The Ecumenical Institute: Chicago
Summer 1971
First of all let's try to identify culture a bit.
Culture is that which sets man off from the animal. The animal
is related to his environment, which is fundamentally what the
economic process is concerned with. And then the animal is an
aggregate, he exists not alone. What sets man off from the animal
is what we commonly call culture. The earlier anthropologists
divided themselves into physical anthropologists (they were concerned
with things like race and so on) and cultural anthropologists.
Now, anthropology cannot be classified in that simple way anymore.
But this category has remained. It is pretty obvious that it is
used in many different ways and that is why we need to talk about
it. Man is in time, that is to say he deals with past and future.
But so does the animal; he is located in time. He tells time differently,
but the hibernation of the bear is an illustration of what you
mean. But man is in space and, by the way, this helps you get
ahold of what internal space is and what internal time is. Space
is the relationship to the environment. And then, man is in society,
that is he cannot exist by himself. He cannot even get born if
there is not a coming together of people, to say nothing of the
interiorization. This has to do with his relations and his organization.
Culture is that which enables him to selfconsciously relate
to these factors.
What we have tried to do is to see this kind of relating
as what we mean in the broad by this triangle of culture. Obviously,
in terms of that kind of a statement, culture is that without
which you do not have the economic or the political. This dynamic
we call culture is that which brings humanness to the economic
realm and the political realm as over against that in which the
animal participates. In one sense, this top triangle we call culture
is the whole triangle. And this is where you have had some kind
of debates. But in pulling that out and looking at relationships
it became clear to me in working with resources that you don't
have a resource when you have gold or coal in the ground. Only
when you bring human consciousness to it or what I'd like to call
organization to it, do you have a resource. And it is the cultural
dimension that determines that organization. This is what I mean
when I say that culture is the illuminating factor to both of
these poles.
Now tints dynamic of culture we have divided into
what I want to call the Weltbilt: and this is the universe that
anybody who lives in these three dynamics has or it's the universe
that creates the dynamic. So that this triangle is really the
whole triangle for in the broad you only get the world view or
the universe in all three of these; it's focused up here. So that
the symbol is this whole triangle and if the cultural triangle
is the whole social process, then symbol is this whole process.
Or you only have culture in material expression, and if you call
the economic dynamic a material expression, it is an expression
of the cultural. And the same is true in the political in the
sense of institution being a material expression at the moment.
Now obviously in terms of proposal writing you've got something
extremely crucial here. But lets say that on this top triangle
is the foundation, or the very limit the foundational expression,
of the world view.
Education is the dynamic of transmitting that world
view fundamentally. You have to say stronger words. It is the
dynamic of , in the rich sense of this, rationalizing the world
view and transmitting the world view. Maybe I'd better say this.
Any culture is both at the same time static and dynamic. The illustration
that a man who I was reading used was: when you see an old movie
and you notice the strange clothes, well, that not only happens
at this moment' that has happened ever since there was culture.
You know back in the caveman days when he showed an old
movie, he grinned exactly like you and I grin. And the most important
changes in culture are not the obvious ones perhaps, they are
the subtle ones. But at the same time it's static. And the effort
of culture is to be static. That is to say that being in society
is to maintain that society; it is to maintain that society. That's
where you're static element is. Maintain has two meanings there
to keep it going now and to be sure it continues in the
future. There is no such thing as a culture that does not have
both of those elements of maintaining in it. Sometimes we think
we have children because at night from time to time we have intercourse.
Oh no, no, how stupid! You have children in order that you maintain
the culture. If you remember that most of what you have up here
is on the unconscious level, that is, you do not pull it to consciousness
but it's there that you have children for the sake of maintaining
the culture.
Maybe this is the point to say that culture is the
cement of the whole thing, its the glue. You guard culture with
your life, the economic with your left arm and the political with
your right. So here fundamentally you have the transmission of
the culture, of the world view. A way of getting at it, if I can
use old images, is to say that the dynamic of culture is to the
dynamic of the political and the dynamic of the economic like
the soul is to the body. If you think in terms of natural environment,
you understand that what we mean by culture has been called man's
second environment which seems to me to be rather crucial. It's
learned but you learn it before you have any awareness of any
learning process. You wake up, so to speak and the job has been
done on you. This is why culture points to the unavoidability
of brainwashing. So that you never really criticize brainwashing,
you criticize the end for which brainwashing is done, because
brainwashing is just a part of what it means to be a human being.
And by the time we come to any consciousness well, lets
say that consciousness is impossible unless an unchangeable brainwashing
job has been done on you. You can alter it but you can never get
over it and that's before you are aware of anything that's going
on. Richard Niebuhr in Christ and Culture pulling from many sources,
sums up culture as first of all, social there isn't such
a thing as culture except in society, and secondly, it is achievement
when you become aware in depth, you understand that man
created this. This is what we mean when we say that man invented
man. Or, when you look at what we mean by culture, man invents
the universe. There is no such thing as a universe save through
(this is Ortega, you well know) man's inventions. Or what you
would mean when you say that man invents God. One of these days
we are going to see with great clarity what the anthropologist
knows, that in this top triangle and in the top triangle of that
which is religion, that the symbolic is the crucial foundation
of all culture. It cannot be separated from language and it cannot
be separated from the practical expression of it in art. Sometimes
I think that it's art that mediates between the top pole of religion
and the rest of this and therefore, on down. Right now in our
society when its popular to say you have no religion, the tragedy
is that you're closing your eyes to the most crucial reality relative
to any social vehicle because its the most crucial point of culture.
Now to read what that religion or faith is in a culture is extremely
difficult. We've hidden for a long time the necessity for really
spelling out for ourselves what the operating religion is for
the man on the street. Maybe we're going to have to do that this
summer and do it in some kind of real depth.
Now, I'm really ready to talk about this dynamic up here. You have before you four sheets of paper One of them is the whole triangle. This is the grand master that covers the economic, political and so on down to the third level. And then you have what we call the masters, that's the ones that cover the whole
thing down .to the third level. That's what you ought
to have before you to take a quick glance at and particularly
on the cultural. Now, the next thing is the three sheets that
are the submasters, the one that deals with education and
the one that deals with style and the one that deals with symbol.
Get them out in front of you and a copy of the master of the whole
cultural. The numbers up at the top show you the levels. The levels
of those submasters are level 2, 3, 4, and 5. What you do
not have before you is level 6 and if you need to refer to that
at any time, that would be on the basic charts. In the process
are the same thing on triangles, they are simplified into the
two basic categories. I think that you ought to be recollected
again to get on top of this, of the sentences. There are 13 that
read like sentences in terms of keeping hold of the dynamics.
Now lets look at culture. The culture dynamic. The
triangle I'm drawing goes from level one through four. I want
to start here with communal symbols, language, art and sacred
or religious symbols are dealt with here. The beginning of any
complex symbol system has to do with language. This is what I
meant the other day when I said that all art was based on the
first uhuhuh, and whether or not that be true (some
people believe that the beginning of art was this pounded
on table), I would want to include that in language which I want
to come back to in a moment. You will notice that in the language
you're dealing with expressing you're dealing with what's
been called there the expressive formation. And (look at the final
chart on language which takes you down to the 6th level) now I
think that to go over this pretty fast, I do not see any way in
which I would go about building a proposal upon this now
I don't mean there cants be, but I don't see any way whatsoever.
The first one is the expressive formation. This has to do with
enunciated perception and what that means is that you say words
that come to you from sounds from outside, i.e., in English you
got the word buzz either by listening to a circular saw or a bumble
bee as it flew by. Here is the very beginning of forming language.
And then linguistic analogy has to do with sounds, yet, but of
one sound creating a similar kind of sound, but not the same sound
within your head, and through that process in the third category
on the sixth level you finally create a sign and that means, in
one way, a word. This is the process in which words come into
being as signs that point to things. Finally, you come up with
the word breeze that becomes a sign which you might say could
be the beginning of consciousness and the beginning of sociality
or the beginning of society itself.
Then the second level is image articulation and the
reoccurring. I see this as the process in Golding's book
on the primitives The Inheritors in which images
are formed in the mind as response by the use of this first process
that gave you your initial signs by which you can identify and
hold onto situations. For example, when I was a little boy, X
happened, the image I have of that and the ability to articulate
it with sounds which have become words means that here I am an
old man and I'm still able to hold onto that. Or it's the way
you build up experience. And then second over there, accompanying
affections, is the way you begin to recognize your emotional dimensions
of life by their relations identifying them in relation to identifying
or articulating or imaging concrete situations. If you would divorce
your emotional structure from the image of the situation, you
wouldn't have any emotional structure. Do you see that? It's my
image of a certain man that makes me fear that man and I recognize
this emotion in relationship to that image. And it's out of this
that you begin to build the complex montages or the montages that
hold together the array of images and begin to build your interior
universe. As a matter of fact, this whole section is on the process
through which that universe inside of you comes to be.
And then the third category is the situation interpretation.
And this is where you begin to systematically and rationally classify
(reflective classification) what has happened here above so that
the rationality or that which holds the universe together comes
into being which means then the second is that you have enumerated
precedents this is actually building the universe. Reflective
classification is beginning to classify these montages and enumerated
precedents is to begin to bring them together into a universe
out of which comes your meaningful conclusions or your capacity
really to make judgments. Now I still don't see how this is going
to be turned into proposals. But if you pressed me and gave me
some time I could spell out the fact that the ghetto child
who was denied participation in these stages relative to other
children's participation and who has been thoroughly denied (I
feel that I'm in this class too) any understanding of this process.
Now I'm not really denying because as you get me talking about
this in my terms, I can make some speeches on it, but I don't
mean that I should. We have got to be loyal to the people who
run this discipline and as far as I'm able to tell, that's what
we have been.
The second part, and we can bury now, is the linguistic
structure and this is society's reflection upon its own process
really. And it has to do with grammatical structure in which you
can almost see sounds inventory and accepted vocabulary and the
practical grammar. It's this then that you can see is transmitted.
And then the abstract relations, and this is really
logic induction and deduction and the analogical method.
And then the actual communication process. You start
out with a situation, you perceive, observe an array of facts
out of which you conceive an idea and then go through the process
of vocal articulation n of that. And here is what it means for
us to converse, actual communication or conversation.
Now the last, the societal world, is really an attempt
to grasp the intellectual understanding of the world view of the
community. Even to make that kind of statement is bad because
there isn't such a thing as a world view that isn't articulated.
If there isn't language, there is no world view. In one sense
your language is the world view, no matter what comes into it.
Basic typifications. That's fairly easy, it's a matter of naming
objects, finally. Actually it's coming to common agreement. Some
say water and some, water, only we come to agreement that we know
what we're talking about when we say water or, water. The second
one is designated actions. I've been struggling with some of my
young colleagues who know more about this by far than I do. My
concern is to get clear that in language through verbal signs
you are pointing to objects and then you are pointing to relationships
to those objects and you have to identify them and this, as far
as I am concerned, is what that second one meansdesignated
actions. And then the third is recognized obligations. Now those
of you who know something about linguistics know you've got somewhat
of a problem when you get that kind of a category in there. But
no matter how you talk about them, obligations occur in the process
of designating objects and relationships to objects and these
can be classified also. Now if you remember carefully, that the
community symbol system, although it's divided up into three systems,
is interrelated dynamics that save you have what I'm going
to come to up here and what I'm going to come to over here, this
actually does not come to be. You can't finally separate them
and that's helpful at least to me to consciously remind myself.
And the next one, the interpreting schemes is to
say that when you and I learn, you and I don't really start back
with the chalk and the action, what is communicated to us is huge
schemes, highly complex schemes a part of which process is learning
that this is chalk. Do you see that? You learn that there is not
such a thing as chalk without a blackboard and you never learned
that, it just happened to you sort of, and if you don't have an
eraser, your hand gets all yellow and so on.
And the last one is the reflective conduct. The exciting
thing about that for me is that language very frequently
the people who operate in this field talk as if language is some
objective thing that doesn't have anything to do with society.
The only reason language was invented was to glue this thing together.
The function of language was for conduct or was ethical action,
social action in the broad sense. If Mao were here he would agree
with that statement in terms of his statement about knowledge,
and perhaps that's enough on that.
I can't escape from the practical aspects of this
in terms of analyzing the problems of our times Oh I'm
sure it crucial to us but I'm so stupid that I don't see
it. If this lecture on language I gave had been a good one, it
would have been the greatest on you'd ever hear on language, I
want you to be clear on that. Now our experts in linguistics,
like in other disciplines, go off into what I always want to call
statistical linguistics, which I'm sure somebody has to do but
that's not what you're out to do. you're out to see that it's
a dynamical part of the social process and therefore, I finally
have decided that this is a tremendous job here that some of your
colleagues have done.
Let's look at art. Now language is the hardest one
of any up here by far. The second hardest one for me is art. You'd
like to give a long history on this. I tell you we had knock downs
and drag outs on it. It's hard to see that art is a social process
and not emphasize its social function. Although you deal with
function, you're not trying to analyze social function, you're
trying to get down deeper than that. And to grasp the dynamic
of art in the whole dynamic we call culture in relationship to
this whole process that we call the social process. And in doing
that if only Slicker were here we were forced here
in the last months to do things that we had been putting off for
years one of them was to get at the bottom of what Susan
Langer was doing in dealing with art. That's what we started with.
The first category says interior awareness and what
they're saying in that, first of all, is that art manifests the
deep tension in humanness itself. And the tension is relative
to inward space, inward time and inward happening.
And then art is that which is constantly occasioning
the internal reconstruction in the effort to harmonize the tension
that it makes manifest. And this is an effort towards unifying
your environment; for when this internal tension is manifest,
you experience it outside, as out of harmony with your environment.
And then secondly, emotional equilibrium is tension inside and
by tension here you're talking about a state of being, not simply
an emotion. This state of being has emotional accompaniments.
You're after bringing back a state of equilibrium which has reconstructed
your universe inside And then, what happens is that your world
view is disturbed the pigeon holes which make you sing
the tension splatters them like dropping a puzzle on the
floor and scattering the parts and you try to bring back your
ideological universe into a form which reconstructs.
Then you begin to experience what they called here
objectified subjectivity. Now I've learned a lot from this about
things I thought I knew something about before. The most objective
thing in the universe is what the psalmist is talking about. That
objectifies what you experience as subjectivity. This is a part
of what I mean when I say I cannot even remember a time when I
had a personal problem. You objectify. You talk about a psychological
state of hell. Have you ever seen the person who pulls everything
into his little private problem. Well this is exactly the reverse
of it. You take this inside and put it out utterly objective.
Which has to do with humanness and when you begin to draw the
dynamics in which I'm not particularly interested today, you begin
to see how that process is a part of the cement which culture
is.
Now the second has to do with eventful consciousness.
Now you're over on the social side. Appropriated humanness means
that art enables one to participate in the objective journey of
mankind. And you see that the first box talks about the human
journey. It's like Patton said the first division was over
there, and over there and over there, which battle happened how
may years before, 1100? Or it's like, have you ever had the experience
of literally feeling that you were Moses striking the rock or
that you were one of those shriveledup followers of his
who, when the Lord sent the water, began bitching for quail
in which you become history, or you become humanity. This second
one, prevailing moods, this is what I mean by sensing after the
times. After the times puts the mood out there. And this again
is appropriated humanness or history anyway. And then, of course,
historical values. I'm screaming more and more about this. Like
you have a PSU and another PSU and another and your colleagues
work and work, and then the next PSU comes along and doesn't even
read the thing and they start from scratch and every single time,
without exception, that's a pile of horse manure. m e next guy
who comes along has got to go back and get this underground work
as if that last PSU has nothing to contribute at all. This is
what you mean by participating in the values of history. Or put
it, billions and billions and billions of people who have lived,
who struggled to articulate what it means to be human and this
is participating in the values that they have created. This is
why you study history, not because it's interesting that in 1492
some grimey Italian with Spanish money stumbled upon what ever
it was he stumbled upon.
You'd like to have some even better terms. This is
reconstructed externality which I think is pretty clear. Art is
that means in which my little naive, but they seem always inclusive
and sacred to me, understanding of what is going on in this time
and in time itself is called into question. Think of Guernica
in terms of what that does when you allow it to scream at you
not simply in terms of your interior universe but in terms of
your understanding of the world in which you live. You've got
to remember that fundamentally art is contentless. The content
of it is your life and your world. You can see this revised content
delivering you towards an increased susceptibility to the first
intrusion. That's what you mean there by contentlessness. Finally,
you and I become contentless in our radical content. We become
more and more susceptible. That is, some people you have got to
pick up a two by four and hit them on the head and others, you
wink at them and they get the whole story.
The last one is experienced transparency. Well I
suppose that's fairly clear to you. I was talking to Pierce in
Manila the other day and I winked at him over the phone and he
got the whole Story. I didn't even wink at Slicker ,today when
he called and he got the whole message. He's been telegramming
for two thousand dollars and we haven't sent it. He called today
and didn't even mention it.. . . I feel like giving my speeches
here and the people who did this will get after me later, but
I've got to take it out of my own life. One of the things when
you talk about turning spirit into matter and mark you, without
a heart you haven't got the slightest what are you laughing
at now? He thinks I'm going to give the same old speech and I
was, I was even going to mention that Buddha down there in Ceylon
with that back drop of the Himalayan Mountains behind It where
I tell you matter turned into spirit for me. And One aspect of
that dynamic is that that one little unique situation gets shoved
into the midst of universality and beyond and you begin
to participate in the primeval origins. Let's get that in another
kind of language. This is beginning to experience yourself not
as just coming out of some woman's womb but when the God of the
Sun sent the Goddess of the Sun. . . . .you've got this, me! So
who are you to tell a son of the Sun Goddess. It's this kind of
participation. You can easily slip into RSI here, I think what
we ought to do is to have art form conversations in RSI! I really
do. Then the potential destiny you can grasp and mark you
I liked it when they called it something about social art, social
art, yes, this isn't propaganda. Without religion up here I could
not say this that I am saying about art. Finally, not realized
eschatology but constantly occurring eschatology; you begin to
participate in not simply the meaning but the transocial meaning
Of every happening (eternal meanings). Art is that dynamic in
society which constantly not only enables me to experience my
experience but to experience it more deeply.
Now we're down here to the transparent pole itself.
They used the term here radical projection and I questioned them
on that and they insisted that that's what ought to be there
it's radical letting loose of myself in being which is, at the
limit, sheer creativity. This is the box in which you realize
you can't say I have creativity; I am creativity. My being is
creativity. This is the experience o, literally bringing something
out of nothing. You don't raise that as some damn metaphysical
question It's a state Of being phenomenological statement out
there. Now interiorized externality. This is the reverse of what's
up there before. But this is where you start, where the external
situation becomes your interior event. This is what's behind what
Scott says about news. News is the internalizing, bringing into,
sucking into, your history, the Viet Nam war. Or the fact that
Bethany Seminary is going out of business. If I might add, and
in a way sort of apologize for myself, you're not in the moral
realm here of nicely participating in it or unnicely participating
in It. I had told a group that I've been having wicked Walter
Middy's about going out to Bethany and walking in and saying I'll
offer you $200,000 for your outfit and we'll throw in this thing
here. That is wicked. That is internalizing the external. Then
revelatory awareness. I think that'5 pretty clear that art calls
forth the increasing capacity to experience externalities as changing
points in your interior history. Like if we were the resurrected
man, if I can misuse the term this is way. Usually we're such
slobs that about Once in every 50 years some revelatory happening
cones to us, Instead of once every 50 seconds. And it's in the
midst of this that what they've called discontinuous wisdom or
to use our language, the heavenly secrets become yours. Or the
capacity to see to use Graham Green's figure the
heart of the matter. Art, art, art, you're talking about art.
Then the interior dialogue. And the best place to
go to read for this is Gealy's article in which all of life is
dialogue; not that life has dialogue, life is a dialogue. And
art enables you to engage in dramatic exchange with all of life.
Not only do you have purple cows when you have eyes to see, but
literally art enables you to grasp that buildings talk with you
and that you, if you're going to be human, are going to talk to
buildings and that dead rats speak and that you speak back to
dead rats. And most of this yakyak that we do with one another,
that's not dialogue. What would it mean one time if really he
spoke to you and you spoke back to him? And then the capacity
to draw together what they call inclusive gestalts. It's like
you spend a day of really speaking and being spoken to, that out
Of that you forge brand new contexts in which to carry on dialogues
with life. And it's in the midst of this that the radical imperatives
come into your life. The reason that most of us have little imperatives
and surface imperatives, is that we do not participate in the
radical dialogue Of life.
Transparent creativity. That's the experience of
creativity. Oh, we're so poverty stricken in this area of art,
most of us. When you think that I don't have any better ear for
music than I have, it's a disgrace, it is really a disgrace. It
is in this that you find a grasping of the fantastic potentiality
that you are, relative to creativity. And then the intellectual
side of it is that when one experiences himself as creativity,
maybe the people who wrote this wont like my kind of illustration.
Did you ever sit around, were you ever with a person who was just
exploding inside in terms of one wham in a universe of ideas.
If you've been around a person like that, that is what they're
pointing to. Art has to do with that dynamic of life. most of
us get ourselves a little vista and we go along in that for ten
years or even ten days which from what I'm talking about is like
ten centuries as over against-- Who was it who said God takes
your world away every moment and hands you a new one?-- it's something
like that. This is in one way what I mean when I talk about the
dance of life. And this last one, I mentioned it when I was talking
about culture as a whole. Here you literally experience what we
sometimes so abstractly talk about when we say we are creating
the universethat we are inventing man. When you realize,
whether you do it well or poorly from anyone's point of view,
that your life is itself creating history, your life itself is
defining man.
The tragedy is that I have gone through only two
ninths of this. Of course, those are the two hardest. Well, what
shall we do? What shall we do?