of language in natural settings (Lavandera 1988, 6). Focusing on speech in context could, in turn, inform us about who is using and manipulating cultural and linguistic forms, in relation to whom and under what circumstances. Such efforts to consider how language and culture are caught up, implicated, and deployed in social action also open up possibilities for investigating the contextual role of power in language use.
Signs and Power
The study of signs began with linguistics, which initially defined signs as elements deployed in the system of langue. Yet it soon became apparent that gestures, colors, tones, apparel, or foods could also serve as signs in appropriate contexts and that, in fact, anything and everything could assume the function of a sign in human communication. The study of language could thus be seen as part of a more general science of all kinds of signs and sign-functions, semiotics.
This expanded interest in signs suggested to some that the notoriously ambiguous concept of “culture” could be made more precise in semiotic terms. One way this was pursued was by drawing on Peirce. The Italian semiotician Umberto Eco took Peirce’s approach to signs and related it to the workings of culture. Accepting the premise that signs do not exist in natural reality, Eco pointed out that they depend for their formulation and function upon the network of practices and communications we call culture. In such networks they appear always with other signs, which relate to one another through likeness or contrast. The dimensions of similarity and difference are also defined culturally, The relation of signs to one another and to the contexts in which they may be used further requires an “interpretant” (in Peirce’s terms), which clarifies what a sign is about by adducing further signs that place it into the web of culture of which it forms a part (1976, 67).
Signs that assume the function of interpretants have a special role in the exercise of power, because the capacity to assign cultural significance to signs constitutes an important aspect of domination. Power can determine (“regulate”) the interpretants that will be admissible, emphasized, or expunged (Parmentier 1994, 127–28). It not only certifies that a sign and its denotatum are cognitively appropriate; it stipulates that this sign is to be used and who may so use it. It can also regulate which signs and interpretants are to be accorded priority and significance and which are to be played down and muted.
The exercise of power over interpretants and their use is clearly a social process that requires study in its own right. To that end, Pierre Bourdieu has suggested the utility of thinking about communication as operating within linguistic fields or “markets.” In these fields not all participants exercise the same degree of control over the processes of communication. Speakers address each other from different social positions, and their differential placement determines how they do so. For Bourdieu, “language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledge, but also an instrument of power. One seeks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished. Whence the complete definition of competence as right to speak, that is, as right to the legitimate language, the authorized language, the language of authority. Competence implies the power to impose reception” (in Thompson 1984, 46–47).
Not all individuals are equally competent in pursuing their interests in the exchange of linguistic actions and counteractions. Some people excel in the knowledge of what can be appropriately exchanged with whom; others lack that knowledge. Nor do such transactions go forward automatically and without conflicts of interest. Power is involved in deciding who can talk, in what order, through which discursive procedures, and about what topics. As Lamont Lindstrom has put it in the context of a field-based study in Vanuatu, “Control of the questions—even more than control of the answers—maintains social inequalities in that such control helps frame and make sense of felt desire.” In this way, “the powerful set the conversational agenda and, by this means, establish inequalities more difficult to perceive or challenge” (1990, 13).
When we combine the insights from semiotics that point up how priority is accorded to some interpretants over others with an understanding of how differential controls operate in the communicative process, we are led to ask how ideologies can be derived from the general stock of ideas. I earlier defined ideology as a complex of ideas selected to underwrite and represent a particular project of installing, maintaining, and aggrandizing power in social relationships. The selection and management of interpretants and control over verbal communication are strategic operations in ideological construction.
Frequently, these functions are assigned to “intellectuals,” part-time or full-time specialists in the communication process, a theme addressed by Mannheim and Gramsci. It may be that human minds or neural systems are constituted to avoid incoherence and to resist “cognitive dissonance” (Festinger 1957); yet it also seems to be the case that not all people are equally concerned with creating cognitive coherence (see Fernandez 1965). Some take on the special role of exercising such functions; this is the case in societies at all levels of complexity.
There is an “intellectual politics in the creation of culture” (Verdery 1991, 420), especially salient in situations where the exercise of structural power is based on the control of culturally available knowledge. Katherine Verdery has stressed the importance of communicative competence in socialist societies, where “language and discourse are among the ultimate means of production” (p. 430). Verdery describes these societies as characterized by states that depend on a mix of coercion and symbolic consensus, but her point applies as well to those marked by weak states or lacking states altogether, where performative speech-acts often play a major role and where words are thought to convey effective power. Performatives are utterances that do something, that accompany an action “not to report facts, but to influence people” (Austin 1962, 234); they promise something, issue orders, warn of trouble, or initiate a change of conditions, such as declaring someone to be married or installing a personage in a seat of power and prestige (Austin 1976). Bourdieu has rightly cautioned against the tendency of speech-act theorists to assume that the power of performative speech derives from language itself. He stresses that the speech-act lacks power and validity unless it is institutionally authorized and carried out by a person with the appropriate cultural credentials (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 148). Thus, competence in enacting performative speech is both a source of power and a demonstration of it.
What has been said about ideology in communication, including the role of intellectuals, applies to nonverbal as well as verbal communication. An important contribution of semiotics is its emphasis on the fact that cultural mandates are not only coded into verbal linguistic forms but are all-pervasive in humanly constructed worlds. The built environment can be shaped semiotically to condense the verbal interpretants around certain emblems and thus convey imperative messages to the beholder. This is seen in such modern phenomena as the Colonial Williamsburg restoration (Parmentier 1994, chap. 6) and the orchestration of Baroque art with music, massed processions, and elaborate ritual performances (Turner 1988) and also in the great prehistoric sites of ancient megapolities like Teotihuacan or Borobudur. Similarly, ideological condensation of interpretants marks particular art forms, such as Mozart’s operas that comment on the contradictions of the Enlightenment in Austria (Till 1993), Richard Wagner’s myth-making Gesamtkunstwerk, and Leni Riefenstahl’s film “Triumph of the Will” celebrating a National Socialist party congress. All ideologies enshrine an aesthetic of sign communication in their very mode of construction.
A special vehicle of ideology that usually combines verbal and nonverbal communication to generate messages in condensed form is ritual. Maurice Bloch has described ritual as a mode of performance in which propositions are muted and played down, while the force of illocutionary speech and performatives is magnified. The addition of dance and music to speech heightens the emotional impact of performatives still further, while diminishing the cognitive component in communication (1974, 1977). In the ritual process, the participant enters a spatially and temporally structured environment and moves through it guided by a prescribed script that dictates bodily movements and emotional responses. In the process, ritual reshapes bodies and minds through the performance itself (Bell 1992, 98–101). Participation in ritual, Roy Rappaport
