V

SEMIOSIS

Each of the preceding chapters offers a different notion of structure, and hence a different orientation to the reading of Genesis. Scripture was viewed throughout the presentations—no matter what level of text was involved—as a stable and well-organized whole. Interpretations of the whole depend upon culturally astute readers, readers sensitive to some of the formal metaphors, political concerns, literary structures, and cultural backgrounds which make Genesis meaningful in immediate, but for modern readers perhaps unusual, ways. Such an orientation to the text is not inconsistent with biblical scholarship in general. Many of the standard critical strategies of readers outside the discipline of anthropology figure prominently in my analysis. The anthropological content of the readings in this book, indeed, only touches lightly upon the formal models and language of kinship and structural analysis.

This chapter does not purport to fill the gaps of theoretical background supported in my occasional citations. Instead, we will briefly concentrate on the meaning of “semiosis” in the context of biblical reading, reasserting and redeveloping some of the points about interpretation theory offered in my substantive presentation. To this end, let us again recognize that no privileged interpretation of Genesis can exist. Genesis persists through its continual reinterpretation—the constant recreation of those who experience it formally or informally. Jewish critical and liturgical tradition surrounding the Torah reinforces this point. What happened, after all, as the Torah became a fixed document, independent of the flexible oral tradition from which its particular stories were partially derived? Were not the original functions of myth and folklore replaced with a written critical medium, the Talmudic documents, thus referring centuries of real-world problems back to the immutable documents of the law?

Our awareness of the relationship between scriptural law and critical tradition is an excellent departure point into the theory of signs, or “semiotic.” If there is no privileged interpretation of law, except in the immediate sense of socially approved interpretation, then a text like Genesis has no particular meaning. The static physical medium we call the “text” is a complex of signifiers imbued with potentials, a set of “promiscuous signs.”¹ Moreover, the meaning potentials of the text are partitioned, not only along the lines of linguistic hierarchy, but also along the lines of the history in which the text as object resides. Thus, the formal structure of the book and the lifeplay surrounding us constantly recreate the effect we call “interpretation of the law.”

Genesis specifically satisfies conditions allowing structural interpretation of myth, set down by Claude Lévi-Strauss decades ago in the widely read and critiqued paper “The Structural Study of Myth.” Lévi-Strauss concluded his powerful essay with the following remarkable passage:²

Prevalent attempts to explain alleged differences between the so-called “primitive” mind and scientific thought have resorted to qualitative differences between the working processes of the mind in both cases while assuming that the objects to which they were applying themselves remained very much the same. If our interpretation is correct, we are led toward a completely different view, namely, that the kind of logic which is used by mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied. This is well in agreement with the situation known to prevail in the field of technology: what makes a steel ax superior to a stone one is not that the first one is better made than the second. They are equally well made, but steel is a different thing than stone. In the same way we may be able to show that the same logical processes are put to use in myth as in science, and that man has always been thinking equally well; the improvement lies, not in the alleged progress of man’s conscience, but in the discovery of new things to which it may apply its unchangeable abilities.

Here, Lévi-Strauss teaches by example, for he employs the distinction of qualities between objects represented in signs as a means of dashing the quality distinction between the minds of people creating signs. The signifying behaviors of a Kariera man in Australia, or Mozart, or “Moses,” were not founded in a different kind of intellect than that of Lévi-Strauss. But in pointing out a false distinction between “primitive” and “scientific” consciousness, Lévi-Strauss affirms the human ability to create signifiers for objects which do not “exist” otherwise. Of this “unreal” part of culture John Deely has recently stated:³

It is true that the unreal relational components of human experience only exist through the cognitive functioning of living individuals, and in this sense the cultural system does have actuality only in and from social interaction. But this “unreal” dimension of experience recognizable as such . . . is in itself something distinct from even though immanent within social interaction and social system. It is then this unreal dimension which is the ground of the cumulative transmission of learning that makes human society as enculturated different in kind from animal societies that cannot jump the links of individuals connecting the generations.

We entertain two broad assertions. First is the idea that the quality of human mind, at least insofar as language is concerned, is constant. Second is the idea that a critical aspect of human mind is the “unreal” component of thought, whether in the form of theory construction or myth construction, a quality capable of forming and modifying experience. The two ideas not only complement each other, but produce the giant leap away from the idea of inherent “meaning” in nature.

Numerous recent essays speak of universal qualities of thought, while questioning the value of purely mechanistic approaches to structure. As Paul Ricoeur observed of text analysis in his essay “Explanation and Understanding”:⁴

I understand full well that structuralism, remaining within the confines of the story, will not look elsewhere than in the signs of the narration for the mark of the narrational level. . . . But what motive does the analyst have in looking for the signs of the narrator and the listener in the text of the story itself, if not the understanding which envelops all of the analytic steps and places the narrative back into a movement of transmission, into a living tradition, as a story told by someone to someone? The story thus belongs to a chain of speeches by which a cultural community is constituted and by which this community interprets itself by means of narratives.

Structural analysis must serve a process of interpretation; and by interpretation we mean not simply a mechanistic application of how meaning occurs, but an enthusiastic approach to what meanings occur. Yet some texts are more appropriate to structural reading than others.

Genesis invites structural explanation more directly than the examples of Lévi-Strauss’s original argument. Where is the independently demonstrable structure behind the presentation of the Oedipus myth of the French master? Where is the internal limitation of details which provides the formal bridge between Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of the myth and his structural representation of the myth as narrative? In what way are Lévi-Strauss’s wonderful interpretations of Greek and Zuni myth compelled? Certainly, his results are extraordinary as much for what they leave out as for what they tell.

We must note that the conscious structural interpretation of the Genesis text, far from leading us to an absolutely new theology or cultural reconstruction, reinforces and complements traditional viewpoints hermeneuticists have embraced for a hundred years. This suggests the critical question: Should structural treatment necessarily yield extraordinary understanding? Probably not. What makes structural interpretation work on conscious levels is the same set of principles that allows our subconscious experience of interpretation. After all, a structural analysis, to be wholly true to the linguistic model, is nothing more than a systematic and explicit set of statements detailing how meanings are produced in a particular instance, by virtue of signs juxtaposed in a syntax. Hence, the “inspired” or “received” view of the text should differ from a formal view mainly in being a product of unconscious associations.

Do we say that a grammarian has a better understanding of the sentence “May I have a slice of bread?” than the grocer? Certainly not. The grammarian may have more power to create meanings, if concerns for structure do not get in the way; at least this is implied in the ideal grammatical construct Noam Chomsky called “competence.”⁵ But the hearer of a particular sentence, each attentive reader of a particular story, is exposed to more or less the same structure and has an equal chance to create associations leading to meanings.

The difficulty with Genesis and modern readers is that we often simply dismiss some of the most important elements of text and never experience a whole structure. If we encounter several different structures, then we may expect to arrive at somewhat different interpretations in each case. This is not to say that a perception of similar structure, consciously or unconsciously, must call forth identical meanings, whether for different readers or the same reader on successive scriptural encounters. We must expect at times to assert similar linguistic or syntactic evidence for quite different interpretations. Texts are simply rich, and reader backgrounds plentiful.

But the idea of “cumulative transmission of learning” is central to semiosis, the active process of experience through signs. Individual experiences in particular cultures remain products of both shared and individual potentials of meaning generation. In linguistics we call the individual potential “ideolect,” emphasizing the uniqueness of the speech productions originating in collective association. In semiotics, we call this potential “the interpretant,” giving emphasis to the absolutely unique set of associations which may be achieved for each individual experiencing the “sign.” The world unfolds as we engage it, but our various avenues of engagement constrain the unfolding process. If we change process, our world changes. Nature, even when “shared” to a degree, is necessarily understood through such an individually changing structure.

A structural reading of Genesis can be rather like encountering geometry. The premises are relatively few, but the combinations of premises yield complex and ordered arguments. What could not happen, or would not likely happen, occurs purely, offering a mimesis rich in possibilities. We experience the story, take hold of the signs, concatenate them, and know the law of the group which creates their transformations. We are not surprised, then, as we would be in the informal reading based upon unconscious traces of connection, when the narrative turns to the very possibility we have already generated. Structural analysis is incapable of unlocking anything beyond this, yet we should not lack appreciation for a process which brings the artifacts of a reading into conscious representation. The formal experience of Genesis involves us in poetics and mythscape in such a way that we more precisely apprehend how the richness of text is created, even as we deprive ourselves of its effect.

For most contemporary readers such formal excursions may represent our most ready access to the text. For example, to conclude with a last comment on the beginning of Genesis, let us recall the compelling representation of a primal God. Amid darkness and void “. . .a mighty wind swept over the waters” or “. . . the spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” How beautifully the image of wind works on our senses. It is something powerful which has no apparent substance. Wind is the perfect first stirring of an eternal Spirit. But some translations of the Hebrew do not force us to appreciate the image, even though “spirit” and “wind” are comprised in a single word, ruach. Even when the passage is rendered “. . . and a wind from God sweeping over the water” we may miss the unity of the sign.

I am reminded of the Zen story about two monks who argued over a flag waving in the wind. Was the flag moving or the wind? Their master resolved the question by observing that neither the flag, nor the wind, but instead the mind was moving. So it must be with the reader new to the text, or old, be the reading in Hebrew or English. Translations are only interpretations of some defined original. Special though they are, they are no different from the process they promote by giving us first access to a foreign document. The original document is not more special, for it is merely an instrument guiding our thought. We are to an extent left to ourselves, and secondarily to the historical community surrounding us, in our attempts to ground our experience of the other minds in the text. In some ways we can never meet these other minds, but happily, in other ways we can touch across centuries of differences based in our common abilities.