Thomas Carmichael, The University of Western Ontario
Abstract of a Paper to Be Presented at the 1999 Triennial Conference of the Kenneth Burke Society
Whether or not one accepts Frank Lentricchia's assertion that Burke's "various acts of reading and writing history" and "not Dramatism" represent "his true project," Lentricchia's description of Burke's as an historical thinker defined by "a series of decisive engagements . . . with the idea of system itself" is perhaps best exemplified in Burke's sustained engagement with Marx (1982: 120). In contemporary left cultural critique, Burke's reading of Marx is most often celebrated as an anticipation of Althusser's structural causality and of the latter's notion of the interpellated subject of ideology, a linkage which provides much of the logical momentum for Fredric Jameson's famous account of the literary text as a formal or symbolic resolution to social contradictions (Jameson, 1981: 79; 1982: 76). Jameson's own observations about Burke, symbolic action, and the "paradox of the subtext" have also informed much of the best recent work on Burke and Marxism. Bob Wess, for example, has subtly and persuasively demonstrated the role of the transhistorical and of "relative autonomy" as engines of Burke's concrete and dynamic history in which acts and subjects "can always be agonistically melted down and reconstituted" (1996: 146). And in a similar vein, Greig Henderson has shown how Burke's early appreciation in "Auscultation, Creation, and Revision" of the negative hermeneutical power of Marxist thought is in large part premised upon a notion of a subject of ideology that shares much with a later Althusserian formulation.
But to the extent that Burke's reading of Marx is fully integrated into his "system," this reading is also open to the left cultural critique of Burke's own work, best represented by Fredric Jameson's reservations about the absence of any place for an unconscious in dramatism, Burke's "too immediate celebration of the free creativity of human language, " and by Jameson's regret that Burke finally "did not want to teach us history" (Jameson 1982: 88, 90). There are moments in Robert Wess' account that we glimpse a Burkeian unconscious of history as the already constituted and endlessly reconstituting situation within which acts are irreducible to theconditions that shape them, but Jameson's reservations are not entirely answered by Wess' account in that Jameson's real concern is with the relation between social contradictions, representation, and the limits of symbolic action (Wess 1996: 13, 36, 146). For Jameson, what is central in Burke is what Cary Nelson has described as the situation of Burke's "motivated subjects," who are "agents of a rhetorical situation of no one's choosing," or, more modestly, who choose within a system of "mobile yet always structured and hierarchized differences" (Nelson 1989: 169).
This paper proposes that we reconsider Burke's account of the cultural construction of the subject in history by reading it in the context of Marx's own grappling with the same dilemma in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, his 1852 account of class logic and representation in France in the events leading up to Louis Napoleon's coup d' in December of 1851. In terms of motives, symbolic logic, and the historical act, The Eighteenth Brumaire stands as what might be termed Marx's representative anecdote, and for the purposes of my discussion, it serves as a focus and a measure to structure the path of Burke's reading of Marx, from the early movement from antithesis to difference in "Auscultation, Creation, and Revision, " to his later readings of Marxism under the heading of "Agent" in A Grammar of Motives and his considerations of mystification and The German Ideology in A Rhetoric of Motives. The end of the argument in this paper is to rethink Jameson's reservations, and to shed new light on the ways in which Burke's successive readings of Marx are an attempt to encompass a dilemma that stands at the center of symbolic action, but which is also very much Marx's own.
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