From the Archive (2009): Auscultation, Creation, Revision

Bill Schraufnagel

English 597B, Selzer and Hawhee

December 16, 2009

Final Paper – Draft 2

Proportional Differences:

Kenneth Burke’s Auscultation, Creation, and Revision

I. Introduction

Kenneth Burke’s first sustained critical effort after Counter-Statement was a 1932 tract entitled Auscultation, Creation, and Revision.[1] Although it was not published until 1993, the year of his death, Burke gives it sustained mention in the “Curriculum Criticum” added to an edition of Counter-Statement in 1953. He calls Auscultation “a short book or long essay still in manuscript” and defines the first title-word, “auscultation,” as “the heart-conscious kind of listening, or vigilance, that precedes expression” (CS 213). Written under conditions of economic turmoil (the Depression), political stagnation (Herbert Hoover), and rivalry among literary critics to whom Burke felt committed, Auscultation responds to the critics, engages with Marx, and states a promise concerning the role of the “aesthete” during times of revolution.

Significant attempts to interpret Auscultation and incorporate it into Burke’s career have been made by Timothy Crusius, Greig E. Henderson, and Ann George and Jack Selzer’s Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. Both Crusius and Henderson stress what Henderson calls “Burke’s ongoing dialogue with Marx” (Henderson 173). Crusius reads Burke’s revision of Marx in the context of European philosophy, and concludes his essay with a polemical defense of rhetoric in search of “allies and adversaries” (Crusius 370). Both commentaries acknowledge the centrality of Burke’s “emphasis upon a Difference rather than upon an Antithesis” (ACR 100). George and Selzer build on the work of Crusius and Henderson with an important difference. Instead of keeping Auscultation bound to Marx, George and Selzer afford Burke’s crucial distinction between antithesis and difference a place within Burke’s own trajectory. Their move allows scholars to view Auscultation as something more than a commentary on “Marx’s social theory” (Henderson 173), that is, to view it as the origin of a pattern of thinking that Burke drew upon throughout his later career.

This uneven text also states Burke’s critical stance, which could be called equally “rhetorical” or “aesthetic,” amalgamating elements of Walter Pater and Remy de Gourmont as well as Marx and Thorstein Veblen. William H. Rueckert argues that Auscultation shows Burke “in the process of changing from a literary to a social critic” (Rueckert 11). Yet Burke shows evidence in Auscultation of both “rhetoricizing” the aesthetic, and “aestheticizing” the rhetorical. The aesthetic stance, especially Pater, makes possible Burke’s “difference-thinking” which relies on the discrimination of ingredients, the observation of parts that become dis-integrated and re-integrated in a given society, historical period, or individual psyche. As symbol-using animals, humans may reflexively “drive” their ideas “into a corner” to encourage the quick formation of opposites, but Burke urges that differences need not become antitheses.

Many ingredients prevail simultaneously, either indifferent to, in support of, or hostile against each other. In a world of proportional differences and strategic emphases, the social problem of specialization becomes inevitable and central. Burke’s specialization remains both aesthetic and rhetorical, both citizen and critic.

II. Auscultation’s Composition: “My Submergence”

George and Selzer explain how Auscultation emerged from plans of a larger project that was originally to have four parts: “historical, logical, hortatory, and poetical.” Auscultation was in fact the “hortatory” section, and “[t]he other parts were abandoned” (George and Selzer 66). A folder of notes from this period is indeed divided into sections labeled “hortatory,” “logical,” “historical,” and others. The “hortatory” section of notes is the largest, but not identical with Auscultation.[2] The origin of the “hortatory” section in particular is clearly associated in Burke’s mind with Auscultation. He arranged these notes into a “list of topics” divided into numbers and letters, e.g. 1-A, 1-B, through 48-A. There are 137 notes in all, and helpfully, Burke elsewhere presents both his self-applied guide to their composition, as well as implicit advice in how to read them:

Let the notes be considered, as much as practicable, as little essays in themselves (as self-sustaining as a book review, hence requiring complete presentation). Perhaps give them all titles. However: do not over-formalize them. One should never add a verb to a noun, merely that his sentence be filled out, when a noun is enough.[3]

An assemblage of “little essays in themselves” rather precisely describes the makeup of Auscultation, Creation, and Revision. Neither could any reader call them “over-formalized”! Each section has a title, and each title provides both its own argumentative capitulation and interpretive dilemma. The same holds true for Burke’s “hortatory” notes within the larger file he titled “Notes on Financial and Economic Matters.”[4] The “little essays” of Auscultation tend to be longer, but the “little essays” of the hortatory notes are more numerous.

The very first of the “hortatory” notes explains Burke’s choice of title that he applied to the would-be book that was only much later published:

creation – revision … let us prefix a third term: auscultation.   At an earlier time they spoke of keeping vigil;  but that which they awaited was already there, and dying.   there is nothing new to come.  we can await only what we know to await – which means that it is present already, in an incipient, emergent state [in pencil: “status”].  in being formalized, it will lose its delicacy.   that is why we can say,  without discrepancy, that the emergent is also the dying.      …      point is: auscultation, rather than keeping vigil, since latter implies that something is to come    – whereas the task is to single out ( by a “configuration of meanings” ) the significant factors already here.[5]

“Auscultation” is a term for listening to the body, as one might listen to a heart beat or breathing through a stethoscope. Written during a difficult period (“the dismality of last Hoover years”), this grim manifesto rejects expectation or hope in an unknown future-to-come, in favor of the discrimination of significant factors already present in a given scene. On September 22, 1932, an exuberant Burke wrote to Cowley that his finished manuscript was a “36,000 word critical credo, containing under one roof a philosophy of history, a psychology, an ‘apology for art,’ a theory of criticism, all considered in the light of exhortations now current [i.e., Marxist].  It is the sweetest thing I have ever done.”[6] On October 3, the day he sent it to Harcourt Brace, Burke wrote apologetically to Parker regarding the summer just past: “Thank you very much indeed for the patience and confidence you have shown in me during my ‘submergence’ – and I hope that I shall be able to bring you sound results before long.”[7]

III. Differential Proportions

“Difference” enables Burke to think by a “configuration of meanings” rather than simplistic binary oppositions.    Timothy Crusius brings out key terms that Burke attaches to Difference, most importantly “complexity” and “the gradual accumulation of new matter until an existing frame of motivational justification begins to break apart” (360-61, Crusius’s emphasis). Crusius also restates Burke’s grammatical formulation of this distinction: “if new matter is thought of as just ‘different from’ rather than ‘antithetical to’ the old” (360). George and Selzer expand the interpretive labor begun by Crusius when they identify “five specific paired contraries” between which Burke “deconstructs” antitheses: 1) historical periods 2) bourgeois and proletarian 3) poetry and propaganda 4) aesthetes and literary Marxists 5) aesthetic and practical framework (George and Selzer 72). The move to “deconstruct” these binaries undermines the origins of their formation, a process that Crusius recognizes as fundamental to Burke’s understanding of dialectic: “Basically [for Burke], opposites arise as abstractions from a unity, from ‘real’ or existential mergers; as abstractions they are necessarily ‘unreal’ in the sense that ‘pure form’ is unreal—it corresponds to nothing in experience” (Crusius 359). By naming the oppositions of a dialectic as originally parts of a merger, among many such “mergers” available in “real experience,” Crusius maintains the idea of oppositions; in their “primal unity” they are joined, which is also to say incipiently divided.

Burke himself gives a helpful account of “abstraction” that goes into the establishment of antithetical opposites in Permanence and Change: “The great danger of analogy is that a similarity is taken as evidence of an identity. Because two things are found to possess a certain trait in common which our point of view considers notable, we take the common notable trait to indicate identity of character” (PC 97, Burke’s emphasis). At later points in his corpus, he refers to the same process as “essentializing.” A mature declaration of the critical stance that can be traced to Auscultation comes at the end of the essay “Calling of the Tune” printed in The Philosophy of Literary Form. At this point in the essay Burke proposes a methodology for reading artworks, but the orientation can be applied in any situation that requires interpretation:

[W]e must consider it in its totality, not singling out some one feature and treating this, in its isolation, as the “essence” of art. … instead of this “essentializing” approach (that abstracts one ingredient in a work as the significant element and overlooks the rest), you analyze the individual work as a recipe, with a proportion of ingredients … (PLF 232)

The discrimination of “ingredients” operates according to difference and not antithesis. In the essay “The Philosophy of Literary Form,” Burke describes the ingredients as related by “synecdochic otherness … Polar otherness unites things that are opposite to one another; synecdochic otherness unites things that are simply different from one another” (PLF 78). Ingredients build up and accumulate over time, they do not necessarily cancel each other out.

The ability to distinguish difference from antithesis, and use “difference-thinking” to classify a situation into “ingredients,” in other words, endures for Burke as a hard-won insight from the summer of 1932. In exasperation, he had written in Auscultation that “there are too many environmental and personal factors of a non-economic nature for us to account for [a person] by the coordinates of economic causality alone” (ACR 96) [ed. 2025: This argues against Thorstein Veblen. See the volume, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization. Whether Veblen or Burke has the victory you can judge for yourself. Veblen includes "environmental and personal factors" in his concept of economy]. Later in the same work Burke refers to life as a “maze,” or “some scheme of mutual adjustments within its parts” (ACR 147). In their patient charting of Burke’s dismantling of the five dichotomies listed above, George and Selzer reveal three sites in which difference-thinking proves to be advantageous over antithesis-thinking: between historical eras, among factions or ideologies contemporary at a given time, and among the varying allegiances of an individual (George and Selzer 72-73, 74, 81).

Differences Between Historical Eras

Burke defines what might be termed an “irony of adjustment” and associates it with aesthetic writers Thomas Mann, de Gourmont, and Anatole France: “that type of vacillation which comes of realizing that the traits which one is best equipped to develop are not the traits best making for one’s adaptation to his environment” (ACR 156). Crusius as well as George and Selzer point to the importance of Burke’s model of history in Auscultation that replaces Marxian and Hegelian “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” with “integration-new matter-disintegration” (ACR 118). If history works by multifarious ingredients, not by reductive dipoles, then new combinations should be expected to form all the time as other combinations decay.

Differences Among Factions or Ideologies Contemporaneous

At one point in Auscultation, Burke calls for an adjustment to the situation of 1932 in terms of “departmentalized cooperation” (ACR 128). This refers to the dilemma of “extreme specialization” demanded by the occupational division of labor forced in Burke’s society by the 20th Century (related, in part to technology and the rise of industrialism). Rather than blunt an economic analysis down to the crude forms of “bourgeois” and “proletariat” pitted against each other, Burke admonished his would-be readers that

[S]ince this specialization will presumably remain an important aspect of modern collective production, we may expect it to remain an important aspect of our ideology. … [W]e may expect to find many different relationships to the productive forces, each relationship having its ideological individuality. (ACR 111)

For “aspects” the reader may substitute “ingredient,” “trait,” or any other synecdochic “constituent” term. Burke is not “post-Marxist” in the sense that any “post-Marxist” must discursively remain inextricably tied to Marx. Rather Burke’s particular “difference-thinking” emerges as a mode of economic analysis uniquely his own, if in the Marxian tradition.

Differences Within an Individual

Burke introjects the metaphors of “difference” and “antithesis” into the individual psyche. Just as historical eras pass through painful periods of adjustment, so the drama is magnified even more to the private individual. Burke somewhat in the manner of Freud diagnoses certain critics, certain of his friends among them, as having replaced “the associative weldings” of their formless adolescences and younger years “by their simple opposites” in simple repudiation of those same essentialized identities. As antidote to this “antithesis-thinking” of the personality, Burke resorts to a Goethean metaphor of the “chambered nautilus,” the development of one’s “understanding by the gradual inclusion of new areas” (ACR 90). This method of growth by accretion, let it be said, does not preclude the possibility of a frame’s becoming unfit to accommodate such new material, which may lead to unpredictable crises that necessitate new frames of meaning. But it does not force such ruptures by the “driving into a corner” of falsely constructed mutual hostilities through reductive antitheses.

The Limits of Difference-Thinking

Burke’s philosophical manipulations construct a framework, that for him, cultivates and maximizes the resources potential for “an equipment for interpretation in general” (ACR 134, Burke’s emphasis). Soon enough, however, even differences can resolve or settle into oppositions as meanings become calcified and weakened over time. Within the heterogeneity of contemporary specializations, Burke reserves a special role for the “aesthete,” which he distinguishes by two special functions. These functions, of discrimination and contextualization, may have been highly developed first by artists—but Burke seeks to make them available to readers of all occupations, and foreground the power of these interpretive functions for all individuals in society, as they themselves comprise the fabric of society.

IV. “Aesthetic” and “Rhetorical”

Burke defines a “meaning” in Auscultation as "a way of grouping relationships” (ACR 149). People develop certain linkages reflexively, in accordance with any number of variables. They can come to define others and themselves in terms of those linkages. In his essay on “Three Adepts of ‘Pure’ Literature” in Counter-Statement, Burke praises “aesthete” Remy de Gourmont for realizing that “Man associates his ideas, not in accordance with logic, or verifiable exactitude, but in accordance with his desires and his interests” (qtd. in CS 22). Conceivably, some of those associations will, at some point or another, become inapposite, and Burke suggests that the best intellectual (or spiritual, emotional, etc.) health might come by way of de Gourmontian dissociation: “Blasphemy is a serious experiment … To blaspheme is to restore the lost gods by renouncing them” (CS 25). Burke’s stress upon “differences” in Ausculation presumes this dissociative faculty, a strength he had earlier explicitly linked with aestheticism.

Just prior to this, Burke had culminated his equivocal tribute to Pater: “The contemplation of permanent things served primarily to strengthen his depiction of the evanescent” (CS 15). This complex definition of aesthetic criticism appears deceptively simple. First of all, nothing would be “permanent” if a critic did not have the power to perceive or designate it as such. In Auscultation Burke talks about the poet and writer who “‘weights’ his observations” (ACR 136). To blur and ultimately erase the boundary between “pure” and “propaganda” literature, Burke claims that “‘pure’ literature … would simply be literature ‘weighted’ as regards broader or less burning issues (preferring perhaps those issues which burn with the ‘hard, gemlike flame’)” (ACR 137). The “hard, gemlike flame” is a direct quote from the conclusion of Pater’s The Renaissance, and Burke does not ridicule it. In fact, one might argue that he preserves it in his ironic definition of “‘pure’ literature.”

That word depiction used by Burke in Counter-Statement to describe Pater’s method cannot be overstressed in the function of the aesthetic, which is nothing if not rhetorical. The aesthetic critic must be able to distinguish and dissociate ingredients of an overall “configuration of meanings,” but also to depict, to put into words, some metaphoric portrayal of them. Burke gets very close to this rhetorical function when he claims two pages earlier that Pater might have been describing himself when he complimented another for his sensitivity to nature, “as if nature had a rhetoric” (qtd. in CS 13) [ed. 2025: from Pater's essay on Sir Thomas Browne: "Browne is certainly an honest investigator; but it is still with a faint hope of something like {transmutation of pewter into silver} upon fitting occasion, and on the alert always for surprises in nature (as if nature had a rhetoric, at times, to deliver to us, like those sudden and surprising flowers of his own poetic style) that he listens to her every day talk so attentively (Appreciations p. 139)]. Those are Pater’s words, so Pater must have been aware that the symbolic translations of his “evanescent” perceptions formed the heart of his work as a critic. Burke makes this even more explicit in Auscultation, as he wrestled to voice his own aesthetic, transformed from the Paterian into something else:

There is a tendency to seek an interchangeability of the conceptual and the imaginative, as would be natural to a state of thinking whereby vocabulary or terminology is discovered to be a major aspect of “observation,” so that we recognize not merely something to be seen and someone seeing it [ala Pater], but also an intermediary process of grouping and linguistic identification which dictates the ‘essence’ of the thing seen. (ACR 146)

The ironies in this passage are difficult. On the one hand, Burke will not permit readers to be satisfied with mere “essences,” but he admits that observation proceeds by a process of essentializing. This is the skill with regards to “pure art” which Burke must praise in Pater, for he has inherited some of the same skill.

One begins by observing and seeing. But a critic who cannot escape word-consciousness does not trick himself into thinking he has really “seen” something in its purity. Burke acknowledges that even the pre-conditions for observation, and therefore observation itself, are mediated by the language and orientation of the observer. To preserve and “apply” Pater, Burke needed to swerve away from him. As he swerved during the composition of Auscultation, Creation, and Revision, he veered into territory that would take him through the writing of Permanence in Change. The twin aesthetic virtues of discrimination and magnification surface in Auscultation, with a Burkean difference. The revelation of insight does not result solely from breaking conventional meanings or translating fluctuant perceptions into rhetorical forms. Both of these, to be sure, but these are supplemented by interpretive shifts in terministic, situational, and rhetorical contexts:

There is the “inspiration” that comes of making an old situation new by clamping a fresh configuration of meanings upon it, locating it in a different scheme of orientation as we discover it among a wholly different galaxy of terms. (160)

Inherent in mobilizing and “clamping” any kind of “configuration of meanings” requires the kind of “difference-thinking” that Burke develops in Auscultation in reaction to Marx and Marxist critics among his contemporaries. For Burke, this is also the power of a strong artist.

In a “little essay” of Auscultation entitled “Souvenirs for All,” Burke introduces his vision of how an artist might contribute to the overall public good in any scheme of values, Marxist or otherwise, and any social time period, transitional or not. That is, artists deliberately cultivate expertise at the conscious understanding and wielding of the processes of association that form commonplace antitheses for many people who may not even regard their own assumptions as “conventional” at all. Although for most of Auscultation Burke rails against “profit-thinking” at this strategic point he grants to the artist the savvy of the businessman:

[T]he literary man profits himself by tapping our attitudes and profits us by giving us a richer and more ramified corpus of imagery for some attitude which otherwise would remain less “documented,” … Clearly, the author who “weights” his observations in this sense will both contribute to the reinforcing of the serviceable attitude and be rewarded for doing so. (136)

These “weights” are very close to “essences,” which Burke and Crusius both argue lie at the heart of dangerously reductive antitheses. By “rigging the system,” by “pulling the heartstrings” as it were, the artist or aesthetic critic can both highlight (or reveal) the intricacies of a system of blended ingredients and contradictory meanings, while at the same time equip others to navigate such a world. This kind of symbolic action can operate within any of the contexts mentioned above: during societal transitions, mediating among rival factions at a given time, or within the scope of an individual’s motivational scheme. Burke’s example prods would-be critics to imagine other applications of “difference-thinking” in the re-orientation of new meanings. Burke retained much of what he calls in Auscultation the “esthetic procedure” (136) and sublimated it into what he may have preferred to call “rhetorical” criticism.

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. Counter-Statement. 1931. Berkeley: U of California P, 1968. Print.

—. Auscultation, Creation, and Revision. Extensions of the Burkean System. Ed. James W. Chesebro. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1993. 42-172. Print.

—. Permanence and Change. 1935. 3rd Ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Print.

—. The Philosophy of Literary Form. 1941. 3rd Ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1973. Print.

Crusius, Timothy. “‘Auscultation’: A ‘De-Struction of Marxist Dialectic and Rhetoric.” Rhetorica 6.4 (Autumn 1988): 355-79. PDF file.

George, Ann, and Jack Selzer. Kenneth Burke in the 1930s. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2007. Print.

Henderson, Greig E. “Aesthetic and Practical Frames of Reference: Burke, Marx, and the Rhetoric of Social Change.” Extensions of the Burkean System. Ed. James W. Chesebro. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1993. 173-85. Print.

Pater, Walter. The Renaissance. 1893. Chicago: Pandora-Academy Chicago Ltd, 1977. Print.

Rueckert, William H. “A Field Guide to Kenneth Burke—1990.” Extensions of the Burkean System. Ed. James W. Chesebro. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1993. 3-41. Print.

[1] In the text, I will refer to the title as Auscultation. In-text citations will follow the format (ACR xx).

[2] In a letter to Elizabeth Parker, Burke writes of his dissociation of the “hortatory” part from the rest of the work: “I suddenly made the discovery that I was really trying to amalgamate three books, each of them tending to require a different kind of receptive adjustment on the part of the reader. This discovery had the signal virtue of undoing much complexity. It had the still more signal virtue of helping me realize that one of the books was already finished.” The “already finished” work is Auscultation, but the bulk of his “hortatory” notes are entirely different.

[3] Penn State Special Collections “Burke 3,” folder P-9c, “Outline Material for a Metabiology,” ca. 1925-32. It is unclear exactly when this was written, but its context suggests Burke mined these notes heavily for Permanence and Change (see PC pp. 232-36).

[4] “Burke 3” folder P-13.

[5] “Burke 3” P-13b.

[6] “Burke 1” Cowley letters, 1916-1932

[7] “Burke 1” Misc. Letters 1932, M-W