Rhetorical counteraction in Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives and The War of Words

ABSTRACT

However esoteric Kenneth Burke's A Rhetoric of Motives seems at first glance, it remains highly relevant to our contemporary moment. As a philosophy of rhetoric that centers on the nature of human conflict, it helps audiences interpret the vicissitudes of political warfare with greater precision and insight. The value of A Rhetoric of Motives becomes even more apparent in light of its recently discovered second volume, The War of Words. Together, these two volumes offer a novel method of rhetorical counteraction that helps specialist and non-specialist audiences redress the threat of nationalistic war. Burke's approach to rhetorical counteraction is distinguished by the study of rhetorical devices across history. By approaching these devices systematically, Burke believed he could help his audience reframe their attitude toward evolving political events. The purpose of this article is to present a thorough account of Burke's method so that it can enrich how we teach and engage in public deliberation today.

KEYWORDS:

• Rhetorical devices
• nationalistic warfare
• philosophy of rhetoric
• rhetorical education
• method

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Mary Stuckey and to the anonymous reviewers for their careful assessment of my article. Their recommendations made this revision process truly instructive. Ron Fortune provided sage guidance throughout the drafting process, and I owe more to him than I can possibly say. Considerable thanks are due to Roxanne Mountford for her encouragement, kindness, and careful reading of an earlier draft. I am not sure this article would exist had she not invited me to lecture in her rhetorical analysis seminar at the University of Oklahoma. Finally, I wish to thank the Burke family for their generosity in allowing me to cite the unpublished drafting materials that populate this article. Having the opportunity to work so closely with them has been an unbelievable gift.

Notes

1. Kenneth Burke, “Situational,” in Burke-3, The Kenneth Burke Papers, Eberly Family Special Collections Library at Pennsylvania State University, 14.

2. Office of Management and Budget, “America First: A Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again,” https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/omb/budget/fy2018/2018_blueprint.pdf, Accessed August 10, 2017.

3. Office of Management and Budget, “America First,” 1.

4. Jessica Taylor, Danielle Hurtzleben, and Scott Horsley, “Trump Unveils ‘Hard Power’ Budget That Boosts Military Spending,” npr.org, March 16, 2017. http://www.npr.org/2017/03/16/520305293/trump-to-unveil-hard-power-budget-that-boosts-military-spending

5. Taylor, Hurtzleben, and Horsley, “Trump Unveils.”

6. Taylor, Hurtzleben, and Horsley, “Trump Unveils.”

7. See, for example: Robert Pear and Thomas Kaplan, “Trump Threat to Obamacare Would Send Premiums and Deficits Higher,” The New York Times, August 15, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us/politics/cbo-obamacare-cost-sharing-reduction-trump.html

8. The Associated Press, “Trump Threatens North Korea With Fire and Fury,” The New York Times, August 9, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000005346140/north-korea-trump-threat-fire-fury.html

9. Pear and Kaplan, “Trump Threat.”

10. The final iteration of this volume, eponymously titled The War of Words, included the chapters, “Of the Devices,” “Scientific Rhetoric,” “The Rhetorical Situation,” and “The Rhetoric of Bureaucracy.” In “Distance as Ultimate Motive: A Dialectical Interpretation of A Rhetoric of Motives,” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2009): 213–39, Bryan Crable argues that this outline appears in a letter written by Burke to Malcolm Cowley on January 26, 1947. However, Burke dated the letter incorrectly. It should have read January 26, 1948. This fact becomes obvious when the letter is placed alongside Burke's other correspondences. Of particular value, in this regard, is a letter that Burke wrote to James Sibley Watson on February 15, 1948, which contains a similar outline. Burke's letter to Watson is held in the James Sibley Watson/The Dial Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at The New York Public Library. Burke's letter to Cowley is held in Burke-1 in The Kenneth Burke Papers at Penn State University.

11. Archival evidence indicates that Burke completed revisions to A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) on March 19, 1949 and submitted the manuscript to his editors at Prentice-Hall shortly thereafter. At the time, he was serving as a short-term faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Letters to friends and collaborators indicate that Burke had not decided to suspend his work on The War of Words prior to his membership. In fact, the archival evidence demonstrates that he was drafting chapters from The War of Words in the months that preceded his appointment. It is important to underscore the fact that Burke suspended his work; he did not abandon it. Burke's footnote on page 294 of A Rhetoric of Motives is particularly valuable with regard to this point: “The closing sentences were originally intended as a transition into our section on The War of Words. But that must await publication in a separate volume.” For more on Burke's decision to suspend this section of the project, see, in particular, Burke, Burke to Watson, March 19, 1949, in James Sibley Watson/The Dial Papers at The New York Public Library. For more on why Burke's discussion of rhetorical devices may have appeared in his essay “Rhetoric—Old and New,” (which gives further credence to his ongoing commitment to rhetorical counteraction well after he submitted A Rhetoric of Motives to press) see Burke's letter to Watson dated April 7, 1950 in the James Sibley Watson/The Dial Papers in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

12. Bryan Crable, “Distance,” 216.

13. Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, xv.

14. Kenneth Burke, “Devices,” The War of Words in the personal archive of the Kenneth Burke Literary Trust, 182–3.

15. For example, Burke argues in A Rhetoric of Motives: “The Rhetoric must lead us through the Scramble, the Wrangle of the Market Place, the flurries and flare-ups of the Human Barnyard, the Give and Take, the wavering line of pressure and counterpressure, the Logomachy, the onus of ownership, the Wars of Nerves, the War” (23). Take note of Burke's use of the definitive article in this passage, which indicates that this conflict obtains across history.

16. Burke, “Devices” 195.

17. Burke, Rhetoric, 22.

18. Kenneth Burke, “Prospectus,” January 2, 1946 in Burke-3, The Kenneth Burke Papers.

19. Burke, Burke to Watson, April 27, 1947 in Berg Collection.

20. Burke, Burke to Watson, April 27, 1947 in Berg Collection.

21. Burke, Burke to Watson, April 27, 1947 in Berg Collection.

22. Burke, Rhetoric, 166.

23. Burke, Rhetoric, 165.

24. Burke, Rhetoric, 166.

25. Burke, Rhetoric, 166.

26. Burke, Rhetoric, 166.

27. Burke, Burke to Watson, December 22, 1948 in Berg Collection.

28. Burke, Burke to Watson, December 22, 1948.

29. Burke, Rhetoric, xiii.

30. Burke, Rhetoric, xiii.

31. Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 87.

32. John Kenneth White, Still Seeing Red: How the Cold War Shapes New American Politics (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1998), 60.

33. Fried, Nightmare, 60.

34. Fried, Nightmare, 59.

35. Fried, Nightmare, 66.

36. Peter L. Steinberg, The Great “Red Menace”: United States Prosecution of American Communists, 1947–1952 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 104.

37. Burke, “Scientific Rhetoric,” in the personal archive of The Kenneth Burke Literary Trust, 35.

38. When referring to Burke's theory of identification in this essay, I use the term nonconscious. As far as I can tell, this is not a term that Burke employs in his discussion of identification either in A Rhetoric of Motives or The War of Words. What is clear is that Burke, in an attempt to revise Freud's approach to identification, marks off an area of consciousness that “lies midway between aimless utterance and speech directly purposive” (Rhetoric, xiii). That this area of consciousness is primarily influenced by our relationship to symbol systems is nowhere more evident than in his critique of psychoanalytic approaches to human motivation: “And the frequent psychoanalytic search for ‘unconscious’ desires to kill some member of the family, either through rivalry or through love frustrated and expressed in reverse, puts the emphasis at the wrong place. For the so-called ‘desire to kill’ a certain person is much more properly analyzable as a desire to transform the principle which that person represents” (Rhetoric, 13). I have chosen the term nonconscious instead of subconscious because the former is more clearly differentiated from the search for deep motivations that Burke clearly opposes. In addition, contemporary research on nonconscious processes adopt a system-based approach to its analysis, which, seems to me, largely consistent with Burke's study of symbolic action. For more on this, see: N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Burke's ongoing struggle to name this area of consciousness is evident in “Mind, Body and the Unconscious” from Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and Method (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966) in which he differentiates the unconscious processes of dramatistic analysis from Freud's psychoanalytic study of neuroses (63). In this essay, he uses the term unconscious to explicate his approach; I have chosen not to follow Burke's lead because it introduces more confusion than clarity.

39. Burke, Burke to Watson, June 3, 1948 in Berg Collection.

40. Burke, Burke to Watson, June 3, 1948.

41. Burke, Rhetoric, 5.

42. Burke, Rhetoric, 151.

43. Burke, Rhetoric, 62.

44. Burke, Rhetoric, 63.

45. Burke, Rhetoric, 63.

46. Burke, Rhetoric, 63.

47. Burke, Rhetoric, 104–5.

48. Burke, Rhetoric, 104–5.

49. Burke, “Devices,” 120.

50. Burke, Rhetoric, 33.

51. Burke, Rhetoric, 33.

52. Burke, Rhetoric, 34.

53. Burke, “Scientific,” 2.

54. Burke, Rhetoric, 35.

55. Burke, Rhetoric, 36.

56. Burke, Rhetoric, 35.

57. Burke, Rhetoric, 36.

58. Burke, Rhetoric, 161.

59. Ross Wolin, The Rhetorical Imagination of Kenneth Burke (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001), 172.

60. Kenneth Burke, “Introduction to the Devices Situational,” in Burke-3, Kenneth Burke Papers, 4.

61. Burke, “Introduction,” 4.

62. Burke, Rhetoric, 141.

63. Burke, “Introduction,” 4.

64. Burke, Rhetoric, 27.

65. Burke, Rhetoric, 178.

66. Burke, Rhetoric, 36.

67. Burke, Rhetoric, 36.

68. Burke, “Introduction,” 11.

69. Burke, Rhetoric, xiii.

70. Burke, Rhetoric, xiii.

71. Burke, “Devices,” 195.

72. Burke, Rhetoric, 22.

73. Burke, Rhetoric, 22.

74. Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 514.

75. Burke, “Devices,” 195.

76. Mary L. Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8.

77. Dudziak, War Time, 8.

78. Dudziak, War Time, 8.