Kenneth Burke's Permanence and Change: A Critical Companion

Kenneth Burke’s

Permanence and Change

Studies in Rhetoric/Communication

Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor

Kenneth Burke’s

Permanence and Change

A CRITICAL COMPANION

Ann George

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH 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

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

ILLUSTRATIONS

Toward Los Angeles, California. Dorothea Lange. March 1937

First edition title page

Burke’s Latin and Greek transcriptions of Matthew 16:18

Perspective by Incongruity notes #6 and #11

Perspective by Incongruity numbered outline

Draft page from Perspective by Incongruity

Hermes Scroll #7. Hermes Publications, 1953

March 1935 New Republic ad for Permanence and Change

SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

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 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

PREFACE

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 much-needed 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.

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 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.

ABBREVIATIONS

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 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, 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.

SITUATING P&C IN 1930S AMERICA

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 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.

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 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 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 FIRST LOOK AT PERMANENCE AND CHANGE AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE

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 define and achieve the good life²—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.

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.

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 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 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 cutting-edge 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