Kenneth Burke’s Theory of Attention: Homo Symbolicus’ Experiential Poetics
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2023
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Abstract
In light of cross-disciplinary interest in rethinking the conceptions of attention and attention economy, this paper conducts an archeology of Kenneth Burke’s concepts in order to construct a theory of attention implicit in his work. First, I overview key parts of rhetorical studies highlighting calls for reexamining and developing the idea of attention. Then, I read Burke’s concepts for their implicit attentional aspects and implications. These findings are collected, listed into a glossary, and extrapolated into an account of Burkean attention, which I reframe as “symbol-formed attention” to complement and round out the reigning empirical theories of attention often borrowed from the sciences. I conclude by formalizing a rhetorical idea of attention itself: a terministic screen adaptively re-configurable to situation and strategy. This project is useful for rhetorical analyses, creative engagement with communication, and reforming attention structures via symbols.
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Scholars@Duke
David Benjamin Landes
David Landes is Assistant Professor of the Practice in Duke’s Thompson Writing Program. His multidisciplinary scholarship in communication draws upon the fields of rhetoric, media, cultural studies, performance studies, and musicology.
As many fields have turned to “attention” as a useful methodological term for studying indeterminate phenomena, Landes’ research builds ways of tracking ongoing changes in “attention” itself—its constituting conditions, its infinite types, its situational dynamics, its strategic remakings—to service a changing world that outpaces our attentional practices.
His scholarship brings together scientific and humanistic traditions to develop attentional capacities for communication, liberal arts training, and social issues widely lamented to be in breakdown. His book project titled Attention Literacy: a Rhetorical Approach (or perhaps more audaciously How to Pay Attention in the 21st Century: A Rhetorical Approach) conceives attention rhetorically (as an adaptive capacity malleable to situations, goals, and strategies) to provide practical heuristics and hermeneutics for communication at pace with changing environments. The book synthesizes a general framework based upon Landes’ articles outlining case studies of attentional modes created by public phenomena (e.g. culture, technology) mingling with private agencies (e.g. volition, hermeneutics). Such case studies centrally involve search engines, music commodities, cell phone use, Arabic semantics, and pedagogies for writing and dialogue. Further articles explicate the operant implicit theories of attention in thinkers paradigmatic to subfields: Kenneth Burke, Marshall McLuhan, Aristotle, and Merleau-Ponty. Together, Landes' scholarly work of contextualizing, historicizing, and re-theorizing attention aims to reveal principles into the rhetorical construction of attention, to enable the chronicling of contemporary attentional forms, and to seize possibilities as they develop.
Landes' research is informed by his extensive background as a freelance musician trained in jazz improvisation, as well as his experiences in stage performance and IT work in Silicon Valley (including early pioneers of social media, Friendster, and of online education, Emergency University).
Additionally, Landes is an ongoing collaborator for multiple editions of the New York Times Bestseller Thank You for Arguing: What Aristotle, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson Can Teach Us About the Art of Persuasion, a book on rhetoric and argument taught in over 3000 college courses and published in 15 languages. Landes made its official Penguin Random House teacher's guides for classroom integration.
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