Review: Kenneth Burke + the Posthuman (original) (raw)

2018, Rhetoric Review

Jason Kalin, Diane Keeling, and Nathan Stormer, reviewers: In the introduction to Kenneth Burke + The Posthuman, Chris Mays, Nathaniel A. Rivers, and Kellie Sharp-Hoskins acknowledge that Kenneth Burke and posthumanism may be an odd cou- pling. So we wonder: Why turn to Burke to respond to contemporary epistemological, ontological, and technological entanglements? Burke—ostensibly a modernist and humanist—grounds his project in the human subject with his “Definition of Man” as “bodies that learn language,” thus establishing a privileged ontological position for the human (85). In contrast, posthumanist thinking tends to emphasize a less hierarchical ontology, diffusing the human subject by placing her within symbolic and material systems or ecologies always already in the process of becoming otherwise. The editors carefully note that they are not claiming Burke as a posthumanist, though some of the contributors come close to doing so; rather, they propose that many of Burke’s ideas and attitudes are compatible with posthumanism. These compatibilities offer a way of reading “the contradictions among Burke’s body of work and posthumanism as generative, as opportunities for invention, revision, and, importantly, transdisciplinary knowledge-making” (6). This collection “Burkes Burke,” returning to him a certain “moltenness” that makes his thinking a resource for ambiguity and transformation regarding posthuman rhetoric(s) ([16]; Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945/1969: xix). As Robert Wess notes in his chapter, Burke develops the term “counter-nature” in relation to the Latin “contra,” which, according to Burke, “can mean ‘against’ both in the sense of ‘opposed to’ and in the sense of ‘in close contact with’” (86). Reading Burke counter to posthumanism attempts to establish, however tentatively, new boundaries of and futures for the human, for rhetoric, and, as many of the contributors argue, for ethical living in a world wrought with ecological crises and technological anxieties.