Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change

4. Further Speculations on the Dialectic: The Rhetoric of Religion

4 Further Speculations on the Dialectic: The Rhetoric of Religion Although much has been made of what Kenneth Burke has called logology, very little attention has been paid to his inaugural booklength manuscript on the subject entitled The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Oddly enough even less attention has been paid to its third chapter wherein Burke applies logological analysis to the creation myth, a story he identifies as "just about perfect for the purposes of the 'logologer' " (3). Indeed, in the attempt to come to terms with Burke's "doctrine of the Logos" (Burke 1985, 89), critics by and large pay mere homage to the book; for the most part their substantive statements about logology derive from articles Burke published at least a decade after he finished writing the original three hundredodd pages on the subject.1 Contrary to the prevailing tendency on the part of critics to interpret the logological enterprise from within the frame presented in Burke's most recent essays, I will take as my own point of departure the book itself. Indeed, it will be my suggestion here that a critical approach that takes as its first order of business a careful charting of the protocols of The Rhetoric of Religion but is willing to follow the precarious rule of textual aporias "which harbors the unbalancing of the equation, the sleight of hand at the limit of a text which cannot be dismissed simply as a contradiction" (Spivak 1976, xlix) makes it possible to produce a supplementary reading of the book that goes 52 / Addressing Postmodernity beyond not only its declared claims but also the claims in Burke's later essays on logology as well. Specifically, I will argue that such a strategy of reading enables us to detect the way in which Burke, one, reopens the question of the condition of possibility for the historical emergence of individual and collective being; two, exposes his earlier theorization of their emergence in A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric ofMotives as inadequate, by way of the principle of the negative ; three, imperfectly exploits the critical resources of the principle of the negative; and four, unwittingly discloses the limits of logology itself. Here I should stress that my interest is not to dismantle the dramatistic-Iogological project. To the contrary, my ultimate aim will be to reinvigorate it by deploying precisely that which has been "repressed " or, as Burke himself would put it, "discounted" by the text-the full force of the negative. A Reading Lesson In his 1985 article entitled "Dramatism and Logology," Kenneth Burke takes up the question, "why two terms [dramatism and logology ] for one theory"? In uncharacteristically lucid fashion, he posits the following answer: " 'Dramatism' ... features what we humans are (the symbol-using animal). Logology is rooted in the range and quality of knowledge that we acquire when our bodies (physiological organisms in the realm of non-symbolic motion) come to profit by their peculiar aptitude for learning the arbitrary, conventional mediums of communication called 'natural' languages (atop which all sorts of specialized nomenclatures are developed, each with its particular kind of insights)" (89-90). To this and other similar statements Burke has recently published, critics attach a particular privilege : they are repeatedly invoked as the authoritative explanation of the purpose and place that The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology has in Burke's system. Indeed, by means of this declaration, everything is made to fall into place: dramatism is Burke's name for his ontology; logology is the name for his epistemology. One could, of course, question the assumptions that enable critics to fix the function of The Rhetoric of Religion in this way, such as the assumption that hindsight is twenty-twenty or, to put it differently, that the oppositional relation between the subject and the object of retrospection, "upon which the possibility of objective descriptions rests," is uncontaminated "by the patterns of the subject's desire as is the subject constituted by that never-fulfilled desire" (Spivak 1976, lix). However, rather than rehearse in theoretical terms the question of whether Burke (or any writer for that matter) has direct access to Further Speculations on the Dialectic / 53 his meaning, I should like to take another tack, once again working against the current of contemporary Burkeian scholarship to raise a somewhat different question, namely, why two books on the same subject? Despite what the history of Burkeian...