6/18/71
Poems to read with triangle D. H. Lawrence: Mosquito Knows... Social Process Poem
I am a social process,
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections
And it is not because the mechanism is an assembly of various sections
And it is not because the mechanism is... that I am ill;
I an ill because of wounds to the soul
To the deep emotional Self
And wounds to the self take a long time
Only time can help and patience and then a certain difficult repentance
Long difficult repentance, realization of life's mistakes
And freeing oneself from the endless repetition of the mistake
that mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
Yesterday morning I understand that Wiegel talked in general about the triangles. We decided that the last thing we want to do is march around triangles, or trample on them. We have to have a way to have them pulsating, The triangle poles are in general the foundational, communal and rational. The lecture side categories are internal dynamics, relations and implications. The first thing we need to talk about is the relationship of the political to the economic and cultural, relative to the social processes. There we are talking about communal empowering, or the pursuit of collective goals. It has to do with the collectivity the organizing , or ordering into the roles the community ascribes, the creation of bindingness. This is Parson's words == a variety of ways to gather the consent.
From Schreiber I have been impacted by his description of the stranglehold of the economic on the political. For him it is the primary contradiction, that there has been an invisible military economic system developed without any kind of corresponding self-conscious political development. So there has been the ease into the stranglehold. Relative to the cultural, the cultural is the place where the society says what is ordered to accomplish, in terms of values and goals. The goals actually get said in the cultural dimension.
The process is Political commonality. We have used the word "corporate" to modify each pole. Foundationally, corporate order, communally, the corporate justice, and one the ideal pole, corporate welfare. Some of you who have worked in political science before, see the breakthrough in the last ten years has to do with both comparative political systems and behavior polities, and when you read models, or just the way Parson, for instance, as an anthropologist and sociologist, talks about t the political without limiting it to government, but without ignoring the fact that primarily what you are talking about is government. It is exciting when you see the political process going on someplace else than in the capital city. You begin to realize that fundamentally you are talking about government. One of our struggles has been where you point and what kind of terminology you use. It seems to me that we use structurally language ontologically, or we take the most sophisticated political metaphors available and use them in our models, in order to make consciousness about the political process a possibility. We have to watch that, in our attempt to be inclusive, to do not become abstract. That is not what we mean to do.
The problem is to hold the picture of something concretely political going on. We would say more about politics and what they have been understood to be. But images li8ke the architectonic art, and stuff like that you would want to pick up and work with.
On the foundation pole of the political triangle is CORPORATE ORDER. The foundational pole is to indicate that without which none of the rest of this would be any possibility: "That without which." Classical definitions of politics have revolved around the image of power. We have named the dimension of power CORPORATE ORDER: the process of establishing corporate power, compared by Parsons to money. Power is the medium of exchange in the political system. The expenditure of power is the delegation of authority. Income of power is consent that is received relative to the collective goal. So power is the fundamental dimension on here When you describe how corporate order is established, you have to talk about common defense, and that is tied to some kind of territorial sovereignty and recognition of that. Basically, what you see on the common defense pole is the army, and on the communal pole, negotiation machinery, and then on the top pole we have something called inclusive systems This is pointing at how the common defense gets established, not so much by the obvious manipulation of rules, or legislation, but that the fact that systems get built that everybody consents to. Authority and force comes in just that kind of consent arrangement. They just operate according to some agreement that has been made.
Then on the communal pole, you have DOMESTIC PEACE. This is the law and order dimension of the order triangle. We have here law enforcement and then prosecution of offenders, on the top pole correctional action, which is tension between the enforcement of law and criminal prosecution. We have had a lot of complaints at that point.
On the top pole, you don't want to just put law, because you are trying to hold the basic covenants, the customary sanctions, and on the top, statutes, or the normalization of the law. When we talk about law, we talk fundamentally about the whole dimension of social control, and rules and procedures to follow. When you talk about sanctions, that connotes something understood there, more than just a sanction requiring obedience, or requiring people to follow it. We have the term codified law used here. It is helpful to make a distinction when you are talking about law, to talk about this dimension as the positive, when you affirm the regulations through rewards of some kind of approval, or public recognition. Negative sanctions have to do with disapproval resulting in some kind of punishment on behalf of society. It has to do with what you think of first, in terms of sanctions.
The whole dimension of order is appropriately placed there establishing of order has been the priority. We have some basic kinds of order, like hierarchy, monarchy, democracy, or you could use examples of' Alexander the Great, pioneering in the use of force to establish order, the Romans pioneering in the use of law to establish order, and western man pioneering in the use of systems like nations and empires to establish order. We have a lot of experience there, but you look around and you sense a deep crisis in terms of that whole pole.
If we move to the communal pole of establishing political commonality, we move to the pole of CORPORATE JUSTICE It seems to me that primarily here we have the whole dimension of decision making. Or, in terms of the classical process for our model, this is where we are out to ensure human equity or issue restraining on the whole process of keeping order, or on the authority that we give to protect. It is that dimension, but related to decision making. So fundamentally, what we have in the dimension of CORPORATE JUSTICE is the decisionmaking and the decision actualization process.
On the foundational pole we used to have the judicial. But about six weeks ago, we changed that and put the legislative process, or getting consent. The consent is gathered in many ways, but we are talking about consent, or the whole creation of some kind of goals in terms of operations, in terms of administration. Or this is particularly where you pick up on the bindingness , or you make sure that order is preserved.
If you look at the legislative process, three poles are the CONSTITUENCY SUFFRAGE, the ALLIGNED PRESSURE, and ,the DELIBERATIVE PROCESS. Very often in the whole political triangle the top pole represents the formal system to hold the tension here between the constituency, which represents the popular will, and the motivating forces, or all the pressures that are put on, and the deliberative process where it gets formalized in congress or a family meeting or whatever .the structure.
In DELIBERATIVE SYSTEMS you could put congress.. or something like that. In political anthropology it has been described as a two part process: defining the problem and then treating it. This is a definition of the problem, treating of the problem, and on the top pole you finally have consensus, or the decision being made. In tension with that is the judicial machinery, unless you have the newest form. The old copy is a good example of how we struggle with expertise in building these models, because when we worked on judicial machinery, we used lawyers, and I think that is appropriate. But when you use experts you get problems, like one of the boxes was dicta. It took Dan about 10 minutes to explain what dicta was, and we finally called it tangential implications. In terms of a controversy, in that is where we have to work out how to say things like that, tangential implications is an important part of the process when somebody is making a decision. That is a clue from Schreiber: he carefully takes tangential implications and boxes than in. He say, "I know you are going to say thins, you are worried here. You should be worried It is going to cost you something. " And he moves around you so that there is no way out. He goes into the past in terms of the future, and takes care of your enemies, and there you are ready to go.
In terms of JUDICIAL MACHINERY (note: since changed to THE JUDICIAL PROCEDURE) on the foundational pole we have LITIGATED DISPUTES: going to court, where ever that kind of process occurs. Then, trying to hold that law is finally dependent upon consensus and upon values and upon an established framework that people have confidence in. Those are the kinds of things we tried to hold in describing the judicial machinery. Things like framework clarification have to do with the continual reaffirmation of the system, or of the judicial framework which provides a whole lot of your bindingness, or gathers your consent, in a more major way than going to court. You know that most of us don't spend a lot of time in court. It has a very special function to play in the judicial process. The values, and here you have to be careful that you are talking about values in a political frame of reference rather than jumping over on the cultural pole of the triangles.
JWM: The thing that irritates me about these lawyers, they were taught in school in our system. Now you tell me what that means out in an African tribe. What we had on there first was the judge that sat outside the gates of the city, on the basic level. Then the system had a way to appeal that, and in every tribe, every people, every organization, there is that. Then there was finally the law. Whether it was the kind, the emperor, or the system, the constitution, or the Supreme Court, those three things make up the judicial machinery of every primitive tribe. It is the system in Japan, in Korea, or on a Coconut Island. Now an anthropologist didn't just get that out. It is Canada, United States, Mexico, whatever. Get into this language you used and I can't get outside of the United States. When you say it is saying the same thing, you have to give me a lecture. After I have exploded, calm me down by telling me the way it is.
Well, when you have as your three major poles on Judicial machinery primary ajudication, appellate review and regenerative pronouncements, that is the basic operating ideal: basic courts, appellate courts, and your Supreme Court. There is nothing wrong with that, except as you look at that model, you are not holding the way that there is participation in law making, you are leaving out a whole dimension. We took primal adjudication and appellate review, etc., and those we held under litigated disputes. Values is very similar to what we were calling regenerative pronouncements, or the policy dimension of the judicial machinery. It is where, in the judicial process, somebody finally says, "This is the way it is going to be". The sanctions dimension has to do with the connection between the law and values. Sanctions, or common understanding about what is right for that particular society. Framework clarifications therefore holds the dimension that the system itself reinforces, the judicial, just the operation of that and the guarding of that Maybe the proportion is not right, but the fact is that part of judicial machinery is just maintaining the machinery in terms of the system. It is the confidence in the system. So what we have now is more culture than a few weeks ago. It is more inclusive than what we had two weeks ago.
JWM: You mean you reached up into the culture and brought part of its responsibility, which is to maintain the whole sanction of every structure; you pulled that down here?
I don't think so, but you have to look at it in terms of limiting it to the terms of authority, equity, and we tried to keep it in the political realms.
JWM: Well, you see, cultural is related to the political, and one of our jobs in the cultural is to see to it that the sacredness of this machinery is instilled into people. And I am asking, not pushing. Whether it is right or wrong, did you pull that down here?
No. But to describe the boundary, you are going to have to do that.
JWM: Then could you take Israel or an African tribe and explain every one of these functions in terms of that?
I think so. But we are going to do final' cleaning and write down stories and illustrations.
Then there is THE EXE1CUTIVE AU.HORITY which is here. What is going on there is carrying out the law , that is formulated in the legislative process and judicial machinery. The executive authority is out to make sure that things get done. Foundationally it is in terms of the administrative bureaucracy, which has to do with all the machinery that it takes to get decision actualized. Then on the communal pole, policy, and then on the ideal pole, the symbolic leadership. Again, when I point to policy, what we had there originally was advisory council, which is in the dimension of policy formation. It did not seem to be inclusive, but you know that you had to move in the direction of advisory, so we called that policy direction. We tried to indicate that the executive always indicate the direction of policy whether it is in his executive office building or in trying to make suggestions and have those acted upon in formal situations. His job is never just to say this is what we are going to do, although that is in there. It is the way that he gathers the consensus and expresses it in the political scene. Symbolic leadership has to do with role. That is near the culture.
Then we move up to the WELFARE triangle. One way to talk about this is to talk about the ideological dimension of a political process or Parsons terms here are motivating origin. The welfare is that for which the other two get done, or what a society is set up to make have happen. This is where rights come in and your vision of what it is to be human. Probably the contemporary crisis is more on the welfare dimension. This pole provides the demanding contextual images. When we worked here, we relied heavily on the classical statements of what it is that a political system is out to do for people, like in the French Declaration, Rights of Man, or the American preamble to the Constitution. Or the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. We set that up basically to talk about 1ife, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We have called those: Insuring the body politic, human 1iberty, and enabling the creative pursuits.
When you look in more detail in terms of the pole of the body politic, we have said that in order to insure the body politic, you have to insure the private domain, the communal wealth, and the public responsibility. One of the places we struggled when we worked on the whole welfare thing was we kept thinking about "my rights". We took images of an individual's rights getting protected, while we forgot the corporate guarantee of rights, or the body politic and instead of just thinking about an individual, started to think about maintaining a city. In terms of the pprivate domain, for instance, which is foundational, we saw that the political system has to be able to protect your body and provide you with basic subsistence, which means the guarantee of private wealthy, whether it is an estate or a red handkerchief over your shoulder. But the dimension of private domain has to do with your identity, or with the whole dimension of status. On the communal wealth we put on the top pole the community image. Like the image of Chicago, this is a convention city. That demands historical significance. That sounded economic instantly, but what we were trying to do is to hold the political dimension of this, guaranteeing the body politic.
Human liberty - guaranteeing - has a similar relationship to justice and order. That is, foundationally, liberty depends upon restraint. We called it constitutional restraint. In order to get liberty we establish the principles, and then in the midst of those restraints, have the civil authority and then the popular sovereignty. Popular sovereignty is taking a classical term and putting it on the ideal pole to hold that dimension in an ontological way.
Finally, enabling creative pursuits, so you know something about the history of this. Originally, on this pole we had education. Then we moved it to vocation, and then we moved it to something else, and now back to vocation. Foundational to enabling the creative pursuits is vocational engagement, on the communal pole destinal decision-making, and up at the top expressed conscience. That is where you traditionally have the right to religion, etc. And here the right to action in the political system, and then the right to construct your own autonomous existence in the political system that you are in the midst of. That takes us across all three poles.
The political pole has been very activist, and for most of us, we have be activists, and we have a lot of examples. As we work this summer we are going to have to be very careful in the proposals that we come up with. Somebody said the economic is much harder to understand, but I say that we are not aware of the economic structures the way we are of the political. We have popular participation here. In Australia you have to vote or you are in violation of the law.
Our key struggle was trying to keep ourselves out of the cultural, and in the political arena.
Elsa Nelson