Chapter 8: The Prehistory of Written Language
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[edit] Second-order Symbolism
Vygotsky views written language as a symbolic representation of spoken language, which in turn is a symbolic representation of the external world.
Question: is it always the case that written language is symbolic of spoken language, or does written language have characteristics of its own that differ in essence from spoken language? It seems to me that many written texts would sound "odd" if they were produced as speech in a normal conversation, yet seem perfectly reasonable and comprehensible as written language. Movies aren't just filmed plays, and paintings aren't just colored drawings.
[edit] Gestures and Visual Signs
In this section, Vygotsky again posits the origin of a purely symbolic entity in a descriptive gesture (very similar to his discussion of the origins of pointing in previous chapters). He argues that the drawings of young children are impressionistic and gestural rather than what most would consider representational. This seems right to me.
[edit] Development of Symbolism in Play
There are some very interesting observations in this section, and I'm curious to know if further work has produced similar findings. According to Vygotsky, very young children are capable of forming a one-to-one matching of a physical token with a concept (for instance, a book can stand in for a house, or a pencil a nursemaid), but don't look for further semiotic connections between the symbol and the referent. Older children, by contrast, look for deeper connections between the two (e.g., the older child who observes that the dark book is a good symbol for the forest because the forest is also dark). He says that the only thing necessary for the young child is that the object admits the appropriate gesture, and that the children are incapable of using items like furniture, people, and their own body parts in this role. I'm not quite sure what he means by this; perhaps the children need to be able to directly manipulate the tokens in order to act out the narrative?
[edit] Development of Symbolism in Drawing
In this section, Vygotsky further develops his thesis that children progress from gestural, abstract drawings to more representational ones.
Question: What most of us would call "representational" art largely derives from classic Western art conventions. Other cultures have different conventions. For instance, classic Egyptian painting routinely depicts human figures with the torso seen in a frontal view. The head is typically shown in profile, except for the eye, which is drawn as seen from the front. The feet are drawn in profile, as seen from the inside. One can only assume that the Egyptians knew that people don't "really" look like that, but no doubt these depictions looked normal to them. There's also a story about Picasso in which someone asked him why he didn't draw representational images. Picasso asked the man for an example of what he meant, so the questioner produced a photograph of his wife. Picasso then asked the man if his wife was really 5 centimeters tall, two dimensional, was nothing but a head, and had skin tones that were shades of gray (Picasso also famously said that when he was a child he had drawn like Raphael, but it had taken the rest of his life in order to learn to draw like a child).
I'm wondering how much of the described progression actually consists of the child learning exactly what sort of artistic conventions are in force in his or her culture.
[edit] Symbolism in Writing
In this section, he continues discussing his idea that graphical signs progress from first-order symbolism (a pencil mark directly corresponds to an external entity, or some aspect of the entity, such as its position ) to second-order symbolism (pencil marks correspond to other symbols, such as spoken words). Question: is the distinction really between first and second order, or is the critical step here the leap to meta-symbols, of whatever order? Consider a playwright's written response to a bad review of a play adapted from a novel based on the life of William Shakespeare. How many orders are involved?
This is the painting "The Treachery of Images" by the artist René Magritte. The words translate as "This is not a pipe" -- the point being that an image of a pipe is not a pipe. But this isn't really even a painting of a pipe. It's an image on your screen of a digitized photograph of a painting of words that refer to a painted image of a pipe (perhaps there are even more levels that I've left out). What order of symbolism is this? :-)
