It's not like he actually does any of the drinking himself--he has been dead since 1993--but a glass of whiskey goes a long way when you're trying to sift through the madness that is the labyrinth of the Burkean corpus. Of course, there are also those days where I have to pour one for him too and then there's a perfectly a good whiskey just sitting there... He wouldn't want it to go to waste would he? I mean, he was a little more than a little fond of fire water in his day. What to do, what to do?
In this case, start blogging... and take the burden off of my incredibly verbose and well published friend's hands.
Until now, I have spared you any pain and sadness associated with prolonged exposure to the Burke. At least any such pain that is the result of my own pen. But that ends today. Uncle Kenny was and is important to rhetorical criticism and we were going to have to deal with him eventually anyway.
A few posts back I offered a few thoughts on laughter. As a result of my recent Burke binge I have been writing an essay that attempts to piece together a Burkean/rhetorical/not-philosophical-anthropological-folkloreological-semantic-inanyway theory of laughter. This is what I've found:
1. Burke argues that laughter is pure persuasion.
I'm glad you asked Ted/Neo/Buddha (yeah, that happened in 1993). Like all things Burke, it kind of depends. Pure persuasion is persuasion for persuasion's sake. It is not motivated toward some rhetorical advantage, it is motivated toward itself. Pure persuasion--like most of Burke--is incredibly vague, annoyingly useful, and a quite a bit tautological. Essentially, his approach to laughter is that we laugh so that we may laugh. Laughter is what it is... just laughter. How can you argue with that? I don't even know what it means.
But wait, there's more.
2. Pure persuasion doesn't exist (or does it?).
Pure persuasion, in its absolute form, may not exist, but it does exist in some form. I mean, we do laugh at all of those groin kicks on America's Funniest Home Videos don't we? And in our laughing do we not prove laughter's existence? And if laughter is pure persuasion then don't we also prove pure persuasion's existence? Confused yet?
These are trick questions, no one really watches America's Funniest Home Videos in the post Bob Saget era because Tom Bergeron sucks all of the potential laughter right out of it.
What I think Burke's on about, and I could be wrong in this, is that pure pure persuasion does not exist, but that something like it does exist. The point, for Burke, is that where it exists, it is only one small part of a greater whole and so it cannot exist in its own right. Laughter--and other such pure persuasions--exist in relation to other rhetorical devices. Thus, it is pure in itself, but it never appears by itself.
Great, but so what?
3. Burke hates me.
Just look at him, you can tell that he'd come right over that podium if he could. This has nothing to do with this blog, but I think it should be clear by now that Burke hates all of us when it comes right down to it.
4. Pure Persuasion--and therefore laughter--indicates form
This is where Burke, as he so often does, finally makes himself useful. Pure Persuasion as an ingredient in any rhetoric suggests what form that rhetoric might take. Thus, it is a powerful heuristic into the logic of that form. The laughter that erupts during any attempt at persuasion tells you what to look for to make sense of that argument. Note: the picture is unrelated to this argument, but it's awesome.
5. (Insert clever unresolved argument heading here)
This laughter heuristic is tremendously useful... I think, but I'm not exactly sure why. Maybe someday I'll figure it out, though if I have to keep drinking with Uncle Kenny to get there, I might also have to check into rehab when I'm done. In the mean time, I'd love to hear your thoughts if you'd like to share them.
Disclaimer: If this blog post didn't make sense, I encourage you to re-read it in the proper Burkean mindset--with a cocktail or two, the stiffer the better.
