Our Bodies and the Language We Learn: The Dialectic of Burkean Identification in the 1930s

Abstract

Rhetorical scholars have long regarded identification as a concept central to Kenneth Burke’s work. However, a close reading of Burke’s work of the 1930s locates the early incarnations of identification in the dialectical relationship between human embodiment and symbolicity. By restoring the complications neglected by a largely symbolic approach to identification through increased attention to the body and the material consequences of symbolicity, a revised understanding of Burkean identification captures more effectively the complex material and symbolic divisions that characterize human social life and prescribes means of negotiating these divisions.

Notes

1 The author thanks RR reviewers Matthew Abraham and Jack Selzer for their helpful and thoughtful comments. In addition, the author also wishes to thank Bryan Crable whose insight and guidance were invaluable to the development of this essay. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Tenth Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society in June 2017.

2 John Belk shares my understanding of identification as “a concept Burke had already been developing (although not necessarily under that name) since the early thirties” (376). However, to complicate Belk’s point, in my reading of Burke’s 1930s writings, I find that central to his development of identification, he remained fixated on the link between human symbol-use and the physiology of human body—a component of identification oft-neglected in existing literature and readings of Burke that, I argue, provides the foundation for both his conception of “symbol-using animals” as well as his conceptualization of the material realities of human social life.

3 In chapter three of Kenneth Burke: Rhetoric, Subjectivity, and Postmodernism, Robert Wess traces Burke’s biological emphasis from “Auscultation” to Permanence. Noting both Burke’s apparently essentialist tendencies in this text and Burke’s resistance to this characterization, Wess suggests that “the ultimate agon in [Permanence] is in the body rather than history” (81). For the purposes of my argument, I believe Burke’s wrestling with the body (and Wess’ analysis of this text) here gestures toward an important moment within the trajectory of Burke’s theorization of the body and sociality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jaclyn S. Olson

Jaclyn S. Olson is a PhD student in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; she received her master’s degree in communication from Villanova University. Her work interrogates the ways that logics of postracialism are configured in the White American imagination, particularly through engagements with non-White genres of music. Most recently, her thesis project explores the rhetorical work performed by (White) critics and musicians who laud jazz music as the colorblind, transcendent “American theme song.” She can be reached by email at [email protected].