10

OUT OF THE CAVE

Plato's image of the cave on whose wall are cast the shadows we mistake for real is a popular one today. There is a heady promise in various intellectual fields of escape from the conditions of knowledge. With this promise an impossible kind of freedom is being proposed, freedom from necessity of any kind. It is preached particularly in artistic and literary circles. These are the people who have shouldered the clergy's old responsibility to care for the symbols of society. They should know that the cave is the body social mediated by the image of the other body. To emerge free from its constraints would be as feasible for the artist as for a linguistic philosopher to give up the constraints of language. Indeed the illusion of escape may well be a new kind of confinement. Bernstein's work shows us something of how our different cosmologies imprison us. The free exercise of our faculties is limited by the media of expression. There are areas of experience which can be investigated in one speech code but not another. There are social relations possible for one but not another. The range of speech codes available is part of the social environment for an individual at any given time. Since the speech code is a quality inhering in the social structure, a strong one-way causal relation seems to be implied. If pressed on the matter, presumably Bernstein would be gloomy about the prospects of ever mastering the codes and being free of their restraints. On his view we can only hope for fortunate shifts in the social structure to introduce change:

The thesis to be developed here places the emphasis on changes in the social structure as major factors in shaping or changing a given culture through their effect on the consequences of speaking . . . which speech codes are generated is a function of the system of social relations. The particular form of a social relation acts selectively on what is said, when it is said, and how it is said.... The experience of the speakers may then be transformed by what is made significant or relevant by the different speech systems. This is a sociological argument, because the speech system is taken as a consequence of the social relation, or to put it more generally, is a quality of the social structure.

(Bernstein, 1965: 151)

If we apply this beyond the case of speech to culture in general, we do not necessarily subscribe to a theory of society as infrastructure, the basic phenomenon, with culture as superstructure, mere epiphenomenon. Bernstein regards both speech and relationships as qualities of the social structure. In the latter there are at least small options for dealing with other persons in one way or another, and from selections among these small-scale social choices there can be changes in the speech codes. Bernstein would not, as I understand his thesis, deny personal creativity and cultural innovation, but would have to locate them primarily in the sphere of direct human interaction. If the same analysis were applied to all the media of communication and allowance made for their effects on the experience of the society using them, the anxiety about sociological determinism would surely be allayed. For on this view, society or culture are both abstractions, categories applied to the process which, in the last resort, consists of individuals dealing with other individuals. Furthermore the elaborated code provides a means of assessing the value of one kind of social process, the codes derived from it, and the values and principles that go with both. In the long run, the argument of this book is that the elaborated code challenges its users to turn round on themselves and inspect their values, to reject some of them, and to resolve to cherish positional forms of control and communication wherever these are available. This would seem to be the only way to use our knowledge to free ourselves from the power of our own cosmology. No one would deliberately choose the elaborated code and the personal control system who is aware of the seeds of alienation it contains. After listing some of the advantages of the restricted code, which unites speakers to kin and community, Bernstein notes:

A change of code involves changes in the means whereby social identity and reality are created. This argument means that educational institutions in a fluid society carry within themselves alienating tendencies.

(ibid.: 168)

By contrast the restricted code allows a person to perceive his identity as part of his immediate social world; personal and social integration are achieved together. Here we should expect to find symbols of the human body actively expressing the solidarity of the social body. The first thing that is striking about the English working-class home is the attempt to provide privacy in spite of the difficulties of layout. The respect for the privacy of bodily functions corresponds to the respect for the distinction between social and private occasions; the back of the house is appropriately allocated to cooking, washing and excretory functions; the front parlour, distinguished from the living room-kitchen, is functionless except for public, social representation. Space by no means wasted, it is the face of the house, which speaks composedly and smiles for the rest of the body; from this room a person must rush if he bursts into tears. Certain families of the middle class tend to break down the barrier between public and private. They seek to live in public together in an unstructured, open room, expressing aptly (perhaps disastrously) their unstructured, personal system of control. In such a family it must be difficult to assimilate the image of society and the house to the image of body, and correspondingly more difficult, one suspects, for the individual to incorporate into his personal identity any symbolic structures integrating him with his own society. Hence it is predictable that the body may come to represent an alien husk, something from which the inmost self needs to escape, something whose exigencies should not be taken too seriously. It can and even must be transcended if the individual encased within the body is to fulfil his unique potential for experience. How brilliantly Bernstein's insight illuminates much of our contemporary culture. Alienation and integration imply different uses of the body as a symbolic mode. Is it legitimate to call them different codes derived from different social systems?

What has gone before has been stimulated by his work, yet I cannot pretend that I have so far succeeded in applying Bernstein's analysis of speech codes to other symbolic systems. It is not easy to distinguish the range from relatively restricted to elaborated ritual forms, which he suggests should be present in any medium as it is in speech. One might start by considering the possibility of the symbolic life being detached more and more from the task of relating an individual to his society and more and more freed for expressing his unique private concerns. This recalls again Lowie's use of Crow Indian beliefs to discredit Durkheim's theory of religion as always and essentially a collective experience. What type of primitive social structure would allow the symbolic orders to be relieved of their Durkheimian office of sustaining it? The question put in this form suggests that we should compare systems making progressively less and less claim on their individual members to honour a common morality. The weaker the social pressures, the freer the individual person. But this range of comparisons would merely show the diminishing moral and control aspects of the restricted code in some social systems. We still have to look for something corresponding to the division of labour among ourselves, some power to call forth an increasingly greater elaboration of the medium of expression towards greater universality in scope and greater syntactic flexibility. This power would create the need to communicate without the intimate knowledge of assumptions held in common. An interesting example would be the so-called ‘mother-in-law language’ of the Tully River aborigines. Robert Dixon says that the language of respect which a man uses for conversing with his mother-in-law expresses social distance by avoiding terms with particular reference and choosing generic terms.

Thus in the everyday language there are about a dozen terms for referring to types of grubs . . . there is no generic term for ‘grub’ in the everyday language. However, in mother-in-law there is only a generic term...

(Dixon, 1968: 653)

This is a linguistic example. It would be a daunting task to analyse non-verbal rituals to see if any distinction between more particular and more universalistic symbols is ever organized to express two distinct ritual codes or even a gradation from one to another. However something suggestive of the elaborated code appears in the aesthetic activity of some New Guinea societies where art, like everything else, is harnessed to individual competition. Here is a challenge for students of primitive art to work out. Admittedly well beyond my own powers of scholarship, this suggestion does not exhaust the interest of pursuing the analogy of the restricted and elaborated code in ritual. However, my own interest is more concerned with varieties of restricted code.

Bernstein has allowed that there will be many different kinds of restricted codes. My classification of cosmologies is based on four social types: first, strong grid and group, the bounded system high on the classification line; second, a bounded, otherwise unstructured system (small group); and third, strong grid, in which the leaders are distinguished; and fourth, their mass of followers. If we ignore for the moment the latter two we can take together the two systems in which boundary is strong. Is it possible to see in the symbolism of the body appropriate to them two different restricted codes? In the one case, the religious emphasis would be expected to treat the body as the focus and symbol of life. We would expect to find positive themes of symbolic nourishment developed to the extent that the social body and the physical body are assimilated and both focus the identity of individuals in a structured, bounded system. In the second case, boundary without structure, that is, group without grid, we would expect to find the body an object of anxiety; fear of poisoning and debilitation would be dominant and ritual officiants much concerned with therapy, physical and social. Here, I suggest, we have two versions of a restricted code which serve the function of mediating the individual and his society by manipulating the image of the human body. Each type exerts its own constraints on the perceptions and thus on the choices of individuals; each symbolic system has its own pre-coded stimuli and responses which intimately affect the person's knowledge of his body and acts selectively on his capacity to respond to bodily images. They are restricted codes which integrate the individual with the social system.

In either of these two social types it is possible for sub-systems of a lower order of inclusiveness to be alienated from the whole. Then we can see another restricted code taking over. The body is still the image of society but somewhere inside it someone is not accepting its rule. I am suggesting that the symbolic medium of the body has its restricted code to express and sustain alienation of a sub-category from the wider society. In this code the claims of the body and of the wider society are not highly credited: bodily grooming, diet, pathology, these subjects attract less interest than other non-bodily claims. The body is despised and disregarded, consciousness is conceptually separated from its vehicle and accorded independent honour. Experimenting with consciousness becomes the most personal form of experience, contributing least to the widest social system, and therefore most approved. This is where the dichotomy of spirit and matter becomes an insistent theme.

If we allow that there is a restricted code for alienation, the way is open for a bold synthesis between the Durkheimian analysis of religious belief and theological controversies, whether from Christian, Islamic, Buddhist or Hindu history. Edmund Leach (1966) has attempted to relate dogmas of virgin birth, a centrally Christian theme, to theories about the kind of dealings held in different cultures to be possible between gods and men. He suggests that the problem is too complex for he himself to be satisfied with the correlations he draws. Indeed his attempt to make a plain sociological approach is less interesting than his attempts to find the local cultural patterns into which ideas about natural and divine procreation would seem to fit. The greatest value of this essay was his insistence that philosophical ideas about physical and metaphysical forces in the universe lie behind dogmas about whether humans and gods can mingle their natures or not. But where, we should ask, is any given balance between physical and other forces generated? Durkheim's famous saying ‘Society is God’, spelt out, means that in every culture where there is an image of society it is endowed with sacredness, or conversely that the idea of God can only be constituted from the idea of society. It follows from the first that alienation from society will be expressed by desacralizing its image. And from the second that the idea of God, dethroned from the centres of power, will be set up again in the small, interpersonal group which is alienated. Thus the image of God loses its majesty and becomes intimate, a personal friend who speaks directly, heart to heart without any truck with instituted forms. This is obvious and the change in the use of the body as a medium for expressing the sacred, from honouring the outside, shifts to honouring the interior exclusively. I shall now suggest that philosophical controversies about the relation of spirit to matter or mind to body be interpreted as exchanges of condensed statements about the relation of society to the individual.

Such controversies flare up and down. There may be no particular reason why they become active at one point in time and not in another. But I suggest that they only become relevant as metaphors when the relation of an alienated sub-group to the social whole becomes an acute political issue. The body or the flesh in these theological controversies represents the wider society; mind and spirit represent the individual identified with the subgroup concerned. To require a discussion to be conducted in those terms is like adopting a restricted speech code which is well understood by all parties. It governs the selections of symbolic relations and skews the judgements towards its own inherent values. To insist on the superiority of spiritual over material elements is to insist on the liberties of the individual and to imply a political programme to free him from unwelcome constraints.

In the contrary view, to declare that spirit works through matter, that spiritual values are made effective through material acts, that body and mind are intimately united, any emphasis on the necessity to mingle spirit and matter implies that the individual is by nature subordinate to society and finds his freedom within its forms. This view is prepared to sacralize flesh, while their opponents count it as blasphemy to teach the physical union of godhead and manhood.

The anthropologist can never assume that the chosen symbols of religious controversy are arbitrary. If they are used to discriminate contended positions, they also express something about the social situation. So it is that anthropologists cannot but admire the aptness of doctrines which deny that God could take human flesh for expressing a revolt against the established ecclesiastical order. In the early centuries of Christianity, when its doctrines were being refined and articulated, most of the theological disputes concerned the nature of the Second Person of the Trinity. As it finally emerged, the orthodox doctrine of the Incarnation insisted on a perfect mediation between spirit and matter. According to this creed, as defined at Nicea, Christ was fully God, fully man, both natures combined mysteriously in one person. The heresies of the third and fourth centuries which taught that Christ was mere man, not really God, or not fully man, an historical emanation from God, all agreed on admitting a gulf between spirit and matter. To move either way from the central doctrine of the Incarnation was to dilute the unique Christian message. Not so obviously, to move either way is to exalt spirit and debase matter and so to adopt the philosophical attitude which, following Durkheim's thought, is appropriate to detachment from or revolt against the established social forms. In his study of Arianism, John Henry Newman (1901) tended very much to treat the heresy itself as no more than a technique of revolt. For him it did not matter what bone of contention they chose, the contumacious behaviour of the heresiarchs was enough to show that their doctrine was of secondary interest. It is certainly very difficult to demonstrate my thesis convincingly to historians because in the long time span of the institutions they study, a movement can start, like Arianism, as a discourse set in the restricted code of alienation, and quickly become one in the restricted code of integration, as when Constantius became Emperor and proclaimed Arianism as the official doctrine of Rome with himself as God's representative on earth. With Arian bishops installed in the great sees, the doctrines they espoused came to sound only hair-splittingly different from those they had so hotly rejected when the fight had been on, and general interest in the issues originally at stake dwindled to the basic symbols of allegiance to one side or another.

It is also difficult to demonstrate this theme in the field of Indian religion, because of its great complexity. What is claimed to be its special feature, the use of bodily purity to symbolize hierarchy and group boundaries, is in itself indeed only the natural system of symbols. India may well have developed the bodily mode to an unparalleled extent. If so, our approach would look, to explain its unique development, to the distinction between hierarchy and power, which Professor Dumont insists is a fundamental principle of the caste system (1966: 91–3). Where hierarchy is truly divorced from power, India would communicate within a restricted code of alienation. We would expect it to separate spirit from matter and to clothe the top ranks of the hierarchy in the most ethereal, non-physical symbols compatible with material comfort. Hence the austerities of the sects, which renounce the world by monastic withdrawal, would naturally provide the symbols of status for worldly and unworldly Brahmans, whose rank is defined by their opposition to the ruling caste. Setting a fashion in vegetarianism, both for gods and men, would appropriately be part of the move away from external, physically mediated religious forms towards the religion of the interior heart which is always preferred by preachers who themselves have withdrawn from temporal responsibility. Each sub-caste which tries to use this code for communicating with others about its relative status fails to realize the internal, spiritual changes which it implies. Each sub-caste is perforce involved in its local and political concerns. Consequently the speech of renunciation from the material world takes on a spectacularly material meaning: formal spirituality becomes hidebound in material gestures and serves very earthy, political ends. The Indian sub-continent, in so far as its use of the bodily medium is peculiar, surely owes this development to the strong disestablishmentarianism of its official church, implicit in the doctrine of hierarchy divorced from power. Conversely, the Church of Rome would owe its own parallel and distinctive development of doctrine to its early association of religious hierarchy with power. In saying this I do not wish to allot the primacy in determining ritual forms to ideological bias. As I see it, essentially it is initially in small decisions, about who deals with whom and how, that these codes develop. As the doctrines and social forms interact, they develop momentum and finally come to create a symbolic environment in which later generations of individuals find themselves. But, however strong the power of this symbolic medium to coerce subsequent choices, just because it is a system, it can be cracked whenever any part of it is breached: thus the original Protestantism; thus the changes in the caste system.

Jung reproached Protestant Europe for giving up its austerity and seeking to parade in the finery of Eastern religions. In a passage which reveals his own abdication of judgement to a restricted code of alienation, he applauds the loss of meaning of the old religious symbols of Christianity, as a noble stripping of outer meaningless husks down to the bare individual self. Having achieved so much, what a falling off he sees in the embracing of alien religious forms:

If he should now go and cover his nakedness with the gorgeous dress of the Orient, like the theosophists, he would be untrue to his own history. A man does not work his way down to beggarhood and then pose as an Indian king on the stage.

(Jung, 1940: 63)

But there was no switch in logic and no betrayal of the principles of Protestantism in the theosophist turning to exotic cultures, only a natural evolution. For a European turning to Eastern doctrines is a European rejecting the Christian gospel of God taking flesh. First the Eucharist, then inevitably sooner or later the Incarnation; for the same social process which made the first repugnant was bound to lead to the rejection of the other. To the extent that society contains individuals united to it by no strong, solidary bonds, their culture is likely to believe romantically in the separation of pure spirit from gross matter, to seek to embrace the one and somehow at the same time to reject the other.

It may be that in this century we have become more aware of the subjective conditions of experience. Certainly it seems that the possibilities of self-awareness are here. But the practical problem of retaining consciousness is as great as ever. Lévi-Strauss has sought to display the action of the unconscious mind expressing itself through social forms. He argues that a moiety system, in which society divides itself into two wife-exchanging halves, makes a visible representation of the mind's natural proclivity to divide and subdivide (1968: 132ff.). The worldwide distribution of moiety systems, their appearance in the most simple and small-scale societies, their persistence, all suggest that by studying moieties we can do a kind of social archaeology. Understanding how a moiety system has power over its members is like digging into the prehistory of mankind in an area which picks and shovels never reach. By binary distinctions our cave-ancestors may have created the contrast of culture/nature, started all the contrasts on which language is built, and even created their society in the image of mind. This is Lévi-Strauss's implied argument.

Mercifully, we are not in thrall at present to that particular surge of creativity which produces dualist organization. Our society is not restricted to the moiety system. But unless reflection on the self-sustaining power of moieties warns us of the power of our own unconscious mental activity, these lessons of prehistory are surely wasted. The resilience of primitive moiety systems shows how difficult it is to break out of the circle, once it is set up, between the impulse of unconscious mind and its external expression. How many people have smiled knowingly at the scribblings on the walls of the Latin Quarter during the 1968 revolts in Paris. ‘La honte est contre-Révolutionnaire’ and ‘Le discours est contre-Révolutionnaire’. But intellectuals are slow to see their own behaviour in the same light as that of the rioters tearing up paving stones. ‘Plus je fais la Révolution, plus j'ai envie de faire l'amour.’ Reforming bishops and radical theologians, to say nothing of Utopian marxists, must eventually recognize that the generous warmth of their doctrinal latitude, their critical dissolving of categories and attack on intellectual and administrative distinctions are generated by analogous social experience. ‘Ears have walls.’ Another of the graffiti of Paris 1968 refers summarily to vain supplications and hardened rejection. No judgement is intended here on the political accuracy of that slogan at that place and time. As a general statement for the sociology of perception it could be amended to ‘Ears must have walls’. Legitimacy must be clothed in magic, words must be made into things, blocks, hedges, compartments are the condition of knowledge. Thinkers must recognize the destructive lure of the natural system of symbols, equally when it devastates category boundaries as when it wrongfully closes them.

Returning to our opening theme, we find that the apparent anti-ritualism of today is the adoption of one set of natural symbols in place of another. It is like a switch between restricted speech codes. Two morals can be drawn from this analogy; first the duty of everyone to preserve their vision from the constraints of the natural symbols when judging any social situation; second the opportunity of religious bodies to set their message in the natural system of symbols. For the first duty, we must recognize that the value of particular social forms can only be judged objectively by the analytic power of the elaborated code. Beware, therefore, of arguments couched in the bodily medium. Strongly subjective attitudes to society get coded through bodily symbols.

For the second, Christian preachers fail to respond to the current meaning in the body. The elaborated code has here intervened too much. Or perhaps the difference of age separating those in authority from those in immediate contact with the faithful may explain the neglect in religion of symbols which are being spontaneously exploited elsewhere. The very religious themes which repelled radicals of half a century ago are now being seized upon in drama, fiction and visual art and woven into a secular symbolic system. We may well ask why the now elderly radicals rejected religious themes of renunciation, why they disdained the unabashed, sexual imagery of the mystics and the completely counter-rational doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and why the young radicals of today express contempt for the physical body, read the mystics and cultivate non-rationality. The difference surely lies in the respective attitudes to political power, the former seeking and the latter rejecting it. The Churches could worry that their clothes are being stolen while they bathe in a stream of ethical sensitivity. For the current dichotomy of spirit and matter is an assertion of spiritual values. While preaching good works they would do well to relate the simple social duty to the wealth of doctrines which in Christian history have done service for the same restricted code: the mystical body, the communion of saints, death, resurrection, immortality and speaking with tongues.