The War of Words by Kenneth Burke

Abstract

Reviewed by: The War of Words by Kenneth Burke M. Elizabeth Weiser Burke, Kenneth. The War of Words. Ed. by Anthony Burke, Kyle Jensen, Jack Selzer. Oakland: University of California Press, 2018. viii + 285 pp. ISBN: 9780520298125 “For it is by the war of words that men are led into battle,” Kenneth Burke asserts in his new book, The War of Words (248). How a man dead these twenty-seven years has come to have a “new” book is not a better story than how prescient is the book, how pointedly this work—written and largely revised by 1950—speaks to our times. Burke’s overarching concern is the impetus to war that he saw all around him in the years immediately following World War II—all in some ways particular to his era. But the rhetoric by which geopolitical forces worked their magic to convince the American public to support their aims—these are universal. Or as Burke writes, “The particulars change from day to day, but the principle they embody recurs constantly, in other particulars” (45). In The War of Words, the editors have uncovered among Burke’s papers his Downward Way, the practical, applied counterpart to his Upward Way [End Page 242] of philosophizing about the universal nature of rhetoric in A Rhetoric of Motives (and its precursor, A Grammar of Motives). After a brief historical introduction from the editors—part context, part explanation of their editing process—the text is Burke’s alone, consisting of two largely completed sections and two sections for which he made substantial notes. As the editors put it, “‘The War of Words’ was designed from the start to be the analytic realization of Burke’s theory of the rhetorical motive. . . .Without The War of Words, [A Rhetoric of Motives] remains incomplete” (30). If Burke’s ultimate purpose in his motivorium trilogy was ad bellum purificandum, “toward the purification of war,” then his optimistic general theory of identification was to be counterbalanced with the shrewder practical analysis of rhetoric in everyday life, the war of words. For various reasons outlined by the editors, this Downward Way was never published, meaning that for some seventy years rhetoricians have been attempting to apply Burke’s theories to the analysis of scenes, acts, and agents in the world around us. It is a tremendously useful addition to the canon, therefore, to find Burke’s own original attempts to do the same. Thus, for instance, while in A Rhetoric of Motives Burke describes identification as identifying our interests with another’s, becoming consubstantial, in War of Words he describes the dangers of identification with a necessarily expansionist nationalism: “It is the deprived persons at home who, impoverished because so much of the national effort is turned to the resources of foreign aggression rather than to the improvement of domestic conditions, it is precisely these victims of nationalistic aggressiveness whose fervor is most readily enlisted through the imagery of sheerly vicarious participation in the power of our nationally subsidized corporations abroad” (251). That he was describing those fervent supporters of a Cold War buildup and not those fervent supporters of Donald Trump serves only to demonstrate the ways in which American exceptionalism relies on similar rhetorical devices in the scene-act ratio that keeps the world on edge. His first section, “The Devices,” then, shows Burke categorizing strategies much as he did with theories in RM, updating and expanding upon classical rhetorical strategies to show how they function in the modern world. The Bland Strategy, Shrewd Simplicity, Undo by Overdoing, Yielding Aggressively, Deflection (“so general an end that nearly all the Logomachy [the War of Words] could be included under it” [68]), Spokesman, Reversal, Say the Opposite, Spiritualization (the unifying achievements and paranoias of “us”), Making the Connection—these ten devices, a multitude of examples, and the theory behind them make up the first 125 pages of The War of Words. That multitude of examples, often confusing for readers of Burke’s longer texts, here in their somewhat condensed form work well. Don’t understand a description of a device? Read an example of it. Don’t understand that example? There are five or ten more, ranging...