Envisioning Power. Eric R. Wolf
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the forms taken by these categories in the individual: the idea of all at the root of classifications could not have come from the individual, but only from society (p. 441). Saussure’s linguistic categories, like Durkheim’s “collective representations,” were attributes of a collectivity, through a “faculty of mind” at work in that collectivity. Saussure, like the neo-Kantians, therefore accorded precedence to mental schemata over experience in dealing with the world, contributing to the forcefulness of the mentalistic turn.
Yet if Saussure’s structuralist view of the workings of langue constituted the main strength of his approach, his view of speech as a domain of free variation through individual choice has proved the weak point of Saussurean linguistics. As such, it has invited criticisms, and also theoretical modifications and alternatives. One source of criticism was from linguists who agreed with Saussure that the gift of language resided in the mind but who thought that he had not gone far enough. Thus, Noam Chomsky took him to task for restricting langue to a system of static grammatical properties and for failing to recognize that grammatical rules also governed the creative construction of sentences uttered in the language of everyday life (1964, 59–60). Yet in making this critique, Chomsky himself revived the Saussurean dichotomy of langue and parole, now rebaptized as “competence” and “performance,” with “competence” defined as the proper arena of linguistic concern and “performance” accorded only secondary status.
A quite different kind of critique raised questions about the relationship of langue and parole to variation in external social contexts. Three such critical stances bear particularly on the question of the relationship between ideas and power. One was that of Malinowski, who described himself as an “ethnographic empiricist.” Malinowski elaborated his influential perspective on language and linguistics on the basis of field materials gathered in fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands between 1914 and 1918. He acknowledged that language had structure but at the same time distanced himself from Saussurean structuralism by asserting that language was “a mode of action, rather than a counter-sign of thought” (Firth 1964, 94).
Another critique of Saussure’s langue was put forward by the Russian linguist Valentin N. Vološinov, who in 1929 published Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, which combined the perspectives of Marxism and linguistic structuralism. After it appeared in English translation in 1973, a review noted that it practically predated “all contemporary interests ranging from semiotics to speech act theory” (Yengoyan 1977, 701). The book is also notable in that its authorship remains uncertain; it may have been written in whole or in part by Mikhail Bakhtin and published, for political reasons, under Vološinov’s authorship. For Vološinov/Bakhtin it was crucial that language was lived out socially, by different cohorts of people interacting in different social contexts. He criticized the assumption that signs were univalent within any speech community and varied only through individual choice in the course of speech. Instead, he argued, signs were likely to be emitted with “accents” that varied by social categories, such as gender, generation, class, occupation, or status or by different interpretations of tradition. Such “multiac-centuality,” he noted, could turn communication into “an arena of struggle” (1986, 23) rather than a chorus of concord.
A third approach to language that went beyond the Saussurean model derived from the American pragmatist and logician Charles Peirce (1839–1914), whose work became important in semiotics in the 1960s. Peirce had argued that “the study of language ought to be based upon a study of the necessary conditions to which signs must conform in order to fulfill their function as signs” (in Parmentier 1994, 11). If no inherent causative relationship exists between an indicator and what it “stands for” in the world, then their mutual association has to be explained, justified, and certified on other grounds. According to Peirce, every linguistic and cultural sign or set of signs that ties an indicator to its designatum must come accompanied by another sign, which refers to the previous sign and defines and explicates it. This sign he called the “interpretant” (Peirce 1955, 100). Each sign functioning as an interprétant requires still another interpretant and sign to define it in turn, thus making semiosis “an infinite process,” “an endless series” (in Parmentier 1994, 27).
In the wake of such critiques, there developed in the 1960s and 1970s various efforts to modify the picture of langue advanced by Saussure and to question the dominant role of grammar defended by Chomsky. The aim of these endeavors was instead “to develop a theory of language in its social context, rather than a theory of grammar,” to delineate which elements of the social context affect the production and understanding 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