Whose Meanings?: Resignifying Voices and Their Social Locations

Abstract

My philosophical reflections in this essay will revolve around the following question linking meaning and identity: What is the relationship between cultural products and the individuals and groups that create them? More specifically, what is the relation between racial and ethnic meanings and the racial and ethnic groups in which they originate? There are two extreme semantic views that answer this question in highly problematic and inappropriate ways. On the one hand, there are those who tie meanings to their originating expressive communities in a rigid way, claiming that there are proprietary relations between semantic structures and the people who created them. On the other hand, there are those who think that meanings can be completely detached from their originating cultural contexts and completely decoupled from the experiences of their users, becoming portable semantic structures as soon as they are created, that is, becoming usable by any body in any context. Since meanings are treated as properties to fight over by these polarized views, I will use an economic metaphor to analyze and discuss them. I will call the first semantic view the Monopoly Model and the second one the Free Trade Model. By contrast, my own view departs from these economic views of meaning as property and understands meanings as relational?as complex sets of relations or relational structures?rather than as property. In the first section of this article, drawing on Alain Locke and Pierre Bourdieu, I will identify the pitfalls of polarized (economic) semantic models and will articulate a critique of their central assumptions. In section 2, I will sketch my relational model of ethnic and racial meanings, which can overcome the difficulties of the existing polarized views. My discussion will highlight the opportunities and obstacles that exist for subversion and symbolic transformations in our cultural practices, trying to show how they are either obscured or clarified by competing semantic models.