Herb, I'm sorry of being (co-)responsible for redundancies in your posting, and to contribute to talking issues to death. I did neither mean nor say that me or anyone else will read Zorn's use of the term "radical" ONLY politically, or that it has to be understood STRICTLY in its political sense. You are reading that into my remark that "it would be naive to believe that it isn't read politically". Why didn't you read it like: "by some and maybe among other readings"? That is how I meant it. (I'm tempted to quote Dave Douglas with his advanced interview technique, but I won't) My own (hypothetical) political reading of RJC's "radical", for example, resulted from my inability to figure out in which other e.g. musical or "cultural identity" or whatever sense it could be intended. In case that, as you "wrote earlier, the aesthetic radicality of any particular musical item is a matter of taste & prior knowledge more than anything else" (what one could well dispute, but I won't), then I can claim for me the right to find RJC music not overly radical, or at least less radical than certain non-RJC Zorn disks, can't I? To set that straight: I'm perfectly fine with Zorn calling a CD series RJC, and I'm aware that you cannot change such a label after a bunch of instances. I just had this unexplainable desire to learn what this is meant to tell me. Maybe I should rather be peacefully waiting until suddenly the, as you put it, "sort of self-defining" process occurs.

If you try to reconcile your theory with the actual practice you're supposedly analyzing, you'll find a lot of practice that this particular theory fails to take into account. As Wittgenstein wrote, Look to the use.

Are you trying to tell me that my use and understanding of "radical" is "theory", and yours is not only the same as Zorn's (inevitably so by the two of you being American?) but "actual practice", as if there were only one actual, i.e. right practice? If you like to rely on Wittgenstein on that matter, you'd better respect my "European" discourse (and Zorn, who has travelled Europe and sells I don't know how much of his records over here). But anyway I don't believe that there's so much of a difference in the use of the term in Europe and America as you imply: some Germans have a radical haircut too, and "radical animal rights activist" or "radical muslims" refers to the same kind of people/non-lingual practice on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. Just for the record. Even the latest Wittgenstein knows to tell adequate use from inadequate. To advocate an account where the meaning of a concept is determined by its use doesn't mean that I am free to use the word "radical" in some sense which I pick to my taste. On the contrary: a meaning theory of use demands that my use of "radical" is the same use as (one of the) uses other speakers fancy. You may not leave the game; there is no private language with Wittgenstein. If this is true, then you could simply teach us Europeans what the American Zorn means by "radical". Go ahead!

I also suspect that the definition of what Zorn includes in the series may have drifted over the years: while he may have had some more strict ideas early on, these ideas may have loosened, to the point where the title is a quite effective marketing ploy which he'd be a fool to drop.

That may well be the case. I don't mind. I'm simply curious what it was intended to transport some day. Fritz np: Naked City (still my all time favourite of Zorn's) ############################################## Fritz Feger mail@fritzfeger.de www.fritzfeger.com ##############################################