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Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose, Third edition, With new Afterword.

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"Permanence and Change" was first published in 1935, revised in 1954 (which included the appendix "On Human Behavior Considered 'Dramatistically'") with an afterword "Permanence and Change: In Restrospective Prospect" added by Burke in 1984. This third edition also reprints Hugh Dalziel Duncan's introduction. This volume is the second in Burke's "first trilogy," which started with "Counter-Statement" and concluded with "Attitudes Toward History," and I should express my preference for these earlier works over the latter ("Rhetoric of Motives," etc.) because of their greater depth and breadth of conceptualization.

In "Permanence and Change" Burke establishes the ways in which "form" permeates society as much as it does the arts. Consequently, even when we look at forms are art we are not dealing exclusively with aesthetics, but with more rhetorical notions of form of which we should be aware. Part I "On Interpretation" works from Veblen's concept of "Trained Incapacity" to establish the connection between rationalization and orientation. This leads to the idea that motives are shorthand terms for situations, the interpretation of which are thwarted by the "occupational psychosis" of the individual. Here is where you get your best sense of Burke as providing a synthesis of Freud and Marx. Part II "Perspective by Incongruity" is perhaps the key section for me in all of Burke's writing, especially given the degree to which I embrace the concept. The goal of which is to create new meanings that are progressively more "real." Part III "The Basis of Simplification" advocates "the poetry of action" as the ideal conceptualization of the interpretive process. As always, the scope of Burke's use of evidence, both in the literary and critical worlds, is astounding. "Permanence and Change" is a key work in the field of rhetoric and social theory.

Permanence and Change is not the easiest read but well worth any effort. Burke's style is delightful if discursive and occasionally digressive. He takes principles of pragmatism and develops them to where we are today and beyond, though he rarely gets credit for his prescience. With sensitivity and a level of literary cultivation too often missing from today's discussions, Burke illustrates how and why we interpret teleologically, how interpretation is shared by all conscious creatures and what makes humans so special in their use of language for survival. Together with its more awkward imperfect sequel, Attitudes Towards History, it gives us a picture of some of the deepest points of intellectual life in the politically engaged 1930's.

Getting a radical start on anything.

At the beginning of Kenneth Burke's book, Permanence and Change/An Anatomy of Purpose (1954, 1965, 1984), the orientation of critics is suspicious of how trained a critic should be:

one's very abilities can function as blindnesses. (p. 7).

I was so smart when I was young that I considered myself fully qualified to be radical at an early age. My father was a minister, but I considered most of the reasons given by Americans for considering themselves Christians part of the higher swindle that serve the scheme of social control of apple pie activities. I was still involved in a church while I was a student at the University of Michigan College of Engineering because singing in the church choir was a skill I enjoyed. I was not involved in any system of finance, as Burke makes a point about those in business:

Veblen generally restricts the concept

[of trained incapacity] to the case of

business men who, through long training

in competitive finance, have so built

their scheme of orientation about this kind

of effort and ambition that they cannot see

serious possibilities in any other system of

production and distribution. (p. 7).

Fight or flight is a range of options that lie behind Burke's discussion of escape as an activity or as a fate that can be applied to those who were:

always trying to escape from life

or avoid realities, (p. 8).

For social control, Christianity is often pictured as a humble way to behave. The meek shall inherit the earth when the tough guys wipe each other our or get wiped out by the wealthy. In literature:

the poets symbolized their resentment

in many ways;

and any kind of symbolization

that did not suit the critic's

particular preferences was

called an escape. (p. 8).

Karel Marx expected religion to be the opiate of the masses. People can be reasoning about their own rituals or rationalizing symbolic actions as representing what God intends to do even if the people who have gained control of traditional institutions raise new questions like David Koresh wondering at what age Jesus would turn children into mothers of new Branch Davidians. Association and transference are examined by Burke as a context for experiments that involve conditioning.

The entire experience of American culture as a sense of monstrosity clinging to marginal thinking for an electronic market in a global financial system that lacks anything that functions as money after being flooded by the gambling debts taking the form of deri9vative contracts on everything that can go up, down, or sideways in free markets ought to be covered by Part I, Chapter III, Occupational Psychosis. Just for an exercise in thinking, I would rather skip to a section on Nietzsche in Part II.

Glorifying the problematical in art was adopted by disciples of Nietzsche, but the art trips on itself if:

the compete establishment

of the problematical would make

glorification impossible. On the whole,

they all seized upon the same device:

stressing the state of tension in itself,

picturing the dangers and discomforts

involved in maintaining it, hence relying

upon the basic military equipment in man

as their last source of appeal (though differing

widely in their selection of the symbols

which would serve as the channels in which this

original biological psychosis would run). (pp. 87-88).

Nietzsche's later style is

like a sequence of darts.

Indeed, at first I tried to

explain it to myself as a

simple conversion of his

fighting, hunting attitude

into its behavioristic

equivalent. His sentences

are forever striking out at

this and that, exactly like

a man in the midst of game,

or enemies. They leap with

a continual abruptness and

sharpness of naming, which

seems to suggest nothing so

much as those saltations by

which cruising animals leap

upon their prey. (p. 88).

Burke thinks Nietzsche's style led him to the term "Perspective by Incongruity," (p. 88). Oswald Spengler grouped periods in various civilizations at times that included "as a culture decayed" (p. 89). The style of writing uses "the same constant reordering of categories that we find in Shakespearean metaphor." (p. 90). Somehow, in the host of:

new insights by such deliberate misfits.

The individualism of fiction and poetry

was mild as compared with the

individualism of science, ever in

quest of new ways for characterizing

and classifying events. (p. 91).

Consensus seeks a basis on which some thinkers can be considered more radical than others, but in a situation which is hopping back and forth like the finger finger end of a cosmic pogo stick up, each incident becomes more individual than the last, but Bergson is hoping:

Metaphysics in this sense,

he holds, is the mere solving

of pseudo-problems, as the

metaphysician works out an

elaborate system for reconciling

differences which never existed

in the first place, but were invented

for purposes of convenience. (p. 93).

Burke considers conversion and regression in religion later in the book.

Christ's conversations with the

theologians at the age of twelve,

and the calm assurance to his

parents that he must be about

his Father's business (p. 155)

is a deliberate orientation:

He was concerned with

matters of strategy, of

presentation, apparently

being certain from the

start that his point of view

was "correct." (p. 155).

The kind of individual that has a herd instinct which is so strong that he is a founder of a distinct religion would probably be considered radical in modern American culture. If he set up something that functioned like real money, he would be accused of money laundering. A financial crisis that keeps sweeping itself under something less than sound accounting standards is like a stage in the life of the Saul/Paul transformation:

When a man so vigorous as Saul

had of a sudden ceased to be Saul,

in that dramatic interim between

the loss of his old self and his rebirth

as Paul, we may expect to find his structure

shaken to its very roots. (p. 156).

The Christian doctrine arose

at a time of pronounced cultural

mongrelism, when many distinct

cultural integers had been brought

into vital contact by the political

unification of Rome. (p. 159).

Instead of being vital, intrusion by Americans is likely to mess things up like God and God's own screw leaders all crashing down together as partners in America.