SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

IZ4 I Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes
ognition that such creativity lies at the very heart and not at the margins of "sociality."
In some societies, then, power might be best viewed as the harnessing
of forces through innovative semiotic tropes rather than as the manipulation of
cultural conventions by differentiated social hierarchies (J. F. MacCannell
1985:452; Wagner 1983:4).
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The Semiotic Regimentation of
Social Life
Social Action and Semiotic Text
RECENT INTERDISCIPLINARYWORK in the social sciences and humanities employing
semiotic concepts and methods, Social Semiotics as Praxis by Paul J. Thibault
(1991) being an exemplary case, has benefited greatly from the realization r ~j[
that the analysis of culturally constituted sign systems is doubly grounded in contexts
of social action. First, many kinds of semiosis engage indexical modes of
meaningfulness and, consequently, the work of analysis requires discovering contextual
parameters that are involved either on an ad hoc basis or as a matter of
systematic regularity. Since these indexical parameters themselves partake of the
concrete" realities of space, time, and matter, and since the token occurrence of
indexical sign types requires physically manifested, temporally experienceable
sign vehicles, the operation of indexicals permits no absolute disjunction between
meaningful and material worlds. As Thibault (1991:7) puts it: "Thus, textual
productions, their,|