On Narrative And Ritual

well good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the last event in today's conference some of you I know have been here this afternoon which is a celebration of the life in letters as it were of Richard Sennett and his retirement for the school usually people don't get this honor until they're dead Richard's not looking too well but he is nonetheless still still alive and so if anything does go wrong we have got what is necessary so I find myself uncomfortably positioned between the godly and the unholy this this evening but it is an enormous pleasure for us an enormous privilege for the school to have the archbishop with us this evening I discovered since I like this kind of trivia that he's curiously eleventh in order of precedence in this country one behind Prince Michael of Kent and one above Kenneth Clark who has achieved this eminence now through becoming Lord Chancellor which is a sort of Grace and favor title these days but which still appears in the order Christmas but the archbishop was a professor of divinity at Oxford so can claim to be an academic of sorts in the Oxford and we're a hundred and fourth Archbishop of Canterbury is also a poet and a translator of poetry and it says in Wikipedia which is almost certainly wrong that he speaks or reads 11 languages I'm always a bit doubtful about that but the one thing we know at the LSE is that any LSE audience does include people who speak almost all languages so I'm hoping that in the questions you'll test him on one of these eleven but he's also a literary critic of great distinction and wrote a fascinating book on Dostoevsky recently he is not however so far as I am aware written a book of literary criticism on the novels of Richard sent I first encountered Richards writings in 1986 82 sorry when I actually reviewed one of his novels called the Frog who dared to crimp which was the first of a series of three novels maybe he's written more but the others have not got into press luckily for our relationship when I came to the school to be his boss this review has been lost to public view because it was pre-internet days and was regional which is since become defunct and so the fact that this text of this review of which I have some vague recollection but the fact that that text has not reappeared has avoided some considerable embarrassment for both of us but since this early flirtation with the novel form Richard's written mainly of course on sociology and particularly the sociology of cities and the next book of his I read was flesh and stone which I enjoyed much more than the Frog book more recently the smell of course has been extremely well reviewed and his final book however is how I write the sociology as literature which i think is a perhaps slightly risky harking back to his career as a novelist but this even ink both of them are going to talk on narrative and ritual Richard will speak first and the archbishop will respond which means that Richard must be at least number 10 in the order of precedence in this country then we will have a little bit of discussion between the two and in the last 30 minutes or so we will open it out to you so thank you very much I want to see that with you sounds very ominous of course I said to leave the London School of Economics after 13 years here but I'm equally glad to be here with you tonight when my mother worked in London just after the Second World War she found new Brits to be remarkably open and welcoming and so you've proved several decades later to my family and to me many friends at the school as in my adopted country I've had the satisfaction of helping create the schools cities program Ricki Burdette and I could have only done this thanks to the former director of the school Anthony Giddens its present director Howard Davies and our academic colleagues by temperament on something of a oyster about the fact that seem to go out to dinner quite a bit I'd like to dig in and stay put intellectually and I owe to my wonderful students here many occasions in which I've been dug out this afternoon's events prompted to me the desire to argue with each speaker preferably with a glass of something cold in hand and with something to smoke since the ominous regime of Health and Safety forbids these physical pleasures I can only thank the organisers of these events Judi Weissman and Saskia Sassen put enormous effort into bringing us together today I should perhaps add that I'm not quite leaving the LSE since I'll keep a connection to the city's program and should you find yourself in need of a smokey boozy talky afternoon you'll find me at Trinity College Cambridge you can smoke and this evening Archbishop Rowan Williams and I are going to talk about an impossibly large issue which passionately concerns us both we are asking what binds human community together culturally and we're exploring two ingredients in the recipe for that cultural blue ritual and narrative without a shared rituals and narratives society has no purpose the everyday relations between human beings risk falling apart and yet modern society courts just that risk cultural glue of shared ritual and narrative is weakened in his recent book on Dostoevsky Rowan Williams has been exploring the intimate bond between narrating and believing Russians have rightly received this work as Villa kaya kanika which means a magisterial book Williams shows how storytelling bounces to one another and inexorably more bounces to a realm beyond ourselves I'm going to focus on the prosaic everyday rituals which could and should bind people together outside the family circle of close friends rituals among strangers that is to say rituals in the public realm a ritual has three essential elements the first is repetition ritual activities or behaviors which can be repeated again and again but unlike mechanical repeats where we gradually get bored by doing the same thing again and again rituals do not stale each time we use the same formulas of comfort enquiry exchange of self-expression the gestures have value ritual renews it combines repetition with presence the reason for this is that ritual secondly transform physical stuff bodily movements plant words into symbols such transforming work we know immediately in religious rituals like the bread and wine of the Eucharist of the food at a seder these become more than physical substances to eat and drink secular symbolic transformations occur equally on the street as in making eye contact with strangers by briefly glancing at one another at another person rather than staring we send the symbol that we mean no harm ritual is thus a work of metamorphosis making the material other than itself and yet this symbol is always removed and refreshed by repetition finally ritual is theatrical and this is less obvious than it may seem a good professional actor speaks his or her lives night after night without going stale or makes the smallest glance speak volumes many years of training are required to bring this off and the actors Rock is a set text not of his or her own making everyday rituals have a different character they have to be accessible and easy to learn so that everybody can participate more the text for real world wood ritual is tradition but traditions as Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson caution us our inventions often unstable or contested over the course of time participants become thus authors as well as actors still the participant in any real-world ritual is performing this is a matter of seeking to gain a case expressively to others which is perhaps the most important thing about ritual it obliges us to turn upward towards others to express something which is not ourselves it stands at the opposite pole from a person lost in the labyrinth of his or her own private feelings when I first started writing about public life I focused on the city as a stage for these expressive performances I started muses of disorder with fundamental fact about cities they concentrated in the same place people who are different to connect to strangers urbanites need to learn how to deal with difference my view was and is that they need performing skills to express themselves to people they do not know and who did not know that this approach is what's called academics always do this this approaches what's called the dramaturgical school of analyzing the public realm school formed by the anthropologist clifford geertz and victor turner the sociologists Erving Goffman and myself it contrasts two views the public realm put forward by Hannah Arendt my teacher stressed deliberation in public and again contrast uragan harbour mouse's idea of the public realm just come to stress consensus building we focused on culture they Impala tips in the fall public man I traced the gradual erosion de Bourbon expressive behavior in Paris London in New York and from the 18th century up to the present culture big Western cities has made it ever harder a thing for strangers to behave expressively to one another down the street this loss of a public stage has driven people within themselves searching for subjective truth at the expense of social bonds and flesh and stone which i think is my best book and of course which I suffered over the most I sought to understand a longer struggle in Western culture about the second element of ritual bodily gesture and symbol making symbolic metamorphosis of the physical has proved singularly fragile in our civilization finally in the conscience the I explored ways in which architectural design and urban planning might stimulate people to contrive and to act out those ritual bonds which bind strangers together I'm something of a physical determinist I believe environmental design profoundly shapes culture and I particularly explored how the boundaries and borders between different immigrant communities are different social classes or different religions might become sites for renewed civic engagement but this kind of work City forum for public life is necessarily incomplete or at least I found itself I hadn't accounted capitalism's role in weakening the tissues of ritual connection it's a good socialist this was a grievous failure on my part the opposition of capitalism to bonding civic rituals is something that's really obsessed me in the last decade that's what I've done with my anger about some bankers from its origins industrial capitalism has offered little in the way of shared civic culture for all the reasons obvious to you at the LSE in this August fabian institution inequality divides social mobility abandons others greed individualizes these are the classic cultural poisons of capitalism but in recent decades a new poison has been added one which concerns the time we think rightly of modern capitalism is orientated to the short-term this means on the side of capital short-term investment rather than long-term ownership inside of management it means running institutions which have a chameleon character changing focus and business plans to suit what the economists been at Harrison once called impatient global capital the side of labor it means a replacement of long-term careers by short-term jobs a consultant who moves constantly who belongs to no one organization and feels no loyalty has become the role model the new kind of work during the heady days of the long boom the 1980s 1990s and 2000's the promise short term capitalism made to its ordinary workers was freedom freedom from the chains of bureaucracy entrepreneurial freedom as I was defined in my researchers however the result the reality is quite different short term flexible work inhibits strategic planning and deprives people of a narrative for their labors confusions I traced in the corrosion of character among middle level tech workers and professional service employees institutions run on a short-term basis erode loyalty and respect for other workers this occurs as I tried to document in respect in welfare state institutions run on the model of modern private enterprise in the culture of the new capitalism I explored the consequences for consumer culture that realm of fleeting quickly junked goods which parallels the work world and I argued that oddly enough in our consumer culture in its negligence for physical things his D materialized of possession and the physical consciousness but the world of fantasy Goods finally in the craftsman I sought to explain the opposition of short-term labor to craftsmanship work ethos of doing things well for their own sake which is necessarily slow and painstaking the short term labor chameleon institutions and quickly junked consumption are poison to the first and most elemental condition of social ritual the symbolic value of repeated action you can make this concrete by thinking of modern about modern attitudes towards institutional service in the ethos of the consultant long service to an organization has little value whereas in the life of a hospital cleaner a male clerk or a Salesman service to an institution becomes a bonding ritual both to the organization and to other workers long-term service is what they have to contribute the experience of time raises a fundamental often misunderstood issue about ritual we might equate ritual simply with the kind of conservative view of tradition this equation is wrong at least about secular ritual in the work world as in the city rituals are created by those who practice them and usually these are informal creations the rituals of tea break are covering for a fellow worker who screws up as of civilities in the street you'll not find these bonding behaviors written down in any organization chart a sitting planning document rather than a line secular ritual with tradition we would do better to align it with sustainability which is to say here are social behaviors which can carry people over the course of time consume out the flux and rough difficulties of everyday life in the modern work world as in the city however bureaucracy invades the parallel universe of informality and when this innovation succeeds the cultural consequences are a week or a superfluous body now this might seem to you a hopeless picture of modern culture and I have my full share of middle European changed but I do do not in fact believe that we are hopeless prisoners in what Max Weber called the iron cage of bureaucracy instead it seems to me modern culture has arrived in a condition our civilization has been at once before that was a time when people believe that things could not go on as they have before when change had to occur beneath the crust of political moving maneuvering when it seemed a fundamental shift in culture was urgent that time was the Reformation the historical Reformation was a religious moment of change but not only that from the early 18th century from excuse me from the early 16th century to the early 17th century Europe saw a flourishing of new technologies mining medicine mechanical fabrication which people did not know how to put see good social use they improvised an improvisation profile that provided a fundamental energy for cultural creation the historical Reformation was again a time when migration to cities began to alter their character with entire uprooted populations of Jews Protestants and peasants challenging the inward-looking character of established cities again these oppressed groups improvised a life shared in common in a strange place and the Reformation was a time when labor began to cut free from the traditional medieval guild system these newly freed workers not knowing how to relate to one another favors Protestant ethic provided a glimpse of a small self-obsessed elite the mass had to look rather than within also at one another the Harris historical Reformation craved new tissues of connection new ritual bars but could not quite see their organized way forward in both the desire for the puzzle of relationship the men and women of the Reformation are our ancestors the idea of cultural Reformation stands in contrast to the idea of Renaissance and of revolution the literal meaning of honey sauce is rebirth and in the case of the historical Renaissance this meant the recovery of antiquity Greek and Roman culture restoring life to the present the idea of revolution is of the clean slate the blank fresh page the idea hardly existed for our Reformation ancestry save in the form of revolt from below today for better or worse the dream of a blank slate is over the idea of reformation looks forward in a different way from that of revolution it emphasises now as didn't his historical Reformation the pain and confusion of lived experience pain and confusion that cannot be washed away I am a palimpsest the philosopher its eundel of white teeth declared I contain every disappointment and yet I have will this was and is the spirit of Reformation it seeks in ritual one among many ways a collective way to counter veil suffering not to eliminate it today I would say that we need something like a new Reformation on these terms we need to reform work and place according to the canons of a more sustainable culture the word reform has become a debased currency in politics certainly in our present circumstances at the moment in Britain the word reform has simply come to mean ways of propping up the the order my own quarrel with this version of reform is rooted and my lifelong dialogue is Hannah Arendt she argued to me that culture is the product of politics and they've argued back both when she was alive and after she died that politics is at best a smudged mirror of everyday culture policymaking is an exercise in fantasy so long as it does not reflect how people actually want to live today in a complex society we face the challenges of desire of how to desire to live with people who are not like ourselves and how did you desire to live more modestly in nature these challenges we can meet I believe only by changes in values and belief cultural Reformation only can put these into practice through improvisation and experiment if Reformation succeeds we would then create new everyday rituals now perhaps this explains this emphasis that I have on culture as a driving force of of change and on Reformation as a model for the searching deep rooted kinds of cultural changes we need perhaps this explains why Archbishop Williams and I are appearing to you tonight on the same platform thank you very much we move from middle European angst to Celtic gloom but before evaporating on that I just like to say what a privilege it is to be part of this event and to be able to share my own profound appreciation of Richard's work which I found rings so many bells for me in the rather different part of what we like to call the vineyard I want to begin with a phrase from the culture of the neo capitalism and that is Richards definition of narrative movement to believe in narrative movement is to believe that events in time connect experience accumulates events in time connect experience accumulates implicit in that is the idea that narrative is something which synthesizes a whole range of transactions that happen in real time between real bodies because we think with matter ideas are embodied and enacted we speak with things and the transactions that we try to hold together when we tell the story about ourselves or about anything else those transactions are material transactions so if events in time connect that experience accumulates that's a way of saying it's possible to connect material transactions to read material transactions as making sense that is being capable of being communicated being talked about but behind that is I think a very significant assumption which takes us a little bit deeper events in time connect if it's some time are about material transactions material transactions can be made sense of but material things are difficult material things resist we begin to learn to think sometimes we said I'm slightly paraphrasing a rather more complicated French version of this we begin to think when we bump into things we learn to draw mental maps of our world by finding the bits that don't give way when we walk into them and we construct pictures of the world around those patterns of bonding difficulty is part of human thinking something resists but that resistance is not the end of the story the resistance is at the same time in some sense something that draws us invites or provokes something is there that is not absorbed or exhausted and so thinking engages inevitably with difficulty thinking with things in the middle of things is bound to be a difficult business and so narrative is a difficult business the significance of narrative in any account of what human thinking and therefore human society are all about is that it doesn't let us get away from that difficulty just be yourself people say tell me about yourself let's start with something simple but anyone who's ever had those things said to them knows painfully well that there is nothing more difficult than telling someone all about yourself I am difficult to myself factors some quests your memes it Santa costume I become a question to myself just a little reminder that we didn't think of difficulty just in Paris in the 1970s I become a question to myself telling the story about myself making a narrative of myself his work its labor and there's something about the constant repositioning involved in talking about myself that is a necessary reminder that narrative is an unfinished business some of you just might have come across a short story by George McCabe Brown great Orkney poet and short story writer it's called brigham dread and it describes the experience of somebody wandering in a fog on a wall and trying to remember what his life has been about you realize of course that eventually the story turns out to be to do with purgatory he's not allowed out of the fog until he's got his stories straight and he walks in recycling again and again repeating in maligned since the versions of his story which keep him trapped the versions of blame and responsibility that leave him absolutely stuck where he was to move out of the fog the story has to be retold and this remarkable short story shows how just very very slightly the walls begin to be reached and the retelling begins to become possible and that as I don't think I need to elaborate is something that happened in the lives of collectivities as much as in the lives of individual cyclists but that's another story I've mentioned st. Agustin as people expect Archbishop's to do on occasions like this having started on theology I'll indulge myself with just a little aside on that to pray in the message and being very drug in Britain tonight and that's simply a reminder that of course yes faith has to do with narrative personal narrative and I belong to a tradition of faith to which narrative is central you open the New Testament you'll find the first things in it are narratives not Creed's or sets of ideas but the rather curious thing is that there are four narratives covering the same ground there is a dimension of Christianity which acknowledges the difficulty of narrative by the mere fact of having four versions of the same events to start you off four versions which if you look at them of course do not always say the same thing by any means as if in that initial that generated story there is an element of having to say there's something here that has not yet be mastered and we could only start again the last words of some John's Gospel memorably put it if I were to try and write down everything the world would not contain the books that could be written so the dimension that relates narrative to faith is indeed as Richard hinted an important one faith surprisingly builds into itself some recognition of difficulty because if you don't recognize at some level that talking about God is difficult then it's rather doubtful whether faith is what you're involved in at all and the difference from ordinary social ritual and narrative involved in religious practice is I suppose simply in saying that what's given you as the difficult don''t difficult gender you were to work with is more than just an environment and more than just the sum of other human narratives but there is an element of narrative I would dare to say though this takes me bit beyond my brief an element of narrative which is always uncomfortably going to push you towards questions about transcendence because you have to think about what exactly it is that is not exhausted in the difficult things you are wrestling with but moving back to the central issue one of the things which I valued most particularly in Rich's last three or four books has been the sketch that he offers of what human experience looks like without difficulty what happens to the human imagination of the human self-image when the ideal is presented as the world without attraction or friction difficulty you might say is being reconcile sylheti difficulty is what is there to be overcome not to be engaged with not to be encountered as something which changes or enlarges readers of some journals from the 60s may recall that wonderful essay on French philosophical movement known as residential ism whose maxim was leashes on continent it was an explanation a philosophical explanation of why tests always falls buttered-side down things are against us difficulty is hostility difficulty is to be overcome which implies in terms of course that the ideal state of human existence is that frictionless undifferentiated time and place where we meet no resistance and I say under forensic undifferentiated time and place of the facts of the past to the facts of the present are the resistance with which we work we don't have we no longer find those resistant or difficult we are in that frictionless timeless place 'less reality which for those formed in an older humanist tradition and I'm using humanist in the proper sense feels like a recipe for boredom and self enclosure I think that I want to talk about Reformation one of the downsides of the Reformation was a certain impatience with sacred time some impatience with the difficulty of what had gone between the beginnings of Christianity and the present day the Reformation at its most marked extreme was an attempt to wipe out that long mediating period in which ideas and therefore material transactions and shaped and reshaped perception it also had a little bit to do with the fact that some people had very sensibly noted that people are having too many days off for religious holidays and this was not doing the economy any good that impatience with sacred time does go alongside I've heard is the gain of the Reformation on which I'd rather agree there's alongside a deeper engagement with the simple outlines of the sacred narrative and creative retelling of origins somebody like Calvin is fascinating because actually he doesn't simply wipe out the intervening centuries he offers a retelling of the great story which opens up new possibilities and he offers it precisely as an urban post renaissance humanist not the first words you normally associate with Calvin but Calvin was not a Scot it's important to remember that it also I think delivers people this particular Reformation story delivers them from an anxiety about ritual one of the things that people clearly felt by the end of the Middle Ages it's what you read in height singers didn't people like that is the sense that the world is now so crowded with ritual that you're stifled and anxiety is your state of being the terrible consequences of missing the similars missing the messages increasingly closes off innovation and creativity and a sense of at homeless in the world is entering us the opposite effect to what ritual ought to have instead of anchoring you it alienates even was everything and that's the sense you have as you look at that fantastically over elaborated late medieval world of symbol allegory and so forth however as I've said the Reformation does have its downside and you can see the modern evolution of global consciousness and global capital as completing a certain logic about undifferentiated time and space you can see how the deep Reformation suspicions of an exaggerated reverence for sacred time works itself through into an attitude to time wear punctuation what you might call the sabbatical principle that is that you take a day off from time to time where that has disappeared because as time zones blend into each other in a global communications environment there are no natural rhythms into which you can fit and time becomes a flat surface if I can mix my metaphors thoroughly and one of the questions which I find put most sharply most interestingly in Richards recent work is precisely how we restore the possibilities of punctuated time time that is where you're not primarily involved in self-justifying or self promoting time where there is some opportunity to look at what it is that we have to engage with you might almost say time to work on our stories I don't mean time to work on our resumes time to look at what has made us what we are and that is indeed the question which I think we've already been led to this evening the question about what the scope and scale is of human communities and human interactions that allows that kind of punctuation that kind of properly episodic approach to our time to emerge given that the global climate of global capital and global communication is not friendly to this and that this has certain results in producing a kind of human being who has no opportunity to examine the story no opportunity to get their stories straight you might say again just in the margin rather I can't be alone I'm sure in finding very curious the reappropriation and reinvention perhaps in the last say 15 years in the UK of Remembrance Day I grew up in a context where Remembrance Day was still a real literal remembering for great many people of the Second World War as I grew older I moved into an environment where it was taken for granted that that was something rapidly dissolving in the consciousness of the culture and I watched during the 90s not least of course with the anniversary of the end of World War two in 1995 I watched the reinvention of Remembrance Day as a different kind of storytelling and community affirmation and watched it reroute itself in the lives of some very deprived communities in Southeast Wales where I was then working which he wouldn't at all have associated with some of the classical locations of the celebration of Remembrance Day and I wondered them and I wonder now about the need for punctuating ceremony and the retelling of stories noting that the way in which was reappropriation a nationalistic rhetoric but strangely in a local one it was a celebration of barely remembered but still what you could call tradition recollections of solidarity and even corporate idealism and it became again some of those circles a popular and meaningful thing and that says something about narrative and ritual and scope and scale I think in the way that Richards encouraged us to to reflect so finally we're being invited I think here to look at the whole task of meaning meaning as engaging with the difficulty of material interaction meaning as something which requires a particular human scale to the environment we're in and what does that mean in the urban context how does it realize itself and I just want to finish with sideways glance at a subject I know is dear to Richards heart and there are some others here simply to notice that of course music is one of the forms in which narrative and ritual eventually and familiarly come together and I do rather wonder whether the answer to some of our social ills is that we don't make social music I don't buy that mean necessarily that everybody ought to join string quartets though there are worse fates but it's not a bad point of intersection perhaps thinking about countervailing suffering without eliminating it thinking about rituals that bind strangers and about activities that are irreducibly and necessarily bound up with time taking and indeed difficulty no actually on something else here I think the interesting intersection between social terms between ritual that narrative is this issue nothing said about informal rituals that were printing to be a nice study tried ways of just getting through the day it's often said about these that these actually reduce difficulties it's often said about routines in public in cities that what they do is they they lower the temperature actually think this is wrong it makes us too much into merely sort of guinea pigs whose desires to feel very little the kind of organization of time that's punctuated in this rhythm which is what ritual is a way of looking forward to a lot of sympathy with that I think the word sustainability is when I want to elect him in what he was saying earlier and I think it would be quite wrong to see ritual as a form of denial which is almost for I what's being said ritual gives you certain ways of of containing conflict that doesn't mean necessarily softening it it gives you some space in which the conflict isn't the only thing that defines you and therefore allows something to stand off somebody wants us described I think it's an anthropological study of shamanism in Central America the tribal shaman drawing circle into which songs the conflicted parties not to deny the conflict and to say this is the place where you you know if you think about it harder I'll deal with it I think ritual has element of that in it it's not therefore I'm making easy I think you're right that the Montford approach is reductive but it also don't you think Rowen it also expresses the kind of deep felt modern need that fulfillment lies in something that some version of user-friendly I thought a lot about this you know in terms of Technology why don't we want to make machines easy to use well for some machines we have to do that but another it's you only get to know the Machine by being able to expose what's inside it and what's inside we make it slower there's a this is cultural there's a vested interest to do with certain and picking up the flow of meaning into which is these are two very different ways my sense is a kind of objectification myself it's in the object but I'd say all servant when the craftsman has that in turn becomes an agenda it becomes a bit of a surprise it becomes another dummy and other sorts of difficulty and pushes the merited further on so they're still not closer in the straightforward sense I mean I guess that a lot of artists as well as crafts people would say that's what I made now I have to try to understand it well yes yes it's not so much to understand that's where the that's the rituals are performing I think in the craftsman I mean I think that craftsmen's world is not a world that leads to religious belief in that sense religious but because there's always this notion of the limit which requires a repetition and requires a kind of ritual to organize going on damn constant to the next to the next to the next you know I didn't see quite such a four Gospels require of 40 yes I think just as Freud said the the good analysis terminates veneno it could go on forever it may be impossible you think okay point there's quite such a gulf in that the repetition of the craftsman it's not simply a hamster going out of the wheel and the next parameter of the craft is going to be different it's going to be different partly because of the last enactment that's the other side again thinking let me put this to another way do you think that faith yes yes you're a difficulty that's closed we'll take two or three comments and then come back to thank you very much I'm a little disconcerted to be going first something I'm struggling with with both speakers is around this difficulty in ease and I'm wondering around difficulty and ease and I'm I'm wondering where I've gone wrong and I'll make the same statements and I want to hear what I'm missing for professor Senna sits around I guess the ease of quick consumption and discarding could that not be a ritual of some kind and I guess similarly and this comes from a position of fairly unknowing unserviceable and sophisticated views of religion for the Archbishop of would imagining a place where the the lion and the lamb can lay down together is that in a sense meaningless because the difficulty at least in the cliched form of how the lion and the lamb relate together that difficulty is no longer there and thus they may not be knowing that narrative they mainly mid there may be no difficulty and thus is a meaningless and obviously the implications for heaven there are some in there so I'm wondering what I'm missing I'm not trying to give a accrued criticism of either professor Senate or the archbishop I'm wanting to know what I'm missing here hello though I was respond during whether either of you were attracted by the romantic idea of the fragment yeah a system of thought or a narrative that both is complete but also advertises its incompleteness by being being a fragment it makes sense of things but admits the incompleteness and then leaves space for new connections I have a question to His grace who is a specialist in Russian Orthodox Christian philosophy and I'm wondering what you things and how he thinks the fact that the Orthodox Church is being outside the performance and the Renaissance influences how is it reflected in the Russian Orthodox narrative and it strikes me that the nature of crafts to some degree is the relationship of the crafts person with the tool and it sort of cursed me that there's been some lamenting the loss of craftsmanship and I think that there's a to some degree a misunderstanding of the nature of new tools as they come along mr. senate's made an interesting point I think in your craftsman but when you spoke about an architect drawing with a CA D system a computer I would like you to comp them a little bit more but it strikes me that actually it's really the type of tool that you're really taught and that you're really familiar with that actually becomes the tool which can express your craft it's not something that's been lost it's just something that's being transformed in that sense well of four fantastic wrestlers actually that's I can have the first question about difficulty in ease and I'll take the question that was put to me about the Lion of the land I find that very challenging because I think a great deal of traditional religious language about heaven an aspiration for heaven is a bit like the aspiration for the frictionless reality I think it's been noticed by some Christian writers I can't speak for others over the centuries in um for example people like that the 4th century Greek writer gregory of nyssa when he talks about the fact that there is even outside the circumstances of this life an endless incompleteness because there is always something we will be moving into the pre-tape the infinity of God seriously so you know the line one of them may be lying down together but they may still be having quite difficult conversations there's a serious element within some strands of the religious discourse that would want to avoid just that temptation frictionless the interesting wouldn't it though I'm not suggesting we do it now be interesting to read Dante's Paradiso the that in mind because when I read Dante I don't really have the impression that he's talking about a static frictionless that's a long story and I was asked a very specific question about the Orthodox Church and its historical and cultural location outside Renaissance and Reformation to me what that's part of what makes the world of Russian religious philosophy of the 19th and early 20th century so very fascinating here is an intellectual world which has not gone through the recovery of the classics that happened in the Western Renaissance which therefore isn't necessarily starting from the idea that philosophy began went into a long decline and started again with John Locke say it's it's a philosophy which is deeply marked of course by Hegel and uses Hegel to think through the reality of a very conflicted society and finds in Hegel's own well as it's read in Russia indeterminacy even more in Shelley some kind of convergence with an Eastern Christian tradition of moving into indeterminacy the difficulty of talking about God and so there's a sense in which the the great Russian writers from today of sleep say in the middle of the 19th century onwards are doing something much more adventurous than Western philosophy philosophers of the century early I'm not seeing adventurous in saying well we've got to think why society's been through this vastly conflicted history and actually it helps to think of conflicts of dialectic as the way in which we move into the endless mystery of creativity and I think it's much more seriously ritual we had this very rough passage in my my own biography from reading music - going into social science really struck me was that some of the means of the craft work of making music apply to social relationships the most primary of that was for me it's issue of rituals of performing okay but there's a large fire that we which is that a lot of music performing fragment romantic the whole aesthetic and in my mind all these years has been the question what is the relation between that value defragment the interruption from the terror and the means of expressing to others which require ritual order and encasing of fragments in something that moves forward in time almost every tennis for instance in place shuma take a piece that piece that you all would know like Carnival is almost pushed to the point of suicide about how to give the narrative shape to these fragments and how to contrive the rituals of performance activate your memory bridging well any musician here will musician will know someone struggling with the difficulty if you like pushing a fragmentary into a long point a longer experience and I've seen workers do this when I interviewed unemployed workers who will take the moment one that were fired or the moment of cleaning out their desks putting them into cardboard boxes when you talk to them five years later that fragment becomes an important it becomes a kind of orientating way of explaining rhythms that occurred ever after but some people think about something as prosaic like is being fired that has the quality in which I was thinking about the way in which pre-modern art can deliberately bring an interruption to signal something about incompletion the missing again the way in which George Herbert is deliberately stops halfway through the line as if to say that's already getting think but that's different from the fragment isn't it because that's in this absence it's an absence the fragment configures the absence by brings something else but what what he was saying about pushing the fragmentary all the fragmenting experience into the longer experience of time yes yes again because I think that that is the social challenge we were together the other night nothing I quoted something about how British history is actually a series of unsuccessful invasions and even complete conquests and we're always trying to tell a story of mentioned I was very struck by the Archbishop's remarks about Reverend Sunday and my question is really or my comment is about ritual degenerating into routine and then routine being elevated back into ritual and I just wonder that if the healing process of Remembrance Sunday and the way that the healing continued and then of course we're back in major wars with coffins coming home it's almost as if the wound has been reopened and the healing processes is it was out in any way being contemptuous at all has been reinvigorated and can I just make two further brief comments and related to that one is I remember my grandparents taking me to the Church of Scotland as a Calvinist in the 1950s and 60s and it was routine me it was routine and yet of course in the crisis of their lives in others it becomes a much more meaningful ritual and similarly over the last few weeks we might see politics perhaps as a routine or parliamentary parliamentary activity as a routine and then we suddenly find ourselves in the ritual of a general area election which perhaps reinvigorates our politics one thing was was was occurring to me as you were talking I have a daughter who's just doing her finals in architecture at the moment and the issue around the three dimensional the three dimensional aspects of building and and models that are made compared to however sophisticated Academy you use there is this three dimensionality to that architecture and to that process of craftsmanship that's developed in them and it made me think about the difference in a sense between the narrative and the ritual issue that ritual is is engaging the senses in the way that narrative doesn't now I'm not saying that narrative doesn't engage the senses but there is a different engagement and it seems to me to be a lot around touch I was intrigued by the reference to avenge capable of being talked about because in the modern world with ritual disappearing you can't spot where people depart from ritual and even for stand-up comic so finding it harder to find people to make fun of because everybody is nobody has characteristics that stand out in any way am i right Richard's question to Rowan as to whether faith is graft I was wondering in a different way whether or how we think of loving as a craft in a way that opens our not a difference between you but certainly a question that for Richard the notion of craft and the meaning of craft can be read as an alternative to faith there is meaning and purpose comes through a certain kind of skill and capacity which we know through craft but it's different from the craft there's a way in which the notion of the self gets somehow lost because the idea is to somehow escape from the south and I'm thinking just briefly of Simone veils notion she has the example of difficulty which I've certainly learned from the ocean of difficulty for her is the image of the sculptor who faces this block and it's through that difficulty or confrontation that the self is in some way both involved in a craft but also in a practice of care and love so that's my question I'm going to give the archbishop again and then Richard gets the final to this day loving as a craft I think having read seen one various well and being very marked by what she says I would go along with that I I think here of course jillian roses great loves work as as a text on that subject love as learn how to fail in the face of what wanna go away and I yes the whole notion that the self in the craft that has a discipline the self is rabbat challenged put in perspective transformed in the engagement what's there in front of you is not what you chose get used to it grow with it so loving as a Croft yes and a phrase which actually is used in some of the spiritual literature that prayer is the the art of Arts means was its the craft across because that is supremely something where you didn't choose this get used to it grow with it is the agenda very quickly ritual routine ritual that cycle absolutely yes ritual comes alive in times of crisis personally and corporately it's why there's this extraordinary search for ritual expression in times of trauma they bunches the flowers at the site of the accident and a story I've often told when in my diocese in Wales years ago particularly traumatic murder on a consultation for Cardiff schoolgirl the local priest meeting some schoolchildren on the street talking to them saying casually how'd it be if I left the church open for an hour to Friday night and being astonished to find 80 or so teenagers coming and lighting candles and the lighting of canvases as a routine what you do when you go to church on Sunday something quite different something to be rediscovered very definitely and 3 how many allottee at night I leave that mostly rigid I think but just note about engaging the senses I entirely take the point of out of touch but I do think that narrative as performance can in its way engage the senses as well and drama as a form of narrative is is sensual in I'd agree and I think we shouldn't underrate the oral performance assault on senses that powerful narrative can instruct and I again very much resonate with the difficulty of not being able to spot where the incongruities are I've occasionally said that you can't actually have a sense of humor unless you've got a metaphysic in that you don't actually know what's funny there isn't the world I feel in on a bone to say that given the Church of England in its present leadership I think stand-up comics and depression estill have that's a very nice we won't go further well I just want to say two very brief things thank you two brief things are that one of the worst things in the world we can do to ourselves is fear routine this is an event that we have to be doing routine things something that we have to it's there I think routine actually actually has a positive particularly when their routines that we make ourselves when music believe me after an hour and a half of practicing scales you know you are not the depths there is a pleasure in it simply because it's become something that you're making happen and that you're living within the variations of routine a hope in modern society is that we don't have routines of that sort that you can dig into imposed they're completely a rhythmic in the sense that they simply repeat again yeah yeah when I wrote the craftspeople I I wanted to get away from the notion the romantic notion we might have the craftsmanship there's something wet which is very self expressive it isn't it's something in which one of these ordinary materials of everyday life just do the same thing again and again gradually take a kind of appropriation and you'll begin to give them a shape and that's something that takes you outside of yourself my work and social plus B my work in cities and certainly my studies of labor for me the point is not self fulfillment or self expression but somebody that something rather processes that liberate people to objectify to get involved in something other themselves and I suppose if I have an ethical point of view is all about that how do you be in the world I'd like to conclude this evening by thanking you particularly those of you who have endured nearly eight hours for for coming this has been great for me I've learned an enormous amount and I hope to have long continued association with you as I say to argue that further we also to have the odd glass of red wine which I think we also might do now I just want to say that from my perspective an ideal colleague as an academic and as a public intellectual he's always thoughtful he's always penetrating and he's perhaps undisciplined but in a positive way in always someone restlessly pushing at the boundaries of the discipline in the way which I think serves to engage people way beyond the confines of sociology but also someone who's remained engaged with teaching always with time for students whether master students PhD students and also someone who has contributed to the community of scholars here in some surprising ways maybe you would not be expect Richard to be actually it has been for the last six years a member of the schools Council which does really exciting things like approve the accounts but someone has to do it they have to be academics who are engaged with that otherwise that community of scholars doesn't work and you do rely if you run this kind of institution on academics like Richard who are prepared to muck in across the whole range of tasks which academics perform so those of you from outside the school will have read his books will know of his engagement with a whole range of public issues but I want to tell you from the school's point of view that this kind of institution couldn't survive without people of his public spirited mindset I also however want to end by thanking the archbishop for joining us this evening it was a great privilege to have you here in such an expensive mood if I may say so and I mean this reveals a bit of the sort of backgrounds but I'm delighted that Prince Michael of Kent actually turned us down this evening and that was - but finally the thanks - to all of you and for some really fascinating questions which could have taken us off into kinds of exciting directions so it was a great afternoon and evening your career is not over Richard so I'm not going to bury you at this point the warmth of the reception you've had shows how much you've contributed to the LSE

Channel: LSE

Views: 7,191

Rating: 4.6981134 out of 5

Keywords: LSE, London School of Economics, Public, Lecture, Event, Seminar, Professor, Richard Sennett, Dr, Rowan Williams

Id: xXpB3e5MsFM

Length: 89min 55sec (5395 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2010