Epistemological bric(k)olage: Toying with the world

This paper proposes a linguistic/epistemological framework for reading LEGO construction toys as a fully-fledged functional language system. From as early as the 1930s, different generations of consumers have identified LEGO with more than a commercial brand. A wide variety of products in different media (books, magazines, films, music videos, videogames, software, amusement parks and art works) are the ever-increasing result of LEGO merchandise and of the cannibalisation of contemporary culture and lifestyle. The purely visual experience of traditional entertainment seems to integrate in LEGO with intellectual engagement, as if mixing Bruno Munari’s pedagogy of creativity (“If I see, I learn. If I do, I understand”) with a pinch of thought-provoking tech discourse. From a linguistic point of view, it is crucial to notice that any LEGO brick produced after 1963 will match any other brick – even the most recent ones – across a wide range of themed sets, drawing from sources as diverse as fairy tales and folklore, cinema, architecture, engineering. Any element in the LEGO system is universally interlockable with any other element, both synchronically and diachronically. Besides providing an example of transgenerational entertainment, this aspect suggests LEGO as a semiotic system where elements can be mixed-and-matched without limitations. The paper analyses the cross-semiotic ideational processes relating to the representation of empirical (or other) referents through the use of building bricks, including the narrative construction of LEGO’s syntactic functioning and the relational arrangement of LEGO’s semantic and cognitive dimension.