Softer soju in South Korea exists in a state of qualic transitivity, where relations
among the qualia of soju consumption in their various semiotic modalities are
regimented in terms of the overarching abstract quality of softness that seems to
drinkers to emerge from the entity itself; the properties or features that apply to one
modality (e.g. gustation) also apply to the various other modalities to which the
former is indexically linked (e.g. sociality, speech, inebriation, etc.). For soju, qualic
transitivity is the state in which ‘the concrete sensuous reality (e.g. color) ... [can]
act as a relay for the more abstract associations (Young! Fresh! Edgy!) that branding
professionals try to ‘‘encode’’ in consumer experience’ (Moore 2003: 332). In
soju consumption, as in Munn’s account of value transformation on Gawa, a
quality like softness operates as a valorized, lexically coded but abstract potentiality
that is experienced through multiple modalities, often at the same time (i.e.
synaesthetically or transaesthetically).