Kenneth Burke's Socio-Poetics: From Ontologism to Dramatism

When Michael Polanyi remarks that "Our believing is conditioned at its source by our belonging. And this reliance on the cultural machinery of our society continues through life" [Personal Knowledge, 322], one is entitled to ask: to what do we belong? From Polanyi's statement, it seems obvious that we belong to some sort of "cultural machinery." But what is that? The best answer that occurs to me is Shakespeare's:

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages...
[As You Like It, II: VII].

The "seven ages" referred to in these lines are seven discrete stages of an individual life (from cradle to grave) outlined by the Bard in the lines which immediately follow. But that individual drama is played out in the course of a larger and more elaborate tragi-comedy--and it is the latter that Polanyi most likely had in mind when he spoke of "cultural machinery."

As an epistemologist, Polanyi's main task was to efface the Cartesian divide between mind and body. Yet he gestured repeatedly to the fact that embodied minds are also participants in social groups. This brings us full circle to Slavophile "ontologism": the assertion that there exists an "organic togetherness in cognition" that has to be accounted for [see the post of 3-18-12, below]. How best to do this? I suggest that we let the master metaphor of the drama be our guide. And if we do that, then we must find ourselves, sooner or later, confronting the genius of Kenneth Burke:

"People are neither animals nor machines (to be analyzed by the migration of metaphors from biology or mechanics), but actors and acters. They establish identity by relation to groups (with the result that, when tested by individualistic concepts of identity, they are felt to be moved by 'deceptions' or 'illusions,' the 'irrational'--for one's identification as a member of a group is a role, yet it is the only active mode of identification possible, as you will note by observing how all individualistic concepts of identity dissolve into the nothingness of mysticism and the absolute). If you would avoid the antitheses of supernaturalism and naturalism, you must develop the coordinates of socialism--which gets us to cooperation, participation, man in society, man in drama" [Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, Berkeley: University of California Press (1973), 311].

Just as the individual mind is not divorced from an individual body, so individual bodies are not divorced from the collectivities in which they are embedded. Therefore, what an individual knows, or thinks she knows, is "conditioned at its source" by her belonging to a particular society and its culture. And, like the individuals who comprise them, societies enact dramas--indeed, they are dramas in which individuals (themselves elaborate sub-plots) play evolving roles.

Burke preserved Slavophile communalism and organicism but discarded Slavophile metaphysics and mysticism. In this respect, his thinking mirrored Tolstoy's quite effectively.