SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

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-