Tool and Sign in Vygotsky’s Development

Vygotsky’s view on tools, signs and the spoken word are elaborated through a comparison of his early anthropological writings with his later works. It is argued that these relations underlie ideological tensions which persist across the human sciences to this day. There is a tension within Vygotsky’s writing, and in its interpretation, hinging around the relation of sign and tool, sometimes taken up under the heading of word and deed (or action). This contradiction turns out to be a microcosm of the tension between language and labour in the wider field of Marxist theory, which in turn evokes the class antagonisms underlying the original work of Marx and Engels, antagonisms which have continued to be reflected in the development of theory up to the present time. Vygotsky’s final position was expressed clearly enough on the last page of “Thinking and Speech” (1934), here taken up under the heading of word and deed: The connection between thought and word is not a primal connection that is given once and forever. It arises in development and itself develops. “In the beginning was the word.” Goethe answered this Biblical phrase through Faust: “In the beginning was the deed.” Through this statement, Goethe wished to counteract the word’s over-valuation. ... we can agree with Goethe that the word as such should not be overvalued and can concur in his transformation of the Biblical line to, “In the beginning was the deed.” Nonetheless, if we consider the history of development, we can still read this line with a different emphasis: “In the beginning was the deed. (1934, p. 284-5) Although Vygotsky does not here touch on the question of tool and sign, this is, as will be seen, a clear and succinct statement of the relation, leaving to the reader the work of unfolding from that relation the richness and complexity of the history of intertwined development alluded to. However, there are other statements of Vygotsky, at other times and in other terms, and interpretations of his writing by other writers which oblige us to look more deeply into this problem. Let us first review what Vygotsky himself said on the topic, which is variously expressed in terms of sign/symbol & tool, word & action/deed or psychological tool & technical tool. Vygotsky’s Early Writing on the Development of Tools The story begins with the book Vygotsky wrote in collaboration with Luria in 1929, Ape, Primitive Man, and Child: Essays in the History of Behaviour. Vygotsky wrote the first two chapters, mainly drawing on the reports of contemporary zoologists, anthropologists and ethnologists. Vygotsky’s ideas were later tested out by Luria in an expedition to * This article was first published on the web in 2015. Vygotsky uses the term “primitive man.” This expression is ‘unmentionable’ in the light of both postcolonial and feminist sensibilities. However, it would be dishonest to excise this and similar terms from Vygotsky’s writing, written at a time before these terms were problematised. But to make it clear that they are not my terms. I have everywhere placed inverted commas around “primitive man.” This is not the only issue with this work, which has been excluded from Vygotsky’s Collected Works. However, in amongst the problems with this work there are some very important insights which need to be excavated and preserved.