SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

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ij4 I Social Theory and Social Action come clearer about its methodology of comparison, along at least three axes: modality, scope, and ground. By modality I refer to the status of the terms of comparison, whether imputed by the analyst, as in Schrempp's (1990) comparison of Maori cosmology and Kantian philosophy, Yearley's (1990) comparison of Mencius and Aquinas, and Patton's comparison of Benjamin's reading of Parisian arcades and Indian interpretations of Vedic mantras, or motivated by historical linkages, as is the case in the articles by Poole, Bantly, Al-Azmeh, and Stout (1994). The analyst must take extra care in making explicit the motivation for creating the artificial juxtaposition. Imputed comparison across cultural levels (India/Paris, Maori/Kant) and comparison between well-articulated systems (Plato/Kükai, Mencius/Aquinas) are particularly difficult. By scope I mean the range of the units of comparison: are the units entire philosophical systems, key interpretive mechanisms (analogy, typology, metaphor), or specific religious doctrines or philosophical principles (good action, miracles)? Given that philosophical discourse tends toward systematic formulation, comparison operating at a lesser scope requires vigilance against atomization or fragmentation. Finally, by ground I mean the metric, criteria, or reason upon which the comparison is based. Whereas some authors take the ground from one of the units to be compared (usually from the Western one), others attempt comparative analysis without realizing, as the present commentary has insisted, that their scholarly activities have deep historical roots and find echoes in the traditions under study. 8 Naturalization of Convention To become aware that one is following a tradition and is dependent on it can have a disturbing effect on persons who thought that they were free from it. Intellectual and literary traditions have much in common with substantive traditions. "Reason," "life," and "naturalness" appear differently when their proponents become conscious that these too are borne by tradition. Just as the argument that one's unquestioned beliefs were particular to one's own time and culture unsettled those who espoused them as universally valid, so the perception that the practice of reason and "naturalness" of conduct are traditional has a similar unsettling effect. —Edward Shils (1981:309) Arbitrariness and Motivation THE CONTRIBUTION OF received anthropological wisdom to the study of conventionality—wisdom I propose to challenge here—can be summarized as follows. From the external perspective of analytical reflection (philosophical, scientific, linguistic, or ethnographic) social convention appears arbitrary in stipulating a non-natural, socially derived retattonship^betweeria^regurative or constitutive principle and its corresponding appropriate context (different nations prescribe driving on different sides of the road) or between an expressive sign and its signified meaning [arbor and kerrekar mean "tree" in different lan-*" guages). But from the internal perspeciiv£jQlsc«JaLaçtors these same conventions appear necessary: if I drive on the left side of the road in this country I will either be arrested or cause an accident; if I want to talk about trees in the Belauan language of Micronesia I must use the phonetic shape kerrekar. Indeed, because it would never occur to me to consider the possibility of an alternative practice, I do not imagine myself as following a rule at all as I drive or speak. As Benveniste (1971:44-46) points out in his critique of the Saussurean doctrine of the linguistic sign, there is no real contradiction here, since the external observer has '1 the benefit of comparativeSmowledge-of different societies, while"the active participant is oriented toward achieving immediate commuhTcafiönäTor pragmatic/ goals. Arbitrariness in "these'"examples refers to the lack of natural or external motivation between rule and context or between signifier and signified and not^ of course, to the random or free choice of individuals (cf. Holbwka 1981).' In 1 75
ij6 I Social Theory and Social Action Naturalization of Convention I 177 fact, absence of motivation implies the complete responsibility of the community as the sole authority for acknowledging—or, as Kripke (1982:89) would say, applying justification conditions to—one of several possible alternative relationships (Barthes 19883:155—56). A paradoxical consequence of this maximal social constraint for maximally arbitrary rules is that individuals acting within a system have a tendency to regard conventions as naturally motivated, that is, as being objective rather than V socially constituted, invariant rather than malleable, autonomous rather than dependent, eternal rather than historical, universal rather than relative, and necessary rather than contingent. This sense of convention as "second nature" focuses, thus, on the "presupposed" (Silverstein 1979:203), "habitual" (Whorf 1956), and "automatized (Havranek*t^4^9Tcharacter of socially legitimized rules. Tr Furthermore, the intensity of this sense of naturalness is often proportional to the degree of systematicity of the convention in question. Rules that fit into elaborate^ coordinated systems reinforce each other through mutual implication and s*5^ have the poSSräTtö appear, like nature, as aK autonomous,{Iniversal reality. In addition to language, ritual (Bell 1992:207), the cô"mm53ity-form (Lukâcs 1971; Marx 1976:163-77; Simmel 1978:128-30; Habermas 1983:358; Baudrillard 1981:93), law (Baibus 1977; Gabel 1982), and naturalism in art (Krieger 1990) are cited in this regard, since each combines an extensive range of relevance with a high level of interlocking coherence and thus appears as a totalized, reified entity. This tendency for naturalization is not without important consequences for the manipulation of power in society, for instituted conventions that enforce asymmetries of any sort—between chiefs and commoners, lords and peasants, older and younger, men and women—will continue to be reproduced (and thus to reproduce the asymmetry) if taken as natural. On the other hand, widespread awareness of the historical contingency of conventions and of the possibility of alternative institutional arrangements can lead to revolutionary challenges to the status quo. Bourdieu (1977:164-67) discusses this relationship among naturalization, systems of symbolic classification, and social power as follows: Every established order tends to produce ... the naturalization of its own arbitrariness. Of all the mechanisms tending to produce this effect, the most important and the best concealed is undoubtedly the dialectic of the objective chances and the agents' aspirations, out of which arises the sense of limits, commonly called the sense of reality, i.e. the correspondence between the objective classes and the internalized classes, social structures and mental structures, which is the basis of the most ineradicable adherence to the established order. Systems of classification which reproduce, in their own specific logic, the objective classes, i.e. the divisions by sex, age, or position in the relations of production, make their specific contribution to the reproduction of the power relations of which they are the product, by securing the misrecognition, and hence the recognition, of the arbitrariness on which they are based: in the extreme case, that is to say, when there is a quasi-perfect correspondence between the objective order and the subjective principles of organization (as in ancient societies) the natural and social world appears as self-evident. This experience we shall call doxa, so as to distinguish it from an orthodox or heterodox belief implying awareness and recognition of the possibility of different or antagonistic beliefs. Schemes of thought and perceptions can produce the objectivity that they do produce only by producing misrecognition of the limits of the cognition that they make possible, thereby founding immediate adherence, in the doxic mode, to the world of tradition experienced as a "natural world" and taken for granted. . . . The self-evidence of the world is reduplicated by the instituted discourses about the world in which the whole group's adherence to that self-evidence is affirmed. The specific potency of the explicit statement that brings subjective experiences into the reassuring unanimity of a socially approved and collectively attested sense imposes itself with the authority and necessity of a collective position adopted on data intrinsically amendable to many other structurations. There is, however, another side to this issue which Bourdieu does not fully consider here, although he does address it in detail in his more recent work on I'd^stinction" (Bourdieu 1984), namely, that conventions explicitly recognized by hïêmbers of a society as constituted by the "established order" can serve as potent social indexes of the hierarchical distribution of power. In other words, within a given community there can be a continuum of conventionality such that those groups which execute rules with maximal delicacy or which are able to impose normative judgments upon the performance of others thereby reinforce their position of authority. Rather than contrive to perpetuate the "doxic mode" of unreflective, internalized acceptance, those in power celebrate their "typifying" power by constructing conventional rules which are exaggerated in complexity (e.g., poetry and ritual) or subject to rapid stylistic change (e.g., manners and fashion). Furthermore, if social conventions do not always appear necessary from the ,actor's poinf~of view, they are also not always regarded as arbitrary by outside, scientific 1 jrjpii Tu fin I. there is an-important,, if not dominant, trend in Western social theory to deny the historical, collective, and relative character of conventions by discovering various elements of motivation in these cultural constructs. This theoretical .naturalization of convention involves (as will be detailed in the next section), for example, showing the deductive .necessity of instituted rules, uncovering concealed practical rationality behind historically transmitted customs^or positing adaptive mechanisms as the real explanation oHïguïâr social practices. Far from transforming the advantage of a comparative perspective, what Benveniste (1971:44) calls the "impassive viewpoint of Sirius," into a vi-
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A D V A N C E S IN S E M I O T I C
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Contents Acknowledgments Introducti
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x I Acknowledgments Acknowledgments
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xiv I Introduction Introduction I x
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PART I Foundations of Peircean Semi
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4 I Foundations ofPeircean Semiotic
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8 I Foundations ofPeircean Semiotic
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iz I Foundations of Peircean Semiot
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16 I Foundations of Peircean Semiot
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48 I Signs in Ethnographic Context
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