Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History

Burke, Kenneth. Attitudes Toward History. California UP: Berkley. 1959.

I think I understand the ideas of “frames of acceptance and rejection” but I’m unsure. Ask about it.

Sentimentalism “Apparently active, it was in essence the most passive of frames, an elaborate method for feeling assertive by a resolve to drift with the current” (33).
“Out of legal sophistication there grew the vast metaphysical strucutures, that eventually imposed scientific concepts of causality upon the earlier patterns of magic and religion” (38).
This makes me wonder if the socio-cultural structures implemented in order to serve men, to guilt women, etc. were “metaphysical”?
“Hence, the events of a tragedy are made to grown out of one another in keeping with the logic of scientific cogency, the Q.E.D. of Euclid and the political oration” (38-9).
Tragedy is contagious.
“Class morality” functions as “cultural lag,” insofar as another class of people arises whose situation is not accurately located by the attitudinizings of the frame” (40).
So, when males couldn’t place women within their idea of “life” and “society” they placed them in a category of their own, one of subservience?
“Comedy is essentially humane, leading in periods of comparative stability to the comedy of manners, the dramatization of quirks and foibles” (42).
Manners, that which so much of social interaction was based on, was in actuality comic relief? I think that could be true, a way of taking social discomfort and setting it aside by making a place to walk it off.
“Thus, when an average compatriot expresses his allegiance to capitalism, he is not considering merely the things that make it different from other economic systems. The symbol also includes for him such notions as family, friendship, neighborliness, education, medicine, golf, tools, sunlight, furniture, and endless other sundries. When the orator shouts “Down with capitalism!’ the auditor often resists because he is countering in secret, “I love the mememory of the river bank where I lolled in the sun as a boy” (99).
So, if I read this correctly we are attached to the frames which we put around our ideas and ideals more than to the ideas/ideals themselves. This makes perfect sense in as much as it is difficult to create social change!
“they arrive at a sect-within-a-sect-within-a-sect. Which may be merely a technical way of saying that a historic trend, in developing the poiwer to go far enough, by the same token develops the power to go too far” (101).
“We are simply suggesting that, when you lump the lot, discounting each poetic category according to its nature, they seem to add up nearest to comedy. Which might be a roundabout way of saying: whatever poetry may be, criticism had best be comic” (107).
Love it!
“Thus the communicative frame developed by the Stoic crust was abstract and superficial. It was more like the co-ordination that we get by a telephone exchange than the co-ordination of intimacy, as in the rapport between Shakespeare and his audiences” (120).
“This need of struggle, this physically grounded commandment that the resources of strain be utilized, can be linked with the human need for justification. One must “prove himself right,” by some form of practical or esthetic composition” (124).
“An inventor, for instance, makes some mementous discovery. It is the subtle synthesis of countless uncharitable factors in his personal life” (125).
That is what we do when we write, study, compose. It is a synthesis not only of all we have learned through our books and teachers, but what we have learned through living.
“So a frame will be stretched until it breaks.” (134).
Frames of understanding can be changed, but the old must break in order to bring into being the new.
“Sincerity and guilt were as hopelessly interwoven as enlightenment and stupidity” (136).
Always.
“We must note how a given frame tends to develop by-products. In aiming at one thing, we incidentally bring about something else” (139).
This is interesting, could it be that abolition brought about women’s rights movements, or vice versa?
“We would inspect them in the symbolic acts of art, because of our belief that art is the dial on which fundamental psychological processes of living are recorded” (202).
Dictionary of Pivital Terms.
“Cauistic Stretching: By cauistic stretching one introduces new principles while theorhetically remaining faithful to old principles” (229).
Martin Luther King’s movments where white men would go along, taking down “white’s only” signs, but then go back to old ways?
“Communion” involves the interdependence of people through their common stake in both co-operative and symbolic networks” (234).
“Heads I Win, Tails You Lose’: A device whereby, if things turn out one way, your system accounts for them—and if they turn out the opposite way, your system also accounts for them” (260).
Simple male philosophy.
“Secular prayer, as a ‘moral act,’ is the coaching of an attitude by the use of mimetic and verbal language” (322).
“Transcendence—When approached from a certain point of view, A and B are ‘opposites.’ We mean by ‘transcendence’ the adoption of another point of view from which they cease to be opposites” (336).