The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Maurice Godelier
of different sex, a person cannot get married without knowing the meaning of marriage and who it is possible or impossible to marry, with respect to the taboo on incest and the prohibitions attached to belonging to a caste, a class, a profession, a religion, and so on. All social relations thus exist in a form that is both intersubjective and subjective, immaterial and material, corporeal and mental. By ‘mental’ [idéel in French] I mean the whole set of representations a society shares about the nature and origin of an institution, marriage for instance, as well as the prescriptions and proscriptions necessary to its implementation, to which must be added the emotions induced by this implementation, all of which depend on each person’s gender and intimate life history.
It is this fundamentally anthropological perspective that reveals the meaning of the fourfold dependence which provides the invariable framework of human nature. Let us reconsider it from this standpoint. All humans are born from the sexual union of a man and a woman, but depending on the rule governing descent in the society into which they are born, an individual will belong to their father’s group if the kinship system is patrilineal, or to their mother’s group if the system is matrilineal, or to both groups but in different ways if the system is bilineal or undifferentiated.
Whether the person ‘descends’ only through men, or only through women, or through both is each time an imaginary social and cultural postulate which entails a whole series of diverging consequences for the constitution of kin groups, clans, lineages and houses, the construction of which is based on this postulate. But it also conditions the representations of men and women in making a baby; the role of semen or menstrual blood; the role of the ancestors or the gods, or God, in transforming the foetus into a child; the name it will be given; and more.2 In addition, if it is necessary to contract alliances with others in order to produce offspring, it is because a person cannot, without committing incest, marry within their own group someone who is socially and culturally defined and forbidden by the society. And, if sexuality must be subject to social prohibitions, it is because, in its spontaneous state, as a biological drive and need, human sexuality is a-social (not anti-social).
To be sure, kinship relations – whether this kinship is ‘real’, adoptive, or of some other nature – play a fundamental role in the first years and stages of our subjective and social construction; nevertheless, there is no such thing as a kin-based society. The only human relations capable of making a society are those that establish and legitimise the sovereignty of social groups created by kinship, class or other factors over a territory, its inhabitants and its resources. These are what in the West are called political-religious relations. And everywhere such relations encompass, crosscut and subordinate kin groups and their relations to their own reproduction.
Lastly, even if an individual never chooses the society into which they are born, or the social status of those who gave birth to or adopted them, this social status attaches to them at birth, and depending on the society, the epoch and their personal history, they may or may not be able or desire to keep, change or reject the status to which they were born. A Brahmin’s son will become a Brahmin and must marry a woman from his caste (jati) on pain of becoming an outcaste.
It is by learning to understand and then to speak the language spoken to them since birth in the interactions with those who surround and care for them that a person consciously and unconsciously absorbs the norms that organise the shared life of their society, together with the attached representations and values that express them.
By now, we already suspect that such a being, born under this fourfold dependency, can be neither an ‘absolute subject’ nor a ‘transcendental subject’, even if philosophers may imagine or think this is the case. But some kind of subject they must be, since in order to live they must act, and to act they must be conscious of their own existence, of the existence of the other humans that interact with them and of that of the surrounding world. To be conscious is to think, but thinking is more than being conscious, since some operations of the mind are unconscious and because thought can never be present at its own birth in each of us.
So, here we are, back at the intersection of the problems that arise when we try to define the meaning of words such as the imaginary, the symbolic or the real. For if imagining is a faculty of the mind and a conscious act, we must then explain the fact that not everything that is imagined is imaginary. What is the difference between the imaginary imagined and the imagined that is not? Is the imagined that is not imaginary the same as the ‘real’? Or, since the products of the imagination are representations (associated with emotions), does the non-imaginary imagined correspond to all those representations of a non-imaginary real? Perhaps. But there are also many imaginary realities that are neither thought nor experienced as imaginary, but as more ‘real’ than the visible real, as surreal; these are imaginary realities such as religions, their rites, their celebrants, their places of worship.
Another example, taken from the news, is that of the present possibility of asking a ‘surrogate’ mother to carry a baby. Whereas for thousands of years, the birth of a child implied that a woman became pregnant, carried her child in her womb for nine months (if the child was full term), and gave birth, it is now possible for a woman who has had repeated miscarriages and still desires a child to allow one of her eggs, fertilised by her companion or spouse, to be transferred into the body of another woman who will ensure the child’s gestation and birth. However, when the child is born, it will not belong to the surrogate mother, but to the man and woman who conceived it and to whom it will be genetically and socially connected in the same way (ideally) as a child in a ‘traditional’ Western monogamous family. What used to be a single biological process in which fertilisation, pregnancy and birth succeeded each other in the body of one woman can now be broken down into two phases and carried out by two women in no way related to each other.
Moreover, it is only with the help of symbolic props that the imagined, whether imaginary or not, can exist, be communicated and take on a social existence. Of course, among these props we find language. But the same word, such as ‘coyote’, does not mean the same thing when used in everyday language as it does in that of myth. The literal sense would correspond to the ‘real world’ coyote, and the figurative meaning to the coyote of the imaginary world of mythology. But, would an Indian perceive the two meanings as being opposed, mutually exclusive, or rather as complementary, designating and describing two aspects of the animal that hunted, like they did, on the Great Plains of North America? Beyond language and words, there are other means of transforming the imaginary into social and material realities, for example, masks, statues, body painting, and so forth. To be sure. However, in Europe carnival masks only conceal men and women whose identities will be discovered later, while in the case of the masks of the Sulka, a tribe in New Britain, in Oceania, admired by André Breton for their splendour, the wearers’ identity must never be revealed. Made over a period of months in the secret recesses of the forest, far from the eyes of women and noninitiates, their original forms, their huge size, their vibrant colours had no purpose other than to attract the spirits of the ancestors or other entities so that they might manifest their presence when the mask wearers danced onto the village meeting ground. Before the awed and terrified eyes of those who discovered them at that moment, the spirit masks would perform sometimes for only a few minutes before once again vanishing into the forest to be thrown into the bush and left to decompose.3 But here we are already talking about the imaginary in art. Let us come back, for the moment, to the conscious mind, since it is the primary source of the realities that concern us: the imagined, the imaginary and the symbolic.
To be conscious is always to be conscious of something. There is no such thing as empty consciousness.1 And everything of which the conscious mind is conscious means something to it. Consciousness is therefore also thought. It is an act of the mind, which at the same time attaches meaning, significations, to the things targeted by consciousness. So consciousness is that whereby the thinking of an individual, of a subject (whom we will call ego), directs itself mentally towards an ‘object’, whatever it may be. This