LAS SEFIROT

8.1. Introduction to The Activating Power of Expression

The Activating Power of Expression (APE) is a theoretical framework for the description

and analysis of the rhetoric of cultural expression. A basic principle of the APE is that although cultural expression is a social phenomenon, it begins and ends with the individual in application and reception. The APE therefore focuses on the individual as the foundation for approaching social phenomena and broader cultural patterns. Exposure to and participation in social phenomena (including language) becomes a process through which they can be “learned” and internalized. The subjective internalized understanding of the individual provides the basis for applications. All applications can therefore be taken to reflect aspects of the internalized understanding.

A second basic principle of the APE is that all forms of cultural expression can develop loaded systems of values, associations and implications to the degree that they have regular patterns of application within a cultural group or particular performative or communicative context. Regular patterns of application lead to the assumption or anticipation of values, associations or implications on the basis of the history of past experience with the phenomenon and its relationships to other phenomena. Registers, metres, genres, structures for the organization of information, motif-complexes, individual motifs, formulae and even individual lexical items can become “loaded” with complexes of information, implications or associations. This process is not limited to verbal aspects of communication. It also occurs (most commonly) in visual and aural

fields. Each element becomes capable of carrying a culturally loaded package when it is applied among an in-group or in the appropriate context so that what is received may be “much richer than the text itself” (van Dijk 1980:241, his emphasis). This occurs both on the level of strategies of representation or communication and on the level of content. Following Foley (1995), the load can be described in terms of “powers”. These “powers” function in four primary fields:

1. word power 2. sound power 3. image power 4. narrative power

These provide the four primary mediums of cultural expression and communication: verbal, aural, visual, and systems of sequential progression. The APE provides a framework for describing, discussing, and analyzing the process of applying, manipulating and interpreting these “powers”. The powers activated in expression derive from a conjunction of expression as an enabling event and “tradition” as an enabling referent (Foley 1995:213): expression constitutes an event through which it becomes possible to activate one or several culturally loaded “powers” that have developed through the contextual patterns of application established by tradition; tradition provides the referent in relation to which the load can be accessed and interpreted. Elements and strategies are manipulated within the “fractal continua” of the semiotic system (Abondolo 2001:2-3). The activation of powers through expression is a largely intuitive and unconscious process.206 When approaching these systems, indexicality provides a practical analytical tool for the assessment of powers being applied and manipulated, and for assessing the probability of their activation. This also allows us to distinguish between the analysis of elements on the basis of their appearance across multiple “texts” and intertextuality in the sense of activating a remote textual or extra-textual entity. The powers activated in expression offer a means of addressing and distinguishing the element from the load, which is essential in treating synchronic and diachronic variation and change.

8.2. Tradition: A Definition

Traditions are usually identified and defined according to their manifestations in performance or other application and/or any supplementary evidence available. For oral traditions, this normally means that we accumulate documentations of numerous performances. Whether these are “librettos” (Honko 2000:13-14) or more dynamic forms of documentation, this variety of “text” is always a form of “delimited articulated hypostasis” (Lotman 1990:11). These delimited articulated hypostases – “texts” – are compared for the identification of patterns of common features contrasted with differences (“variation”). This provides the basis for our definition or understanding of the particular tradition, its geographical distribution and patterns of synchronic and diachronic variation and change. This process is directly comparable to the identification and definition of folktale “types”, which Dégh & Vázsonyi (1975:207) have described as “a hypothetical abstraction deduced statistically from the variants.” The development of such a hypothetical abstraction is a necessary process in research (Lotman 1990:218), but when generating this abstraction and when addressing individual “texts”, it is important to recognize that our sources derive from expressions by individuals or groups of individuals (e.g. group singing), and each expression (including comments in interview contexts and medieval manuscript marginalia) is a manifestation and application of the internalized knowledge and understandings of an individual or of individuals who make up the groups.

Applications are both generated and received (if successful) through the enabling referent of tradition. In this process, “tradition” is not “a hypothetical abstraction deduced statistically from the variants” – it is the internalized understanding of specific individuals. Not all applications attempt accurate reproduction of the referent, nor can we assume that the performer and audience have fully corresponding internalized understandings of a tradition (cf. Lotman 1990:11-19).

8.3. Internalization

Internalization is a process which is dependent on exposure to the cultural activity of the particular phenomenon. Traditions are learned and internalized as constellations of forms

(or strategies of representation), contents and applications, within the semiosphere. It is through exposure to and participation in the cultural activity of and surrounding traditions within these systems that an individual develops competence in a tradition (Honko 2000a:20; Hymes 2001), whether as an active or a passive tradition bearer (von Sydow 1948:11-12). Exposure always takes place in a particular place and in a particular “present”. This very simple observation is significant when we consider differences in form, content and applications of the hypothetical abstractions of a “tradition” on a regional basis and in transmission over time. Contemporary conventions of forms, contents and applications persist and develop in the cultural activity of networks of individuals. Regional variation develops through cycles of exposure and application in which conventions gradually and/or actively change. Contemporary conventions cannot be assumed to be identical to those of earlier periods or of other contemporary communities which share genetically related traditions.

Internalization is a subjective process which develops through a unique sequence of personal experiences. It continues across the life of the individual, both in terms of internalizing new material, and developing or adapting existing material. Personality and identity play a significant role in the process of developing relationships to the spectrum of material in the pool of traditions, and what Siikala (1990a) terms “tradition- orientation”. Proximity and authority – the primary cultural activity to which the individual is exposed and the relative significance of performers or performances within that cultural activity to the individual – are primary factors in this process of internalization. Not all voices in a tradition community carry equal weight (Honko 1962:126), nor do all tradition bearers within a community carry the same weight for every individual. Proximity and authority, and the individual‟s attitudes toward them, account for distinctive features which mark epic traditions in different families of Viena (Tarkka 2005:44-45), while to the south, kin-group appears secondary to region or location (Kuusi 1949:14-15).