Our view of the world is in many ways pre-established for all of us. These habituated ways of seeing and of acting are nearly invisible to us; they have become second nature, obvious and beyond the need or the possibility of inspection. This naturalization has its foundation in the myriad of social and cultural experiences which make up our own personal histories. Nevertheless it may be useful to focus on two relatively different kinds of influences in this shaping of common sense: overt instruction, and our own practical experience. Overt instruction comes in many ways, from the parent or teacher’s direct instruction: ‘No, not this way, that way’; ‘No, that’s not the reason, this is’; ‘No, that’s not what you do, this is what you do.’ In an example that sticks in my mind, a friend’s friend, in teaching her 3-year-old to cook scones, says: ‘No, James, you don’t spit on the spoon’—when he had just done so.
‘Practical experience’ hardly needs elaborating, except perhaps to say that it might or does provide an often countervailing common sense to that produced by overt instruction, so that James may find that it is, after all, useful to spit on the spoon in order to get off some particularly sticky bit of doughy mixture.
It is this composite common sense which I would like to unsettle, in relation to our views of children’s meaning-making. To do so, I will consider several quite ordinary and everyday kinds of activities which children of, say, up to 8 years of age happily, readily and constantly engage in, without particular prompting. Some of these examples I have to reconstruct here by telling alone. In one case in particular I have lost the object in question— let me call it the ‘Panadol-man’; in other cases the ‘objects’ never really existed as objects—they were temporary arrangements of building blocks, pillows, blankets, chairs, dolls
and so on, usually on a floor in the corner of a room, sometimes taking over and transforming the whole room. And not only were they temporary, swept away by the next order to ‘tidy your room’, ‘tidy up the mess you’ve made in the living room’, they were also constantly being transformed: a tent turning into a spaceship, turning into a house for aliens, turning into an ordinary family setting, and so on, and so on. Sequences of play have a relative stability, which, I imagine, appear to the children engaged in them as coherent, stable and persistent, because the changes, the transformations—each quite minute in itself yet adding up to significant change quite rapidly—are each of them well motivated by the substance of the play.
To start with two points central to an exploration of meaning begun in the first chapter: (c) the sign-maker’s interest; and (b), arising out of that, the motivated nature of the sign. In all the examples which I will discuss here, as in all examples in all instances, my assumption is that at a particular moment we, all of us, act out of a certain interest in the environment in which we are, and that in our making of signs, that interest is reflected in the sign in the best possible way, in the most plausible fashion, in the most apt form. So the environment for two children may be: playing at home, in a room, playing at ‘families’, in which at this point in the play, the family wants to go out in the car. A ‘car’ is needed, so a car is made—a car which satisfies the purposes of the play (being capable of being sat ‘in’ for instance), and it is made out of materials which are to hand, and which can adequately represent the meanings which need to be made concrete.
As all signs are complex, then the further assumption on which I proceed is that all aspects of these complex signs are equally formed in that way. Reading of signs, whether made by child or adult, is therefore an attempt to uncover the complexity of that initial interest as it is represented in the sign. That is what I wish to show here: that all signs show rationality, logic, human desire and affect.
Consider the cars in Figure 2.1 and Plate 1. They are drawn at around the same time, together with many others, at a period of great interest by the drawer in this kind of car. Let me describe some of the differences and similarities. The car in Figure 2.1 shows a plethora of detail, all of it to do with power. This is expressed through drawing and through writing: the visual emphasis on the ‘power units’ (the rocket exhausts at the back, with red flames emerging from them; the rocket-launcher behind the driver which has just fired a rocket that is now above the driver’s cabin; the streams of sparks and flames coming from
the wheels, an effect of the enormous speed at which the car is moving; the dart-shape of the car itself; the streamlining over the driver’s seat; and the energetically drawn lines of colouring-in, and of those indicating the ground, all suggesting movement, speed. Apart from the name of the car, the written labelling is about power too, indicating strength, or potential violence.
Other signs which express this same interest are colour and lettering; for instance the strong black lettering of Power engin; the colour-harmony of driver’s dress, wheels and the car’s name.
It is not difficult to read this 8½-year-old’s interests in this sign; and all aspects of this complex sign are motivated expressions of his meanings. The child decided to cut around this picture, though he did not cut out the car, as he did do, by contrast, in Plate 1. Difference in cutting-out is therefore part of the complex sign too. His cutting-out tells us that what he has chosen to represent in Figure 2.1 is not the car just by itself, as ‘object’, but the car in a context, in an environment: on a road where sparks can fly, and dust can be thrown up by the wheels; where the exhaust flames and fumes are visible; as is the rocket which the driver/pilot has just fired. So this sign, Figure 2.1, is not just a sign of a super technologically advanced car, but a sign of that car in action.
The interest in speed and power is also there in the drawing of the car in Plate 1, but here it is an interest in a much more abstracted and intensified notion of speed, expressed through ‘line’, and through the coding of notions of aerodynamics. The detail of Figure 2.1 has been replaced by an intense concentration Figure 2.1 Car in its environment
on the dart-shape; the aerodynamic line; the exterior design features; the paintwork—now in the reduced colour scheme (compared to the seven colours of Figure 2.1) of red and black. The surface of this object has been worked to a shiny finish, by intense rubbing with the red and the black pencils. When asked why he had made it shiny, the child said: ‘Oh because I like it like that, it has to be like that’ Clearly, special effort has gone into producing the effect of glossy paintwork. The only technological gadgetry that remains are the two ‘legs’ below the car which, it appears from the sign-maker’s spoken description, can be lowered in order to lift the car above obstacles on the road ahead, such as trucks for instance. The car’s black logo, M, is on a tailfin, which lends a jet-like appearance to this car. Streamlining is emphasized by the style of the paintwork.
Above all, perhaps, the difference of interest between Figure 2.1 and Plate 1 is that of focus on the elaboration of technical/techno logical detail of power in one, as against its concentrated, abstracted expression in the other; and the emphasis on the car’s performance in (relevant aspects of) its environment included in the cut-out representation of Figure 2.1, as against the car as object and its potential in Plate 1. As much effort has gone into the precision of cutting around the shape of the car in Plate 1 as into anything else.
Clearly the two images share an overarching interest. Yet there are also distinct and fundamental differences. Within the broad similarity of interest in power, speed, the differences point to importantly distinct conceptual and cognitive orientations: the relevant details of one object versus an intensification and abstraction of criterial features—how it works, what it is, as against ‘its potential’; an object acting in its environment as against an object per se: ‘action’ as against ‘being’; ‘what it does’ as against ‘what it is’.
The resources available to this child for making these objects were the same in each case. First, there is a history of previous reading and seeing—whether of Thunderbirds as a television series, as comic-strip, as detailed technical information; or of James Bond films seen on television. Then the resources for actually making these two representations (and others at the same time—many not completed or ending up on the floor): paper, pencils, scissors, sticking tape (the car of Plate 1 is actually made from two bits of paper stuck together to give the elongated ‘nose’ of the car). But sameness of resources gives rise to importantly different design, to different representational, aesthetic, affective and cognitive purposes.
A third example of this ‘car series’ is shown in Figure 2.2. It was also made at this time. This object is three-dimensional: a craft (perhaps now a space-craft) with the same triangular, dart-shape, made from Lego blocks. As with Figure 2.1, the plethora of detail is pronounced; there are similarities of overall ‘design’; and the same interest in speed and power. At this point the potentials— and limitations—of the representational resources become most noticeable. Lego blocks offer possibilities which paper does not; although paper, designed, painted and cut out, also offers possibilities which Lego does not—for instance, the possibilities of abstraction/intensification of Plate 1. But in Figure 2.2 issues of design arise even more insistently, as questions of symmetry, of balance, of ‘making it work’, as well as actual constructional possibilities and challenges. The cognitive potentials of the three objects are distinct; each offers possibilities and imposes limitations.
It is important to focus on the strong dynamic interrelation of the resources available for making—the representational resources— with the maker’s shifting interest. In part it is suggested by and determined by the possibilities of the material; in part the maker of the sign shapes the material in accordance with his interests. But the possibilities of shaping differ for Lego blocks and paper. In the process of the making of these objects the child has explored, shaped, designed and remade for himself significant notions of a technical, aesthetic and cognitive kind. Cognitively—and conceptually—this exploration ranges from the still relatively two- dimensional representation of Figure 2.1 with its variety of concerns; to the bare three-dimensionality of the cut-out car of Plate 1, with the expression of its concerns; to the fully three- dimensional Figure 2.2 with its conceptual and cognitive challenges.
The concepts explored in the making of each of these three objects are every bit as demanding, rewarding and significant as any concept expressed and explored in the medium of either spoken or written language. So are the cognitive challenges. Affectively each of the three offers totally different possibilities. An attempt to translate any of these into language reveals the real difficulty, in fact the impossibility of that task. These are ideas, concepts, notions, feelings, relations, affective states which are properly expressed in the way they are expressed here, and translation into language produces at best an impoverished account. Nevertheless, of the three it is perhaps Figure 2.1 which is most nearly translatable, perhaps in terms of ‘has-relations’: ‘the car
has a turbine engine, and it has secret weapons, and it has…’, and of ‘can-relations’: ‘it can fire rockets, and it can speed along on any surface,…’ The two-dimensionality of that representation, its classificatory characteristics, are most writing-like. The cut-out car of Plate 1, a three-dimensional object, is already much more difficult to ‘translate’; and the Lego construction could only be given in full translation, in ‘précis’ form.
This translatability or the lack of it, can give us an important clue both about criterial aspects of writing and of two-dimensional representation, namely their relative flatness, and the cognitive and affective ‘distance’ from the maker. I can pick up, feel, handle, the cut-out car. It is a tangible object; it gives me the possibility of a real tactile relation. I can feel how heavy or light it is, how smooth its surface, feel its shape, its dynamic quality. This is obviously so with the Lego car also. It fulfils all the criteria and meets all the requirements of the detail of Figure 2.1, but in addition I can physically explore it; I can feel it. Above all, I can move it about and place it in entirely new environments, with other objects, to form new structures in new imagined and real worlds. Its affective qualities and potentials are entirely different from those of the flat, two-dimensional object. With the latter, any attempts to insert it into an imaginary new context do have to remain imaginary and distanced. The cut-out car and the Lego ‘craft’ actually can and do become real objects in this real world. Figure 2.2 Lego car
HOW REAL IS REAL? OR, IMAGINING