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