SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

122 I Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes
moral force by differentiating a sequence of tropes from a conventional image
of ordinary social discourse, revealing the conventional nature of this image
itself, indeed, recreating it by a particular innovation or individual perspective
on convention.
Thus, magical spells, though secretly held, rely on collectively shared conventions
for their effectiveness; myths, on the other hand, though publicly recited, are
I creative products of individual inventiveness. This is one place where the danger
of Weiner's conflation of "collectivizing" symbolization and Durkheimian "collectivity"
manifests itself: spells are "collectivizing" as semiotic forms yet privately
held as cultural objects, while myths are "differentiating" semiotic forms
yet collectively shared cultural objects.
Furthermore, whereas magical spells generate sets of metaphorical equivalences,
myths are free to differentiate cultural conventions by placing into fresh,
tropic juxtaposition Foi roles and categories that, in social life, would forever
remain contradictory, paradoxical, or incompatible; and in doing so myths "present
such contradictions in terms of images not given by the conventions of normative
social process and language" (Weiner 1988:287). The tales do not offer
"solutions" so much as suggest the field of "play": narrative flow can accomplish
in a moment of storytelling what social exchanges spend generations working out
(e.g., the creation of agnatic lineality out of female reproductive power) and can
place in the same syntagmatic context oppositions which are normally kept contextually
separate (e.g., aname kobora [pork/shell] exchanges and affinal ex-
] changes). Finally, this freedom of compositional innovation is matched by a freedom
from contextual entailment (Silverstein 1992): whereas spells are uttered
only when magic power is being delivered or when the spells as objects are being
purchased, tales are told in the most neutral social setting possible, in the afterdinner
relaxation of the longhouse. Moral tales are, as Weiner correctly argues,
obviational devices because they simultaneously metaphorize cultural norms and
render these same norms apparent.
Wagner and Weiner use the dialectical distinction between collectivizing,
conventional-N symbolization and differentiating, tropic symbolization in three
contexts: (1) as a global typological opposition between Western societies and
tribal cultures such as the Daribi and the Foi (implying a reversal in the valuation
of "artificial" and "innate" cultural forms), (2) as a contrast between the closure
and the openness of local semiotic constructs (the distinction between Foi magical
spells and moral tales), and (3) as alternative poles in sequential metaphorical
substitutions within the texts of a discursive genre (the motivating and facilitating
modalities of social exchanges and stories). 5 I have voiced doubts about the
value of the global typology argument and the sequential alternation argument;
the former seems to be a naive variant of the theoretically vacuous "great divide"
model of the world's cultures (Goody 1977), and the latter does not seem ade-
Tropical Semiotics I 123
quate either to the narrative data themselves or to the indigenous interpretive
models (Foster 1989:154). I am, however, intrigued by the middle hypothesis
that, within a given culture, semiotic constructs can be placed along a continuum
in terms of certain form-function correspondences. This analytical focus could
highlight the connections between the obviational method and other semiotic
proposals, such as Bakhtin's (1981) contrast between monoglossic poetry and
heteroglossic novels in European literature and his analysis (1968) of dialogically
linked layers of the petrified clerical culture and the carnivalesque universe of
popular laughter in the late Middle Ages, 6 Turner's (1969) descriptions of structural
and anti-structural moments in Ndembu social life, and Boon's (1982,
1984:199) reflections on monastic and ludic or parodie strains in Balinese cultural
symbolism.
Finally, Wagner and Weiner both provide an interesting challenge to the by- I
now normal assumption that the powers-that-be in a society legitimize their
power by increasing the systematicity of the symbolic order, often to the degree
that its very artificiality is forgotten, especially by those who cannot break out
of the regimenting authority of a dominant worldview. As Bourdieu (1979:80)
puts it:
The different classes and class fractions are engaged in a specifically symbolic
struggle to impose the definition of the social world that is most consistent
with their interests; the field of ideological positions reproduces the field of
social positions, in a transfigured form. They may pursue this struggle either
directly, in the symbolic conflicts of daily life, or vicariously, through the struggle
between the specialists of symbolic production (full-time producers), for the
monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence, i.e., the power to impose (and even
inculcate) instruments of knowledge and expression (taxonomies) of social reality,
which are arbitrary but not recognized as such.
Figurative symbolization, on the other hand, remains the one arena of cultural
opposition, a possibility for authentic countercultural or revolutionary alterity by
which subordinate voices can be heard in the diverse languages of inversion,
humor, parody, and criticism. But Wagner and Weiner hint at another possibility:
societies in which "the revelation of social power must necessarily involve the
nullification, or obviation, of conventional social meanings" (Wagner
19863:217). Semiotic creativity, according to this idea, is not primarily the refuge
of antistructural social categories (the mystics, matrilaterals, and mummers
of Turnerian comparative symbology); rather, it is the power to recontextualize
or refigure existing cultural categories so that the force of cosmic or sexual energy
is constantly channeled into the "flow" of social relations. This is not to
deny that metaphoric innovation often takes the form of aesthetic vision in which
the artists "invoke and compel the power that 'new' meanings represent through
the creative displacement of 'given' meanings" (Wagner 1972:171). It is the rec-