Reviews. Kenneth Burke and the Conversation after Philosophy, Timothy W. Crusius (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, pages).

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1 Reviews Kenneth Burke and the Conversation after Philosophy, Timothy W. Crusius (Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, pages). Reviewed by Ellen Quandahl, San Diego State University Recently, I picked up the Wall Street Journal, where I read Harold Bloom's wonderfully erudite and cranky review of the latest Harry Potter book and the whole J.K. Rawling phenomenon. The review blasted the New York Times for the currency it has given Potter, and the books themselves for being inferior to earlier boys-at-school books. Bloom is difficult to refute because, as a friend recently commented, "He's read more than God." So, as I sat down to read Timothy Crusius' new book on Kenneth Burke, I reflected that Burke, the famous autodidact, had read even more than the omnivorous Bloom. Burke is most engaging as a reader of texts, and not a page of his work goes by without an intriguing, readerly move made on a play or poem, a book from almost any category, an article or review essay; he is always analyzing interpretive vocabularies and thinking through the "disposition and transposition" of terms. Those readings-what Barbara Biesecker calls "the series of decisive engagements we call Burke's thought"-always produce rather than master texts; they locate promising or ambiguous moments, going against the grain of announced projects and relating even the odd comment or quirk of vocabulary to timely events and to a vast project of philosophical rhetoric. The best readings of Burke follow this lead, not reproducing or explicating his philosophy, but opening up the rhetorical work of his texts. One thinks, for example, of the brilliant readings by Biesecker of Burke reading Marx or by James Kastely of Burke's critique of capitalism and the construction of a rhetoric of class. But in the past twenty years or so, it's been fashionable to locate and categorize Burke-usually to claim, like Bloom contraharry Potter, that Burke does better what later theorists jac 21.2 (2001)

2 454 jac of our anti-foundationalist age have done in fancier, more daunting, and less American language. It is this trope in Burke scholarship that Crusius addresses in Kenneth Burke and the Conversation after Philosophy, the first book in the new series "Rhetorical Philosophy and Theory," edited by David Blakesley. Noting that Burke's reputation as a literary and rhetorical critic is secure and that his "recent critics have been trying to locate him in or claim him for hermeneutics, critical theory, or deconstruction," Crus ius asks, "Can Burke be assimilated successfully to anyone of these three schools?" The project of the book is to argue that he cannot, and to raise an even broader question: What is Burke's identity as a philosopher in the age of post-philosophy, the age when the contemplation oftranshistorical truths, as opposed to rhetoric's probabilities and tropes, is no longer possible? In approaching this question, Crusius in some ways continues the project begun in his 1991 A Teacher's Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. The Teacher's Introduction series is "geared toward the intellectually curious teacher who would like to get an initial, lucid glance into rich areas of scholarship in our discipline," but who hasn't the time to read in these many areas that now shape textual studies. In this spirit, Crusius provides in the earlier book an overview of various hermeneutical theories, offering both an accessible rendering of and an argument for "philosophical hermeneutics." This is the general philosophy that holds, as Burke does, that human beings are interpreters whose being depends on "nature, language, culture, tradition, and social practices." Similarly, in the new book, Crus ius sketches three "discourse communities": hermeneutics (where he includes Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, Hans Blumenberg, and Charles Taylor), critical theory (the Frankfurt school, including Jurgen Habermas), and radical postmodemism (Richard Rorty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Francois Lyotard). To some extent, Crus ius uses the Burke-was-first-and-better trope, claiming, for example, that "Burke understood poststructuralism better than many ofi ts adherents and critics do today," that he understood the dialectic of difference "better than most postmodernists do," and that he was already "our intellectual contemporary" as early as the 1930s. He nevertheless aims to demonstrate that Burke cannot be fully appropriated for anyone of these schools. To show this, he traces Burke's practice of philosophyincluding his skeptical approach to identity, reason, and foundational principles-first in developmental terms, in the books from the 1930s, and then thematically in the later works. The project is once again to provide an accessible rendering, which emerges in language that repeat-

3 Reviews 455 edly asks (and answers) "what exactly does Burke mean?" or stakes out "what Burke is saying" or "what Burke believes" by working with a cluster of Burke 's terms and relating them to the book's own key concept: "post-philosophy." The feel of the work, then, is that of a series of general statements about Burke's most abstract claims, placed in relation to summarizing overviews of the three schools and often set out as broad statements about how "we" humans function. Crusius wrangles with a number of recent critics, especially Giles Gunn, Frank Lentricchia, and Robert Southwell. My sense, however, is that the audience constructed by the book is once again those who want a lucid overview and categorizing of Burke, those who may wish to get a feel for Burke in relation to current isms, perhaps without engaging primary texts. The danger of this approach is that it domesticates texts and ways of reading, sometimes by repeating.popular views. For example, in this reading, Derrida becomes the nihilist who does away with authors, agents, and subjects; deconstruction becomes merely an activity of tearing down and "refusing to take a stance" rather than constructing something new. Against this popular notion of deconstruction, one of the most frequent claims of the book is the commonplace that a philosophy must construct and edify, even as it suspects and discounts. (Interestingly, Crusius mentions neither Biesecker's deconstructive reading of Burke in Addressing Postmodernity nor her discussion of the specifically productive aims of this kind of reading.) Foucault, treated even more summarily, becomes one who "acted out," seeking the forbidden in "sexual excess and sadism." Much to his credit, Crusius is more thorough in discussing his own favored territory, hermeneutics, and many of his conclusions about Burke are not radically different from those he made in his earlier book about philosophical hermeneutics: that it claims priority over specific schools as "an interpretation of interpretation," that it is postmodem in its overcoming of traditional metaphysics, that it commits us to inquiry and dialogue, that it is aware of situatedness and committed to investigating practical matters. These are the main contours of Crusius' Kenneth Burke, whose work he variously names hermeneutical pluralism, philosophical anthropology, comic pragmatism, dialectical dialogics, and constructive deconstructionism, and whose late philosophy, he suggests, "finds its strongest 'family resemblance' among hermeneutic neo-humanists." To my mind, the strongest element of Crusius' reading of Burke as philosopher-and one that goes beyond the association with hermeneutics-is his discussion of how Burke links symbolic action with

4 456 jac ethics, a discussion taken up most explicitly in the chapter "Being Without Metaphysics." Here, Crusius admirably contextualizes the vexed struggle over Being and Becoming in contemporary philosophy, and he argues the paradoxical case that, qua philosopher, Burke both affirms Being and avoids ontology. While this is a position that has been and will continue to be argued, Crusius correctly points to the limited engagement with this issue among critics, and I believe this is one of the central motives for writing this book. Crusius writes eloquently about how much Burke values "concepts of Being as part of an art of living," and he makes a strong case for the strand of moral reflection in Burke. It is for this work that the book will find an important place, showing a way to read Burke in the current climate ofmouming over the failures of theory, together with the new return to ethics. A second theme that Crusius handles admirably pertains to contemporary attitudes toward reason and logic. Here, Crusius opens up important new territory in Burke's account of human functioning, arguing for the importance of nonrational and irrational thinking (in expanded senses of those terms). As he often does in this book, Crus ius embraces this view and makes the broad claims about "us" that give the book its characteristic flavor. Here is a taste: "The irrational runs so deep and so far ahead of us that it is ludicrous to imagine eliminating it. With a little effort and training, we can minimize or eliminate the illogical, but the irrational, like the nonrational, is infinitely beyond control by elimination." There is no question that Crusius is a patient reader of Burke, and he is adept at constructing broad syntheses of trends in philosophy. My reservation about the book has to do with its lack ofreflection on language that purports to speak/or Burke. Crusius works relatively little with the hermeneutic insight (on which he comments) that the life of a reading is its enacting of a text as a script for performance, nor does he work with his own insight that "Burke is an outstanding textual phenomenologist, as tireless in his detailed study of individual texts as he is in patient comparison of several." The book makes me long for a reading of Burke that shows that textual work, how it operates, and how it fares in relation to the outpouring ofreaderly work that constitutes the "post-philosophical" turns to language and rhetoric. To illustrate this point, I want to close by quoting a passage at length, one in which Crusius makes his most typical move: explaining "what Burke means," but unself-consciously and in ways that side-step significant theorizing by Burke about the social dimensions of motive. Here, Crusius is commenting on Burke's famous "Definition of Man" and the idea that the ethical negative or "hortatory

5 Reviews 457 no" shapes the human experience from childhood on, producing a world that is "negatively infused": What Burke means by "negatively infused" is this: Whereas, for example, a mature, healthy male animal will normally attempt with little or no ceremony to copulate with a female in estrus, all of it, including the "ceremony," instinctive behavior triggered by hormones and pheromones, for the heterosexual human male the female is a vast "repository" of negation. There is the fear ofrejection-"will she say no?"-and the fear of acceptance-"should I say no to myself, refusing to become involved?" And of course there are the thou-shalt-not' s having to do with marital status and sexual ethics in general, hardly a concern for languageless animals. Ceremony in our sexual arrangements is not a metaphor, as when we speak of "courtship rituals" in birds, but a reality, always fraught with symbols "negatively infused," patently or latently. Setting aside the odd elision whereby the "female in estrus" shifts from the animal to the human kind, giving the passage its tortuous syntax, it seems clear that Crusiusis here writingpartly about Burke but also partly out of "interference from within" (to use a phrase from Burke), evoking in his example a vast cultural language about femaleness and the womb. While Burke has much to sayaboutthe body, andwhile he is no feminist, there is nothing in his work that I am aware of that approaches this evocation of language about femaleness, and especially the womb, as a place, indeed a repository, of what is dark, nasty, forbidding. As Crusius himself suggests, culture speaksthrough us and readers' constructionsof texts are situated in "horizons of meaning" that "have us more than we have them." I hope Crusius will have more to say about this view, which he correctly finds at work in Burke's texts, and with greater awareness of his own hermeneutic strategies. Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World,Lise Buranenand AliceM. Roy (Albany: StateU of New York P, pages). Reviewed by Susan M. Hunter, Kennesaw State University In Perspectives on Plagiarism and Intellectual Property in a Postmodern World, Lise Buranen and Alice Roy bring together a number of diverse