Before there were pictures, there were relations. Early Homo sapiens did not stand apart from the world to depict it. The earth, the animal, the ancestor, and the self were interwoven in a single relational field — a living continuity rather than a scene viewed from outside. The act of marking stone, arranging pigment, or carving form was not a gesture of representation, but one of participation: a way of aligning with the powers and presences that constituted the world.
To call this art “primitive” or “symbolic” in the later sense is to miss its ontology. The bison on the wall was not an image of a bison — it was an enactment of bison-being, a semiotic participation in the same relational field that sustained both hunter and hunted. The line did not depict life; it extended life.
Pre-Homo sapiens hominins — Homo erectus and their kin — operated within proto-semiotic systems. They likely had forms of content and expression, but these were not yet reflexively stratified: meaning and action were inseparable, gesture inseparable from the event. These proto-semiotic capacities laid the groundwork, stirring the potential for symbolic reflexivity that would later unfold in Homo sapiens.
When early Homo sapiens engaged in cave painting, carvings, or sand drawings, they already possessed a stratified semiotic order capable of reflexivity. The silhouette of a hand, the curve of a bison’s back, the spiral of a carved motif — these were not mere extensions of action or ritual. They were symbolic construals: acts in which the form itself enacted relational meaning. In these gestures, the world could be seen, felt, and organised as a system of relations — a participatory art that was already metaphorical, not in depicting one thing as another, but in revealing the relational folds through which human experience could be apprehended.
Campbell observed in these early works the germ of myth: the dawning recognition that form could carry meaning beyond its immediate act. But the mythic mode, in its full reflexive sense, required the stratified semiotic order that only Homo sapiens possessed — the capacity to relate meanings to meanings, to let one act or image stand for another. This same leap underpins language: the junctional relation between token and value that Halliday identified as the hallmark of metaphor.
Only with this reflexive fold could an image become truly symbolic — able to stand for a meaning rather than merely enacting a participation. In this light, participatory art anticipates symbolic art much as protolanguage anticipates fully realised language: each is a living precursor, charged with the energy of a transformation already in motion.
When that transformation fully unfolded, it changed everything. The image would cease to be the world itself and would begin to mean it. Yet something profound was preserved — and simultaneously lost — in the transition: the sense that to draw was to belong, that to inscribe was to enter the living field of relation itself.
In the next post, we follow that metamorphosis: from participation to representation — from the world as relation to the world as image.
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