Beyond Signification: The Co-Evolution of Subject and Semiosis 41first ―humble, but real, manifestation of the symbolic function‖, with the difference that in
animals it is ―biological finality‖ that has the power to generate the symbol, whereas ―this no
longer holds true in man, where the smoothness property, this transitivity of the index,
spreads, even to objects and to concepts which are biologically indifferent‖ (Thom, 1983, p.
269, emphasis added). This enhanced transitivity, which characterises the symbolic realm
proper, is definitive of a whole range of questions in the humanities; one thinks of issues
ranging from fetishism in psychoanalysis to the tropes of metaphor and metonymy in literary
and cultural studies.
But before we turn to this symbolic realm we should note that the indexical principle,
insofar as it links cause with effect or signified with signifier is also the basis of the
combinatorial capacity of semiotic systems, that of language in particular. The fact that two
things are associated, smoke with fire, or a certain smell with food, means that there is
already a meaningful conjoining of mental objects at a very basic level. This combinatorial
capacity is most highly developed in the human symbolic order but it is by no means absent
in the animal kingdom.
The experimental data cited by Hurford (2007, 2008) suggests that there is a fundamental
pre-linguistic and pre-human distinction between certain activities of the dorsal and ventral
cortical streams (see also Givón, 2008). The distinction consists in the identification by the
organism of a unique individual (dorsal stream), about which something is thought or
̳predicated‘ (ventral stream). The unique individual could simply be a visual stimulus of
some kind, while the ventral activity corresponds with identification of that stimulus as a
class of object, or as an object having some sort of quality or attribute, such as large/small,
prey/predator, etc. The important point is that two different types of perception occur and that
these are integrated into one mental object, which may be the most fundamental form of
ideation, underlying what is commonly called the proposition in human language and
cognition. Thus the combinatorial basis of ideation, as well as its unity, can it seems be
noticed in pre-linguistic creatures as part of the indexical order.
There must be a considerable distance travelled, however, in the evolution of the
cognitive faculty in the process of hominisation, since it has resulted in much more complex
expressions of meaning than these, including the possibility that there can be a meaningful
expression freed from the identification of a unique individual or stimulus in the immediate
environment, so that ―human language allows the description of a distant process (in space
and time) and frees the mind from the tyranny of the ̳here and now‘ to which the animal
remains subject‖ (Thom, 1983, p. 275). This crucial aspect we will deal with shortly under the
rubric of abstraction.
2.2. The Symbolic Realm
The symbolic order involves a massive expansion of the capacity to manipulate and
combine signs. The symbolic is defined in terms of several related capacities: firstly the
capacity for a more contingent relationship between the signifier and that which is signified –
we should not claim, however, that such relationships are always and entirely arbitrary;
secondly the capacity to retain and distribute a very large number of these signifiers
differentially across various meanings; thirdly the capacity to manipulate and aggregate them
in a wide range of combinatorial forms, from multidimensional structures in mental space to