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LSA LI 2017 – Lecture # 2. 10 VII 17

EVENT. Performativity (Austin) as conventionalized (metapragmatically regimented) cause-and-effect. Interaction ritual in relation to full-tilt ritual events. Adjaceny-pair structures of metricalization in discursive interaction. Explicit ritual’s “autonomous” performativity via metricalization and other meta-semiotic tactics; hyper-meta-semiosis and the space-time trajectory of dynamic figuration (indexical iconicity).

Last time we showed how “what is said” or conveyed in-and-by discourse indexically presumes

upon or “indexically presupposes” certain conditions in the context of an emerging

entextualization, revealed in the emerging metrical patterns of denotational information

organized by deixis, repetition, parallelism [repetition with semantic substitutions], and on

occasion by metricalizing ‘discourse markers’ (Schiffrin) like so, well, yeah and, etc. We

followed along as a denotational text, in the instance a narrative of remembered/re-lived

experience, came into being. At every point in the emergence of the text, the structure of what

was previously uttered became part of the context for what was then being added to the

information conveyed; this special text-internal relationship we term co-textuality. ([Slide 1]

Note that, as shown in my overall diagram of the material we examined last time, we can

represent the overall co-textuality as a beautiful ultimate structure, much as we can diagram the

internal morphosyntax of a finished sentence-type abstracted from the crucial fact that co-textual

structure emerges over the spacetime experience of discourse; it is a model of an emergent

structure. It never ceases to amaze me how complex and powerful must be the computational

production and interpretation mechanisms of mind on which this depends, constantly at-the-

ready to to revise an emerging denotational text in their hermeneutic – interpretative – operations

of entextualization/contextualization.)

This time I want to lay out “indexical entailment,” the context-transforming direction of

indexical cause-and-effect not in the realm merely of “what is said,” but in the realm of “what is

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socioculturally done or effectuated – brought about in terms of norms of “effectiveness-in-

context” – so that discourse is as well the medium of moves in an interactional text that tells us

how individuals relate one to another in the events of the social world. The lesson here is that

every instance of entailing indexicality depends upon – is licensed and regimented by, we say – a

meta-indexical (or meta-pragmatic) function, whether explicit – as we’ll see for Austinian

‘performative utterances’ – or implicit – as is maximally seen in ritual, which rests on dense

metricalization of all the communicative machinery, language included, plus other “meta-”

semiotic forms.

Recall from last time the concept of the adjacency pair, a metrical structure linking

utterances that is generated by interacting individuals engaging one with another. Observe [Slide

2] how many adjaceny pairs have meta-pragmatic names, indicating how speakers identify the

social moves they meta-pragmatically ascribe to individuals in terms of what their utterances

normatively – “appropriately” – elicit in response/respond to as elicited. Thus, to identify some

utterance form with the label invitation is smoothly followed by something people label an

acceptance, and, less preferred, by an utterance labeled by speakers as a refusal or declination.

(The less preferred second generally triggers further adjaceny pair work, such as elaborating

reasons and modified invitation with new refusal – or acceptance or conditional acceptance, etc.)

As we will see in detail in Ervin-Tripp’s paper next time, very few adjaceny pair-parts that we

readily can label with interpretations of what they achieve or accomplish during discursive

interaction have the canonical grammatical formula identified by John L. Austin [Slide 3], the

so-called ‘explicit primary performative’ construction uttered under properly licensed conditions.

***

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Even Austinian “explicit primary performative [EPP] utterances,” as in [Slide 3], denotationally

anchored to the here-and-now by the personal deixis of the grammatical Agentive Subject and

Recipient (Direct or Indirect, as the case may be) Object, depend crucially on the descriptor, the

metapragmatic verb describing the event in which a token of the form occurs, so reflexively

denoting this event in which it occurs as one of the type described by the verb. (Recall here the

culminating explicit primary performative in a marriage in this culture, which we’ll come to

shortly.) “What is now happening ought to be taken as, ought to count-as an instance of such-

and-such (whatever the descriptor stipulates).” Of course, like any ritual act, it frequently fails

so to count, so an “I warn you that …” construction may in fact instance a “threat,” a descriptor

that cannot, as it turns out in English, be used in an explicit primary performative construction,

though it describes a kind of social action with consequentiality. (There is no *“I threaten you

that …!”) So old Austin differentiated between the “illocutionary force” of an utterance, the

normative or conventional (or Legisign) consequentiality described by the verb in the EPP

utterance, and its “perlocutionary effect,” and retrodictively – since he endowed these utterances

with a magic essence, “force,” just like Bronislaw Malinowski’s Trobrianders do for their

magical formulae – its possible “perrlocutionary forces,” though as you can see the whole matter

is just really one of the possible gaps between lexically-coded normative expectation – the act-

type that the verb predicates – and what actually happens on an occasion of its use.

And, since these utterances are “explicit” by having the canonical I- VERB – you form, and

“primary” because they transparently or explicitly describe the conventional – cosmically

known; the semantic/denotational meaning of the verb, in fact, as part of presupposed lexical

knowledge – kind of act an utterance is supposed to instantiate, note [Slide 4] that one generally

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encounters a whole two-by-two table of possible types of consequential utterance-acts, only one

small category of which are of Austin’s explicit primary performative type.

[Think about the two dimensions of classification of such so-called “speech acts” from the

Austinian point of view: explicitness (explicit denotation in a metapragmatic lexical word or

expression, like the main verb or predicate expression) and primariness (the unmarked

[unremarkable] or regular way of accomplishing an understood move in interactional text

realtime). What utterance expression might even count as an equivalent non-explicit, non-

primary way of “doing [particular] things with words,” like ‘promising’ or ‘asking’ or

‘baptizing’ or whatever, has no real solution by attempting to start from such E[xplicit] P[rimary]

P[erformative] descriptors and trying to equate other consequential verbal utterances with them

somehow. (Imagine trying to derive the equivalence of “This salad tastes a bit flat” to “Pass the

salt” said by A to B as a first adjacency pair-part at table as a ‘request’ for B so to do! That’s the

problem this “theory” sets for us.) Unless – unless – you have a theory of language utterances

(words, expressions, parsable constructions) that index clear intentions-in-context of the utterers

even when not denotationally externalized by EPP verbs. This folk metapragmatics was

developed by another British philosopher, though one resident in Berkeley, CA, rather than

Oxford: Paul Grice. The Gricean theories of meaning-as-intention are also empirical non-

starters, retrodictive cracker-barrel ruminations about an individual speaking agent’s both

functionally clear and conventional intentionality – whateve that might mean – operating in

social context, thought up by a sociologically ignorant but highly ingenious native – but we don’t

have time to delve into these non-starters in systematic detail.]

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Is it the case that every utterance in a first adjacency pair-part position must be, in effect,

translated into an EPP for us to be able to respond in kind with a coherent second? As you can

see [Slide 2] from the chart made by Stephen Levinson, we actually have elaborate social

knowledge of metrical adjacency-pair structures, with an elaborate metapragmatic vocabulary of

descriptors, for how we come to consciousness about interaction and its social cause-and-effect

nature. And, though we can describe a particular contribution to interaction as an act of such-

and-such kind, vanishingly few occur in the EPP form; it’s the metricalization of discourse in its

cumulative workings that allows us to understand what people are doing in the way of

coordinating socially.

But the situation is much worse for this Austinian “speech-act” approach. Historically,

the verbal descriptors of EPPs are constantly coming into and leaving the language. [Slide 5]

Who uses the former EPP verb quoth- any more, as in “Quoth I, ‘…’.” Particular expressions,

verbal and otherwise, happen to occur at any moment in some particular language used among

some particular community of practice in characteristic social acts; some of these are lexicalized

into verbal descriptors, metapragmatic expressions that denote what act someone engages in, or

can engage in. Did I catch you Googling the other day, something you could not have been

doing 20 years ago (the corporation was founded in 1998). Very few metapragmatic descriptors

then become EPP descriptors, as in French saluer, used in an EPP je vous salue. But even noises

are turned, with what Benveniste termed a delocutionary derivation, into metapragmatic

descriptors of kinds of utterance-events with social consequentiality. In fact, in English almost

any expression or gesture can be so transformed. So we should not confuse the “performativity”

of utterance-expressions in general – whatever we say – with the completely arbitrary and

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historically contingent list of lexical forms of EPP-usable head verbs, all hyponyms of ‘say’, to

try to build a theory of how language “works” as the medium of social action.

So if there is in general no direct association even of sentence-long utterances with what they

count-as in the performance of socially consequential acts, how can we actually study what goes

on in real life? Speakers have intuitions – and strong ideologically formed ones in the post-

Enlightenment West – that language is just to “talk-about” the universe of experience and

imagination; but if speakers co-contribute to such talk, what emerges intersubjectively between

them is a gradually formed denotational text, a precipitated “what has been said” by the

aggregate of individuals, for example alternating as speakers. How, using the tools we will

develop in the analysis of ritual, does such a denotational text as gradually precipitated come to

count as – to be consequential as – a particular interactional text, what comes about in the realm

of social eventhood?

Austin’s happening to fall over EPPs and, in his hokey philosopher’s mode trying to

explain them does remind us that for EPPs in particular [Slide 6], for them to have their

indexically entailing cause-and-effect contribution to social life, several conditions must be taken

account of. And we should also note [Slide 7] that EPPs are thick on the interpersonal social

ground when stakes are high in ritualized interactions, such as courtrooms – we’ll see an

example next time – and places of ritual life-cycle transitions.

***

By some fortuitous or serendipitous good luck, social anthropologists and other nascent

social scientists of yore – think of Uncle Emile [Durkheim] and his Elementary Forms of the

Religious Life, for example – have long looked at societies through the lens of society’s

explicitly recognized ritual events, events where the people concerned have strong intuitions that

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textuality [elaborate and anxious entextualization] is linked to – indeed, necessary to –

consequentiality [indexically entailing contextualization, a.k.a. “performativity”]. So for the

participants there is a purposive (hence, “functionally ‘efficient’”) clarity: this ritual will

accomplish or achieve such-and-such; that’s why we do it/why I participate in it; for the analyst,

as we will see this week, there is maximal functional-sub-two clarity in the way of sharply

defined text based on co-textuality as metapragmatic function. Recall here the key problem: that

we can study contextualization only to the extent that entextualization demarcates co-textuality

and, thence, what can come to function as contextualizing in its effectiveness. The claim this

week is that first, explicit rituals are hyper-meta-semiotic along multiple dimensions; and second,

why ritual texts have such characteristics is that – metaphorically, of course – these allow ritual

text to shout “I’m an autonomous text! I’m an autonomous text!” in all kinds of ways – and

therefore its consequentiality as an interactional text follows automatically within the context it

indexically presupposes, generally a scheme of what I term “cosmic belief.” Once we

understand ritual entextualization/contextualization this week, we can go on in the next couple of

weeks to define any old denotational text and see how it, too, projects into interactional text-in-

context.

So, in thinking about “why” ritual works, we ought to keep in mind two things: first, that

ritual does not always work, in fact, so ritual’s efficacy is everywhere contingent; and second,

that whether ritual works or fails to work on any given occasion, we can observe and analyze the

mechanics – the how – of ritual as a performance text in context, like all manifestations of social

life. But we must also keep in mind that what people locally recognize as ritual they invest with

explicit power-to-transform social life as manifested more generally, and so ritual becomes,

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ethnographically speaking, a special kind of text-in-context, the “specialness” of which is, of

course, what we should seek to illuminate.

Now Austin certainly reminds us that on certain social occasions, an individual utters a

formula such as “I pronounce you husband and wife” – in America, notwithstanding a Supreme

Court decision, we are currently still at war about whether or not “husband and husband” or

“wife and wife” can also occur in the formula, or just the term spouses. In-and-by the utterance

of the formula under the proper circumstances – there’s the catch – the social identities of two

individuals are rendered other than what they were before. There is ritual “efficacy” here, as not

only Austin but the natives, as it were, recognize, in that the uttering of a token (instance) of the

formula seems to map the context that existed before its utterance into a transformed context that

now exists after its utterance and, most importantly, is understood to be a consequence of its

utterance. That is, the social act of utterance seems to have a certain transformative power or

“force” – that is, when it works.

Austin, falling into extreme mysticism, tells us that “forces” – conventional “illocutionary

forces” and happenstance or actual “perlocutionary” ones – suddenly arise in-and-by the

utterance of such an EPP formula, and Shazzam! the “force” is causally consequential for social

life. (It is no different from the Trobriand Islanders of Malinowski’s account understanding that

the garden magician, in whispering his incantations over the garden implements, hoe, rake, etc.,

in the middle of the night, infuses them with growth principle – an essence – to make fat yams at

the end of the garden cycle for the person using those implements. Or any other kind of

conventional belief in magical forces suddenly coming into being as essences of

sign-vehicles/representamina.) I do not wish to dwell on error, because old Austin is verbalizing

the introspecting intuitions of the ethno-metapragmatic savage, the “folk” interpreter of social

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life, not the social scientist; and while we always pay attention to the native ethno-metapragmatic

input to pragmatics, which transforms indexicality in the dialectic of establishing the perceivable

signs of cultural value, as we will see in some weeks, notwithstanding I trust you see that you

cannot derive in any empirically useful way – as a student of such matters – from EPPs in

English or similar languages a useful theory of what happens in interactional text – in English

more generally or in any other society and its language.

Now as Austin himself notes in elaborate, if unsystematic and unscientific terms, there

are elaborate pre-conditions on who, by community convention, may normatively utter the

formula, denoting and affecting whom, before whom as observing or ratifying others, and in

what kind of institutionally formed event context. The formula, too, has a conventionally

stipulated grammatico-lexical structure deviations from which may render the utterance invalid.

And most importantly there must be what Austin terms “uptake” of the act of utterance as first in

a sequence of acts in what our Conversation Analysis friends would term one or more second

adjacency pair-part acts that indicate if and how participants and others have understood the

performance of the utterance-formula. There are three sets of factors, then.

The pre-conditions are matters of what, sociologically speaking, we term recruitment to

role inhabitance on a particular institutionalized social occasion. Here we are dealing with a

ceremonial occasion, that is, one recognized by everyone in the community as a “ritual”

occasion, specifically a ‘marriage’. The individual occupying the role of Speaker/Sender of the

message in question occupies this role – is “recruited” to it – by virtue of being duly licensed or

authorized by the state, by a church or other collectivity of worshippers, or by both. Thus,

“who” the Speaker is really means what institutional pre-conditions map a determinate and

socially identifiable set of persons as the ones who can speak the formula effectively, that is,

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with the power or force it can have. Similarly, we can investigate the principles of role

recruitment as to who can occupy the roles understood here to be the referents of the term you,

here used with its full etymological meaning of ‘Second Person non-Singular’. In many Euro-

American situations, this must be a dyad who have bureaucratically and in other ways registered

their anticipatory intent to participate in this kind of ritual occasion as the “you” of the formulaic

utterance. They are not a random pair pulled off the street by the Speaker, nor indeed

unprepared for the utterance of the formula. They frequently have invited others to be onlookers

or Audience as we say, witnesses to the culminating moment who have been recruited to this

aggregated role by invitation of the dyad in question, their families, etc.

There will have been a time and place set for the ritual utterance, when and where all of

the roles will be properly inhabited in a determinate configuration in which a central triad –

Speaker and two Addressees – become the attended-to central activity for the Audience in

attendance, marked off in ritual space-time, as it were, in some conventionally theatricalized

staging. Formally walking in to take up the recruitment to role is frequently a carefully

choreographed figuration of the presumed-upon and impendingly transformed social dynamics

involved in a wedding. And all of this physical activity is just a precursor to the static spatial

text that allows the verbal text to do its ritual work. For example, in a church setting, the central

triad may come to its configurative culmination in the apse or before the usual place of liturgical

exercises, with or without further Attendants in a flanking, gendered array, while the Audience

will long since have filled the pews down-and-around/behind the central activity. This general

arrangement is transposed even to secular enactments in various other kinds of contexts, from

courthouses to city halls to a parental backyard or rented private club, in which a ritual

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processional and a ceremonial stasis precede the ritual utterance at issue here (not to mention the

carefully choreographed recessional as part of the Austinian “uptake”).

We should take note of all this choreography and stasis, by the way, because in it we

already see some of what we need to get beyond Austin’s lack of sociological insight. The

action-in-space-time of performing a ‘wedding’ in society brings individuals to be configured in

certain ways, as I have noted, having been recruited from certain sociologically describable

statuses outside the event-context of the ritual performance itself. The Speaker is an officiant

who speaks – if you pardon the pun – ex cathedra, that is, with the backing of at least one

organization in which his or her status exists before and outside of the ritual; in a sense, then, this

status-in-organization brings the organization into the context of ritual performance, it makes it

part of the here-and-now of ritual performance. “In the name of our Savior Jesus Christ and by

the authority vested in me by the State of Illinois…” precedes the Austinian performative

formula as uttered by priests and pastors in local churches in my state, who can speak in the

name of the divinity within the church organization and who, recognized by the state

government, has the civil power as well to transform individuals into married dyads. It is not

just anyone who can effectively utter the formula in question, but someone who synecdochically

– pars pro tota – figurates and hence, ritually, is the church and/or state operating with the

church’s and/or state’s power of social definition and classification – and here, re-classification

in the here-and-now of the ritual.

Everyone at such a ceremony is there, we might point out, in-and-as figuration within a

dynamic drama in which a supplicating dyad, wishing legitimation by church and/or state, with

accompanying interested relatives, friends, etc. looking on, is legitimated as a social dyad of a

particular kind – think of the rights and benefits/costs that come with marriage – in-and-by the ex

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cathedra utterance of the representative of the controlling institutional collectivity or

collectivities, church and/or state. The Audience, those socially most concerned with the social

status of the supplicants, is conventionally delighted by and relieved at the outcome of the

supplication when ultimately granted in-and-by the utterance of the formula, perhaps for many

different reasons. All kinds of additional figurations sometimes accompany, particularly

figurations of ‘giving’-and-‘taking’, ‘sharing’, ‘earlier/former’ vs. ‘later/future’, and of course

dense manifestations of identities.

Let us turn, second, to Austinian “uptake.” In the immediate context, one of the most

common sequellae following the utterance of the explicit primary performative is a public

demonstration of affection, most generally at the specific permission articulated by the

officiant/Speaker still acting for the supervening power of church and/or state: “You may

kiss/embrace.” or “You may kiss the bride” in a more sexist idiom, again an ex cathedra license,

pars pro tota, to the implied legitimation of sexuality – and of its unfettered consequences – as a

perquisite of the married state consequent upon the occurrence of the ritual. And this done for all

in the Audience to see – and frequently applaud! (The first post-nuptial “kiss” before the

relevantly aggregated public ritually figurates what everyone understands is to follow in private.)

I leave to last the third factor here, the text, the actual explicit primary performative

utterance, “[By the authority vested in me by …,] I pronounce you husband and wife.” Austin,

you may recall, had the expectable intuition of the native speaker that such an utterance – of

course, only when uttered in appropriate ritual-event space-time – was quite different from the

usual utterance predicating a truth about the world, and that is why his initial guess was that there

are two great classes of utterances, the so-called “constative” and the so-called “performative.”

He later gives this up in favor of his tripartition of locutionary—illocutionary—perlocutionary

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acts, but alas discovers that every utterance-act, even every erstwhile “constative” one, partakes

of all three! Yet he never analyzed the text in any comparative detail. As it turns out, as you

saw in [Slide 3], universally, when such explicit primary performative utterances occur, they

have a comparable grammatico-lexical structure: ‘First Person, Agentive-Volitional’

grammatical Subject or equivalent; ‘Second Person, Recipient/Benefactee’ grammatical

(Indirect) Object or equivalent; frequently a complement nominal or subordinate clause denoting

some aspect of the condition brought about in-and-by the utterance; and the head lexical Verb of

the formula a semantic hyponym of the verb say- with minimal obligatory inflection to create a

clause with a finite verb.

The last fact, true no matter one is using English or Chinook or whatever, is very

important to the grammatically sensitive. [Slide 3] Minimal obligatory inflection in the ‘First

Person’ is what we term “unmarked” inflection, the kind of grammatical marking used for purely

formal, as opposed to fully denotational purposes. [Slide 8] In English, note that the simple

present tense form is used, contrasting with a descriptive proposition of actually ongoing

activity, such as – to continue with this verb pronounce- – I am pronouncing you husband and

wife, namely, a description of what the Speaker-as-Referent is doing in-and-at the moment of

utterance. But how does the Speaker-as-Referent actually “do” or accomplish what this

performative utterance seems to do? Certainly not by simply describing the utterance-act. The

key to understanding how an explicit primary performative utterance can effectuate a social

transformation is to see that while the I Agentive Subject and the you Recipient (Indirect) Object

anchor the utterance deictically (with indexical denotation) to the here-and-now of the utterance

context, there is no functioning tense marking as in the -ing form of the English – merely the

formality of making a pseudo-finite clause as constrained by grammatical requirements. The

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verb looks, in fact, like a generic or habitual statement (compare “I pronounce Bulgarian

poorly”), relevantly to be evaluated as true or false whenever, wherever. It is a statement of a

law-like regularity, not a statement about some specific occurrence such as what is going on in

the here-and-now of the ritual event. What it is communicating is, as I term it, following

Benjamin Lee Whorf, in “nomic” – generic law-stating – relationship to the event in which it is

uttered, rather than a description of that event or of any other specific event.

But note, uttering this formula counts as performing the event. Given we can decipher all

of the preconditions such as I described above, what more does one need to be able to decipher

about this formula in order to understand its ritual force? I think [Slide 9] one needs to know

four things: [1] that the tokens of I and of you refer to those inhabiting specific roles and

properly recruited to them. Here, “I” is the officiant invoking the authority of some licensing

organization(s), and “you” denotes the two individuals wishing to be socially transformed; [2]

that the expression husband and wife denotes a generic relational dyad of kinship-status

reciprocals such that if ‘Y’ = ‘X’s husband’ then ‘X’ = ‘Y’s wife’, kinship terms being

inalienably possessed two-place relational semantic units not normally used without explicit or

implied possessor. As used here, the very attempt at generic denotation of a collective dyad as

the outcome of the utterance addressed to the aggregate “you” of two individuals is part of a

larger idiomatic expression; [3] that larger idiomatic expression, [pronounce- … [husband- and

wife-]], meaning ‘verbally to do [whatever this expression describes]’ is the effective

performative operator here, what John Searle would term (pronounce?) the “illocutionary force

indicating device.” It has a meaning parallel to [baptize-/christen-/name- … [PROPER NAME]],

but its verb pronounce- is used for non-proper nouns and adjectives, where its illocutionary

targets are transformed into instances of what is describable as a general social category (should

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everything work), rather than into the referent of a specific indexical like a proper name. Like

most of our semantic knowledge, we need only have the vaguest of intuitions of the meaning or

‘sense” of the performative operator, so long as we are able to recognize new contextual

instances of its application, whether successful (effective) or unsuccessful (ineffective) – for

which all the ritual preparation is a good contextual cue; [4] that an instance – a token, a replica

in space-times – of this nomic or predicatively generic grammatical expression is performed in

this context such that if we know what the expression in [3] means (even just to recognize

another instance) and to whom it is applying in the ritual here-and-now, from [1], then we know

that this is a ‘marriage’ here-and-now or, as the formula makes so literally clear, a “union” of

two individuals into a single collective dyad-as-generically denotable, for which this is the

culminating transformative formula, a ritual one-liner to which all that went before leads. And

let no man [= person] rent it asunder, as old timers used to say.

The formula, then, no less than all of the choreographed stages or phases of the larger

event, processional > configurative role inhabitance by the focal triad of officiant and two

erstwhile individuals, later a social dyad > recessional at a marriage is an inhabited figuration of

its own social significance as an outcome: licensed union of two individuals as a dyad that is a

recognized membership collectivity in society (itself in pars pro tota representation by the

AUDIENCE witnessing (monitoring and reacting to) the spectacle.

Every ritual works the same way, by dynamic figuration that mobilizes participants to

role inhabitance by particular rules of recruitment, that enacts motion or movement in space and

time across multiple semiotic channels, including especially the verbal channel, and that in effect

diagrammatically portrays the sought-after transformative goal or end of the event. So there are

three factors to keep in mind.

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[Slide 10] First, every ritual presumes upon participants’ knowledge of what I like to

term the “cosmic orders” immanent in its figurations by the very fact of experiencing what is

going on and being said/sung/danced/etc. as figuration. [Slide Cosmic orders have nothing

inherently to do with astronomy – let alone astrology! What I am jokingly pointing to is

cultural knowledge of the normativities of the social universe, particular sectors of which are

relevant to particular rituals in society. In marriage in Euro-American societies, for instance, the

intuitive knowledge we have involving complex structures of cognatic kinship, matters of

consanguinity vs. affinity, individuals—aggregates—collectivities as manifest in kinship,

sexuality licensed in society vs. guarded from society, state and/or church vs. individual and kin-

and domestic units, even so-called “love,” erotic and otherwise, are all key elements of cultural

knowledge and its affective orientational tugs on our psyches that are obviously being invoked

by aspects of the ritual-as-inhabitable framework of action. (Isn’t it wonderful that one of the

couple wore clothing that his/her parent wore at his/her wedding! It makes us cry with

sentiment.) They are the well from which the very performability of ritual figuration is drawn.

Second, every ritual presumes upon participants’ knowledge of the modalities of fixity –

such as relative locations where different roles are relationally inhabitable, such as internally

complex illocutionarily-effective formulae – which constitute at least the building blocks of the

spatiotemporally emergent “text” or textual structure (or architectonic) of the ritual event.

There is, in short, a densely intersected organization in space-time of many highly patterned

modalities of semiotic form through which ritual participation communicates its figurations of

the cosmic order. [Slide 11=Slide 1] This is, in essence, a “poetics” in the Jakobsonian sense,

that is, a simultaneous, multi-modal metricalization of an emergently determinate “inside” of a

text in each of its modalities and across all modalities that comes into being in any ritual, by

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which units of accomplishment as ordered into text-segments can be measured out, frequently

seeming to induce a hierarchical clustering of partials of the overall ritual event into phases that

both participants and analysts can experience as such. One or another of the modes of semiosis

may predominate as the figurational focus in any such phase or segment, and, scripted as all this

is by dense metricalization, experiencing any current phase of a ritual form, we know what has

preceded and what will follow. In short, ritual semiosis is densely co-textual at the same time as

cosmically con-textual, connecting both forms of indexicality being the very essence of its

mechanism. When one arrives at a wedding hearing the strains of Mendelssohn’s “Wedding

March,” one knows one has arrived too late to witness the moment of ritual union, but one

should be ready to participate in the subsequent figuration of fecundity by participating in the

collective showering of the newly married couple with rice or – in a variant practice – rose petals

(which comes after the public kiss, of course and heightens its pars pro tota ritual efficacy).

Third, every ritual presumes upon the connectivity of the two other factors via that

relevant role inhabitants’ participation in the event so as to dynamically figurate, through all the

partial phased figurations, the movement from what is presumed upon as the initial state of

things at T0 to what is, if all goes well, a rather different state of things at interval-end T1. While,

as just noted above, there is an overall poetics or dense metricalization of laminated multi-

modalities by which we can even anticipate “what comes next,” ritual is, when all is said and

done, performed in socio-space-time, not out of it (as some would-be mystics have it). It is a

text-in-praesentia that gradually emerges through what participants do in all the figuratively

relevant semiotic modes. Hence, ritual never just sets out “what is”; ritual takes us from a “what

has been” (before this moment in socio-space-time) to a “what will have been” (if this ritual

performance “works” as a figuration of cause-and-effect).

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Hence, all the anxiety about ritual efficacy is concerned with doing things “correctly” so

that the dynamic figuration constitutes a diagram of the transformative power of what

happens – i.e., in the instance, will have happened – when everyone does his or her part over the

space-time course of ritual enactment indexically connected to the cosmic order (we term this the

‘cosmic axis’ of instantiation whereby the cosmic order is “made flesh,” rendered indexically

here, now as the “context.” Critique of ritual enactment, we find ethnographically, centers on

finding faults of performance to have constituted performance of a faulty, that is, unsuccessful

ritual. The bride and groom flubbed the recitation of their vows, so the precondition for their

being validly or effectively “pronounced husband and wife” did not obtain [note the inverse

order of the binomials, by the way: the first “ladies first” in a social aggregation, the second,

“head of collective household first”]. In his preamble to uttering the performative formula, the

officiant called the groom by someone else’s name, so he could not have been marrying the

particular “you” standing before him or her. Performance of figuration traces the diagrammatic

figuration of transformation that is the essence of ritual, so that, poorly or questionably

accomplished, it calls into question the outcome (even legally, one might point out for the case of

marriage and other identity-transforming rituals). (And by the way, garden magicians in Kiriwina

are always being accused of not having whispered the right formulae, or the complete formulae,

or even any formula of the garden magic, when the yams don’t grow big and succulent!)

For the semiotically savvy ethnographer, knowledge of two realms of this triad points in

the direction of being able to figure out the third in how ritual does its sociocultural work.

As one can now understand, the entire substance – the how – of ritual depends on iconic

and indexical semiotic processes through which the experienceable social world is transformed

in some respect by appeal to cultural presumptions about the universe. The case of the utterance

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of a simple explicit, primary performative formula is a one-sentence-long ritual text that depends

essentially on participants’ sharing the knowledge of the sense of the predicate, including a verb

that is a hyponym of the quotation-framing verb ‘say’ or its equivalent. Some of these

performative formulae, such as [pronounce- … [husband- and wife-]], have elaborate pre-

conditions and “uptake” requirements as well, while many of what we might term “everyday

performatives,” such as [agree- that/to …], have asymptotically vanishing nonlinguistic

contextual pre-conditions and depend maximally on interlocutory partners to their utterance

simply knowing the verb’s sense.

But when look at more elaborate and indeed more public kinds of ritual texts, we find

that what facilitates performative success is not that interested participants know the

straightforward senses of words and expressions, or the straightforward conventional

indexicalities of nonverbal signs. Instead, in keeping with the fact that ritual is figuration “all the

way down,” such figuration – operating at the level of meta-semiosis, in technical terms –

comprises the entirety of ritual. Such meta-semiosis manifests in a number of different forms, all

contributing to the overall macro-trope of autonomous performative power. Hence, the very

ritual ‘text’ must impress those concerned with its effectiveness as a self-licensed and self-

constructed entity-in-space-time, deriving its power from the cosmic orders to which all its

semiotic components indexically appeal as instantiated tokens of types. The dynamically

emergent ritual ‘text’ is built up, variously, from metasemantic [denotationally tropic or

‘metaphorical’ in Peirce’s sense] and metapragmatic [entextualization-determining] devices such

as we see abundantly illustrated in the Wolof villagers’ greeting rituals, as described by Judith

Irvine some years ago, or in the Christian liturgical service of the Eucharist.

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[Slide 12] Irvine focuses on interactional strategies associated with actual examples of

the ritual greeting against the backdrop of normative expectations. These are, as she terms them,

strategies of “status manipulation,” that is, ways in which an individual does indexical work to

extricate him- or herself from the expectations of this highly consequential public encounter. If,

as we note, there is a rigid template of metricalization built around a Q-&-A adjacency pair

structure, one’s position in the utterance cycle derives, in local understanding, from one’s

position within a caste-like structure of social stratification. Nobles, needless to say, are higher-

caste than griots, public speakers, propitiators of reputation and spokespersons for noble houses

on ritual occasions like marriages; a griot greets, while a noble is greeted (and celebrated as to

lineage, deeds, character). Griots speak sonorous, loud, rapid, elaborately metricalized and

grammatically and lexically fluent speech; nobles rasp softly and deliberately (slowly),

sometimes exhibiting disfluencies of grammar. When a griot greets a noble, an act of upward

propitiation, a recompense is appropriately returned by the noble as a kind of “tip” for the good

words; griot verbal behavior has value within a political economy of patronage.

Now against the backdrop of dynamic figuration normal to the greeting routine, given the

dense metricalization of the greeting, in two tiered structural forms that cluster the adjacency

pairs into distinct textual segments – like stanzas and lines in our European poetries – Irvine

reports on how individuals can perform ‘role distancing’, a kind of indexical editorializing on the

fact that presumptions of who – remember, sociologically kind of person – one is are incorrect or

relationally dubious, etc. One is attempting to make the current greeting non-canonical so that

one’s relational status for whatever follows shifts accordingly. Like a soldier stepping to the

half-beat rather than the beat, thus syncopating the metricalization of the march, one can steal

one’s interlocutor’s position in the adjacency pair metricalization: before he or she knows it, he

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or she is being greeted, or is greeting, in the poetry of turns! One can deliver one’s utterances

with the phonetic voice dynamics and tempo of who (what) one wants to be taken as in the

greeting event, for example greeting in the voice of a griot when one is a noble so as to signal

indexically that little recompense will result, etc. I hope you see that every greeting is a ritual

occasion for enhancing or attempting – if only for that social relationship – to transform identity,

and hence social positionality.

A person officiating at the service of the Eucharist bounds off a ritual space of objects at

a table, an altar in the spacetime of liturgical rite – wine poured from a cruet into a chalice,

wafers or pieces of bread on a paten or ceremonial plate, both comestibles at a ritual table

between him- or herself and a congregation of co-participatory onlookers in a congregation.

[Slide 13] He or she begins to tell the story of The Last Supper of Jesus and the Apostles,1

specifically quoting in the transposed here-and-now of first-person figural narration and, at the

appropriate places for ostensive reference – pointing to the objects of the congregation’s

perception and the officiant’s narration – gesturally holding up in turn the ritual objects: the

congregants are informed that “This is my body,” and instructed “Partake ye thereof!” and

likewise “This is my blood,” “Drink ye of it!” just as were the Apostles, according to the

liturgical order of the fateful Passover Seder that constitutes, by belief, actually the first or

authorizing occasion of the ritual in which the officiant and congregants are participating in

1In the Gospels, one finds the parallel narrative passages at Matthew 26:26-29, Mark 14:22-25, and Luke 22:17-20; John 6:48-58 articulates the mystical equivalences that underlie the liturgical figuration in the Eucharistic service. For example: “And as they were eating Jesus took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to the disciples and said, ‘Take, eat; this is My body.’ Then he took the cup, and gave thanks, and gave it to them saying, ‘Drink from it, all of you. For this is My blood of the new covenant, which is shed for many for the remission of sins. …’.” (Matthew 26:26-28) “Then [Jesus] took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given up for you—do this in my remembrance.’ Likewise he took the cup after they had eaten and said, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for you.’ ” (Luke 22:19–20)

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unbroken (indexical) chain. [Slide 14] The diagrammatic figuration thus is: [In the here-and-

now] Officiant : congregant :: [At the sacred initiating moment] Jesus : Apostles. The first is

experienced, the second part of the cosmic order of sacred belief.

Observe, too, that the specific figurational equivalences – the ritual baptism of objects

with names – will have been stated by someone whose authority goes back – “indexically,” as

we say – in presumptively unbroken line to Jesus himself, via a causal chain of authorization.

The ritual action-to-follow with these now figurating signs has thus also been given figurational

value within the bounds of the ritual form. And, ritually “transubstantiated” as these comestibles

now have become,2 to eat and drink, to consume or incorporate, we should say, is mystically

followed by an equal and opposite-or-greater incorporation. For as one consumes or

incorporates the host in turn, first the officiant him- or herself, and then the totality of individual

congregants, each figurationally re-sacrifices “the lamb of God” in the “new covenant” so as to

be incorporated him- or herself – through the figure of mutual co-participation – in the body-and-

blood of Jesus made institutional on earth, to wit, the church and its spiritual corporation. The

individual act of faith, INCORPORATING SO AS TO BE INCORPORATED, figurates an aggregate

becoming a collectivity “in Christ,” as one says with a pregnant metaphor of containment made

literal – as is the case for metaphor in all ritual – in the Eucharistic mystery.

This central ritual of Christian faith, moreover, is a brilliantly compact chiastic structure of

action, as classical rhetoric would see it, from the Greek term for a marking with the letter Chi,

chiasmós, a criss-cross reciprocation figurating, of course, The Cross. Here, the 90-degree

perpendicularity of the iconic cross is dynamically figurated by recriprocal action, a back-and-

forth whereby a small ingestion figurating incorporation is tantamount to, i.e., results in, a large

2Of course, the precise nature of such transubstantiation has been a theological doctrine of some controversial nature over the centuries, around which churches have fissioned.

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counter-directional incorporation into a mystical corporate union or fellowship. This is literally

an act – as in “social act” – of renewal of individual faith in the divine, selfless, self-sacrificing

agency of Jesus who became the sacrifice on the Cross, this act the foundation for the faithful of

Christianity-as-lived.

Once we see how ritual as such operates, we can tackle ordinary discourse to see that, by degree,

it works the same way insofar it works at all.