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keith GiBson Burke AnD the Positive PotentiAls of technoloGy Recovering the “Complete Literary Event” Kenneth Burke often wrote in his published work about the effects of science and technology on society. The majority of those writings have left readers with the impression that Burke was at least skeptical and perhaps even downright negative about the consequences of our modern scientific rationalization. One set of documents from the Kenneth Burke Papers at the Penn State archives challenges the simplicity of that notion, and this essay will consider how they provoke us to refine our understanding of Burke’s view of science and technology. I begin with his published work, and I demonstrate that Burke had a well-established (and welldeserved ) reputation as a skeptic of the virtues of technology. I then introduce a little-known interview Burke gave to a Swedish radio station that complicates our idea of Burke as technological pessimist; in this interview he described some positive uses of technology, especially in relation to literature and the preservation of what he regarded as the “complete literary event.” I conclude by applying the ideas from this interview to contemporary multimedia technologies. Burke’s writings on technology and literature were important in the 1950s, and they continue to be relevant as literary and rhetorical scholars learn to deal with rapidly changing technology today. Burke’s technoloGicAl skePticism Finding explicit skepticism regarding science and technology in Burke’s writings is a very simple task. Burke’s criticisms of science and technology have tended to follow three themes: (1) critiquing those who see science as an unerring boon to society; (2) warning us about the negative consequences of science and its application; and (3) pointing out the weak epistemological position of science. While I lack the space here to provide an exhaustive list of Burke’s criticisms of science, I will provide a representative sample to illustrate each of these motifs that appear in his work, and I conclude the section with a summary of the scholarly community’s views of Burke’s attitudes toward science and technology. 100 Keith Gibson Critiques of Science as “an intrinsically good power” One of Burke’s best-known treatments of technology occurs in his description of the modern occupational psychoses in Permanence and Change, among them the agrarian psychosis, the investor’s psychosis, and the criminal psychosis. As Burke traced the history of rationalization through magic, religion, and science, he noted that each of these had been brought to bear to control a certain aspect of society: magic to control nature, religion to control humans, and science to control machinery. The technological psychosis (“mainly responsible for their [the other modern psychoses’] perplexities”) arose when the “doctrine of use, as the prime mover of judgments, formally established the secular as the point of reference by which to consider questions of valuation” (PC 45). Burke claimed this led to a series of confusions for philosophers working in this rationalization. Marx for instance “tended to confuse the is and the ought to be,” and he had difficulty making “the subtle distinction between what is to a man’s interests and what he is interested in” (PC 45). Burke did not see a particularly easy way out of this “problematical approach to questions of value,” given that it is intensified by “the occupational diversity that is part of this same technological framework” (PC 47). Burke further explained in Attitudes toward History that this new scientific rationalization will lead to an even more debilitating social side effect than the technological psychosis: naïve capitalism (ATH 142–58). And though many saw science and technology as the liberators freeing society from the falsehoods of magic and religion, Burke did not see this as liberating at all; instead he foresaw a prolonged struggle that would result in an uneven distribution of wealth and eventual class warfare (ATH 158; see also Gibson). It was not just that science could lead to undesirable side effects; Burke persuasively argued that it would. In The Philosophy of Literary Form Burke took to task some specific thinkers who saw science and technology as nearly unerring forces for good. In his critique of John Dewey’s Liberalism and Social Action for instance, he noted that Dewey took this leap: “if the author’s merging of science as technique with science as charitable attitude towards people were made the express subject of analysis and rationalization , Dr. Dewey’s volume would be more enlightening” (PLF 391). Burke continued this theme in...

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