Culture As Code

All of the preceding definitional elements of culture were retained during the third phase of conceptualization, but they underwent a more comprehensive theoretical interpretation in light of biological genetics and Chomsky's theory of generative grammar. As before, culture is taken to mean "symbolic formulations" of cognitive, cathectic, and expressive orientations and a "system of ordered"—symbolically mediated, as it were—"selective standards," and, as before, the concept of culture is connected with the theoretical idea of a symbolic, hierarchical control of those subsystems that are situated below the L-component of the general action system. But Parsons's concept of culture now additionally contains the thesis that the culture-constitutive set of standards should be understood as a code; such a code has a dispositional character and realizes itself in the construction or generation of concrete symbolic acts. This code is explicitly analogous to the principles of generative grammar, which serve to formulate individual messages or utterances, or to the genetic code, which determines the generation of species and within which variations are established (Parsons 1977:113, 131, 281, 1978:220–221, 1982; Parsons and Platt 1973:220n.40). This is well on the way to being a generative (or structuralist) linguistic model of "culture as language" (Parsons 1977:235), whose most general explanatory principle is located in a "culturally structured 'symbolic code'" (Parsons 1977:330).

The advantages of this further conceptual modification of Parsons's theory are easily summarized. Drawing on the now well-grounded identification of language and medium, Parsons interprets all forms of personal interaction and intersystemic exchange as based on a languagelike code; this interpretation, by implication, enables him to understand the connections and interchanges within and between independently differentiated systems and subsystems as the products of a number of Sondersprachen (Jensen 1980:12) or as forms of "communication" (Parsons 1969:352–396, 405–429, 433–438, 457, 1977:204–228, 1978:394–395). At the same time, Parsons's theory of the mutual interpenetration of divergent systems and subsystems takes on a new shape. The interpenetration of systems^[2] is no longer represented by the idea of an overlapping or

intersecting membership of parts or elements of different systems, and thus by implication as a relationship between a system and its parts, but is now conceptualized as a form of symbolic mediation (Parsons 1977:200 and elsewhere). Finally, Parsons has an empirically reliable explanation for the relative longevity of the cultural system compared with the transitory nature of the singular acts that it helps to generate; for it is obvious that the control system of culture, if understood as a code, can change only partially and as the result of an increased input of energy, which, for Parsons, means charismatic energy (Parsons 1961a:78–79), as even the construction of precisely those actions that might eventually change the cultural code necessarily presupposes such a code (Parsons 1961a:61–62, 72, 73–74).