Abstract

Reviews Debra Hawhee, Moving Bodies: Kenneth Burke at the Edges ofLanguage, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009. 215 pp. ISBN 978-1-57003-809-9 "There are only bodies and languages." Alain Badiou's proposition at the beginning of Logics of Worlds neatly sums up the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke as elaborated by Debra Hawhee in Moving Bodies. Hawhee's book is an excellent study of Burke's career-long preoccupation with hu­ mans as "bodies that learn language." Hawhee selectively tracks this pre­ occupation from Burke's earliest fiction through his engagements with bod­ ily mysticism, drug research, endocrinology, constitutional medicine, and gesture-speech evolution to his final recapitulations organized around the opposition between nonsymbolic motion and symbolic action. Hawhee's multidimensional discussion presents a powerful case for Burkean explo­ rations of the rhetorical primacy of bodies and language, what Badiou more generally labels "democratic materialism." In her introduction Hawhee defines the transdisciplinary framework she uses to examine Burke's thinking. Distinguishing it from interdisci­ plinary study, Hawhee describes contemporary transdisciplinarity as an "effort to suspend—however temporarily—one's own disciplinary terms and values in favor of a broad, open, and multilevel inquiry," focusing on specific problems by drawing together radically different orientations (p. 3). Burke himself was a transdisciplinarian avant la lettre. His early critical method of "perspective by incongruity" brought together contrasting in­ terpretive frames to do productive explanatory work, and his svnecdochic clustering approach transformed associative constellations of terms into sug­ gestive meaningful wholes. Throughout Moving Bodies Hawhee provides a transdisciplinary kind of rhetorical history. She skillfully tracks Burke's in­ terpretive accomplishments in juxtaposing radically different discourses and tropically clustering terms associated with the body/language problematic. For example, in Chapter 1, "Bodies as Equipment for Moving," Hawhee pursues the "music-body-language cluster" through Burke's early fiction and music criticism to challenge past claims about his purported movement from aesthetics to rhetoric in the twenties. She persuasively argues instead that a distinctive rhetoric centered on bodily effects was there from the very Rhetorica, Vol. XXX, Issue 1, pp. 94-110, ISSN 0734-8584, electronic ISSN 15338541 . ©2012 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights re­ served. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Rights and Permissions website at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintlnfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/RH.2012.30. IN4. Reviews 95 start. Hawhee explains how7 this Burkean rhetorical aesthetics arose from his fictional interest in characters' bodily rhythms and his critical interest in music s effects on audience bodies. Her account of Burkean talk about “bodies and their rhythmic/arrhythmic capacities" sets the stage for a rich rhetorical story about Burke's developing theories of language, rhetoric, and symbol-using generally. Haw7hee finds one passage in Counter-Statement to be especially significant, returning to it at least three times in Moving Bodies: The appeal of form as exemplified in rhythm enjoys a special advantage in that rhythm is more closely allied with 'bodily' processes." Rhetorical form appeals to somatic rhythms of “systole and diastole, alternation of the feet in walking, inhalation and exhalation, up and down, in and out, back and forth." In Chapter 2, "Burke's Mystical Method," Hawhee concentrates on Burke's engagement with bodily and intellectual strands of mysticism, es­ pecially in his tw7o books of the mid-thirties, Permanence and Change and Attitudes toward History. During times of crisis and alienation, Burke sug­ gests, mystics emerge to perceive things differently. As he puts it in Perma­ nence and Change, mysticism is primarily “an attempt to define the ultimate motivation of human conduct by seeing around the corner of our accepted verbalizations." Significantly, a valuable resource of such mystical insight can be found in the human body. Writing to Allen Tate in 1933, Burke asserts that during historical periods when, as in the thirties, ethical systems fall into disrepute, mystics often seek in bodily processes an ''undeniable point of reference outside the system whereby sturdier and more accurate moral exhortations could be built up." For Burke, mystical bodies move thought tow7ard new7 perspectives and into unexpected meaningful associations. Hawhee...