Читать книгу The Imagined, the Imaginary and the Symbolic - Maurice Godelier - Страница 8
ОглавлениеTo inquire into the nature and role of the imaginary and the symbolic is to attempt to account for the basic components of all societies. But because the two are connected, it is also to attempt to explain the essential aspects of the human way of life, aspects which, in every instance, form a large portion of the social and private parts of our identity. To shed some light on our endeavour, I will cite a few examples of imaginary and symbolic material that form part of the social fabric and the way of life of those living in a society, while stressing that such a list, however long, can never be complete.
The worlds that spring from the imaginary are, first of all, the founding myths of religions, or those that have legitimised political systems or other power regimes that have emerged throughout history. Two examples: the Chinese notion of the Mandate of Heaven, which legitimised one man’s right to become emperor; or that of the God-given right invoked by the Catholic king Louis XIV in exercising his absolute power over his kingdom’s subjects. But in addition to religions and political systems, we should not forget that there are many other social relations built on an imaginary component.
The assertions that humans ‘descend’ from each other either solely through men or solely through women are two purely imaginary postulates, each of which acts as a departure point and mental framework for the formation of kin groups organised according to a patrilineal or a matrilineal descent rule. We find ourselves here at the heart of kinship, with the full consequences of these imaginary postulates weighing, for instance, on the asserted or denied role of semen or menstrual blood in making children. The same postulates justify the appropriation of offspring of unions between members of these societies by adults, who have different rights and duties with regard to these children according to whether they are maternal or paternal kin.
In fact, there can be no religion, power system, kinship system or other social relations without the support and effectiveness of numerous symbolic components that not only express the nature of these relations but cause them to exist socially, collectively, and within the mind and body of all those who must reproduce them daily through their acts and works. For religions, these symbolic elements include rites, places of worship – totemic sites, mosques, temples, sacred mountains, et cetera – as well as offerings, sacrifices, prayers, invocations, chants, songs, dances, and attitudes and gestures, whether prescribed (prostration, genuflection) or proscribed (blasphemy), concerning the gods, spirits and ancestors. In the case of political systems, we can mention palaces; fortresses; big, chiefly houses; sceptres; thrones; insignia of rank within military or administrative hierarchies; and commemorations of moments that founded a new society (for the French, the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 and the song ‘La Marseillaise’, which became the national anthem).
However, the distinction between religion and politics is recent in the history of humankind and present in only a few societies. For thousands of years, religion and politics were inseparable and even fused. Jupiter was Rome’s first citizen (primus civis). The Chinese emperor, the Wang, was ‘the Unique Man’, the only one capable of uniting Heaven and Earth (the components of the character Wang), and therefore the only one qualified to celebrate the great cosmic rituals for the benefit of the peoples of the Empire.
The tu’i tonga, or Polynesian paramount chief, whose power was said to extend over a hundred islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, claimed to descend directly from Tangaloa, one of the major gods in the Polynesian pantheon, who had infused into the chief’s body a component of his divine force – the most powerful ‘mana’, which no other man could possess. As a consequence, when the tu’i tonga celebrated the rites of the passage of seasons, his mana was believed to make the women’s wombs fertile and multiply the riches of the sea and the land.
In order for these ancestors, spirits and gods, normally invisible to the human eye, to become present when not incarnated in the body of a man or a woman, carvings, paintings and masks would lend them form and matter. Did not the goddess Athena, patron of Athens, dwell in the Parthenon in a body sculpted by Phidias in the fifth century BCE? Did not Johann Sebastian Bach put his talent to work composing the Saint Matthew Passion (1729) and El Greco his to painting The Holy Trinity (1577) on the altar screen of the Monastery of Saint Dominic in Toledo? And, countless works of art have been dedicated to glorifying the power of the powerful among men; I will choose only one, the Portrait of Louis XIV, painted by Rigaud in 1701, a theological-political representation of the king of France as ‘absolute’ monarch.
But imaginary and symbolic creations are by no means the monopoly of religious and political systems, of kinship systems or of any other social relationship that gives rise to a collective identity and practices that must be manifested and celebrated. They pervade the even-larger domain of artistic works and practices that are meant, above all, to express the personality and inner life of their creators; to express their dreams, their emotions, their anger and their hopes: whether it is Goya’s The Nude Maja (ca. 1797), or Picasso’s Guernica (1937), which proclaims his horror and pain at the massacres committed by Franco’s troops and their German allies during the Spanish Civil War.
And can we forget the novelists, poets, songwriters, playwrights and filmmakers who transport us to worlds that exist only in and through their works? The French poet Paul Verlaine’s famous alliterations, ‘les sanglots longs des violons de l’automne bercent mon coeur d’une langueur monotone’ [the long sobbing of the violins of autumn lull my heart with monotonous languor], reproduce the sound of the long sobbing notes of the violins of autumn. Although everyone knows that the violins of autumn and their sobbing notes have never existed – that they are metaphors, figures of speech – the images and music of these words can inspire feelings in us that suggest the smell of rain and dead leaves associated with the word ‘autumn’. But metaphors are not only the matter of myth or poetry; everyday language is full of them as well. We will return to this. Finally, how could I fail to mention fairy tales – Snow White and the Seven Dwarves – illustrated books for children, but also for adults – Mickey Mouse, Tintin and the Temple of the Sun, Tarzan, Japanese manga – and, of course, games – cards, chess, ball games, and so on: play invites the players temporarily into a virtual world that they themselves create when they play by the rules invented so they may confront each other (and have fun doing it). But the game world vanishes as soon as the game is over.
To bring to an end a list that has no possible end, I will mention those symbolic objects par excellence: toys, dolls, stuffed bears, Batman costumes, plastic Kalashnikovs, et cetera. Through them, children multiply their ‘selves’ and explore the imagined and imaginary worlds they have invented, and they do this without ever leaving their room, their apartment or their parents’ garden. Reading this list, one may get the idea that human existence is nothing more than imaginary and symbolic realities. This is by no means the case, but even so, there are men and women who believe they are Napoleon or Joan of Arc. The imaginary seems to have taken them over, and because of this they are no longer able to live like, or with, other people. An effort must, then, be made to make them aware that they are not who or what they imagine themselves to be, that they are ‘really’ someone else, an other. But they can persist in denying or refusing this other within themselves, which is their initial ego. Could Don Quixote, who was not ‘completely’ mad, hear the warnings of Sancho Panza, his valet whom he saw as his squire, when he said that the knights he was challenging or preparing to fight were merely windmills? Is there something in addition to the imaginary and the symbolic that, together with them, makes up human reality? What is the nature of this additional component? And what relationship does it entertain with the imaginary and the symbolic? Are these relations of complementarity or opposition? Or of mutual exclusion? To answer these questions, we will have to analyse what is meant by the words ‘imagine’, ‘symbolise’, ‘believe’, ‘possible’, ‘impossible’, ‘unbelievable’, ‘real’, and so on.
But before getting down to this subject, I must warn the reader that the present book will not be dealing with the ‘imaginary self’ that each of us constructs, unaware that this part of ourselves is imaginary.5 Nor will I examine Lacan’s three fathers hovering over each of us: the ‘real’ father we have, the ‘imaginary’ father we would like to have had, and the ‘symbolic’ father who is the father of no one in particular but is the embodiment, for everyone, of the inner presence of the law that presides over desire, the exercise of our sexuality. These imaginaries are always singular, attesting to a particular life story, but one in which the analyst can decipher the effects of universal unconscious processes.6 These imaginaries that structure the ego but elude its conscious awareness are often the symptoms and symbols of a difficulty in living, a suffering, of which some ask an analyst to help them to become aware and distance themselves.7
Exploring this domain is not the job of anthropologists, however, but the work of psychologists, psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. As an anthropologist, I will investigate other imaginaries: those of games and of art, where the distinction between what is imaginary and what is not is conscious and experienced; those of the founding myths of religious and political systems, which are shared and believed to be given by the gods, God or reason, but which are not experienced and recognised as imaginary. On the contrary, these are held to be the invisible but ever-present basis of reality, a surreal portion of the real.
Of course, I have often talked with psychoanalysts about the nature and the basis of the hetero- and homosexual incest taboos, as well as about the defining characteristics of human sexuality. I have defined the latter as polymorphous (it is homo- and heterosexual); polytropic (the sexual drive does not distinguish spontaneously between permitted and prohibited persons); generalised, because it is present throughout the body; and cerebralised – in other words it functions as much in reaction to internal representations as it does to external stimuli and results in the disjunction between sexuality-as-desire (pleasure) and sexuality-as-reproduction. But everywhere, sexuality, which is in itself a-social, is placed in the service of and subordinated to the reproduction of social relations and issues which go beyond it and make it into a ventriloquist’s dummy, obliged to testify in favour of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of a social order that encompasses and traverses it.8
