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