SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

ij8 I Social Theory and Social Action
Naturalization of Convention I 179
sion of historical and cultural variability, these theories struggle to reintroduce
universal explanatory principles in order to argue that existing conventions are
the only possible arrangements.
These preliminary observations about the limitations of the received wisdom
about conventionality are sufficient to point out the need to reopen the question
of the relationship between nature and convention as a dynamic process in both
social theory and social reality.
Naturalization in Social Theory
Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of
institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are
artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this
they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion.
,Ëvery religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an
/ emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations—the
\f relations of bourgeois production—are natural, they imply that these are the
relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in
conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves
natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which
must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer
any.
—Karl Marx, 1847 (1963:110—11)
A central dynamic in modern Western culture involves, on the one hand, the
. insistence on the ability of individuals working together to rationally establish the
conventions, rules, or laws which are the foundation of social order and, on the
other hand, the attempt to ground these,constructed principles in some suprahistorical,
transcendent, or natural reality. That is, the social order is deemed
rational when it is found to be the result of uncoerced, coordinated agreement
of atomic individuals whose decisions are subject to no external constraints, but
then the social order so constituted is legitimized by appeal to eternal, immutable
postulates. To put it simply: the institutions of society are as they are because we
agree to make them that way (the "conventional" moment) and at the same time
our system of social practices could not possibly be other than it is (the "natural"
moment).
This seemingly paradoxical dynamic corresponds to a paradoxical attitude
toward the concept of conventionality itself. From one perspective, conventions
are positively valued insofar as they register decision-making processes in which
the only reason behind the agreed-upon rule is contributed bythe participants
involved. This ideal of presuppositionless agreement through the "marketplace
of ideas" (Bosmajian 1984) repudiates all external or imposed restrictions and
assumes that participants bring to negotiations identical rational equipment. In
the words of Kant (1970:55), enlightenment consists of "the freedom to make
public use of one's reason in all matters." Thus, actions regulated by conventions
willfully and rationally undertaken are not seen as constrained, and those established
conventions whose origin does not lie in explicit agreement persist only
because of continued mutual consent (see, e.g., Lewis 1975:26). From a second
perspective, however, conventions are negatively valued insofar as they appear to
be historically transmitted formulas which confront rational actors as an oppressive
burden from the past. Conventions in this sense channel thinking according
to reasons not supplied freely by those in the present. Again Kant (1970:54—55):
"Dogmas and formulas, these mechanical instruments for rational use (or rather
misuse) of his natural endowments, are the ball and chain of his permanent immaturity."
Now the trouble lies in the obvious fact that conventions in the first "agreement"
sense are destined to become conventions in the second "formula" sense,
given the universal character of cultures to transmit symbolic constructs, including,
for example, isolated semiotic types, patterns for action, artistic genres, and
entire worldviews, rather than always invent them afresh. 2 There is, then, a tendency
for positivistic modes of discourse to appeal to "nature" (in a number of
senses) in order to justify inherited conventions as being, after all, in perfect harmony
with some invariable, objective standard rather than as the result of coercive,
unquestioned, and binding "tradition" (Acton 1952—53:5; Weber
1978:326). Accordingly, the category "nature" receives parallel alternative valuation.
Nature is negatively valued if it is viewed as an external constraint on the
exercise of individual rationality, and yet nature is positively valued as the source
of validation that instituted conventions are the only ones possible.
To summarize: conventions as present agreements are seen as wholly arbi-"
trary constructs, but conventions as historically transmitted formulas are taken
as naturalized truths. .—
The opposition between convention and nature in Western social theory parallels
the classical philosophical speculation on the character of language. The
terms of these debates as established in Greek thought need only a brief review
here. Using the then-standard contrast between the state of affairs in the natural
world as it is as a matter of fact (physei) and the conventional institutions or
opinions resulting from agreement, custom, or stipulation (thesei), Plato constructs
the debate in the Cratylus between rival Heraclitean and Eleatic views,
the former insisting that language has a built-in harmony with nature independent
of human intervention and the latter arguing that words are appropriate for
their meanings only by customary choice. Socrates, the mediating character in
this dispute, shows how the relationship between various phonetic realizations
and the corresponding "ideal name" is indeed conventional and arbitrary, while
the relationship between the "ideal name" and the immutable world of form is
natural and universal.