What is Writing? Remembering and Adapting, Nurture and Nature
Describing the work of his colleague L. S. Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist A. R. Luria offered this formula: “the young child thinks by remembering, an adolescent remembers by thinking.” (Cognitive Development, p. 11).
Luria and Vygotsky championed a “materialist” approach to psychology, one at least formally in line with Marxist doctrine: consciousness in humans is shaped not primarily by the primordial traits selected by evolution, but by the vicissitudes of social change. Our minds are nurtured by history, Luria says—in fact what we call “history” may be seen as an adaptation that evolved in humans to front the challenges of nature. If by history we mean more than the written record, but instead embrace consciousness, experience, and identity with the term. History, perhaps, is simply another word for human nature.
But as the quote above hints, Luria and Vygotsky didn’t eschew the developmental biology of the brain. The meeting point of nature and nurture is no either/or fault line, but an intertidal zone in which uniquely hardy and adaptable forms survive.
What has this got to do with writing? Not only the limits of writing systems, but the nearly-endless variety that flourishes within those limits, is nurtured by our nature. The coterie of sensory, perceptual, and cognitive traits that accompanies consciousness—traits formed and forged by natural selection—set the table for the efflorescence of the whole range of graphic, narrative, enumerative, ordinating behaviors we call writing.
Writing is often taken as the root-system of history, at least in its grammar-school definition. History, we typically teach, begins when we start writing things down. Before that, it’s all prehistory. Of course, any historian knows that history is more troubled and complex than that; the written record is full of holes, cæsura and palimpsests; even (and especially) what is recorded can deceive and mislead; writing only effaces the absence of times past. Like everything else in nature, knowledge doesn’t accumulate; it evolves.
