10/2: Metabiologies and Microrhetorics
October 2, 2007
- Kenneth Burke: Permanence and Change
- Notes
- Scarry Documents 1, 2, 3
- Neuropolitics Neuropowerpoint
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1.
Jack McIntyre | October 3, 2007 at 1:50 pm
In the spirit of “Bodies of Persuasion”, let’s assume, for the purposes of this paragraph, that the self equals the face. And as a means of exploring Burke, let’s consider a conundrum: does the mirrored self equal the self? Superficially one might be tempted to answer “yes”, until one considers that all mirrors distort images to some degree, and the image will always be reversed; one might now answer “no”. Upon further reflection one might question this conception of self; what is the “real” self? It is impossible to see oneself without a reflective surface, or camera, or drawing, or other mediator. Others see your face unmediated, but you cannot see through another’s eyes without a mediator, and upon further reflection the other is mediating the image, optically through the eye and through the brain in its interpretation of the raw data. The paradoxical conclusion (one conclusion anyway) is that that one does have a face, but it is inaccessible without a mediator which, in a sense, creates the face. This exercise makes apparent the difficulty in characterizing the self as real or not, material or not, natural or constructed. But, as Burke might ask, what do we gain from attempting to divide the mirrored self and the self?
So far the readings for “Bodies of Persuasion” have suggested two major categories: the first includes rhetoric, the body, science, individuality, and materiality. The second includes Truth, God, mind, tragedy, unity (de-individuality), and emphasizes the immaterial. Socrates, for example, seems to prioritize the second with his mystical emphasis on “forms”, and describes perceived reality as derivative. Nietzsche then complicates matters by accusing Socrates of causing a 2500 year degeneration of western civilization by excessively de-emphasizing the second category. Of course one might debate how to classify Socrates, but I suspect one would find that he is as difficult to classify as the self. This is because, in Burke’s terms, one’s view of Socrates is mediated by one’s orientation; one is creating Socrates, in a sense. Yet Socrates, and more importantly his writing, was there before one’s act of creation. The same is true of Nietzsche and Hawhee; either can be placed on either side of the divide. Hawhee’s non-Socratic Greeks seemed to fall in the first category, with their emphasis on the body, but metis and kairos are, one might argue, mental states, and therefore intangible and properly belong to the second category. Nietzsche in Birth of Tragedy seems to belong in the second category, as he clearly dislikes the prioritization of science over tragedy, yet his comfort with deception seems to belie any glorification of Truth, and therefore he belongs in the first category. Likely the reader can come up with much more ingenious and legitimate rationales for the categorization of each philosopher on both sides of the divide.
That this division divides so ambiguously might indicate that it is not a meaningful division, comparable to, for example, categorizing philosophers as short guys and tall guys. Yet this division seems to be implicit in all of the works we have addressed in class so far. Socrates clearly sees rhetors and philosophers as heterogeneous; Hawhee is concerned with pointing out the connection between the body and rhetoric in ancient Greece and contrasting it with the current body-mind division so prevalent today, indicating an underlying assumption that the world today is divided according the categories described above. Similarly Nietzsche contrasts today’s science with the ancient’s tragedy.
As in the conundrum of the mirrored self and the self, it is appropriate to ask ourselves what philosophy has gained by cleaving itself into two categories. Applying Burke, philosophy is perhaps trapped by this division. My question: is philosophy trapped, and if so, how can it escape? How can we change our orientation to unify this ancient division, and how would such a change be useful?
P.S. Prof. Pruchnic seems to see the same division that I tried to describe, though his division of philosophy/metaphysics and Sophism/Rhetoric-Theory is obviously more refined. Clearly my categories can be revised and expanded. However I think the point I was trying to make stands, and is reinforced by Prof. Pruchnic’s categories; philosophy has divided itself along the lines described in the preceding essay.
Also I want to point out that not only is the position of thinkers ambiguous, some of the terms in each category could go either way. Science, for example, belongs in the first category because it’s empirical and therefore attached to the material; on the other hand it is ultimately concerned with finding truth (as in a Theory of Everything) and therefore could be placed in the second category. I think this further confirms the point that this division is artificial rather than natural or inevitable, and should be evaluated as Burke might evaluate it: why has philosophy divided itself in this way, how is it useful to us, or not, and would we benefit from finding a different division to focus on?
2.
Kim Lacey | October 3, 2007 at 2:39 pm
**A response-response will be posted sometime soon, but in the meantime, here’s just the response…
Noted in the afterword, the “investment in analogy is central” to Kenneth Burke’s Permanence and Change (324). The above statement, therefore, functions as the most concise summarization of this text, since the notion of something alluding to something else is precisely what Burke’s discussions of language and the symbolic lend to the text as a whole. To borrow directly from Burke, this ‘linking’ between what something is and what something is named becomes somewhat blurry, as illustrated early on with the examples of the tests performed by Watson, Pavlov, and Gestalt (i.e. fear, incited by the banging of a steel bar, was linked to rabbits, and eventually spread to all objects rabbit-related). While reading Burke, I realized that “linking” is quite related to my personal research, and I would like to take some space here to discus how I might be able to utilize these Burkean concepts in relation to performance and gender studies.
Even though the Butler readings are not for a few weeks, I have been smitten by her writings over the past few years, but more recently in relation to blogging. Due to the space restrictions, I will only briefly (and crudely) touch upon ‘repetition’ and ‘gender construction.’ Through dress, hairstyles, or make-up, we visually construct gender, and thus ignore the actual body because we are covering it. What we are instead focusing upon is the outside, or what one selects to present. We become either male or female through consistent performance, and gender is defined by what Butler terms as “repetition”: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being” (Gender 44). Therefore, physical appearance such as the clothes, make-up, and hairstyles are more than reflections of taste, they become vehicles by which we are gendered, or read. We see the body as a text, we read the ‘language’ of someone’s clothing, and make assumptions of one’s gender based upon on our readings. By focusing so entirely upon the construction of a body through language rather than the body’s physicality, “the body is nothing other than the language by which it is known” (“How Can I” 256). More precisely, if gender is ‘discursively fabricated,’ we are formulating gender through the invisible, through language, and socially constructing the idea of the body.
As I was reading Burke, Butler kept returning to my mind every time “preference” was used. To examine this, I would like to point to a specific moment in the text that I feel links back to the above discussion of Butler. Burke writes that, “man lives by purpose—and purpose is basically preference. […] Action is fundamentally ethical, since it involves preferences […] The ethical shapes our selection of means. It shapes our structures of orientation, while these in turn shape the perceptions of the individuals born within the orientation” (235, 250). For Butler, gender is a preference, a performance. One chooses to be either male or female and repeats this preference daily (i.e. by dressing as either a male or a female). Structured through this selection, the repeated perceptions have come to represent specific genders. Thus, when we automatically think ‘female’ upon seeing someone wearing a dress, we are enacting a Burkean sense of linking gender to the language through which it is known.
Question for class: How does trained incapacity play into the formation of gender? If trained incapacity is the past working against the present experience, how does this idea play a part in rethinking the male and female body? What about the metrosexual, or the butch? When Burke says that, “a way of seeing is also a way of not seeing,” do we then not see ‘enough’ male in the metrosexual? Do we see too much male in the butch? What about transsexuals or cross-dressers? What do we see while not seeing?
3.
Clay Walker | October 4, 2007 at 2:57 am
I want to begin with Charlie Chaplin, the silent actor who told stories – Burke takes up Chaplin in a brief example, he writes, “The people’s extreme delight in the acting of Charlie Chaplin was probably due to the way in which his accurate mimetic style could surmount the social confusion. His expressions possessed an almost universal significance, since they were based upon the permanent certainties of the body, the eternal correlations between mental attitude and bodily posture” (44). Without the heuristic structure of language and discourse to guide the audience toward the punch line, Chaplin draws from a semiotics of the body to guide the audience through the narrative. Body language seems to be registered unconsciously as we engage eye contact in conversation (my eyes usually focus on my conversant’s right eye) while directing our consciousness toward the vocalized messages – and after some cognitive and emotional processes, toward the generation and performance of our own responses; although that is not to dismiss the fact that some of this process indeed relies on unconscious systems such as motor control, sensation, etc. Nonetheless, without the dominating force of vocalized language, Chaplin brings the immediate communicative capacity of “the permanent certainties of the body” and “the correlations between mental attitude and bodily posture” to the fore, much like Tetris brings our instinctive visual attraction toward patterns, lines, and form to the fore. [The Tetris argument comes from Stephen Johnson.] Perhaps Burke’s interest in Chaplin lies in the immediacy of the body’s non-vocalized modes of communication – this corporeal analogy of cognitive/emotive expressions into bodily postures, gestures, movements. Perhaps we forget about the parallel immediacy of metaphor in regular speech because of the difference, the variety of usages, the high frequency of vocal communication in our lives that naturalizes this mode as normative, a given, always there.
Burke calls for a synthesis of antitheses as in mind-body (93, 94). We have to recognize that language is not reality, but is already an interpretation of reality, grounded itself in our own biological makeup. This interpretive faculty is the basis of all culture, civilization, it is the outward projection of particularly human modes of understanding and therefore communication – in Burke’s argument, poetic metaphor. He writes,
“Insofar as the individual mind is a group product, we may look for the same patterns of relationship between the one and the many in any historical period. And however much we may question the terminology in which these patterns were expressed [myth, religion, science], the fact that man’s neurological structure has remained pretty much of a constant through all the shifts of his environment would justify us in looking for permanencies beneath the differences, as the individual seeks by thought and act [sic] to confirm his solidarity with his group (159) … insofar as the [human] neurological structure remains a constant, there will be a corresponding constancy in the devices by which sociality is maintained. Changes in the environmental structure will, of course, call forth changes in the particularities of rationalization … But the essentials of purpose and gratification will not change (162).”
Thus, although all sorts of human constructions change over time and across the spectrum of societies, they remain rooted as particularly human constructions (interpretations based on interpretations), and since there has (apparently) been no change in the essential biological structure of humans, there has been little change in the way these sorts of societal institutions and structures are constructed. Therefore, “no given historical texture need be accepted as the underlying basis of a universal causal series … thought and action are integrally related [in humans] to begin with … all of man’s historic institutions [should] be considered the externalization of biologic, or non-historic factors … [and] the materials of invention (of either the speculative or applied varieties) are but the objective projection of subjective patterns grounded in our organic equipment)” (228). This grounding of human cultural structures in the biological structure of the human body may be located also in cognitive linguistics: the corner stone text, Metaphors We Live By (1980) by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson shifted linguistic attention away from the metaphysical, universal, ethereal deep structure toward the particularly human and particularly experientially based process of analogical relationships:
“Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish – a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. …
“The concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people. Our conceptual system thus plays a central role in defining our everyday realities. If we are right in suggesting that our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor (3).”
I find both Burke and Lakoff and Johnson compelling – (by the way Burke is not mentioned in “Metaphors We Live By”) – and I would like to end with the following question: If we are to turn away from the essentially Platonic argument that truth is metaphysical, unbounded by the body, and accessible only by the soul-mind-cognitive faculty, what is at stake? What worth is their in posing the mind-body synthesis and claiming that all human understanding and all human structure (tangible and intangible) stems from our natural process of analogical thought? Is it a shuffling of the deck, or do we stand to gain something from it all?
—
Update:
What is at stake? Here are some citations from my notes of our discussion along with comments mixed in, although I do not really differentiate between the two. (1) Maybe Truth, or at least the way we conceive of Truth as having been constructed. Rather than a metaphysical concept, one with clear pathways through the body (Foucault seems to be alluding to this as well). (2) Imposing truth on the body. Although I can’t remember who said it, and I made no note of context, it seems interesting and, again, echos Foucault’s text. (3) There is an increased agency if we acknowledge the fluidity of culture as Burke has constructed it (interpretation of an interpretation) but this raises the quagmire of interpretation. So what if human constructions like culture are fluid and not fixed – if they are constructed from language, and language is our fundamental interpretation of reality (i.e. Our only access to reality) then what can we really do, who cares if we have an agency that we cannot actually access? Rather than being trapped in a transcendental hierarchical structure, we become trapped in the body, grounded in the prison of interpretation. (4) Relieve some notions of human suffering. Identity gains agency when Truth is not tied to a fixed celestial transcendent hierarchy. Rigid interpretations of what Truth and Reality and the Human Condition or Identity or Subjectivity or any other socio-cultural construction break down. Maybe people can re-imagine themselves, and it is in this juncture that I see the most potential. (5) What is at stake if we are indeed stuck in the human prison of interpretation/body? Affective change, we can make the way we receive (feel) reality change. If there is a biological basis, then there can be biological reconditioning. We can change the way we relate to Truth, change what it means to us and our lives – appreciate the struggle ≠ escape.
4.
Michael Cipielewski | October 4, 2007 at 3:53 am
Michael Cipielewski
Response 4
Eng 7007
“You are an analog girl, living in a digital world.”
Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Neil Gaiman speaks of new Gods, American Gods named solely by the concept they embody: the God of the internet, the Goddess of media, and so on. In the above quote, it is the Internet embodied in a young and fat child speaking to the Queen of Sheba, invoking her obsolescence, “digital is the new black”, so to speak. This whole business of etiology in terms of newness – our worship of things nameless, that otherwise could fall under those of existing pantheons, modern or ancient – lends itself to a Secular Psychosis once religious, once the “newness” the internet God speaks of, but now a fossilized institution. In short, Kenneth Burke’s extrapolations of fossil institutions, psychosis, expectancy, and weltanschauung inform Gaiman’s artistic representation, a work that draws few conclusions but raises questions considering technology and embodiment, both for social bodies and “heavenly bodies”.
In the modern context, Burke points out that “our psychotic openness to fads, the great cry for innovation engendered by competitive capitalism, could seem to be in keeping with the marked unstableness of our economic and social expectancies.” In this manner, social structure is cyclical in that, though technology serves as a signpost of innovation, there exists a recurrence of technological mysticism (in the Maffesolian “neotribe” sense) where the social structure is oriented in a way that is conducive to a “recycling” of “obsolete thinking” (As Burke states of Marx, a society’s historical environment is synonymous with its methods of production.) Thusly, computer desks turn into altars not by nature of the way they are “worshipped”, but how they are used, the humachine interface, the pronounced psychosis in the proprioception of technology further modeling the proprioception of Gods.
Veblen’s Fossilized institution further informs this cyclical nature, where “as long as they survive, the values they reinforce [will] be upheld” – and not so much “values” in this case, but destiny; the character (will/psyche) telescoping the past, present, and future (14). The Gestalt character then telescopes the past, present, and future in a social sense. That is not to say that there is a sort of pervasive pre-destiny, but rather cyclical parameter in which linkage occurs. The remnant orientations recur, amalgamate, and hybridize; the telescope in this manner is a (social) cycle – now is now, yesterday, and tomorrow for everyone at once, or intermittently.
Returning to the God of the internet, or rather, the medium which the God represents: if character is derived from relationships in larger contexts, then the largest social structure in existence is the social world body of the internet. This social body is the vector of the three rationalizations, magic, religion, and science. In this schema, the science of technology manifests religious psychosis in unnamed worship, where the unnamed are etiological (a magic, a mythos) in and of themselves. “Orientation takes on character in accordance with the contexts in which we experience it” to such a degree that that psyche can be defined by the technology it proprioceptionally embodies; orientation is derived from the medium. If the medium is internet social structure, what can we extrapolate from the digital weltanschauung? How or is this complicated by Cyberphobia? To what extent is technology proprioceptive?
Postscript:
On proprioception and Gods:
The term of proprioception seemed to confuse the issue of the human-machine interface: I am thinking of proprioception in the sense of kinesthesia, or simply put, a feedback loop. In the body the feedback loop is described as being between the body and the brain, a constant (re)adjustment perception of object-in-space (a body part) and cognition. Kinesthesia further expands on this idea, where the feedback loop is no longer a body-brain relation, but body-object relation. Kinesthesia allows us to drive a car, for example. Through learned action we are able to operate the pedals, steer, and have “proportion” between the car and, say a parking space. In this model, the car becomes an extension of the body, and of perception.
This concept tied into the Gaiman reference, as well as the Burkean weltanschauung. Gaiman’s description of the relationship between Gods and humans is what seemed to draw from weltanschauung and an extension into cybernetics. In Gaiman’s view, Gods only exist when they are either worshipped or useful. A God is worshipped in the plainest sense: sacrifices, a place of worship, etc. A useful God is one whose primary function is still recognized, and thusly how new Gods come to be. Etiology plays a major role in this relationship, for historically every God and Goddess has had some “purpose”, whether it be thunder, the harvest, the seasons, wine, et al. New Gods are neither named nor worshipped. Rather, they are some extension of use; somewhere, there is a God/dess of stop signs!
This is an interesting concept in terms of a pervasive world view, a weltanschauung, given Burke’s description of exactly how weltanschauung functions in social and economic environments. When extended further to cybernetics and the human-machine interface, the relationship becomes even more plain, and I will use Demeter is a framework.
Demeter, the Goddess of the harvest, is integral for agriculture. For the farmer, the Goddess is important because the harvest is important. The linkage between the Goddess and the harvest is the result of weltanschauung-production, but the harvest is inseparable from the functions of the farmer. The higher power is less important in this way, and the function holds more “functionality” in the model. (we seem to enjoy these sort of comparisons? Ahem. More human than human!)
Now, in context of technology and cybernetics, the relationship between human and machine parallels the agricultural model to the point that the God figure no longer exists, only function. It is at this apex where Maffesoli comes to mind in describing “the return of the mystical.” Mysticism no longer need resemble the God-human relationship, that use alone exhibits the same function.
This being the case, I still may pour a libation to the God of Ipods tonight.
As a side note: given everything I’ve expanded on in context of mysticism, could brand loyalty/rivalry somehow play out as an even further extension of neomysticism? Will masses of people with squares and apples on their chain mail meet in a field at the backs of Bill Gates and Steve Jobbs to battle out a Maffesolian neotribe Jihad? I speak metaphorically, of course… and I know Burke has warned me already of such juxtapositions. Still, it is interesting to think about how neotribalism and neomysticism could possibly play out in both our simple use of a technology, and which specific technologies we choose.
5.
Crystal Starkey | October 4, 2007 at 6:26 pm
Hi all… I technically have a get out of jail free card for this week, but after reading your responses I am drawn to addressing Jack’s questions… or at least in theory I THINK I have something to say to Jack’s questions. Im not going to pretend I have an answer to your questions; rather, I have a comment, an aside, a “yeah, but”…or something like that.
I think Burke attempts to show that as human beings our mind is not as separate from our bodies as some philosophies would lead us to believe. As a means of making sense of our where our mind, our soul, begins and our body takes over (or vice versa) human beings tend to separate these entities. This inaccurate separation represents the ways in which human beings try to make sense of what they do not fully understand. We do this in such a way that shows the mind as being the knowledgeable, more affective essence of our whole selves, which is merely housed, kept if you will, by our bodies. At the very least, Burke pleads, if we are unable to change our thinking about the oneness of our mind and body, then address this oneness in our philosophies.
Burke claims human beings also falsely believe that it is our mind– our ability to reason– which separates us from animals and animalistic behavior. Burke says this thinking is incorrect. In fact, Burke begins his book with the sentiment that every animal is a critic. He exemplifies this through the trout which, having had his lip torn out from a previous hook, will opt for hunger over attempting to eat other food that, at least in sight, is similar to the bug that hooked him. Is this not an ability to reason? Perhaps we are not as special as we think we are? Kind of, Burke would say. I think Burke claims it is our language– the use of symbols– that distinguishes us from animals and further. It is this language that allows us to not only be a critic of experience (being hooked by a fisherman’s fly) but also a critic of criticism. Thus, according to Burke, our primary focus should be on analyzing and interpreting our language, as it is the element which sets us a part. Moreover, since language is public and social, truly understanding it and the beings which utilize such poetic, political, socialized laden language must be part of a collective consciousness rather than individualistic.
Does the study of language, then, become a rhetorical understanding of the human being, because, says Burke, people communicate with a weighted vocabluary? He goes on to say that it is not the study of the symbols themselves that we should concern ourselves with; rather, we should be actively analyzing what the motives are of human beings who put to use this systems of symbols.
Well, Im not sue that is connected much at all to your question Jack, now that I wrote it out, but in my mind it was. Maybe I need to go to sleep. Or get some coffee.
6.
mlmcginnis | October 4, 2007 at 7:43 pm
Among many, many other claims, Burke contends that “in our enlightened era we have ethicized machinery” (207). In support of this claim, he offers two corollary claims: first, the industrialized emphasis on machinery as “an absolute good” and a concomitant association of progress with mechanization; second, the metaphorization of an assumed absolute value of the machine, extended into explanations of “biologic behavior totally different from mechanistic behavior”. (Though, parenthetically, it should be noted that Burke is not immune to this mechanizing trope; witness his description of “organic equipment” (228) in the following chapter.) Burke’s contention here is not about the value of machinery or technology per se, nor even about how humans signify through technologies; rather, Burke’s interest here is in inquiring how humans come to associate matters of value with technologies, rather than viewing them as merely implements, as means to an end. It is this process that Burke describes as “ethicizing”.
Burke’s choice of words here can be confusing. (A statement that Burke might suggest is the objective projection of my subjective orientation—which is another way of saying: I was confused by Burke’s use of language.) Burke admits the divide between his use of the concept of ethics and more familiar uses such as those of Bentham and utilitarian philosophy and of Kant’s transcendental categorical imperatives. What characterizes all uses of the ethic, Burke suggests, is a relationship, specifically, that “between the individual and his group” (195). The primary distinction between Burkean ethical philosophy and earlier philosophies seems to lie in the role Burke attributes to ethics in the social sphere. For Kant, the categorical imperative is a supra-natural, super-rational duty that imposes ethical behavior on rational human beings; for the utilitarians, ethical behavior is guided by striving for the greatest good for the greatest number. In both transcendental and utilitarian philosophies, ethics thus has the form of obligation, of duty, and of law—or, at least, the potential for codification. Burke’s ethics offers a radical departure by not situating ethics within the sphere of imperatives, duties, or laws; in fact, Burke appears to studiously avoid any dogmatic elaboration of a quasi-moral ethical system. In its stead, Burke seems to offer, as a way of understanding ethics, a philosophy of how humans associate meaning with objects and events, and assign to them values dependent on orientation and frame of reference. Which, in turn, is to suggest that Burke’s ethics is less philosophy than phenomenology.
It should be noted, though, that I think either praising or condemning Burke’s ethics as simply a pre-postmodern exercise in cultural relativity substitutes an easy categorization of his work that overlooks an opportunity for more pointed inquiry. I’ve provided here only a very broad-strokes gloss on Burke’s ethics, but there are questions in wait for the scholar who wishes to take them up. What is gained by approaching ethics phenomenologically rather than philosophically? A question of method: although I wish to point out the schism phenomenology-philosophy, is, like Burke’s mind-body paradigm, a necessary shorthand for effective communication, we should ask whether there is a distinction—or if all philosophies are phenomenological—and vice-versa? To what extent—by representing the merger of the subject’s ego-centric drives and the altruistic concern with others—is Burke’s ethics a totalizing model, one that might be said to offer a model of subjectivity itself? And if that is the case, where do the distinctions lie between Burkean subjectivity and that posited by Hegel? And, finally, why do I have so many questions when Jeff only asked for one?
Post Script . . .
I seem to recall the following notes/comments stemming from Clay’s response, as we tried to figure out what the stakes were in Burke’s resituating of truth into the metabiologic category. I say “tried,” ‘cos we’da done it if Jeff had just let me say my last piece, but noooo, people had to do their preeesenTAtions.
So anyway: I think one thing I’d like to ask, post-Burke, is what degree he would accord the very values of truth and falsity. While he claims that there is a truth in so far as such things as POV, frame of reference, orientation etc. exist, I think he goes to great lengths too to suggest that any claim of Truth is a social construction. (In turn based on biological needs and capabilities etc.) So what I might suggest then is that one thing Burke is attempting to do is to efface the binary True/False and, in its place, champion the binary Permanent/Mutable. Truth (in its social construction sense) is dependent on seeming natural, eternal, permanent–while, by definition, Falsity must not be any of those things. But if we accept Burke’s claims about truth/Truth, then it is difficult, if not impossible, to still hail the Truth of “Truth.” Nevertheless, there are categories–as Burke shows–which remain constant (or, I might suggest, are mutable on such an infinitesimal scale that they create the illusion of permanence) as well as those that are historically and socially mutable. One way to read Permanence & Change, then, is as a substitute binary for Truth & Falsity.
7.
Kim Lacey | October 4, 2007 at 7:57 pm
If I have deciphered my class notes correctly, we questioned if ethics leans more towards the phenomenological rather than the philosophical, and further questioning if all we have are representations (if I’ve butchered this, well, there goes this response!). And after reading Jack’s response, the lean towards phenomenology seems a bit clearer, or at least more convincing to me. Jack brings up the interesting idea of intervention, or the mirror remediating the image of one’s face. This reminds me of a moment in Lacan in which he states, “I saw myself seeing myself” (I can’t remember off hand, but is Lacan quoting Merleau-Ponty here?). By questioning if the reflected self is actually the real self throws the above quote into question: who is myself?—the reflection? –the one looking? Does something only exist once it is related to something else? In this case, one’s face does not exist only because it is represented in the mirror; so, for the purposes of this paragraph, the self does not equal the face. To say, “I saw myself seeing myself” implies that the self is doubly existent in both the reflection and the actual, and I don’t think that Burke would agree with this. The reflected face differs from the actual face in Burkean analogy-istic (heck, we’re English majors, we can make up words!) sort of way in that we cannot see the reflection and the actual as the same. The reflection is meant to stand in for the actual face, and functions as the link back to the original. For Burke, the mirror’s reflection of the face would not be “myself seeing myself,” but rather myself seeing an image that looks like me, and represents me, all the while fully understanding that it is not me.
8.
eric herhuth | October 4, 2007 at 8:00 pm
Below, is my original response followed by a secondary entry that reflects on Kim’s comment in an effort to delineate the similarity in our respective applications of Burke.
In the Hebrew story of Moses’ recording of the ten commandments, Moses’ communication with God causes his face to glow and this elicits fear amongst the Hebrews who see their leader’s shining visage. Thus, Moses veils his face when with his people and only removes the veil when receiving commands from God (Exodus 34:29-35).
This moment in the religious text of the old testament is a fine example of stigma as Burke mentions it near the end of his “Meaning and Regression” chapter. The “marked” change of Moses participates in altering the overall orientation of the Hebrew people (remember that earlier in the story there is that episode with the golden calf and the breaking of the commandment tablets written on by the finger of God). The visual rhetoric of Moses’ face works to garner the “solidarity” of the Hebrew people. Burke compares such stigma to a poem where, “The poem is a sudden fusion, a falling together of many things formerly apart” (158). Now this quote refers primarily to the subject’s perspective of the occurrence and surely we can use Moses as a character who could reflect upon that series of revelations that produced his glowing face as the “poetic moment” that established/reconfirmed his “piety” toward the Yaweh God, but at the same time this is foremost a poetic moment for the Hebrew people; thus, it exists recorded in Exodus. This is a moment where things are coming together, namely their Law, their Leader, and their God. Now it is plausible to consider a “mechanistic metaphor” for the glowing face of Moses, perhaps his fasting caused his face to take on an unseemly hue. Nonetheless, the “teleological metaphor” or “poetic metaphor” represents the actual or rather “biological” experience of the Hebrew people upon witnessing the event. Given the context of the story, i.e. the characterization of the feelings, anxieties, and sufferings of the Hebrew people, there is no way that the glowing of Moses’ face that accompanied his culture-defining revelations could be interpreted by the folk as anything less than the result of encountering the divine.
There is also something to say about appearance in this exemplary narrative. The face of Moses is what the people see; it is the thing that appears to them. Even the use of a veil to cover the face of Moses, a classic rhetorical maneuver, works to amplify the mystery and magnificence of the stigma. Yet I question this assumption based on the Burkean interpretation I have just applied. If this anecdote is a “poetic metaphor” used by the Hebrew people to represent to themselves, and others I suppose, the birth of their divine Law and leadership, why veil the stigma, the bodily marker? Or perhaps the better question is to ask why record the veil as part of the “poetic metaphor”? The Biblical text tells us that the people were afraid of Moses’ appearance and therefore the veil eases their fear and effectively allows Moses to appear before them as their oracle. The glowing face is scary—the veil, not so much. The glowing face is the symbol corresponding to divine encounter; the veil symbolizes the human work to make that encounter bearable or shall we say rhetorically efficacious. Surely, tablets written on by the finger of God would have been better, but no such luck; instead, the people made their own golden version of an animal they knew. The veil is similar to this scenario, isn’t it? Granted, the Hebrews did not know Moses was coming down the mountain with God’s own fingerpainting, nonetheless the veil-story follows in its theme as the people distancing themselves from the divine with their own works. The veil would be the human-made thing inserted into the process of divine “orientation” (Burke’s orientation). Thus, I would argue that the veil exists in the story to legitimize the very writing-down of such stories. When Moses’ face ceases to glow or when the leader himself passes away, his veil will remain as a reminder of the Hebrew religious orientation in the same way that the written narrative operates as a detailed remembrance. The veil is the “poetic metaphor” in Burkean terms. It gives the Hebrew the precedence to make stuff (part of the human condition as argued by Hannah Arendt), to do the “ethical universe-building,” which it seems was understood as the irresistible temptation of the people. The irony of course is that this human-made thing veils the stuff it is working to preserve.
** Though my entry says nothing of gender, it shares with Kim’s analysis a look at bodily appearance and adornment. It seems that Burke’s work illuminates such issues and may help to steer our queries into them. Kim asks, “What do we see while not seeing?” and in Burkean terms I respond, we see the new in its impiety or in other words our trained sight renders us incapable of seeing the new without its impiety. Thus, the question becomes what do we do with the new appearance? The word “new” here is much too general and inprecise but attempts to refer to the body appearing differently from some previous appearance. We take-in appearances, they build orientations and piety as Burke describes it, “Piety is the sense of what properly goes with what” (74). The new appearance is bodily rhetoric in that it attempts to establish new “linkages” and this sort of thing usually elicits an interpretation and response; like the flock of birds that decide to follow the first bird that flew away and like the trout. However, I proposed that the veil in the Hebrew narrative represents the space for narrative, for representations that perform something—like hiding the scary, shining face of an oracle in order to enable the people to listen to that oracle. If rhetoric can serve as a veil that helps to ameliorate the effect of impiety, then my question is, how should rhetoric, and therein what kinds of rhetoric, participate in the changing appearances of the body, i.e. my question is about the rhetoric of the rhetoric of the body? If I think of a better way to articulate this I will, but in the meantime this veil of veils is yours to wear and play with.
9.
J. Niester | October 4, 2007 at 8:13 pm
Techno-Optimism and Orientations
When discussing man’s relation to the universe, Burke advocates the use of the poetic or dramatic metaphor. The goal of the poetic metaphor is to create the following environment: “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 to which both naturalistic and supernaturalistic rationalizations have given less than seems necessary to our modern urbanized ways of living.” At that time, Burke believed society was forced to live under the standards created by economic patterns, which limited the cooperative aspects of action (271). In many places, I felt the oppressive weight of work and technology limiting and warping orientations. Of particular interest to me is how Burke seems to oppose throughout Permanence and Change the idea of building a metaphor around machinery and the danger of considering man a mechanism.
With all the new theories emerging about information technologies, I couldn’t help myself from comparing and contrasting the views of technology in the 1930s with views of today. Burke’s view seems rather deterministic from what I can gather from the sporadic references to machinery. The machine is the determinant of orientations, shaping how people view themselves and their world. There is no reversal where man determines how the machines operate; at least it is not heavily explored in this text. In new media theory, there have been many debates centered around the question: does technology determine culture or does culture determine technology? Most seem to agree that is a co-creative process, where both the user and the technology have agency that leads to a new product. I don’t see the operating of machinery as a communicative act in Burke’s discussion, however, that is very much how I see myself working with computers. Does that say more about the interactivity of today’s media or more about my own orientation of having a computer since the age of 10?
In Burke’s piece, technology and individuals are not agents reorienting each other; instead machinery is seen as an external force bearing down and dictating the daily communicative practices of mankind. Many in Burke’s view erroneously ethnicize machinery in two ways:
1) We tended to consider machinery as an absolute good, as witness the frequent identification between mechanization and progress 2) We have been so impressed by the prestige of machinery that we attempt to carry the machine metaphor into other areas of investigation, assuming its absolute or universal interpretative value, as when we employ it to “explain” kinds of biologic behavior totally different from mechanistic behavior” (207)
Again, I wonder if Burke were here today what he would say about the current way we ethnicize technology? I will admit to doing this. I’ve become a bit obsessed with the project One Laptop Per Child, which is working with children in developing countries. The project gives children, who don’t have electricity, running water, etc., laptops, which they teach themselves to use without the aid of a teacher in a classroom and then take the laptop home to share their knowledge with their family. Of course, the first English word they learn is “Google.” But the presence of this technology has led to increased school attendance, a 50% increase in some schools, even though children do not need to go to school to receive a laptop. I was immediately sucked in as I realized I could compare this project’s efforts in Brazil to Freire’s past efforts in Brazil to make a brilliant (of course) comparative analysis to show how critical pedagogy and the way we look at literacy has evolved. However, I did not ask the questions Burke would perhaps pose: what will get lost as these areas move into a more technological way of viewing the world? Is this project overly ethnicizing the technology?
Postscript:
In class we had the fascinating and amusing comparisons of Burke’s work to American Gods and The Colbert Report; today I had my own moment of uncanny meshing as I watched the movie Metropolis while subbing for a Science Fiction class. For those who haven’t seen it, the movie is centered around how technology and economic forces impede communication between the working class (in this case the subterranean minions running the machine of the city) and the upper-class tier of planners/designers and the generally wealthy. These two groups, even though they technically speak the same language, cannot understand or communicate to each other due to their differing economic orientations. Tensions rise as a mediator can’t be found. Underlying all this is the deception of machinery, which is developed when a scientist creates a cyborg doppelganger of the woman trying to negotiate better conditions for the worker. This doppelganger leads the workers to near self destruction. In the end only a human (the boss’s son who has fallen in love with the female crusader) can step in and communicatively mediate the two parts of society to create a harmonious world.
10.
Clay Walker | October 5, 2007 at 2:35 am
From Kim’s second response – If “Permenance and Change” were looking in the mirror, there would have to be a tripartite reflection such that “I saw myself [#1] seeing myself [#2] seeing myself [#3]” – thus, [I --> Myself #1 --> Myself #2--> Myself #3] would directly correlate to [Subject --> Socio-Cultural Institutions --> Language --> Reality]. Is this reductive? Maybe, but interestingly another parallel layer would be [body-mind --> mirror --> body-mind --> mirror]. That is, if we combine these three formulations of Burke’s argument we get the following: “I [Subject + Body-Mind] saw myself [Socio-Cultural-Institutions + Mirror] seeing myself [Language + Body-Mind] seeing myself [Reality + Mirror]“. Does that make sense? Maybe. Maybe not. Nonetheless, the figurations of Subject/Language/Body-Mind on the one hand and Socio-Cultural-Institutions/Reality/Mirror are provocative.
Eric, I liked your response, too bad you didn’t get a chance to read it out loud – I find this face project fascinating, and I keep stumbling on passages in our readings. As I was reading your post on the moses veil, I thought about Foucault’s description of the hiding of the face during public execution as one step in the transition from punishment of the body to punishment of the soul.
11.
Jared | October 5, 2007 at 3:04 am
7007 Response #4
October 2nd, 2007
~Jared Grogan
Last year I discovered Burke for the first time. I worked with some of the ideas in A Rhetoric of Motives and The Rhetoric of Religion in order to explore how the recent construction of a Creation Museum (of “natural history”) in northern Kentucky positioned various symbols from Genesis within the museum’s structure to buttress a particular version of history. My essay was a response to a call to explore a particular figure of figuration of rhetoric. Let’s just say that the Creation Museum was a cultural structure a little more complex and bizarre than the fishhook or bell. The “food-processes” and “bait-processes” within its cultural and rhetorical tangles revealed some interesting questions that relate well to our course and to our reading of Permanence and Change.
The museum emphatically brings together key symbols and meanings, most from Genesis, that are categorically changed when they are brought in from outside the structure of the building itself. The symbols are strategically placed on a path, a “walk-through history” that is organized chiefly as an ordered narrative alleged to be governed by the ‘presence’ of God because of the literal order of various symbols from Genesis. The Internet walk-through the museum brings us into the creationist narrative as a historical narrative; no surprise, as we know history is largely about different ways of narrating events! Rhetoric’s materialization in the fifty thousand square-foot Creation Museum is not built so much to change the minds of those who are rooted in a belief in evolution, as it is built to reinforce the general orientation of most who already have belief in creationism.
In Permanence and Change, Burke notes that religion seems to be a “rationalization which primarily attempts to control the specifically human forces” because of an increased need for ordering more cooperative habits under increasingly complex social and political conditions (44). The Creation Museum, though a powerful rhetorical figuration affecting more than fundamentalist groups alone, is not an attempt to coordinate non-believers, even non-fundamentalist believers. It is an attempt to bolster a particular community, and it aggressively resists forms of skeptical dialogue because of a stance of impermeable belief, one offering open contempt for other forms of knowledge or deeper orientations.
In Permanence and Change Burke also notes that the rationalization of science has a particular genius in its experimentalism, creative skepticism, and organized doubt, but it also carries a technological psychosis in its positivistic self-affirmation that tends to lay waste to other rationalizations, orientations, and more artful ways of living, in order to maintain a particular model of progress deemed as natural. Burke, in The Rhetoric of Religion, notes that “it would seem that nothing can more effectively set people at odds than the demand that they think alike. For given our many disparate ways of life, we couldn’t really think alike, even if we wanted to” (Burke V). He finds great significance in the sacrificial principle that comes with the idea of assigning strict order to our existence in the world. He says:
If we are right in what we take the Creation Myth in Genesis to be saying, then the contemporary world must doubly fear the cyclical compulsions of Empire, as two mighty world orders, each homicidally armed to the point of suicide, confront each other… wanting to feel certain that, if the other and its tendencies were but eliminated, all governmental discord (all the Disorder that goes with Order) would be eliminated (4).
Perhaps the Creation Museum falls into a larger historical pattern of rhetoric that has consistently and irrationally cut off progressive conversation with larger loyalties and instead brought violent short-lived divisions. Whether it is religious fundamentalism or false positivism, proposing that your vision of the world is the absolute and necessary means towards certain historical progress will almost necessarily cause significant factions.
What, if any, advice does Burke offer us as means to bridge such conflicts? Is it possible that the Creation Museum is not a “pillar of militaristic culture” or a socially dangerous institution but a recalcitrant/poetic/fictional response emblematic of our time, or a new era?
post-post.
I enjoyed all your responses this week and was genuinely impressed with the breadth of thought about Burke… nice. I thought my postscript should run through some of your responses at first, but I’m stuck in a cult-like rut on this one…and I keep running up against my own ideas. I was wondering how the divisions many of us touch on in our responses this week seem to be taking shape in today’s world (materially/structurally). Are there any clear forces at work that are creating or tearing apart the more divisive and “certain” (but spiritual) orientations, like those I mentioned? Do you see any cultural constructions grounded in some kind of poetic recalcitrance, poetic metaphor, or poetic living? And I’m not asking if anyone went to the reunited Rage Against the Machine tour….I’m just wondering about your thoughts about any new symbols/situations indicating a break in orientations? I can’t seem to get over how these material/symbolic structures seem to tie into Part three of the book…
12.
jule wallis | October 8, 2007 at 2:14 pm
Kenneth Burke’s major contribution to the field of rhetoric and communication is his assertion that language is “weighted…men do not communicate by a neutral vocabulary” (162). Specifically, Burke brings together perspectives of “orientation,” “trained incapacity,” and “technological psychosis.” Burke’s overriding concern, then, is how orientation interferes with its own revision and how a society’s ways of life gives rise to only partial perspectives. Particularly in “Part One: On Interpretation,” Burke posits the ways in which all living things interpret signs and base their actions on these interpretations. In Burkian fashion, Burke takes his thesis one step further by arguing that not only do people interpret signs and events, they also interpret their interpretations. In an attempt to situate Burke’s theory of communication and the ways in which communication determines how we act and relate as social beings to my area of study, I have paid special attention to language’s biased power, expressly the ethical and moral component attached to language/communication. My interest in the rhetoric of rape exhorts, if not requires me, to further examine and apply Burke’s theory of communication/rhetorics. Burke’s book gives me theoretical tools for demonstrating the ways in which the rhetoric of rape is inherently orientated, perspectival, and, most importantly, encased in morality. Language is intensely moral – its names for objects contain the emotional overtones which give us the cues as to how we should act toward these objects (specifically women and violence). “Spontaneous speech is not a naming at all, but a system of attitudes, of implicit exhortations. . .An important ingredient in the meaning of such words is precisely the attitudes and acts which go with them.”
How then, does society, policies, ethics, etc. define the seemingly natural connection between women and rape? For Burke, human language is really a terminology rather than a language. In other words, language defines- it defines rape, who can be raped, and how the violated or rapeable woman can and must respond. If one doubts this correlation between language/communication and the rules of who is rapeable and how a woman must avoid or act in such situations, one need only hearken to society’s proliferation of myths and rape. What woman hasn’t heard numerous examples on how to avoid or escape rape? “Never go back to his place, never enter the car, run in an arch, acquiesce rather than risk further bodily harm, and so on. We literally have a social and communicative rule book for responding to rape or situations that can lead to rape. Similarly, Burke analyzes the ways in which the contingent meaning of stimuli is shaped by our vocabulary: “different frameworks of interpretation will lead to different conclusions of what reality is” (35). Burke’s underlying meaning here is that orientation shapes motives; orientation frames how we see the world, and this worldview shapes our motives for acting. Thus, if society defines rape as an inherently female experience, such an orientation will not only shape the ways in which we view women, but how women should act, where they can and cannot go, and how they should be resigned or respond to the impending act of rape itself.
It becomes obvious, then, that if we hope to eradicate the imprisonment of women into a realm of violation, we must realize our orientations, and thus definitions and responses/actions, are faulty. Burke asserts that “to discover in oneself the motives accepted by one’s group is much the same thing as to use the language of one’s group;” both are “self-deceptive” because motives, like language, are not “right” or “wrong” but simply the result of orientation. Initially I balked at Burke’s assertion, but upon further investigation, it began to make sense. For example, our orientation situates our understanding of what it is to be female and who is naturally rapeable. Most women (at least the ones I know) comply with the idea that rape is an inherently female experience (biology is often used in this defense). Often, they are the worse judges of women who “act out” and are therefore obviously/naturally raped by placing themselves into a rapeable situation. Who hasn’t heard the common response “She was asking for it” after a woman hears the story of an inebriated woman, scantily dressed, going alone to a male companions room? Thus, as indicated by Burke, such motivations and arguments are so inherent in the mind of the social subject that he/she think of them as “natural” when, in fact, they are constructed and socialized.
Thus, how we interpret the world is shaped, in part, by our training/orientation. This training may lead one to misjudge and choose the wrong actions. As a result, “their training has become an incapacity” (10). However, one’s orientation results in one’s experience which lessens the ability to change. Through stories, myths, news accounts, shows such as Law and Order: SVU, and so on, women have been given a unique and “universal” experience of femaleness. These female experiences and communication of rape stories have perpetuated the belief that women are naturally rapeable. Thus, not only language, but experiences and communication, define and position women and rape, and ultimately thwart action. Burke explicates the ways in which meanings and stimuli merge: “and you may assume that, if a certain stimulus has rightly or wrongly a danger-character, a danger response will result….danger-stimulus and fear-response are one—and to remove the latter you must redefine the first” (150). In other words, signs create meaning which create reality. If a person reacts to a “danger-stimulus” with a “fear response” they have not regressed, but instead are reacting rationally. To alter the cycle, the “danger-stimulus” sign needs to be redefined.
Can this occur? Can rape and violence against women be eradicated? Can we re-envision a female experience in which woman does not equal rape/violation? I believe so, and Burke imagines this change occurring via an alternative social orientation. A different orientation would entail a different linkage. It would “link the outstanding economic distress with an outstanding defect in the economic system itself” (16). Yet, a change in our orientation feels impious because it challenges our sense of piety which is based on orientation. But this is needed if we hope to make a change. It may seem impious to state that women are not naturally rapeable, that their existence does not naturally have to revolve around violation. Many women, especially, get angry with me when I state that rape is a form of social control/power over women and should be treated as such and not as an inherent identity/fear experienced by women. They assume that our biology, at best, makes us rapeable. I argue that it is not our biology that enables the rape of women, but a social and ideological power which makes it seem that we are more rapeable because we have a vagina. Women were not always the figures of desire and violation. One need only revisit the young men of Greece to see this is so. Orientation means everything! Burke argues that “planned incongruity should be deliberately cultivated” in order to “subject language to the same ‘cracking’ process that chemist now use in their refining of oil” (119). He furthers indicates the importance of planned incongruity by stating: “The mind is a social product, and our very concepts of character depend upon the verbalizations of our group. In its origins, language is an implement of action, a device which takes its shape by the cooperative patterns of the group that uses it” (173). Thus, we need a new orientation, a new perspective in regard to rape/women if we ever hope to eradicate the “natural” connection between women and violation.