Wesleyan University

Language and the Shift from Signs to Practices in Cultural Inquiry

Author(s): Richard Biernacki
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Oct., 2000), pp. 289-310
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History and Theory39 (October2000), 289-310 ( WesleyanUniversity2000 ISSN: 0018-2656

FORUMON CULTUREAND EXPLANATIONIN HISTORICALINQUIRY

1.

LANGUAGE AND THE SHIFT FROM SIGNS TO

PRACTICES IN CULTURAL INQUIRY

RICHARDBIERNACKI

ABSTRACT

A model of culture as a partially coherent system of signs comprised the most widely
employed instrumentfor analyzing culturalmeaning among the new culturalhistorians.
However, the model failed to account for meanings that agents produce by executing
social practicesratherthan by only "reading"contrastsamong signs. It also encouraged
some analysts to conceive the difference between sign system and concrete practice as
that between what is graspable as an intellectual form and what remains inaccessibly
material or corporeal. This essay introduces three exemplars of the ties between signs
and practicesto show how the pragmaticsof using signs comprises a structureand a gen-
eratorof meaning in its own right. In the three exemplars,which are based on the tropes
of metonymy,metaphor,and irony, I employ the analytic tools of linguistics to appreci-
ate the non-discursiveorganizationof practice. Analysis of the diverse logics for orga-
nizing practice offers promising means for investigatinghow signs come to seem expe-
rientially real for their users. Finally, this view of culture in practice suggests new
hypotheses aboutthe possible interdependenciesas well as the lack of connection among
the elements of a culturalsetting.

The new cultural history has become both preeminent and old. A quarter century
has now passed since the phrase "linguistic turn" entered our vocabulary of
inquiry. The great majority of the think pieces published in the last five years as
symposia or review essays in the American Historical Review have focused on
discursive identities, collective memory, fictional narratives, and other motifs of
cultural history. But a just-issued collection of essays on method in cultural his-
tory and historical sociology, edited by two early practitioners of cultural method
in historical inquiry, Lynn Hunt and Victoria Bonnell, suggests that some are trou-
bled by the role of culture in historical inquiry in the current phase of consolida-
tion "after the revolution." The very title of their collection, Beyond the Cultural
Turn, raises the question "What next?" Above all, Hunt and Bonnell conclude,
many analysts at the current juncture share a general unease "with a definition of
culture as entirely systematic, symbolic, or linguistic."' Recent historical works
on the embodied culture of material life and on the use of culture in practice rep-
resent efforts to rethink the constituents of culture and how culture fits into social

1. Editors'introduction,Beyond the CulturalTurn,ed. VictoriaBonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley,

1999), 26.

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290 RICHARDBIERNACKI

context-without returning,however,to the notion that the economic or political

logic of that context determinesa culture'sthemes and organization.2
From my perspective,this most recent emphasis on embeddingculture in its
practicalcontext evinces a stirringthat seems likely to lead historicalresearchers
to cede two premises that gave rise to the culturalturnin the first place. Rather
thanmoving away from cultureas a tool of illumination,however,historiansare
likely to renew theirunderstandingof how culture"works"in action. I will eval-
uate, quickly andprovocatively,the advantagesand limitationsof the most wide-
ly employed model of culture that the culturalturn in historical investigations
made familiar;then I tentativelyoffer examples of an alternateapproachto cul-
ture, one focused on the implicit ties between representationsand practices. In
the currentstate of play, I suggest, investigatorshave much to gain from typify-
ing the organizationof the use of signs in ongoing practicesas a structurein its
own right, ratherthan focusing primarilyon abstractingthe systematic relations
among signs in a separate,purely semiotic reality.Not only would such an alter-
native approachto culturecapturethe meaningsgeneratedthroughthe execution
of practices that are not discernible from reading the signs or symbols of prac-
tice; it would also help to resolve some of the disabling limitations in the new
culturalhistory's tools of explanation.
For movementsso rich as the new culturalhistoryor cultural-historicalsociol-
ogy, it would be reckless to suppose there has been any kind of consensus about
whatcultureis or how to studyit.3Nonetheless,it is helpful to considertwo of the
assumptionsthatwere at least the most widely sharedandwhose fusion, I suspect,
powered the extraordinaryperiod of invention in historical studies during the
1980s. These assumptionspromotedthe establishmentof a new, if diversecanon
of culturalhistories that has come to include the works of such investigatorsas
RobertDarnton,LynnHunt,Joan Scott, CarloGinzburg,andWilliam Sewell, Jr.

I. THE FORMALIZINGPREMISE

The most importantassumption,which I will call the "formalizingpremise,"is

thatmeaningis generatedby the synchronicrelationsamong signs in a "signsys-
tem." Darnton, Hunt, Scott, Ginzburg,and Sewell have not only adopted this
assumptionin their craft.They have articulatedit in their methodologicalreflec-
tions.4To captureculturalmeanings,they argue,investigatorsought to isolate the

2. Recent exemplarsinclude ChandraMukerji,TerritorialAmbitionsand the Gardensat Versailles

(Cambridge,Eng., 1997); KenAlder, Engineeringthe Revolution:Armsand Enlightenmentin France,
1763-1815 (Princeton, 1997); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the
Making (Chicago, 1998), especially chaptertwo.
3. For an example of a more unconventionalapproachthat highlighted cultural meaning as the
product of fluid social interaction, see John R. Hall, "Social Interaction,Culture, and Historical
Studies,"in SymbolicInteractionand CulturalStudies, ed. HowardS. Becker and Michal M. McCall
(Chicago, 1990), 31-32.
4. RobertDarnton,"TheSymbolic Elementin History,"Journalof ModernHistory58 (1986), 218-
234; The New CulturalHistory, ed. Lynn Hunt (Berkeley, 1989), "Introduction:History,Culture,and
Text,"16-17; JoanScott, Genderand the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 59-60; CarloGinzburg,

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 THE SHIFTFROMSIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 291

contrastsand systematicrelationsamong the signs employed in a semiotic com-

munity.It is worth emphasizinghow far this assumptioncan be stretchedwith-
out losing its role. In the craft of researchit does not block practitionersfrom
portrayingthe messy, multilayeredprocesses of social action. But it leads inves-
tigatorsto assumethattheirjob ultimatelyis to abstractout of this historicalflow
of action the networksof analogy and difference among signs at discretejunc-
tures and to analyze those networks as a separate semiotic dimension. In the
handsof the early Michel Foucault,most famously,this approachresultedin sta-
tic but architecturallyelegant presentations of the relations of signification.5
Lynn Hunt introduced a more dynamic perspective in her analyses of the
sequences of political change in the French Revolution. She showed how the
agents' conduct complied with the placement of political emblems into general
narrativeforms of comedy, tragedy,and romance.6
More recently, investigatorshave sought to underscoredeparturesfrom the
assumptionthat culture is fixed or orderedby making culturepart of a story of
"symbolic conflict,""transgression,"and "culturalsubversion."Yet these recent
emphaseson slippage in a culture'scoherenceunderscorehow enduringthe for-
malist premise remains.7Joan Scott's emphasis on the instability of meanings
and their tactical transformations,for instance, still draws on the notion that the
overarchingrelations among signs at a given moment generatesculturalmean-
ing. Scott searches for relations of significance across whole constellations of
intersectingdiscourses, even if those relations are driven by locally contingent,
discrepantundertakings.8In a similar rethinkingof the stability of culture as a
"system,"WilliamSewell has askedhow sign systems are open to transformation
and remainstructureswith their own powers of cohesion as generatorsof mean-
ing. To combine those perspectives on structureand change, he proposes we
rethinkcultureas a kind of code thatis both realized and transformedin practice.
Although Sewell's rich project is still taking shape, he has set out by defining
practice derivatively,as a peculiar historical instantiationof an inheritedcode.
"Toengage in culturalpractice,"he reasons, "is to make use of a semiotic code
to do somethingin the world."9In keeping with the formalistpremise that cul-

Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches'Sabbath (New York, 1992), 23, 30; William Sewell, Jr., "The
Concept(s)of Culture,"in Beyond the CulturalTurn,ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 35-61. In culturalsociol-
ogy, perhapsthe most stringentanalysis of the syntax of symbols, drawingon Saussure,is KarenA.
Cerulo,IdentityDesigns: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation (New Brunswick,N.J., 1995).
5. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York,
1971).
6. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture,and Class in the FrenchRevolution(Berkeley, 1984), 34-39.
7. Analysts may position deviance and creativityas parts of a cohesive sign system. See the cri-
tiques by CatherineGallagherand Stephen Greenblattin Practicing the New Historicism (Chicago,
2000), 12-13 and by William M. Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe. A Critique of
Historical Understanding(Cambridge,Eng., 1987), 39.
8. Scott's notion of culturalmeaning draws, I think, on what William Sewell has termed "thin"
coherence among cultural elements. Sewell's synthetic review of changes in investigators'under-
standingsof culture,"TheConcept(s)of Culture,"convincingly demonstratescontinuedreliance on a
concept of cultureas a sign system. See Beyond the CulturalTurn,ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 35-61.
9. Sewell, "TheConcept(s) of Culture,"in Beyond the CulturalTurn,ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 51.

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292 RICHARDBIERNACKI

ture should be grasped as a sign system, he designates the synchronically

defined, intellectualcode-not the processes of puttingit to work-as compris-
ing the structureof a culture.
The notion of cultureas a sign system exhilaratedinvestigatorsby suggesting
that humanaction could be elucidatedas a kind of text.10But an implicationof
the textual analogy was to divide the agents' self-understandingof their conduct
(the text) from its execution (the doing), and to make their self-understandingthe
chief object of cultural analysis. The division took place because investigators
reasonedthat if culturalmeanings emerge from interdependenciesamong signs,
practicegeneratesmeaning as it is reflectedon in turnas itself a sign in relation
to othersigns. Researcherssupposedthatagents experiencethe meaningof prac-
tice as the apprehensionand composition of sign statementsabout the world or
about their conduct in it. The conception of culture as "sign system" worked
against analyzing the generationof meaning in the processual actions in which
agents not only reflectupon, but occupy the world and organizeand execute their
practicesin it. The receptionof PierreBourdieu'swork on body hexis reinforced
this unfortunatenarrowingof focus. For it suggested to many a kind of dualism
between the textualand the material,between what was graspableas an intellec-
tual form and what remainedinaccessibly corporeal.What lay outside the logic
of sign readingseemed eitherimpenetrableto verbalrepresentationor functioned
by principles that could not be broughtinto relation with models of discursive
thought.1 1
Theorizing culture as sign system also set up a hierarchybetween sign and
practicethat paralleledthat between a general culturalstructureand a contextu-
ally unique, eventful use of that structure.Practicecomprisedsimply the manip-
ulation of signs in specific statements.This notion of culture renderedpractice
and the system of signs complementarybut not coequal. Investigatorsabsorbed
the pragmaticsof using signs into their historicallyparticularaccounts of each
discrete setting, ratherthan theorizingthose pragmaticsas a component of cul-
turalstructurein their own right.
Investigatorsalso organizedtheir histories aroundthe assumptionthat culture
creates unanticipatedconsequencesfor agents because social reality is consti-
tuted by the semantic relations among signs. Every powerful form of historical
inquiryincludes formulas for narratingthe tragedyof the unintendedeffects of
humanagency. In the new culturalhistory,sign systems producedthose miscar-
riages. Signs mislead agents aboutthe situationalconsequencesof actionby con-

10. In Darnton'sthe Great Cat Massacre, for example, the analysis culminatesby showing how
Parisianjourneymenin revoltcould manipulateritualsigns as dextrouslyas poets could words.Robert
Darnton,The Great Cat Massacre and OtherEpisodes in French CulturalHistory (New York, 1984),
101.
11. As illustration,see Bourdieu'soft-repeatedassertionthat the logic of practice "hasnothing in
common with intellectualwork, that it consists of an activity of practicalconstruction. .. that ordi-
nary notions of thought, consciousness, knowledge preventus from adequatelythinking."In Pierre
Bourdieu and Lofc Wacquant,An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago, 1992), 121. On the
reception of Bourdieu's divide between thought and practice, see Paul Connerton,How Societies
Remember(Cambridge,Eng., 1989), 94-95.

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 THE SHIFT FROM SIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 293

veying a counterproductivereading of the world. Incidentalchanges in the net-

work of signs may also activatelargermetaphorictransferswhich the agents did
not anticipateand which may even underminetheir attemptsat the self-interest-
ed deployment of those signs. Sewell shows, for instance, how French
Enlightenmentthinkerswho classified humankindas part of natureratherthanas
spiritualbeings counterposedto natureaccidentallyturnedupside down the place
of manuallaborin the hierarchyof social honor and, by implication,recoded the
sources of authorityand the grounds for organizingthe professions.12 With the
model of cultureas sign reading,the pathos of historicalaction derives as much
from intellectualmaneuveringto masterthe representationof social relations as
from the coercive capacities of social relations."3

II. THE ESSENTIALIZINGPREMISE

The second of the two majorassumptionsthat came togetherin the 1980s could
well be termedthe "essentializingpremise."By this I mean to suggest how cul-
turalinvestigatorsmistook the concepts of "sign" and "sign reading"for parts
of the naturalfurnitureof the world, ratherthan as historicallygenerated"ways
of seeing." Clifford Geertz's statement of principle in The Interpretationof
Culturesproved phenomenally influentialin legitimating this move. "As inter-
worked systems of construablesigns," Geertz wrote, "cultureis not a power,
something to which social events, behaviors, institutions, or processes can be
causally attributed;it is a context, something within which they can be intelligi-
bly-that is, thickly-described."14 Geertz disallowed any form of illumination
that would put cultureon the same plane as other elements with which it might
be compared(it "is not a power").In my view, however,there is a contradiction
here thathad to be suppressedat all cost: the formal theory of meaning focused
on sign and sign system as naturalconstituentsviolates the principlethat all con-
cepts are conjuredby convention.To call on the title of one of Geertz's books,
the paradigmof the sign system is the only exception to the rule that every prin-
ciple is "local knowledge." 15 This naturalizingmove emerges in Geertz's non-

12. William Sewell, Jr., Workand Revolution in France: The Language of Laborfrom the Old
Regimeto 1848 (Cambridge,Eng., 1980), 23-24, 71.
13. See, for illustration,Lynn Hunt, review essay of Penser la revolutionfranCaise,History and
Theory20 (1981), 320; and the treatmentof languageas a brokerof historyin GarethStedmanJones,
"RethinkingChartism,"in his Languages of Class: Studies in English WorkingClass History,
1832-1982 (Cambridge,Eng., 1983).
14. CliffordGeertz, The Interpretationof Cultures(New York, 1973), 14.
15. It is worth noting how Geertz's naturalizingof culture as a fundamentis confirmed by his
stance towardthose outside the culturalistfold. He often wrote that the ultimategoal of anthropolo-
gy was to promote dialogue between different communities in the world. Yet he rejected dialogue
between himself and those outside his own paradigm.For instance, he treatedthe metaphorsof cul-
ture-skepticsas inadmissible a priori and blacklisted the enterpriseof social explanationas "social
physics" (CliffordGeertz,Local Knowledge:FurtherEssays in InterpretiveAnthropology[New York,
1983], 3). Geertz describedthe acceptanceof the culturalparadigmas a kind of conversionprocess:
you are either inside the flock or you are lost outside of it. His illiberal stance is evident in how he
narratesthe rise of interpretivestudies. In 1972 he wrote that "Even Marxists are quoting Cassirer;

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294 RICHARDBIERNACKI

chalance about the nomenclatureemployed to think about interpretationof

meanings. Whereas some linguists see high stakes in the technical distinctions
we make abouttypes of signs and abouthow they work, Geertz'squips aboutthe
lack of real differences among the terms establishes that whateverthe choice of
label, somethinglike the sign is so fundamentallypartof the world, it cannot be
coloredby the voucherswe adopt.16Culturalhistoriansand sociologists followed
Geertzin reifying the concept of a sign system as a naturallygiven dimension of
social reality.17 At the same time they were ready to acknowledge the tentative
status of their diagnoses of particularsign systems and the possibility of multi-
ple, even irreconcilablereconstructionsby historiansof those systems.18
The culturalturntook place when historicalinvestigatorsfound thatthey could
persuasivelycombine the formalizing and the essentializing premises: the pro-
posal that culture consists of a (partially)cohesive, intelligible system of signs
fused with the proposalthat our general notion of a sign system reflects a basic
and irreducible sphere of being. Nowadays, the union seems so natural and
inevitable a part of the scholarly landscape, it is difficult to conceive the two
premises separately. But the first assumption in isolation, exemplified in
Saussure'swork, yields a formaltheoryof semanticsfor artificiallydelimitedlin-
guistic units, the kind handledby philologists in ancient texts strippedof a life-
context.On its own Saussure'smodel neverseemed to presenta competitiveform
of historicalexplanationfor complex-socialcontexts.After all, how could a book-
ish view of semantics alone compete with the more relevantconjecturethat the
motors of conduct-the interestsand values that decide how agents orient them-
selves to signs-were generatedby the institutionsof, say, governmentor class?
The second assumptionin isolation, the essentializingpremise, assertedthe pri-
macy or autonomyof culturein historicalprocesses, but lacked a means for jus-
tifying this sovereignty.Combiningit with the formalistpremisesolved this prob-
lem by making a sign system constitutiveand definitiveof agents' conduct.
Each of the two assumptionsshores up the inadequaciesof the other.In taking
over a Saussurian-affiliatedtheory of sign systems, the formalizingpremise had

even positivists, KennethBurke"(The Interpretationof Cultures,29). Geertz portraysthe ongoing

shift to the study of symbols as a wondrousprocess of conversion."Thewoods are full of eager inter-
preters,"Geertz concludes in Local Knowledge (21). His essays in every climate from the 1960s
throughthe 1990s assert that the conversionsare ongoing and will continue.The eventless teleology
implies thatpracticesof inquirygrow by naturalassent to general truth,ratherthan by empiricalcon-
test and messy debateover historicalriddles.
16. Geertz,Local Knowledge,21; CliffordGeertz,AvailableLight:AnthropologicalReflectionson
Philosophical Topics(Princeton,2000), 17.
17. I attemptedto trace historians' naturalizingof the concept of the sign system in Richard
Biernacki,"Methodand Metaphorafter the New CulturalHistory,"in Beyond the CulturalTurn,ed.
Bonnell and Hunt, 64.
18. John E. Toews portrayedthe acceptance of a multiplicity of interpretationsof a historical
process as a form of anti-essentialism in "Historiographyas Exorcism: Conjuring Up 'Foreign
Worlds'and Historicizing Subjects,"Theoryand Society 27 (August, 1998), 593. In my view, how-
ever, it is easy to imagine scientists who agree among themselves that their concepts reflect the
essence of the world, while disagreeingonly on key measurementsmade with those concepts in a par-
ticularcontext.

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 THE SHIFT FROM SIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 295

inheritedthe problem of analyzing how agents use signs to indicate or to "refer

to" processes in the social world. That problem arises because the signifieds
called to life by the signs are not of the world of give-and-takeinteraction.They
are only concepts within an idealized sign system, defined by their interdepen-
dencies in a separate and closed semiotic domain. How, in the terms of this
model, do agents take the pure signifieds of that sign system and use them to
index things and to make things happenin theirworld of action?Saussurerecog-
nized this as a distinct and importantquestion,one he thoughtdid not have to be
addressed in a theory of structure.19His mode of exposition from dictionary
examples enabled him to devote his enterpriseto the philologist's analysis of
tokens of language isolated from any context of utterance.More specifically,he
relegatedthe question of how agents connect signifieds with their world of prac-
tice and social interactionto a haphazardevent of parole, comparativelyunsuited
for theoreticalanalysis.20This distancebetween sign system andcontextof action
might have been expected to make Saussure'sapproachunhelpfuland unconge-
nial for historians,who remainamong the paramountinvestigatorsof irreducible
contexts. But the essentializingpremise of the culturalturnpatchedup this dis-
tance between the sign in a formally conceived semiotic system and the agent's
use of signs as tools of maneuverand referencein the world. By suggesting that
the sign is not a philosopher'sartifactbut the constituentof a real firmament,and
that the world consists of signs "all the way down,"it collapsed categoricaldis-
tinctionsbetween signs and actionin the world, as well as between signifieds and
what they problematicallyindex in the world. Culturalinvetigatorsassociated
theirconstructsof "signifieds"with the historicaluniverseitself. Agents, actions,
and processes were now the signs and signifieds by which they revealed them-
selves in history. Bruno Latour drew on this naturalizingreduction when he
claimed that diagnostic machineryin laboratoriesthatproduce signs in the form
of data and readoutsdo thereby"speak"and exercise a genuine agency.21
On its own the essentializing move was similarly problematic.The new cul-
turalhistorianshad customarilyobjected to the searchfor realist foundationsfor
history,but they replacedone ultimateground-economic conditions and social
structure,which the social historiansand materialistMarxistshad reified-with
another,named "culture"or "sign system." The formalist premise suppressed
thatcontradictorycontinuity.We usually classify a "sign system"as belonging to
the categoryof a figure, and as such it appearsan insubstantialconstruct,a mere
form. Culture,Geertz insists, remains a mot, not a chose, even if indispensable

19. For a swift exposition of Saussure'sview of the use of languageto make referenceto the world,
see Benjamin Lee, "Peirce, Frege, Saussure, and Whorf: The Semiotic Mediation of Ontology,"in
Semiotic Meditation:Socioculturaland Psychological Perspectives,ed. E. Mertz and R. Parmentier
(Orlando,Fla., 1985), 113.
20. FerdinandSaussure,Course in General Linguistics(New York, 1959), 15, 18.
* 21. Bruno Latour, WeHave Never Been Modern (Cambridge,Mass., 1993), 23. MargaretJacob
shows how Latour'sequationof naturalwith humanagency rests on a naturalizedconcept of the sign
in "Science Studies after Social Construction,"in Beyond the CulturalTurn,ed. Bonnell and Hunt,
106.

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296 RICHARDBIERNACKI

andgrounding.22 The ethereal,unrealconnotationsof "sign system"camouflaged

its function of denoting a prerequisitematerialthat served as the putativeunder-
pinning of history.In the conduct of inquiry,neither of the two premises-nei-
ther the formalizing nor the essentializing-could work without the other, but
togetherthey createda new conception of historicalanalysis.

III. THE TURN IN METHOD

The fusion of the formalist and essentializing premises licensed rich and novel
methodologicalmoves. In retrospectit is easy to quibble with their soundness,
but they enabledhistoriansto launch dazzling new genres of research.
1. Historicalinvestigatorsused the marriageof the two assumptionsto show
that the deciphermentof meaning is not the explication of subjectivemeanings
or states of consciousness locked away in the heads of individualagents. Instead
culturalinvestigatorsextracteda semiotic code (or at least a model of partialcon-
sistencies) from public symbols and conventions.The code is independentof the
ideas in the head of any individual.As Geertz always emphasized, the analyst
does not have to perceive what agents perceive, only the sharedconventionsthe
agents perceive with.23That is sufficient for the investigatorto explain how the
agents use the conventionsso as to carryon their own thoughtor performances.
Perhaps only the marriageof the formalist and essentializing premises could
have so naturallylegitimatedthe pursuitof the putativecode, not of individuals'
fluid consciousness and thoughts, as the grasping of the tenable foundationto
historicalprocess. The abstractedcode for studying meaning became more sub-
stantial than the agents' thinking itself. Historians were relieved of the inter-
minable evidentiarygame of guessing the inwardintentions in agents' sayings.
They had a rationalefor limiting themselves to the accessible conventions by
which those sayings were structured-or, more exactly, to examples sufficientto
supportthe inventionof a putativelysharedmodel of their meanings. Likewise
sociologists who had been influenced by the Weberianand Parsonianviews of
culturewere now fortunatethey no longer had to stake inquiriesinto cultureon
the agents' "ultimatevalues."Those final commitmentshad not only proven dif-
ficult to documentand measure;worse yet, since the constraintsand ethical con-
tradictionsof actualsocial settings skewed the agents'pursuitof ultimatevalues,
these values had begun to appearto be related only tangentiallyto the agents'
observeddecision-makingand courses of action.24
2. The new combinationof premises gave investigatorsa license to relate any
piece of cultureto another.If meaningis generatedby an approximatecoherence
in a sign system thatreaches across local sites of practice,then investigatorscan
startwith any fragmentand move with it to a perspectiveon a largerculturalsys-
22. Geertz,Available Light, 12.
23. As Geertz famously put it, "Cultureis public because meaning is." Geertz, The Interpretation
of Cultures,12. For his most recent formulation,see Available Light, 16.
24. Ann Swidler, "Culturein Action: Symbols and Strategies,"AmericanSociological Review 51
(April, 1986), 275, 280.

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 THE SHIFTFROM SIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 297

tem. As is well known,this strategypermittedthe new historicistsin literarystud-

ies to relate fragmentsof aesthetic texts to bits of almost any other kind of text
or symbolic practice, popular or elite.25But it also meant investigatorsdid not
have to arguefor the importanceof the arcanedetails thathad caughttheirfancy,
or decide a priori what practices were importantfor initiatingstudy-a peasant
tale, to recall one of Darnton'scelebratedstudies, could provoke one to identify
the uniqueness of "French culture in general."26The essentializing premise
helped imply that the underlyingqualities connecting the textual fragmentsinto
a whole were not conjuredby the act of interpretation,but presentin the minuti-
ae themselves, and indeed necessary for each detail to have developed at all.27
For historiansof distantandpartiallynon-literatelocales who were challengedin
their researchby the skewed productionand preservationof documentation,the
license to startwith whateverlimited and opaque sources remainedat hand, and
to follow their noses, proved exhilarating.By supposing individual thought is
constitutedby the use of codes in semiotic communities, investigatorsreceived
an unprecedentedauthorityto move from the rare, accidentallypreservedwrit-
ings of individualsto deductionsabout the codes and counter-codesof commu-
nities at large.28
3. The combinationof premises gave investigatorsa means of making culture
both an explanatoryfoundationand a device for conceiving the metamorphosing
power of actions and events. To appreciatethe culturallytransformativepower of
the contingentin history,an analystneeds to begin with an orderlydissection-
a model, if you will-of how a field of signs fits together,if incompletely,at an
initial historicaljuncture. That is the only means of appreciatinghow a local,
even incidentalevent can triggerfar-reachingchanges in a cognitive framework.
The view of culture as a set of mutually dependentsigns satisfied that require-
ment for identifying a kind of fundamental(if potentiallyunstable)structureand
its built-inpossibilities for eventful change. Earlierunderstandingsof cultureas
a collection of values and norms had explained change as a largely gradual,
inevitable product of social evolution;29or, alternatively,had focused only on
massive interventions(such as sudden contact between civilizations) or on the
deliberatelycreativegenius of individuals.The methods of the culturalturncre-
ated a new understandingof how the outcomes of historicalprocesses are both
deeply structuredby culture and contingent on conjuncturesof local events.
William Sewell's analysis of the transformativepower of the taking of the
Bastille in the FrenchRevolutionrepresentsthe most sophisticatedamongrecent
attemptsto apply these dual insights. Sewell shows how the inheritedambiguity

25. Stephen Greenblatt,"TheTouch of the Real,"in The Fate of Culture:Geertzand Beyond, ed.
SherryOrtner(Berkeley, 1999).
26. Darnton,The Great Cat Massacre, 64.
27. I try to develop this point from a differentperspectivein "Methodand Metaphorafterthe New
CulturalHistory,"in Beyond the CulturalTurn,ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 70-71.
28. Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms:The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-CenturyMiller
(Baltimore, 1980).
29. See, illustratively,RobertNisbet, Social Change and History (Oxford, 1969), 264ff.

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298 RICHARDBIERNACKI

of the term "le peuple"-which referredto the sovereignty of the citizenry at

large as well as to the poor commonersof the streets-contained the potentialfor
the innovation of interpretingthe mob action of the Bastille as the legitimate
inaugurationof a new regime through "revolution."30 Where historiansproved
less receptiveto the formalistnotion of cultureas a structurednetwork,they were
less well equippedto analyze eventful political transformations. In Germany,for
example, they focused more exclusively in Alltagsgeschichte on the inward
details and fluidity of everydaythought.3'
4. Finally, the marriageof the two primaryassumptionsreleased investigators
from the problem of weighing the relative explanatorycontributionsof cultural
elements in particularhistoricaloutcomes. Ratherthan asking what would have
happenedin the absence of specific ingredients-that is, asking what difference
they made-historical investigatorscould take for grantedthe explanatoryforce
of an outline of local signs due to the a priori theoremthat culturewas constitu-
tive of the world.32In the U.S. this philosophical point of entry was crucial for
facilitating the professional conversion of social historians. For it freed those
who were making the turnto culturefrom the challenge of specifying precisely
how explanationsthatmade relationsamong signs the way to illuminationwere
competitivelysuperiorfor a historicalsetting. The two foundingpremises of the
new cultural history also legitimated the sufficiency of explanationsbased on
intensive analysis of single cases-the historian'straditionalforte-rather than
pressinghistoriansto seek comparativeevidence in supportof the inferencesthey
made.33
Althougheach of these methodologicaldeparturesinvites separateappraisal,I
would like to focus on two broaderproblems that resulted from theorizing cul-
ture as a sign system.

IV.A HIDDEN REDUCTIONISM

The first, astonishing difficulty is that the cultural analysts surreptitiously

embracedsocioeconomic reductionismin their narratives.In a word, the covert
practiceof culturalhistory underminedthe explicit professions of culturaltheo-
ry. To explicatethis sweeping claim, it is helpful to undertakean intensive analy-
sis of an exemplarywork where such reductionismwould least be expected. Let
me considerthe argumentsof JoanScott'sjustly celebratedessays in Genderand
the Politics of History. In "WorkIdentitiesfor Men and Women,"Scott follows

30. William Sewell, "HistoricalEvents as Transformationsof Structures:InventingRevolutionat

the Bastille,"Theoryand Society 25 (December, 1996), 863.
31. See, illustratively,Hans-UlrichWehler,Politikin der Geschichte:Essays (Munich, 1998), 193-
194.
32. For a detailed exposition, see Biernacki, "Method and Metaphor after the New Cultural
History,"in Beyond the CulturalTurn,ed. Bonnell and Hunt, 65ff.
33. MarkA. Schneidercrippledthe force of Geertz's analysis of the Balinese cockfight-and thus
the logic of isolated case studies-by suggesting that featuresof the fight which Geertzconnected to
a singularlocal culturewere actually sharedby fights in very distantand differentcommunities.See
MarkA. Schneider,Cultureand Enchantment(Chicago, 1993), 65-66.

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 THE SHIFTFROM SIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 299

the play of imagery about gender in "economic"discourse among Parisiangar-

ment workersduringthe 1840s. Yet, to explain the formulationand adoptionof
such a discourse among workers,she cites the crude socioeconomic pressuresof
declining wages and de-skilling. Among male and female garmentworkers,she
reasoned,"Theemphasisfor both groupswas on economics, on the ways the gar-
ment trades were being transformedby increasingly minute divisions of labor
and the employmentof large numbersof unskilled workerssewing at home for
low piece-rates."34 Why in this essay does Scott assume so automaticallythatthe
rise of an idiom of economics among workers is reflective of problems of
employmentin the economy-problems of a kind thatare, afterall, almost a con-
stantto be found at every historicalconjuncture?Why should the analystencode
the workers'complaintsas "economic"in origin, ratherthan as classifying them
as, say, symptoms of recent breakdownsin the social rights of citizenship? Or,
more radically,should not Scott also consider the possibility that the origins of
the new idiom are to be found at least proximallywithin the circuit of signs, say,
because the idiom servedthe symbolic functionof linking changes among varied
discourses? Or, supposing that the source of the economic idiom really were to
be found in the workplace,why should we assume an economic idiom arises for
an economic problem?The discourse of citizenship-claimsmight have coordi-
natedthe workers'responseas effectively as thatof political economy.Whateach
of these questionshighlightsis thatScott presumesthe workers'motives are eco-
nomic, as in the old social history.This strangeparallel arises because, like her
philosophical opponents,including the reductionistMarxists, she takes the link
between the characterof the problemand the tenorof the culturalresponseas rel-
atively unproblematic,because (like them) she collapses the social problemwith
the workers'representationof the problem.Scott switches only the metaphysics
of the concurrentterms, not their alignment with each other: for the crude
Marxists,formativebeing is on the side of the social problem;for Scott, on the
side of the representation.
Is the constructionof this essay by Scott exceptional, or is it symptomaticof
a more basic difficulty?In her essay on GarethStedmanJones's "TheLanguage
of Chartism,"she applies a poststructuralistlens to reconsider the triumphin
Britainof Chartistidioms of politics and class. In theirpeculiarculturalcircum-
stances, Chartistswere led to organizeworking men "by insisting on a common
denominatordespite certaindifferences.That common denominatorwas proper-
ty...."35 Justas Locke derivedthe enjoymentof individualpolitical rights from
property,so the Chartistsjustified their demand for political participation"by
claiming that the fruit of one's labor or labor power was itself property."36 The
Chartistconstructionof class became salient for unions, cooperativemovements,
and communitypolitics because its masterterm,property,resonatedacross mul-

34. JoanWallachScott, "WorkIdentitiesfor Men andWomen:The Politics of Workand Family in

the ParisianGarmentTradesin 1848,"in Genderand the Politics of History, 96. See also 98-99.
35. Ibid., 62.
36. Ibid., 63.

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300 RICHARDBIERNACKI

tiple realms of debate. Chartistdiscourse worked by "evolving the notion of

propertyin labor for disenfranchisedand otherwise propertylessmen."37Scott's
reasoning about Chartism'sappeal assumes, first, a fit and resonance between
materialownershipof a thing and the culturalconstructof "property." To put the
issue more generally,she imagines that linguistic play with the concepts "prop-
ertied" and "propertyless"grows out of the socioeconomic positions of the
movement's adherents, "propertylessmen." But the correspondencebecomes
spurious if the contemporaries'sense of propertyis considered. For Chartists,
propertywas not a thing, but a relationshipamong membersof a public commu-
nity that dispensed rights and obligations. Propertycould entail disposition over
land or labor skills, to be sure, but Chartistsdrew upon pre-Lockeannotions of
propertyto conceive that disposition as a social relationderivedfrom, and exer-
cised within, the priorpolitical and associationallife of local British communi-
ties.38For Chartists,property was originally property in a community body,
therefore cultural and political. Scott's reasoning gives priority to economic
reductionismin a second respect, then, by assumingthatpropertyis in the initial
instancematerialor economic, and thatpolitical membershipderives from argu-
ments about such property,not propertyfrom political membership.
I hardlymean to focus on Scott exclusively,because otherleading culturalhis-
torians-including Darntonand Ginzburg-make the reductionistmove with less
subtlety.39The ploy is so ubiquitous,it is propelled by an inner dynamic. Once
the investigatordefines cultureby the internalrelationsamong a system of signs,
as if those relationswere cut off from the othermaterialsof historicalprocess, it
is hardto resituatethose signs withininstitutionalstructuresexcept by havingone
of themparallelor reflectthe structureof thatinstitutionalcontext-as Scott does
over and again in her case studies. Or,to put the claim more simply,definingcul-
tureas an analyticallypurerealmof signs apartfrom its usages drives analyststo
some kind of reductionismwhen they identify the key sign or key functionwhich
reattachesthat abstractedrealm to its broaderinstitutionalcontext.40Historians
conceal the reductionismin theirmaneuverby rhetoricallyhighlightingthe philo-
sophical assumptionthat the sign system is constitutive of all domains of the
world in the first instance, even if, in concrete historicalnarrativesof how that
constitutedworldcomes to change, as in Scott's essay on workidentities,changes

37. Ibid., 62.

38. I drawhere on MargaretR. Somers's essay "The 'Misteries'of Property:Relationality,Rural-
Industrialization,and Community in Chartist Narratives of Political Rights," in Early Modern
Conceptionsof Property,ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London, 1996), especially 67, 83.
39. SarahMaza recentlycalled attentionto the reductionistmomentin one of Darnton'srightlycel-
ebratedessays, "PeasantsTell Tales:The Meaning of MotherGoose."To be sure, Darntoninsists that
venerableruralstories have their own symbolic coherence.Yet in practice,Maza notices, Darnton's
strategy "is to ask what concrete experiences most peasants would have had in common and, once
these are identified-scarcity, hunger, recurrentepidemics, high mortality-to explain the ways in
which the tales express materialconditionsin storiedform."SarahMaza, "Storiesin History:Cultural
Narrativesin Recent Worksin EuropeanHistory,"AmericanHistorical Review 101 (1996), 1497.
40. I endeavorto show how an emphasis on languageas discoursebreeds this covert reductionism
in "Workand Culturein the Reception of Class Ideologies," in ReworkingClass, ed. John. R. Hall
(Ithaca,N.Y, 1997), 173.

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 THE SHIFTFROM SIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 301

in the signs at hand are motivatedby non-semioticcausal pressures.Similarly,in

"Titian, Ovid, and Sixteenth-CenturyCodes for Erotic Illustration,"Carlo
Ginzburgforegroundsthe hidden order of significationin new genres of Italian
mythological paintings. Having established the irreducibilityof these new con-
veyors of meaning,Ginzburginquiresfurtherinto the backgroundcauses of their
emergence and concludes: "In the final analysis, all this probably can be
explainedby the demographicstrainsemergingin Europeansociety.""4

V. THE INCOMPLETEPREMISESOF THE MODEL OF CULTUREAS A SIGN SYSTEM

The second broad difficulty concealed in the culturalturn is that its principal,
Saussurean-affiliated model of sign systems as a distinctand irreduciblerealm is
untenableas an accountof how culturalmeaningis generated.Of course,linguists
such as R. Rommetveitand V. N. Voloshinov had made this point long ago by
offering more pragmatic,context-dependentanalyses of how language conveys
meaning.42But their philosophies have not dislodged the Saussureanaccount
because it is all too easy for historiansto see the critiquesas calling only for sup-
plements to the fashionableway of doing culturalanalysis. If the meanings of
signs also dependon how they areused in the momentin a particular,often unpre-
dictable social context, researcherscan take this as suggesting only that the sign
system is inflected by "history"and "politics" to produce specific meanings.
Historical investigatorsretain the notion that the synchronically and formally
defined sign system provides an adequategeneral structurefor culturalmeaning
in a community,and they view the particularsof practicein context as historical
instantiationsof thatstructure.43
Ratherthantry to arguehere thatanotherphilosophyof culturalmeaningmore
"accurately"capturesthe way significationworks, it is simplerto accept the for-
malist model on its termsand to reason abouthow it breaksdown by its own pro-
cedures. Once we develop formal models of the generationof culturalmeaning
out of contrasts among signs, we inauguratea divide between statements and
theirsignificance:meaning,as is often said, is no longer immanentin expression.
The divide in place, a verbal disclosure cannot contain a meaning, it can only
standat a distancefor something.This shifts the agenda of questions we pursue
to grasphow cultureworks. If meaningis at a remove from form, a model of cul-
ture has to acknowledge as a separateorder of logic the principles that agents
employ for bridging that deferralin major types of practice or types of social
41. Carlo Ginzburg,"Titian,Ovid, and Sixteenth-CenturyCodes for Erotic Illustration,"in Myths,
Emblems,Clues, transl.John and Anne C. Tedeschi (London, 1990), 93.
42. R. Rommetveit, On Message Structure: A Frameworkfor the Study of Language and
Communication(New York, 1974); V. N. Voloshinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language
[1929] (Cambridge,Mass., 1986).
43. Sonya 0. Rose, "CulturalAnalysis and Moral Discourses,"in Beyond the CulturalTurn,ed.
Bonnell and Hunt, 223. For a brilliantcritiqueof this method of haphazardlypatchingup the model
of language,see Michael Silverstein,"LanguageStructureand Linguistic Ideology,"in TheElements:
A Parasession on Linguistic Units and Levels, ed. Paul Clyne et al. (Chicago Linguistic Society,
1979).

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302 RICHARDBIERNACKI

context.It is also helpful to recall how the importof majorchunksof language-

even whole bodies of thought-builds on independentassumptionsabout what
terms and texts index in a setting. This dependency is most obvious with so-
called "indexicals"such as "here,""I,"or "thepast."Benedict Andersonattuned
investigatorsto this class of terms in his well-known account of realist novels in
Imagined Communities.44 To understand how these indexing processes take
place, we cannot restrictourselves to analyzing the grammarand semantics of
disclosures. It is a matterof pragmatics,not only of codes.
To sum up so far, I propose that aside from dissecting the content or structure
of sign systems, the analystalso classify the means by which agents connect rep-
resentationsto practiceas they engage in social conduct.Whatis "cultural"about
culturalanalysis, then, is not inclusion of a particulardimension that is founda-
tional of the setting-a pure realm of signifying signs-but analysis of the mode
by which the agents executing a practice come to operate in a meaningful and
symbolically "real"world. The definition of culture as a foundationalsign sys-
tem won culturalanalystsa pyrrhicvictory.They re-encodedas "signs"the fun-
damentalconstituentsof social life-the self, emotion, labor,individualinterest,
and more-without havingto show how lending those categoriesa statusas "cul-
tural"resultedin differentaccounts of the efficient mechanismsresponsible for
particularhistoricaloutcomes. To the contrary,the essentialist premise ironical-
ly facilitated applicationof rational choice and socioeconomic logics. By sup-
posing that the signs the agents used to interpretand negotiate the social world
correspondedunproblematicallyto the signs thatcomprisedthe social world, cul-
tural analysts unintentionallyauthorized utilitarianexplanations of outcomes.
For agents could be seen as following exclusively instrumentalor materialinter-
est in the world-relabeled as a sign-yet their conduct could illustrate at the
same time the proviso that cultureis constitutiveof the action and the scene "in
the last instance."45By contrast, if we think of culture as resting on the ties
between two levels-an order of representationsand an order of practice that
connects representationto a context of social exchange-we can concentratethe
analysis on variationin those types of ties.

VI. THREETYPIFYINGEXAMPLESOF PRACTICE

To reflectmore concretelyon the relationsbetween representationsand practice,

let me turn to three primaryillustrationsin well-known or recent works. These
examples are intended to sketch domains for future explorationratherthan to
map an organizedterritory.Each case illustrateshow a literarytrope figures the
relationbetween representationand practice;and each illustrateshow signs may

44. Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities:Reflectionson the Origin and Spread of Nation-

alism, rev. ed. (London, 1991), 32.
45. Consider,for example, the commendationsthe notion of the "moraleconomy" received even
after the behavior it designated was reexplained as rational price bargaining.For references, see
RichardBiernacki,TheFabricationof Labor: Germanyand Britain, 1640-1914 (Berkeley, 1995), 18,
note 47.

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 THE SHIFTFROM SIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 303

be connectedto context in the execution of a practice.I presentthe argumentsthe

authorsmake as models that are "good to think with,"not as empirical studies
whose claims to validity we need necessarily endorse.
In his canonical study of nationalism,Imagined Communities,Anderson fig-
ures the orderof representationsand that of practiceas two partsthat are related
by the trope of metonymy. The parts neither establish nor mirroreach other.
Anderson,unlike many who analyze the inventionof nationalidentity,does not
arguethat the imagery of nationalisttexts or the emblems of nationalityare suf-
ficient to make the category of the nation experientiallyreal. Instead, he shows
that the representationsin nationally-sharedtexts create an experience of the
nation when they are anchoredin peculiarreadingpracticessharedby a commu-
nity of print consumers.Every readerin the act of digesting the morningnews-
paper,he infers, is "well aware that the ceremony he performsis being replicat-
ed simultaneouslyby thousands(or millions) of others of whose existence he is
confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion."46The readers
enact the core principleof the nationalcommunity-that they are equal, anony-
mous members of a collective "we" moving through calendrical time-as an
implied assumptionof practicein the readingsituation,ratherthanas something
explicitly invokedby a representationor as a message received as an instruction.
The two levels at stake in Anderson's model, the representationsin the texts
and the collectively enactedproceduresfor consumingprint, are separablecom-
ponents thatcan be juxtaposedin the social setting he characterizesas printcap-
italism. Texts do not "represent"reading or prescribethe rules of reading;nor
does the collective reading process necessitate a particularstyle of writing or
form of addressin texts. Yet the conjoining of the collectively executed reading
practices with the representationsof the texts creates an experience of the
"nation"as the symbolicallyreal. Carryingout the pragmaticassumptionthatthe
text is sharedin an anonymouscommunityof printconsumersmanufacturesthe
meaning of the reading activity and enables the signs of the text to stand for an
experiencedreality of a community.47
ContrastAnderson'smodel with the ties between representationand practice
thatMarx sketchedin Das Kapital in his well-known, if controversialcritiqueof
the fetishism of commodities.In Marx's model a very differentrelationbetween
the two orders emerges, based on the trope of metaphor.Practice serves as the
paradigm for the representationit creates.Marx contends that agents' key expe-
rience-of commodities carryingtheir own abstractvalues to market-mirrors
the mechanicsof a practice,the public exchange of productsafterthey have been
46. Anderson,Imagined Comnmunities, 35.
47. A similarmetonymicrelationbetween representationsand enactedproceduresguides Matthew
Edney's recentwork on the colonial surveyingof India.Britishrulersrequireda map of Indiato define
India as a governablebody, but this representationno more establishedthe reality of the object than
a text establishesthe nationin Anderson'saccount.Edney demonstratesin luminousdetail how a col-
lective, practicalritual-the physical enactmentof obsessive mappingproceduresby British gentle-
men scientists-enshrined the mapped "India"as a symbolically real targetof governance.Matthew
H. Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843
(Chicago, 1997).

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304 RICHARDBIERNACKI

manufacturedby private labor. The independent producers who make contact

with each other in the moment of marketintercourseare concerned solely with
how much of anothercommoditythey can receive for theirown. Despite thatnar-
rowly efficientperspectiveon the significanceof theirwares, Marxcontends,pro-
ducers in the act of exchange equate their qualitativelydifferentkinds of human
labor as abstractembodiments of value. As Marx took care to emphasize, the
resultingmessage-that the diverseproductsin their own right,by theirown fea-
tures, are the vessels and measures of abstracthuman labor-is not an enabling
condition of practice,not a belief offered up for use or assent. The agents do not
become fetishists by intellection;they makethemselves fetishists in theirdeeds.48
"People do not bring the productsof their labor into relation with each other as
values because they accept these articles as merely the material receptacles of
homogeneoushumanlabor,"Marxwrote. "Itis just the other way around.By set-
ting diverse wares next to each other in exchange as values, they equate in that
very act, as general human labor, their diverse kids of labor."49In Marx's story
producersdo not initiateor execute the practiceby means of a representation.(At
most they requirea measureof price.) But implicit suppositions the equatingof
wares by a common substance, abstractlabor-are experienced as foundational
in the process of productionand exchange. In contrastwith the practice of read-
ing in Imagined Communities,the practice of exchange is not structuredby the
purpose of putting representationsto work; instead, the practice proceeds inde-
pendently. Enacting the exchange of finished products brings into cognizance,
however, the implicit principle that agents use to equate the products in prac-
tice the treatmentof laborproductsas autonomousbearersof abstractlabor.50
A thirdtype of relationbetween representationand practicecan be illustrated
through my comparativeresearch into nineteenth-centuryGerman and British
weaving mills, in The Fabricationof Labor.5'In this model, the tie between rep-
resentationand practiceis figuredby the trope of irony.The practicedepends for
its execution on an initial, constitutiverepresentationof the essence of the prac-
tice which the very execution of the practicecomments upon and ironizes (with-
out assuming an "objective"perspective, however, from which to classify the
representationas false). Weavers in both Germany and Britain were paid by
piece-ratescales thatgauged the quantityof output.When posted as writtentexts
on the factory walls, these schedules all appearedto gauge the same object: cloth
turned in. Surely one could expect nothing else from a piece-rate scale! The
British piece-rate scales representedthe value of differentfabrics by their densi-
ty given a fixed length of cloth, whereas the Germanscales portrayedthe value
of differentfabrics by the numberof weft insertions made per fixed length. The

48. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989), 31. Zizek shows Marx should
be considered a theoristof culturalpracticeratherthan a socioeconomic determinist.
49. Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Berlin, 1980), 88.
50. For a recent work that in my view analogously uses the trope of metaphorto figure the gener-
ation of representationsthrough"materialaction,"see Mukerji,TerritorialAmbitionsand the Gardens
of Versailles,especially 326, 332.
51. Biernacki, The Fabricationof Labor, chaptertwo.

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 THE SHIFTFROM SIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 305

weavers in both lands used the schedules to maximize earnings,not to conform

to a premise about the transferof labor.Yet from daily applicationof the repre-
sentations to equate diverse types of output, the British weavers learned that
value fluctuatedaccording to the dimension of the cloth, whereas the German
weavers learned that value fluctuatedaccording to the process of inserting the
weft threads. By accustoming themselves to different ways of comparing the
value of their fabrics, Germanweavers perceived the motions of labor, British
weavers the yards of output, as the denominatorof labor as a quantifiablesub-
stance.52Weaversin each countrycould not "read"the divergentmessages about
labor through the signs of the piece-rate systems posted on the wall; they
received those messages as a process, as weavers day by day exerienced the
transmissionof abstractlaborin the expenditureof laborpower-in Germany
or as laborconcretizedin finishedproducts in Britain.
In this example of piece-rates,unlike Marx's critiqueof the fetishism of com-
modities, a representation the systematiccodificationof the rules of turningin
diverse types of finished cloth for a wage is requisitefor the exchange to pro-
ceed. Yet agents could not decipherthe conditions for equatingdiverse kinds of
weaving work as general labor from the piece-rate scales themselves. As verbal
characterizations,the schedules equatepaymentwith the same object, cloth, and
nothing more. But practice implicitly changes the status of what is affirmedin
signs. In execution, the German system, by making the expenditure of labor
power in inserting weft threadsthe unit of abstractlabor, changes on a figural
level what is affirmedon the literal level of the scale. It turns cloth into only a
tokenfor the actualunit of value, the expenditureof laborpower. The Britishsys-
tem, too, turnsout to convey the meaning of abstractlabor,not merely to mea-
sure cloth as it claims. By ironizing the piece-rate scales, the unfolding of prac-
tice makes us skepticalof the ability of representationto secure the meaning of
agents' experience.By contrastwith the trope of metaphorin Marx's story, the
representationof products as autonomousbearers of value, though based on a
limitedperspective,is nonethelessa mirroradequateto the producers'experience
of theirpractice.53
Let me finish by pulling out the implications of the three examples and sug-
gesting how explorationmight proceed. In all three, the structureof culture is
definedby how signs fit into a context of practice,not by an analyticallyseparate
realm of semiotic relations.All three examples of relationsbetween representa-
tions andpracticesoffer a meansfor explaininghow the use of symbols can make
them seem experientiallyreal. Neither the original linguistic turn nor the older,
Marxist-inspiredemphasison practicefocused on this experienceas an unsolved
puzzle. Not every set of beliefs seems definitiveof the worldjust because it is so

52. The mathematicsof the two systems of payment were indeed distinct:in the Germansystem
thereis a linearincrease in paymentas the density of the cloth into which one thousandweft threads
are inserteddeclines; whereas in Britainthere was a linear increase in paymentwith increases in the
density of cloth.
53. For an analysis of representationsthat are complete for practicalexperiencebut partialas the-
ories, see JohnTorrance,Karl Marx's Theoty of Ideas (Cambridge,Eng., 1995), 158, 165.

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306 RICHARDBIERNACKI

applied.For example, the state socialist regimes of EasternEuropesucceeded in

institutionalizingtheir language of collective productionand association as the
lingua francaof public life. Ethnographershave also shown in remarkabledetail
how parts of Communistideology such as the emphasis on productionas the
basis of social relations and as the creator of value became natural givens
among the working populations.54Yet other parts of that ideology, such as the
emphasis on collective authority over the generation of wealth, were never
accepted as genuine or as taken-for-grantedwisdom. Simple reiterationin the
everydaylife of collectivized farms or factories did not suffice. The representa-
tions encoded social relations,but did not seem experientiallyfaithfulor natural.
Pascal's dictum for religion, made famous by Althusser and other Marxist ana-
lysts for all of ideology in practice,was "Kneeldown, move your lips in prayer,
and you will believe."55The dictum asserts that practice is crucial, but does not
explain why, because it fails to offer a comparativehypothesis about the failure
of symbols in many instances to do their mystifying work.56
Althoughcomparativestudies are requiredto pursuethis riddle, the models of
relationsbetween practice and representationoffer a preliminaryconjecture.In
each of the threetypifying examples at hand Anderson,Marx, and the payment
systems in The Fabrication of Labor the beliefs supportedby practice are
implicit suppositionsof practicethe agents need to "fill in" the execution of the
practice,and they can supportsecond-ordersigns thatindex the real execution of
a practice.To clarify these implicitprinciplesfor each of the threeprimaryexam-
ples: the practicalassumptionto digest printedtexts as if they were sharedby an
anonymouscommunitymoving throughtime help readersprocess printedtexts
and thereby experience that anonymous community as foundational;implicit
assumptionsto treat manufacturedgoods as originating in labor enable com-
modity producersto complete their exchanges with each other and to perceive
their disparate wares as self-governing carriers of value; implicit practical
assumptions that ephemeral work activities can be fitted to metrics of value
enableweaversto organizetheirtasks in time andto attachthe signs of the piece-
rate scales to quantitiesof abstractlabor.Each of these kinds of tacit pragmatic
suppositionscan center largerclusters of practices and beliefs. To elucidate for
the case of the piece-ratescales, the assumptionsaboutthe form in which human
labor was abstractedinto comparable quantities structuredthe German and
Britishworkers'entireresponseto industrialemployment.It creatednationaldif-
ferences in the understandingof time, in the organizationof factory space, in the
articulationof strikedemands,and in the receptionof ideologies of exploitation
in the labor movements. Most importantly,it served as the unspoken basis for
workers'conduct even when alternativecourses of action might have been rec-

54. MarthaLampland,The Objectof Labor (Chicago, 1995).

55. Louis Althusser,Lenin and Philosophy and OtherEssays (London, 1971), 168.
56. For an example of the failureof mass ritualto cast its spell, consider the imperialGermangov-
ernment'sunsuccessful effort to make Sedan Day a significantholiday for Germansin Wurttemberg
after 1871. Alon Confino, The Nation as Local Metaphor: Wiirttemnberg, Inperial Germnany,and
National Menioty, 1871-1918 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997), 84-85.

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 THE SHIFTFROM SIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 307

ommended.7 Even as workers' beliefs about religion, politics, and the family
underwentsubstantialchange in each countryin the course of the nineteenthcen-
tury,these assumptionsabout the metric of abstractlabor,reproducedas a prag-
matic assumption,remaineduncannily stable until the shock of the First World
War.58Similarly,in Anderson'saccount,the unspokenassumptionsabouta com-
munity of anonymous readers moving incrementallythrough calendrical time
become the experientialbasis for sacralizing the nation as the frameworkfor
humanexistence; and in Marx's story,the fetishism of commodities is a central
mystificationanchoringother conceits of our culture.
Furthermore,in each of the three typifying examples, the pragmaticassump-
tions thatbecome so influentialarenot necessarily seen as "sacred,"because they
are anchoredby the execution of practice ratherthan by their cognitive or nor-
mativeimport.In consequence,the stabilityof culturalelements does not depend
on the iteration or resonance of signs across multiple domains of conduct.
Conversely,deep culturalchanges in one domain may not echo across others.
The coherence of culturehas to be tested ratherthan assumed. In Germanyand
Britain, state regulatorsin the First WorldWar intervenedwithout ado to dra-
matically modify payment systems for textile workers.In each countrythe con-
stellationof industrialtechniquesand laborrelationsthat revolved arounda par-
ticularmetric of abstractlabor suddenlycame apartwithout an amplifyingsense
of crisis in other locales. Similarly,in Anderson's model, the rituals of reading
that structuredthe experienceof the nation seem to be a relativelyincidentalfea-
tureof commercialsociety. With rapidchanges in the distributionof media, they
may undergo independentand fateful change. Finally, Marx emphasized that
practicesof commodityexchangereproducethe perceptionthatcommodities are
independentcarriersof value no matterwhetherproducersdrawon wider cogni-
tive fields to deconstructthose exchanges from a cynical scientific perspective.59
Investigatorswho seek to analyze a culture's contingent fixity and coherence
must focus initially on the connections between representationsand practice in
situ, ratherthan only on global associations among representations.
Just as the new culturalhistory drew on analogies with languageto appreciate
semanticrelations,so a rethinkingof culturein operationcan drawon models of
languagein use to appreciatehow practicenaturalizesculturalcategories.In fact,
we can takethe case of languageas an object of popularreflectionto contrastdis-
belief about the realism of signs with the experiencedrealism of the principles
used to put the signs to work. It is now almost folk knowledge to claim that any
language is an arbitraryconstruct,not a faithful telescope of the structureof the
world. Despite that "fictive"status,however,the users of a language still experi-
ence as foundationalthe implicit principles by which they use the signs of that
languageto referencethe world.Recall BenjaminWhorf's famous accountof the
generation of natural or metaphysical categories out of the process of using

57. For illustration,see Biernacki, The Fabricationof Labor, 52.

58. Ibid., 433-434.
59. Marx, Das Kapital, 88.

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308 RICHARDBIERNACKI

English or "StandardAverageEuropean"to referencethe world:60speakersher-

ald the categories of abstract "substance,""form,""extension in space," and
"time"when they use noun phrasesand verb tenses to communicatewith others
abouttheir environment,no matterwhat the speakersmight say aboutthe repre-
sentational"realism"of the language.61 However conventionalor unbelievable
the signs we manipulatemay seem, the principles by which we enact their use
can seem foundationallyreal.62Conversely,a belief may appearspecious if it is
not an implicit organizingprinciple of practice, however genuine our commit-
ment to the belief may be. Some analysts have concluded that the failure of the
communistideology of humanrelationsto take root as an acceptedpiece of real-
ity in Eastern European societies originated in its unsuitability for adapting
agents to everydaycontingenciesof conduct, ratherthanin lack of popularcom-
mitmentto thatideology as a social philosophy.Or,to illustratethe reverserela-
tion, Americansin opinion polls reject as myth the propositionthat an individ-
ual's ability and effort guaranteepersonal occupational success, at least when
surveyorsdirect respondents'attentionto particularexamples. Yet the individu-
alistic principleof success resurfacesas a general cliche, even among the disad-
vantaged,because they must adopt that principle to negotiate their way in mar-
ket society as formally self-sufficientpersons.63

VII. THE COUNTER-PROPOSALSOF CULTUREIN PRACTICE

Threepropositionssum up the differencesbetween this model of culturein prac-

tice versusthe most widespread(thoughscarcely monolithic)model of cultureas
a sign system with which the new culturalhistory began.
1. Culturalmeaning is generated in the ties betweenpractice and representa-
tion. Historical analysts are adding a cluster of new metaphorsabout how "cul-
ture"works as a tool kit, as know-how,as a repetroirefor applyingthe body-
beside the older metaphorsof cultureas the readingor decoding of signs.64The
new imagerydrawson the premise thatneitherthe organizationof a practicenor
its experiencedimportfor agents are derivablefrom the semanticinterdependen-
cies among signs in a system. The pragmaticdimension of culturecomprises a
structureand a typifiableconstituentof meaning in its own right. By analyzing
60. BenjaminWhorf,"TheRelationof HabitualThoughtandBehaviorto Language,"in Language,
Cultureand Personality,ed. Leslie Spier (Menasha,Wisc., 1941), 75-93.
61. Michael Silverstein has updatedthis insight by showing how Austin's philosophy of speech
acts, which has the appearanceof capturingthe real essence of language use, only mirrorsthe prag-
matics of reportingspeech in context in Europeanlanguages. "LanguageStructureand Linguistic
Ideology,"215.
62. In this pragmaticview of culture,the unspokenstatus of an assumptionper se does not grant
that assumptionits stability,experiencedrealism,or organizingpower.But the principlesof pragmat-
ics are, to be sure, often unspoken or virtually irretrievableamong the agents themselves, partly
because these principlesare only aboutrelationsin processes, not necessarily about separablethings,
and partlybecause their role is to organize conduct ratherthan to representit.
63. Ann Swidler, "Inequalityin American Culture:The Persistence of Voluntarism,"American
BehavioralScientist 35 (March, 1992), 606-629.
64. Swidler, "Culturein Action,"277.

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 THE SHIFTFROM SIGNS TO PRACTICESIN CULTURALINQUIRY 309
the pragmaticrelationsbetween signs and the organizationof practice,we move
away from a purely discursivenotion of culturewithout,however,counterposing
"corporeal"practice as a binaryopposite that is inaccessible and essentially dis-
similarto language.As I sought to illustrateby calling on Whorf and on the ele-
mentaryliterarytropes, we can dissect the relationsbetween representationand
practicewith the incomparableanalyticresourcesof the linguists.
2. The agents' relationsto the signs theyput to workdecides whetherapplying
a cultural metaphor to illuminate conduct offers explanatoryadvantages over
competingsociohistorical theory. In some kinds of transactions,the agents are
severelyrestrictedin the institutionalsettingsin which they can employ signs, are
unableto play with or vary the use of signs in that setting, or even lack resources
for readingthe signs' nuances.A corporateexecutive's exercise of a stock option
representsone such transaction.The means of using the sign, the stock option, are
relatively explicit and determinate.In this instance, it is more difficult for an
account that treats the stock option as a sign to offer a systematic, empirically
diverging,and more accuratepredictionor explanationof exchanges.65But when
cultural categories-such as the "economic signs" of labor and capital-are
deployed in environmentswhere the use of symbols is less formalizedand insu-
lated (such as the messy province of manufactureproper),66cultural accounts
illustrateuniquepatternsin the use of signs thatexclusively utilitarianor materi-
al-economic accounts are poorly equipped to explain. The pragmatics of the
agents'use of symbols decides whetherresortingto the artificesof culturalanaly-
sis offers an epistemologicalgain. In this enterprise,as the three primaryexem-
plarssuggested,embeddingthe functioningof signs in a largerpracticalor social
contextbolstersour ability to highlightdistinctiveculturalorganizationsof prac-
tice. In each of the threemajortypifying examplesintroduced,the model of prac-
tice incorporatesthe social context via the implicitprinciplesagentscall on to use
signs: in Anderson's story, for instance, the circulationof commodities in print
capitalismenables readersto interpretthe texts as if texts were the propertyof an
audience of anonymous readers on equal footing. Since culture is identified
throughits pragmaticsin an institutionalcontext, the problemof reductionism-
when a separate,abstractedsemiotic structureis repositionedagainst its institu-
tional background does not recuras a necessary,irresolvableissue.
3. A leading cause of the miscarriage of humanagency is the very belief that
thepurpose of culturalcategories is to representthe world. The new culturalhis-
tory remainedcaptive to this misleading belief by making the representational
function of language supremely responsible for tragedy.But in the alternative
65. The rich sociological literatureon the meaningof distinctkinds of money-like currencies,from
stock options to household "pin money,"has not yielded distinctivepredictionsso far about the cre-
ation and use of these currencies.Economists have alreadyshown that individualsor households will
segregatetheir monies by frequencyof receipt and expenditureand by whetherthe expenditureis a
relative luxury, the better to regulate their consumption rationally.Cultural sociologists are unac-
quaintedwith these parallel accounts. CompareViviana Zelizer's fascinating "Paymentsand Social
Ties,"Sociological Forum 11 (1996) with congruentrationalchoice explanationsin RichardThaler,
"MentalAccounting and ConsumerChoice,"MarketingScience 4 (1985), 199-201.
66. Biernacki, The Fabricationof Labor, chaptereleven.

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310 RICHARDBIERNACKI

sketchedhere, categoriesof a culturemay reflect the implicit means for carrying

out practices or for putting signs to work; they may be based, that is, more on
doing than on thinking.A hypothesis from the use of language will clarify how
this distinctiondoes not re-inauguratethe old divide between materialand ideal.
We speakersof English are likely to maintainat firstthatno matterhow puzzling
and indefinablethe concept of "causation"may at times appear,we have this
term to help us interpretwhat happensin the world. Whorf's celebratedanalysis
suggested that our sentimentoriginates in a covert patternin our language, one
we enact without having any lexical markerfor it. (For instance, since English
links conditionsand the verbs thatbringconditions about explicitly with "sick,
to sicken,"implicitly with "die, to kill" we are apt to feel there is an intrinsic
connection between actions and results, not mere sequence.) We covertly enact
this categoryof "thecausative"in puttingother signs to work. Our sense of cau-
sation has precipitatedout of our own linguistic practice, and we mistake our
inventionif we think the second-ordersigns that try to capturethis underlying
sense originatein the effort to emulate the world outside.67That misunderstand-
ing of culturein practicealso engineersthe dramaof the threeprimaryexamples
introducedin the presentessay. In Marx's Capital, for instance, the category of
labor as an imagined substanceof value is not a representationof the productive
importanceof work in the world. Instead, Marx endeavors to explain that the
concept, however central and naturalit appears,precipitatesout of the peculiar
practiceof exchangingprivatelyproducedcommodities.Apartfrom coordinating
the executionof thathistoricallyuniquepracticein the epoch of capitalism,Marx
claims, the concept of labor as a general substanceof value is without applica-
tion.68Were Marxists to misconstruethe derivationof the concept of labor and
treat it as a category for representingthe material world of production, they
would banefully restricttheirpolitical vision.69
Of course the approachto culturalinquiryoutlinedby these propositionsrais-
es a largeragendaof questions.Does each kind of relationbetween practiceand
representation,exemplified in the three case types, contain its own distinctive
dynamics of culturalchange? Are the three types exhaustive?Does each trope
thatconnects practiceand representationin an analysis also entail a specific kind
of narrativeemplotmentof history?When is misrecognitionor lack of awareness
of the implicit assumptionsof practice a constitutive part of a life-world, and
when does insight into those implicit assumptionslead to a restructuringof the
life-world? In developing responses to these questions, the agents' own models
of the relation between language and the world will prove crucial to the play
between representationand practice in their culture. May we as self-analysts
become more awareof that paradoxin the ongoing life of our investigations.
Universityof California,San Diego

67. Language,Thought,and Reality:Selected Writingsof BenjaminLee Whoif,ed. JohnB. Carroll

(New York, 1956), 81, 266.
68. Marx-EngelsWerke,volume 32 (Berlin, 1964), 552-553; Das Kapital, 62.
69. Moishe Postone, Time,Labot;and Social Domination:A Reinterpretationof Marx's Critical
Theory(Cambridge,Eng., 1993), 156-157, 394.

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