The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic. Maurice Godelier
a lengthy development if described using abstract concepts. They therefore have explanatory power; we can use the term ‘metaphorical concepts’ in talking about them, keeping in mind that the explanatory part of a metaphor goes no further than what the image of the phenomenon it uses as raw material can suggest to the mind (the fact of stewing). That is why a metaphor often provides only a partial comprehension of what it describes, whether it be our inner feelings, our aesthetic experiences, our moral practices, and so on. Let me add that metaphors are not the only means the mind has to move from the literal to the figurative. If metaphor is first of all a means of thinking one thing in terms of another, we can also use one entity in place of another, for example, instead of saying ‘Get yourself over here,’ we can say more crudely, ‘Get your butt over here,’ the part being taken for the whole. In this case, the mind calls not on metaphors, but on metonymies, for instance: ‘I bought a two-wheeler.’ Religious systems make great use of metonymies, like the symbolic metonymy of the dove to designate the Holy Spirit in Christianity. I will return to religious symbolisms at the end of this book.
In conclusion, metaphor and metonymy are not merely linguistic phenomena. They are phenomena that have to do in the first place with thought and action; they are a sort of ‘imaginative rationality’,12 as Lakoff so elegantly puts it, a rationality combining ideas and images that functions in everyday life and draws on our daily experiences. It must be stressed that this imaginative reasoning proceeds basically by drawing analogies between two or several facts, actions or situations, or between living and nonliving beings: ‘He is as stubborn as a mule’; ‘You can’t budge him, he’s rock solid.’ The logic of imaginative reasoning is a logic of analogy, and this logic is not restricted to daily life. It is the bedrock of poetry, on the one hand, and of mythic thought, on the other. Verlaine’s ‘les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne bercent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone’ again comes to mind,13 as does the mythological figure of the Amerindian Coyote, who is a demiurge, master of salmon and womaniser with a snakelike penis. Once again, with these analogies imagined by the mind, we find ourselves surrounded by symbols. We can therefore no longer postpone an examination of the symbolic function.
To symbolise is to produce signs that have meaning. A sign that has meaning is a signifier, whatever its nature. The universe of the symbolic is thus the set of all past and present signifiers and all possible signifieds. The symbolic function is what enables us to associate in a stable fashion one psychic state with another. That is how English speakers repeatedly associate the word ‘cow’ with the animal the word designates. The symbolic function is pre-inscribed – that is to say genetically inscribed – in our psyche and in our entire body. It is involved in all forms of thought and action humankind has invented until now and will be in all those we invent in the future.
All signifiers are signs that refer to something other than themselves, whereby this thing takes on meaning for everyone who produces or receives these signs. In 1910, Ferdinand de Saussure had envisaged a discipline, semiology, that would study and explain ‘the social life of signs’, and which would thus reach beyond linguistics; this was a limitless project that got no further than its ambitious beginnings. The difficulty lay in the fact that nearly everything can be or become the sign of something, which makes a general, global classification of signs nearly impossible. C. S. Peirce tackled the problem without ever resolving it.1 He analysed signs from three standpoints: the sign itself (sound, gesture, mental representation, spoken word, written form, etc.); the sign as it relates to its ‘object’; and the sign as it relates to its interpreter. We shall restrict ourselves to commenting on the three categories into which Peirce divided signs according to their relation with their object: signs as indications, or ‘indices’; signs as ‘icons’; and signs as ‘symbols’. But let us not forget that all these signs have meaning and that all are therefore ‘symbols’.
An index is a sign that has a physical connection with the object it indicates. It is the paw print of a bear in the snow, in which a tracker will read the animal’s size, its sex, the time elapsed since its passage and the direction in which it is moving. The mental image of the bear will immediately spring to mind, call up, through inner speech, the word for the animal and unconsciously reactivate all of the cultural representations and emotions connected with the bear in his society and in his personal experience. It is a trace of blood a killer leaves at the scene of his crime, which will allow the police to identify his DNA. It is the involuntary signs of weakness, good health or despair, produced by the body of those who are sick, desperate or joyful, but which the doctor, friend, et cetera observes and interprets.2 Smoke rising from a chimney means that someone has made a fire. A bear’s paw print, blood, and smoke are all signs in the present that refer to past events; they are all ‘indices’. But for a driver, the red light at an intersection means stop, do not go through; the green light means it is possible to go. A finger on the lips is a discreet signal to another to keep quiet. Here the sign concerns the future.
Peirce termed ‘icons’ all signs that possess a certain formal resemblance to the object they refer to, such as van Gogh’s self-portrait, or the giant portraits of Mao Zedong or Stalin. Another kind of icon is a road sign bearing the silhouette of a wild boar or a deer at the entrance to a forest, which tells drivers of the risk of suddenly coming upon one or several of these animals. Another type of icon is that which adorns Orthodox churches, representing the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus, or the archangel Gabriel announcing to Mary that she would bear a son who would be the Messiah long awaited by the Jewish people. Yet another icon is the mental image of the bear I have in my head.
The relationship of similitude between a silhouette of a deer and the animal on a road sign is easy to understand. On the other hand, for a non-Christian, the relationship is much less easy to perceive in the case of religious icons, whether Greek, Russian or Bulgarian. The portraits of Mary and Jesus are purely imaginary. They are idealised representations of figures who no doubt existed, but whose features no one has passed on to us. And the icon painter escalated the imaginary when he painted the archangel Gabriel (who we may believe to have never existed) in human likeness with wings on his back (a sign that he is ‘truly’ an angel). It is therefore hard for the non-Christian to understand the theological meaning of this picture, even if, independently, he can appreciate its beauty and admire it.
Let us move on to the signs Peirce classified as ‘symbols’, those for which there is no relationship of similitude between the sign and the thing signified, but an arbitrary relation determined by convention. Such are the words of a spoken language, and the same words if they are written, whatever the system used: alphabetic, ideographic, pictographic, et cetera. To these must be added the gestural systems that make up the different languages invented to communicate with the deaf and so that the deaf may communicate with each other. And then there is the drummed language of the Yangere people of Zaire, whose drumbeats send messages deep into the forest, for instance to tell a hunter to hurry back because his wife has just given birth. Nor should we forget Morse code and the various languages invented by sailors or soldiers to communicate their messages.
I could go on and on with examples of symbols. The blue, white and red French flag, the red flag of the communist parties bearing the hammer and sickle, symbols of the (hoped for) alliance between peasants and workers, or the black flag of the anarchists. These symbols refer to the existence of social groups that have chosen them as emblems of their identity, their values; though everyone knows that communists and anarchists hold opposite views on the role of the state and the nature of the society they would like to establish.
To conclude, I have chosen a strong symbol – ‘Je suis Charlie’ – which emerged in France following the assassination on 7 January 2015 by two terrorists, claiming to be from the Yemenite branch of al-Qaida, of twelve artists and editors from the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, together with two policemen. The symbol appeared in the streets, brandished by hundreds of thousands of people gathered to show their indignation, their anger and their solidarity with the victims, and above all their will and desire to defend