Act and Image by Warren Colman;

Author:Warren Colman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000407488
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Unlimited)
Published: 2020-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Searle designates this by a general formula for symbols whereby “X counts as Y in context C.”7 But if X is the symbol and Y is what is symbolized, how do we know what Y is except by reference to X? That is, if we want to know what money is, we need to refer to what counts as money, such as a dollar bill or the pound in my pocket. Without coins, paper, or digits with £ and $ signs in front of them, money has no existence—thus the symbol X constitutes the symbolized Y in the context of collective social agreement.

Searle shows how such institutional facts contrast with the “brute facts” of the natural world that exist independently of human activity.8 By contrast, the symbols of human intentionality constitute the realities they represent. In Renfrew’s example, there is a “brute fact” of heaviness to which the symbol of weight relates but heaviness is not a measurable weight any more than a piece of metal is inherently money. In both cases, the practice of using these material objects creates a class of entities that cannot exist without the practice and the practice cannot exist without symbols to think it with, even if the only symbols in question are the objects which are being symbolized (e.g., as money or weights). This gives the symbols of human intentional activity an ontological significance without which they could not exist, in contrast to the existence of “brute facts” which do not need symbolization in order to exist.

There is, however, a difference between things like money which exists only through human social activity and the concept of weight which is a socially derived transformation of a pre-existing ontological property of the material world. And it is the latter that I want to extend to the kind of things that Jung designated “archetypal” symbols, symbols which are characterized by their powerful affective charge (“numinosity”) and the sense of special meaning and significance that attach to them. These symbols are emergent from affective responses that are transformed by being formulated as symbols within a social context, particularly the context of ritual. Hence the idea that symbolic imagination is created by symbols without which there is nothing to imagine with. If we were to look for the something which is symbolized by the Lion Man, for example, our point of reference would have to be the mammoth tusk carving itself. The material object is what it represents. The Lion Man (X) symbolizes Y in context C (e.g., Aurignacian rituals or beliefs) but Y only exists in and through the material object. And because the context in which it was created no longer exists, we can no longer decipher its meaning. For sure, we can recognize it as a symbolic object and give it other meanings in a different context, but, as with money, we cannot separate the meaning from either the object or the context.

With these considerations in mind, I will now return to the emergence of symbolic objects in the archaeological record in the form of shell beads.

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