1. Introduction
Human life is filled with ceremonies.
A child is given a name and baptized. People marry. A young person undergoes initiation. A priest is ordained. A ruler is crowned, a president takes an oath of office. A university graduate receives a degree. The dead are buried and commemorated.
Ceremonies accompany transitions that societies regard as especially significant: birth, coming of age, marriage, parenthood, the assumption of obligations, the acquisition of a new status, death.
But what exactly does a ceremony do?
Some of its consequences are obvious. After a marriage ceremony, people’s legal status changes. After an inauguration, a person receives authority. After an oath, an obligation arises. Yet the effect of ceremony clearly cannot be reduced to these institutional consequences.
If the purpose of a wedding were only to register a marriage, why music?
Why flowers, special clothing, rings, a solemn entrance, a decorated space, a festive meal?
If a coronation were needed only to establish who the ruler is, why a cathedral, a choir, trumpets, a procession, a crown, a robe?
If the fact of death is already known, why a funeral? Why music, flowers, mourning clothes, farewell speeches, silence, a procession to the grave?
It seems that two different mechanisms are at work within ceremony.
On the one hand, words are spoken that establish or confirm a new social relation:
“I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
“I swear…”
“You shall be called…”
On the other hand, ceremony creates a specially organized aesthetic environment: music, images, architecture, light, color, clothing, symbolic objects, gestures, movement, rhythm, and silence.
The first mechanism is well described by the theory of speech acts developed by J. L. Austin and John Searle.
The second directs attention toward art.
From the perspective of the model of the psyche proposed here, the distinction between these two mechanisms may be fundamental.
The function T generates the significance of knowledge for the non-subject.
The function F generates the significance of knowledge for the subject.
Ritual may be understood as combining both processes.
Speech acts and institutional acts organize and stabilize the significance of knowledge for the non-subject — T.
Art, symbolism, and the aesthetic organization of ceremony create conditions that facilitate the generation of the significance of what is happening for the subject by the F-function.
If this hypothesis is correct, ritual is one of the fundamental mechanisms of human culture through which individual psyche and social reality become connected.
2. Independent Reality and Significance
We must begin by distinguishing an event from its significance.
Changes occur in independent reality.
A child is born.
A person reaches a certain age.
Two people live together.
A person dies.
But independent reality does not tell the participants what these events mean.
It does not contain labels saying:
“a new member of the community has been born”;
“this person is now an adult”;
“these two people are now spouses”;
“this is the death of a person who is to be mourned and remembered.”
According to the present model, independent reality acts upon the organism through the sense organs, but it does not transmit ready-made psychic content.
The psyche itself generates knowledge about the environment and the significance of that knowledge.
An event in human life therefore exists not only as a change in independent reality. It acquires psychic significance.
Yet the human being exists among other people.
This produces another problem: how does significance, generated separately within individual psyches, become the basis of stable relations among people?
This is where ritual appears.
3. Two Kinds of Significance
In the proposed model, the rational functions F and T differ according to the relation of generated significance to the subject.
F generates the significance of knowledge for the subject.
T generates the significance of knowledge for the non-subject.
This distinction can be seen particularly clearly in marriage.
After a marriage ceremony, a social relation exists:
these two people are spouses.
This relation matters not only to them personally. It must also be taken into account by other people and institutions.
But there is another question:
What does this marriage mean to me?
That is not the same kind of knowledge.
A person may be legally married and experience the marriage as the greatest event of their life.
They may experience it calmly.
They may doubt.
They may regret it.
They may feel almost nothing.
Thus two processes must not be confused:
“We are now married.”
and
“This marriage is of enormous significance to me.”
The first concerns a social relation that is significant for the non-subject.
The second concerns the significance of that knowledge for the subject.
Ceremony, remarkably, works with both.
4. Speech Acts: When Words Do Not Describe an Action but Perform It
The first mechanism of ceremony can be understood through speech act theory.
Its founder is generally considered to be the British philosopher John Langshaw Austin. His lectures were published posthumously in 1962 as How to Do Things with Words [1].
Austin drew attention to the fact that language is not used only to describe an already existing state of affairs.
Sometimes uttering words is itself an action.
A classic example is:
“I promise.”
The speaker is not merely reporting a fact:
“There is now a promise in my mind.”
By saying “I promise” under the appropriate conditions, the speaker performs the act of promising.
Marriage is among Austin’s examples.
The words spoken during a marriage ceremony need not describe a marriage that has already arisen independently of them. Under the appropriate conditions, they are part of the action by which the marriage is constituted.
Austin distinguished:
the locutionary act — the production of a meaningful utterance;
the illocutionary act — the action performed in saying something: promising, ordering, warning, declaring;
the perlocutionary act — the effect of the utterance on another person: persuading, frightening, inspiring, and so on [1].
For the analysis of ceremony, the illocutionary act is especially important.
5. “I Now Pronounce You Husband and Wife”
Imagine a marriage ceremony.
An authorized person says:
“I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
It would be inaccurate to treat this phrase merely as the transmission of information.
If the ceremony is valid, the speaker is not simply informing the couple about a fact that already exists independently of the utterance.
The speech act participates in creating a new social state of affairs.
This is where the distinction between information and a speech act becomes especially useful.
The statement
“Berlin is in Germany”
may communicate knowledge about an existing state of affairs.
But:
“I now pronounce you married”
does not merely communicate.
It does something.
In terms of the present model, T becomes especially visible here.
After the act has been successfully performed, knowledge arises that is significant for the non-subject:
these two people must now be taken into account as spouses.
For the person making the declaration, the non-subjects include the marrying partners themselves.
The speech act does not establish their inner experience. It establishes a relation that must be taken into account by other people.
6. Searle: Declarations and Institutional Reality
Austin’s theory was systematically developed by John R. Searle in Speech Acts (1969) [2].
For the present analysis, Searle’s category of declarations is especially important.
A declaration has an unusual relation to reality.
An ordinary assertion attempts to fit an already existing world:
“The meeting has begun.”
A declaration, under the appropriate conditions, changes the social state of affairs:
“I declare the meeting open.”
After the successful speech act, the meeting is indeed regarded as open.
The same applies to such acts as:
declaring a marriage;
passing a sentence;
appointing someone to office;
declaring war;
baptizing or naming within an appropriate institutional system;
conferring a degree;
opening a session.
But uttering the right words is not enough.
If a random passerby says to two people:
“I pronounce you husband and wife,”
a marriage will ordinarily not arise.
If a visitor in a courtroom says to the defendant:
“I sentence you to five years in prison,”
the visitor does not thereby become a judge, and no valid sentence is created.
The force of the words therefore depends on institutional conditions.
7. Searle and Social Facts
Searle later took a further step in The Construction of Social Reality (1995) [3].
His question became more general:
How do social facts exist?
The physical properties of an object alone do not explain why a piece of paper is money, why a person is president, why a building is a university, or why a certain area is the territory of a state.
Searle introduces the idea of a status function.
An object or person acquires a status that cannot be derived merely from physical properties, and with that status come certain functions, rights, duties, or powers.
Searle’s well-known formula can be represented as:
X counts as Y in context C.
A certain person X counts as president Y within a particular institutional system C.
A certain object counts as money.
A certain document counts as a diploma.
Certain people count as spouses.
These statuses exist because of collective recognition.
Here Searle’s theory comes very close to the problem examined in this article.
8. Where Does Social Reality Exist?
If marriage is not a physical object, where does it exist?
Where is citizenship?
Where is property?
Where is the office of president?
Where is a promise?
It would be a mistake to conclude that such things are therefore unreal.
Social facts can have extremely real consequences.
Money is a social institution, but one can buy physical bread with it.
A state border is socially established, but crossing it may lead to physical detention.
Marriage is a social relation, but it can affect residence, inheritance, property, and childrearing.
From the point of view of the present model, another question arises:
If there is no single supra-individual psyche of society, how is collective recognition possible at all?
The answer must be sought in individual psyches.
The psychic functions of each individual independently generate psychic content.
But language, institutions, rituals, and repeated practices make it possible for the T-functions of many individual psyches to generate sufficiently coordinated content.
Thus Searle’s collective recognition can be reconsidered at the level of psychic functions:
a social status exists insofar as the T-functions of many individual psyches generate sufficiently coordinated content and the individuals act in accordance with it.
No collective consciousness is required.
9. But the Speech Act Is Not Enough
Up to this point, the analysis has mainly concerned one side of ceremony.
If the only purpose were to establish social status, one could imagine an extremely reduced wedding:
an official checks the documents;
the partners give consent;
the official pronounces the required formula;
the documents are signed.
The social relation has been established.
Yet actual human ceremonies are often very different.
They include:
music;
singing;
flowers;
special clothing;
architecturally organized space;
candles;
rings;
processions;
festive meals;
dance;
a rhythmically structured sequence of actions;
silence.
Why?
Most of these elements are not required in order to create the social fact.
Organ music does not communicate that two people are married.
Flowers are not declarations.
A wedding dress does not perform a speech act.
And yet a ceremony without these elements may be experienced entirely differently.
Here the second line of ritual appears — F.
10. Significance Cannot Be Declared by Decree
Imagine that after the marriage has been concluded, the official says:
“From this moment onward, this day has enormous personal significance for you.”
Such a declaration does not work.
The official may successfully declare the two people married, provided the necessary authority exists.
But the official cannot in the same way declare the significance of the marriage for their subject.
One cannot perform a speech act such as:
“You now love this person.”
Or:
“From this moment onward, the death of your mother has enormous significance for you.”
Or:
“From now on, this music moves you to tears.”
Significance for the subject cannot be created by institutional declaration.
It must be generated by the F-function of the individual psyche.
Here a fundamental boundary appears between T and F.
T-content can be socially coordinated.
F-content remains the content of a particular psyche.
And this is why ceremony requires more than language.
It requires art.
11. Art and the Generation of Significance for the Subject
If psychic content is not transmitted from one individual to another in ready-made form, the common formula
“art transmits feelings”
becomes imprecise.
A composer cannot transmit their feeling into the psyche of the listener as ready-made psychic content.
A painter cannot place their experience directly into the mind of the viewer.
A singer does not transfer personal significance into the consciousness of the listener.
There are material influences: sound waves, light, images, movement.
Another individual perceives them.
But the psychic content that arises is generated by the psychic functions of that individual’s own psyche.
A more precise formulation would therefore be:
Art creates an organized impact that facilitates the generation of significance by the F-function of another psyche — significance of knowledge for its subject.
In terms of the present model, this concerns above all the function F — the generation of the significance of knowledge for the subject.
12. The Aesthetic Organization of Ceremony
It now becomes easier to understand why art occupies such a large place in ritual.
Ceremony affects the human being not only through words.
It organizes almost the entire perceptual environment.
Music and singing organize auditory space.
Architecture organizes physical space and the direction of attention.
Images create visual content.
Light highlights some objects and conceals others.
Color acquires symbolic and affective significance.
Clothing separates ceremonial roles from everyday ones.
Symbolic objects — rings, crowns, candles, crosses, flags — become focal points of attention and stable associations.
Processions and gestures organize bodily movement.
Rhythm separates ceremonial time from ordinary time.
Silence can become as significant as music.
It is therefore useful to speak of the aesthetic and symbolic organization of space, time, and action.
Its task is not necessarily to communicate a definite proposition.
It creates conditions in which what is happening can acquire special significance for the subject.
13. Marriage: T and F in One Event
Let us return to the wedding.
Its T-structure includes:
“Do you consent…”
“Yes.”
“I now pronounce you married.”
A social relation is created and stabilized.
Knowledge arises:
these people are married.
It is significant for others and must be taken into account by them.
At the same time, music is playing.
People wear clothing they may never wear again.
Flowers appear.
Rings are exchanged.
Relatives and friends are present.
There is a solemn entrance.
Photographs are taken and preserved for decades.
For the establishment of the legal fact, almost none of this is necessary.
But these elements help transform:
“we have registered a new social relation”
into:
“this happened to me; this is my marriage; this moment matters in my life.”
The first is primarily connected with T.
The second with F.
Ceremony combines them.
14. Funerals: When the Fact Is Already Known
Funerals show the distinction between the institutional and aesthetic sides of ritual particularly clearly.
The fact of death is usually known before the funeral:
“This person has died.”
The funeral is therefore not necessary merely in order to communicate this fact.
And yet there are a coffin, flowers, music, mourning clothes, speeches, silence, a procession, and a grave.
Most of these elements add nothing that is necessary for establishing the fact of death. Instead, they organize the perceptual environment and the attention of the participants. The death is separated from the ordinary flow of events and becomes the focus of a specially organized ceremony.
Within the proposed model, this aesthetic and symbolic organization can be understood as creating conditions that facilitate the F-function’s generation of the significance of the fact of death for the subject.
The fact of death and its significance for the subject are not the same thing. Knowledge that a person has died can exist without a funeral. The aesthetic organization of a funeral performs a different function: it creates additional conditions for the generation of the significance of this fact by F.
Funeral ritual can therefore be understood not primarily as a means of communicating death, but as an organized ceremonial environment that facilitates the generation of its significance for the subject.
15. Coronation: The Social Fact Must Become Significant
Coronation offers another almost laboratory-like example.
For T, it is enough to establish:
“this person is now king.”
But historical coronation surrounds this fact with an enormous aesthetic apparatus:
the architecture of a cathedral;
a procession;
a choir;
music;
rich garments;
a crown;
a throne;
ritual objects;
a prescribed sequence of actions.
Why?
Because a social fact must not only be known.
It must also acquire significance for the subject within the individual psyches of participants.
The aesthetic organization of ceremony creates conditions that facilitate the F-function’s generation of the significance of this fact for the subject.
16. Significance for the Subject Is Generated in Individual Psyches
A ceremony may involve many people at the same time.
They hear the same words, listen to the same music, see the same symbolic objects, occupy the same ceremonially organized space, and participate in the same sequence of actions.
Yet there is no collective psyche in which the psychic content of the ceremony is generated.
Each participant has an individual psyche, and the psychic functions of that psyche generate their own content.
This applies to F as well.
Music, architecture, light, clothing, symbolic objects, movement, rhythm, and silence organize the impact of the ceremony on the organisms of the participants. In doing so, they create conditions that facilitate the generation by the F-function of the significance of what is happening for the subject.
Thus the aesthetic organization of ritual can operate simultaneously in relation to many individual psyches without requiring a collective F-function or a collective subject.
The common ceremony provides an organized impact. The generation of significance remains the work of the F-function within each individual psyche.
17. Coordination of T Does Not Require Coordination of F
The institutional side of ritual involves a different mechanism.
After a marriage ceremony, the participants can know:
A and B are now spouses.
After a coronation:
X is now king.
After the conferral of a degree:
X has received this academic status.
For social relations to function, such content must be sufficiently coordinated between individuals. Other people must be able to recognize the established relation and take it into account in their actions.
This is where T becomes especially important. The T-functions of individual psyches generate the significance of this content for the non-subject, while language, institutions, and repeated social practices make coordination of the relevant content between individuals possible.
The F-side of ritual does not require the same kind of coordination.
Its aesthetic organization creates conditions that facilitate the generation by the F-function of the significance of the same event, fact, object, or relation for the subject. For this function of ritual, it is not necessary that F-content be coordinated between different individuals.
Ritual therefore combines two different processes around the same event.
Its linguistic and institutional organization makes possible the coordination of socially relevant content and relations between individuals.
Its aesthetic organization creates conditions that facilitate the generation of significance for the subject by the F-function of each individual psyche.
No collective psyche is required for either process.
18. Van Gennep: Ritual Creates a Boundary
Even before speech act theory, the French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep, in Les Rites de passage (1909), identified a recurring structure in ceremonies accompanying changes of social status [4].
He distinguished three stages:
separation → an intermediate, liminal state → incorporation into a new status.
A child becomes an adult.
An unmarried person becomes a spouse.
An ordinary member of the community acquires a special status.
A living person becomes a dead person, and perhaps an ancestor.
This observation acquires additional meaning from the standpoint of the generation of significance.
Many processes in independent reality do not have sharp boundaries.
Growing up is gradual.
Relations between people develop gradually.
Competence is acquired gradually.
But social reality requires discrete states.
Society must determine:
from this moment onward, you are an adult;
from this moment onward, you are spouses;
from this moment onward, you hold this office.
Ritual creates a boundary of significance where the physical process may be continuous.
19. Fatherhood as a Particularly Revealing Case
Fatherhood makes this mechanism even clearer.
Motherhood begins with an immediately given biological event: a woman carries and gives birth to a child.
Fatherhood lacks the same direct perceptual givenness.
Johann Jakob Bachofen, in Das Mutterrecht (1861), gave great importance to this asymmetry [6].
His historical scheme of a transition from mother-right to father-right cannot today be accepted as an established history of human societies. Yet the distinction he identified between the immediate givenness of motherhood and the mediated character of fatherhood retains independent theoretical interest.
Fatherhood must be established, recognized, and socially stabilized.
Two relations arise at once:
“This is my child.”
and
“This man is the father of this child.”
The fact “This is my child” may acquire enormous significance for the subject through F.
The second is a social relation significant for others — T.
And it is especially important that social fatherhood can exist independently of biological paternity.
A man may say of a child he did not biologically father:
“This is my son.”
Here it becomes especially clear that human fatherhood may involve not only biological causation, but recognition, belonging, responsibility, and continuity of relation.
20. Religion as the Organization of Significance
We can now ask a broader question:
Why do religions devote so much attention to ritual?
Religious systems have accompanied nearly all fundamental human transitions with ceremonies:
birth → appearance of a new member of the community;
naming → acquisition of social identity;
initiation → acquisition of a new status;
marriage → emergence of a recognized relation;
parenthood → emergence of new kinship relations;
ordination → acquisition of religious status;
death → transition from the community of the living into memory, ancestry, or a religiously conceived posthumous existence.
But religion organizes significance not only around transitions.
It transforms the significance of space:
a place becomes a temple or shrine.
It transforms the significance of time:
a day becomes a feast, a fast, or a memorial day.
It transforms the significance of objects:
an object becomes a relic or cult object.
It transforms the significance of actions:
washing becomes purification, a journey becomes pilgrimage, a meal becomes communion.
Religion creates stable cultural forms through which what happens acquires human significance.
21. Durkheim: The Sacred and the Profane
Émile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), treated the distinction between the sacred and the profane as fundamental to religious life [5].
From the perspective of the present model, this distinction can be reformulated.
What physically happens to a stone when it becomes sacred?
The stone may remain the same stone.
What physically happens to a day when it becomes a feast day?
The duration of the day does not change.
What physically happens to a building after consecration?
Its walls may remain exactly as they were.
What changes is significance.
But we can now distinguish two sides even here.
T:
“This is a recognized sacred object.”
Others must take its special status into account.
F:
“This is sacred to me.”
These statements are not identical.
A person may know that a temple is sacred within another religion and respect its social status without experiencing religious significance personally.
Conversely, a place may have enormous significance for a subject without possessing any official sacred status.
Ritual can connect the two levels without abolishing the distinction between them.
22. Religion Does Not Generate Significance by Itself
A terminological clarification is necessary.
The phrase
“religion generates significance”
is convenient but imprecise within the present model.
Religion is not a human being.
It does not possess a psyche.
Therefore it cannot literally perform F or T.
Significance is generated by the F- and T-functions of individual psyches.
A more precise hypothesis would be:
One of the fundamental historical functions of religious systems has been to create and preserve stable forms that organize the generation, expression, and social coordination of significance among many separate individuals.
Religion provides:
words;
rituals;
symbols;
music;
images;
architecture;
repeated actions;
calendars;
places;
objects;
social roles.
But the content of psychic functions arises in individual psyches.
23. Two Channels of Ritual
The central hypothesis of the article can now be stated more precisely.
Ritual combines two fundamentally different ways of organizing significance.
The Speech and Institutional Channel — T
Speech acts, declarations, promises, oaths, naming, and institutional procedures create, define, and stabilize social relations.
They answer questions such as:
What has happened?
What status now exists?
What relations must others take into account?
What obligations have arisen?
This is the domain of the significance of knowledge for the non-subject.
The Aesthetic Channel — F
Music, singing, architecture, images, light, color, clothing, symbolic objects, movement, and rhythm create conditions that facilitate the generation by the F-function of the significance of what is happening for the subject.
They cannot prescribe:
“Feel exactly this.”
But they can distinguish the event from everyday life, concentrate attention upon it, and provide material relative to which the F-function generates significance for the subject.
Thus:
T makes the event socially determinate.
F makes it significant for the subject.
24. Why a Social Fact May Not Be Enough
A social relation can exist and function through sufficiently coordinated content in individual psyches.
People can know:
“This is the national flag.”
“This is my father’s grave.”
“Today is the anniversary of this event.”
Such knowledge can be communicated, coordinated, and taken into account in social interaction.
But the existence and coordination of this knowledge do not by themselves generate its significance for the subject.
This is where the aesthetic organization of social reality becomes important.
Societies use not only laws, definitions, declarations, and institutional procedures. They also create monuments, ceremonies, music, architecture, holidays, symbols, and commemorative practices.
These forms organize the perceptual environment and direct attention toward particular events, objects, places, and relations. In doing so, they create conditions that facilitate the generation by the F-function of the significance of the corresponding facts for the subject.
Social reality can therefore be maintained at the level of coordinated social relations without such aesthetic organization. But where these relations and the facts associated with them are also incorporated into ritual, symbols, art, and commemorative practices, additional conditions arise for their significance for the subject to be generated by the F-function.
This may help explain why enduring social institutions so often develop not only rules and procedures, but also ceremonies, symbols, monuments, architecture, music, and other forms of aesthetic organization.
25. Ritual and Art
This makes the ancient connection between religion and art easier to understand.
Music, dance, poetry, architecture, sculpture, image, and theatre existed for much of human history within or near ritual contexts.
Perhaps this is not accidental.
If art is one of the means by which conditions are created for the generation of F-significance, then religious ritual needs art precisely because speech and institutional T are insufficient.
One can declare:
“This is a sacred day.”
But one cannot by declaration make a person experience it as sacred.
One can say:
“This is a temple.”
But one cannot create reverence through a speech act.
One can communicate:
“This person has died.”
But one cannot command grief into existence.
Where declaration reaches its limit, the space of aesthetic influence begins.
26. Ritual Creates Conditions for the Generation of F-Significance
The aesthetic elements of ritual are not merely additions to an institutional procedure.
Music, singing, architecture, light, color, clothing, symbolic objects, movement, rhythm, and silence organize the impact of the ceremony upon the human organism.
Within the proposed model, this organization can be understood as creating conditions that facilitate the generation of significance by the F-function.
The ceremony distinguishes an event from the continuous flow of everyday life. It concentrates attention upon it, organizes the perceptual environment around it, and thereby facilitates the generation of the significance of this fact for the subject.
This is why aesthetic organization is so characteristic of ceremonies surrounding events that are regarded as especially important in human life.
A marriage can be legally established without music, special clothing, flowers, rings, or a ceremonial space. Death can be known without a funeral. A new political status can be established without monumental architecture, processions, or music.
But when these events are organized as ceremonies, aesthetic means create additional conditions for the F-function to generate the significance of the corresponding knowledge for the subject.
The same principle applies to art more generally.
Art does not transmit significance from one psyche to another and does not tell the F-function what significance to generate. It organizes an impact upon the organism that facilitates the generation of significance by the F-function of the psyche.
Ritual brings this mechanism together with the institutional mechanism of T.
Its institutional elements establish and coordinate social relations. Its aesthetic elements facilitate the generation of the significance of knowledge about these relations and events for the subject.
27. Ritual as a Mechanism of Social Discretization
Ritual performs another fundamental task.
Independent reality often changes continuously.
But social reality requires boundaries.
When does a child become an adult?
When do relations become marriage?
When does a person become ruler?
When does a candidate become a graduate?
When does a promise become an obligation?
Ceremony answers:
now.
The speech act fixes the T-boundary:
“From this moment onward…”
The aesthetic organization marks the same moment for F:
“This moment is different from the others.”
Thus T and F work in relation to the same boundary, but generate different kinds of significance.
28. Why Ritual Really “Works”
This approach allows us to return to the question of magic.
When people say that a ritual “works,” one must ask:
What exactly is it supposed to change?
If certain words are supposed to cause rain independently of the physical mechanisms of the atmosphere, this is a claim about causation in independent reality.
But if a ceremony is supposed to make a person a spouse, citizen, priest, president, or bearer of an obligation, it can indeed do so — provided the relevant institution and recognition exist.
And if a ceremony is supposed to help an event acquire significance for the subject, it may also be effective — through music, art, symbolism, and the organization of attention.
The real force of ritual may therefore have at least two sources:
the institutional effectiveness of T;
aesthetic influence creating conditions for F.
Neither mechanism requires supernatural causation.
29. Closing the Chain Through the Individual’s Actions
Social reality is not causally isolated from independent reality.
Independent reality affects the organism.
The psyche generates content.
The individual acts.
And the individual’s actions alter independent reality again.
In ritual, the chain becomes more complex:
independent reality
→ impact on many organisms
→ generation of content by separate psyches
→ T: generation of significance for the non-subject
→ F: generation of significance for the subject
→ speech, art, symbolic action
→ perception by other individuals
→ generation of their own T- and F-content
→ coordination of social relations
→ actions of individuals
→ changes in independent reality.
Social reality is therefore not a separate mystical world.
But neither can it be reduced to physical reality.
It arises and is maintained through the interaction of many autonomous individuals, whose psychic functions independently generate their respective content.
This avoids two opposite errors.
On the one hand, social reality need not be turned into an independent supra-individual subject.
On the other hand, it cannot be dismissed as mere fiction.
If many individuals recognize a relation and act in accordance with it, the consequences are fully real.
Words can lead to actions.
Significance can change behavior.
The behavior of individuals can alter independent reality.
30. Ritual as the Combination of T and F
We can now formulate the central mechanism more strictly.
Ritual does not merely “create significance.”
It organizes two distinct processes of generating significance, which cannot be reduced to one another.
T: Significance for the Non-Subject
Through speech acts, declarations, oaths, naming, institutional procedures, and recognition, knowledge about social relations is created:
this person holds this office;
these people are married;
this promise has been accepted;
this child has been given a name;
this person belongs to this community.
Such content must be available to other individuals and taken into account by them.
It creates the structure of social reality.
F: Significance for the Subject
Through music, singing, architecture, light, color, clothing, symbolic objects, images, processions, rhythm, and silence, ceremony creates conditions in which an individual psyche may generate:
“this matters to me”;
“I experience this moment as exceptional”;
“this concerns me”;
“this person, place, object, or event has special significance for me.”
Such content cannot be established through declaration.
It arises within a particular psyche.
Ritual can therefore be understood as the meeting point of socially coordinated T and individually generated F.
31. Can Ritual Exist with T Alone?
In principle, yes.
Some modern institutional procedures are almost entirely reduced to T.
For example:
electronic confirmation of a contract;
legal registration;
automatic conferral of status;
signing a document;
entry into a registry.
The social fact arises even though there is almost no aesthetic form.
This shows that the T-side of ritual can exist almost without the F-side.
But such procedures are often not experienced as ceremonies at all.
Conversely, when society regards a transition as especially important, it frequently adds an aesthetic structure to the formal procedure.
A diploma can simply be handed over in an office.
Yet there is a graduation ceremony.
Citizenship can be administratively registered.
Yet many countries hold citizenship ceremonies.
A president could simply receive legal confirmation of office.
Yet there is an inauguration.
This suggests:
the more important it is to a society that a new social status be not only known but subjectively significant to participants, the more likely a developed ceremony becomes.
32. Can F Exist Without T?
Yes, and that is equally important.
A person may create a private ritual with no official social status.
They may visit each year the place associated with someone who has died.
They may keep an object of enormous personal significance.
They may listen to certain music on the anniversary of an important event.
They may mark a transition into a new phase of life on their own.
Here social T may be minimal or absent.
The F-significance generated in such a case may nevertheless be considerable.
Thus rituality does not necessarily require institutional status.
This again confirms that T and F are independent dimensions.
Historically, however, the most powerful public ceremonies often combine both.
33. Art as Communication Without Transmission of Ready-Made Significance
The relation between art and communication requires further clarification.
If the psyche itself generates the content of its functions, communication cannot be understood as the literal transfer of content from one psyche to another.
The composer creates a musical structure.
The musician performs it.
Physical sound changes arise.
They affect the listener’s sense organs.
But what arises in the listener’s psyche is not a copy of the composer’s psychic content.
It is therefore more precise to speak not of transmitting significance or feeling, but of creating conditions for the generation of content by another psyche.
This distinguishes art from many forms of linguistic communication.
Language often seeks relatively precise coordination of T-content.
If I say:
“The train leaves at eight o’clock,”
successful communication presupposes that another person generates sufficiently similar knowledge about the departure time.
But when a piece of music is played, its aesthetic effectiveness does not depend on the coordination of F-content between listeners. Its organization of sound creates conditions that facilitate the generation of significance by the F-functions of their individual psyches.
Art is therefore a special form of influence:
it organizes the stimulus while leaving significance fundamentally open to generation by the psyche.
This is exactly why it is so well suited to ritual.
34. The Artistic Organization of Space as Part of Ritual
The expression “artistic decoration of space” can be made more precise.
The issue is not merely decoration.
A more adequate expression is:
the aesthetic and symbolic organization of space.
A temple, palace, courtroom, cemetery, theatre, or university hall during a ceremony is not merely physical space.
It organizes:
the direction of attention;
hierarchy among participants;
distance;
visibility and invisibility;
movement;
the sound environment;
the rhythm of what is happening.
The altar is separated from surrounding space.
A throne is placed differently from an ordinary chair.
The grave becomes the focus of funeral action.
A stage is separated from the audience.
A procession moves along a particular route.
Participants stand, sit, kneel.
Space itself thus becomes part of the impact relative to which the psyche generates significance.
35. Music as a Special Element of Ceremony
Music deserves special attention.
It is hardly necessary for establishing a social fact.
Yet it appears extremely often in ceremonies.
This may not be accidental.
Music directly organizes change in time: rhythm, tempo, dynamics, pitch, repetition, expectation.
It can mark a moment, create tension, closure, solemnity, mourning, anticipation.
But one must not say too much.
Music does not contain ready-made “solemnity” or “grief” that is then transferred to the listener.
It acts upon the organism.
The individual’s psyche generates its own content.
Within the present model, one may therefore formulate cautiously:
music is one of the most powerful means of creating conditions for the generation of F-significance in ritual.
This may be why music appears at weddings, funerals, coronations, military ceremonies, religious services, and state commemorations.
36. Singing and Collective Participation
Singing adds another dimension.
Listening to music can be individual.
But collective singing requires coordination of breathing, rhythm, text, and voice.
Participants do not merely witness the event.
They participate physically.
This is especially clear in religious hymns, national anthems, funeral chants, wedding songs.
Here T and F may intertwine especially closely.
The words of the song may contain socially shared knowledge or assertions.
The musical form creates conditions for individual F-significance.
And collective performance turns separate participants into a coordinated group of action, without turning them into a single subject.
37. Baptism and Naming
Baptism is especially interesting because several processes overlap within it.
On the one hand, there is T:
this child has received a name;
the child has been included in a religious community;
godparents or another socially recognized relation may have been established, depending on the tradition.
On the other hand, there are water, candles, special clothing, music, church space, gestures, prayers.
These create an F-dimension.
For parents, relatives, and members of the community, the event may be experienced as:
“this is not merely an administrative registration; something important has happened.”
Again, the speech and institutional act form T, while aesthetically organized ritual creates a space for F.
38. Initiation: Social Status and Significance for the Subject
Initiation provides a particularly clear example of the combination of the institutional and aesthetic sides of ritual.
A society can establish the transition to adulthood by means of a rule:
From the age of eighteen, a person is legally an adult.
Such a rule establishes a socially relevant boundary. Knowledge of the new status can be communicated, coordinated between individuals, and taken into account in social relations.
But many societies have surrounded transitions to adulthood with elaborate rituals.
These rituals do much more than establish or announce a new status. They may include special clothing, symbolic objects, music, dance, prescribed movements, separation from ordinary surroundings, a particular organization of space and time, and a sequence of actions that clearly distinguishes the transition from everyday life.
These elements are not necessary for the mere establishment of social status.
Their role can be understood in terms of F.
The aesthetic and symbolic organization of initiation creates conditions that facilitate the generation by the F-function of the significance of the transition for the subject.
Thus initiation brings together two processes around the same event. Its institutional organization establishes and communicates a new social status. Its aesthetic organization creates conditions that facilitate the generation of the significance of this fact for the subject.
The transition thereby becomes not only a socially established boundary but also the focus of an organized impact designed to facilitate the work of F.
39. Coronation: Social Status and the Significance of Power
Coronation shows the same combination on a particularly large scale.
The establishment of political status does not in itself require an elaborate ceremony.
It is sufficient for the relevant institutional system to establish:
X is now the ruler.
Knowledge of this status can then be communicated and coordinated between individuals and taken into account in their actions.
Historical coronations, however, have often surrounded the establishment of political status with an extensive aesthetic and symbolic organization: monumental architecture, music, processions, special clothing, crowns, thrones, regalia, prescribed gestures, and carefully structured sequences of actions.
None of these elements is necessary merely in order to establish who holds political office.
They organize the impact of the event on the human organism.
Within the proposed model, their role can therefore be understood as creating conditions that facilitate the generation by the F-function of the significance of the ruler’s status for the subject.
Coronation thus combines the establishment and social coordination of political status with an aesthetic organization that facilitates the generation of its significance for the subject.
This distinction also helps explain why political institutions have historically relied not only on laws, offices, titles, and declarations, but also on architecture, symbols, music, ceremonies, and regalia.
The institutional organization makes the status socially determinate. The aesthetic organization creates additional conditions for the generation of its significance by F.
40. Religion and the Generation of Significance
We can now return to the broader hypothesis about religion.
It would be too strong to claim that the sole or even primary function of religion in all epochs has been the generation of significance.
Religions have performed many functions: cosmological, moral, social, political, explanatory, therapeutic.
But one can propose a more limited and testable hypothesis:
one of the fundamental historical functions of religious systems has been to create stable forms through which significance could be generated by individual psyches while simultaneously receiving social expression and recognition.
Religion brought together:
speech acts;
myths;
music;
poetry;
images;
architecture;
ritual actions;
calendars;
symbols;
social roles.
That is, it brought T- and F-mechanisms together within one cultural system.
41. Religion as the Organization of a World of Significant Distinctions
From this perspective, religious classification of the world can be seen anew.
Religion distinguishes:
the sacred and the profane;
the pure and the impure;
festive and ordinary time;
consecrated and ordinary objects;
the living and the dead;
one’s own and the foreign;
the permitted and the forbidden.
These distinctions need not exist as physical boundaries in independent reality.
They are boundaries of significance.
But some must be socially coordinated — T.
Others must become significant for the individual subject — F.
Developed ritual can support both levels at once.
42. From Ritual to Social Reality
The initial formula of the article can now be refined.
One might have said:
ritual transforms individually generated significance into social reality.
But after distinguishing T and F, this is too crude.
More precisely:
ritual coordinates the socially shareable generation of T-content and the individual generation of F-content in relation to the same event, object, or relation.
Social reality arises primarily where many individuals generate and take into account sufficiently coordinated T-content.
But social reality acquires additional depth and stability when the F-functions of individual psyches also generate the significance of the associated knowledge for their respective subjects.
Ritual is therefore not merely a mechanism of social recognition.
It is a meeting point of the social and the subjective.
43. From Ritual to Culture
If this hypothesis is correct, ritual is only one special case of a broader cultural mechanism.
Culture constantly does two things:
- creates forms for the social coordination of T;
- creates forms for the individual generation of F.
Laws, contracts, definitions, classifications, and institutions work primarily with T.
Music, painting, literature, theatre, and other arts are especially closely connected with F.
But in actual culture, these lines constantly intersect.
Ritual is one of the places where their combination becomes particularly visible.
44. A Possible New Role for Art in the Model
This leads to an important question for the further development of the model of consciousness.
If language is especially effective where relatively precise coordination of T-content between individuals is required, while art is especially effective in creating conditions that facilitate the generation of F-content, then a broader question can be asked:
Do language and art differ in how they contribute to the generation of psychic content in individual human psyches?
This does not mean that language is connected only with T or art only with F.
Literature uses language and can contribute to the generation of powerful F-content.
Music may carry conventional signals.
Political speech combines information, speech acts, and aesthetic influence.
But the distinction in direction may prove theoretically productive:
language tends toward coordination of content; art toward the creation of conditions for the independent generation of significance.
In linguistic communication, successful coordination often requires different psyches to generate sufficiently similar content. If one person says that a train leaves at eight, successful communication requires another person to generate sufficiently similar knowledge about the departure time.
Art does not require the same kind of coordination. Its aesthetic organization can facilitate the generation of significance by the F-functions of different psyches without requiring the generated F-content to be coordinated between them.
Language and art may therefore represent two different forms of organized influence on the human organism: one especially suited to coordinating psychically generated content between individuals, the other especially suited to facilitating the generation of significance by the F-function.
45. Further Consequences of the Proposed Model of Ritual
The proposed understanding of ritual leads to several broader consequences.
The more strongly a ritual is concerned with establishing or changing social status, the more important speech acts, declarations, and institutionally fixed actions become. They establish relations that must be recognized and taken into account by other people.
The aesthetic organization of ritual performs a different function. Music, architecture, clothing, symbolic objects, movement, rhythm, light, and silence create conditions that facilitate the generation of significance by the F-function. This helps explain why ceremonies surrounding important events in human life so often acquire elaborate aesthetic forms.
The institutional and aesthetic components of ritual can vary independently to a considerable degree. A social status can be established through a highly simplified institutional procedure, with almost no aesthetic organization. Conversely, aesthetic organization can greatly exceed what is necessary for establishing the social relation itself.
This distinction also helps explain why institutions do not rely exclusively on rules, declarations, and formal procedures. Symbols, ceremonies, music, monuments, architecture, and commemorative practices organize aesthetic influence and thereby create conditions for the generation of significance by the F-function.
From this perspective, the persistence of ritual in secular societies is not surprising. Functions historically concentrated in religious ritual can also appear in ceremonies organized by states, families, educational institutions, cultural organizations, and other forms of social life.
Ritual can therefore take very different historical and institutional forms while retaining the same fundamental combination: the establishment and coordination of social relations through T and the creation of conditions that facilitate the generation of significance through F.
46. A Working Definition of Ritual
An expanded working definition can now be proposed:
Ritual is a socially organized sequence of symbolic, linguistic, bodily, and aesthetic actions that creates conditions for establishing and coordinating the significance of knowledge for the non-subject while simultaneously enabling the individual generation of the significance of what is happening for the subject.
In shorter form:
Ritual combines T and F: social recognition and significance for the subject.
But this abbreviation must not conceal the crucial difference:
T can be coordinated between individuals.
F remains an individual result of the work of each separate psyche.
47. Conclusion
Human ceremony does more than it first appears to do.
It does not merely accompany an event.
It helps transform a change in independent reality into a significant event of human life.
At least two different mechanisms are involved.
Through speech acts and institutional acts, social relations are established that must be taken into account by other individuals.
This is the T-line — the generation of the significance of knowledge for the non-subject.
“You are spouses.”
“You are a citizen.”
“This person is the ruler.”
“I assume this obligation.”
“This child has been given a name.”
But social definition is not enough for an event to become significant to a particular person.
Here another line appears.
Music, singing, architecture, light, color, clothing, symbolic objects, images, processions, rhythm, and silence create conditions in which the F-function of the individual itself generates:
“this matters to me.”
This is F — the generation of the significance of knowledge for the subject.
That is why a wedding is not reducible to registration.
A funeral is not reducible to notification of death.
A coronation is not reducible to administrative appointment.
Baptism is not reducible to entering a name in a record.
Ceremony creates a space in which what is socially significant may become significant for the subject.
But this transformation is never automatic.
A speech act may successfully establish social status.
No speech act can determine the significance that knowledge of this status has for the subject.
F remains an autonomous function of the individual psyche.
A developed ritual therefore does not replace this function.
It creates conditions for its operation.
This helps explain the deep historical connection between ritual and art.
Art does not transmit a ready-made feeling from one psyche to another.
It organizes an impact in such a way that the F-function of another psyche may generate the significance of knowledge for its subject.
Religion historically brought both mechanisms together with particular power.
It created verbal formulas and institutions that defined social relations.
At the same time, it created music, architecture, images, symbols, festivals, rites, and special organizations of space and time.
A broader hypothesis can therefore be proposed:
One of the fundamental historical functions of religious systems has been to create stable forms in which socially coordinated significance for the non-subject through T and individually generated significance for the subject through F could meet around the same events, objects, and relations.
Birth became not merely a biological event, but the appearance of a new person.
A name became not merely a sound, but a social identity.
A biological connection became kinship.
A relation became marriage.
A promise became an obligation.
A place became a shrine.
A day became a feast.
Power became recognized status.
Death became not merely the cessation of life, but an event of memory and human relation.
But neither church, nor state, nor culture generates psychic content by itself.
It is generated by individual psyches.
This is precisely why social reality does not require collective consciousness.
It can arise as a distributed system of interaction among many autonomous individuals.
The psychic functions of each individual independently generate their respective content.
Language and institutions make coordination of T possible.
Art and aesthetic organization create conditions for F.
Ritual brings these processes together in one event.
Social reality can therefore be understood as arising and being maintained through the interaction of many separate human beings, whose psychic functions independently generate their respective psychic content.
References
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