Boyles Boil

You gotta love anyone who can site B.F. Skinner without a hint of irony or disgust. Posing the conversation as a spontaneous and perhaps (debated) inherent quality of human nature, Boyle goes on to examine the improvisational nature of such which then in turn becomes a conversation in music, between musicians with word, gesture, attitude, intent made action. Conversation is the specific location of our dialectic, the red dress with which we affix our speech communities. (see above) It is a process by which as Burke might say we come into identification with one another and leaving room for " the potential of dissent" we experience something-- communication, understanding, knowledge, play? All of the above?
Music is the tableau upon which Boyle quite aptly places the "harmonic changes" which integrate into our thoughts-made-genre-made-conversation. lovely.

Ramage Chapter 5-- uncertainty reigns

Ramage's extensive interpretation and critical response to the events of 9/11 find us considering all angles of the issue, from our own personal responses and the emotional, cultural, economic ones to the attempt at sympathy when he touches the tender wound of wondering "how could the terrorists justify such an act?" Where was their agency or motive?
We all try and schematize or adjust to a simulacra of an event that was bigger than anything we could really comprehend. Whether is is through his own response "It's like a bad movie" or Stockhausen's "the greatest work of art" response we find ourselves at the door of uncertainty, grasping with our individual and collective terministic screens to interpret the indescribable.
Uncertainty is a scary beast to encounter, especially as beings who must "overcome our powerful resistance to this acknwoledgement" and by accepting this uncertainty we must accept that our "interpretive model cannot be set in motion." After all, what is language for if it cannot in some way begin to interpret things, from the very mundane to the utterly catastrophic?
Ramage asserts that the cost of refusing to at least try to interpret things with our limited schema is too high. So in the face of not knowing, we must at least try to know, in order to not destroy ourselves with our ignorance or as the Buddhists would have it, we cannot succumb to our greed fear and delusion merely because our frame no longer fits. Because we are so enmeshed in our terminology, we have a difficult time rising above it, or perhaps we even have an impossible time with this but Ramage argues that it is an "ethical imperative" to at least attempt to do so. We do this with language by allowing it to "create a synthesis that reconnects the terms and establishes a new common ground between them."

In response to Blakesely chapter 4

As Blakesley interprets Freud through the lens of Burke...



Blakesely-says-Burke-says that Freud was "adept at tracking down the implications of his own terminology." He posited his own interpretation of symbols, as the analyst, over those of his "clients" or his "patients."
I find it interesting that apparently for Freud, one symbolic means of interpretation is just as valid as another even if it comes to the dreams of another person. In the realm of the subconscious Blakesley notes that Freud cared less about what happened in the dreams of his patients and more about what language they used, and what symbol system they identified with in order to describe their subconscious. Freud laid his own framework of the Oedipal anecdote over the thing and called it good, defining integral principals of the feminine in terms of the negative, in terms of being the opposite of male or the absence of the phallus. Yes, I think this is what we would call a terministic screen.
In a sense, Freud's terministic screen was then imposed on a series of successive generations of people looking to understand the meaning of their own lives and those making an efffort to track down the underlying source of their own terms. Of course, his discoveries, aimed at a deeper understanding of human nature then in turn became oppressive.
If we are all making efforts towards the personal entelechy of own impulses and associations with our own "entelechial dog" are we at all being accurate in our discoveries if we have another person's symbology laid out over our own? Or is it possible as genre theory supposes, and that Blakesely asserts as well that invention comes not from a discovery of something new rather than it comes from it's own antecedent genre.
I come again to the conclusion that there are no absolutes, that all we do, say, think, suppose, happens deeply situated in our own experience and in the experience that we create in our own lives and culture.
I appreciate in this sense that Blakesely is advocating a "systematic tracking down of [its] originating terms" as crucial to a critical look at the forces which form us as the "symbol making" and "symbol using" animal that we seem to be.