The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Maurice Godelier
person’s own body, internal sensations; it can be the perception of an object or a set of objects outside the self; it can be the desire to paint or to answer a phone call; and so on. Consciousness is thus a continuous series of acts aimed at objects which each time take on ‘meaning’ for the conscious mind. The intentionality of the conscious mind has nothing to do with the intentions an individual may have to do or not do something. The intentionality of the conscious mind is the act whereby the mind defines and operates the meaning of the object viewed as a concrete object, or as a mathematical ideality, or as an imaginary world, or as a relation between things or people, and so on.
‘Meaning’ exists only for a conscious mind; the only meaning is that given, produced by the mind. There is no such thing as an isolated intentionality, for a targeted ‘object’ is always part of an encompassing whole. We do not listen to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony note by note. Likewise, the meaning of a sentence remains present, even as it is continually modified, until the sentence has been uttered in its entirety. The individual (ego) exists not only as a singular body, but also as the subject of all the intentional, conscious acts he or she performs simultaneously and successively.2 He or she exists as the centre from which these continuous acts emanate and as the place to which all experiences, ideas, emotions and desires associated with the individual’s conscious mind belong. In short, ego exists as a body, as thought and as subjectivity.
Therefore, if we are to perceive the faculties of the conscious mind, we must take a closer look at its structures. The conscious mind is conscious of itself. Sartre called the fact that it knows it exists ‘the great ontological law’ of consciousness.3 Ego’s consciousness is always already inhabited, even before birth, by the presence of the world around it: a specific natural environment, society, culture and language, and a particular time in history. Consciousness is also the internal consciousness of time. This consciousness exists in the present, but to this present are always attached elements of the recent past and the imminent future. But the conscious mind can also step back from the present the subject is living and from the world with which he or she is involved. It can represent to itself past events that once existed but no longer do. It can represent to itself future events whose realisation seems unlikely for the time being. We see clearly that if the ‘things’ that present themselves to the conscious mind have meaning for it, it is because the mind gives or has given them this meaning. It is by thought that consciousness can be both present in the present and, at the same time, make real or imaginary events retrieved from the past or projected into the future present by their absence. In short, the conscious mind has the capacity to step back from the experienced present while remaining present to it; and this faculty comes from the fact that the human mind can ‘imagine’.
More than a property, then, it is the very essence of the mind to be able to examine itself and to step back from its content. Reflexivity is constituent of consciousness. It is already present in ordinary, spontaneous awareness, since to be aware of something particular is both to target and to highlight this thing against the backdrop of underlying consciousness. And this highlighting immediately establishes a distance between consciousness and what it has highlighted. This is the first degree of conscious reflexivity.
But there is a second degree, which appears when the mind inquires into the nature of that of which it is conscious. The way, then, is opened to an attempt to understand the nature of the relations surrounding the subject: relations between things perceived, relations between other interacting humans, but also those between these humans and things. In this search for meaning, it is the subject that reveals and discovers itself, and that positions itself with respect to others and to things. The second degree of reflexivity available to consciousness opens the way to knowledge, art and the invention of religions, but also to the production of concrete skills.
Nevertheless, there is a fundamental constituent of consciousness I have not yet talked about, and without which we cannot understand the forms of reflexivity available to the conscious mind, nor the subject’s capacity to understand the world around them and their place, their identity within this world. The missing component is language. Language is immanent to consciousness and inseparable from thought. Before going into the analysis of language, however, it must be clarified that some thought processes are not conscious, but instead either underlie the operations of the mind (the rules of grammar of a language, for example), or belong to the deeper layers of the unconscious part of thinking. This clarification is fundamental because it precludes reducing our knowledge of the nature of the mind merely to the processes of which it is aware. The unconscious mind also contributes to the production of meaning, the meanings the mind gives to the world. We must not forget this.
To analyse the relationship between the mind and language, we will start from what linguists and psychologists have taught us about the mechanisms and stages of language acquisition in children. How do children come, first, to understand, then, to speak the language spoken to and around them before and since their birth? Speech cannot be dissociated from language. It is its accomplishment. Language is at once a means of communication with others and a means of action on others and on oneself. The great apes also possess complex systems of visual, gestural and vocal communication, but they do not have spoken language. However, all languages spoken by humans presuppose these capacities. To explore these questions, we are going to leave phenomenology and turn to linguistics and psychology.
In 1975, the linguist Noam Chomsky showed that language acquisition could not be explained, as it was at the time, simply as a result of imitation and learning.1 To account for the rapidity, the regularity of the stages and the relative independence of this acquisition from differences in children’s intelligence and social context, we must therefore posit the existence of a universal mechanism inscribed in the genetic heritage of humankind and therefore in the brain of every child born. And it is this mechanism that enables the child to extract the model of language from that spoken by the adults, and to reproduce it.
It was during the biosocial evolution of our ancestors, sometime between Homo habilis and Homo sapiens, that the capacity to learn a spoken language became inscribed in our genetic code and thus possessed its own neural base.2 Several conditions must be present in order for a child to understand the language spoken to it and to speak it. It must be able to distinguish ‘linguistically relevant’ sounds from among all the sounds it hears. Then, it must be able to cut up the flow of words addressed to it or which it hears, and to classify them according to their meaning. Finally, one day, the child will recognise in the adults’ speech their intention to signify.
But language is not the only means of self-expression and communication among humans. The whole body participates, through the gaze, gestures, facial expressions, cries, signs, and so on. As we will see, all these forms of communication are aspects of the symbolising function, which is also inscribed in the human mind. Even before birth, the child is already familiar with the voice of the woman carrying it in her womb, and with the sounds of the language she speaks. After birth, the infant will be immersed in a world of sounds, smells, handling of its body, words spoken to it, all of which inform it about the surrounding world. The child will seek to communicate with this world via its gaze, through a repertory of facial expressions and gestures used to show pleasure, fear, well-being, distress and so on. In short, if the child needs others to survive, it already seeks also to communicate with others by bodily means. Later, when the infant becomes a baby, it will babble and play with the sounds produced. Between nine and eighteen months of age, it will gradually discover the meaning of the words spoken to it, even before it can actually pronounce them. This means that children must start by understanding, to a certain extent, what is going on around them and within them before they can choose the words to talk about it. The connection between the appropriate word and cognition is therefore clear, even if there is a time lag between being able to understand words and being able to produce them.3
And then, between eighteen and twenty-four months, when the child has come to understand what others are saying, it will quickly start talking. Let us not forget that,