SIGNS IN SOCIETY - STIBA Malang

i8o I Social Theory and Social Action Naturalization of Convention I 181
The poles of this debate about language mirror the distinction in classical
political theory between inevitable "rules which are innate in nature" and adventitious
"rules of the laws . . . created by covenant" (Antiphon in Gough
1936:10). That there is a constant interplay between the two terms is evident,
for example, in hypothetical arguments about the way individuals, faced with
competition and conflict in the state of nature prior to the establishment of law,
covenant together to curb these natural tendencies. Society is, thus, an antinatural
construction generated by the necessities of the natural order. As Plato
(1961:606) synthesizes one such contractual theory:
By nature, they say, to commit injustice is a good and to suffer it is an evil,
but that the excess of evil in being wronged is greater than the excess of good
in doing wrong, so that when men do wrong and are wronged by one another
and taste of both, those who lack the power to avoid the one and take the
other determine that it is for their profit to make a compact with one another
neither to commit nor to suffer injustice, and that this is the beginning of legislation
and of covenants between men.
This notion that legislative covenants protect individuals from the brute exercise
of power is, of course, part of the charter myth of modern contractual
theories of society, a myth which persists in recent philosophical theories of convention
as coordinated agreement. Contractual theories of social origin often go
hand in hand with conventional theories of language. Hobbes, for example, sees
an analogy between the process by which individuals compact together in a commonwealth
and the willful stipulation of the relationship between words and denoted
reality. Society and language are both "artificial" constructs in contrast,
respectively, to the state of nature and animal cries, which operate according to
natural laws and do not involve conventional agreements of any sort. While bees
and ants may form rudimentary societies, they do not constitute a commonwealth
or speak a language, for they lack conventionality: "The agreements of
these creatures is natural; that of men, is by covenant only, which is artificial"
(Hobbes 1962:131). And yet for Hobbes both society and language are
grounded in necessity. In the case of the commonwealth, individuals in the state
of nature are compelled by dictates of reason to agree to give up their natural
right to everything in order to protect their own interests. The original covenant
which results in the submission of all to the sovereign does not presuppose some
prior collective understanding; rather, it is the logical ground for all later sociability
(Cassirer 1951:257). While the specific content of the contracts, covenants,
and promises established by individuals in society varies widely, the inevitability
of making them follows deductively from Hobbes's first principles about hedonistic
determinism.
Similarly in language, words which we employ as mnemonic "marks" and
communicative "signs" are, according to Hobbes, conventional along four di-
mensions: opacity (objects named do not display their natures in their names),
mutability (new names are born daily), relativity (different words are in use in
different nations), and noniconicity (there is no physical similarity between name
and thing). And yet that we so invent words is a matter of necessity, due to the
natural limitation of human memory and the physical separation between minds.
As Hobbes (1981:195) argues: "Therefore, it is necessary for the acquisition of
philosophy that there should be some signs by which what has been contrived by
some might be disclosed and made known to others." Aware of the obvious
problem that faces any theory of the conventional origin of names, that "it is
incredible that men once came together to take counsel to constitute by decree
what all words and all connexions of words would signify" (Hobbes 1978:38),
Hobbes hypothesizes that the first individuals agree on names of only a few objects
pointed out by God and then pass these names down through an ever-expanding
tradition of naming conventions. What begins as a conventionalist approach
to meaning ends up as a causal, mechanistic model of the development of
language. For Hobbes, then, the artificiality of covenants and the conventionality
of words are both anchored in necessity, since both are regimented by the fundamental
notion that "reason is the law of nature" (Hobbes 1928:150; see also
Habermas 1973:62-64). But as Sahlins (1976^96) notes, Hobbes reproduces
the historical specificity of market competition as the image of nature: "Since
Hobbes, at least, the competitive and acquisitive characteristics of Western man
have been confounded with Nature, and the Nature thus fashioned in the human
image has been in turn reapplied to the explanation of Western man."
This tendency to locate a historically specific form of social relations in the
state of nature characterizes the political philosophy of Locke as well. Locke defends
an emergent bourgeois society against absolutist, noble, and feudal powers
by arguing that state power's primary responsibility is to protect and legitimize
those features of "civil society" which derive not from artificial, contractual
causes but from aspects of the natural state. In particular, Locke attributes to
this state of nature both the right to private property produced through individual
labor and the right to unlimited accumulation made possible through
money. Civil society thus appears to itself as a natural state, as a self-regulating,
autonomous system requiring no arbitrary constructs to bring it into existence.
The function of contracts becomes, then, not to constitute but rather to recognize
already developing property relations (Rohbeck 1984:74).
A central opponent of this kind of contractual theory in the mid-nineteenth
century was Henry Maine, who challenged the basic premise that the transition
from the state of nature to civil society was accomplished through contractual
agreements by pointing out that it is precisely this ability to make contracts that
has to be explained historically. As Maine (1889:110—11) puts it: "Authority,
Custom, or Chance are in fact the great source of law in primitive communities
as we know them, not Contract." Equally forceful, however, is Maine's repudi-