the aura of sedimented meaning that inscribes ‘the ideological content which
the words used had in preceding periods of civilization’.^16
Vygotsky’s explanation of concept-formation in children furnishes an
excellent description of this metaphorical drift. It begins with what he calls
‘complexes’ – that is, associations of objects in the perceptual experience of
the child (‘[i]n a complex, individual objects are united in the child’s mind
not only by his subjective impressions but also by bonds actually existing between
these objects’).^17 These associations tend to form chains, but without there being
a centre from which all the associations stem. Instead, there is a drift, which
passes from one element of the chain to another, the set possessing the
coherence of what Wittgenstein calls ‘family resemblances’. A chain complex
consists in ‘a dynamic, consecutive joining of individual links into a simple
chain, with meaning carried over from one link to the other ’.^18 It is here that
the association of objects in perceptual experience becomes linguistic, becomes
an association between a word, with its meaning, and not a singular object
but a chain complex. And this is not due to some spontaneous decision on
the part of the child; it depends on her interaction with adults, in the course
of an elementary form of social praxis: ‘in real life complexes corresponding
to word meanings are not spontaneously developed by the child: The lines
along which a complex develops are predetermined by the meaning a given
word already has in the language of adults’.^19 Vygotsky explains how the
child gradually passes from associated pseudo-complexes to chain complexes
to complexes proper – that is, how she acquires the collective meaning of the
‘words of the tribe’. What interests me here is that his explanation attributes
a radically metaphorical character to language. Meaning does not develop
through a leap from one reified meaning to another reified meaning, but
though metaphorical slippage:
What are the laws governing the formation of word families? More often
than not, new phenomena or objects are named after unessential attributes,
so that the name does not truly express the nature of the thing named.
Because a name is never a concept when it first emerges, it is usually bothPropositions (1) • 157(^16) Gramsci 1971, p. 450.
(^17) Vygotsky 1962, p. 61.
(^18) Vygotsky 1962, p. 64.
(^19) Vygotsky 1962, p. 67.