A Comment on "It Takes Capital to Defeat Dracula"

Author(s): Kenneth Burke

Source: College English, Vol. 49, No. 2 (Feb., 1987), pp. 221-222
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377884
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Comment and Response

versus basic writers in an urbanopendoor community college. Our theories
may never coincide, and I doubt that
they should.
All that aside, I disagree most with
Crusius'final comment: "There are no
other choices." Ridiculous. We all
have lots of choices to make. The 1986
Rhetoric Society of America Conference, for example, exhibited generous openness to and genuine interest
in emerging rhetorics that may be
called poststructuralist, postmodern,
or postphilosophical(I do not mean to
imply that these three terms are interchangeable,merely related).Never did
I witness suggestions that anyone
"withdrawfrom the field." One of the
dangers of the kind of paradigmhunting in which Crusius engages and that
he recommendsis precisely this: when
we think we have the Truth, we want
others to hush-or to "withdraw." It
was precisely that kind of paradigm
claim-illustrated best by Kinneavy's
insistence that "Educational syllabuses in language from kindergarten
through graduate school must make
these aims [as defined in A Theoryof
Discourse] the governing concepts"
(38; my emphasis)-that compelled me
to write. Pluralism,as I understandit,
involves our willingness to live with
our neighbors' choices-even though
we may disagree with them. Yes, I am
willing to live with Kinneavian discourse theory, but I am not prepared
to accept it.

221

(see my article for several selections)

leads the readersto this position. Still,
I could have made it clearer that my
complaintis with the text, not with the
scholar who wrote it. Also, I could
find no place in my article to recognize
a few things that ought to be recognized.
First, Kinneavy's text helped to
change composition studies at a critical time. In the early 1970s, composition studies seemed to too many scholars guilty of the charge made by
Robert Pirsig's fictional (?) professor:
it was not a "substantive" field, just a
"methodological" field. True, as
Crusius points out, some English professors would still make a similar
charge. That their numberis declining
is, to some extent, due to Kinneavy's
scholarship.
Second, as Crusiuscorrectly points
out, Kinneavy'stheoryhas led to a few
good textbooks. Indeed,for the last two
years I have tried, without success, to
persuademy colleaguesin the freshman
writingprogramto adoptthe Kinneavy,
Nakadate, and McCleary text, which
seems to avoid many of the overstatementsof A Theory.
Finally, and I want to make this very
clear, my critique of Kinneavy's text
should not be read as an attack on the
man, one of the most helpful and influential teachers of my undergraduate
years.
None of these three admissions,
however, causes me to retreat from
my earlierclaims.
I wish to answer some other letters
North Lake College
and remarks that have convinced me
the tone of my article, like Crusius'
two articles, was too strident. I wrote A Comment on "It Takes
the article to a good many people who
have reifiedthe aims and made mecha- Capital to Defeat Dracula"
nistic, deterministic constructs of Thanks one whole lot for that ingenthem. But let's face it: the moralistic ious article (CE, March 1986)on Dracand positivistic language of A Theory ula, as incidentally involving my

222

College English

Pentad (which has become a Hexad)

and the implications of the difference
between digital and analogue computers. Incidentally, the ironic fact is
that, though I am quite in line with
Richard Coe's stress upon "attitude,"
and my Grammar of Motives has a
chapter tracing its treatment in I. A.
Richards, George Herbert Mean, and
Korzybski, the Pentaddidn't include it
as a basic term, and my Hexad, as discussed in later editions of that book,
simply includes "attitude" ("how,"
quo modo) as an area of its own,
whereas in the Pentad I bunched it
with "agency" ("by what means,"
quibus auxiliis). And I can see the justice of his focus upon "identification"
in that regard.
In the preface to the first edition of
Towardsa Better Life, I observe, "By
changing the proportions of a very
average man, we can obtain a monster. . . . That is, a monstrousor inhuman character does not possess
qualitiesnot possessed by other menhe simply possesses them to a greater
or less extent than other men." Thus
in that regard we are all potentially
monsters, all Draculas "in principle,"
since we all have the same spectrumof
motives. And in that regard Coe's inventive application of the difference
between digital and analogue computers is good fun.
But I would have to startfroma kind
of analogizing that is prior to any algorithmicor graphiccalculatingsuch as
the "artificial intelligence" any computer's programming proceeds by.
Whenour primordialancestorsevolved
frombodily organismsthat experienced
sensations and feelings into bodies genetically endowed with the ability to
learnanduse andmakewordsfor sensations and feelings, there came into the

worlda mediumof expression and communicationthat in its very essence involves a principleof analogy, long before our technology (which could never
have even remotely turned out an analog computer without the guidance of
language).Back in 1978I published an
essay which shows both Emerson and
Bentham,for all theirdifferencesof outlook, proclaimingthe principleof analogy as basic to the development of a
vocabulary ("[Nonsymbolic] Motion/[Symbolic] Action." Critical Inquiry 4[1978]: 809-38. See especially
809-13).
Second, my definition of us as
bodies-that-learn-language brings up
the fact that languageis learnable as a
collective medium of expression and
communication only because its application implicitlyinvolves the principle of analogy. For words are such that
we can apply the same words to different situations; yet all situations are in
theircombinationof details unique.Our
very term "identification" has in its
usage an implicitly analogizing function.
But in any case, Colleague Coe
does contrive to give us some entertaining glimpses-and I'm glad to be
"among those present."
Kenneth Burke
Andover, New Jersey

RichardM. Coe Responds

Absolutely. I could hardly agree more.
Lest I was not explicitly clear (e.g.,
in my fourth footnote), I find the
cybernetic analog/digital distinction
useful because it entitles so precisely
and seminally "a kind of analogizing
that is prior to any algorithmic or
graphic calculating such as 'artificial