SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang
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iz6 I Comparative Perspectives on Complex Semiotic Processes<br />
Thibault captures these two axes of contextualization in the title phrase "social<br />
semiotics as praxis," which implies a sensitivity both to the pragmatic character<br />
of social codes and to institutional embeddedness of modes of theoretical reflection.<br />
Parallel to this complementarity of real-space/time contextualization and institutional<br />
contextualization is a second realization witnessed in recent semiotic<br />
scholarship, namely, that the distinction of levels between object language and<br />
metalanguage pertains not just in obvious cases where, for example, a relatively<br />
detached theoretical discourse refers to the operation of signs in social contexts<br />
/"but also in the realm of social action, much of which, as Balchtin (1981:338,<br />
1986:103) and Geertz (1973:15) tirelessly observe, involves "talk about talk"<br />
or "interpretations of interpretations" (see Chapter 4). No semiotic analysis can<br />
claim to be-adequate-wfithout-j^cognition of these multiple levels of semiosis,<br />
whether intertextual or hermeneutjcal, as part of the explanation of semiotic theory.<br />
While~;~äs Taylor (1985:117) so forcefully argues, it would be a gross error<br />
merely to accept as a full analytical account the metasemiotic expressions of a<br />
text or an action, this meta^-leyel potential must always be itself accounted for in<br />
a systematic rather than in an ad hoc fashion. The existence of metasemiotic<br />
understanding in the social,collectivity is never a matter of complete agreement<br />
by social actors, since the ability to create accepted meta-level discourse is a key<br />
to the ptiwer^bf dominant versus "muted" groups (Ardener 1975:2z;<br />
Goldschläger i98z:i3). And the "semiosphere," to use Lotman's term, of a<br />
given culture or cultural era can also be characterized by the relative degree of<br />
metasemiotic strength in the center or core of the tradition:<br />
As a result, in the centre of the cultural space, sections of the semiosphere<br />
aspiring to the level of self-description become rigidly organized and self-regulating.<br />
But at the same time they lose dynamism and having once exhausted<br />
their reserve of indeterminancy they became inflexible and incapable of further<br />
development. On the periphery—and the further one goes from the centre, the<br />
more noticeable this becomes—the relationship between semiotic practice and<br />
the norms imposed on it becomes ever more strained. Texts generated in accordance<br />
with these norms hang in the air, without any real semiotic context;<br />
while organic creations, born of the actual semiotic milieu, come into conflict<br />
with the artificial norms. (Lotman 1990:134)<br />
Not all texts or actions, however, contain in themselves the stipulated rules for<br />
interpreting meanings, so the metasemioticjeyeljieeds to be, additionally, sought<br />
-—in general ideological assumpüons\hisjoncaljytransmitted in each culture, that<br />
transcend paftîcûTâr events or utterances. As Thibault (1991:233—34) observes:<br />
ir<br />
Texts do not tell us how to read them, nor are meanings simply contained "in"<br />
texts, waiting for the reader to extract them during a purportedly asocial reading<br />
process. Textual meanings are made in and through specific socially and<br />
historically contingent meaning making practices, which enact specific systems<br />
The Semiotic Regimentation of Social Life I 1 Z 7<br />
of foregrounded meaning relations. Meaning making practices construct and I<br />
index both local and global relations of equivalence, contrast, generality, and J<br />
specificity in the partial hierarchies of thematic and actional resources in the /<br />
social semiotic.<br />
Few would take exception to these two general points, but Thibault goes<br />
further in specifying several more axioms that should meet with equally enthusiastic<br />
approval. As enacted social practices, cultural semiosis usually takes place<br />
neither in the condition of an isolated sign (along the axis of semantic meaningfulness<br />
Saussure [1959:114] called "signification") nor in the condition of a fully<br />
enacted code, the completeness of which is only a matter of potentiality and the<br />
coherence of which a matter of virtuality. Rather, action and discourse occur in<br />
realizations of "texts," a term which refers to middle-order Semiotic forms, between<br />
signs and codes. From a semiotic point of view, texts are type-level discursive<br />
regularities, in whatever medium of expression (contra Harris 1984), the<br />
meanings of which involve conventions of organization beyond that of their component<br />
signs (see Hanks 1989). Texts.^when contextually realized, encounter<br />
each other in social life, which can thus be seen as an Tritërfëxtual field—not only<br />
because texts refer to each^mef"burälSö~'becausr materially embodied texts are<br />
items jof exchange, negotiation, and valuation. And texts are products of social]<br />
actors iff nonrandom ways, such that a correlation exists between tfre social po- ;<br />
:<br />
sitions of actors and the discursive fields of intertextuality.<br />
-^J<br />
Next, like Foucault (1978:97, 1980), Bourdieu (1984), and others, Thibault<br />
stresses the close connection between social action as the realization of positioned<br />
texts and local power relations, in its many dimensions. I think it is useful to<br />
further conceptualize semiotjcjjower along distinct dimensions of semiosis. At<br />
the level of codes, power involves the delimitation of potentially meaningful utterances<br />
and the correlated degrees of awareness, misperception, and projection<br />
channeled by these form-function regularities. As Jakobson (1985) points out,<br />
the grammatical codes of language condition what must be conveyed, not what<br />
can be conveyed. This accounts for the Whorfian dimension of "semiotic mediation"<br />
(Mertz and Parmentier 1985). At the level of texts as organized discursive<br />
types, power resides in the conventional understandings that control genre production,<br />
in the institutional stricturës that regulate the occurrence or nonoccurrence<br />
of text tokens in particular contexts, and in the valuation of prototypical<br />
or exemplary text-types in specific discursive fields. Textuality is the key to understanding<br />
the creative or performative power of certain utterances and actions<br />
such as ritual and oratory where the degree of formal organization foregrounds<br />
the collective origination of the semiotic complex (Valeri 1990:255).<br />
Beyond the levels of code and text,.,pQyyer can be further analyzed in terms<br />
of tV^e> Jcinds of metasemiotic "regimentation^to use a term introduced by Silverstein<br />
(198104, 1987a, 1992) to label the sçmiotic process of stipulating, controlling,<br />
or de_fining the contextual, indexical, or pragmatic dimension of sign