Thoughts on Sign and Image in Neo-Platonism and Northwest Amazonian Ontology
Using semiotics to understand another ontology may face the same problems as that of assuming an “ontology of ontologies” - an ontology that describes the relations between all ontologies - when another ontology involves a distinct ontology of the sign. I have tried to describe the soul(-as-image) in Northwest Amazonia as an iconic sign, because it bears a relationship of similarity to its referent (in this case, the body), while it is also indexical, as it refers by contiguity to a relation of energy-exchange with an immortal ancestral being or a dark, shadowy demon. However, to say that the relation is one of both contiguity and similarity may be to say all too little if the very meaning of contiguity and similarity differ within a distinct ontology. In Neo-Platonic (and I would say also Northwest Amazonian) emanationism, contiguity and similarity accompany one another, in so far as nearness to other beings in the processual hierarchy is part and parcel of the relationship of participation through which the lower receives qualities from the higher, thus becoming similar to it. The emanation is a transmission of “energy” (ἐνέργεια).
Thus, a Neo-Platonist like Iamblichus, whose On the Mysteries at times reads like a kind of close phenomenology of the manifestations and images that unfold from divine emanations, can himself understand ritual symbols (σύμβολον, the root of ‘symbol’, or otherwise συνθημα ‘token’) as images that participate in the Gods. These ‘symbols’ are just as much’ ‘icons’ (εἰκών, root of ‘icon’). The same goes for omens such as in bird-signs or haruspicy (divinization based on the entrails of sacrificial animals), except here we are dealing with ‘signs’ (as σῆμα, from which we get ‘semiotics’). Whereas omens seem like paradigmatic cases of indexical signs - since they should ‘indicate’ what will follow from them in time (although in terms of the sequence of cause and effect, the indexical relation appears to be reversed, since the sign indexes a future event, rather than a past one) - for Iamblichus they are in fact images that participate in their divine models (De Myst. II-III).
I do not want to push the point too far, but its clear how the logic of participation is serving to create a semantic cluster that serves to unify the concepts of ‘sign’ ‘symbol’ ‘image’ and ‘icon’ (which semiotics might differentiate between), in a way that relates contiguity and similarity according to a specific ontology, thus requiring that our own semiotic vocabulary adjust itself to distinct ontological presuppositions.
The emanationism of the people of the Northwest Amazon would appear to follow Neo-Platonism, if only in linking the idea of a transmission of energy to a manifestation of image and quality, defining both relations of contiguity and similarity (see my post on emanationism in Northwest Amazonia, which I also plan to expand upon in the near future). This is exactly how Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, who worked closely with Antonio Guzman, a Desano who was also fluent in Spanish, ended up understanding the concept of the ‘keori’, which Reichel-Dolmatoff ended up translating as ‘symbol’ but also as “image, echo, shadow, reflection” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971). Examples of the keori images are hallucinatory forms seen during the consumption of yajé (=ayahuasca) or the design-patterns and paintings that decorate the walls of houses and, in fact, I would suggest, any patterned surface or visible form.
Now, it would seem that Reichel-Dolmatoff and Guzman together came to the conclusion that the keori must be distinguished according to the idea of ‘symbol as model’ and ‘symbol as replica” (Reichel-Dolmatoff 1971), which strongly suggests a Platonic-style model-copy relationship between different images. They also devised a kind of schema to understand Desano ‘symbolism’ - a four-fold movement of “thought jumps,” which pass from ‘concrete’ to ‘abstract’: from immediate metaphorical-metonymic associations, to sexual physiology (such as round, womb-like forms vs. phallic, long forms), to the fertile energy that circulates through the cosmos, to the principle of the color-energies as emanations from the Sun. The movement from ‘concrete’ to ‘abstract’ seems to follow the difference between ‘perceiving’ (as inyamahsiri) and ‘conceiving’ (as pemahsiri). It appears that ‘conceiving’ is itself directed to the keori, and so we would suspect, the keori as model, ‘Form’ or ‘Concept’ in the Platonic sense of eidos, whose basic meaning we should remember is ‘image’ or ‘manifest appearance.’
Can the phenomenology of the image in Desano thought be meaningfully compared to the Neo-Platonist one? I would say yes, even if we should understand the specific hierarchy of “thought jumps” as more of a reflexive schema that Reichel-Dolmatoff and Guzman developed through their dialogues in the writing of Amazonian Cosmos. However, it is not yet totally clear what is going on, exactly, when we move from the keori as such to ‘symbol’ ‘sign’ and ‘icon,’ almost all terms which in fact derive directly from the Greek (‘sign’ in fact from Latin ‘signum’ but linked in our thinking to ‘semiotics,’ from Greek σῆμα), a point which cannot help but arise in comparing to Neo-Platonist theories of the image in the context of emanationist ontology. The problem of translation is not innocent, because it gets at the very question of understanding the underlying phenomenological intuitions that ground the Northwest Amazonian thought of ‘appearance’ as they dovetail with what “we” would call signs, symbols, or icons.
Just as Heidegger carried out a kind of phenomenology of the Greek language, the logical step seems to me to carry out a phenomenology of Desano or Tukanoan language, in order to get inside its own intuitions, and thus its own phenomenology of emanationism, light, and image. This is something I plan to pursue over the coming years, building on Reichel-Dolmatoff’s own practice of glossing and etymology, whose principles he unfortunately never explicated or tried to define. My hope would be to proceed in this way to a kind of ontological relativization of the sign through an encounter with another’s semiotics. At the same time, one might arrive at a clarification of the stakes of this “overlapping” with the intuition of the eidos, and so perhaps deepening the latter’s motivation, now within a transcendental field confined neither to the West nor to the Modern.
