Late Modernism. Robert Genter

critic, Burke did not fully enter the cultural debates over modernism until the appearance of Counter-Statement. A collection of eight essays ranging from literary studies of Andre Gide and Thomas Mann to theoretical discussions of literary methods, Burke’s book was a celebration of the “antinomian” character of art and a commitment to the “purely aesthetic judgment” as distinct from “scientific criteria.”¹¹² Like the New Critics who would follow his lead, Burke distinguished between art as “the psychology of information,” which dealt with human existence only in generalities, and art as “the psychology of form,” which was an “exercise of human propriety, the formulation of symbols which rigidify our sense of poise and rhythm” (42). According to Burke, there were five aspects to this psychology of form: syllogistic (the logical unraveling of elements or plot); qualitative (the preparation for the quality of a particular element through the quality of the preceding one); repetitive (the maintenance of one principle under new guises); conventional (the categorical expectancy associated with standard formal practices); and minor (the appearance of brief yet moving elements). Such forms were the basic “appeal” of any work of art, the “equipment” that enabled “the mind to follow processes amenable to it” (143). The subtle artistic use of formal elements created frustrations and expectations within the audience that demanded some sense of resolution. In “Lexicon Rhetoricae,” Burke was willing to acknowledge that formal elements were integrated differently in each work of art according to the particular subject matter involved. He was also willing to acknowledge that the “perfection” of the aesthetic experience was continuously hampered by the “divergence in the ideologies of writer and reader” (178). Nonetheless, he was unwilling in this early book to consider “eloquence” anything but the formal properties of an artwork as they related to the particular content. Eloquence was jeopardized by the contingencies of history that distorted true “symbolic” interpretation, contingencies that included “variations in ideology,” the “remoteness” of patterns of concern, the “degree of familiarity” with a pattern of experience, and the “divergence” of modes of existence (172). Due to particular vicissitudes, an antiquated symbolic configuration soon lost its eloquence and became merely “quaint.” Consequently, Burke considered music the purest form of artistic expression because it was able to dispense with linguistic or verbal content in the name of structure by not relying on the “surprise” and “suspense” connected with imparting narrative “information.” Indeed, because music was “fitted less than any other art for imparting information,” its form could not “atrophy” and therefore was able to deal “minutely in frustrations and fulfillments of desire” (34). Eloquence as the subtle balance of formal elements and the minimization of extraneous content was for Burke the end of art and the essence of aesthetic appeal.

      But Burke was not finished. If high modernists appropriated Kant to reflect on the productive side of aestheticism, Burke used the German philosopher to consider the consumptive side. In so doing, his early work brought the high modernist project full circle. Burke realized that to validate modernist goals he had to demonstrate that formalist elements were appreciable by the audience. In other words, he needed to prove that “though forms need not be prior to experience, they are certainly prior to the work of art exemplifying them” (141). He needed a theory of the subject, and Kant, not surprisingly, provided the answer. Kant of course had situated objective knowledge not in relationship to the natural world but in accordance with the thinking subject. Thus, as Burke explained, “we need but take [Plato’s] universals out of heaven and situate them in the human mind (a process begun by Kant), making them not metaphysical, but psychological” (48). In borrowing from Kant’s transcendental categories of apperception, Burke argued that the sense of contrast, comparison, expansion, and contraction needed for aesthetic enjoyment were formal categories within the mind, giving man “the potentiality of speech, art, mythology, and so on.” Thus, art appealed to the “innate forms of the mind,” “the germ-plasm of man.” A transcendental aesthetic needed a transcendental subject, both of which took part in historical time but were not limited by it.

      But by the time high modernism was institutionalized in American intellectual circles after World War II, Burke had already rejected many of his earlier statements. Beginning with his Depression-era works such as Permanence and Change (1935) and Attitudes Toward History (1937) and culminating in his Cold War-era works such as A Grammar of Motives (1945) and A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), Burke unearthed the political implications of high modernism and reenvisioned aesthetics, if not social theory in general, as a symbolic act, that is, as a deliberate attempt to destabilize the key symbols of authority residing in prevailing systems of thought, in notions of social and religious piety, and in the overall sense “of what properly goes with what.”¹¹³ Art, as such, was a way to gain and offer perspective, a form of critical discourse that used the force of the poetic to violate decorum, taste, and propriety by “merging things which common sense had divided and dividing things which common sense had merged” (113). In this way, aesthetics blended with the psychological, the sociological, the political, and the familial, all of those areas abandoned by high modernism. Borrowing from Aristotle, Freud, and Marx, Burke rejected his earlier search for transcendental forms of appeal and instead linked the efficacy of the aesthetic work to the artist’s stylized and strategic resizing of an intractable situation in a way that appealed rhetorically to the social and linguistic communities of address. The artistic act was visionary, educational, confrontational, courting, and integrative, not through the artist’s invocation of some spiritual or metaphysical principle as Ginsberg would have it but through the artist’s use of comedy, burlesque, punning, incongruity, misnomer, and “verbal blasting.” Art worked through its immersion into the social and temporal scene in which it was placed, not as a form of disinterested contemplation or a form of spiritual absolution but as a poetic solvent that dissolved the stale orientations littering the scene and that imagined new, and possibly more liberating, ones.

      An example of Burke’s “un-timeliness” was of course his participation in the 1949 “Western Round Table on Modern Art,” discussed in the Introduction. Amid the clamor declaring “the work of art independent of the artist” and the painter uninterested in “the reaction of the public,” Burke wondered aloud whether or not his high modernist counterparts had negated the efficacy of art in general.¹¹⁴ Burke traced the root of the problem to the beginning of the nineteenth century when the study of aesthetics as a singular discipline emerged and theoreticians separated the poetic (“the work in itself, its kind, its properties, the internal relations among its parts, etc.”) from the rhetorical (“the work’s persuasiveness, its appeal”).¹¹⁵ Noting that this decision was the effect of the “specialized nature of our modern culture,” Burke argued that the “systems of symbols,” despite claims to the contrary, used by artists were not different in essence to those used by other specialists. “Each of these symbolic structures,” continued Burke, “is an organized vocabulary which a man learns to manipulate for purposes of expression, discovery and communication” (36). Consequently, since there was no fundamental antithesis between art and rhetoric, there was no reason to keep reinforcing the solipsistic notion that the artist was merely “talking to himself” (33).

      In a reversal of the argument of high modernism, Burke compared the disinterested stance of the formalist poet to the apolitical stance of the postwar scientist who reluctantly but thoroughly abdicated any responsibility for his role in furthering the advances of the Cold War state. While making claims about the purity and disinterested nature of basic research, the scientist refused to acknowledge that his specialized expertise, whether in chemical, biological, or physical research, was often swallowed up by larger military imperatives. Content with severing his role as a “technical expert” from his responsibility as a citizen, the “pure” scientist ignored the political purposes for which his discoveries were used. As Burke sarcastically noted, “the question of what the new force might mean, as released into a social texture emotionally and intellectually unfit to control it, or as surrendered to men whose speciality is professional killing—well, that is simply ‘none of his business,’ as specialist, however great may be his misgivings as father of a family, or as citizen of his nation and of the world.”¹¹⁶ Even those of “good will” associated with organizations such as the Federation of American Scientists, who clamored for international control of atomic