The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Ar ...

the like, figure as well as humor.⁷ Plessner’s study really shows eccentric organization at work in ongoing social experience, continuously inverting and rendering risible stable social formations: a kind of operative, narrative, structural procedure for understanding cultural process, expressible philosophically (as Plessner did) or, for the case of comparative analysis, anthropologically.

In the following pages, I examine the immense network in which these Chinese symbols were designed and articulated. Never forgetting these archaic achievements of categorization presented objectively factual structures subordinated to a phenomenology of aspects,⁸ I suspend some modern cultural standpoints to submerge awareness into ancient thought’s reality. When explored in depth, ancient thought’s matrices appear as truly complex, amazingly profound, and “prodigiously sophisticated” embodiments of social pattern and individual life experiences.⁹ It is hard to escape the conclusion: cultural fields were astonishingly organized through the designers’ structural scruples and their passion for mathesis. Ultimately, though, one wants to be familiar enough with this language, in spite of its staggering complexity, to learn to operate it—in short, to gain some orientation from it for one’s own poor cultural milieu. This is not ultimately an exercise in abstract exoticism but intends to open up extremely archaic forms of consciousness to benefit contemporary understandings, such as they may be, and thereby build bridges from the Neolithic past to a brighter future on this planet.

Muse, Music, Mutings

The immediacy of what human beings live and know is mediated through imagery and symbolism in the human cultural habitus. Although analysts often focus reflection on representations of knowledge of possibly true or false propositions in sentences, in fact even a semantic analysis of language must acknowledge its many nonpropositional aspects: distinctive features, figures, structural composition, symmetries, tone, rhythm,