SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

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