne Booth used it in Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, a great many articles and books either had new rhetoric in their titles or claimed to set forth “a” or “the” “new” (or “New”) rhetoric. Surveying this ground in 1964, Richard Ohmann wrote that “rhetoricians have lately taken to using the phrase ‘new rhetoric’ as if it had a reference like that of the word ‘horse,’ rather than that of the word ‘hippogriff ’” (17). Ohmann himself was dubious about the horse but went on to describe common characteristics of New Rhetorics in the event that

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the New Rhetoric might materialize. One year later, after chairing a Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) seminar on the current state of rhetoric, Robert Gorrell likened “new rhetoric” to a whale (including the blubber), a jellyfish, a weasel, and a multihumped camel. Two and a half decades later, Theresa Enos published a “polylog” from the riotous 1990 CCCC seminar roundtable, “Professing the New Rhetorics,” which reveals that the horse or hippogriff question remained: Is there such a thing as New Rhetoric? Is it one thing or many? And is there really anything new about New Rhetoric?3 In  a follow-up volume, Enos and Brown dryly observe that “little agreement exists among scholars as to what the New Rhetorics are and do, other than to suggest that they encompass many things and that those things suggest a usage beyond the practices promoted in speech and composition textbooks” (Defining viii). It is not my purpose here to articulate a definitive understanding of New Rhetoric, but we can gain insight into this body of theory by exploring it as Burke might: dramatistically, that is, as an act within a specific scene. What did some of the writers who themselves identified their theory as new (Burke; Booth; Langer; Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca; Richards; and Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike) think they were up to? How did they— in their own words—see themselves and their work as responding to a cultural scene? The New Rhetoricians I examine here explicitly argue that their scene motivates their theory, and, like Burke in P&C, they describe that scene as under assault from positivism and escalating violence. New Rhetoricians take clear aim against the sharp and dangerous divide between subjective interpretation and objective fact, which Burke calls the scientific orientation or technological psychosis, Langer calls the “old key,” Booth calls “modern dogma,” and Richards calls the “Proper Meaning Superstition” (11), a usage doctrine that insists “there is a right or a good use for every word” [51]—that meaning is clear and stable. Booth bemoans modern “impoverished notions of rhetoric” (10): “we have lost our faith in the very possibility of finding a rational path through any thicket that includes what we call value judgments” (Modern Dogma 7). Given this lack of faith, he claims, people have become either skeptical empiricists (“scientismists”) or committed “irrationalists”: “A thoroughly articulated, seemingly impregnable system of dogmas has sliced the world into two unequal parts, the tiny domain of the provable, about which nobody cares very much, and the great domain of ‘all the rest,’ in which anyone can believe or do what he pleases” (Modern Dogma 85). Of the old philosophy, Langer writes that “an undisputed and uncritical empiricism—not skeptical, but positivistic—became its official metaphysical creed, experiment its avowed method, a vast hoard of ‘data’ its capital, and correct prediction of future occurrences its proof ” (15). Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca similarly deplore “the habit of seeing nothing in reason except the faculty

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to calculate” (510). The opening pages of their The New Rhetoric discuss the “perfectly unjustified and unwarranted limitation” of reason resulting from Descartes’s dictum that we should “take well nigh for false everything which was only plausible” (3, 1). “Must we,” they ask, “draw from this evolution of logic, and from the very real advances it has made, the conclusion that reason is entirely incompetent in those areas which elude calculation and that, where neither experiment nor logical deduction is in a position to furnish the solution of a problem, we can but abandon ourselves to irrational forces, instincts, suggestions, or even violence?” (3). Their question is rendered even more poignant in light of Perelman’s World War II experience: as a Polish-born Jew living in Brussels, he worked with the Belgian resistance both as a founder of the Comité de Défense des Juifs and, under the authority of German occupational forces, as chief of the Association des Juifs en Belgique, responsible for overseeing the Jewish population. While the latter position forced him to send many Jews to concentration camps, it also enabled him to funnel food, supplies, and money to Jews still in hiding (Gross and Dearin 2–3). Indeed the memory of World War II and fear of another such holocaust hang over The New Rhetoric like a pall, and it is no coincidence that New Rhetorical theory flourished during the Cold War. Booth wrote in the shadow of University of Chicago protests over the Vietnam War. Douglas Ehninger, in his 1967 survey of the history of rhetoric, explains the “compelling” need for a new rhetoric: “from the personal to the national and international levels, tensions and breakdowns in human relations now, as never before, may result not only in maladjusted personalities or in misunderstandings, but also in depressions, wars, and the suicide of the race” (“On Rhetoric” 246). In such a scene, further marked by theorists’ sense of both a shrinking world and a growing awareness of culturally diverse and often incompatible value systems, Young, Becker, and Pike warn that humans cannot afford to practice what the authors see as the overly combative and manipulative practices of classical rhetoric: “It becomes more and more difficult to reason from ethical assumptions that are generally accepted. . . . All of us are learning to become citizens of the world, confronting people whose beliefs are radically different from our own and with whom we must learn to live. It has become imperative to develop a rhetoric that has as its goal not skillful verbal coercion but discussion and exchange of ideas” (8). Given this scene, New Rhetoricians define two overarching theoretical acts —“saving” the world from self-destruction by advocating cooperative communication and dethroning positivism by arguing for the centrality of human symbol use. This theorizing then typically leads them to articulate alternative understandings of knowledge production, human purpose, and the function of rhetoric futher. For without positivism’s (supposedly) objective, rational criteria for  evaluating knowledge and behavior, theorists faced a tremendous ethical

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challenge, which they met by developing a postmodern ethics based on the human motive to use language and an expanded scope for rhetoric to include the aesthetic, the dialogic, the mass-mediated, and the everyday—that is, the epideictic. In what follows I examine New Rhetoric’s four primary acts. A New Rhetoric of Cooperation First, New Rhetoricians explicitly acted to save humans from self-destruction. Thus Ehninger points to the development of “a rhetoric dedicated to the promotion of healthy and productive human relations” (“Synoptic View” 449). The theorists themselves often spoke in more extreme terms. For Richards, as Louis Mackey observes, New Rhetoric is a “soteriological enterprise” (64): Richards articulates a “dream . . . that with enough improvement in Rhetoric we may in time learn so much about words that they will tell us how our minds work” and further still “that a patient persistence with the problems of Rhetoric may, while exposing the causes and modes of the misinterpretation of words, also throw light upon and suggest remedial discipline for deeper and more grievous disorders; that, as the small and local errors in our everyday misunderstandings with language are models in miniature of the greater errors which disturb the development of our personalities, their study may also show us more about how these large scale disasters may be avoided” (Philosophy 136–37). And I have shown that Burke created metabiology explicitly for the purpose of illuminating the linguistic goads to war as well as offsetting the competition built into capitalism and its attendant push toward technological progress. In New Rhetoric texts, argument and persuasion give way to communication, discussion, conversation, dialogue, exchange. As in Burke, cooperation appears as a constant refrain. Of all the New Rhetoricians discussed here, however, the most explicitly nonagonistic theory and practice come from Young, Becker, and Pike. Like others, they assert that “whatever other purposes rhetoric may serve, it is, fundamentally, a means for achieving social cooperation” (171). What makes their rhetoric distinctive is its introduction of Rogerian rhetoric—one of the most widely recognized contributions to writing studies, included in many argument textbooks. Developed from the practice of psychoanalyst Carl Rogers, it “rests on the assumption that a man holds to his beliefs about who he is and what the world is like because other beliefs threaten his identity and integrity” (7)—a conception akin to Burke’s piety. Thus Rogers reasons that to enable people to change their minds, rhetors must remove the sense of threat inherent in agonistic argument. “The goal,” Young, Becker, and Pike explain, “is thus not to work one’s will on others but to establish and maintain communication as an end in itself ” (8). To do so Rogers advocates two general strategies: avoid using all evaluative language, which tends to lock people into their positions, and listen with understanding and acceptance. My earlier discussions of Burke’s art of living and recalcitrance,

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particularly the importance of stylistic ingratiation and collaborative revision, suggest, however, that while Young, Becker, and Pike’s text may be the most overtly nonagonistic, P&C rivals it in intensity. Against Positivism: Symbol Use and Human Purpose The second major act of New Rhetoric is the displacement of positivism, which so mischaracterized humans and human behavior: hard science, as Langer notes, “is bootless for the study of mental phenomena” (24). Furthermore, as Booth, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca, and Burke all insist, positivism’s claims to rationality and objective vocabulary deny humans the most important means they have of dealing with life’s inevitable crises—empathy, tolerance, stylistic inducement, rhetoric. Powerless to argue reasonably about competing belief systems and value judgments, people are left with nothing but relativism and a spiraling descent into disorder and violence. The new humanistic orientation or “new key” that must replace positivism is based, Langer argues, on “the all-importance of symbol-using or symbol-reading” (22), especially “the use of symbols to attain, as well as to organize, belief ” (26). Indeed, like Burke, Langer explicitly maintains that “symbolism is the recognized key to that mental life which is characteristically human. . . . Symbol and meaning make man’s world” (28). No longer purely instrumental, language (and symbol use more broadly) constitute human identity and reality. New Rhetoric’s linguistic turn leads inevitably to a social turn, for, as Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca observe, “all language is the language of a community” (513). Burke’s claim that people interpret their experience via “the particular linguistic texture into which [they] are born” (P&C 36) is, in fact, a central tenet of New Rhetoric—a tenet so deeply shared that the theorists’ articulations of it often overlap in uncanny ways. For instance, Burke explains that people “discern situational patterns by means of the particular vocabulary of the cultural group into which [they] are born. Our minds, as linguistic products, are composed of concepts (verbally molded) which select relationships as meaningful” (35). This claim is mirrored by Langer’s assertion that “the formulation of experience which is contained within the intellectual horizon of an age and a society is determined, I believe, not so much by events and desires, as by the basic concepts at people’s disposal for analyzing and describing their adventures to their own understanding. . . . Every society meets a new idea with its own concepts, its own tacit, fundamental way of seeing things” (6). Or take this example: Burke argues that people “obey[] the only realities which their scheme of orientation equips them to recognize” (23); Langer similarly claims that a culture’s overarching symbolic structures “give the angle of perspective, the palette, the style in which the picture is drawn[,] . . . [the] principles of analysis. . . . This predetermination

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of thought . . . is at once its scaffolding and its limit” (4). Similarly the following passage explaining how an orientation trains—and incapacitates—human thought might have been written by either Burke or Langer (it happens to be Langer): “The very framework of his thinking, the orientation of his mind, the basic assumptions he has always entertained as common-sense notions about things in general. . . . These are natural ways of thinking. Such implicit ‘ways’ are not avowed by the average man, but simply followed. He is not conscious of assuming any basic principles. They are what a German would call his ‘Weltanschauung,’ his attitude of mind, rather than specific articles of faith. They constitute his outlook” (Langer 3–4). Indeed the echoes between Burke and Langer (ways of seeing, perspective, orientation, common sense, Weltanschauung), neither of whom had yet read the other, illustrate the remarkable symmetry between many New Rhetorical theories.4 For New Rhetoricians, then, human thought and experience are shot through with rhetoric, the domain of which has expanded to cover all forms of symbol use. People read themselves and their worlds, these theorists asserted, via interpretive vocabularies constructed through social exchange. Meaning making is a rhetorical process, embedded in and constituted by symbol use. Rhetoric, in other words, is epistemic: knowledge is a product of human thought, not of Cartesian logic or empirical calculation. Such a view of epistemology and of the mutually constitutive process of cultural and individual identity formation has stunning consequences for understanding the self. Skeptical of New Rhetoric’s claims of newness, Nelson J. Smith III insists that “the only difference between the New Rhetoric and the Old Rhetoric is the difference between what we post-Freudians know about the psychology of an audience and what Aristotle knew about the psychology of an audience” (305–6). That, in and of itself, is a huge difference, I would argue, but New Rhetorical theory produced not just a new understanding of audience; it produced a new understanding of the human mind and human purpose, clearly articulated by Wayne Booth: “What happens if we think of ourselves as essentially participants”—that key word from P&C again—“in a field or process or mode of being persons together?” (134). This is Burke’s unstated question—nay, plea—in P&C, what he meant, I have argued, by an art of living. “If man is essentially a rhetorical animal,” Booth continues, “in the sense that his nature is discovered and lived only in symbolic process, then the whole world shifts” (134; emphasis added)—or at least it is the fervent hope of New Rhetoricians that a new orientation, a philosophy in a new key, a discovery and change are ushered in. Booth concludes that “every usage of words like I, my, mine, self, must be reconsidered, because the borderlines between the self and the other have either disappeared or shifted sharply. . . . All we need to do is honor what we know about who we are”—poets, communicators, symbol users, participators—“and how we come to be, in language,” which Booth defines as “the medium in which selves

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grow, the social invention through which we make each other and the structures that are our world, the shared products of our efforts to cope with experience” (Modern Dogma 134–35). Like Burke, then, other New Rhetoricians define humans as symbol users whose primary purpose is composing—together—their individual and collective identities and their ways of seeing the world. New Rhetoric as Postmodern Ethics For New Rhetoricians such as Burke; Young, Becker, and Pike; and Booth, this new understanding of who we are as humans, of what language is and does, both creates and helps resolve the difficulties of navigating an antifoundational world, always lurching toward war. New Rhetoricians’ insistence that there is no purely objective, scientifically verifiable knowledge on which to ground value judgments as well as their implicit or explicit refusal of metaphysical absolutes create an enormous ethical challenge: “in the absence of foundations, without master narratives or theoretical certainty, can we live meaningfully?” (Crusius 456). Crusius identifies this as the central question Burke faced in P&C and argues, as I have in chapters 2 and 3, that Burke’s answer was a resounding yes—that he worked in what Crusius calls “constructive postmodernism” (461). But this question and this answer are not Burke’s alone; they become one of the defining acts of New Rhetoric: moral imperatives, these theorists insist, reside within humans’ very nature as symbol users. Thus Young, Becker, and Pike claim that “we have sought to develop a rhetoric that implies that we are all citizens of an extraordinarily diverse and disturbed world, that the ‘truths’ we live by are tentative and subject to change, that we must be discoverers of new truths as well as preservers and transmitters of the old, and that enlightened cooperation is the preeminent ethical goal of communication” (9; emphasis added). Given a world too varied and changeable for a single foundational philosophy, Young, Becker, and Pike theorize a rhetorically based ethics. Booth goes further, identifying symbol use as the core reality of our existence; a human being, he argues, is “essentially . . . a self-making-andremaking, symbol manipulating creature, an exchanger of information, a communicator, a persuader and manipulator, an inquirer. The terms will differ depending on one’s philosophical vocabulary, but what will not vary is the central notion that man’s value-embedded symbolic processes are as real as anything we know” (136; emphasis added). From that claim it followed for Booth that “if all men make each other in symbolic interchange, then by implication they should make each other, and it is an inescapable value in their lives that it is good to do it well” (137). Like Burke, then, Booth grounded his ethical system in a new understanding of human purpose and built from it a vision of human interaction much like Burke’s art of living. “If there is, finally, an inescapable, natural command to ‘make minds meet,’ ” Booth concludes—and I hear Burke’s “rock-bottom”

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metabiology and the poetic orientation in his words—“then suddenly a host of commandments that men have said were simply an interesting, perhaps precious but finally indefensible heritage from this or that tradition become genuine imperatives again” (142; emphasis added). Hence Burke and the New Rhetoricians who succeeded him ultimately argue that a world without positivism or metaphysical certainty only seems to lack compelling reasons to engage in meaningful symbolic exchange; in truth those ethical imperatives are inherent in humans’ nature as symbol users. New Rhetoric as Modern Rearticulation of Epideictic If, as the New Rhetoricians argue, humans use symbols to construct selves, communities, and the perspectives through which they categorize and interpret experience, then Booth’s claim that “the whole world shifts” is right on the money: rhetoric can no longer be defined as a type of discourse nor a bounded set of processes. Burke’s work in particular, Clark argues, demonstrates that “the full range of symbols that constitute a person’s social and cultural experience have rhetorical functions” (Rhetorical Landscapes 3). In other words rhetoric is the stuff our lives are made of: it is the air we breathe, the water we swim in. It is what humans do. In P&C Burke theorizes the overt and, more important, the covert ways people are socialized into inhabiting certain kinds of orientations and identities. This process of identification, what Julie A. Bokser calls, following Burke, the “rhetoric of belonging” (148), is what rhetoricians today typically mean by epideictic. Epideictic rhetoric, traditionally the ceremonial discourse of praise and blame, has long been understood to have an educative function. While contemporary reappraisals of epideictic (beginning with Perelman and OlbrechtsTyteca and later including Michael Carter, Celeste Condit, Christine Oravec, and Dale Sullivan, among others) may seem to suggest that epideictic’s didacticism is a recent discovery, Gerard Hauser maintains that even Aristotle saw epideictic as much more than display rhetoric—that he envisioned it as a critical source of  “community instruction” that, by “offering praise of virtues[,] teaches the meaning of civilized action . . . and encourages virtuous civic conduct” (17, 16). Hauser’s discussion of epideictic’s “constitutive possibilities” (5) hints that he and/or Aristotle may have imagined a still broader role for epideictic, but he limits his analysis to classical ceremonial genres (encomia, eulogies, etc.) with an explicitly didactic function. Cynthia Miecznikowski Sheard, surveying scholarship on epideictic through 1996, finds a wide range of definitions for this mode of rhetoric and proposes an even wider, “multi-valent concept[ion]” (774) that “break[s] down the notion of epideictic as ‘occasional’ discourse and . . . define[s] it less by its recurring forms and forums and more by its imaginative

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functions within communities—its capacity for ‘theorizing,’ for speculating, criticizing, and imagining” (786). Nevertheless even Sheard’s groundbreaking discussion centers on “sites at which communal and institutional goals, practices, and values are reaffirmed, reevaluated, or revised and where specific kinds of behaviors are urged” (771)—sites such as op-eds, classrooms, conferences, journals, and religious venues that are finite and bounded. Jeffrey Walker claims, however, that epideictic is more properly understood as “the central and indeed fundamental mode of rhetoric in human culture” (10); epideictic is “that which shapes and cultivates the basic codes of value and belief by which a society or culture lives; it shapes the ideologies and imageries with which, and by which, the individual members of a community identify themselves; and, perhaps most significantly, it shapes the fundamental grounds, the ‘deep’ commitments and presuppositions, that will underlie and ultimately determine decision and debate in particular pragmatic forums” (9). Although Burkean theory, especially his early work, is rarely explicitly discussed as epideictic (Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca are usually credited with revitalizing epideictic), given Walker’s description, it is clear that epideictic is where Burke’s interest primarily lay. Through his theorization of orientation and piety, Burke offered an expansive understanding of epideictic’s pedagogical and moralizing function as ongoing and everywhere and all the more powerful for being unmarked—and, unlike in Aristotle’s theorization, usually not performed by model rhetors but by musicians, photographers, screenwriters, advertisers and PR firms, fashion designers, architects, teachers and curriculum developers, app and game designers, celebrities, religious leaders, and each and every one of us through the “merest commonplaces of language” and gesture (“Reading While You Run” 36). In P&C Burke uncovered and provided a critical vocabulary for the microprocesses of rhetoric that constitute human experience. As I have shown throughout this volume, Burke argued that a culture is not held together primarily by deliberative discourse but by an orientation—“the entire scheme of judgments as to what people ought to do, how they proved themselves worthy, on what grounds they could expect good treatment, what good treatment was, etc.” (P&C 25). It is easy to see the basic epideictic “praise and blame” in this definition, but Burke theorized epideictic as fundamental, ubiquitous, and quotidian: if people read their worlds and themselves through an orientation, then all those ongoing acts of identity construction are epideictic. It also becomes an extraordinarily powerful form of rhetoric, for epideictic understood via piety is an active, embodied, and psychic force, a motive, a yearning. Epideictic builds the “social recipes” people live by and then builds their devotion to them, piety being, as Burke said, “loyalty to the sources of [their] being” (78, 71). Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca state that epideictic’s purpose is “to increase the intensity of adherence to values held in common” (52; emphasis added),

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which parallels the psychological power that Burke ascribed to epideictic understood as piety, but for him that intensity of adherence is a double-edged sword: it has the strength and the stubbornness of an addiction. Hence in P&C Burke expanded utterly our understanding of epideictic’s scope and function—another reason the book stands as a landmark in modern rhetoric.5 P & C a s a C r i t i c a l , C i v i c P e da g o g y “More and more,” Burke wrote Cowley in 1955, “I begin to realize that I left school because I wanted to be a teacher, and could never be if I went all the way through that mill.” Teachers, he continued, “are an evangelical brood, bejeez” (P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 324). Beginning in 1938 he occasionally accepted semester-long teaching positions in universities across the country (University of Chicago, Kenyon, and Penn State, among others), and in 1943 he joined the faculty at Bennington College, where he taught every fall term for nearly twenty years. Burke’s educational—evangelical—mission and classroom pedagogy have been well explored by Jessica Enoch, Scott Wible, and the contributors to Peter M. Smudde’s Humanist Critique of Education. Enoch, for instance, argues that Burke’s 1955 essay “Linguistic Approaches to Education” (LAPE) outlined a “pedagogy of critical reflection” (287). In the essay Burke explained an educational philosophy and analytical methods designed to train students “systematically to question the many symbolically-stimulated goads”—goads to competition, ambition, and, ultimately, violence—“that are now accepted too often without question” (LAPE 26) and, in the questioning, to short-circuit the rush to judgment. But Burke thought of himself as a civic educator long before he stepped into a college classroom. And although rhetoricians and critical pedagogues seldom turn to P&C for educational philosophy or strategies, he was in top evangelical form as a teacher there. His initial drafting of the book was framed, remember, by two explicit (if abortive) projects of civic pedagogy: the New State magazine, designed to create a “citizenry” “properly equipped” to analyze and evaluate public institutions (3), and the “Men of Leisure” project, a “Schema of Adult Education” that would offer average Americans a critical perspective toward work, play, and human purpose (“Approaches to project” n.pag). He also chose to submit P&C to the New Republic Dollar Series because, as he repeatedly told friends, it put the book squarely in the “educational field, where it belongs” (letter to Matthew Josephson, 7 Sept. 1934). In P&C he tutored readers how to be, and then recruited them to become, “propounder[s] of new meanings” whose “natural mode of action” includes education and who “cultivat[e] the arts of translation and inducement” (272). Duncan remarks in his introduction to P&C that although Burke developed remarkable critical methodologies for analyzing various symbol systems, he “is never content to exhort us to think in a certain way”

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(xiv). But, as I have argued throughout this Critical Companion, P&C was designed precisely to exhort readers how to think, or rather, how to live. Indeed Burke’s methodologies ultimately constitute a way of life: perspective by incongruity, stylistic ingratiation, and collaborative revision to mitigate recalcitrance are not exercises to be done periodically but recursive approaches to experience, an openness to new interpretations and to working through those interpretations with others. Burke well knew that rhetorical strategies can be used for good or ill, but he explicitly argued that readers should use his methodologies to enhance communication and civic participation as moves toward the purification of war. Put another way, part of Burke’s argument in P&C is that his theorizing and critical methods were inextricably bound up with his ongoing civic mission. His sophisticated New Rhetorical theory and methodologies, developed in the service of a civic pedagogy, created an imperative for rhetoricians to use and teach communication in ways that foster cooperative—that is, democratic and nonviolent—enterprise. The Burke I see in P&C, then, is unabashedly a critical pedagogue whose work is as wholly relevant and as urgently needed now as it was in the 1930s. P&C offers an extraordinarily robust critical pedagogy—one that makes a vital contribution to American rhetorical education—because Burke’s study of symbol use was imbued with his profound social psychology and ethics and is, I have recently come to believe, eminently pragmatic—that is, full of viable strategies readers can employ now to help heal what is still an “ailing world” (P&C 223). Then and Now It is sobering to note how readily the bleak chapter titles of Theodore Dreiser’s 1931 Tragic America catalog problems of twenty-first-century tragic America: “Exploitation—The American Rule by Force,” “Our American Railways—Their Profits and Greed,” “The Supreme Court as a Corporation-Minded Institution,” “The Constitution as a Scrap of Paper,” “The Growth of Police Power,” “The Abuse of the Individual,” “Who Owns America” (n. pag.). Consider, for instance, American rule by force: “regime change” in Iraq and the George W. Bush administration’s authorization of “enhanced interrogation” of detainees in the War on Terror. Corporation-minded Supreme Court: the 2010 Citizens United ruling that protected the free speech (i.e., political campaign contributions) not of individuals but of corporations. Constitution as Scrap of Paper: the rollback of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act or the NSA’s secret wiretapping program. Police Power: the sprawling American prison system and militarized police forces, both infected with systemic racism. Individual Abuse: all of the above. Who Owns America: the 2011 Occupy Wall Street movement, protesting the concentration of wealth in 1 percent of the US population. Only the chapter on railroads’ excessive profits seems a relic of the past. Then, again, in my home state of Texas, it is

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the Railroad Commission that regulates (or refuses to regulate) the profits and greed of the oil and gas industry. Like Burke in the 1930s, we face runaway consumerism and mechanization; headlines blare that Americans are the most overworked, overstressed people in the industrialized world, miles (or hours?) away from being women and men of leisure, from understanding our human vocation; we are gripped still by the technological psychosis and by what may become our fatal trained incapacity— a reluctance to address climate chaos: the record heat and cold, drought and flooding, anomalous storms and melting ice caps of our battered planet. We live in a gargoyle culture seemingly dominated by positivism but in which a senior aide to President George W. Bush scoffed at journalist Ron Suskind’s “realitybased” thinking because “that’s not the way the world really works anymore” (Suskind). Indeed, Oxford Dictionaries named post-truth their 2016 Word of the Year, and the media is awash with “alternative facts” and “fake news.” Educational theorist Henry Giroux asserts that “the United States finds itself in the midst of a revolution in which the most basic underlying principles of democracy have begun to unravel” (“Resisting” 3), and the current political scene is a spectacular manifestation of a hyper-commitment to entrenched, polarized positions. Even Burke’s 1955 claim that “war [is] now always threatening” (LAPE 14) seems, in retrospect, overly optimistic. America is now always at war. The “postwar” descriptor for literary and historical periodization (that portrays America as an essentially peaceful country that resorts to war only to vanquish absolute evil) stands as a willful refusal to acknowledge our unending string a troop deployments: Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Laos, Cambodia, El Salvador, Lebanon, Grenada, the Persian Gulf, Nicaragua, Panama, Serbia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Syria, and the potentially endless War on Terror. America, by far the world’s leading arms dealer, has become the main underwriter of death. Ours is a world more in need of a Burkean critical pedagogy than ever. As I explain in “Critical Pedagogies: Dreaming of Democracy,” traditional critical pedagogies, which draw heavily upon Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s influential Pedagogy of the Oppressed, engage students in analyses of the unequal power relations that produce and are produced by cultural practices and institutions (particularly schools). By training students to name, probe, and challenge this inequality, they seek to liberate them from oppression and reconstitute democratic society.6 Alarmed by growing inequality and, especially after 9/11, by increasingly reactionary ideologies and militarism, today’s critical educators often move beyond critiques of formal education to confront the broader threat of what Henry Giroux calls “public pedagogy” (“Public Pedagogy” 14) and what bell hooks calls “the pedagogy of domination”—“the lessons taught by imperialist

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white-supremacist capitalist patriarchal mass media” (11, 8). “Public pedagogy,” Giroux explains, “refers to a powerful ensemble of ideological and institutional forces whose aim is to produce competitive, self-interested individuals vying for their own material and ideological gain” (“Resisting” 12). To analyze public pedagogy is to understand “how private issues are connected to larger social conditions and collective forces—that is, how . . . identities are shaped, desires mobilized, and experiences take on form and meaning within those collective conditions and larger forces that constitute the realm of the social” (19). Giroux writes as if his conceptualization of public pedagogy, including the relationship between the individual and culture, is something new: twentiethcentury educational theorists such as Dewey and Freire, he notes, “had no way in their time of recognizing that the larger culture would extend beyond, if not supercede, institutionalized education . . . as the most important educational force in overdeveloped societies” (15). But he clearly underestimates the sophistication of New Rhetorical analyses of individuals and culture as mutually constitutive as well as the speed with which Burke and other 1930s cultural critics identified and critiqued mass culture’s socializing force, especially in the wake of Edward Bernays’s launching of modern public relations in the late 1920s. In fact in the 1930s Burke often explicitly discussed mass culture as a uniquely powerful form of education. His 1930 “Waste—the Future of Prosperity” satirized the “educational advertising” that prompts Americans to equate culture with consumption (230). “More and more,” Burke claimed, “our people are being taught to buy what they don’t need and to replace it before it is worn out. . . . If people can be educated to the full realization of their function as wasters,” they will dispose of last year’s model of refrigerator or tennis racket or hat and demand another in the latest design or color, creating an upward spiral of production and consumption in which, Burke exclaimed, “business need never face a saturation point. For though there is a limit to what a man can use, there is no limit whatever to what he can waste” (228–29). And if world economies get sluggish because some dullards “simply won’t throw out things fast enough,” why “the still more thoroughgoing wastage of . . . an intelligently managed war” will set things right (229). Here Burke pinpointed how business spends millions of dollars to ensure unlimited demand, and hence profits, despite a relatively stable population—and regardless of wasting precious resources and lives. Similarly Burke’s unpublished satire “The Principles of Wise Spending” revealed the “educational coercion” (“Principles [a]” 8) practiced by public relations agencies on behalf of their business clients—the strategies of which, Burke wrote Cowley, are exactly those of fascism (13 January 1936). “Principles” takes the form of a speech delivered by a slick PR spokesman to a group of manufacturers and entrepreneurs. The speaker’s homily is “Give—and it shall be given unto you,” or, as he later reframes it, “give in such a way that it shall be given unto

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you” (3)—that is, wisely subsidize universities, political parties, the entertainment industry, newspapers, and radio so that “the chastening hand of wealth has been laid upon every important channel of popular education, and every important channel of popular expression” (4). For while formal education instrumentally trains citizens to look kindly upon business and industry, the PR man assures his audience that the most powerful educator is mass-mediated culture—songs, advertisements, movies, exposés and true confessions, slogans and jingles— crafted by skilled wordsmiths who “ha[ve] [the public’s] ear daily” and whose lessons are all the more powerful because they “teach[] people who are unaware that they are learning” (6). As a result of its wise spending, big business has effected a “stupendous revolution in . . . mores” within the space of one generation (2). “The meekness of the people,” Burke’s speaker concludes, “is a monument to the thoroughness with which sound mental habits have already been inculcated into them” (8). “Principles of Wise Spending” condemns the corrosive force of public relations propaganda masquerading as businesses’ public benevolence. To resist such public pedagogy, Giroux proposes a cultural studies curriculum (rather than critical pedagogy per se) “as a theoretical, pedagogical, and political intervention” (“Resisting” 6). He argues that cultural studies, which teaches students to analyze the relationship between culture and power, can be an effective antidote to mass culture because it “provid[es] a language of critique and possibility, of imagining different futures”—that is, cultural studies “can play an important role in producing narratives, metaphors, images, and desiring maps that exercise a powerful pedagogical force over how people think about themselves, engage with the claims of others, address questions of justice, and take up the obligations of an engaged citizenship” (18). This sounds remarkably like P&C. Like critical pedagogies, P&C’s goal is to enable citizens to envision alternatives (perspectives by incongruity) and to inspire them to assume the responsibility for collectively re-creating society. P&C: Civic Engagement for Our Time If we were to envision an educational program designed to remake culture, what would “properly equipped” citizens need to understand or be able to do? That is, what constitutes a critical, civic pedagogy? Five interconnected elements seem essential: ethics, criticism, vision, human agency, and rhetorical strategies for change. Civic ethics, Giroux observes, are crucial: “any viable cultural politics needs a socially committed notion of injustice if we are to take seriously what it means to fight for the idea of the good society” (“Resisting” 20). Second, people need a compelling reason to change; they must understand what is wrong with existing social structures—which is to say they need the critical methods to read the world, to understand how power is produced and maintained. Within traditional critical pedagogies, this includes a study of language and a Marxist critique

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of capitalism and class structures, but more and more critical educators embrace intersectionality and poststructuralist understandings of power circulation. Third, the goal of most critical pedagogies is democracy and social justice, and they typically stress citizens’ ability to envision alternatives to existing cultural institutions and hope to fuel social progress. Fourth, Giroux argues that, along with hope, citizens need “critical modes of agency”: they need to see themselves as political actors with the power to produce change (13; emphasis added). Finally, citizens must have effective means of social change—specifically rhetorical strategies. This, I argue, has been a key missing piece in most critical education, focused as it has been (and understandably so) on developing students’ critical consciousness and rewriting teacher-student relationships. Traditional critical pedagogies, which encouraged direct political action, often did so sans rhetorical training for addressing resistant audiences. What makes P&C such a rich resource for today’s critical pedagogy is that it offers theoretically, psychologically, ethically, and rhetorically sophisticated accounts of all five fundamental elements of radical education: it yokes Burke’s deeply felt civic mission with the theoretical and methodological innovations that make it a landmark in modern rhetoric. Throughout A Critical Companion, I have examined how P&C both theorizes and enacts a critical pedagogy, one that can help revitalize American rhetorical and civic education. I have studied critical pedagogy for twenty years and have often taught a somewhat tame version of it with varying degrees of success, but I have never imagined teaching a Burkean critical pedagogy until now. For I have come to understand P&C not as utopian (i.e., fantastical, impossible) but as hopeful, inspiring, and pragmatic—made to do work in the world and to work in the world, often by raising questions and challenging readers to reconsider how they work and live. As I complete this volume, I am certain of this: P&C “properly equip[s]” educators and citizens in ways other critical pedagogies do not. Most obviously P&C supplies vocabulary and methodologies for sophisticated cultural criticism and for understanding how knowledge, values, and identities are socially constructed through language. It enables readers to analyze both interpretations and systems of interpretation. More broadly it presents a modern retheorizing of epideictic rhetoric: the tremendously powerful because often unrecognized microprocesses of rhetoric that constitute our reality. Burke takes readers beyond claims that everything is an argument or all interpretations are ideological to the more radical, and perhaps unsettling, claim that experience itself is rhetorical. Second, P&C is a truly rhetorical critical pedagogy that explores the difficulty activist rhetors face—the need to recommend the culturally impious (change) in pious terms—and outlines rhetorical strategies to mitigate audience resistance:

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perspective by incongruity, graded series, translation, and stylistic inducement. Furthermore these strategies are based upon Burke’s understanding of why humans resist change and thus give rhetors a relatively nonjudgmental language (orientation, piety, trained incapacity) through which to humanize rather than demonize those they disagree with—those they most need to engage. In the 1930s Burke was ever frustrated by the “zestful antagonism” projected by leftist rhetors who, he claimed, should know that “America is the country of ‘boring from within’” (“Boring” 327). In other words effective radical rhetors should identify themselves and their cause with existing American values. Such a lack of rhetorical awareness, even with their own students, has been a persistent problem for radical educators. As Virginia Anderson notes, critical teachers often “align themselves with those the students hope never to become, and they depict themselves as enemies of what many students are” (203). The failure of so much leftist rhetoric explains why Burke emphasized stylistic ingratiation and reinforced the very difficult lesson that others’ pieties “are no less real or deep through being different from [their] own” (P&C 272). He would have us prepare ourselves and students (whatever their political positions) to participate in civic life “stylishly”—that is, without giving offense. Furthermore in P&C Burke not only theorized critical methods and rhetorical strategies; as I have shown, he also modeled those practices, offering tutorials on perspective by incongruity, graded series, and the collaborative revision prompted by recalcitrance. But P&C is an exceptional critical pedagogy text because it offers more than rhetorical theory and criticism. I have unexpectedly found myself feeling particularly well equipped by concepts not usually counted among P&C’s most significant takeaways. Metabiology is one such. It is a knotty concept, to be sure, but an admirable one too: designed as an embodied, “workable” ethics, it both prompts and enables work in the world, insisting that Americans evaluate and reform cultural institutions so that basic human needs are met. Through metabiology Burke also offered a provocative meditation on human purpose, urging readers to see themselves as symbol users whose chief sources of human satisfaction derive from community building and collaboratively revising their attempts to compose “the good life.” To think of definitions of human purpose as fundamental to a critical pedagogy is to reframe and deepen one’s ethical commitment to civic well-being. I do not mean to suggest that Burke was personally more committed or ethical than other critical educators. Rather he challenged readers to take a longer view of human needs and satisfactions without ever quite losing sight of the pressing particularities of inadequate healthcare or sexual assault or childhood poverty. Considering human purpose requires an extra step in any argument for social change. What, I wonder, would students, colleagues, and other readers make of such a move? How would we make such a move? I am particularly transfixed by Burke’s “Men of Leisure” project, caught

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by his suggestion (and its stylistic elegance) that Americans define meaningful occupation by imagining the way “one would ‘work’ in Paradise” (MOL 5). If students were asked what it would mean to work the way one would in paradise, what would they say? What would their instructors say? What would it mean to teach or write or learn or live the way one would in paradise? No other critical pedagogy texts raise such provocative questions for me. I am similarly intrigued by the idea of an engaged or civic mysticism that Burke enacted, wondering how to be the mystic civic educator he called on readers to become. Could I imagine teaching students to be mystic civic composers —or becoming one myself? Imagine asking sutdents to see around corners and crack apart commonsense notions of what goes with what, making each other at home with uncertainty, celebrating—via perspective by incongruity—the “heuristic value of error” (P&C 121–22). Other critical pedagogies do not inspire me to consider such ambitions. Finally P&C is an extraordinary resource because it offers critical pedagogues a multifaceted understanding of democracy, encouraging them to seek it in unsuspected places and unexpected practices. Like rhetoric, democracy is seldom mentioned explicitly in P&C, but cues from other 1930s Burkean works indicate that it is everywhere in the text, rendered with the same sophistication as the rest of his theorizing. Democracy for Burke was not simply—or even primarily—a type of government, nor would he consider an engaged citizenry to be one that merely votes. Democracy is expressed not as consensus or unproblematic community but as a sense of humans’ interdependence. Democracy lives in P&C as an attitude, a habit of being, an acting together—akin to Dewey’s sense of it as “primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” (Democracy and Education 101). In P&C democracy is bound up with perspective by incongruity, which, Burke argues, facilitates “the ‘mass production’ of perspectives. It ‘democratizes’ a resource once confined to a choice few of our ‘royal’ thinkers” (ATH 228–29). It is bound up, too, with recalcitrance, with style, and with the art of living—and hence with Burke’s work toward the purification of war, functioning alternately as an agency or means, a scene, a motive, and a way of being in the world with others. To get at Burke’s expanisve understanding of democracy, I return to his 1939 “On Dialectic” essay in which he portrayed democracy as an agency or a means to an end: he defined it as “a device for institutionalizing the dialectic process, by setting up a political structure that gives full opportunity for the use of competition to a cooperative end. Allow full scope to the dialectic process, and you establish a scene” that affords a person advancing an argument “the maximum opportunity to modify . . . and so mature it” (“On Dialectic” 444; emphasis added). In other words democracy creates a cultural space for or practice of (it institutionalizes) a multivocal discussion (dialectic) during which citizens are able to revise

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(modify and mature) ideas. In P&C Burke explained this process as a response to recalcitrance and maintained that such collaborative revision works best when it is inclusive, inviting those who would differently support, qualify, reframe, or even oppose the claim. Democracy, Burke suggested, authorizes an agon in which citizens argue over (compete) and then collectively revise their ideas (cooperate). It follows that democracy is a means of working toward the purification of war (competition to a cooperative end). But “On Dialectic” states that democracy is also the scene in which the dialectic takes place. In such a scene, P&C’s poetic orientation, Americans could identify themselves as composers who build a community and who, prompted by recalcitrance, collectively test and revise their knowledge. Finally, because democracy involves communication, cooperation, and participation, it incorporates the actions Burke defined as fundamental human motives. Democracy is, thus, a precondition for, and a result of, the art of living: it creates the scene and the means that allow Americans to fulfill their deepest human needs, and as they participate in collaborative civic conversations, they instantiate and reaffirm, for themselves and each other, their commitment to democratic values. There is a lot here for critical pedagogues and students to chew on: democracy, for instance, becomes a cultural space that is not a voting booth but could be a school cafeteria or baseball stadium or anywhere people come together to argue, compete, and cooperate. In P&C democracy is writ large by being writ small: composing or revision can become a democratic practice; style—defined by Burke, remember, as not giving offense, as “a way of . . . affirming solidarity” (268), as doing the right thing, on and off the page—can also become a democratic practice. (So if style is the democratic art of creating and maintaining relationships, how do I revise my undergraduate style course to reflect that? Yet another provocative question for a critical educator.) But in P&C democracy is also writ large by actually being writ large: it is a vision, an orientation, a way of  life—a set of embodied ethics and critical practices enacted by citizens— together. “A democratic way of life,” Clark explains, “constitutes individuals as, among other things, citizens who join with others in sustaining civic life” (Civic Jazz 85)—and they do so, Burke argues in P&C, through the most human—and the most rhetorical—of arts: communication, cooperation, and participation. If the good life is “a project for ‘getting along with people’” (ATH 256), then the poetic orientation is the democratizing civic project that teaches citizens rhetorical techniques to foster that good life—the civic, rhetorical, democratic art of living.

Appendix A Toward a P&C Chronology Creating a precise chronology of Burke’s drafts is extremely difficult for three reasons: (1) most are undated; (2) parts of what likely comprise one entire draft seem to be scattered among unrelated archival folders; and (3) folders that are labeled “P&C draft” or “final P&C” never actually contain a complete manuscript (“On Interpretation” is usually missing). Burke also revised some parts more than others and/or revised them at very different times. My best guess is that the order goes like this: • Draft 1 (June–September 1933): “Religious and Poetic Piety” (Folder P37), “Perspective by Incongruity” and “Basis of Simplification” (Folder Q1, labeled “Copy, P&C”); alternately, there is a slightly longer draft of part 3 in Folder P5. • Revised part l (October 1933): retitled “Range of Piety” (Folder P9a). • Revised part l (complete by 1 January 1934): retitled “On Interpretation” and published in Plowshare; clearly a revision of “Range of Piety.” • Draft 2 (May 1934), titled Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose: likely the draft Burke submitted to Eduard Lindeman and New Republic Dollar Series; housed at Andover, wrapped in brown paper, and labeled “Final P&C”; contains table of contents, preface, and parts 2 and 3; Burke wrote to Watson that he simply submitted the Plowshare “On Interpretation” to complete the manuscript (6 July 1934). • Draft 3: contains only parts 2 and 3; clearly a revision of the Andover manuscript; many pages have publisher’s page stamps and galley numbers on them, although they also show signs of significant revision, possibly to trim the book to fit the Dollar Series page limits (Folder Q2, labeled “Copy P&C”). • Galley from Permanence and Change: not accessible to scholars (Folder H21).

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Appendix B Works Referenced in P&C Adler, Alfred. Understanding Human Nature. Trans. Walter Beran Wolfe and Leland E. Hinsie. New York: Greenberg, 1927. Allen, A. H. Burlton. Pleasure and Instinct: A Study in the Psychology of Human Action. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. Bentham, Jeremy. “Book of Fallacies.” The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Vol. 2. Ed. John Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843.** ———. “A Table of the Springs of Action.” The Works of Jeremy Bentham. Vol. 1. Ed. John Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843.** Berguer, Georges. Some Aspects of the Life of Jesus from the Psychological and Psychoanalytical Point of View. Trans. Eleanor Stimson Brooks and Van Wyck Brooks. London: Williams & Norgate, 1923. Bible (Moses, Job, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah).* Burrow, Trigant. The Social Basis of Consciousness: A Study in Organic Psychology Based upon a Synthetic and Societal Concept of the Neuroses. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1927. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Ed. Archibald MacMechan. Boston: Ginn, 1925.** Carroll, Lewis. Alice in Wonderland.* Cohen, Morris R.* Cummings, e. e.* Crane, Hart. The Bridge. Paris: Black Sun, 1930. Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man: And Selection in Relation to Sex, Volume 2.** Dewey, John. Art as Experience. New York: Putnam, 1934. Eddington, Arthur. The Nature of the Physical World. New York: Macmillan, 1928. Eliot, T. S. “The Hollow Men.” Poems 1909–1925. London: Faber & Faber, 1925. 123–28. ———. The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism: Studies in the Relation of Criticism to Poetry in England. London: Faber & Faber, 1933. ———. The Waste Land. Dial 73.5 (1922): 473–85. Everett, Charles Warren. The Education of Jeremy Bentham. New York: Columbia University Press, 1931. Fichte, Johann Gottlieb.* Frazer, James George. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. New York: Macmillan, 1922. *Authors (without specific works) and/or “classic” works (with many editions) referenced **Works probably referenced (probable editions and/or probable specific works) 227

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Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Macmillan, 1913.** ———. Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory. Trans. A. A. Brill. New York: Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing, 1910.** Hare, William Loftus. Mysticism of East and West: Studies in Mystical and Moral Philosophy. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.* Helmholtz, Herman L. F. von. On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music. Trans. Alexander J. Ellis. 5th ed. London: Longmans, Green, 1930. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford: Clarendon, 1909.** Hook, Sidney. Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation. New York: Day, 1933. Huizinga, Johan. The Waning of the Middle Ages: A Study of the Forms of Life, Thought, and Art. Trans. Fritz Hopman. London: Arnold, 1924. Jaensch, E. R. Eidetic Imagery and Typological Methods of Investigation. Trans. O. A. Oeser. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1930. James, William. The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green, 1910.** Janet, Pierre. The Major Symptoms of Hysteria: Fifteen Lectures Given in the Medical School of Harvard University. New York: Macmillan, 1907.** (Burke may have read Janet through McDougall, below.) Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Huebsch, 1916.** Kretschmer, Ernst. Physique and Character: An Investigation of the Nature of Constitution and of the Theory of Temperament. Trans. W. J. H. Sprott. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926. La Rochefoucauld, François, duc de. Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims.* Lange, Carl Georg, and William James. The Emotions. Ed. Knight Dunlap. Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1922. Lawrence, D. H. Fantasia of the Unconscious. New York: Seltzer, 1922. Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm. Discourse on Metaphysics.** Lenin, Vladimir.* Malinowski, Bronislaw. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1927. Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1927.** (Burke might have translated this himself.) Marston, William M., C. Daly King, and Elizabeth H. Marston. Integrative Psychology: A Study of Unit Response. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. Ed. Frederick Engels. Chicago: Kerr, 1906. McDougall, William. Outline of Abnormal Psychology. New York: Scribner, 1926. Milton, John. Paradise Lost.* Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Trans. Thomas Common. Edinburgh: Foulis, 1909.** ———. The Will to Power: An Attempted Transvaluation of All Values. Trans. Anthony M. Ludovici. Ed. Oscar Levy. London: Allen & Unwin, 1910.**

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Ogden, C. K. Bentham’s Theory of Fictions. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1932. ———. The Meaning of Psychology. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1926. Ogden, C. K., and I. A. Richards. The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1923. Pavlov, Ivan*. Piaget, Jean. Probably/possibly Le langage et la pensée chez l’enfant.* Prince, Morton.* Proust, Marcel.* Radin, Paul. Primitive Man as Philosopher. New York: Appleton, 1927. Richards, I. A. Mencius on the Mind: Experiments in Multiple Definition. Ed. John Constable. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1932. ———. The Principles of Literary Criticism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1924. ———. Science and Poetry. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1926. Rivers, W. H. R. Instinct and the Unconscious: A Contribution to a Biological Theory of the Psycho-Neuroses. London: Cambridge University Press, 1920. Rothschild, Richard. Reality and Illusion: A New Framework of Values. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934. Russell, Bertrand. Analysis of Mind.* Santayana, George. “Piety.” Reason in Religion. London: Constable, 1906.** Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph.* Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Idea. 3 vols. Trans. Richard Burdon Haldane and John Kemp. London: Trübner, 1883.** Seaver, Edwin. The Company. New York: Macmillan, 1930. Shakespeare, William (King Lear, Macbeth, Hamlet, Twelfth Night)* Sherrington, Charles Scott.* Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West: Form and Actuality. Trans. Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Knopf, 1926.** Spinoza, Baruch. The Ethics. Trans. R. H. M. Elwes.** Stephen, Karin. The Misuse of Mind: A Study of Bergson’s Attack on Intellectualism. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1922. Strachey, John. The Coming Struggle for Power. New York: Covici-Friede, 1933. Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travels.* Unamuno, Miguel de. Essays and Soliloquies. New York: Knopf, 1925. Veblen, Thorstein. Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts. New York: Huebsch, 1918. ———. Theory of Business Enterprise. New York: Scribner, 1904. Watson, John B. Behaviorism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1924. Whitehead, Alfred North. Nature and Life. London: Cambridge University Press, 1934. Woodger, Joseph Henry. Biological Principles. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1929.

Notes

Introduction 1. For more on Burke’s early life and times, see Selzer, Kenneth Burke in Greenwich Village, and the informal chronology in George and Selzer, Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. 2. Burke’s 1931 essay “Boring from Within”; his 1935 Writers’ Congress address “Revolutionary Symbolism in America”; his unpublished 1932 monograph Auscultation, Creation, and Revision; and his 1937 Attitudes toward History are other notable examples of Burke’s response. See George and Selzer for fuller discussion of these and related 1930s works. 3. See Sandy Stelts and Jeannette Sabre for a history and description of Penn State’s Kenneth Burke Papers. 4. Publishing quotations from a copyright-protected archival document requires two separate permissions: one from the archive that owns the physical document (Penn State, for instance, or the Beinecke) and one from the copyright holder who controls use of the document’s content (its language)—the document’s author or, for 1930s documents, more likely the author’s heirs or literary executor. Burke’s own writing is not a problem: Anthony and Michael Burke, trustees of the Burke Literary Estate, have generously granted uncountable copyright permissions. But trying to identify and contact heirs of Average Citizen X whose 1935 fan letter is held at Penn State or even of a Bennington colleague whose 1953 musings on Burke’s influence are also at Penn State has proven nearly impossible. Working on this project, I have also been astonished to discover how many famous 1930s writers and critics have seemingly fallen off the grid. Several research assistants and I have spent hours working on permissions—a substantial but seldom-discussed cost of some archival research—and failed searches for heirs mean I have had to delete some tremendously interesting comments from Burke’s correspondents.

One. Pieties, Perspectives, and Incongruities 1. In P&C Burke studiously avoids the word ideology, preferring to draw from Dewey and Veblen concepts (occupational psychosis and trained incapacity, for instance) he might have gotten from Marx. Why? In P&C he was still distancing himself from elements of orthodox Marxism. Avoiding Marxist terminology may also be, in part, a form of audience accommodation: orientation was a commonly used term at the time, and P&C’s readers included aesthetes and the staunchly anticommunist Agrarians. Perhaps more surprising, in the 1930s Veblen also had more cultural capital than Marx: H. L. Mencken noted that Veblen was the dominant intellectual figure in America—some of his works were rereleased (one became a bestseller), the definitive biography appeared, and a New

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Republic poll ranked Veblen as the most influential thinker of the day, far ahead of Dewey, Freud, and Lenin. Avoiding ideology also helped Burke distance himself from Hegelian idealism. Finally Burke was attracted to the triadic structure created by orientation, disorientation, and reorientation—roughly the three parts of P&C (304–5). 2. So even if people reject an existing piety, the rebellion will be framed within the terms of the dominant culture—the way teenagers often rebel by behaving in the exact way they know will drive their parents crazy. The 1960s counterculture movement was framed quite specifically to counter the culture in place, to be “antiestablishment” (“Make love not war!”). 3. Clark has added the phrase “sense of ” to Burke’s original passage. 4. Burke often uses the term rationalization as a synonym for orientation, such as when he introduces his proposal for communism as a “humanistic, or poetic, rationalization” (65); he does not use the term to evoke negative connotations of rationalizing as inventing reasons for behavior to hide actual, often unsavory motives. 5. To illustrate this point, Burke often noted shifts in cultural attitudes toward ambition: for most of Western history, ambition was a source of tragedy and shame—hubris, a deadly sin; now an unambitious person is dismissed or despised. 6. Rosteck and Leff note that, as process, pious linkages “are created by human makers as they interact with their fellows and with the world. . . . They come to be, change, and pass out of existence in accordance with the situated interests of human communities” (329–30). Still, while those linkages hold, they “function as stable frames of reference which direct human perception and determine our judgments about what is proper in given circumstances” (329). 7. Piety thus has connections with etiquette, taste, style, and identification. For instance Burke notes that style “is a constant meeting of obligations . . . a repeated doing of the ‘right’ thing. . . . For style (custom) is a complex schema of what-goes-with-what, carried through all the subtleties of manner and attitudes” (269n). 8. According to Erin Wais, Veblen coined the term in The Instinct of Workmanship and Industrial Arts, which Burke cites in P&C. See Wais for a good discussion of how Burke adapted Veblen’s concept. 9. Hawhee argues that Nietzsche is Burke’s source for this understanding. See “Burke and Nietzsche” and Moving Bodies for discussions of Nietzsche’s importance for Burke’s theory. 10. Burke did not, however, posit a stable, singular subjectivity: “the so-called ‘I’ is merely a unique combination of partially conflicting ‘corporate we’s’” (ATH 264). 11. Here I do not mean to draw hard lines between analysis and production; Burke argues, rightly, that criticism is a form of rhetorical action. But Jay is interested primarily in Burke’s language use; I focus on perspective by incongruity as a rhetorical tool Burke develops for others to use. 12. Burke repeatedly explains perspective by incongruity using scientific language, as when he likens it to “experimentally wrenching apart . . . molecular combinations. . . . It should subject language to the same ‘cracking’ process that chemists now use in their refining of oil” (119). The “atom-cracking” metaphor is particularly interesting given that scientists first succeeded in splitting the atom in 1932—just a year before Burke began drafting P&C.

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13. Although in his second edition prologue, Burke pointedly distinguishes de Gourmont’s dissociation from his own method of perspective by incongruity—he claims, “the one was ‘fission’; the other, ‘fusion’?” (lv)—the “wrenching” and “cracking” language he uses to explain perspective by incongruity throughout P&C and ATH suggests that “fission” and “fusion” are complementary processes, steps one and two of the same methodological move. Hence Burke applauds James Joyce’s “blasting apart the verbal atoms of meaning, and out of the ruins making new elements synthetically” (P&C 113). Indeed Burke often speaks in one breath of perspective by incongruity as fission and/or fusion— as “any attempt to offer two concepts where the language of common sense had had one, or to offer a merger where the language of common sense had discriminated” (110). Similarly he sees “associative and dissociative processes,” a.k.a. perspective by incongruity or metaphor, as “a pivotal concern” in the work of Joyce and Gertrude Stein (CS 24). Perspective by incongruity clearly has roots in modernist literary experimentation, including Burke’s own genre-bending fiction. 14. William Carlos Williams was delighted with the article, writing Burke “that [it] cries for a follow up, you hit something that time—and what a book it would make! . . . A breath of truth here comes close to being a veritable blast of genius. Go to it, it isn’t everyone who has the power” (22 Nov. 1937; East 69–70); Burke, who wrote the article in December 1935, replied that it had been “allowed to mellow in the editorial basket” for so long that he had assumed it was not worth pursuing and moved on (21 Dec. 1937; East 70). 15. Burke was clearly influenced here by Veblen’s distinction between businessmen and industrialists in Theory of Business Enterprise (1904); Veblen condemned the former for manipulating, even deliberately damaging, industry to create higher profits. 16. Tonn and Endress also develop the critical concept unplanned incongruity to describe the counterperspective created by Perot’s political missteps, which paradoxically reinforced the very political pieties he called into question. 17. Some scholars analyzing perspective by incongruity created through images or performance claim to be extending what they see as Burke’s purely verbal sense of incongruous strategies. But as his examples of using the wrong end of telescopes, observing mosquitoes, and altering photographs indicate, he was already alive to visual and embodied possibilities of perspective by incongruity. Indeed Hawhee argues convincingly that Burke’s articulation of the concept was partly influenced by the mystic G. I. Gurdjieff, whose dances and “stop exercises” (sudden calls for dancers to freeze and hold even awkward positions) were designed to disrupt automatized movement and response, to “suspend all physical, mental, and emotional habits in order to allow for new possibilities of movement and thought” (Moving Bodies 40). Similarly I am wary of Dow’s claim, in an otherwise remarkable analysis of AIDS activist Larry Kramer, that Burkean perspective by incongruity accounts primarily for shifts in perspective rather than the “profound” change effected only by “re-evaluation and reconstitution of self” (240). But as I have shown, Burke’s theory fully accounts for identity creation as a rhetorical process. 18. Even a thinker as congenial to Burke as Alfred North Whitehead, who found hardened disciplinary borders “dangerous for philosophy” because they “hid[e] the truth that the different modes of natural existence shade off into each other,” nevertheless claimed (in the passage that serves as P&C’s epigraph) that “sharp-cut scientific distinctions are essential for scientific method” (n. pag.; emphasis added).

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19. The phrase scientific lore would, for many readers, be another instance of an incongruous fusion of words, lore referring to beliefs accumulated and handed down, to knowledge gained experientially but not experimentally. Burke’s move here to put science on a par with magic and mysticism is highly impious—another perspective by incongruity. As Paul Jay notes, Burke’s “conflation of philosophical, literary, poetic, sociological, and psychological material and topics in any given book is the methodological equivalent of that same kind of conflating at the level of his terminology. In this regard, there is little difference in Burke between the style of his writing and the style of his analyses. His books are organized as well as written by the principle of gaining new perspectives by incongruous juxtapositions” (“Modernism” 352). 20. These notes are not paginated, but Burke had handwritten, circled numbers on the notes that typically correspond to statements on a numbered outline. 21. Burke’s “atom-cracking” definition is typically cited, leading scholars to stress perspective by incongruity’s violence as “jarring” (Waisenen, Rockler) or “shattering” (Demo). 22. Martha Solomon’s study of Emma Goldman’s failed anarchist rhetoric demonstrates the necessity that strategies of incongruity tap into audience’s existing values and vocabularies—something that Goldman’s “radical metaphors” and “caustic tone” failed to do (187). 23. Similarly, in his 1935 American Writers’ Congress speech, “Revolutionary Symbolism in America,” Burke recommended that, in order to court middle-class Americans, leftist rhetors and literary Marxists adopt symbols of inclusion not exclusion. For more on the rhetorical strategies discussed in “Boring from Within,” ACR, and “Revolutionary Symbolism,” see George and Selzer. 24. See Overall for a discussion of how Burke’s interest in music helped him theorize the graded series as a rhetorical strategy. 25. Burke himself uses a graded series when presenting his incongruous definitions of piety. Beginning with a fairly uncontroversial definition of piety as “loyalty to the sources of our being” (71), Burke advances step by step, explicitly signaling each advance to readers: “furthermore, piety is a system-builder” (74), “I would even go further . . .” (75), “extending our term still further . . .” (76), and, finally, “we are now prepared to carry our term to its limit” (77) as he arrives at his claim that even criminals exhibit piety—a claim most readers would flatly reject if Burke had not gradually led them through intermediate steps. 26. In a letter written to Cowley just as he was beginning work on P&C, Burke said: “Think I have found my vehicckle. I mean: that mould into which one can pour the maximum variety of one’s ways and that will be yet a mould. Translator born, but with no thorough grounding in any language but English, I have decided to translate from English into English” (18 Nov. 1932). (Despite Burke’s disclaimer about his lack of proficiency in foreign languages, he had sufficient “grounding” in German to produce a definitive translation of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice in 1925.) 27. Burke confirmed this in A Rhetoric of Motives, noting, “the translation of one’s wishes into terms of an audience’s opinion would clearly be an instance of identification” (57; emphasis added). 28. This section returns to an argument from the 1932 Auscultation, Creation, and Revision in which Burke criticizes Marxist rhetors, who “invite persecution rather than seek

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results. . . . The whole enterprise becomes a vague, inspiring, orgy, glorious but ineffective” (163, 170). Bluntly put, they are preaching to the choir. Burke argues, “One might distinguish the ‘evangelist’ [Jesus] who brought new meanings, from the ‘organizer’ [Paul] who consolidated the convinced.” “The wheedler-propagandist Christ,” Burke continues, “minimized the antithetical aspect of his propaganda as far as was humanly possible, even stretching his doctrines to the limit in the interests of ‘tactics.’ . . . The ‘Christ-function,’ as ‘bringer of glad tidings,’ was that of propounding a new configuration of meanings, and making this configuration as appealing as possible” (ACR 163). 29. As I have suggested earlier in this chapter (and will discuss in future chapters), Burke showed himself to be a master rhetor/translator in P&C. He converted or—to use his language—translated “religious piety” into “poetic piety,” Jesus into a revolutionary rhetor, life into a composition or poem, communism into cooperation and community, biology into a system of ethics (metabiology). Jay similarly argues that Burke’s stylistic use of perspective by incongruity is an instance of Burke himself attempting “to force the critical structure”: “Burke announces and begins to use a style of writing appropriate to a mode of analysis which focuses on the role of metaphor in the production of knowledge, and which seeks to exploit that role in its own elaboration of a ‘corrective philosophy.’ It is a critical language meant to offer new perspectives, that is, new interpretations, by the incongruous juxtaposition of terms from two different, perhaps even contradictory contexts. . . . It is a style based on the power of a metaphor to name and explain” (“Modernism” 350). In short Burke used P&C to theorize and enact the critical practices he presents and, in doing so, created and modeled a critical pedagogy.

Two. Metabiology as Purification of War 1. Burke famously elaborated upon this definition of humans as symbol-using animals in Language as Symbolic Action. 2. As the chapter’s epigraphs indicate, Burke was thinking about the intersections between ethics and the body well before he began P&C. In particular ACR, written the year before P&C, shows him working through ideas that take center stage in P&C: the need for ethical clarity, which, he explained to Allen Tate while drafting ACR, comes from “some certainty that arises out of one’s own living” (15 June 1932)—that is, from the body—as well as his interest in intervening to reorient culture. “One can think of turning evangelical,” Burke wrote, “trying to advocate directer ways of living, a return to conditions wherein the nature of desires and their appeasements would be clearer, so that we should require only rudimentary kinds of good judgment to make the proper choices, should not have to be exceptionally wise to do the wise thing, as a dog, when you toss him a bone, need not be a skilled economist to snatch at it” (ACR 50). Also clearly evident at this stage, indicated in ACR’s subtitle, “Marxism and Beyond,” is Burke’s insistence that only this kind of reorientation based on simpler values—a shift that goes beyond a change in economic or political systems—is radical enough to cure current social ills: “I felt that if our ways of living were simple enough for us to be making the correct social choices by simply making the correct physical choices (as projected into their closest mental equivalents), we might then honestly consider ourselves in the way of a real revolution, while anything less thoroughgoing than this would be a mere palliative” (50). Hence Burke hoped that any “immediate revolution of expedients” such as the abolition of capitalism

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would happen quickly so that the “fundamental revolution can begin” (82). See Hawhee, Moving Bodies, for more on Burke’s explorations of bodies, mysticism, and ideology from his earliest writing through CS and into the 1930s. 3. I cite the five “Outline” documents in Folder P9c this way: “Outline [a]” indicates a typed page beginning “Outline: In the body of our text”; “Outline [b]” indicates a handwritten page beginning “Outline Do not start with the instrumental”; “Outline [c]” indicates a handwritten document beginning “Outline: Perhaps have little orientative outlines”; “Outline [d]” indicates a two-page, handwritten document beginning “What the Nineteenth Century left us”; and “Outline [e]” indicates a handwritten document beginning “Outline: Do not formalize” and appearing on the same page with “Procedure.” 4. Hence, Burke admits, “it is not so great a throwing-out as you might think” (“Minimized Ethic” 2). “One points out that the Basic Undeniable Certainty is to be found in the Biological Imperative, the Avoidance of Malnutrition (thou shalt avoid Malnutrition). . . . Then one quickly starts palming off ‘extensions’ of the concept of Malnutrition —and lo!—one is after discovering that there are all sorts of select cultural acquisitions which we must have if we are not to be ‘Undernourished’” (“Outline material [from letter to Watson]” n. pag.). 5. That language never completely disappears: witness Burke’s discussion of simplification as relying on “a standard constitutional demand,” “those elaborate regimens of social diet” (P&C 181). 6. Here Burke references C. K. Ogden and I. A. Richards’s The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (1923), which he repeatedly acknowledges his debt to, as in his discussion of metabiology: “Might we, attempting the sort of translation which Ogden and Richards advocate, suspect that our label of doctrines is much less varied in its essence than it appears on the surface, where it manifests only the shifting symbolizations of history and status?” (234). One other note: Burke’s language here of “glimpsing” the Way while seeking a lost ultimate realm among “shifting,” “surface” “appear[ance]s” disguising a truer “essence” suggests a Platonic idealism, but Burke’s argument in P&C is emphatically secular and his interests cultural and anthropological rather than metaphysical or idealistic. 7. Wess calls this “biological essentialism” (Kenneth Burke 66). Wolfe (“Nature as a Critical Concept”) and Hawhee disagree, the latter arguing, “rather than positing a body made through discourse or—even more nebulous—culture, and rather than viewing the body as a strong, stable rock of certainty, Burke instead followed the Gurdjieffian mystics in figuring the body as a variable gathering of intensities, a site of movement and change” (Moving Bodies 47). 8. As Selzer and I note, this (re)turn to nature and/or the body is relatively common among Depression-era cultural historians (132–40), especially notable in the Southern Agrarian Lyle Lanier’s 1930s claim about humans’ permanent “organic needs”: “The neuromuscular-glandular systems which underlie affective behavior and which operate to energize the individual cannot be excised or fundamentally modified by social patterns” (143). See also Hawhee’s discussion of Burke’s interest in mysticism and the body in Moving Bodies. 9. See Hawhee, Moving Bodies, chapter 1, for a fuller explanation.

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10. Worried that his original discussion of metabiology was reductive, in his second edition prologue Burke foregrounds metabiology’s dialectical nature: “At many points, by a ‘metabiology’ the author seems to have meant that all ‘higher manifestations’ of human culture are to be explained as ‘projections’ of the body in its sheerly physiological nature” (P&C l)—precisely the opposite of the dialectic relationship Burke intended. “A ‘Metabiology,’ ” he continues, “needs the corrective of a concern with social motives as such. Thus, human kinds of domination and subjection must decidedly never be reduced to the strictly ‘natural’ or ‘biological.’ The necessary discount is implicit in this book at many points. But it is not as explicit as the author would now have it” (li). Indeed Crable argues that this very dissatisfaction with metabiology explains why Burke drops the term after P&C in favor of the later motion/action vocabulary. See Wolfe, “Nature as a Critical Concept,” and Crable, “Symbolizing,” for especially helpful readings of metabiology and Burke’s later development of related concepts. 11. Interestingly the models of relationships Burke examines in P&C—causal chains and graded series—are linear representations of relationships between parts and whole and thus necessitate an arbitrary choice of cause or essence. It seems reasonable that the pentad, with its cluster (as opposed to chain) of terms and ratios, was an attempt to resolve this methodological dilemma by theorizing relationships that more nearly resemble those of organs—a system that has no clear beginning or end or essence and, hence, short-circuits any search for a first cause. Such speculation raises the possibility that dramatism may be, in part, an extension of Burke’s metabiologic project. 12. Hence Burke asks, “Is oxygen environmental or internal?” “Are the microscopic creatures in our blood stream separate from us or a part of us? They are members of a ‘civic corporation’ which we call the organism” (233). Writing in 1933–34, Burke here demonstrated remarkable prescience of what is now widely discussed in popular science: relatively few cells of the trillions in the body are actually human cells. 13. Hawhee offers excellent studies of Burke’s use of research on drugs, endocrinology, and constitutional medicine in P&C—much of it drawn, she reports, from Burke’s two fulltime research jobs and his engagement with scientists at the John D. Rockefeller Foundation while he studied, first, criminology for the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Trust and, second, drugs and drug addiction for Col. Arthur Woods at the Bureau of Social Hygiene (Moving Bodies 55). See Thames (“Nature’s Physician”) for Burke’s use of Woodger. 14. Burke’s claim that war is a disease of cooperation indicates, first, that he saw war not as the opposite of cooperation but as its dialectical partner and, second, that enshrining cooperation will not, in and of itself, eliminate war. 15. Richard Thames’s “The Meaning of the Motivorum’s Motto” offers a thorough discussion of Burke’s use of ad bellum purificandum. 16. Indeed the second edition prologue shows Burke’s concern that the original text may wrongly suggest that “pugnacity in human relations is thought of as directly”—as if there is no other source—“deriving from the ‘biological fact’ that the human organism, in its animality, is equipped by brain and muscle for survival in the natural warfare of the jungle” (l). 17. Penn State archival folder P15 “Miscellaneous Articles,” ca. 1935–37, contains an earlier version of “Principles” that Burke apparently abandoned when (according to Burke)

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Cowley pronounced it “outdated” (Burke to Cowley, 13 Jan. 1936). Linguistic similarities between this draft and “My Approach to Communism,” the publication dates of his other satires, and a similar pseudonym suggest the first “Principles” dates from ca. 1933–34. Bernays’s article—“a perfect replica of that old address of mine, with the satire left out”— provided Burke an exigence to revise the original as a pointed attack on Bernays, which Burke hoped to submit to New Republic: “Get[] yourself into a frame of mind,” Burke wrote Cowley, “to welcome 3,000 words of nauseous unction” on public relations and capitalism (13 Jan. 1936). Cowley encouraged Burke to send the essay but warned that for satire to succeed, the satiric motive must be unmistakable to even the dullest readers (15 Jan. 1936). Burke completed the revision, but there is no record he submitted it for publication. If, as Burke says, a satirist “tak[es] conditions that are here already . . . [and] carries them ‘to the end of the line’” (“Why Satire” 318), his quip that Bernays has replicated the satiric “Principles” without the satire suggests just how near the end of the line Burke felt things were in the 1930s, when there was little appreciable distance between factual and satiric worlds. 18. “Approaches” is a typescript of Burke’s speech at the John Reed Club in early 1934 (made, Burke notes, after the fact and submitted for publication to New Masses editor Joshua Kunitz), which was published as “My Approach to Communism” in March.

Three. Enacting the Poetic Orientation 1. I resist Rueckert’s claims that Burke’s summoning of the artist figure is extraordinary in Depression-era criticism. Indeed, as Jack Selzer and I have argued, Burke was only one of many cultural critics who called upon artists to reorient and cure a diseased American culture. And those critics are, themselves, part of a longer American tradition, seen in Emerson and Whitman, of representing the “poet” as a cultural leader or prophet. 2. The famed, evocative phrase the art of living (and the qualifications that it is not a performer’s or specialist’s art) first appeared as a handwritten addition to a draft of “On Interpretation,” which Burke submitted for publication to the literary magazine Plowshare in January 1934 (“On Interpretation” draft 61; folder P5). “On Interpretation” was a revision of an early version of part 1 titled “Range of Piety” and dated October 1933: archival manuscript pages show that Burke had crossed out “Range of Piety” and penciled in “On Interpretation.” 3. The first edition reads Communistic here. 4. Burke’s early explanations of P&C often explicitly linked religion and poetry. Witness his comments to Cowley, for instance: “society[’s] . . . most desirable aspects [are] the poetic or religious aspects” (4 June 1933; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 205); “I have chosen to ally my doctrine with the word ‘religion,’ ” (15 June 1933b); and “art [is] an aspect of religion” (16 June 1933; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 206). Burke’s point in such passages seems to be that art fills the psychological or emotional void created when the scientific orientation displaced the religious one. 5. Prelli, Anderson, and Althouse provide a valuable history of scholarship invoking recalcitrance, showing how rhetoricians’ focus on recalcitrance as resistance fails to capture the term’s complexity. Two early exchanges highlight the epistemological and ontological issues raised by Burkean perspectivism and recalcitrance as well as the difficulty of articulating Burke’s stance on social constructionism. At issue in both debates is the

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existence of an objective reality as the source and judge (via science) of knowledge—a verifiable material source of recalcitrance that limits human interpretations. In 1982 Barry Brummett responded to Earl Croasmun and Richard Cherwitz’s criticism of the crippling relativism borne of social consensus theory and their insistence that truth claims be measured against empirical reality. Brummett argued, instead, that the question of the “real” world’s existence is moot given that human knowledge of it is always mediated. All recalcitrance, according to him, is necessarily, if partially, social. A decade later a similar exchange played out within the rhetoric of science. J. E. McGuire and Trevor Melia (and, later, Thomas Woodward) used Burkean recalcitrance to reject the “radical rhetoric of science” advocated by Alan Gross, who treated scientific texts as rhetorical through and through (298). Although McGuire and Melia acknowledged that most knowledge is socially constructed (and hence can be analyzed rhetorically), they used—or, rather, as Edward Schiappa clarifies in “Burkean Tropes,” misused—Burke to claim that the physical sciences occupy a separate ontological domain and that scientific texts contain objective knowledge (and hence can only be partially explained by rhetorical analysis). 6. A critique of Freudian psychoanalysis that offers Lawrence’s counterargument on human motives and that many critics saw as a guide to the views advanced in his poetry. 7. As indicated by Burke’s notes (“From the chapter ‘Do Things Exist?’”), one source informing Burke’s “new realism” was John Elof Boodin’s A Realistic Universe: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1916), a pragmatic metaphysical treatise that, unlike P&C, maintained the existence and knowability of individual things. Burke wrote, “Cite when talking of Richards and Lawrence” (1) next to a Bergson passage quoted and challenged by Boodin. Burke devoted a section in part 2 to Bergson’s thought but did not cite this passage. Another, more congenial source was the astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington’s The Nature of the Physical World (1929), which, against the background of relativity and quantum mechanics, posits an idealist metaphysics: “the stuff of the world is mind-stuff ” (276). In his notes Burke copied an Eddington passage observing that because relativity severely limits the scope of “true science,” views once dismissed as “unscientific superstition” can now only be rejected as “bad science,” a remark that likely inspired Burke’s claim that Lawrence did bad astronomy (“On Richard [sic]-Lawrence question” n. pag.).

Four. Caught in the Act 1. Witness, for instance, this exchange when Burke proposed three related articles, the first two of which he sent with his letter (“look what I . . . went and done. See the pretty enclosures herewith”—well over twenty pages), which used a literary quarrel between Cowley and Archibald MacLeish to launch a discussion of mechanization, human purpose, and homo poeta (i.e., P&C in a nutshell). After outlining the planned third article, Burke pleaded, “Would you plizz, plizz get me as quick a decision on this MSS as you find convenient?” (22 Sept. 1933). Cowley’s response: “it is absolutely out of the question” for New Republic to print three articles about one of its editors, even if Cowley liked them— which he did not. “So your manuscript comes snapping back like a rubber check” (27 Sept. 1933). “Okeigh, baybay,” Burke shot back. “You’re the Boss and don’t I know it.” Despite (or because of) Cowley’s refusal, Burke enclosed another submission—a “little squib”— which turned out to be the “Men of Leisure” essay (1 Oct. 1933) and which Cowley found no less objectionable: “And back it comes, like a rubber check” (Cowley to Burke, 4 Oct.

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1933). Burke wasted no time in submitting these pieces to James Burham, editor of the Symposium, who published them as one mash-up piece later that month. 2. In recruiting Burke to contribute to the Southern Review in 1935, Robert Penn Warren boasted that he could pay more than most competitors (26 Mar. 1935)—which was 1.5 cents per word for prose (Winchell 95). 3. See Hawhee, Moving Bodies and “Historiography,” and Jack for discussions of how this and Burke’s other ghostwriting and research work shaped his thought. 4. No doubt there is some of that going on in one appendix plan for “playful applications,” including “esthetic speculations, metabiology, interpretations of artistic efficacy (exploitation of dispositions, prejudices, apprehensions, conditionings, judgments, apprehensions, etc.), our project for a play, etc.” with the handwritten addition: “might these items in the appendix be called Improvisations (Metabiological)—Excursions (Esthetic)— Extravaganzas (Fictional)—Archives (Historical), etc.” (“Metabiology” 7). 5. Folder P14d shows that Burke got as far as typing up notes and constructing a numbered outline of fifty subtopics for “Economic Authority,” which included a good deal of psychology. Note, too, how early Burke had been planning P&C’s structure; he had an initial outline formed and revised by April, two months before he formally began drafting. 6. This argument has been advanced by several Burke scholars, including Angus Fletcher, Armin Frank, Paul Jay (“Modernism”), and Tilly Warnock. 7. The notes include typed pages labeled “Approach” and “Arrangement of the book,” a handwritten page on “Approaches to project for lectures,” and several pages of disjointed notes. 8. Burke’s notes demonstrated less confidence in his oral skills and audience accommodation: he planned to “ask permission to take down any questions which I have not been considered to have answered adequately, and to present my case afterwards in writing. For (a) I am not skilled in interviews, and (b) I see the matter so thoroughly in my own terms that I may be slow in readjusting it to the terms of another” (“Approach” n. pag.). 9. A number of MOL passages, including this one, as well as others eventually deleted from the 1933 P&C draft, quickly found their way into print in Burke’s October 1933 Symposium article “War, Response, and Contradiction,” in which he uses the vocationalvacational split as evidence of an inherent biological and psychological contradiction in human responses to external stimuli—in this case a book of war poetry. Burke’s essay responded to a New Republic debate between Malcolm Cowley and Archibald MacLeish about whether the poems idealize—and hence encourage—future wars. (Cowley had rejected this essay [letter to Burke, 27 Sept. 1933].) Burke’s attempt to use the CowleyMacLeish debate as a launch pad into the MOL/P&C material produced a rather disjointed, strained argument. Nevertheless this seldom-discussed essay, which Burke reprinted in PLF alongside classics such as “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle,’ ” is an interesting companion piece to P&C. 10. That, in turn, might encourage Burkeans to follow the lead of scholars of play and games (Brian Sutton-Smith, Ian Bogost, Joshua Daniel-Wariya) who draw upon Burke’s expansive definition of rhetoric. Daniel-Wariya, for instance, theorizes a “ludic rhetoric” by pairing Burke with Dutch anthropologist, linguist, and cultural historian Johan Huizinga, whose Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (1938) Burke cites in LSA. Like Burke, Huizinga decried the modern mechanization displacing humanistic

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cultural orientations. Burke’s redefinition of play and art in MOL bears a certain symmetry to Huizinga’s claim that it is through “playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and the world” (46). 11. Pearce, for example, sent Burke information on C. K. Ogden (10 Apr. 33; 21 Sept. 1933) and tried to arrange a meeting when Burke wrote his New Republic essay “The Meaning of C. K. Ogden” (16 Aug. 1933). Later Pearce employed Burke to review or edit manuscripts for Harcourt (2 Dec. 1933) and passed on a freelance-editing job (4 Oct. 1934). 12. The correspondence contains no record of Harcourt’s rejection, but within a month Burke had submitted ACR to Hound and Horn, which also rejected it in short order. 13. Frugal living and a large garden equipped the Burkes to weather the Depression; nevertheless Burke worried constantly about money, as he confessed to Cowley: “my concern with forebodings of poverty has come close to the neurotic. . . . I have been wormlike, even in good years tormented by a constant feeling that it ‘would not last’” (27 June 1933a). 14. Cuff reports only 7 copies of CS and 10 of TBL had sold from June to December 1933—insufficient demand to continue publication. Per Burke’s contract Harcourt offered him plates of CS at half price ($200) and remaining copies of books (440 of CS and 175 of TBL) at 62.5 cents each. Arrangements for purchase and transfer of some books dragged on until April (Pearce to Burke, 9 Apr. 1934); copies of TBL were remaindered at Bank Street Surplus Book Mart (Pearce to Burke, 28 Dec. 1934)—just down the road from Burke’s city residence. 15. Cowley’s portrait of Burke in the “Apprentices of the Arts” chapter as a pimply, isolated teen wasting his talent was hurtful rather than scandalous; as Selzer and I note, however, Burke was livid at his best friend’s seeming betrayal (245n18). An excerpted version of Burke’s 9 June 1934 letter appears in Paul Jay’s Selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke and Malcolm Cowley; this particular passage is not included. 16. This is the last recorded exchange between them until the end of September, when Pearce wrote to inquire if, as he had heard from their mutual friend Matthew Josephson, Burke had made final arrangements for publishing P&C (24 Sept. 1934). But their letters and friendship continued long after. 17. In 1935 Lindeman himself had three titles in the Dollar Series, including his groundbreaking The Meaning of Adult Education (1926), already in a third edition. 18. The cover price would, indeed, have been a bargain at the time—about one-third to one-half the cost of many serious books. The New Republic’s 1935 “Check List of Spring Books,” for instance, shows that Selected Poems of Marianne Moore, Faulkner’s novel Pylon, Young Joseph by Thomas Mann, and Call It Sleep by Henry Roth all cost $2.50 (253). The most recent books by Burke’s two best friends—Cowley’s Exile’s Return and Josephson’s Robber Barons—both sold for $3.00. 19. This draft was shelved in a sealed package labeled “final P&C”; however it is not the final draft, nor does it include part 1, because, as Burke explained to Watson, he used the Plowshare “On Interpretation” rather than retyping the whole first section (6 July 1934). 20. My searches of rare bookstore sites have not revealed any jacketed copies. ATH was also bound in Permatex. 21. This is the “Q2” draft from the Burke-3 acquisition, described in the Burke Papers inventory as “‘Copy P&C’. Typescripts of drafts somewhat revised.” It appears to be a

242 Notes to Pages 159–174 revision of the May 1934 manuscript housed at Andover, so it does not include part 1, “On Interpretation.” 22. Burke told Waldo Frank an overview of P&C’s argument was vital to help readers navigate what he called a “forbidding and cumbersome” first section (19 Sept. 1934), and I personally relied heavily on the current edition’s section headnotes as anchors for years. 23. By comparison Burke sold 344 copies of TBL in the first quarter, earning about eighty-five dollars in royalties (Pearce to Burke, 2 Mar. 1932). 24. My thanks to Michelle Iten and Charlotte Hogg for their insight on these points.

Five. Archival Recalcitrance 1. A number of scholars have contributed to the effort to articulate clearly Burke’s relationship to Marxism, communism, or the Communist Party, pointing to his resistance to orthodoxy, his insistence on rhetorically based arguments for social change, his assertions that communism is a necessary but insufficient means to the end of cultural reorientation, and his support of communism for primarily aesthetic reasons. See studies by Aaron, Abbott, Aune, Burks, George and Selzer, G. Jay, Lentricchia, Sheriff Wander, and Wess (Kenneth Burke). 2. Thanks to Edward Schiappa and Mary F. Keehner’s Communication Studies article, “The ‘Lost’ Passages of Permanence and Change,” readers without access to the first edition text can read the most significant parts of Burke’s 1935 argument for communism. 3. The other two extra paragraphs contain an extended quote from Marx (on the inevitable development of “human powers” and “freedom” afforded by communism) followed, characteristically, by a paragraph of Burkean rebuttal. Burke could not let Marx have the last word. 4. Archival recalcitrance abounds here too. Comparing Burke’s prefaces and forewords is simultaneously suggestive and inconclusive. The May 1934 Andover draft included a two-page preface that plainly labeled his rhetoric communistic, but a November 1934 preface made no mention whatsoever of communism, dwelling instead on the formative influence of Ogden and Richards’s Meaning of Meaning on Burke’s thought. Communism went in, and communism came out. Who knows what his introduction to P&C—the one that was cut for space reasons—might have said. Burke’s working files contain two other, much longer and very similar forewords, one of which barely mentioned communism while the other included the brief but unambiguous claim that a communist “framework” will “give people a fresh grip upon their cooperative habits . . . and it is sternly needed” (“Foreword [b]” 3); however, since neither foreword was dated, it is hard to determine if they were drafts of that deleted introduction or part of some other chronology. 5. Also at work on Cowley’s case was the “cadre of Communist hunters” on the state legislature’s Canwell Committee—the local equivalent of the Dies Committee—who were instrumental in firing three University of Washington professors and putting three others on probation, maintaining that the presence of Communist Party members (or alleged members) in the classroom violated students’ academic freedom. Three of the six were English department faculty. This episode helped fuel nationwide red-baiting campaigns driven, in part, by Burke’s 1930s nemesis Sidney Hook, whose 1949 New York Times, Saturday Evening Post, and Commonweal editorials assured readers that Communist Party members adhered absolutely to a rigid party line—even in the classroom (E. Alexander 21).

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6. Actually this was Heilman’s second invitation to Burke: he had written in fall 1950, offering Burke a temporary appointment for winter or spring quarter 1951 to fill in for a faculty member doing a Fulbright in France (11 Oct. 1950). Burke declined, determined to stay in Andover to write. Heilman expressed the department’s disappointment over his refusal in a letter to Cowley but planned to keep working on him through their mutual friend, William Carlos Williams (28 Oct. 1950; Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 231). Williams, himself at Washington delivering a week of lectures, did indeed work on Burke, ordering him not to “be so god damned coy.” The department, Williams assured Burke, was tremendously excited to have him come teach. “I wouldn’t be a professor for anything on this earth but since you are one, come on out and profess. They need you” (24 Oct. 1950; East 145–46). 7. Burke was absolutely right about Heilman’s “good letters.” When Heilman got Schmitz’s letter announcing the withdrawal of the recommendation for Burke’s appointment, he wrote a long, blistering reply, asking for a formal inquiry to force the administration to declare its reasons for deeming Burke unsuitable. He assured Schmitz that of all the faculty he had invited to campus, Burke was “the most distinguished” (18 Sept. 1952; Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 261). In a particularly stirring letter, he further insisted that, in troubled times, the university should play a leading role in “the substitution of understanding for unfounded fear, and the confrontation of suspicion by facts and truth” (264). And whereas Schmitz had suggested that his decision to block Burke’s appointment reflected his concern for the good of the community, Heilman argued, “We cannot believe that the State will applaud us if by our actions in this case we win a national reputation for being uninformed, fearful, and prejudiced” (264). Indeed, he remarked, “the one way we can really ‘belittle’ the people of the state is to regard them as so sunken in irrational fears that all we can do is soothe them . . . and protect them against our most gifted thinkers” (262). Privately Heilman’s frustration with Schmitz boiled over in a letter to his close friend Cleanth Brooks: he complained that he had spent much of the fall quarter arguing with the university’s “idiot-boy president” about whether Burke was a “Kremlin agent” and whether he could be trusted teaching graduate students for two months “without subverting the whole damn state of Washington” (17 Nov. 1952; Alexander, Dunn, and Jaussen 266). 8. Tellingly the Union-Bulletin article was flanked by two reports on communist activity abroad: one about an apparent power struggle in the Kremlin and another about a French victory over the communist Viet Minh forces in the French-Indochina War. 9. In this letter Cowley also reported that their lost jobs had gone to their longtime friends the Tates. Caroline Tate got the University of Washington job initially offered to Burke, and Allen Tate got Cowley’s Minnesota job. But Cowley hastened to note that even the Tates, somewhat protected by being Catholics, were coming under fire: Caroline lost her job at an unnamed Catholic college “for being too outspoken,” and Allen “fight[s] against Catholic censorship . . . and for books that the hierarchy would like to suppress” (29 Apr. 1953). 10. I particularly emphasize Mildred’s role because she was the driving force at Hermes —she contacted Burke; she owned and ran the business—and because the Ligdas divorced in April 1954. 11. The Ligdas already owned printing equipment and released texts under a Palopress Printers/ Publishers imprint; it is the Hermes imprint that seems to have been developed

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as something of a Burke “brand.” Ted Ligda was, by all accounts, an experienced, wellrespected typographer and linotype operator (P. Ligda). 12. For instance one year after the Hermes P&C was released, Noonday Press proposed to buy reprint rights for a paperback edition of P&C with a print run of ten thousand copies (Dwight Webb to Hermes Publishing, 23 Feb. 1955), which might have done more to increase the book’s circulation than the more expensive Hermes edition; then again the timing of the offer suggests that P&C might not even have been on Noonday’s radar if not for the Hermes reprint. (To Burke’s disappointment, Ligda ultimately rejected Noonday’s offer.) 13. According to Penn State archivist Jeannette Sabre, Ligda and Burke’s working relationship deteriorated in later years. Until 14 February 1968 (nearly twenty-five years after Hermes began publishing Burke’s work), they had no official contracts for the Hermes editions of CS, P&C, and ATH, relying instead on a verbal gentleman’s agreement. In 1968 Ligda encouraged Burke to sign legally binding contracts to protect him financially and to enable Hermes to contract with the University of California Press to reprint CS; however Ligda never signed the California contract, even though she repeatedly said she would (Ligda to Burke, 22 Feb. 1968; Burke to Robert Zachary [University of California Press], 2 Mar. 1968; Burke to Ligda, 13 May 1968; Burke to Ligda, 18 June 1968 [unsent]; Burke to Zachary, 18 June 1968; Burke to Zachary, 24 June 1968; Burke to Zachary, 21 Nov. 1968). It was not until after her death that her son Alan Ligda signed over sole proprietorship of CS, P&C, and ATH to Burke in 1979, clearing the way for California to publish the third edition of P&C in 1984 (Zachary to Burke, 7 June 1979). 14. Ligda is most clearly remembered by her family as a successful, even compulsive, real-estate speculator—what today we might call a “flipper” (P. Ligda). 15. It is unclear whether or not the Ligdas purchased this business. 16. Within a month of the Burkes’ arrival in California, Burke reported to Cowley that Hermes had finished typesetting CS and had starting plating and that he planned to begin P&C revisions the next week (16 Jan. 1953; P. Jay, Selected Correspondence 314).

Six. Finding the Time for Burke 1. Representing Burke ahead of his time also betrays simplistic assumptions that criticism between the wars consisted largely of lockstep thinking when only he marched to the beat of his own drum. However Burke was only one of many independent, highly sophisticated critics who wrote (as, for instance, Van Wyck Brooks, William Carlos Williams, and Lewis Mumford did) postmodern ethics or revisionist histories or analyzed the cultural construction of subjectivity; in The Public and Its Problems, John Dewey even analyzed symbols and ideology in ways strikingly similar to (and earlier than) Burke’s. The ways in which we think of Burke as ahead of his time might be the very ways that clearly mark him as deeply immersed in it. 2. This article was, itself, Burke’s intervention in a “battle” in the New Republic between Malcolm Cowley and Archibald MacLeish over representations of war in The First World War, a poetry collection. 3. For a detailed account of Burke’s relationship with Tate, see George and Selzer. 4. The February 1934 publication of “On Interpretation” in the Plowshare: A Literary Periodical of One-Man Exhibits had already created significant buzz around P&C. In early

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December 1933, Burke had received a serendipitous invitation from Ernest Brace, coeditor of the Plowshare, to submit something to the newly relaunched magazine. Since the editors planned a January release, they needed his answer—and his manuscript— immediately. What they could offer (in addition to a modest stipend of twenty-five dollars) was an extended solo act (Brace to Burke, 4 Dec. 1933). It was a perfect opportunity for Burke: he had a draft to hand and would not have to cut his seventy-five-page manuscript to fit a normal journal length. He submitted part 1 of P&C, “On Interpretation,” to coeditor Henry Robinson on 1 January 1934, and the essay appeared the next month. Eager to capitalize on this opportunity, Burke apparently sent an address list of readers who should receive copies of the Plowshare, including local friends, colleagues, and potential reviewers from the East Coast literary world—Gorham Munson, James Burnham, John Chamberlain, William Knickerbocker, Lewis Mumford, Edmund Wilson—and international luminaries I. A. Richards, C. K. Ogden, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and Bertrand Russell (Pearce to Burke, 9 Jan. 1934). The editors were delighted with Burke’s essay (Robinson to Burke, 6 Feb. 1934), which sold out when Edgar Johnson’s glowing New Republic review appeared in September 1934. Mebane reported that four readers (mistakenly) ordered copies of Plowshare after reading Johnson’s review (14 Sept. 1934). Jim Daly, a lifelong friend, first introduced himself by asking if Burke would sell him a copy of the out-of-print issue or, better still, if Burke might have the essay republished. “I have several friends here who would like to have it,” Daly wrote, “and that must be true of others, here and in other cities. It seems a pity we should all be deprived of it because too few copies of that issue of The Plowshare were printed” (29 Sept. 1934). 5. I have included two reviews of “On Interpretation.” 6. We can only speculate about why these reviews did not surface earlier. Reviews in local publications and those in short-lived larger publications (such as New Democracy) quickly disappeared from view. The absence of Chamberlain’s New York Times review is harder to explain, but possibly earlier scholars assumed that the Times and the Times Book Review would not both run reviews. 7. To Burke’s disappointment, the New Republic ran no review, probably due to a policy forbidding the magazine to carry reviews of books published by its own press (letter to Cowley, 27 Oct. 1934). 8. The American Review had a self-proclaimed fascist publisher; oddly the 1935 index is dominated by Agrarian issues and contributors such as Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren, Cleanth Brooks, and Donald Davidson. Austin Warren wrote the AR review. 9. Burke, who began reviewing for Poetry in late 1934, asked editor Morton Zabel to commission a review of P&C: “It is essentially a work on social psychology, or ethics, but its concern with such subjects as meaning, symbolism, ritual, perspective, and its plea for a philosophy having homo poeticus as the key concept, might make it a candidate for treatment in your magazine” (3 Nov. 1934). Zabel selected Harold Rosenberg, who had reviewed Counter-Statement rather critically but whom Burke had warmed to after the Writers’ Congress (Skodnick 16). Burke thanked Zabel “for entrusting the book to a man whose keenness is considerable” (1 May 1935). 10. An Edgar Johnson review of “On Interpretation” sent to Burke by his editor Daniel Mebane with the comment: “Herewith copy of interesting review clipped from Reader’s News, published in Hollywood” (19 Dec. 1935).

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11. The folder contains only a typed excerpt from the Daily Cardinal review—probably one of several Burke was compiling for an ad to announce the book’s second printing (KB to Daniel Mebane, 24 Apr. 1936). It also contains a retyped copy of a complete but unidentified review. 12. As coeditor of the aesthetically conservative Hound and Horn magazine, Blackmur had published chapters of what eventually became Towards a Better Life; Burke and Blackmur had known and respected each other since the late 1920s. 13. Selzer and I argue that the known reviews indicate that P&C was well received (but see Wolin for a counter-reading). Since eight of the nine new reviews are also positive, the percentage of favorable reviews increases dramatically. 14. Krutch, an editor at the Nation, had originally assigned the P&C review to Abel, but not having read the book himself, he, in an extraordinary move, sent Abel’s review to Burke, asking for a “frank” opinion (25 Jan. 1935). Burke drafted a “frank” reply on the back of Krutch’s letter: “I think it’s lousy.” Krutch wrote Burke that he had asked Abel to “try again” (30 Jan. 1935), but when he still was not satisfied, he wrote the review himself, leaving Abel to publish his piece in Modern Monthly. Krutch later wrote Burke that he did not think his review “is terribly good, but at least I think it more understandable than Abel’s” (2 Apr. 1935). Burke agreed with the first part—he immediately penned a rebuttal, only to be told that the Nation printed author’s replies only in cases of “demonstrable errors of fact” (16 Apr. 1935). Henry Hazlitt, an economist and libertarian philosopher, wrote numerous books and contributed to such publications as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. 15. Waylett sent his review to the New Republic editors (WW to New Republic, 25 May 1935), who then forwarded it to Burke. 16. Cowley, however, called Burke’s communism “mild” (letter to Matthew Josephson, 1 Feb. 1934). 17. Chamberlain was, with Burke, a regular in New York City leftist literary circles. The two corresponded, and Chamberlain occasionally spent weekends at Burke’s house in Andover. 18. Though not an official Communist Party organ, the New Masses, with its emphasis on radical proletarian literature, was associated with party orthodoxy and, in Burke’s mind, simplistic criticism. 19. Modern Monthly was edited by the dissident Marxist V. F. Calverton and took an anti-Stalinist stance. 20. Louis Wirth was a University of Chicago social scientist and coeditor of the American Journal of Sociology. Eliot, whose review appeared in American Sociological Review, was another Chicago School sociologist, who befriended Burke during his summer of 1938 teaching stint at the University of Chicago; Lee, then a graduate student at Chicago, also met Burke that summer. 21. Two years earlier Warren had written a long, sympathetic article about CounterStatement and Towards a Better Life for the Sewanee Review; that article established a relationship of mutual interest and respect between the two writers. 22. Blackmur, however, admired Burke for this very reason, insisting that any approach was “provisional and tentative and highly selective. . . . No observation . . . ever tells the whole story” (378).

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23. This is not to say, however, that no misreading went on. It did, of course. Most puzzling is Rosenberg’s Poetry review, which launched a seemingly irrelevant critique of modernist poetry and which, as Wolin notes, “turns Burke inside out” (89), somehow concluding that not communism but science “promotes coöperation and thus turns society towards conditions favorable to poetry” (348). 24. In 1908 Dummer founded the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, later the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration. 25. Burke’s correspondence files are littered with invitations to speak.

Conclusion 1. As Elizabeth Weiser, Janet Zepernick, and I argue in Women and Rhetoric between the Wars, many women during the interwar period wrote profound rhetorical theories in genres or forms not traditionally recognized as theory per se. See also my “Mr. Burke, Meet Helen Keller.” 2. Lyon reads P&C strangely, claiming that Burke “defin[es] relationships common to the rhetorical tradition in terms that minimized the interaction between individual and society”—the very thing that Hugh Dalziel Duncan says Burke highlights—and “emphasiz[es] the rhetor’s power and aggression” (279). 3. Michael Halloran argues, “One cannot simply graft modern rhetorical theory onto classical rhetoric as some writers have tried to do. For one thing, the guest is not entirely compatible with the host; for another, the host is ailing if indeed alive” (“Tradition and Theory” 241). Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede counter that such claims are typically based on a simplistic understanding of classical rhetoric as overly rational and agonistic and of classical cultural as monolithic. Others such as Jim Corder suggest that we will not have a new rhetoric until human nature radically changes. Interestingly theorists and scholars who most strenuously insist that New Rhetoric departs from the classical tradition (Richards; Booth, Modern Dogma; Young, Becker, and Pike; Halloran; Ehninger, “On Rhetoric,” “Syntoptic View”) overwhelmingly represent the latter as Aristotelian or Ciceronian. A growing number of scholars, however (Michael Hassett, Michael Leff, Bruce McComiskey), trace similarities between New Rhetoricians and the ancient Sophists and, hence, label Burke a neosophist for embracing “the sophistic rejection of philosophy” (Hassett 376) and for understanding “knowledge [as] a rhetorical construct” (Leff 82). 4. These echoes also, by the way, call into question Crusius’s assertion that “Burke’s turn to philosophy was also a turn to language decades before anyone could speak of a linguistic turn in contemporary philosophy generally” (458). Reading Langer’s discussion in light of Burke’s and Crusius’s analyses, it is easy to see why Lyon positions Langer at the leading edge of New Rhetoric and why she rightly complains about Langer’s omission from the rhetorical canon. 5. Of course not all scholars welcomed such claims of rhetoric’s ubiquity. For instance, writing in 1953, Donald C. Bryant, then associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, worried that an overly expansive definition of rhetoric would render the term meaningless, and he lobbied for setting some “practical” limits lest “we are driven to claim practically all interhuman activity as the field of rhetoric” (405)—which, of course, is precisely what Burke and other New Rhetoricians had in mind.

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6. My review of twenty-first-century critical pedagogies, however, reveals that as educators responded to feminist and poststructuralist understandings of power and intersectionality and as they strove to adapt approaches better suited to American student populations, their critical pedagogies became less dominated by Freire, relied less on orthodox Marxist readings of culture, often resisted traditional assumptions that critical pedagogy should lead students to direct political action, and in general included a wide range of approaches, goals, and activities as instructors worked within particular institutional constraints to address local student audiences.

Wo r k s C i t e d Manuscript Collections The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Kenneth Burke Papers. Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries, State College. Malcolm Cowley Papers. Midwest Manuscript Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago. Waldo Frank Papers. Van Pelt Library, University of Pennsylvania. Horace Gregory Papers. Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Libraries. Matthew Josephson Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Southern Review Papers. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Allen Tate Papers. Manuscript Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Morton Dauwen Zabel Papers. Joseph Regenstein Library, University of Chicago.

Unpublished Manuscripts Unless otherwise indicated, all Kenneth Burke’s unpublished book notes and manuscripts listed here come from the Kenneth Burke Papers, 6369, Series Burke 3 (1915–1969), Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries. “Approach.” n.d. [1933]. n.pag. TS. Folder P14e. “Approaches to project for lecture.” n.d.[1933]. n.pag. MS. Folder P14e. “Approaches to Communism.” 1934. 27pp. TS. Folder P27. “Arrangement of the book.” n.d. N. pag. TS. Folder P14e. “Attendant Conditioning.” n.d. N. pag. TS. Folder P9c. “The Basis of Simplification [Andover draft].” May 1934. 104 pp. TS. Kenneth Burke Homestead, Andover, NJ. “Disposition of the Arts” [numbered outline and notes]. n.d. N.pag. TM. Folder P31. “Foreword [a].” n.d. 9 pp. TS. Folder P9e. “Foreword [b].” n.d. 9 pp. TS. Folder P9e. “Foreword [Andover draft].” May 1934. 2 pp. TS. Kenneth Burke Homestead, Andover, NJ. “From the chapter ‘Do Things Exist’ in John Elof Boodin’s ‘A Realistic Universe.’ ” n.d. 3 pp. TS. Folder P5. “The Living Rock—a ‘System of Metabiology.’ ” n.d. N.pag. TS. Folder P14f. “Meaning and Cure” [numbered outline and notes]. n.d. N.pag. MS & TS. Folder P9f. “Men of Leisure.” 1933. 8 pp. TS. Folder P14e. “Metabiology.” n.d. 7 pp. TS. Folder P9c. “Metabiology, Outline for a Minimized Ethic.” n.d. 3 pp. TS. Folder P9c. 249

250

Works Cited

“The New State.” Kenneth Burke to James Abell, letter enclosure, 7 April 1933. Series Burke 2. “On Richard [sic]- Lawrence question: A.S. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World.” n.d. N.pag. TS. Folder P5. “Outline [a]” [“In the body of our text”]. n.d. N.pag. TS. Folder P9c. “Outline [c]” [“Perhaps have little orientative outlines”] n.d. N.pag. MS. Folder P9c. “Outline [e]” [“Do not formalize”]. n.d. N.pag. MS. Folder p9c. “Outline of Main Theses in P&C.” n.d. N.page. TS. Folder P15. “Outline material [from letter to Watson].” n.d. N.pag. TS. Folder P9.5a. “Perhaps for device quote: Matthew 16:18” [Latin & Greek transcriptions]. n.d. N.pag. Folder P9c. “Perspective by Incongruity [Andover draft].” May 1934. 115 pp. TS. Kenneth Burke Homestead, Andover, NJ. “Perspectives by incongruity” [numbered outline]. n.d. 4 pp. TS. Folder P9d. “Place in a general social schema.” n.d. 1 p. TS. Folder P9c. “Principles of Wise Spending [a].” n.d. [ca. 1933–34]. TS. Folder P15. “Principles of Wise Spending [b].” n.d. [ca. 1936]. TS. Folder P15. “Procedure” [“quote Nietzsche on ‘perspective’”]. n.d. N. pag. TS. Folder P9c. “The Range of Piety.” Oct. 1933. 75pp. TS. Folder P9a. “Religious and Poetic Piety.” n.d. 64pp. TS. Folder P37. “Religious and Poetic Piety” [numbered outline]. n.d. 3 pp. TS. Folder P37. “Schema.” n.d. N.pag. TS. Folder P9c. “Strachey: of fascists.” n.d. N.pag. TS. Folder P9.5a. “When a nation.” n.d. [1933]. N.pag. TS. Folder P14e.

Primary and Secondary Works Aaron, Daniel. Writers on the Left: Episodes in American Literary Communism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1961. Abbott, Don Paul. “Marxist Influences on the Rhetorical Theory of Kenneth Burke.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 7, no. 4 (1974): 217–33. Abel, Lionel. Rev. of Permanence and Change, by Kenneth Burke. Modern Monthly n.d.: 187–89. Agar, Herbert, and Allen Tate, eds. Who Owns America? A New Declaration of Independence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1936. Alexander, Edward. Introduction to Robert B. Heilman: His Life in Letters. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. 3–53. Alexander, Edward, Richard J. Dunn, and Paul Jaussen, eds. Robert B. Heilman: His Life in Letters. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009. Anderson, Dana, and Jessica Enoch, eds. Burke in the Archives: Using the Past to Transform the Future of Burkean Studies. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2013. Anderson, Virginia. “Confrontational Teaching and Rhetorical Practice.” College Composition and Communication 48, no. 2 (1997): 197–214. “Appointment Blocked by Dr. Schmitz.” Walla Walla (Wash.) Union-Bulletin, 10 Nov. 1952. Aune, James A. “Burke’s Palimpsest: Rereading Permanence and Change.” Communication Studies 42, no. 3 (1991): 234–37.

Works Cited 251 Bates, Ernest S. “A Spendthrift with Idea.” Rev. of Permanence and Change, by Kenneth Burke. New York Herald Tribune Books, 12 May 1935, 8. Bernays, Edward L. “How to Restore Public Confidence in Business and Finance.” Economic Forum 3, no. 3 (1936): 273–83. ———. Propaganda. New York: Liveright, 1928. Bentham, Jeremy. “A Table of the Springs of Action.” The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 1. Ed. John Bowring. Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843. 195–219. Biesecker, Barbara. “Of Historicity, Rhetoric: The Archive as Scene of Invention.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 9.1 (2006): 124–31. Blackmur, R. P. “A Critic’s Job of Work.” 1935. Language as Gesture: Essays in Poetry. New York: Harcourt, 1952. 372–99. Blankenship, Jane, Edward Murphy, and Marie Rosenwasser. “Pivotal Terms in the Early Works of Kenneth Burke.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 7.1 (1974): 1–24. Bliven, Bruce. “The Second World War.” New Republic 9 Mar. 1932: 92–94. Bokser, Julie A. “Reading and Writing Sor Juana’s Arch: Rhetorics of Belonging, Criollo Identity, and Feminist Histories.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42.2 (2012): 144–63. Booth, Wayne. Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. ———. Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Borchard, Edwin. “No Economic Boycott.” Nation 23 Mar. 1932: 332–33. Bostdorff, Denise M. “Making Light of James Watt: A Burkean Approach to the Form an Attitude of Political Cartoons.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73.1 (1987): 43–59. “Boycott Leads to War.” New Republic 2 Mar. 1932: 58–59. Bradley, Harriet. “The Seductions of the Archive: Voices Lost and Found.” History of the Human Sciences 12.2 (1999): 107–22. Brummett, Barry. “Introduction.” Landmark Essays on Kenneth Burke. Davis: Hermagoras, 1993. xi–xix. ———. “On to Rhetorical Relativism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68.4 (1982): 425–37. Bryant, Donald C. “Rhetoric: Its Functions and Its Scope.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 39.4 (1953): 401–24. Buchanan, Lindal. “Making Fortunate Connections.” Ramsey et al. 253–55. Burke, Anthony, and Kenneth Burke. “Inventory for the Kenneth Burke Papers, Third Collection, 1915–1969.” n.d. 17 pp. The Kenneth Burke Papers, 6369, Special Collections Library, Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes toward History. 1937. Berkley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. “Auscultation, Creation, and Revision: The Rout of the Esthetes, or, Literature, Marxism, and Beyond.” Extensions of the Burkeian System. Ed. James W. Chesebro. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993. 43–172. ———. “Boring from Within.” New Republic 4 Feb. 1931: 326–29. ———. Counter-Statement. 1931. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. ———. “Embargo.” Direction 2.7 (1939): 2. ———. “For Bond Money.” New Republic 4 Jan. 1933: 218–19 (under the name Ethel Howardell). ———. “From Time to Time.” Hermes Scroll no. 7. Los Altos: Hermes, 1953.

252 Works Cited ———. A Grammar of Motives. 1945. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. ———. “Intelligence as a Good.” Rev. of The Quest for Certainty, by John Dewey. New Republic 3 Sept. 1930: 77–79. ———. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature, and Method. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. ———. “Linguistic Approaches to Education.” Humanistic Critique of Education: Teaching and Learning as Symbolic Action. Ed. Peter M. Smudde. West Lafayette: Parlor, 2010. 3–41. ———. “Literature as Equipment for Living.” Direction 1.4 (1938): 10–13. ———. “Lullaby—for Oneself as Adult Male.” New Republic 27 May 1936: 71. ———. “My Approach to Communism.” New Masses 10 Mar. 1934: 16, 18–20. ———. “The Nature of Art under Capitalism.” Nation 13 Dec. 1933: 675–77. ———. “On Dialectic.” American Teacher 24 (1939): 26–27. Rpt. in Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. 443–47. ———. “On Interpretation.” Plowshare: A Literary Periodical of One-Man Exhibits 10.1 (1934): 3–79. ———. “On Persuasion, Identification, and Dialectical Symmetry.” Ed. James Zappen. Philosophy and Rhetoric 39.4 (2006): 333–39. ———. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. 1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. ———. The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. ———. “Poets All.” Rev. of Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, by C. K. Ogden. Nation 18 Jan. 1933: 70. ———. “Preserving Capitalism.” New Republic 22 Feb. 1933: 49 (under the name Walter S. Hankel). ———. “Reading while You Run: An Exercise in Translation from English to English.” New Republic 17 Nov. 1937: 36–37. ———. “Revolutionary Symbolism in America.” The First American Writers’ Congress. Ed. Henry Hart. New York: International Publishers, 1935: 87–94. ———. “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle.’ ” Southern Review 5.1 (1939): 1–21. ———. A Rhetoric of Motives. 1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969. ———. Towards a Better Life, Being a Series of Epistles or Declamations. 1932. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966. ———. “Uneasy Thought of Peace.” New Republic 27 May 1936: 71. ———. “War, Response, and Contradiction.” Symposium: A Critical Review 4.4 (1933): 458–82. Rpt. in The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action. 1941. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. 234–57. ———. “Waste—the Future of Prosperity.” New Republic 16 July 1930: 228–31. ———. “Why Satire, with a Plan for Writing One.” Michigan Quarterly Review 13.4 (1974): 307–37. Burks, Don M. “Kenneth Burke: The Argo-Bohemian ‘Marxoid.’ ” Communication Studies 42.3 (1991): 219–33.

Works Cited 253 Burton, Antoinette, ed. Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Carmichael, Thomas. “Screening Symbolicity: Kenneth Burke and Contemporary Theory.” Unending Conversations: New Writings by and about Kenneth Burke. Eds. Greig Henderson and David Cratis Williams. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001. 143–53. Carter, Michael F. “The Ritual Functions of Epideictic Rhetoric: The Case of Socrates’ Funeral Oration.” Rhetorica 9 (1991): 209–32. The Century: America’s Time. Vol. 2: The ’30s. Narr. Peter Jennings. ABC News/The History Channel. 1999. Videocassette. Chamberlain, John. “Book of the Times.” Rev. of Permanence and Change, by Kenneth Burke. New York Times 15 Feb. 1935: 17. “A Check List of Spring Books.” New Republic 10 Apr. 1935: 253. Clark, Gregory. “Aesthetic Power and Rhetorical Experience.” Kenneth Burke and His Circles. Ed. Jack Selzer and Robert Wess. West Lafayette: Parlor, 2008. 96–108. ———. “‘A Child Born of the Land’: The Rhetorical Aesthetic of Hawaiian Song.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 42.3 (2012): 251–70. ———. Civic Jazz: American Music and Kenneth Burke on the Art of Getting Along. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. ———. Rhetorical Landscapes in America: Variations on a Theme from Kenneth Burke. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004. Condit, Celeste M. “The Function of Epideictic: The Boston Massacre Orations as Exemplar.” Communication Quarterly 33.4 (1985): 284–98. Conklin, Groff. “The Science of Symbology.” Rev. of Attitudes toward History, by Kenneth Burke. New Masses 10 Aug. 1937: 25–26. Corder, Jim. “On the Way, Perhaps, to a New Rhetoric, but Not There Yet, and If We Do Get There, There Won’t Be There Anymore.” College English 47.2 (1985): 162–70. Corey, Lewis. The Decline of American Capitalism. New York: Covici-Friede, 1934. Crowley, Malcolm. The Dream of the Golden Mountains: Remembering the 1930s. 1964. New York: Viking, 1980. ———. Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s. London: Bodley Head, 1934. Crable, Bryan. “Ideology as ‘Metabiology’: Rereading Burke’s Permanence and Change.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 84.3 (1998): 303–19. ———. “Symbolizing Motion: Burke’s Dialectic and Rhetoric of the Body.” Rhetoric Review 22.2 (2003): 121–37. Croasman, Earl, and Richard A. Cherwitz. “Beyond Rhetorical Relativism.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 68.1 (1982): 1–16. Crusius, Timothy W. “The Question of Kenneth Burke’s Identity: And Permanence and Change.” JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory 18.3 (1998): 449–61. Daniel-Wariya, Joshua. “Ludic Rhetoric and the Language of Play.” Unpublished diss., Texas Christian University, 2014. Dell, Robert. “Hitler over Europe.” Nation 3 May 1933: 497–98. Demo, Anne Teresa. “The Guerrilla Girls’ Comic Politics of Subversion.” Women’s Studies in Communication 23.2 (2000): 133–56.

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Index Italic page numbers indicate illustrations. Aaron, Daniel, 169, 171 Abel, Lionel, 195, 197, 198, 199, 246n14 Abell, James, 1 Accent, 183 Adler, Alfred, 49 agency: Giroux on, 221; and perspective by incongruity, 52; and poetic orientation, 95, 96, 103, 109; and poststructuralism, 205; and purpose, 68, 77 Alexander, Edward, 174 Alice in Wonderland (Carroll), 138 Allen & Unwin, 160 Althouse, Matthew, 112, 114, 117, 118, 238–39n5 ambition, cultural attitudes toward, 232n5 American Association for Adult Education, 143 American Dream, 4, 15 American Journal of Sociology, 195, 246n20 American Recreation Association, 143 American Review, 195, 245n8 American Sociological Review, 246n20 American Teacher, 122 American work ethic, 148 analogy, 43, 48 anarchist rhetoric, 234n22 Anderson, Dana, 21, 23 Anderson, Floyd, 112, 114, 117, 118, 238–39n5 Anderson, Virginia, 222 Andover, New Jersey farm: and Burke’s Andover draft of P&C, 167, 168, 171–72, 242n4; Burke’s papers in, 20, 158; Burke’s summering at, 6–7; Chamberlain’s visits to, 246n17; George’s visit to, 130; Pearce’s planned visits to, 153 antifoundational ethics, defining of, 12

archival interventions: archives as equipment for criticism, 17–24; and Burke’s position on communism, 164–65; and Burke’s publication of P&C, 25, 127, 152–61; and Burke’s writing process, 132–34; and knowledge, 128, 188–89; and “Men of Leisure,” 143, 145–52; and perspective by incongruity, 127; and representation of Burke, 127–28, 162–63; and rhetorical power of archival researchers, 3; and serendipity, 18, 21–24; and strategic contemplation, 18–19; and theory of archival research, 188 archival recalcitrance: and answers from archives, 188; and Burke’s position on communism, 166, 173, 174, 176, 178, 187, 242n4; and continued learning, 189; and critical and creative heuristic, 187; definition of, 165–66; and second edition of P&C, 180, 187–88; and trained incapacity, 179, 186 Aristotle, 15, 83, 102, 212, 214, 215 Arnold, Matthew, 35, 36, 91, 169 art: art for art’s sake, 107, 114; and perspective by incongruity, 48, 52 art of living: Burke’s argument for, 135, 206, 210, 212, 213; and Burke’s position on communism, 168, 169, 171, 187; and definition of the “good life,” 29; and democracy, 223, 224; and “Men of Leisure,” 148–49; and metabiology, 57; and P&C, 2, 10, 11, 16, 55, 56, 111, 151; and poetic orientation, 87, 88, 90, 93, 95–96, 100–111, 115, 122, 187, 238n2 Arvin, Newton, 161, 203 “Attendant Conditioning” (Burke), 131, 138

263

264 Attitudes toward History (Burke): book design, 162, 240n20; and good life, 64, 231n2; Hook’s review of, 176–77; and perspective by incongruity, 233n13; and recalcitrance, 116; second edition of, 165, 178, 244n13 Auscultation, Creation, and Revision (Burke): Burke’s submission to Harcourt, 153–54, 241n12; Burke’s writing of, 134; critique of materialist philosophies, 66; and ethical clarity, 235n2; and good life, 231n2; length of, 135; on Marxist rhetoric, 234–35n28; and new meanings, 96; and new patterns, 45; and recalcitrance, 119; Selzer on, 66, 154; and verbal thinking, 102 automation, 146 Baker & Taylor, 159 Barthes, Roland, 190 Bates, Ernest, 197, 199–200 Becker, Alton, 12, 16, 208, 209, 210–11, 213 behavioral determinism, 86 Benjamin, Walter, 18 Bennington College, 216 Bentham, Jeremy: Burke on motives, 142; and Burke on mysticism, 87, 97, 134; Burke presenting arguments through, 137; and language as symbolic warfare, 78, 79–82; “Table of the Springs of Action,” 98–99, 186; on war of words, 69 Bergson, Henri, 42, 44, 122, 239n7 Berguer, George, 52 Bernays, Edward, 73, 219, 238n17 Biesecker, Barbara, 20 Blackmur, R. P., 195, 197, 200, 246n12, 246n22 Blankenship, Jane, 33, 34 Bliven, Bruce, 75 Bogost, Ian, 240n10 Bokser, Julie A., 214 Boodin, John Elof, 239n7 Book of Moments (Burke), 165, 175, 178, 183, 186 Booth, Wayne: on Burke and postmodernism, 190; on ethics, 213–14; and New

Index Rhetoric, 12, 207, 208, 209; on positivism, 211; rhetoric of assent, 16; on symbols, 212–13, 214 “Boring from Within” (Burke), 50, 231n2 Bostdorff, Denise, 46 Boyle, Kay, 193 Brace, Ernest, 245n4 Bradley, Harriet, 3 Brémond, Henri, 139 Brooks, Cleanth, 243n7, 245n8 Brooks, Van Wyck, 7, 130, 244n1 Brown, Stuart C., 208 Brummett, Barry, 239n5 Bryant, Donald C., 247n5 Burham, James, 240n1 Burke, Anthony, 19 Burke, Kenneth: and Abell, 1; archives of, 17–21, 22, 23, 24, 129–30, 131, 165; bibliographies on, 195; as “both/and” thinker, 63; as civic theorist, 2, 3, 19; on coexistence of old and new, 205; correspondence of, 130, 133, 134, 142, 143, 145, 146–47, 148, 150, 152–58, 160–61, 165, 166, 170–71, 172, 174–83, 187, 188, 191, 192, 194, 202, 241n15, 241n16, 247n25; demarcation of aesthetic and political “periods,” 134; and Depression era, 4–7; as epistemological skeptic, 199–203; fan mail of, 202–3, 204; finances of, 133, 134, 154, 157, 239–40n1, 240n2, 241n13; as freelance writer, 133–34, 153, 239–40n1, 240n2, 241n11; as ghostwriter, 133, 134; habits of mind, 204–5; handwriting of, 20, 129, 165, 234n20; labeled as “Agro-Bohemian Marxoid,” 164; Latin and Greek transcriptions of Matthew 16:18, 59, 59, 132; on mass culture, 219; and mysticism, 87; nonlinear thinking of, 137, 197; personal life of, 131; as public intellectual, 25, 149–50; and publishing of P&C, 152–61; representation of, 127–28, 129, 130–31, 133, 146, 162–63, 190–93, 195, 203, 204, 244n1; on reviews, 194; reviews written by, 134; satire of, 72–73, 110, 145, 219, 237–38n17; strategic scheduling of, 134; terms for interrelated concepts, 29–30;

Index traditional accounts of, 3, 21, 127, 162, 163; unsent letters of, 142. See also Permanence and Change (Burke); and other specific works Burke, Libbie, 19 Burke family, 130 Burks, Don, 164 Burks, Virginia, 162 Burnham, James, 245n4 Burton, Antoinette, 3 Bush, George W., 217, 218 buttressing, 118 Calverton, V. F., 246n19 Cantwell, Robert, 4 Canwell Committee, 242n5 capitalism: and Burke’s position on communism, 171–72; condemnation of in 1930s America, 4, 30; and critical civic pedagogy, 16; and Depression era, 30, 39, 148, 218; and language of war, 13; Marxists on, 35, 49; and mechanistic monomania, 91; and “Men of Leisure,” 148, 151; and metabiology, 72–74, 235–36n2; and perspective by incongruity, 53; and piety, 34, 35, 39, 49–50; and poetic orientation, 94; and positivism, 13; propaganda of, 44, 233n15; rules and values of, 33; and social Darwinism, 79; and technological psychosis, 37–38, 47; and trained incapacity, 37 Carroll, Lewis, 138 Carter, Michael, 214 categories: and perspective by incongruity, 42–43; and poetic orientation, 98–99, 122 Chamberlain, John, 195, 198, 245n4, 245n6, 246n17 Chaplin, Charlie, 177 Cherwitz, Richard, 239n5 China, Japanese invasion of, 6 Citizens United ruling, 217 civic engagement, and poetic orientation, 95, 96, 98, 100–111, 224 civic pedagogy: critical pedagogy, 12–13, 16–17, 25, 207, 216–24, 248n6; for cultural

265 reorientation, 11; and New Rhetoric, 12–13; in P&C, 1–3, 11, 12–13, 16–17, 24, 25, 42, 58, 145, 163, 171, 172, 173, 205, 207, 216–24, 235n29; and perspective by incongruity, 45, 217, 223; and poetic orientation, 95, 96; and recalcitrance, 17, 222, 223, 224 Clark, Greg: on Burke’s art of living, 111; on Burke’s definition of identity, 31, 36, 232n3; on Burke’s rationale and method for civic interaction, 12, 13, 95, 109–10; Civic Jazz, 10; on democracy, 224; on symbols, 214; on transformative power of rhetoric, 40 classification process, and perspective by incongruity, 42–43, 46, 47 class struggle, 13, 73–74 Coates, Bob, 202 Colbert, Stephen, 46 Cold War, 209 collective identities: as mutually constitutive with individual identities, 31, 34, 39, 232n10; and pieties, 36, 38; as poems or texts, 2; and poetic orientation, 87; and psychosocial behavior, 29 Columbia University Bookstore, 160 communism: Burke’s position on, 164–65, 166, 167–72, 173–77, 178, 184, 187, 188, 192, 197–98, 242n1, 242n4, 243n6, 243n7, 243n9; and Burke’s position on wealth distribution, 168, 172; and communal cooperation, 10; and mechanistic monomania, 91; and orientation, 232n4; in P&C, 24, 78, 151, 155, 164, 165, 166, 167–72, 187, 197–98, 203; and pieties, 51; and poetic orientation, 57, 104–5, 168, 170 Communist Party: and Burke, 164, 166, 169, 175, 177, 242n1; and Cowley, 91, 242n5; and Hook, 193, 195; and New Masses, 246n18; and University of Washington faculty, 176, 242n5 “Compliment, in Passing” (Burke), 186 Condit, Celeste, 214 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) seminar, 208 Conklin, Groff, 167

266 cooperation, and New Rhetoric, 210–11 cooperative enterprise: and art of living, 2; and Burke on communism, 164, 170; and Burke on reorientation of America, 1; and P&C, 13; and poetic orientation, 93–94, 96, 100, 101, 102, 104–8, 110, 122; and purification of war, 70, 77, 82, 237n14 Corder, Jim, 247n3 Corey, Lewis, 4 Cotlow, Lewis, 186 Counter-Statement (Burke): critical success of, 152; demand for, 183; as essay collection, 135; and Harcourt contract, 153, 154, 184, 241n14; and Hermes Publications, 179, 184, 244n13, 244n16; Hicks on, 193; Marxists’ criticism of, 91; and “Men of Leisure,” 145, 146; and New Rhetoric, 206, 207; reviews of, 193, 245n9; royalties from, 6; sales of, 241n14; second edition of, 165, 178, 186, 244n13; theory of aesthetic form in, 10; Austin Warren on, 199, 246n21 Cowley, Malcolm: and Burke on communism, 91, 171, 175–76, 192, 246n16; and Burke on finances, 241n13; and Burke on language, 194; and Burke on poetic orientation, 86; and Burke on poetry and religion, 238n4; and Burke on public relations agencies, 219; and Burke on rhetoric, 102; and Burke on symbols, 88; Burke’s correspondence on P&C, 7, 17, 137, 142, 156, 157–58, 161, 172, 173, 178, 194–95, 202, 216, 234n26, 244n16; Burke’s relationship with, 194, 239n1, 241n15; and Burke’s satires, 238n17; and Burke’s submissions, 133, 239n1; and Burke’s University of Washington position, 166, 174, 175–78; and Cantwell on capitalism, 4; Exile’s Return, 17, 154, 241n15; and MacLeish, 239n1, 240n9, 244n2; review of Towards a Better Life, 203; and Tate, 195; University of Minnesota position of, 174–75, 178, 243n9; University of Washington position of, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 242n5, 243n6; and Viking Press, 188

Index Crable, Bryan: on metabiology, 55, 56, 65, 67, 84, 237n10; on recalcitrance, 115, 123 Crane, Hart, 130 critical pedagogy, 12–13, 16–17, 25, 207, 216–24, 248n6 Croasmun, Earl, 239n5 Crusius, Timothy: on Burke as skeptic, 202; on Burke’s contribution to New Rhetoric, 12, 15–16, 206; on Burke’s rhetorical strategies, 11; on Burke’s turn to language, 247n4; on ethics, 213; on metabiology, 65; on P&C’s place in postmodern philosophical tradition, 207; “The Question of Kenneth Burke’s Identity,” 111 Cuff, Margaret, 241n14 cultural historians, 7, 130, 236n8 cultural lag: and exaltation, 71, 76; as scene of war, 70, 71, 73, 76 cultural materialist critics, 190 cultural scripts, 9. See also reorientation Curtis Brown International Publishing, 160 Daily Cardinal, 195, 246n11 Daly, James, 10, 254n4 Daniel-Wariya, Joshua, 240n10 Darwin, Charles, 79, 116, 138, 149 Davidson, Donald, 245n8 defamiliarization program, 9 de Gourmont, Remy, 44, 233n13 de Man, Paul, 190 Demo, Anne Teresa, 48 democracy: Burke’s portrayal of, 223–24; and civic engagement, 110; and critical pedagogy, 221, 223, 224; and dialectic process, 122; principles of, 218 Denis, Armand, 186 Denning, Michael, 4, 206 Depression era: analyses of human behavior, 39; and Burke’s position on communism, 173; Burke’s productivity during, 191; and capitalism, 30, 39, 148, 218; and class tensions, 73–74; conditions of, 3–6; culture wars of, 110, 192, 193; and loss of moral certainty, 12; and

Index perspective by incongruity, 52; and publishing industry, 152, 204; and return to nature, 236n8; role of book reviews in literary culture, 192; role of P&C in, 3, 13, 32, 34, 110, 111; terms circulating during, 29, 34 Derrida, Jacques, 18, 190 Descartes, René, 209 Dewey, John: as cultural historian, 7, 56; Giroux on, 219; as influence on Burke, 155; Nature and Experience, 155; and New Republic Dollar Series, 156; on occupational psychosis, 142, 231n1; The Public and Its Problems, 244n1; The Quest for Certainty, 134; on technological psychosis, 37; Veblen compared to, 232n1 Dial, 41 dialectical biologism, 64–67, 69 dialectical materialism, 15, 65–67, 198 Direction, 177 Disarmament Conference, 75–76 disorientation, Burke’s definition of, 232n1 dissociation of ideas, 43 Dos Passos, John, 203 Dow, Bonnie, 45, 48, 233n17 dramatism, 127, 202, 208, 237n11 Dreiser, Theodore, Tragic America, 4, 217–18 Dummer, Ethel S., 203, 247n24 Duncan, Hugh Dalziel, 10, 11, 17, 216–17, 247n2 Eastman, Max, 192–93 ecocriticism, 115–16 economic determinism, 66, 86 Eddington, Arthur Stanley, 68, 239n7 Ede, Lisa, 247n3 Ehninger, Douglas, 206–7, 209, 210 Eliot, T. D., 198–99, 203, 246n20 Eliot, T. S.: Ash Wednesday, 194; and Burke’s “On Interpretation,” 245n4; and “keeping something alive,” 106; and Southern Agrarians, 193; The Waste Land, 194 Ellison, Ralph, 130 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 155, 238n1

267 Endress, Valerie, 45–46, 48, 233n16 Enoch, Jessica, 21, 23, 216 Enos, Theresa, 208 epideictic rhetoric: importance of, 12; and New Rhetoric, 14–15, 16, 205, 207, 214–16, 247n5; and P&C, 14–15, 215, 216, 221 epistemology: and New Rhetoric, 212; in P&C, 113, 114, 120, 199–203; perspective by incongruity as, 42, 46–48; postmodern epistemology, 32 Erskine, John, 70, 71, 143, 145, 146–47, 148, 150 ethics: and civic pedagogy, 58, 220; and metabiology, 9–10, 16, 30, 55–56, 57, 58–62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 78, 80, 84–85, 86, 98, 123, 124, 202, 222, 235n29; and New Rhetoric, 209–10, 213–14; and piety, 35–36, 39; and poetic orientation, 9, 16, 56, 57, 86, 98, 107, 200; postmodern ethics, 15–16, 210, 213–14; and purification of war, 80; secular ethics, 59, 123; universal ethics, 9, 200, 201, 202; workable ethics, 2, 16, 55–56, 58, 60, 69, 70, 82, 123, 124, 222 Everest, H. P., 177 everyday artifacts, and archival research, 22 experience: constructed nature of, 9, 41; interpretation of, 42, 46, 47; and perspective by incongruity, 47; and poetic orientation, 100; rhetorical nature of, 14, 221; symbols mediating, 14 Eyman, Douglas, 204 Faber & Faber, 160 fascism, 7, 219 feminist rhetorical research methodology, 18–19, 128–31, 132 First American Writers’ Congress, 192–93, 195, 206, 234n23, 245n9 Fletcher, Angus, 240n6 “For Bond Money” (Burke), 72 Fosdick, Raymond, 147 Foucault, Michel, 37, 79 foundationalism, 15, 32, 123, 199, 201 Frank, Armin, 240n6

268 Frank, Waldo, 55, 154, 155–56, 158, 161, 203, 242n22 Frankfurt School, 190 Franklin, Jay, 193 Frazer, James, 31, 32 Freire, Paulo: Giroux on, 219; Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 16, 218, 248n6 Freshwater, Helen, 18 Freud, Sigmund, 67, 156, 232n1, 239n6 Freudians, 33 “From Time to Time,” 185, 186 Frost, Robert, 193 Frye, Northrop, 174 Gabin, Rosalind, 191 Gaillet, Lynée Lewis, 22, 23 general strikes, 4 genres, and orientations, 33 George, Ann, archival research of, 23–24, 129–31, 173 Giroux, Henry, 16, 218–21 Glicksberg, Charles, 46–47, 197, 199, 200, 201 Goehring, Charles E., 46 Goldman, Emma, 41, 234n22 good life: definition of, 29, 61, 64, 67, 71, 78, 79, 87, 222, 224; and poetic orientation, 29, 96, 100, 101, 110, 224 Gorrell, Robert, 208 Gotham Book Mart, 183 graded series: and cultural transformation, 29; and human motivation, 82; and metabiology, 68; as model of relationships, 237n11; and perspective by incongruity, 42, 50–51; and piety, 234n25; rhetorical power of, 17, 234n24; as rhetorical strategy, 54, 222 Grammar of Motives (Burke), 12, 13, 162, 179, 181 Gramsci, Antonio, 190 Grattan, C. Hartley, “New Voices: The Promise of Our Youngest Writers,” 193 Gregory, Horace, 161, 170 Gross, Alan, 239n5 Gurdjieff, G. I., 97, 233n17, 236n7 Guterman, Norbert, 198

Index Halloran, Michael, 247n3 Harcourt Brace, 152, 153–54, 155, 184, 241n11 Harmsen, Tyrus G., 184 Harvard University, 181 Hassett, Michael, 247n3 Hauser, Gerard, 214 Hawhee, Debra: on archival research, 165–66; on Burke’s counter-efficient style of scholarship, 18–19; on Burke’s use of research on drugs, 237n13; on Burke’s writing process, 143; on Burkophilia, 180; on historiography by incongruity, 24, 165, 166, 179, 188; on mysticism, 87, 97, 233n17, 236n7; on Nietzsche, 232n9; on piety, 36; on poetic orientation, 96–97 Hazlitt, Henry, 145, 197, 200, 246n14 Hegel, Georg, 79 Hegelian idealism, 232n1 Heilman, Robert, 174, 175, 176–77, 243n6, 243n7 Helmholtz, Herman von, 48, 68, 122 Hermes Enterprises, 188 Hermes Publications, Burke’s relationship with, 165, 166, 174, 178, 179, 180–81, 183–84, 186, 187, 188, 243n10, 243–44n11, 244n12, 244n13, 244n16 Hermes Scroll series, 185, 186 heroism, and language of war, 13, 76 Hicks, Granville, 193, 194 historical determinism, 86 historiographic theory, and archival interventions, 18–24 historiography by incongruity, 24, 165, 166, 178–79, 186, 188 history writing, as interpretive act, 3 Hitler, Adolf, 6, 73, 74, 75–76 Homo ludens, 151 Homo poeta: Burke’s article proposals on, 239n1; and “On Interpretation,” 169 Homo poeta vs. technological man: and Burke’s position on communism, 169; and poetic orientation, 90–93, 103, 104, 151, 168 Hook, Sidney, 166, 176–77, 192–93, 195, 242n5 hooks, bell, 218–19

Index Hound and Horn, 241n12, 246n12 Huizinga, Johan, 240–41n10 human behavior: analyses of, 39; and poetic orientation, 86, 88–90, 104; psychosocial behavior, 29 humanism: and Burke on communism, 164, 169; and “Men of Leisure,” 146; and metabiology, 58, 64, 84, 124; and poetic orientation, 92, 94, 111 human motivation: effect of symbols on, 17; and language, 80; and metabiology, 55, 63; and orientation, 33; and piety, 34; and purpose, 67, 68 human purpose: Burke’s article proposals on, 239n1; and metabiology, 60, 67–69, 70, 77, 78, 79, 86, 123, 222; and New Rhetoric, 209, 211–13; and poetic orientation, 87, 91, 93, 96, 100, 101 Human Relations, Inc., 181–82 human welfare, 1, 2 Huxley, Thomas, 116 Hyman, Stanley Edgar, 101, 119 idealism, 65, 66, 232n1 identification, and perspective by incongruity, 50, 234n27 identity formation: and piety, 30, 31, 36, 37, 38; and poetic orientation, 88, 89, 110; as rhetorical process, 212, 214, 215, 221, 233n17. See also collective identities; individual identities ideology: Burke’s avoidance of term, 231–32n1; and orientation, 31, 34, 41; and perspective by incongruity, 51; and science, 48; and suspended judgment, 200; and trained incapacity, 37 “Ideology and Myth” (Burke), 183 I’ll Take My Stand (Southern Agrarians), 7, 151 Indiana University, 176, 178 individual identities: as mutually constitutive with collective identities, 31, 34, 39, 232n10; and piety, 38; as poems or texts, 2; and poetic orientation, 87; and psychosocial behavior, 29; rhetorical constitution of, 10, 38–39

269 industrialism, 100, 151 interpretive act, 3, 32 irony, 46 Jack, Jordynn, 36, 38, 39–40 James, William, 68–69, 123, 138 Jameson, Fredric, 43 Japan, 74–75, 76 Jay, Gregory, 190 Jay, Paul, 41, 42, 232n11, 234n19, 235n29, 240n6, 241n15 jazz musicians, 109–10 Jeffers, Robinson, Meditation on Saviours, 183–84 Jesus, and perspective by incongruity, 52, 235n28, 235n29 John D. Rockefeller Foundation, 237n13 John Reed Club, 238n18 Johnson, Edgar, 197, 199, 245n4, 245n10 Johnson, Nan, 22, 24, 129 Josephson, Matthew, 156, 161, 172, 241n16 Joyce, James, 233n13 Justema, Billy, 203 Kalaidjian, Walter, 193, 204 Kazarian, John, 4 Keehner, Mary F., 172–73 Keller, Helen, 7 Kenneth Burke Papers, Penn State, 19–20, 23, 24, 129–30, 131, 179 Kenyon College, 180, 216 Keynes, John Maynard, 156 Kilpatrick, William, 122 Kirsch, Gesa E., 18–19, 21–22, 128, 130, 132, 146 Knickerbocker, William, 245n4 knowledge: and archival interventions, 128, 188–89; and New Rhetoric, 209, 212; and poetic orientation, 87, 95, 122; and science, 14, 47; social construction of, 12, 14, 17, 46, 48, 118, 119, 122, 204, 207 Kramer, Larry, 233n17 Kretschmer, Ernst, 68 Kroch’s Bookstores, 159, 203 Krutch, Joseph Wood, 197, 199, 200–201, 246n14

270 Kuhn, Thomas, 190 Kuhnian paradigm, 31 Lamm, Herbert, 195 Lange, Dorothea: photographs for Steinbeck’s Harvest Gypsies, 6; Toward Los Angeles, California, 5 Langer, Susanne, 12, 16, 207, 208, 211–12, 247n4 language: and Burke’s rhetorical theory, 38–39, 205, 206, 211; and metabiology, 65, 77–78, 210; and New Rhetoric, 210, 211; and perspective by incongruity, 42, 43, 46, 49, 50, 51, 232n12; and poetic orientation, 95, 98–99, 102, 108; social construction of, 42, 205, 221; as symbolic warfare, 78, 79–82 Language as Symbolic Action (Burke), 207, 218, 235n1, 240–41n10 Lanier, Lyle, 236n8 Larson, Leif, 203 Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Trust, 237n13 Lawrence, D. H.: Burke presenting arguments through, 137; Burke’s notes on, 138; Fantasia of the Unconscious, 112–13, 114; and poetic orientation, 87, 97, 98, 99–100, 113–15, 119, 120–22, 124, 239n6, 239n7; Richards on, 112, 113–15, 118, 120, 121, 142 League of American Writers, 177, 193 League of Nations, 74–75 Lee, Irving, 198, 246n20 Leff, Michael, 34, 36, 47, 48, 232n6, 247n3 leftist rhetoric: Burke’s contributions to, 34, 164, 166, 170, 174, 175–76, 177, 203, 206, 222; and Cowley, 174; fractured nature of, 193; and perspective by incongruity, 50, 234n22, 234n23; Tate on, 195 Leibniz, Gottfried, 50, 68, 122 Lenin, Vladimir, 232n1 lex continui (law of continuity), 50, 51 Ligda, Alan, 179, 180, 244n13 Ligda, Kenneth Scott, 180 Ligda, Mildred: Burke’s relationship with, 165, 178, 179–80, 184, 186, 187, 243n10,

Index 243–44n11, 244n13; correspondence with Burke, 166, 179–83, 188; and Jeffers, 184; and real estate, 244n14; and second edition of P&C, 166; and Van Vloten, 188 Ligda, Ted, 178, 180, 181–82, 183, 184, 243n10, 244n11 Lindeman, Eduard, 154–57, 158, 159, 160, 161, 241n17 Lindsay, Vachel, 193 “Linguistic Approaches to Education” (Burke), 216 Long, Huey, 7 Lowrey, Lacy, 46 “Lullaby–for Oneself as Adult Male” (Burke), 161 Lunsford, Andrea, 247n3 Lyon, Arabella, 207, 247n2, 247n4 Lytle, Andrew, 151 Lytton, V. A. G. R. Bulwer-Lytton, Lord, 74 McCarthy era, 164, 173 McComiskey, Bruce, 207, 247n3 McDougall, William, 49 McGuire, J. E., 239n5 McKeon, Richard, 207 Mackey, Louis, 210 MacLeish, Archibald, 194, 239n1, 240n9, 244n2 Macy’s, 159, 203 Mailloux, Steven, 204 Manchuria, Japanese invasion of, 74–75 Marsalis, Wynton, 109 Marx, Karl, 64–67, 79, 195, 231n1, 242n3 Marxist criticism, 194 Marxist rhetoric: assumptions of, 49; Burke on failure of, 150; Burke’s avoidance of, 231n1; failure of, 39; and perspective by incongruity, 51, 234n23, 234–35n28; and rational self-interest, 9; on work and occupation, 92 Marxists: Burke’s relationship to, 91, 198, 242n1; on capitalism, 35, 49; on classless society, 55; on human motivation, 33, 67; on P&C, 198–99 Marxist theory, 191

Index Masters, Edgar Lee, 193 materialism, 64, 65, 66–67 Matrix (film), 117 Matthiessen, F. O., 194 Maverick Press, 170 “The Meaning of C. K. Ogden” (Burke), 241n11 Mebane, Daniel, 153, 155–61, 245n4, 245n10 mechanism: Burke’s article proposals on, 146, 239n1; Burke’s critique of, 103, 150, 151, 240–41n10; and metabiology, 58, 64, 69, 77; and poetic orientation, 90–91, 103, 123 Mechlowitz, Abe, 203 media and cultural studies, 190 Melia, Trevor, 239n5 Mencken, H. L., 231–32n1 “Men of Leisure” (Burke): and archival research, 23, 130, 143, 145–52; and athletic angle, 150, 151; Burke’s critique of Committee on the Use of Leisure Time, 147–49; Burke’s draft of, 128, 145, 239n1, 240n9; Burke’s response to current events, 162; and civic pedagogy, 19, 216, 222–23; and Darwinian vocation, 149, 151; folder P14e, 145; submissions of, 143, 145; and understanding of P&C, 149–52 “Metabiology: Outline for a Minimized Ethic” (Burke), 138 metabiology: Burke’s development of, 58, 132, 134; Burke’s notes on, 58, 59, 60, 132; and capitalism, 72–74, 235–36n2; and cultural lag, 71; dialectical nature of, 65, 237n10; and ethics, 9–10, 16, 30, 55–56, 57, 58–62, 64, 65, 68, 69, 71, 78, 80, 84–85, 86, 98, 123, 124, 202, 222, 235n29; and false utility and realism, 71–72, 74; and Folder P9c, 131–32, 138; function of, 9–10, 13, 55, 59, 60; as holistic view of humans, 60, 63–67; and language, 65, 77–78, 210; and Lawrence, 99, 100; and motives for activism, 84–85; in P&C, 9, 13, 55, 56, 58–62, 200, 237n10; as permanence, 60, 62–63; and poetic orientation, 56, 57, 82–84, 109, 122, 124; and

271 purification of war, 21, 55, 60, 69–78, 80; and recalcitrance, 115, 123; as restoration of human purpose, 60, 67–69, 70, 77, 78, 79, 86, 123, 222; and rock-church connection, 59, 60, 62, 63; and scenes of war, 70–76; and science, 67–68, 77, 78; as simplification, 56, 58, 60–62, 69, 71, 236n5; and symbols, 56, 64, 65, 84, 236n6; and violence in human biology, 70–71, 237n16; and World War II, 74–76 metaphor: and metabiology, 61–62, 63, 236n4; and perspective by incongruity, 43, 45, 46, 47, 235n29; and poetic orientation, 87, 93–94, 95, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112, 123, 200, 202; and recalcitrance, 118 methodological misnaming, 43 metonymy, 46 Midwestern Observer, 195 Miller, Carolyn, 33 Milton, John, 89 modernist literary culture, 44, 233n13 Modern Monthly, 195, 198, 246n14, 246n19 Moore, Marianne, 130 morality: and language of war, 13; loss of moral certainty, 12; and simplification, 60–62 “A Moral Made Manifest” (Burke), 186 Morris, Charles E., 20 Mosaic, 195 Mumford, Lewis, 56, 155–56, 202–3, 244n1, 245n4 Munson, Gorham, 245n4 Murphy, Edward, 33, 34 Murray, Jeffrey, 118 Mussolini, Benito, 73 “My Approach to Communism” (Burke), 73, 74, 167, 238n17, 238n18 mysticism: and civic pedagogy, 223; and poetic orientation, 87, 95, 97–100, 114–15, 124, 170–71; as source of agency, 52 Nation: Burke’s submissions to, 6, 133, 145, 170; review of P&C in, 195, 197; on World War II, 74–75 National Industrial Recovery Act, 4

272 National Recovery Administration (NRA) Committee on the Use of Leisure Time, 128, 143, 146–49 “The Nature of Art under Capitalism” (Burke), 170 New Deal, 55 New Democracy, 195, 245n6 new historicist critics, 190 New Masses, 6, 167, 198, 238n18, 246n18 New Republic: advertisement for P&C, 159, 160, 195, 196, 203; on American Dream, 4; Burke’s submissions to, 1, 6, 44, 50, 72–73, 133, 143, 154, 155–56, 158, 239n1, 241n11; and Cowley-MacLeish debate, 240n9, 244n2; lack of review for P&C, 245n7; publication of P&C, 7; reviews of “On Interpretation,” 170, 245n4; on World War II, 74, 75, 76 New Republic Dollar Series, 152, 153, 154–61, 163, 216, 241n17 New Rhetoric: Burke’s contribution to, 2, 12, 206–7; and cooperation, 210–11; and critical civic pedagogy, 12–13, 16–17; development of, 12–13, 207–16, 247n3; and epideictic rhetoric, 14–15, 16, 205, 207, 214–16, 247n5; and ethics, 209–10, 213–14; and mass culture, 219; P&C as text of, 2, 3, 11, 12–13, 16–17, 25, 205, 206, 207, 210–11, 212, 213–16, 217 New State magazine, 1, 2–3, 16, 19, 216 New York Herald Tribune, 44, 145, 147, 197, 199 New York Times, 131, 138, 143, 195, 197, 245n6 New York Times Book Review, 195, 245n6 Nichols, Marie Hochmuth, 206 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 68, 71, 78, 79, 82, 139, 232n9 9/11 terrorist attacks, 218 Noonday Press, 244n12 Northwest Viking, 195, 197 nudism, metaphors of, 62, 63 nutrition, metaphors of, 61–62, 236n4 Occupy Wall Street movement, 217 Ogden, C. K.: Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, 134; and Burke’s “On Interpretation,”

Index 245n4; Lindeman on, 155; Meaning of Meaning, 236n6, 242n4; and Pearce, 241n11 Ohio State University, 176 Ohio Teachers’ and Pupils’ Reading Circle, 160 Ohmann, Richard, 207–8 Olbrechts-Tyteca, Lucie, 12, 15, 208–9, 211, 214, 215–16 Olsen, Tillie Lerner, “Bloody Thursday,” 6 “On Dialectic” (Burke), 122, 223–24 “On Interpretation” (Burke): and art of living, 238n2; and Burke’s position on communism, 167–71; and Marx, 242n3; and P&C, 241n19, 244–45n4; Pearce on, 154; “Range of Piety” compared to, 93, 142, 168, 238n2; reviews of, 244–45n4 Oravec, Christine, 214 organism/environment distinction, 66, 237n12 orientation and orientations: and agency, 52; Burke’s definition of, 15, 29, 30, 32–34, 215, 231–32n1; construction of, 34, 54, 92, 202; and ideology, 31, 34, 41; in P&C, 30, 32–34; and perspective by incongruity, 40; and piety, 30–32, 34, 35, 38, 40; and postmodern epistemology, 32; rationalization as synonym for, 232n4; and recalcitrance, 117; rhetorical function of, 33, 38–40; and symbols, 89. See also poetic orientation; reorientation Osborne, Thomas, 22 Ostergaard, Lori, 22 “Outline material (from letter to [Sibley] Watson)” (Burke), 134 Palopress Printers/Publishers, 183, 243n11 Parker, Elizabeth, 134 Parker, George M., 134 Partisan Review, 6, 194 Pearce, Charles A., 152, 153, 154, 159, 241n11, 241n16 Penn State, 216 Perelman, Chaim, 12, 15, 208–9, 211, 214, 215–16

Index Permanence and Change (Burke): Andover draft of, 167, 168, 171–72, 242n4; and antipositivism, 12, 13–14, 15, 211; antiviolence agenda of, 12, 13, 16, 56, 69; and archival interventions, 128–29; archival material on, 2–3, 17–18, 21, 25, 127; and art of living, 2, 10, 11, 16, 55, 56, 111, 151; audience of, 103, 136, 150, 156, 157, 159, 163, 195, 203; book design of, 157, 158–59, 162, 188; in Burke-3 collection, 131, 137, 138, 139, 241–42n21; Burke’s appendix plan for, 136, 240n4; and Burke’s book notes, 25; and Burke’s correspondence, 25, 137, 142, 154, 155, 156, 157–58, 160–61, 172; Burke’s dialogues with source material, 138; Burke’s drafts of, 1, 3, 6, 74, 134, 135, 137, 142–43, 145, 146, 151, 157–58, 164, 165, 167, 170, 171–72, 187, 194, 225, 240n9, 241n19, 241–42n21, 242n4; and Burke’s methodology, 11, 24, 198–99, 200, 201, 217; Burke’s outlines of, 3, 75, 76, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136–37, 139, 236n3, 240n5; Burke’s planning notes for, 13, 21, 62, 80–81, 128, 129, 136, 137, 138, 140, 191, 201–2, 240n5; Burke’s proposal to “translate” into lecture series, 145, 146, 240n8; Burke’s revisions of, 133, 137, 139, 141–43, 141, 164, 165, 171, 172–74, 178, 184, 188, 244n16; Burke’s rhetorical planning of, 128, 135–37, 150; and Burke’s rhetorical strategies, 128, 133, 150, 201–2, 217, 222; Burke’s working materials from, 23; and Burke’s writing practices, 23, 60, 128, 129, 131, 132–34, 137–39, 143, 170; and causal chains, 66, 237n11; civic pedagogy in, 1–3, 11, 12–13, 16–17, 24, 25, 42, 58, 145, 163, 171, 172, 173, 205, 207, 216–24, 235n29; claims of, 10–11; communism in, 24, 78, 151, 155, 164, 166, 167–72, 187, 197–98, 203; contemporary reception of, 2, 11, 25, 157, 159, 191–92, 195, 197–203; and critical vocabulary, 17; demand for, 183; development of, 2, 24; different readings of, 21; and epideictic rhetoric, 14–15, 215, 216, 221; and epistemology, 113, 114, 120, 199–203; first edition of,

273 152–61, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 187; folder P5, 138, 139; folder P9c, 131–33, 135, 137–38, 141; folder P9d, 139; folder P14d, 240n5; folder P14f, 138; folder P31, 138, 139, 142; folder Q11, 195; and human symbol use, 10, 11, 12, 14, 16; interdisciplinary theory in, 11; as introduction to Burkean theory, 10, 11, 162, 163; on meaning of human occupation, 149; and “Men of Leisure,” 149–52; on metabiology, 9, 13, 55, 56, 58–62, 237n10; as New Rhetoric text, 2, 3, 11, 12–13, 16–17, 25, 205, 206, 207, 210–11, 212, 213–16, 217; in 1930s America, 3–7; notes in, 48, 234n20; and Ogden’s Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, 134; and “On Interpretation,” 241n19, 244–45n4; on piety, 9, 10, 16, 30, 31, 147, 235n29; as postmodern ethics, 15–16; on process of social change, 9; publication of, 2, 7, 128, 152–61, 165, 179, 188, 216; and purification of war, 12, 13, 69, 78–84, 94, 108, 217; purpose of, 2, 115; readers of, 32, 153, 156, 157, 159, 162, 173, 179, 203, 231n1; on recalcitrance, 55, 56, 165; on reciprocal effects of language and society, 10; reviewers of, 47, 195, 200; reviews of, 191, 195, 197–203, 204, 205, 245n6, 245n9, 246n20, 247n23; rhetorical theory of, 2, 9, 10–11, 38–40, 101, 102, 104, 108, 111, 115, 119, 133, 153, 172–73, 215, 216, 235n29; royalties for, 157, 159–60; sales of, 159, 160, 203; second edition of, 31, 157, 164, 165, 166, 172–78, 179, 186, 187–88, 233n13, 237n10, 237n16; second printing of, 160, 161, 246n11; selling of, 128, 152–61; significance of, 7, 9–11; and social text, 33, 39; theoretical and methodological innovation of, 11, 24, 198–99, 200, 201, 217; and theory as form of social engagement, 145; third edition of, 179, 244n13; title of, 157–58; title page, first edition, 8; traditional accounts of, 3; vocabulary of, 29–30; as work in progress, 128 Perot, Ross, 41, 45–46, 233n16

274 Index perspective by incongruity: and archival interventions, 127; and boring from within, 50; Burke’s definition of, 41, 232n12; Burke’s draft page of, 144; Burke’s drafts of outline for, 139, 141, 143; Burke’s notes keyed to numbered outline, 140; Burke’s use of, 222, 235n29; and civic pedagogy, 45, 217, 223; and comic strategy, 46, 48; and conversion rhetoric, 49–51, 52, 53; as critical heuristic, 42–46; and cultural transformation, 29; and democracy, 223; double-voiced incongruity, 45–46; as epistemology, 42, 46–48; and graded series, 42, 50–51; and “Men of Leisure,” 147, 150–51; and orientation, 40; in P&C, 9, 41, 198–99, 233n13; and pieties, 30, 35, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50–51, 234n19; and planned incongruity, 44–45; and poetic orientation, 86; reorienting power of, 42; as rhetorical strategy, 42, 48, 49–53, 54, 201, 232n11; scholarly analysis of, 233n17; and social change, 40, 41, 42, 48–49, 50, 222; and trained incapacity, 30; and translation, 42, 51–52, 53, 150, 234n26; and unplanned incongruity, 233n16; visual and embodied possibilities of, 46, 233n17 perspectivism, 238–39n5 Pfaelzer, Jean, 23 Philip Neri, Saint, 139 philosophy of becoming, 30, 79 philosophy of being, 30, 63, 69, 79 Philosophy of Literary Form (Burke), 19, 240n9 Piaget, Jean, 134 piety and pieties: Burke’s definition of, 29, 30, 34–37, 210, 215; construction of, 54; and epideictic rhetoric, 15, 215, 216; and ethics, 35–36, 39; and graded series, 234n25; and identity formation, 30, 31, 36, 37, 38; and internal and external policing, 36–37; linkages of, 34, 36–37, 38, 41, 43, 88, 147, 168–69, 232n6, 232n7; and “Men of Leisure,” 147, 148; multiple functions of, 34; and orientation, 30–32, 34, 35, 38, 40; in P&C, 9, 10, 16, 30, 31,

147, 235n29; personal level of, 31; and perspective by incongruity, 30, 35, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 50–51, 234n19; and pietyimpiety conflict, 40, 50–51; and poetic orientation, 87, 88, 89; and recalcitrance, 112, 119; rejection of existing piety, 232n2; and representations of P&C, 25; and resistance to social change, 30, 39–40, 221–22; rhetorical construction of, 38–40; and style, 106, 107; and symbols, 34, 38, 39, 63 Pike, Kenneth, 12, 16, 208, 209, 210–11, 213 Platonic idealism, 236n6 Plowshare, 93, 142, 154, 167–71, 238n2, 241n19, 244–45n4 poetic orientation: and action, 96; and art of living, 87, 88, 90, 93, 95–96, 100–111, 115, 122, 187, 238n2; and civic engagement, 95, 96, 98, 100–111, 224; and communication, 96, 100, 101–5, 107, 108, 110, 122, 124; and communism, 57, 104–5, 168, 170; and cooperation, 93–94, 96, 100, 101, 102, 104–8, 110, 122, 124; counterstatement on, 95–100; and creative motives, 95, 96–97, 100, 103; and definition of poet, 87–90, 95, 96, 103, 238n1; descriptions of, 93–100; ethical grounding for, 9, 16, 56, 57, 86, 98, 107; function of, 55, 86, 87–88, 92–93; and good life, 29, 96, 100, 101, 110, 224; Homo poeta vs. technological man, 90–93, 103, 104, 151, 168; and human behavior, 86, 88–90, 104; and metabiology, 56, 57, 82–84, 109, 122, 124; and metaphor, 87, 93–94, 95, 102, 104, 105, 108, 109, 112, 123, 200, 202; and mysticism, 87, 95, 97–100, 114–15, 124, 170–71; in P&C, 9, 16, 41, 55, 56, 78, 109, 200, 201–2; and participation, 96, 100, 101, 108–11, 122, 124; and purification of war, 55, 69, 78, 82–84, 101, 104, 108; and recalcitrance, 88, 111–22, 124; and religion, 95, 168–69, 171, 238n4; replacing scientific orientation, 32; as rhetorical strategy, 86–87, 101; and social change, 93–94; and style, 105–7, 108, 110; and symbols,

Index 87, 88–89, 94, 95, 101–2, 104, 111, 112, 115, 122, 124; and technology, 67–68, 90–93; and transvaluation of values, 52 Poetry, 195, 245n9, 247n23 positivism: and archival research, 22; in Depression era, 32; and human motivation, 67; Lawrence on, 99; as materialistic philosophy, 66; and metabiology, 77; New Rhetoric countering, 12, 13–14, 15, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211–13; and P&C, 12, 13–14, 15, 211; poetic orientation contrasted with, 92, 100; Richards on, 113, 114, 115, 119, 120, 121 Post, Emily, 138 power relations, and critical civic pedagogy, 16, 218, 248n6 Prelli, Lawrence, 112, 114, 117, 118, 238–39n5 Prentice Hall, 183 “Preserving Capitalism” (Burke), 72–73 “Principles of Wise Spending” (Burke), 73, 219–20, 237–38n17 progressive education, 16 proto–New Critics, 47, 114 psychoanalysis, 48–49, 239n6 psychotherapy, 49, 134 public pedagogy, 218–20 public policy, ethical criteria for evaluating, 62 purification of war: and democracy, 223, 224; and metabiology, 21, 55, 60, 69–78, 80; and P&C, 12, 13, 69, 78–84, 94, 108, 217; and poetic orientation, 55, 69, 78, 82–84, 101, 104, 108 Quarterly Journal of Speech, 195, 198 “Range of Piety” (Burke): and Burke’s position on communism, 167, 168–69; “On Interpretation” compared to, 93, 142, 168, 238n2; and poetic orientation, 90–91 Ransom, John Crowe, 47, 151, 193, 245n8 rational self-interest, 9 Reader’s News, 195 “Reading While You Run” (Burke), 44, 51, 233n14

275 realism, 71–72, 74, 112, 114, 117, 120, 121–22, 123, 239n7 recalcitrance: Burke’s tutorial on, 119–22; and civic pedagogy, 17, 222, 223, 224; and collaborative revision, 189, 210–11, 217, 222, 223; and definition of the “good life,” 29; and democracy, 223; history of scholarship on, 238–39n5; and metabiology, 115, 123; in P&C, 55, 56, 165; and poetic orientation, 88, 111–22, 124; as realistic corrective, 115–17; and Richards-Lawrence conflict, 119–21; as social heuristic, 115, 118–19, 120, 121–22. See also archival recalcitrance recursive practice of thinking, 18–19, 23, 135, 137, 146, 149, 217 Reilly, Colleen, 204 relativism, 112, 119, 199, 200, 202 religion: and Burke’s position on communism, 168, 170, 171, 187; and poetic orientation, 95, 168–69, 171, 238n4 Renegar, Valerie R., 46 reorientation: and Burke on communism, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171; Burke’s definition of, 232n1; Burke’s goal of reorienting American culture, 1, 33, 40–41, 54, 56, 164, 167, 168, 170, 171, 207, 235–36n2; and mysticism, 87; and perspective by incongruity, 42, 48–49 “Revolutionary Symbolism in America” (Burke), 51, 192, 206, 231n2, 234n23 “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s Battle” (Burke), 240n9 Rhetoric of Motives (Burke): availability of, 179; book design of, 162; and New Rhetoric, 12, 206–7; “On Human Relations” as tagline for, 181; and purification of war, 70; and translation, 234n27 Richards, I. A.: Burke’s notes on, 138; and Burke’s “On Interpretation,” 245n4; Burke’s quoting of, 169; on Lawrence, 112, 113–15, 118, 120, 121, 142; Lindeman on, 155; Meaning of Meaning, 236n6, 242n4; and New Rhetoric, 12, 210; Philosophy of Rhetoric, 16, 42, 206–7;

276 Index Richards, I. A. (continued) on poetry, 91–92, 113–14; on proper meaning superstition, 208; and recalcitrance, 115, 118, 119–21; on science, 47, 113–14; Science and Poetry, 113–14; Tate on, 193; and University of Washington, 174 Rider, 160 Rivers, W. H. R., 49, 134, 138 Robinson, Henry, 245n4 Rockefeller, John D., 89 Rodin, Auguste, 149 Roethke, Theodore, 174 Rogers, Carl, 210 Rohan, Liz, 21–22 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 3, 7 Rosenberg, Harold, 245n9, 247n23 Rosenwasser, Marie, 33, 34 Rosteck, Thomas, 34, 35–36, 47, 48, 232n6 Rothschild, Richard, 89, 122 Round Table Books, 188 Routledge, 160 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 18–19, 128, 130, 132, 146 Rueckert, William: on “Burke-sickness,” 180; on Burke’s poetic orientation, 69, 83, 87, 91, 94–95, 96, 238n1; on Burke’s skepticism, 202; on Burke’s writing style, 135; on capitalism, 91 Rukeyser, Muriel, 194 Russell, Bertrand, 134, 245n4 Sabre, Jeannette, 130, 145, 244n13 Sandburg, Carl, 193 Santayana, George, 31 Saturday Review of Literature, 197 Savage Splendor (documentary), 186 Schiappa, Edward, 172–73, 239n5 Schmitz, Henry, 173, 175–76, 177, 243n7 Schneider, Isidor, 193 Schoenberg, Arnold, 122 science: and metabiology, 67–68, 77, 78; as neutral, objective realm, 14, 41, 47, 48, 113, 200–201, 208; and perspective by incongruity, 47–48, 234n19; and poetic orientation, 90–93, 114, 116, 121; and

purification of war, 83–84; Richards on, 47, 113–14; social construction of, 47 scientific language, 43, 232n12 scientific lore, 47, 234n19 scientific method, 47–48, 233n18 scientific orientation, poetic orientation replacing, 32 scientism, 208 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 177 Seldes, Gilbert, The Years of the Locust, 4 self, rhetorical construction of, 38–39, 232n10 Selzer, Jack: on archival research, 21; on Attitudes toward History, 176; on Auscultation, Creation, and Revision, 66, 154; and Burke on communism, 166, 192; Burke seminars of, 130; on cultural historians of Depression era, 7, 236n8; Kenneth Burke in the 1930s, 192, 202, 204; on P&C, 58, 66, 152; on poetic orientation, 97, 101, 238n1 “Semantic and Poetic Meaning” (Burke), 106 serendipity, and archival research, 18, 21–24 Sewanee Review, 246n21 Shakespeare, William, 89, 138 Shanks, Michael, 21 Sheard, Cynthia Miecznikowski, 214–15 Sheriff, Stacey, 108, 167 Sherrington, Charles, 68, 70, 122 Silverman, Sarah, 41, 46 simplification: Burke’s outline on, 139, 142; metabiology as, 56, 58, 60–62, 69, 71, 236n5 Slochower, Harry, 177 Smith, Nelson J., III, 212 Smudde, Peter M., 216 social change: and Burke’s audience, 150, 195; Burke’s rhetorically base arguments for, 206, 242n1; and Burke’s terms, 29–30; and human purpose, 222; logic of Burke’s argument for, 57; and metabiology, 200; and perspective by incongruity, 40, 41, 42, 48–49, 50, 222; pious resistance to, 30, 39–40, 221–22; and poetic orientation, 86, 93–94; rhetorical

Index problems of, 39–40; rhetorical strategies for, 221 social class: in Depression era, 73–74; and language of war, 13; Marxists on, 55; and philosophies of becoming, 79 social consensus theory, 239n5 social constructionism, 238–39n5 social Darwinism, 13, 79 socialism, 51, 53, 73, 164 Socialist Party, 44 Solomon, Martha, 234n22 Sophism, 207, 247n3 Soule, George, The Coming American Revolution, 4 South Atlantic Quarterly, 197 Southern Agrarians: anticapitalist manifestos of, 7, 151; Burke’s involvement with, 145, 151; and T. S. Eliot, 193; and metabiology, 56; as readers of P&C, 231n1; and return to nature, 236n8; Tate on, 195; and yeoman farmstead, 55 Southern California Growers’ Association, 6 Southern Review, 6, 106, 240n2 Stalin, Joseph, 73, 193 Star Trek: The Next Generation (film), 43 Stein, Gertrude, 233n13 Steinbeck, John, Harvest Gypsies, 5–6 Stelts, Sandy, 130 Stewart, Jon, 41, 46 stock-market crash, 37 Strachey, John, 138 strategic contemplation, 18–19, 128–31, 132, 135, 146, 149 strikes, 4, 6 structuralist theory, 191 style: and democracy, 223, 224; as rhetorical strategy, 105–7, 108, 110, 122, 217, 222, 223 Sullivan, Dale, 214 Supreme Court, 217 Suskind, Ron, 218 Sutton-Smith, Brian, 240n10 symbols and symbolism: effect on human motivation, 17; experience of world mediated through, 14; humans as

277 embodied symbol users, 10–11, 12, 14, 16, 56, 64, 65, 111, 112, 115, 124, 211, 213, 222, 235n1; linkages of, 39; and metabiology, 56, 64, 65, 84, 236n6; and New Rhetoric, 12, 207, 209, 211–13, 214; in P&C, 10, 11, 14–15, 217; and perspective by incongruity, 46; and piety, 34, 38, 39, 63; and poetic orientation, 87, 88–89, 94, 95, 101–2, 104, 111, 112, 115, 122, 124 Symposium, 145, 240n1, 240n9 synecdoche, 46 Taintor, Anne, 46 Tao, “the Way,” 63, 142, 236n6 Tate, Allen: and American Review, 245n8; and art for art’s sake, 107; and Burke on ethical clarity, 235n2; Burke’s relationship with, 64, 90, 98, 194; and Cowley, 195; on Eliot, 194; “Poetry and Politics,” 193; on science, 47; and University of Minnesota, 243n9 Tate, Caroline, 243n9 Taylor, Frederick, 18, 146 Taylorism, 146 technological psychosis: Burke’s definition of, 29, 37–38, 208; and capitalism, 37–38, 47; and “Men of Leisure,” 148, 150; and metabiology, 77; and poetic orientation, 88, 115 technology: and metabiology, 56, 67, 77; and poetic orientation, 67–68, 90–93; and positivism, 13 Tell, Dave, 23 textile workers, national strike of 1934, 4 Thames, Richard, 55, 237n15 theory: as form of social engagement, 145, 151–52; rhetorical nature of, 149 Thoreau, Henry David, 61 Tompkins, Phillip K., 31 Tonn, Mari Boor, 45–46, 48, 233n16 Toulmin, Stephen, 207 Towards a Better Life (Burke): and Blackmur, 246n12; and Burke’s archival research, 17; Cowley’s review of, 203; as critical failure, 136, 152; Harcourt’s publishing of, 153, 154, 184, 214n14;

278 Towards a Better Life (Burke) (continued) Marxists’ criticism of, 91; royalties from, 6, 154, 157, 242n23; Austin Warren on, 246n21 trained incapacity: and archival recalcitrance, 179, 186; Burke’s definition of, 29, 37; and pieties, 30; Veblen on, 37, 232n8; and verbal fusion, 43 translation: Burke’s mastery of, 235n29; and cultural transformation, 29; and perspective by incongruity, 42, 51–52, 53, 150, 234n26; as rhetorical strategy, 54, 118, 222 Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society, 145 truth: absolute truth, 15, 41, 46; and perspective of incongruity, 46–47 “Uneasy Thought of Peace” (Burke), 161 unionization, 4, 6 United States, in Depression era, 3–7 University of California Press, 244n13 University of Chicago, 176, 216, 246n20 university of Minnesota, 174–75, 178, 243n9 University of Washington: and Burke’s position on communism, 164, 165, 166, 173–77, 178, 184, 188, 243n6, 243n7, 243n9; and Cowley’s position, 173, 174, 175, 177, 178, 242n5, 243n6 utiliarianism, 71–72, 79 utilitarian test of pain-pleasure, 61 Valery, Paul, 138 Van Vloten, Pieter Milton, 188 Veblen, Thorstein, 37, 51, 72, 134, 138, 142, 231–32n1, 233n15 verbal atom-cracking, and perspective by incongruity, 43, 44, 49, 232n12, 233n13, 233n17, 234n21 verbal fusion, and perspective by incongruity, 43, 44, 233n13, 233n17 Viking Press, 188 Wais, Erin, 232n8 Waisanen, Don, 46 Walker, Jeffrey, 15, 215

Index Walla-Walla Union-Bulletin, 177, 243n8 “War, Response, and Contradiction” (Burke), 145, 193, 240n9, 244n2 war-debt forgiveness, 74 Warnock, Tilly, 240n6 War on Terror, 217, 218 Warren, Austin: and Burke on communism, 170–71; and Burke on ethics, 55, 60; and Burke on P&C, 142; on CounterStatement, 199, 246n21; review of P&C, 200, 202, 245n8 Warren, Robert Penn, 130, 174, 193, 240n2, 245n8 “Waste—The Future of Prosperity” (Burke), 72, 145, 219 Watson, James Sibley: and Burke on metabiology, 62; and Burke on P&C, 75, 76, 134, 155, 241n19; and Burke on perspective by incongruity, 41; and Burke on reviews, 192, 198; and Burke retrieving knowledge from past, 98; and Burke’s position on communism, 170, 172, 178 Watson, John B., 68 Watt, James, 46 Waylett, Wilson, 197, 199 Weaver, Richard, 12, 15, 207 Weiser, Elizabeth, 66, 247n1 Weltanschauung, 30, 33, 212 Wess, Robert, 63, 94, 108, 112, 113, 123, 202, 236n7 Western Speech, 188 Wheelwright, Philip, 195, 200 Whitehead, Alfred North, 51, 233n18 Whitman, Walt, 238n1 Wible, Scott, 216 Wikipedia, 119 Williams, William Carlos: and Burke on “Men of Leisure,” 145; as Burke’s contemporary, 244n1; on Burke’s “Reading While You Run,” 233n14; as cultural historian, 7, 130; on Eliot, 193–94; as leftist, 166; and University of Washington, 173, 174, 243n6 Wilson, Adrian, 184 Wilson, Edmund, 192–93, 245n4 Winters, Yvor, 193

Index Wirth, Louis, 198, 246n20 Wolfe, Cary, 55, 84, 236n7 Wolin, Ross, 191, 192, 200, 247n23 Woodger, M. H., 68, 122 Woods, Arthur, 36, 143, 145, 148, 237n13 Woodward, Trevor, 239n5 Woolf, Virginia, 245n4 Workers Education Council, 143 World Economic Conference, 74 World War I, 6, 12, 15

279 World War II: inevitability of, 6, 7, 13, 74–76, 108; memory of, 209; and metabiology, 74–76 Young, Richard, 12, 16, 208, 209, 210–11, 213 Young, Stephanie, 46 Zabel, Morton, 245n9 Zepernick, Janet, 247n1