Page 177 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

152 Guy Poitevin

3. Quite differently, in the perspective of a wish of collective
recognition through a divine emblematic figure projected as
-
symbolic reference, the result might be a reification of the Vadar
.
status through its very deification. This could be compared to
Mahatma Gandhi granting the name of ‘Harijan’ to communi-
ties otherwise looked down upon to raise their social dignity,
with the simultaneous effect of sanctioning their actual lot. The
divine identification, by a perverse effect, through granting a
transcendent value to a subaltern condition, maintains its very
subordination. 17
4. We may also make an opposite reading of the claim to a divine
identity of one’s own. The radical inversion of role and status
may be construed as a claim of absolute superiority for the toil-
ing donkey over the hegemonic political and symbolic powers
of this world. When the latter reduce him into servile subjection
and assign to him a degraded status, the narrative discourse
proclaims that the slave is actually the one who deserves the
power and the glory. The nightly transfiguration, an ontological
revelation, becomes a utopia (Paquot 1996), an act of faith in
oneself which might prove the seed of a new history.

Notes

1. ‘The semiotic points to the mode of significance specific to the SIGN and
constitutes it as a unit …, with regard to its capacity to signify, it is a unit of
signification and remains such.… Strictly speaking, any semiotic study will
consist in identifying those units, in describing their distinctive features
and in discovering more and more refined criteria of their distinctivity.…
Taken in itself, the sign is pure identity to itself, pure alterity to any other
one, ground of any meaning for the language, material necessary for making
sentences’ (Benveniste 1974: 51–52).
2. ‘With the semantic, we enter into the specific mode of significance which is
generated by the DISCOURSE. The problems raised here refer to those raised
by language as a production of messages. The fact is that these messages
cannot be reduced to a succession of units to be separately identified; we
have not a sum of signs producing a meaning, it is absolutely the other way
round, it is the meaning (the “intended”) which, globaly conceived, realises
itself and splits itself into particular “signs”, namely, the WORDS. Moreover,
the semantic necessarily takes hold of the whole lot of referents, whereas