“As Usual I Fell on the Bias”: Kenneth Burke’s Situated Dialectic

Abstract

In a 1938 letter to his childhood friend Matthew Josephson, Kenneth Burke commented on the new world he had entered by agreeing to lecture in the University of Chicagos Humanities College that summer: The burning issue here is not between Stalinists and Trotskyites, but between Platonists and Aristotelians?and thence, to complicate the symmetry, between Aristotelians and the Social Sciences. As usual, I fell on the bias across the controversies'(8/5/1938, KBP, emphasis mine).1 As we know, this propensity to situate his arguments across seeming dichotomies marks Burke s work. Pragmatists and idealists; Marxists and esthetes; urban radicals and agrar ian conservatives; psychological and sociological theorists: Burke continuously take a position that fell, as he put it, on the bias?not simply in the middle, not finding some common ground between them in a weak compromise, but cutting across their positions, envisioning an alternative that was parts of both as well as new, Burkean ideas. Burke scholar Robert Wess has commented that he would like to see more of... an attempt to follow Burke s practice of situating his thought (e.g., the purification of war'as an alternative to 'fanaticism'at one extreme and 'dissipation at the other)?a situating, he added, that places Burke within the intellectual debates of his time (2005). Wess is of course referring here to Burke's situational stance in A Grammar of Motives, his