Re-reading sections of Burke's Counter-Statement today--incorporating various notions of practical art into article on working-class poetics--and am struck by several lines:
"An author who lives most of his life in his head must perform his transgressions on paper."
“Poets, deciding that the world needs or does not need woman suffrage, or the forty-hour week, or being interested in how some one starts a traction company in Idaho, write accordingly.”
Art and poetry as rhetorical. Burke revises poetics into rhetoric with elements of compromise, symbol-as-generative force, transformation, and revision (revision as Platonic emotion enters material world via "paper").
"In information, the matter is intrinsically interesting. And by intrinsically interesting I do not necessarily mean intrinsically valuable, as witness the instrinsic interest of backyard gossip or the most casual newspaper items. In art, at least the art of the great ages...the matter is interesting by means of an extrinsic use, a function."
Burke elsewhere in the text rejects "proletarian attitude" that art must "deal with life" or be "useful," seeing productive possibilities of abstraction. "The literature of the imagination may prepare the minds in a more general fashion." Thus Burke does not seek to define an extant genre or body of work or discrete set of texts or utterances as working class, but rather opens up the entire realm of poetics as having that kind of potentiality, a potentiality rooted in consciousness of various ilk.
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