The man who made "identity" and "identification" key terms in our understanding of rhetoric had an identity problem of his own throughout his career, a problem that has only intensified since his death in 1993 at age 96: Who was Kenneth Burke? As we try to sort out the massive but decentered and fragmented intellectual life of a century about to end, what will he come to represent for us?--this man whose life very nearly spanned the century itself.

It may seem absurd to claim that we still don't know who Kenneth Burke was when any competent Ph.D. candidate in rhetoric or literature could "identify" him on a qualifying exam. By "identity," however, I mean something more than a biographical note, an encyclopedia entry, or a list of accomplishments and rewards; I have in mind where he belongs in that crucial sense of "intellectual community."

Because he was born about the same time they were, knew them all, and had spirited exchanges with some of them, Burke was once identified with the New Critics. But he was never a formalist, nor, for all the literary criticism he published, a literary critic as that term is usually understood. Claimed by rhetoricians in both speech and English since the 1950's, Burke is indisputably one of a very few original contributors to the New Rhetoric. But many of his books and articles have nothing directly to do with rhetoric, and his approach to language and discourse, while perhaps always "rhetorical" in some of the many meanings of the word, ranges far beyond the traditional focus on persuasion. Perhaps, then, given the breadth and intensity of his reflections on language, the subject of subjects in recent philosophy, we could call him a philosopher. But if we do, how can we explain his near exclusion from philosophy? He is seldom cited by philosophers, very rarely the subject of essays by them. Among others, Frank Lentricchia, Giles Gunn, and Samuel Southwell--all literary critics or theorists--have made the argument for Burke as a philosopher (see works cited for their studies), but thus far philosophy is not buying it, or apparently even much aware of it.

Burke himself understood his identity problem clearly. "All my life," he wrote, "I've lived on the fringes/ an Ist Among the Isms/ I've been my own disease," adding with typical self-directed humor,

O let me be as much of a disgrace/ as I can risk/ and still pay the taxes./ Let me run afoul/but not too much/ of every speciality.

"Dis-eased" by not belonging, yet he required the margins as a place to think more freely, without disciplinary constraints. He had created himself as an outsider and now the self-creation had him: "In happier days," he remarks ruefully, "Self-Reliance" (Collected Poems 243).

He identified himself typically with Dramatism, or logology, or "Definition of Man"--with his own creations, not with a well-defined tradition, movement, or "school." As a lecturer or visiting scholar, a role that took him all over the United States, Burke moved with apparent ease in and out of all sorts of intellectual communities, but claimed none in particular and seemed friendly towards but at the same time wary of those that would claim him.

No doubt Burke could not have been Burke except by living on the fringes. But if the outsider stance served him tolerably well in life, in death its liabilities are apparent. Maybe, as Lentricchia claims, there is something "disturbing . . . perhaps dangerous" (53) about Burke that accounts for his exclusion from the mainstream of every discipline save rhetoric, a passion by nature unruly. However, "dangerous" types are hardly rare these days in any of the humanities or social sciences, nor is multi-, cross-, or extra-disciplinary thinking unusual. I would advance, therefore, a less dramatic explanation. The "unidentified" mind gets left out of the conversation--or becomes an afterthought or a footnote. Only the very timid would now find Burke dangerous; most are simply nonplussed about a man who has been identified with Aristotle, Coleridge, Marx, Nietzsche, American pragmatism, deconstruction, semiology, modernism, postmodernism, and so on, ad (almost) infinitum.

In short, confusion reigns.

Much Burke scholarship, unfortunately, has only added to the confusion. For example, William Rueckert contends that there are "many Kenneth Burkes"--i.e., the poet and novelist, the social critic, the language theorist, the dialectician, etc. (1). Although hardly disputable, the "plural Burke" conception only further disperses an already too-scattered identity. Similarly, when Southwell professes to find "a revised Marxism, a revised Freudianism, hermeneutics, structuralism, semiotics, reader-response theory, theory of ritual, speech-act theory, even a kind of deconstructionism" (1) in Burke, he means to celebrate an extraordinary achievement, but also contributes to the diffuseness of Burke's identity.

Even posing the question can be confusing in the current intellectual climate. The concept of identity itself is open to challenge. As one of Burke's recent critics put it,

From Barthes to Foucault, from Lacan to Derrida, the wholeness, uniqueness, intentionality, and generative power of individual human beings, generally phrased as the "problem of identity," has been thrown into question. . . . A common thrust that links these various approaches [is] a view of the individual subject as "constructed" rather than "constructing." (Oravec 176)

Poststructuralists view identity as, at best, a fiction. If it is a fiction, I would only insist that it is a necessary one. Just as Homer identified his heroes with repeated "tags" ("breaker of horses," "light of counsels"), so we will likewise require identities of some sort for the dramatis personae of our world. We can discard identity in theory but never in practice, where it matters little whether we make our identities or they are made for us. Whatever the case, we cannot interpret our world except by attributing identity, and these attributions matter because they have ethical, political, and rhetorical consequences.

In posing the question of Burke's identity, then, I have in mind hermeneutical identity in this necessary- fiction-and-practical-consequences sense. I think we can "name Burke's number" better than we have before, in a way that reduces confusion and fragmentation, maybe even in a way that makes greater consensus possible.

The Critic-Philosopher

Who is/was Kenneth Burke?

Let's begin with his lineage, his tradition. Burke was a skeptic in the original meaning of the Greek skeptikos-- i.e., an inquirer. We must be careful and precise here: He was not a "dogmatic skeptic," a person who believes that there is no good reason to affirm anything. Rather, in affirming (and Burke was never without a thesis), he remained open to the challenge, responsive to the question. He never felt that he had finished or settled anything, or that anything significant we might talk or write about could be finished or settled.

His tradition, then, extends as far back as ancient dialectic when it was used as a genuine mode of inquiry--not as a disguised monologue of "Truth" or solely as a destructive instrument of universal doubt. Nearer to our time, Burke belongs to Montaigne and the "assai" tradition, where composing itself becomes the trial of an idea, where bold speculation is a good, and writing more of value for what it stirs up then for any intellectual certainty or security it might offer.

Moving still nearer the present, Burke belongs to a group of thinkers and writers that emerged in the nineteenth century and whose heirs are now among the most influential contemporary voices--the nonsystematic critic-philosophers. The great American exemplar was Emerson, whom Burke alludes to in the poem cited earlier, and wrote about extensively elsewhere. He have with Emerson and Burke, not so much kindred minds, as kindred roles and range--as we do to a greater degree with Coleridge, England's first great critic- philosopher, and one of Burke's favorite subjects.

In Europe there is Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the latter being especially important to postmodernism as the beginning of a line extending through Heidegger to recent figures such as Foucault and Derrida. In the hermeneutical tradition Schleiermacher is the first modern critic- philosopher, but the contemporary line moves again from Nietzsche through Heidegger to Gadamer, Ricoeur, and Habermas, among others.

Working in the United States as a largely self-educated intellectual in an era increasing obsessed with credentials and specialization, Burke had good reason to cast himself as an Ist Among the Isms, but he actually represents an easily recognizable type with a long and distinguished ancestry. Although more common in Europe than in Britain or the United States, what Richard Rorty terms "the all-purpose intellectual" (56) is actually no oddity at all. As we come to understand this figure and its cultural roles and functions better, we will also understand Burke better.

How can we characterize these critic-philosophers?

Their collective motto might well be Hamlet's line: "There are more things in heaven and earth . . . than are dreamt of in your philosophy"--but instead of addressing Horatio's sturdy stoicism, the target is Philosophy in general, Enlightenment Philosophy in particular. This capital-p Philosophy understands itself as seeking Truth: That which is so regardless of time and place, history and culture. Philosophy seeks the Foundation, The Paradigm of paradigms. In the Enlightenment it sought to rationalize scientific knowledge and method and to unify all knowledge encyclopedically.

Put another way, critic-philosophers belong in one way or another to the Romantic counterthrust against the cultural dominance of scientific-technical reason. Typically they do not condemn science and technology wholesale, but rather the hubris still too often central to its self-esteem, its faith in itself--belief in its own certainty, omnicompetence, exhaustiveness, purity, reliability. Given the current cultural context, therefore, where scientific- technological reason has intruded into all aspects of life, the work of the critic-philosopher is resistance, advancing the inconvenient question, the overlooked, the pushed aside, the anomalous, the forgotten. The Other.

The critic-philosopher draws inspiration from Philosophy's Other especially--I mean the disciplines Philosophy wished to be entirely apart from and either replace or subordinate: poetry in the inclusive sense, rhetoric, dialectic, and hermeneutic, those "merely verbal" arts. We can call it collectively "literature," providing that we do not slip into the narrow, effete, and classist sense of this word, nor forget that the joy and life of it are the conversations preserved in it and the conversations we can have with it. For critic-philosophers engage literature in a way wholly unlike most literary critics: typically "makers" themselves, the former think with literature rather than merely about it, and understand literature as a prime source of unsecured and unsecurable insight from which thought begins, not where it comes to rest.

The critic-philosopher, then, is by nature an "impure" type, "too literary" for most academic philosophers, "too philosophical" for most academic literary critics. Burke shares his identity problem with the type in general, whose fate is to have a high and broad cultural significance but to be ignored or undervalued by most specialists. Commonly the innovators or paradigm-makers listen to the critic- philosophers, but the "normal" scientist or humanist does not.

The error of most Burke scholarship so far has been to trace specific aspects of his thought to this or that critic-philosopher or philosophical school--e.g., for Lentricchia, it was Marx; for Southwell, Nietzsche; for Gunn, American pragmatism, and so on. Burke's reading was so inclusive and among critic-philosophers especially also so intense--I have seen, for example, his personal copies of the works of Marx, Coleridge, Freud, and Nietzsche, and they are so marked up, so full of marginalia, that the text itself almost disappears--that one can make a plausible case for linking him to many critic-philosophers, many critical and philosophical schools. But such approaches tell us about Burke in much the same way that the blind men told us about the elephant in the famous fable--what they say is true enough, but cannot yield a notion of the whole, a workable identity. We must understand Burke as a distinctive instance of a type with definite roles and functions--as a critic- philosopher--rather than a latter-day student of one or several of his predecessors in the type.

At Work After Philosophy

Supposing that we have placed Burke in the general tradition to which he belongs, can we understand what he was doing in a more specific context, in his "curve of history"?

In the century or so before Burke, we may characterize the intellectual struggle in this way: On the one hand, we have extraordinary efforts to save Philosophy as a coherent and totalizing system--e.g., Hegel and Kant--and, on the other, withering critiques of Philosophy from, e.g., Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche. In hindsight we can read both as signifying that Philosophy in its modernist, Cartesian incarnation was dying.

Now, with the reign of quantum mechanics in physics, the clear recognition that not even mathematics can be fully coherent, daily exposure to cultural relativity through the electronic media, and much else besides tending toward anti- foundational sentiment, we can hardly imagine, much less share, the motives that once drove Philosophy. Swamped by data about everything from everywhere, by an explosion of diagnostic terminologies and theories, we dwell in the condition that late modernism found so disorienting and threatening--as T. S. Eliot put it, "multiplying variety in a wilderness of mirrors." Or recalling Yeats, "the center will not hold." What center is there? And how could anything "hold" our world?

We may hazard a modest synthesis within a field, but The Synthesis is almost out of mind, a barely audible echo of another era's ambitions. Our task has become how to live meaningfully without requiring that our meanings have some ultimate warrant, some final, preemptive justification, or be shared by all.

But this was not precisely the task of Burke's generation. By around the turn of this century, the critique of Philosophy had been accomplished--by Darwin, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche especially, each in his own way contributing to the destruction of the universalist, consciousness- centered, geometrical thinking of modernism. But our habits of thought resist change. The most influential minds flourishing as Burke came to maturity began their careers enmeshed in Philosophy. Heidegger, for example, was Husserl's student and Husserl's phenomenology still had Philosophical aspirations. Dewey began his work as an Hegelian, idealism having a strong hold on American thought in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Wittgenstein was a logical positivist. Each worked his way through and beyond Philosophy, Heidegger most radically in turning to a kind of philosophical poetry designed to overcome conceptual thought itself, Wittgenstein in rejecting the whole assumptional structure of the Tractatus and opting for the contextual study of language as language games, and Dewey with his pragmatic emphasis on process in general and never- ending inquiry in particular. This tendency to abandon metaphysics and epistemology led toward what Rorty calls a "postPhilosophical culture" (55).

Probably because the most powerful single influence on the young Kenneth Burke was Nietzsche and certain Nietzscheans (e.g., Thomas Mann, Oswald Spengler, Remy de Gourmont), Burke was never caught up in Philosophy and so never struggled to work his way free of it. As a reading of Counter-Statement (1931), his first theoretical book, will confirm, he began his career as an antinomian, a skeptic in the sense already discussed, in effect reasserting the claims of "literature" against Philosophical assurance of any kind, including dogmas of racial and cultural superiority that rationalized colonial capitalism and Fascism. We find Burke celebrating the polyvocal qualities of literature and its dialogical potential in much the same way and at about the same time as Mikhail Bakhtin, but with greater emphasis on literature as a source of resistance to the power structure. Also in Counter-Statement Burke explicitly defends and centers his book around the one discipline Philosophy despised the most, "mere rhetoric."

At bottom, what makes Burke's identity so difficult to articulate, so confusing, is that he shouldn't yet have been doing what he was doing. We are accustomed to reading the great minds of Burke's generation as working from Philosophy toward postmodernism. But with Burke we can only understand him as working from postmodernism toward philosophy, emphatically small-p. In effect, he jumped past the task of his own generation to confront the options we now confront. Perhaps such an interpretation disorients at first, but it should make Burke more familiar and easier to assimilate as we think it through. Instead of trying to force him to fit "back there," "where he belongs," and failing, instead of reading him as only a forerunner of this or that, we should "assai" another possibility: That Burke answered our question in a certain way and spent more than half a century trying to do something with his answer.

What is our question? Basically, this: Does the end of Philosophy mean the end of philosophy? (See Baynes 1-18 for a fuller discussion of this question.) For some the answer is yes--philosophy can now only be critique, deconstruction, negative herrneneutics, or negative dialectic. We must overcome the very desire to "have a philosophy," and until we do we have not really disentangled ourselves from Philosophy. Burke's answer was clearly no: We can drop the foundationalist aspiration, we can cease doing metaphysics and epistemology, and yet continue to create philosophies. Philosophy as Philosophy understood itself must be transformed, but construction is still possible and worthwhile. It need not become the narrow specialization it has become too often among academic philosophers, the study of logic.

In opting for philosophy after Philosophy, Burke joins a major contingent of contemporary postmoderns, including most notably those working in the tradition of American pragmatism, philosophical hermeneutics, and critical theory when it is "constructivist" (e.g., Habermas). We have located his cohort in the postPhilosophical conversation, which includes such critic-philosophers as Bakhtin, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Taylor, and Habermas. This is the first step toward genuine dialogues with Kenneth Burke, which should get us beyond Burke's own self-conception, beyond hero worship (characteristic of many Burkeans), and beyond the common impulse merely to bow in his direction and move on.

The Significance of Permanence and Change

I began by posing the question of Burke's identity, which included a defense of the question itself as a practical necessity whatever theoretical doubts we may have about the notion of identity itself. I then offered an answer: Kenneth Burke is a nonsystematic critic-philosopher whose tradition is as ancient as the Socratic skeptikos, as (comparatively) recent as Montaigne, Emerson, and Coleridge, as (literally) alive as Habermas, Ricoeur, and Derrida. The figure is hardly unfamiliar to us.

The question then became: How might we identify more specifically what Burke was doing? He was attempting to reveal constructive possibilities for thought "after Philosophy," for what we now conceptualize as "the postmodern condition." That is: We will largely miss Burke if we think of him as "leading towards" our present intellectual situation; we will find him if we think of him as "leading away from" a postmodernism still dominated by negative hermeneutics in general, deconstruction in particular.

I shall attempt to support this interpretation by showing what it can do with a relatively neglected work, Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. First published in 1935, between Counter-Statement (1931) and Attitudes Toward History (1937), Permanence and Change has never figured prominently in any recent interpretation of Kenneth Burke. There are at least two reasons for this: Most scholars concentrate on the later works, A Grammar of Motives (1945) and after; the few that pay attention to the work from the thirties are drawn more to the other books. Rhetoricians understandably are attracted to Counter-Statement, Marxists (as Lentricchia`s book shows) to Attitudes, and literary critics generally to The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941, but a collection of essays from the thirties). Permanence and Change becomes a kind of odd book out, read usually as transitional, of no particular importance in itself. It is only when we read Burke as a critic-philosopher and in the context of postmodernism that the book comes into its own as the most important of the early works.

What makes it so significant?--among others, the following key developments:

l. Burke argues that only philosophy can cope with modernity, and so chooses its resources over a narrowly literary strategy;

2. He rejects positivism, the assumptional background of scientific-technical reason, and opts for the primacy of hermeneutics, or interpretation;

3. Yet, in contrast to the hermeneutical tradition and most PostPhilosophers (e.g., Heidegger and Wittgenstein), Burke insists that intellectual life cannot be separated from "life" generally, animal or biological existence.

4. Burke singles out natural language (or more broadly the use of symbols of all kinds) as that which distinguishes the human animal from other animals, and argues that contemporary philosophy must make the study of language its defining concern.

5. Because language is irreducibly collective and public, the turn to language entails a social (rather than an individualistic) approach to understanding human being; and

6. Because language is always already morally committed, always already ethical and political, it cannot be understood as a neutral, objective instrument--i.e., the turn to language entails a rhetorical understanding of human being.

I shall now comment briefly on each of these six points.

The Turn to Philosophy

In Part One, "On Interpretation," Burke characterizes modernity as the loss of sensus communis, as cultural and linguistic fragmentation. Science and technology thrives under these conditions because its

language, even much more than scholastic Latin, is devoid of the tonalities, the mimetic reinforcements, the vaguely remembered human situations, which go to make up the full, complex appeal of the poetic medium. To the scientist's symbols one can respond adequately by looking them up in a book. (58)

The common language is increasingly displaced by specialized nomenclatures, terminologies reduced as nearly as possible to denotation "designed for machines," not for people.

"A corrective rationalization" must resist scientific-technical reason's "emphasis upon dominance rather than upon inducement"--must move, that is, toward the poetic. But since "the poetic medium of communication itself is weakened" by the cultural conditions of modernity, "the center of authority must be situated in a philosophy . . . of poetry, rather than in a body of poetry"; furthermore, it must be "not a specialist's art for some to produce and many to observe, but an art in its widest aspects, an art of living" (Burke's emphasis, 65-66).

Here and elsewhere in Permanence and Change Burke explains and justifies a choice decisive for his entire career: the turn from literature in the narrow sense to philosophy. From this book on to the end of his career, he is primarily a philosopher whose critical work is subordinate to developing an art of living.

In our current context, Burke's turn to philosophy matters on at least two counts. First, in contrast to Heidegger, Burke maintains that conceptual formulation is in practical terms indispensable. The hegemony of scientific-technical reason cannot be resisted in any other way. The attempt to recover Being via a return to preSocratic mythos in effect abandons the struggle, surrenders the field to instrumental reason.

Second, Burke confronts the postmodern problem explicitly and directly: In the absence of foundations, without master narratives or theoretical certainty, can we live meaningfully? Science and technology offer powerful means for coping, but not any sense of end or purpose, because, as Burke points out, both operate by eliminating purpose itself in favor of mindless mechanism (171). Merely to recover purpose involves "poetry"; philosophy's task is to formulate and reflect upon the meanings and purposes implicit in ungrounded ingenium.

The Primacy of Interpretation

"Stimuli," Burke says in another of the many passages in Permanence and Change that deserve our attention, "do not possess an absolute meaning":

Even a set of signs indicating . . . death by torture has another meaning in the orientation of a comfort-loving skeptic than it would for the ascetic whose world view promised eternal reward for martyrdom. Any given situation derives its character from the entire framework of interpretation by which we judge it. (35, Burke's emphasis)

Beyond any doubt, Burke here rejects positivism and advances the first premise of contemporary hermeneutics: There is no unmediated, uninterpreted contact with "reality."

Granted, we are not surprised by the claim itself--only perhaps that Burke could assert the primacy of interpretation so clearly and forcefully in 1935, when positivism was much more strongly entrenched. Of greater interest than the claim per se is what he does with it, which I will explicate via the next four points.

Avoiding Reductionism

The legacy of Cartesian dualism is a reductionistic, bifurcated understanding of human being, still very much with us: On the one side, we have biologisms, whose tendency is to follow Darwin in stressing our continuity with other animals; on the other, we have idealism in many forms, which stresses discontinuity, taking mind, consciousness, "pure" reason, language, culture, etc., as essentially a transcendence of the body, of "merely animal" existence. In Permanence and Change Burke not only rejects Cartesian dualism but also begins a lengthy effort to overcome its schizoid legacy, one of his more important contributions to contemporary thought.

As we can see clearly, for example, in current "social constructionist" theory, asserting the primacy of interpretation has idealistic temptations. In general Burke resists the pull of idealism by urging us, if we cannot avoid thinking in categories like "mind" and "body," to at least cultivate a melding of the two in our philosophies. We should think in terms of mind-body mergers (94), rather than in terms of a separate entity, "mind," our supposed essence, which happens accidentally to be "embodied." Nothing in Burke's view requires us to ignore or dispute the findings of paleoanthropology, nor to ask the question Heidegger poses in "Letter on Humanism," "whether the essence of man . . . lies in the dimension of animalitas at all" (203). Essence or not, human beings evolved from so-called lower animals and remain, whatever else we are, organic, biological beings. Consequently, Burke describes his philosophy in Permanence and Change, not as a metaphysic (i.e., "beyond nature") but as a metabiology (261).

More to the immediate point, Burke denies that interpretation per se distinguishes human beings from other forms of life. "All living things are critics" (5) is the first assertion of Permanence and Change.

Burke wrote a new chapter in humanistic philosophy by refusing, on the one hand, to glorify our species and, on the other, to reduce it to a being indistinguishable from other animals. His metabiology, as we will see in the next section, is not a biological reductionism.

The Linguistic Turn

If "all organisms are critics in the sense that they interpret the signs about them"--if the capacity to interpret does not distinguish us from other animals--what does?

It is the experimental, speculative technique made available by speech [which] . . . single[s] out the human species as the only one possessing an equipment for going beyond the criticism of experience to a criticism of criticism. (6)

Burke's turn to philosophy was also a turn to language, decades before anyone could speak of a linguistic turn in contemporary philosophy generally.

Now, of course, the linguistic turn is a fait accompli, and the question is, Where will it take us? It has taken us to semiology, to the study of signs and symbols as self- contained systems. We know where this leads, to Derrida and deconstruction--to, paradoxically, loss of the symbol itself as referring to anything else but other symbols. It has also taken us, via Wittgenstein, Austin, Searle and many others, to the pragmatics of language, the study of symbolism in use. It seems to me that Burke's understanding of language is never abstract and structural. Rather his later development of language as symbolic action contributes to pragmatics.

But is it primarily language in itself or language games that a philosophy of language should seek to understand? Are we interested in understanding language per se or the animal that uses it? Linguistic science and most language philosophy has chosen the former. From Permanence and Change on to the end of his career, Burke chose the latter. It is this difference that makes Burke's linguistic turn distinctive, worth special study, especially in light of mounting doubts about whether the pay-off for the linguistic turn has justified the investment.

In a key passage almost at the midpoint of Permanence and Change, Burke points out that we have a choice: "We [can] approach human problems historically, as in the philosophies of becoming" that have dominated thought since the Romantic movement; or we can "return through symbolism to a philosophy of being, the Spinozistic concern with man sub specie aeternitatis" (163, Burke's emphasis). The important phrase is "through symbolism," which means, not study of symbol systems as such and in themselves, but rather study of the motives that human beings have because they are symbol-users. Burke is attempting to reclaim the topic of human motivation, ceded by 1935 to psychology, for philosophy: His question is, Why do people do what they do? and much of his answer comes from a life-long inquiry into the recurrent motives we have because language has us.

It is important to see that Burke's return to a philosophy of being is not like Heidegger's at all--not, that is, Being and time, Being as unfolding in time. It is closer to Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence of the same," except that Burke would modify the formula to "the approximate recurrence of 'the same.'" He wants to preserve a tension between becoming and being, historical and ahistorical understanding. Historical understanding "emphasize[s] the shifting particularities" (163) of human affairs, and so is given over to the study of difference. It would teach us to distinguish, say, the motives Rome had for conquest from, say, those that drove Islam, no doubt knowledge worth having. But if we wanted to ask the more general, philosophical question, Why do people assert themselves or justify themselves through conquest at all? history is not much help. This is a question about our recurrent motivations, apparently about our being, since no other animal establishes empires or seeks to conquer nature itself. And we can only hope to answer it "through symbolism," since the needs of the body can hardly motivate triumphal marches.

We can argue endlessly, of course, over what knowledge is most worth having. But there can be no doubt that for Burke the linguistic turn requires us to renew an ancient quest. Who are we? How can we understand ourselves? The direction of questioning is certainly different from most philosophy after the linguistic turn, and the potential yield is surely more worth having than knowledge of speech acts and conversational implicatures.

The Social Turn

About the time recent thought began to be conscious of the linguistic turn, Philosophy's faced another challenge to its traditional self-conception, now called the social turn. Philosophy was supposed to be "above" or detached from society and thus empowered to reflect upon it, whereas critic-philosophers began to see intellectual effort more as Marx did, as embedded in and a product of social forces. Such a reversal of relationships relativized Philosophy, construing its claims to universal truth as largely rationalizations of the current order of things.

For Burke the linguistic turn entailed the social turn. As he explained in Permanence and Change, "a motive is not some fixed thing, like a table, which one can go and look at. It is a term of interpretation" (25, my emphasis). "Motives [therefore] are distinctly linguistic products" (35). That is, we "have" the motives of the language community to which we belong, and "any explanation [of our motives] is an attempt at socialization" (24), an effort to make what we are doing, have done, or about to do comprehensible and acceptable to ourselves and to others.

Philosophy, in this respect no different from anything else people do, is motivated activity, and so is enmeshed in its own language community, its own ways of accounting for itself. Which is to say, philosophy is not an escape from history, nor the work of transcendental egos. All it offers, and this not solely its own, is the power of reflection, "speculation" in the root sense, what we have already found Burke calling "an equipment for going beyond the criticism of experience to a criticism of criticism" (6). By 1935 Burke had embraced wholeheartedly the social turn, a claim we cannot make as yet for all recent philosophy. How is it that Burke could do it so soon? To understand this, we must take up our last point.

The Rhetorical Turn

Traditionally Philosophy, following Plato's lead, defined itself by contrast with rhetoric: Philosophy sought Truth, whereas rhetoric worked with "mere" opinion. The rhetorical turn denies any meaningful distinction. A distinctive rhetoric of philosophy may be possible, but not an a- or non-rhetorical philosophy.

Certainly Burke understands philosophy as rhetoric, as far from innocent of the will to power. But Burke takes the rhetorical turn a step beyond depolarizing philosophy and rhetoric. If speech is our distinguishing characteristic, what is speech?

"The spontaneous symbols of communication are hortatory, suggestive, hypnotic" (54)
In the last analysis, [people] do not communicate by a neutral vocabulary. In the profoundest human sense, one communicates by a weighted vocabulary. (162, Burke's emphasis)
In its origins, language is an implement of action, a device which takes its shape by the cooperative patterns of the group that uses it. (173)
The spontaneous speech of a people is loaded with judgments. It is intensely moral . . . a system of attitudes, of implicit exhortations. (177)

In these and other places in Permanence and Change, Burke claims that language is always already rhetorical. One cannot take the rhetorical turn any further or more seriously than Burke had already taken it by 1935.

However else we might explain it, the decisiveness of Burke's social turn is enabled by the radicalness of his rhetorical turn. If language is always already rhetorical, "weighted," "loaded with judgments" and "implicit exhortations," then it must also be always already situated in a language community that can respond to its "hortatory, suggestive, and hypnotic" power. Language is not and cannot be made into the neutral instrument that method wants it to be; when method abstracts from language as used to Language as a self-contained system of signs, it is not taking one of many possible routes to understanding language. It is rather misunderstanding language, missing it even as it tries to bring it into focus. Language escapes methodical understanding because method wants to begin by bracketing and setting aside that which language always already is, i.e., rhetoric.

Conclusion

In Permanence and Change Burke made the linguistic, social, and rhetorical turns, and made them in an integrated way, with a full grasp of their implications for postmodern thought. This is a remarkable achievement, difficult to accept fully for what it is, since we are still struggling, more than sixty years later, to digest all the challenges to traditional thought embraced by the concept of "postmodern." And here we encounter in the Burke of the middle thirties a man already well into postmodern philosophy. No wonder his identity is a puzzle to us, his place in the conversation uncertain. It will take us some time to get used to the notion that Burke is "on the other side" of postmodernism, somewhere in that not-yet of whatever-it-is that comes after.

Postmodernism has thus far been on the whole "de-(con)structive"--usefully so, perhaps, but nevertheless for the most part only a negative critique of modernism. Burke dares to build on postmodern terrain. If we read his work from 1935 on as "assais" in constructive postmodernism, I think we have a chance to understand him better than we have so far.

Works Cited

Baynes, Kenneth. "General Introduction." After Philosophy: End or Transformation?. Ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P; 1987. 1-18.

Burke, Kenneth. Collected Poems, 1915-1967. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968.

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