Corresponding
to the path from primal outrage through humble irony to warranted outrage, we
need a rhetorical path from melodrama through high comedy to a rhetoric of
outrage that plays well outside the church of the already convinced. For Burke,
I think, one key to that rhetoric of outrage was a sense of balance. The notion
of ambivalence, he says at the outset of "Comic Correctives,"
gets
us to our main thesis with regard to propagandistic (didactic) strategy. We hold
that it must be employed as an essentially comic notion, containing two-way
attributes lacking in polemical, one-way approaches to social necessity. It is
neither wholly euphemistic, not wholly debunking--hence, it provides the charitable
attitude toward people that is required for purposes of persuasion and
cooperation (p. 166
The
ultimate balance was to be found in high comedy, with its "maximum of
forensic complexity," but Burke was not above utilizing the other comic
arts, including those that "converted downwards," such as burlesque
and satire. Here again, however, Burke sought a form of critique that was
intellectually and rhetorically sophisticated. His idols were not those who
personalized the enemy; rather they were the practitioners of what the Frankfurt
School called ideology critique. These include psychoanalysts like Freud
as well as the formulators of "economic psychoanalysis," such as
Machiavelli, Hobbes, Voltaire, Bentham, Marx and Veblen.
These social theorists were complexifiers, alive to
error and not just evil. But, as Burke acknowledges in a prose that is
uncharacteristically contorted, they never permitted themselves "to
overlook the admonitions of even the most caustic social criticism." ATH,
p. 172.
What we have here is reluctant recognition of the value
of satire, of burlesque, even of ridicule, provided that it has first been
comically corrected and tested against the criterion of persuasiveness as well.
Earned outrage, warrantable outrage, must be something more than righteous
indignation; it must emerge out of Burke’s stage of comedic irony as something
that demands the cry of “Thou Shalt Not” despite awareness of our own
limitations; of our own foolishness. Let
me illustrate.