Starting from Scratch

The Origin and Development of Expression, Representation and Symbolism in Human and Non-Human Primates

John Matthews

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136894213
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book compares the beginning of symbolic thought in human infancy with that of our close primate relatives, the chimpanzees. The author investigates the precursors of symbolism by studying the actions and interactions of a small group of these intelligent, non-human primates who live in Singapore Zoo.

Drawing upon his years of detailed observations, Matthews offers an in-depth analysis and interpretation of chimp behaviour to present an unprecedented account of the beginnings of symbolic thought. The book shows that the actions the chimpanzees perform have structural and semantic similarities with the actions of emergent expression and representation we find in human infancy. Of great importance is the finding that chimpanzee mark-making activity is not an artefact of human interference, but part of chimpanzee culture. Young chimpanzees seem to be introduced to acts of pretence and imagination by older and more experienced ones and taught the rudiments of expression, representation and symbolism.

The implications for our understanding of symbolism, language, art and education are enormous, as are those about our origins and our place within nature. The book is written in an accessible style for both specialist and non-specialist readers, and illustrated with the author's drawings and photographs.

1
Expression, representation and symbolism Children’s drawings

In my earlier work on children’s drawing, I discovered that the earliest mark-making and the later ‘scribbling’ was important in the formation of symbolic thought. I found that so-called ‘scribbling’ had structure, organisation and meaning. Soon I found that even scribbling was not the beginning of the story but had itself a developmental pre-history which stretched even further back in time. What people thought of as ‘scribbling’ turned out to be a rather sophisticated type of drawing, emerging relatively late on in developmental time.

So, scribbling has predecessors. Now I wanted to go even further, back into deep time, to the origins of representational, expressive and symbolic thinking. In my child studies, I located the act of drawing within intellectual and emotional development as a whole. I realised that the role of play was crucial to development in symbolisation. I focused especial attention on the example of drawing but I located drawing within a background of trivial-seeming actions which had received little attention. These chaotic looking actions set the context for drawing. Note carefully that we are not here discussing drawings as depiction. Most other work (exceptions include Athey, 1990/2007; Bruce, 1987, 1991; Costall, 1993, 1995; Maurer & Riboni, 2010; Stamatopoulou, 2009; Wolf, 1983) habitually equates drawing with picturing and in doing so misses an opportunity to study a family of activities which accompany drawing and which are critically connected with it. These actions are usually considered extraneous and irrelevant to the act of drawing. On the contrary, I found that, to fully appreciate the meaning and significance of the acts of drawing and writing, it was vital to study precursor actions which led toward symbolic thought. I wanted to show that expressive and representational thought was built gradually, incrementally, in a process involving evolution, development and learning. My work with children taught me that symbolisation was built slowly upon behaviours which were not initially symbolic in themselves. This approach to the dawning of semiotic thought is in contrast to a prevailing view at present that symbolic thought has no developmental or learned aspect. Currently, many psychologists think that representation is the province of human thought alone and that it appears ‘just like that’, as Alan Costall (2010, personal communication, Tate Modern Art Gallery) aptly writes – the product of special ‘modules’ unique to the human brain (Leslie, 1987).

The ideas contained within the present book do not fit into this paradigm at all. Nor do my studies seem to fit in with the idea that human learning is so vastly different from that of the chimpanzee. Tomasello, Kruger and Horn Ratner (1993) think that only humans consciously ‘teach’ their young but my observations challenge this, revealing some rather active, sensitive, and structured teaching offered to the young chimpanzee by those more experienced.

In order to counter the prevailing notion that expression, representation and symbolic thought are unique to humans and just appeared ‘out of the blue’ I knew I had to look very carefully and in an unbiased way at both the child’s and the chimpanzee’s actions and interactions with the environment in a range of behaviours which had received scant attention. These were actions which, on the face of it, seemed trivial, chaotic and meaningless.

The book focuses on a group of chimpanzees in a zoo but we immediately see in their world our own human society. We can see an eerie reflection of the human family and how the child grows up within it and how his or her natural development and learning is supported. We can see our own, human condition; our moments of despair and transcendence.

I thought that my 35 years or so of study of children’s drawing and play was complete. After learning about the chimpanzees I realised I was wrong. I had to start again. I had to start from scratch.

Expression, representation and symbolism in non-human primates

This book then, compares the development of expressive, representational and symbolic thought in human infancy with that of one of our closest primate relatives, the chimpanzees (pan troglodytes). In the pages which follow I investigate the precursors of expression, representation and symbolism in the actions and interactions of a small group of these intelligent, non-human primates who live out their days in Singapore Zoo.

By the term ‘expression’ I mean when a sound, a movement or an image is used, individually or in combination with others to form a single unit, to communicate or – more fundamentally – expel an emotion in relation to another. This ‘other’ may be a real-life, physical other, or it may be a virtual other, existing in one’s own mind. By ‘representation’ I mean when a sound, movement or image is used individually, or together with others as a unit, to ‘stand for’ something other than itself, whilst, paradoxically, still remaining just itself. This means that any object, action, or combination of actions, might be a representation; it just has to temporarily take the place of something else.

For a representation to become a symbol, however, requires it to form part of a symbol system, in which each part or element in a work (a sentence, say, or an artwork) contributes to the meaning of the whole piece or work, according to rules which organise the symbol system. Language is of course a good example of a symbol system, but an artwork also relies on the organisation of elements within it. It is in this sense then, that I use the term ‘symbolism’ to differentiate it from ‘representation’. Additionally, a symbol (as used here) can stand for a generic type or class of object, whereas a representation cannot: A representation stands for a specific object or, in its more advanced form, encodes the specific features of a unique object.

Expression, representation and symbolism in humans

In my earlier work, I was fascinated to discover that all of these possibilities are present during the investigation and play of very young human infants. When I looked at very young children playing and investigating things, and especially when I saw them starting to record and express experiences in mark-making, I realised that I was witnessing the genesis of semiotic thought. I went to the literature to find help in understanding what I was seeing but I found a paucity of any helpful research.

This was in the 1970s. I found two main schools of thought about children’s art. One certainly appreciated its beauty but had little to say about how it came about, preferring to describe it as the creative products of a golden age of innocence. This approach however was on the wane and being replaced by a long tradition in science in which children’s development was described in terms of its supposed deficits; that is, in terms of the child slowly overcoming severe obstacles or limitations in his or her thinking until he or she represented reality in a fashion deemed ‘correct’ by the establishment. This prejudice was obvious in accounts of the child’s development in the visual arts, especially in drawing. Here, the child was thought to slowly progress from thorough incompetence through a series of stages until he or she could draw objects and scenes visually realistically.

In contrast to this general model, I found the beginnings of drawing started with the first markings; that these were not merely haphazard but exhibited semantic and organisational characteristics right from their outset. Traditionally, such mark-making activities were relegated to a so-called ‘scribbling stage’ and were considered to be without meaning or control. From here (it was thought), the child might have a lucky break when he or she makes a fortuitous representation – that is, if and when the child happens, by accident, to draw something recognisable to an adult. From here, the myth continues with the child learning to repeat purposely those configurations which were initially the product of accident.

In fact, the accidental and the fortuitous do play an important role in the development of drawing and, as I will show in this book, in the development of semiotic thought overall. This was first suggested by George Luquet, a great pioneer in the analysis of children’s drawing but many subsequent interpretations of his theory have distorted what is actually a very powerful idea (Costall 2001; Luquet 1927/2001).

From here (the story goes) the child is launched along the correct developmental trajectory. Usually, the endpoint of this development is assumed to be the production of visually realistic pictures. With a few notable exceptions, the ‘visually realistic’ was never defined by the majority of researchers who apparently found the term unproblematic. The assumption seemed to be that the term ‘drawing’ was synonymous with a perspectival representation of the object. To compound the problem, very few of the investigators seemed to have any clear idea of what ‘perspective’ meant either. Nor did they much care. Everyone knew what a ‘good’ drawing was, didn’t they?

The concept of play

Before we go any further, I need to introduce the crucial concept of play. An understanding of play is central to what follows. Without the capacity for play, the symbolic act would not be possible.

Play will be a key theme in this book because of its role in the development of expressive, representational and symbolic thought. There are many kinds of play and in this book I am concerned only with spontaneous play. In both human childhood and in the chimpanzee’s development, this is their self-initiated, self-motivated, self-sustained and unsupervised play. This type of play is still rarely studied properly with regard to its structure and meaning. Both chimpanzees and children fare badly in this respect. In educational research recently there has been tendency to study only those aspects of children’s play which can be shown to measurably increase cognition. Some kinds of play are barely studied at all and discouraged or even forbidden in many educational settings. Proper outdoor play is nowadays rare. So is rough-and-tumble play. Kathy Sylva, Roy, and Painter (1980) seem to think that it offers nothing of worth to children in terms of their cognitive development (Jarvis, 2007). And of course we must not forget the dreadful effects of pretend ‘gun-play’. For decades now wrongly associated with machismo ‘male’ violence by the female-dominated, early-years profession, contemporary children can no longer experience the important thoughts and feelings which take place in pretend fighting – not in school anyway.

Shortly I will be describing to you the facilities supplied for the play of a group of chimpanzees. These animals are held in captivity in a zoo in Singapore yet a brief look at the supposed ‘free’ play of children in the playgrounds of our cities offers an eerie, dreary comparison to the zoo enclosure. Indeed, after watching children playing on the tamed and domesticated plastic and metal junk supplied them one might be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that the apes are better off in their prison.

From my work with young children in early childhood development I have learnt about forms of play not generally considered remotely important in education. These are the frowned-upon, anarchic messings about which remain largely unanalysed by scholars; behaviours which seem at first glance chaotic, without rules and certainly without ‘aims and objectives’. These are the behaviours never associated with ‘high-achieving schools’ and which never get printed into what Gunther Kress (1997) succinctly describes as today’s ‘profoundly unimaginative’ national curricular. Yet these forms of play turn out to be ludic experiments of enormous emotional and intellectual worth and probably the most important types of activities in the formation of the human semiotic thinking. They also appear to serve the same function for one of our last remaining primate relatives, the chimpanzee, whom we seem bent on exterminating.

Complex mammals including the whales, dolphins and seals and many land-dwelling ones including cats, dogs, smaller mammals, plus ourselves, as well as our close cousins the Great Apes, have access to two important and interpenetrating modes of consciousness. It may even be that we cannot restrict intelligent ludic play to mammals. For example, the manta ray also displays play behaviour and the sentient curiosity which accompanies it (Marshall, 2009).

We are all capable of two quite different types of orientation to the world. On the one hand, the actions we perform have evolved to help us survive. Involvement with the everyday world requires the development of efficient, adaptational actions in order to accommodate to the external environment and its demands. Included within this class of action are tool and object mastery. The manipulation and use of objects and the refinement of the skilled actions we can perform upon them or with them have assisted our survival. The making and using of tools has been especially important.

However, we also need access to quite another type of orientation to action and objects. Our learning could never be complete were it not for a quite different type of interaction with objects and with other persons. We have access to an arena of activity which is released from adaptational constraints and in which the components of task demands and object mastery are set free from immediate concerns about survival. This arena of activity is called play.

Consider the handling and use of an object. By relinquishing the object from any function and liberating the components of the actions involved in handling it from their usual adaptational contexts and performing them instead in a highly subjective mode, with no utilitarian object in mind, paradoxically, objectifiable properties are revealed, properties which would remain undiscovered if we simply had a set of fixed and routinised responses ...