SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

i66 I Social Theory and Social Action Comparison, Pragmatics, and Interpretation I 16'7
At first glance, the application of the notion of "practical reason" to the field
of religion seems to be an uneasy juxtaposition of opposites, since the division
between religious practice and philosophical or theological discourse can correlarticulated
by, say, Hume and Hegel, it will be important to grasp the role of
conclusions about comparative understanding found in their philosophical texts;
at the less obvious level, if we are to compare the implicit philosophies of, say,
medieval Islam and medieval Christianity, part of the task will be to discover the
stances toward other religions embodied in these religious traditions.
This is not to say, of course, that our scholarly comparison will be identical,
in intellectual motive or written discourse, to the comparative motives or discourses
under study. While philosophers and religious traditions may provide
modern scholars with useful tools for comparative analysis—the notions of analogy
(Yearley 1990), metaphor (Poole 1986b; Schweiker 1992:271), and "superimposition"
(Clooney n.d.:ch. 5), for example, have proven particularly helpful—I
do not think that we can simply borrow their models of understanding as
our models of understanding. To the degree that research increasingly reveals the
richness of the interpretive, comparative, metapractical (Kasulis 1992), or metapragmatic
(Silverstein 1993) resources of philosophical texts and religious traditions,
this stricture becomes increasingly difficult to obey. Three options seem to
be open to those who confront this dilemma: to appropriate local interpretive,
comparative, and metapragmatic models as our analytical tools (e.g., using Thomistic
analogy to understand Mencius); to take these local discourses under study
as equal dialogic partners with reference to our analytical discourses (e.g., comparing
their metaphors with our metaphors), ideally leading simultaneously to the
"preservation" of the other's discourse (as Hallisey [1994] argues) and the sharpening
of our conceptual tools; and to find in these local discourses necessary
limitations and biases which in principle exclude them from sharing in the task
of analysis yet which expand the range of things the analyst is forced to comprehend
(Taylor 1985).
Why is it so dangerous to dignify local "theories" of comparison with the
status of explanatory models? First, these kinds of local theories are often rationalizations,
justifications, or secondary elaborations that must themselves be penetrated
in the act of analysis. Second, they often lack time perspective and thus
cannot begin to account for changes in either historical situations or ideological
assumptions. Third, they tend to be decontextualized abstractions that "iron
out" the contextual or indexical dimensions of experience, ignoring precisely
those pragmatic aspects of philosophical reasoning and religious action that are
subject to only limited self-awareness (Silverstein 1981a). Fourth, they often focus
on semantic, propositional, or referential dimensions of discourse and miss
the meaningfulness of rhetorical, organizational, and structural dimensions of
texts and actions. Finally, they are inherently positional within society, whether
the product of elites, radicals, or world renouncers, and need to be linked to
alternative, competing, or contradictory theories from elsewhere in the heteroglossic
social order. Taken together, all these conclusions point to the same general
principle: to the degree that a philosophical or religious discourse approaches
in either formal shape or declared purpose the status of being an abstract, complete,
or true account of comparison, this discourse fails to achieve critical selfawareness
of its own pragmatic features.
So comparative analytics and comparisons within traditions both have pragmatic
dimensions that need to be critically identified. As a first approximation,
several things might be included in an account of the pragmatics of any discourse:
the personal motives or institutional interests behind the production of
texts; the contextually grounded presuppositions and implications of texts; the
strategic design or rhetorical organization of texts that contributes to their function
or efficacy; the social dispersion of texts within a culture, such as the evaluative
opposition between high and low culture, official and carnivalesque (Bakhtin
1968:9-10), or scholarly and popular (Gurevich 1983); explicit text-internal
metapragmatic devices, such as performatives and verba dicendi, and implicit
metapragmatic forms grounded in a discourse's textual properties, both of which
provide a commentary on the function of the discourse in context; 6 the real-time
dynamics of interpretive acts as socially realized practices; and the intertextual
relationship among texts in a culture, including the chain of commentaries on
texts (Doniger 1992:39-41). In sum, the pragmatics of discourse comprehends
almost every kind of meaningfulness other than the decontextualized, distantiated,
semantic meaning that Ricoeur (1984) labels the "said" of the text.
Despite the fact that many philosophical texts attempt to claim that they are
decontextualized discourses asserting universal truths, just as many religious traditions
claim unique access to the "really real," one of the jobs for analysts is to
discover the pragmatics of these discourses or claims. But the analyst's discourse
is not free from pragmatics! One of the great dangers of modern scholarship—
and the discipline of the comparative philosophy of religion is no exception—is
to assume that our own intellectual models, research techniques, and academic
writings are not themselves subject to pragmatic considerations. 7 The ultimate
irony of the position advocated here is that, although our scholarly acts of comparison
can be fundamentally homologous to the comparative doctrines, stances,
and encounters revealed in cross-cultural study, there is no reason in principle to
model our comparative analytics on the specific comparative maneuvers we observe
in religious or philosophical traditions. While the ubiquity of comparative
discourse and cross-tradition interface can lead us to the universal set of pragmatic
conditions and implications of comparison, our comprehension, though itself
an act of comparison, is not compelled by any particular discoverable model.
Comparison and Interpretation as Practical Reason