Counter-Statement by Burke Kenneth

Author:Burke, Kenneth
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520001961
Amazon: 0520001966
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 1997-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

PROGRAM

ART--"eternal" in so far as it deals with the constants of humanity ("constants of humanity": the recurrent emotions, the fundamental attitudes, the typical experiences).

But art is also historical--a particular mode of adjustment to a particular cluster of conditions. The cluster of conditions is fluctuant (from age to age, from class to class, from person to person) thus calling for changes of emphasis. (Before the flowering of chemistry, for instance, there may have been some value in stressing the heroism of war. A more fitting emphasis now may be the analogy between war and mosquito extermination. Neither aspect is "the truth." Either can be stressed with justice. But a change in the cluster of conditions requires the change of stress.)

Any particular cluster of conditions will involve the recurrent emotions (fear, tenderness, delight, etc.), and fundamental attitudes (belief, cynicism, skepticism, expansiveness, reclusion, etc.); but the particularities of the cluster will require the stressing of some and the slighting of others. (The simplicity and faith needed to construct a particular society may serve badly in the subsequent business of annulling the society's excesses.)

The present Program speculates as to which emotions and attitudes should be stressed, and which slighted, in the aesthetic adjustment to the particular conditions of today.

In contemporary America the distinguishing emergent factor is obviously mechanization, industrialism, as it affects our political institutions, as it alters our way of living, as it makes earlier emphases malapropos or even dangerous ("malapropos or even dangerous"--consider for instance the

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