Title: The Civilization of Illiteracy
Author: Nadin, Mihai, 1938-
Language: English
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The Civilization of Illiteracy, by Mihai Nadin
(C) Mihai Nadin 1997


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Foreward

Introduction
 Literacy in a Changing World
Thinking about alternatives
Progressing towards illiteracy?

Book One
 The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow
Contrasting characters
Choose a letter and click
Keeping up with faster living
Loaded literacy
Man proposes, man disposes
Beyond the commitment to literacy
A moving target
The wise fox
"Between us the rift"
Malthus revisited
Captives to literacy

 The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy
For the love of trade
"The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental"
The rear-view mirror syndrome

Book Two
 From Signs to Language
Semeion revisited
The first record is a whip
Scale and threshold
Signs and tools

 From Orality to Writing
Individual and collective memory
Cultural memory
Frames of existence
The alienation of immediacy

 Orality and Writing Today: What Do People Understand When They
Understand
Language?
A feedback called confirmation
Primitive orality and incipient writing
Assumptions
Taking literacy for granted
To understand understanding
Words about images

 The Functioning of Language
Expression, communication, signification
The idea machine
Writing and the expression of ideas
Future and past
Knowing and understanding
Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous
Making thoughts visible
Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia

 Language and Logic
Logics behind the logic
A plurality of intellectual structures
The logics of actions
Sampling
Memetic optimism

Book Three
 Language as Mediating Mechanism
The power of insertion
Myth as mediating pre-text
Differentiation and coordination
Integration and coordination revisited
Life after literacy

 Literacy, Language and Market
Preliminaries
Products 'R' Us
The language of the market
The language of products
Transaction and literacy
Whose market? Whose freedom?
New markets, new languages
Literacy and the transient
Market, advertisement, literacy

 Language and Work
Inside and outside the world
We are what we do
Literacy and the machine
The disposable human being
Scale of work, scale of language
Innate heuristics
The realm of alternatives
Mediation of mediation

 Literacy and Education
"Know the best"
Ideal vs. real
Relevance
Temples of knowledge
Coherence and connection
Plenty of questions
The equation of a compromise
To be a child
Who are we kidding?
What about alternatives?

Book Four
 Language and the Visual
How many words in a look?
The mechanical eye and the electronic eye
Who is afraid of a locomotive?
Being here and there at the same time
Visualization

 Unbounded Sexuality
Seeking good sex
Beyond immediacy
The land of sexual ubiquity
The literate invention of the woman
Ahead to the past
Freud, modern homosexuality, AIDS
Sex and creativity
Equal access to erotic mediocrity

 Family: Discovering the Primitive Future
Togetherness
The quest for permanency
What breaks down when family fails?
The homosexual family
To want a child
Children in the illiterate family
A new individuality
Discontinuity
How advanced the past. How primitive the future

 A God for Each of Us
But who made God?
The plurality of religious experiences
The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms?
Challenging permanency and universality
Religion and efficiency
Religiosity in the civilization of illiteracy
Secular religion

 A Mouthful of Microwave Diet
Food and expectations
Fishing in a videolake
Language and nourishment
Sequence and configuration revisited
On cooks, pots, and spoons
The identity of food
The language of expectations
Coping with the right to affluence
From self-nourishment to being fed
Run and feed the hungry
No truffles (yet) in the coop
We are what we eat

 The Professional Winner
Sport and self-constitution
Language and physical performance
The illiterate champion
Gentlemen, place your bets!
The message is the sneaker

 Science and Philosophy-More Questions Than Answers
Rationality, reason, and the scale of things
A lost balance
Thinking about thinking
Quo vadis science?
Discovery and explanation
Time and space: freed hostages
Coherence and diversity
Computational science
Explaining ourselves away
The efficiency of science
Exploring the virtual
Quo vadis philosophy?
The language of wisdom
In scientific disguise
Who needs philosophy? And what for?

 Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes
Making and perceiving
Art and language
Impatience and autarchy
The copy is better than the original
A nose by any other name
Crying wolf started early
Meta-literature
Writing as co-writing
The end of the great novel

 Libraries, Books, Readers
Why don't people read books?
Topos uranikos distributed

 The Sense of Design
Drawing the future
Breakaway
Convergence and divergence
The new designer
Designing the virtual

 Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning
The commercial democracy of permissiveness
How did we get here?
Political tongues
Can literacy lead politics to failure?
Crabs learned how to whistle
A world of worlds
Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents
Rhetoric and politics
Judging justice
The programmed parliament
A battle to be won

 "Theirs not to reason why"
The first war of the civilization of illiteracy
War as practical experience
The institution of the military
From the literate to the illiterate war
The Nintendo war (a cliché revisited)
The look that kills

Book Five
The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the
Age of the
Web
Transcending literacy
Being in language
The wall behind the Wall
The message is the medium
From democracy to media-ocracy
Self-organization
The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution?
From possibilities to choices
Coping with choice
Trade-off
Learning from the experience of interface

 A Sense of the Future
Cognitive energy
Literacy is not all it's made out to be
Networks of cognitive energy
The University of Doubt
Interactive learning
Footing the bill
A wake-up call
Consumption and interaction
Unexpected opportunities


Foreword

No other time than ours has had more of the future and less of
the past in it. The heat and beat of network interactions and
the richness of multimedia and virtual reality reflect this time
more than do the pages you are about to read. I wish I could put
in your hands the new book, suggested on the cover, as the first
page following all those that make up the huge library of our
literate accumulation of knowledge.

Let's us imagine that it exists. As I see it, the book would read
your mind.as you pause on a thought and start formulating
questions. It should enable you to come closer to the persons
whose thoughts are mentioned here, either through further
investigation of their ideas or by entering into a dialogue with
them. We would be able to interact with many of the individuals
making this fascinating present happen.

The emergence of a new civilization, freed from constraints borne
by its members during a time to which we must bid farewell-this
is the subject of the book. Science and technology are themes of
this intellectual expedition, but the subject is the
ever-changing human being. The civilization we are entering is no
promised land, make no mistake about that. But it is a realm of
challenge. Tentative upon entering the territory of new
possibilities, we have no choice but to go ahead.

Some-the pioneers, inventors, entrepreneurs, even politicians of
the so-called Third Wave-rush into it, unable to contain an
optimism based on their own opportunistic enthusiasm (as real or
fake as it might be). The young lead, unburdening themselves of
the shackles of an education which made the least contribution to
their innovative accomplishments.

Others hesitate. They don't even notice the chains of a literate
heritage, a heritage that buffers them, as it buffers us all at
various times, from the often disquieting changes we experience
at all levels of our existence. In the palace of books and
eternity, we were promised love and beauty, prosperity, and above
all permanence.

Disinheriting ourselves from all that was, we are nostalgic for
our lost sense of continuity and security. Still, we cannot help
feeling that something very different from what we used to
expect is ahead of us. We are excited, though at times
apprehensive.

It might be that the cutting-edge language and look of Wired, the
magazine of the Netizens, is more appropriate to the subject
than is the elaborate prose of this book. But this is not yet
another product of the cottage industry of predictions, as we
know them from Naisbitt, Gilder, or the Tofflers.

To explain without explaining away the complexity of this time of
change was more important to me than to ride the coattails of
today's sound-byte stars. Solid arguments that suggest
possibilities fundamentally different from what they are willing
to accept, or even entertain, make for a more deeply founded
optimism.

If you get lost along the intellectual journey to which this book
invites, it can be only my fault. If you agree with the argument
only because it tired you out, it will be my loss. But if you
can argue with me, and if your argument is free of prejudice, we
can continue the journey together.

Try reaching me, as my thoughts try to reach you through this
book. Unfortunately, I am not yet able to hand you that ideal
book that would directly connect us. Short of this, here is an
address you can use:

nadin@code.uni-wuppertal.de. Let's keep on touch!



Literacy in a Changing World

Thinking about alternatives

Preoccupation with language is, in fact, preoccupation with
ourselves as individuals and as a species. While many concerns,
such as terrorism, AIDS, poverty, racism, and massive migration
of populations, haunt us as we hurry to achieve our portion of
well-being, one at least seems easier to allay: illiteracy. This
book proclaims the end of literacy, as it also accounts for the
incredible forces at work in our restlessly shifting world. The
end of literacy-a chasm between a not-so-distant yesterday and
the exciting, though confusing, tomorrow-is probably more
difficult to understand than to live with. Reluctance to
acknowledge change only makes things worse. We notice that
literate language use does not work as we assume or were told it
should, and wonder what can be done to make things fit our
expectations. Parents hope that better schools with better
teachers will remedy the situation. Teachers expect more from the
family and suggest that society should invest more in order to
maintain literacy skills. Professors groan under the prospect of
ill-prepared students entering college. Publishers redefine
their strategies as new forms of expression and communication vie
for public attention and dollars. Lawyers, journalists, the
military, and politicians worry about the role and functions of
language in society. Probably most concerned with their own
roles in the social structure and with the legitimacy of their
institutions, they would preserve those structures of human
activity that justify literacy and thus their own positions of
power and influence. The few who believe that literacy comprises
not only skills, but also ideals and values, say that the
destiny of our civilization is at stake, and that the decline in
literacy has dreadful implications. Opportunity is not part of
the discourse or argument.

The major accomplishment of analyzing illiteracy so far has been
the listing of symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; a
general degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension;
an alarming increase of packaged language (clichés used in
speeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitute
visual media (especially television and video) for written
language. Parallel to scholarship on the subject, a massive but
unfocused public opinion campaign has resulted in all kinds of
literacy enterprises. Frequently using stereotypes that in
themselves affect language quality, such enterprises plead for
teaching adults who cannot read or write, for improving language
study in all grades, and for raising public awareness of
illiteracy and its various implications. Still, we do not really
understand the necessary character of the decline of literacy.
Historic and systematic aspects of functional illiteracy, as well
as language degradation, are minimally addressed. They are
phenomena that affect not only the United States. Countries with
a long cultural tradition, and which make the preservation and
literate use of language a public institution, experience them as
well.

My interest in the subject of illiteracy was triggered by two
factors: the personal experience of being uprooted from an East
European culture that stubbornly defended and maintained rigid
structures of literacy; and involvement in what are commonly
described as new technologies. I ended up in the USA, a land of
unstructured and flawed literacy, but also one of amazing
dynamics. Here I joined those who experienced the consequences
of the low quality of education, as well as the opening of new
opportunities. The majority of these are disconnected from what
is going on in schools and universities. This is how and why I
started thinking, like many others, about alternatives.

My Mayflower (if I may use the analogy to the Pilgrims) brought
me to individuals who do many things-shop, work, play or watch
sports, travel, go to church, even love-with an acute sense of
immediacy. Worshippers of the instant, my new compatriots served
as a contrast to those who, on the European continent I came
from, conscientiously strive for permanency-of family, work,
values, tools, homes, appliances, cars, buildings. In contrast,
the USA is a place where everything is the present, the coming
moment. Not only television programs and advertisements made me
aware of this fact. Books are as permanent as their survival on
bestseller lists. The market, with its increasingly breathtaking
fluctuations, might today celebrate a company that tomorrow
disappears for good. Commencement ceremonies, family life,
business commitments, religious practice, succeeding fashions,
songs, presidents, denture creams, car models, movies, and
practically everything else embody the same obsession. Language
and literacy could not escape this obsession with change.
Because of my work as a university professor, I was in the
trenches where battles of literacy are fought. That is where I
came to realize that a better curriculum, multicultural or not,
or better paid teachers, or cheaper and better books could make a
difference, but would not change the outcome.

The decline of literacy is an encompassing phenomenon impossible
to reduce to the state of education, to a nation's economic
rank, to the status of social, ethnic, religious, or racial
groups, to a political system, or to cultural history. There was
life before literacy and there will be life after it. In fact,
it has already begun. Let us not forget that literacy is a
relatively late acquisition in human culture. The time preceding
writing is 99% of the entire story of the human being. My
position in the discussion is one of questioning historic
continuity as a premise for literacy. If we can understand what
the end of literacy as we know it means in practical terms, we
will avoid further lamentation and initiate a course of action
from which all can benefit. Moreover, if we can get an idea of
what to expect beyond the safe haven now fading on the horizon,
then we will be able to come up with improved, more effective
models of education. At the same time, we will comprehend what
individuals need in order to successfully ascertain their
manifold nature. Improved human interaction, for which new
technologies are plentifully available, should be the concrete
result of this understanding of the end of the civilization of
literacy.

The first irony of any publication on illiteracy is that it is
inaccessible to those who are the very subject of the concern of
literacy partisans. Indeed, the majority of the millions active
on the Internet read at most a 3-sentence short paragraph. The
attention span of students in high school and universities is
not much shorter than that of their instructors: one typed page.
Legislators, no less than bureaucrats, thrive on executive
summaries. A 30-second TV spot is many times more influential
than a 4-column in- depth article. But those who give life and
dynamics to reality use means other than those whose continued
predominance this book questions.

The second irony is that this book also presents arguments which
are, in their logical sequence, dependent on the conventions of
reading and writing. As a medium for constituting and
interpreting history, writing definitely influences how we think
and what we think about. I wondered how my arguments would hold
up in an interactive, non-linear medium of communication, in
which we can question each other, and which also makes
authorship, if not irrelevant, the last thing someone would worry
about. Since I have used language to think through this book, I
know that it would make less sense in a different medium.

This leads me to state from the outset-almost as
self-encouragement-that literacy, whose end I discuss, will not
disappear. For some, Literacy Studies will become a new
specialty, as Sanskrit or Ancient Greek has become for a handful
of experts. For others, it will become a skill, as it is already
for editors, proofreaders, and professional writers. For the
majority, it will continue in literacies that facilitate the use
and integration of new media and new forms of communication and
interpretation. The utopian in me says that we will find ways to
reinvent literacy, if not save it. It has played a major role in
leading to the new civilization we are entering. The realist
acknowledges that new times and challenges require new means to
cope with their complexity. Reluctance to acknowledge change
does not prevent it from coming about. It only prevents us from
making the best of it.

Probably my active practice of literacy has been matched by all
those means, computer-based or not, for coping with complexity,
to whose design and realization I contributed. This book is not
an exercise in prophesying a brave new world of people happy to
know less but all that they have to know when they need to.
Neither is it about individuals who are superficial but who
adapt more easily to change, mediocre but extremely competitive.
Its subject is language and everything pertaining to it: family
and sexuality, politics, the market, what and how we eat, how we
dress, the wars we fight, love, sports, and more. It is a book
about ourselves who give life to words whenever we speak, write,
or read. We give life to images, sounds, textures, to multimedia
and virtual reality involving ourselves in new interactions.
Transcending boundaries of literacy in practical experiences for
which literacy is no longer appropriate means, ultimately, to
grow into a new civilization.

Progressing towards illiteracy?

Here is as good a place as any to explain my perspective.
Language involves human beings in all their aspects: biology,
sense of space and time, cognitive and manual skills, emotional
resources, sensitivity, tendency to social interaction and
political organization. But what best defines our relation to
language is the pragmatics of our existence. Our continuous
self-constitution through what we do, why we do, and how we do
all we actually do-in short, human pragmatics-involves language,
but is not reducible to it. The pragmatic perspective I assume
originated with Charles Sanders Peirce. When I began teaching in
the USA, my American colleagues and students did not know who he
was. The semiotic implications of this text relate to his work.
Questioning how knowledge is shared, Peirce noticed that, without
talking about the bearers of our knowledge-all the sign carriers
we constitute-we would not be able to figure out how results of
our inquiries are integrated in our deeds, actions, and theories.

Language and the formation and expression of ideas is unique to
humans in that they define a part of the cognitive dimension of
our pragmatic. We seem endowed with language, as we are with
hearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste. But behind the
appearance is a process through which human self-constitution led
to the possibility and necessity of language, as it led to the
humanization of our senses. Furthermore, it led to the means by
which we constitute ourselves as literate as the pragmatics of
our existence requires under ever-changing circumstances. The
appearance is that literacy is a useful tool, when in fact it
results in the pragmatic context. We can use a hammer or a
computer, but we are our language. The experience of language
extends to the experience of the logic it embodies, as well as
to that of the institutions that language and literacy made
possible. These, in turn, influence what we are and how we think,
what we do and why we do. So does every tool, appliance, and
machine we use, and so do all the people with whom we interact.
Our interactions with people, with nature, or with artifacts we
ourselves generated further affect the pragmatic
self-constitution of our identity.

The literate experience of language enhanced our cognitive
capabilities. Consequently, literacy became larger than life.
Much is covered by the practice of literacy: tradition, culture,
thoughts and feelings, human expression through literature, the
constitution of political, scientific, and artistic programs,
ethics, the practical experience of law. In this book, I use a
broad definition of literacy that reflects the many facets it
has acquired over time. Those readers who think I stretch the
term literacy too far should keep in mind all that literacy
comprises in our culture. In contrast, illiteracy, no matter
what its cause or what other attributes an individual labeled
illiterate has, is seen as something harmful and shameful, to be
avoided at any price. Without an understanding that encompasses
our values and ways of thinking, we cannot perceive how a
civilization can progress to illiteracy. Many people are willing
to be part of post- literate society, but by no means are they
willing to be labeled members of a civilization qualified as
illiterate.

By civilization of illiteracy I mean one in which literate
characteristics no longer constitute the underlying structure of
effective practical experiences. Furthermore, I mean a
civilization in which no one literacy dominates, as it did until
around the turn of the century, and still does. This domination
takes place through imposition of its rules, which prevent
practical experiences of human self-constitution in domains where
literacy has exhausted its potential or is impotent. In
describing the post-literate, I know that any metaphor will do
as long as it does not call undue attention to itself. What
counts is not the provocativeness but that we lift our gaze,
determined to see, not just to look for the comforting
familiar.

This civilization of illiteracy is one of many literacies, each
with its own characteristics and rules of functioning. Some of
such partial literacies are based on configurational modes of
expression, as in the written languages of Japan, China, or
Korea; on visual forms of communication; or on synesthetic
communication involving a combination of our senses. Some are
numerical and rely on a different notation system than that of
literacy. The civilization of illiteracy comprises experiences of
thinking and working above and beyond language, as
mathematicians from different countries communicating perfectly
through mathematical formulae demonstrate. Or as we experience
in activities where the visual, digitally processed, supports a
human pragmatics of increased efficiency. Even in its primitive,
but extremely dynamic, deployment, the Internet embodies the
directions and possibilities of such a civilization. This brings
us back to literacy's reason for being: pragmatics expressed in
methods for increasing efficiency, of ensuring a desired
outcome, be this in regard to a list of merchandise, a deed,
instructions on how to make something or to carry out an act, a
description of a place, poetry and drama, philosophy, the
recording and dissemination of history and abstract ideas,
mythology, stories and novels, laws, and customs. Some of these
products of literacy are simply no longer necessary. That new
methods and technologies of a digital nature effectively
constitute an alternative to literacy cannot be overemphasized.

I started this book convinced that the price we pay for the human
tendency to efficiency-that is, our striving for more and more
at an ever cheaper price-is literacy and the values connected to
it as represented by tradition, books, art, family, philosophy,
ethics, among many others. We are confronted with the increased
speed and shorter durations of human interactions. A growing
number and a variety of mediating elements in human praxis
challenge our understanding of what we do. Fragmentation and
interconnectedness of the world, the new technology of
synchronization, the dynamics of life forms or of artificial
constructs elude the domain of literacy as they constitute a new
pragmatic framework. This becomes apparent when we compare the
fundamental characteristics of language to the characteristics of
the many new sign systems complementing or replacing it.
Language is sequential, centralized, linear, and corresponds to
the stage of linear growth of humankind. Matched by the linear
increase of the means of subsistence and production required for
the survival and development of the species, this stage reached
its implicit potential. The new stage corresponds to
distributed, non-sequential forms of human activity, nonlinear
dependencies. Reflecting the exponential growth of humankind
(population, expectations, needs, and desires), this new stage
is one of alternative resources, mainly cognitive in nature,
compensating for what was perceived as limited natural means for
supporting humankind. It is a system of a different scale,
suggestively represented by our concerns with globality and
higher levels of complexity. Therefore, humans can no longer
develop within the limitations of an intrinsically centralized,
linear, hierarchic, proportional model of contingencies that
connect existence to production and consumption, and to the
life-support system. Alternatives that affect the nature of
life, work, and social interaction emerge through practical
experiences of a fundamentally new condition.

Literacy and the means of human self-constitution based on it
reached their full potential decades ago. The new means, which
are not as universal (i.e., as encompassing) as language, open
possibilities for exponential growth, resulting from their
connectivity and improved involvement of cognitive resources. As
long as the world was composed of small units (tribes,
communities, cities, counties), language, despite differences in
structure and use, occupied a central place. It had a unifying
character and exercised a homogenizing function within each
viable political unit. The world has entered the phase of global
interdependencies. Many local languages and their literacies of
relative, restricted significance emerge as instruments of
optimization. What takes precedence today is interconnectivity
at many levels, a function for which literacy is ill prepared.
Citizens become Netizens, an identity that relates them to the
entire world, not only to where they happen to live and work.

The encompassing system of culture broke into subsystems, not
just into the "two cultures" of science and literacy that C.P.
Snow discussed in 1959, hoping idealistically that a third
culture could unite and harmonize them. Market mechanisms,
representative of the competitive nature of human beings, are in
the process of emancipating themselves from literacy. Where
literate norms and regulations still in place prevent this
emancipation-as is the case with government activity and
bureaucracies, the military, and legal institutions-the price is
expressed in lower efficiency and painful stagnation. Some
European countries, more productive in impeding the work of the
forces of renewal, pay dearly for their inability to understand
the need for structural changes. United or not in a Europe of
broader market opportunities, member countries will have to free
themselves from the rigid constraints of a pragmatic framework
that no longer supports their viability. Conflicts are not
solved; solutions are a long time in coming.

One more remark before ending this introduction. It seems that
those who run the scholarly publishing industry are unable to
accept that someone can have an idea that does not originate
from a quotation. In keeping with literacy's reliance on
authority, I have acknowledged in the references the works that
have some bearing on the ideas presented in this book. Few, very
few indeed, are mentioned in the body of the text. The line of
argument deserves priority over the stereotypes of referencing.
This does not prevent me from acknowledging here, in addition to
Leibniz and Peirce, the influence of thinkers and writers such
as Roberto Maturana, Terry Winograd, George Lakoff, Lotfi Zadeh,
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, George Steiner, Marshall McLuhan,
Ivan Illich, Yuri M. Lotman, and even Baudrillard, the essayist
of the post-industrial. If I misunderstood any of them, it is
not because I do not respect their contributions. Seduced by my
own interest and line of reasoning, I integrated what I thought
could become solid bricks into a building of arguments which was
to be mine. I am willing to take blame for its design and
construction, remaining thankful to all those whose
fingerprints are, probably, still evident on some of the bricks I
used.

In the 14 years that have gone by since I started thinking and
writing about the civilization of illiteracy, many of the
directions I brought into discussion are making it into the
public domain. But I should be the last to be surprised or
unhappy that reality changed before I was able to finish this
book, and before publishers could make up their minds about
printing it. The Internet was not yet driving the stock market,
neither had the writers of future shock had published their
books churning prophecies, nor had companies made fortunes in
multimedia when the ideas that go into this book were discussed
with students, presented in public lectures, outlined to
policy-makers (including administrators in higher education),
and printed in scholarly journals. On starting this book, I
wanted it to be not only a presentation of events and trends, but
a program for practical action. This is why, after examination
of what could be called the theoretical aspects, the focus
shifts to the applied. The book ends with suggestions for
practical measures to be considered as alternatives to the beaten
path of the bandage method that only puts off radical treatment,
even when its inevitability is acknowledged. Yes, I like to see
my ideas tested and applied, even taken over and developed
further (credit given or not!). I would rather put up with a
negative outcome in discussions following publication of this
book, than have it go unnoticed.



Book one The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

Contrasting characters

The information produced in our time, in one day, exceeds that of
the last 300 years. What this means can be more easily
understood by giving some life to this dry evaluation
originating from people in the business of quantifying data
processing.

Zizi, the hairdresser, and her companions exemplify today's
literate population. Portrayed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, she
is contrasted to Pascal, who at the age of sixteen had already
published his work on conic sections, to Hugo Grotius, who
graduated from college at fifteen, and to Melanchton, who at the
age of twelve was a student at the once famous Heidelberg
University. Zizi knows how to get around. She is like a living
address on the Internet at its current stage of development: more
links than content, perennially under construction. She
continuously starts on new avenues, never pursuing any to the
end. Her well-being is supported by public money as she lives off
all the social benefits society affords. Zizi's conversations
are about her taxes, and characters she reads about in
magazines, sees on television, or meets on vacation. As
superficial as such conversations can be, they are full of catch
phrases associated or not with the celebrations of the day. Her
boyfriend, 34-year-old Bruno G., graduated with a degree in
political economy, drives a taxi cab, and still wonders what he
wants to do in life. He knows the name of every soccer team that
has won the championship since 1936; he knows by heart the names
of the players, which coach was fired when, and every game
score.

Melanchton studied reading, writing, Latin, Greek, and theology.
He knew by heart many fragments from the classical writers and
from the Bible. The world he lived in was small. To explain its
workings, one did not need to master mathematics or physics, but
philosophy. Since Melanchton can no longer be subjected to
multiple choice or to IQ tests, we will never know if he could
make it into college today. The question posed about all the
characters introduced is a simple one: Who is more ignorant,
Melanchton or Zizi?

Enzensberger's examples are from Germany, but the phenomena he
brings to his readers' attention transcend national boundaries.
He himself-writer, poet, publisher-is far from being an Internet
buff, although he might be as informed about it as his
characters are. As opposed to many other writers on literacy and
education, Enzensberger confirms that the efficiency reached in
the civilization of illiteracy (he does not call it that) makes
it possible to extend adolescence well into what used to be the
more productive time in the life of past generations. Everyone
goes to college-in some countries college education is a right.
This means that over half of the young people enter some form of
higher education. After graduating, they find out that they
still don't know what they want. Or, worse yet, that what they
know, or are certified as knowing, is of no consequence to what
they are expected to do. They will live, like Zizi, from social
benefits and will get extremely angry at anyone questioning
society's ability to provide them. For them, efficiency of human
practical experiences translate into the right to not worry
whether they will ever contribute to this efficiency. While still
students, they demand, and probably rightly so, that everything
be to the point. The problem is that neither they nor their
teachers can define what that means. What students get are more
choices among less significant subjects. That, at least, is how
it looks. They probably never finish a book from cover to cover.
Assignments are given to them in small portions, and usually
with photocopied pages, which they are expected to read. A
question-and-answer sheet is conveniently attached, with the hope
that the students will read the pages to find the answers, and
not copy them from more dedicated classmates.

That Zizi probably has a vocabulary as rich as that of a
16th-century scholar in the humanities can be assumed. That she
likely uses fewer than 1,000 of these words only says that this
is how much she needs in order to function efficiently.
Melanchton used almost all the words he knew. His work required
mastery of literacy so that he could express every new idea
prompted by the few new practical experiences of human
self-constitution he was involved in or aware of. He spoke and
wrote in three languages, two of which are used today only in
the specialties they are part of. Two or three sentences from a
tourist guidebook or from a tape is all Zizi needs for her next
vacation in Greece or Italy. For her, travel is a practical
experience as vital as any other. She knows the names of rock
groups, and lip-syncs the songs that express her concerns: sex,
drugs, loneliness. Her memory of any stage performance or movie
surpasses that of Melanchton, who probably knew by heart the
entire liturgy of the Catholic Church. Like everyone else
constituting their identities in the civilization of
illiteracy, Zizi knows what it takes to minimize her tax burden
and how to use coupons. The rhythm of her existence is defined
more by commercial than natural cycles. And she keeps refreshing
her base of practical information. Living in a time of change,
this is her chance to beat the system and all the literate norms
and constraints it imposes on her.

Melanchton, despite his literacy, would have been lost between
two consecutive tax laws of our time, and even more between
consecutive changes in fashion or music trends, or between
consecutive versions of computer software, not to say chips. He
belonged to a system appropriate to a stable world of relatively
unchanging expectations. What he studied would last him a
lifetime. Zizi and Bruno, as well as their friend Helga-the
third in Enzensberger's text-live in a world of unsettled,
heterogeneous information, based on ad hoc methods delivered by
magazines, or through the Internet, that one has only to scan or
surf in order to find useful data.

At this juncture, readers familiar with the World Wide Web,
whether passionate about it or strongly against it, understand
why I describe Zizi as a living Internet address. To derive some
meaning from this description, and especially to avoid the
appearance of drawing a caricature of the Internet, we need to
focus on the pragmatic context in which Zizi constitutes herself
and in which the Internet is constituted as a global experience.
The picture one gets from contrasting the famous Melanchton to
Zizi the hairdresser is not exactly fair, as it would be unfair
to contrast the Library of Alexandria to the Internet. On the
one hand, we have a tremendous collection representative of
human knowledge (and the illusion of knowledge). On the other we
have the embodiment of extremely effective methods for acquiring,
testing, using, and discarding information required by human
pragmatics. The world in which Melanchton worked was limited to
Central Europe and Rome. News circulated mainly by word-of-
mouth. Melanchton, like everyone who was raised with and worked
amid books, was subjected to less information than we are today.
He did not need an Intel inside computer or search engine to
find what he wanted. He would not understand how anyone could
replace the need for and pleasure of browsing by a machine called
Browser. His was a world of associations, not matches, no matter
how successful. Human minds, not machines, made up his cognitive
world.

Literacy opened access to knowledge as long as this knowledge was
compatible with the pragmatic structures it embodied and
supported. The ozone hole of over- information broke the
protective bubble of literacy. In the new pragmatic context, the
human being, thirsty for data, seems at the mercy of the
informational environment that shapes work, entertainment,
life-in short, everything. Access to study was far from being
equal, or even close to some standard of fairness, in
Melanchton's time of obsession with excellence. Information
itself was very expensive. In order to become a
hairdresser-were it possible and necessary 500 years ago-Zizi, as
well as the millions who attend career training schools, would
have had to pay much more for her training than she did in our
age of unlimited equal access to mediocrity. Knowledge was
acquired through channels as diverse as family, schools,
churches, and disseminated in very few books, or orally, or
through imitation.

Individuals in Melanchton's time formed a set of expectations and
pursued goals that changed minimally over their lifetime, since
the pragmatic context remained the same. This ended with the
dynamic practical experiences of self-constitution that led to
the pragmatic context of our day. Ended also are the variety of
forms of human cooperation and solidarity-as imperfect as they
were-characteristic of a scale in which survival of the
individual was essential for the survival and well-being of the
community. They are replaced by a generalized sense of
competition. Not infrequently, this takes the form of adversity,
socially acceptable when performed by literate lawyers, for
instance, yet undesirable when performed by illiterate
terrorists.

More suggestive than precise, this description, in which Zizi and
Melanchton play the leading characters, exemplifies the chasm
between yesterday and today. A further examination of what is
going on in our world allows the observation that literate
language no longer exclusively, or even dominantly, affects and
regulates day-to-day activities. A great amount of language used
in the daily routine of people living in economically advanced
countries was simply wiped out or absorbed in machine
transactions. Digital networks, connecting production lines,
distribution channels, and points of sale spectacularly augment
the volume and variety of such transactions. Practical
experiences of shopping, transportation, banking, and stock
market transactions require literacy less and less. Automation
rationalized away the literate component of many activities. All
over the world, regardless of the economic or technological
level reached, communication-specific endeavors, such as
advertisement, political campaigns, various forms of ceremonial
(religious, military, athletic), make crystal clear that
literate language use is subordinated to the function or purpose
pursued.

The developments under scrutiny affect surviving pre-literate
societies-the nomadic, animistic population of Sudan, the tribes
of the Brazilian Amazon forests, remote populations of Africa,
Asia, Australia-as they affect the literate and post- literate.
Without going into the details of the process, we should be aware
that commodities coming from such societies, including the
commodity of labor, no less than their needs and expectations,
are traded on the global market. In the African Sahara, TV is
watched-sets connected to car batteries-as much as in the high
mountains of Peru populated by illiterate Incas. As virtual
points of sale, the lands with pre-literate societies are traded
in the futures markets as possible tourist resorts, or as a
source of cheap labor. Experiences of practical
self-constitution as nomadic, animistic, and tribal are no
longer confined to the small scale of the respective community.
In the effective world of a global pragmatics of high
efficiency, their hunger and misery shows up in ledgers as
potential aid and cooperation programs. Don't read here only
greed and cynicism, rather the expression of reciprocal
dependencies. AIDS on the African sub- continent and the Ebola
epidemics only capture the image of shared dangers. Across the
Atlantic Ocean, the plants of the disappearing Amazon rain
forest, studied for their healing potential, capture an image of
opportunity. In such situations and locations, the pragmatics of
literacy and illiteracy meet and interact.

Choose a letter and click

Images substitute text; sounds add rhythm or nuance; visual
representations other than written words become dominant;
animation introduces dynamics where written words could only
suggest it. In technologically advanced societies, interactive
multimedia (or hypermedia) combine visual, aural, dynamic, and
structural representations. Environments for personal
exploration, organization, and manipulation of information
proliferate in CD-ROM formats, interactive games, and tutorial
networks. High fidelity sound, rich video resources, computer
graphics, and a variety of devices for individualized human
interaction provide the technological basis for what emerges as
a ubiquitous computing environment.

The entire process can be provisionally summarized as follows:
Human cooperation and interaction corresponding to the
complexity of the undertakings of our age is defined by
expectations of high efficiency. Relatively stable and well
structured literate communication among the people involved is
less efficient than rather fast and fragmentary contact through
means other than those facilitated by, or based on, literacy.
Stereotyped, highly repetitive or well defined unique tasks, and
the literate language associated with them, have been
transferred to machines. Unique tasks require strategies of
specialization. The smaller the task assigned to each
participant, the more effective the ways to carry it out at the
expense of variety of forms and extent of direct human
interaction, as well as at the expense of literacy-based
interactions. Accordingly, human self-constitution today
involves means of expression and communication no longer based
on or reducible to literacy. Characteristics immanent in
literacy affect cognitive processes, forms of human interaction,
and the nature of productive effort to a lesser extent.
Nevertheless, the reshaping of human pragmatics does not take
place by general agreement or without conflict, as will be
pointed out more than once.

While some fail to notice the decreased role of literacy and the
deterioration of language in our life today, others surrender to
illiteracy without even being aware of their surrender. We live
in a world in which many people-especially those with more than
undergraduate college education-complain about the low level of
literacy while they simultaneously acquiesce to methods and
necessities that make literacy less and less significant.
Furthermore, when invoking literacy, people maintain a nostalgia
for something that has already ceased to affect their lives.
Their thinking, feeling, interpersonal relations, and
expectations regarding family, religion, ethics, morals, art,
dining, cultural and leisure activities already reflect the new
illiterate condition. It is not a matter of personal choice, but
a necessary development. The low level of literacy of those who
receive an education from which society used to expect literate
adults to graduate worries politicians, educators, and literacy
professionals (writers, publishers, booksellers). They fear,
probably for the wrong reasons, that people cannot live and
prosper without knowing how to write or read at high levels of
competence. What actually worries them is not that people write
less well, or less correctly, or read less (some if at all), but
that some succeed despite the odds. Self-styled champions of
literacy, instead of focusing on change, spend money, energy, and
intelligence, not in exploring how to optimally benefit from
change, but on how to stop an inexorable process.

The state of affairs characteristic of the civilization of
illiteracy did not come about overnight. Norbert Wiener's
prophetic warning that we will become slaves of intelligent
contraptions that take over intellectual faculties deserves more
than a parenthetic reminder. Some commentators point to the
disruption of the sixties, which put the educational system all
over the world in turmoil. The events of the sixties, as much as
the new machines Wiener discussed, are yet another symptom of,
but not a reason for, the decline of literacy. The major
hypothesis of this book is that illiteracy, in its relative
terms mentioned so far, results from the changed nature of human
practical experiences; that is, from the pragmatics
corresponding to a new stage of human civilization. (I prefer to
use pragmatics in the sense the Greeks used it: pragma, for
deeds, from prattein, to do.) Regardless of our vocations-working
in a large corporation or heading one's own business, farming,
creating art, teaching language or mathematics, programming, or
even participating in a university's board of trustees- we
accept, even if with some reluctance, the rationalization of
language. Our lives take place increasingly in the impersonal
world of stereotype discourse of forms, applications, passwords,
and word processed letters. The Internet, as World Wide Web,
e-mail medium, data exchange, or chat forum effectively overrides
constraints and limitations resulting from the participation of
language in human pragmatics. Our world is becoming more and
more a world of efficiency and interconnected activities that
take place at a speed and at a variety of levels for which
literacy is not appropriate.

Still, complex interdependencies are reflected in our relation to
language in general, and in our use of it, in particular. It
seems that language is a key-at least one among many-to the
mind, the reason for which artificial intelligence is interested
in language. It also seems to be a major social ingredient.
Accordingly, no one should be surprised that once the status of
language changes, there are also changes far beyond what we
expect when we naively consider what a word is, or what is in a
word or a rule of grammar, or what defines a text. A word on
paper, one like the many on this page, is quite different from a
word in the hypertext of a multimedia application or that of the
Web. The letters serve a different function. Omit one from this
page and you have a misspelling. Click on one and nothing
happens. Click on a letter displayed on a Web page and you might
be connected to other signs, images, sounds, and interactive
multimedia presentations. These changes, among others, are the
implicit themes of this book and define the context for
understanding why illiteracy is not an accident, but a necessary
development.

Keeping up with faster living

Ours is a world of efficiency. Although more obvious on the
computer screen, and on the command buttons and touch-sensitive
levers of the machines we rely quite heavily upon, efficiency
expectations met in business and financial life insinuate
themselves into the intimacy of our private lives as well. As a
result of efficiency expectations, we have changed almost
everything we inherited in our homes-kitchen, study, or
bathroom-and redefined our respective social or family roles. We
do almost everything others used to do for us. We cook (if
warming up prefabricated dishes in a microwave oven still
qualifies as cooking), do the laundry (if selecting dirty sheets
or clothes by color and fabric and stuffing them into the
machine qualifies as washing), type or desktop publish,
transport (ourselves, our children). Machines replaced
servants, and we became their servants in turn. We have to learn
their language of instructions and to cope with the consequences
their use entails: increased energy demand, pollution, waste,
and most important, dependence. Ours is a world of brief
encounters in which "How are you?" is not a question reflecting
concern or expecting a real answer, but a formula. Once it meant
what it expressed and prefaced dialogue. Now it is the end of
interaction, or at best the introduction to a dialogue totally
independent of the question. Where everyone living within the
model of literacy expected the homogeneous background of shared
language, we now find a very fragmented reality of
sub-languages, images, sounds, body gestures, and new
conventions.

Despite the heavy investment society has made in literacy over
hundreds of years, literacy is no longer adopted by all as a
desired educational goal. Neither is it actively pursued for
immediate practical or long-term reasons. People seem to
acknowledge that they need not even that amount of literacy
imposed upon them by obligatory education. For quite a
few-speech writers, editors, perhaps novelists and
educators-literacy is indeed a skill which they aptly use for
making a living. They know and apply rules of correct language
usage. Methods for augmenting the efficiency of the message they
put in the mouths of politicians, soap-opera actors, businessmen,
activists and many others in need of somebody to write (and
sometimes even to think) for them are part of their trade. For
others, these rules are a means of exploring the wealth of
fiction, poetry, history, and philosophy. For a great majority,
literacy is but another skill required in high school and
college, but not necessarily an essential component of their
current and, more important, future lives and work. This
majority, estimated at ca. 75% of the population, believes that
all one has to know is already stored for them and made
available as an expected social service-mathematics in the cash
register or pocket calculator, chemistry in the laundry
detergent, physics in the toaster, language in the greeting
cards available for all imaginable occasions, eventually
incorporated, as spellers or writing routines, into the word
processing programs they use or others use for them.

Four groups seem to have formed: those for whom literacy is a
skill; those using it as a means for studying values based on
literacy; those functioning in a world of pre- packaged literacy
artifacts; and those active beyond the limitations of literacy,
stretching cognitive boundaries, defining new means and methods
of communication and interaction, constituting themselves in
practical activities of higher and higher efficiency. These four
groups are the result of changes in the condition of the human
being in what was broadly (in fact, too broadly) termed
Post-Industrial Society. Whether specifically identified as such
or assuming labels of convenience, the conflict characteristic of
this time of fundamental change has its locus in literacy; and
more specifically in the direction of change towards the
civilization of illiteracy.

At first glance, it is exceedingly difficult to say whether
language, as an instrument of continuity and permanence, is
failing because the rhythm of existence has accelerated
increasingly since the Industrial Revolution, or the rhythm of
existence has accelerated because human interaction is no longer
at the mercy of language. We do not know whether this
acceleration is due to, or nourished by, changes in language and
the way people use it, or if changes in language reflect this
acceleration. It is quite plausible that the use of images,
moreover of interactive multimedia and network-based exchange of
complex data are more appropriate to a faster paced society than
texts requiring more time and concentration. But it is less
clear whether we use images and synesthetic means of expression
because we want to be faster, and thus more efficient, or we can
be faster and improve efficiency if we use such means.

Shorter terms of human interaction and, for example, the change
in the status of the family have something in common. The new
political condition of the individual in modern society also has
something in common with the characteristics of human
interaction and the means of this interaction. But again, we do
not really know whether the new socio-economic dynamics resulted
from our intention to accelerate interactions, or the
acceleration in human interaction is only the background (or a
marginal effect) of a more encompassing change of our condition
under circumstances making this change necessary. My hypothesis
is that a dramatic change in the scale of humankind and in the
nature of the relation between humans and their natural and
cultural environments might explain the new socio-economic
dynamics.

Loaded literacy

Languages, or any other form of expression and communication, are
meaningful only to the extent that they become part of our
existence. When people do not know how to spell words that refer
to their existence, we suspect that something related to the
learning of spelling (usually the learner) does not function as
we assumed it should. (Obviously, literacy is more than
spelling.) School, family, new habits-such as extensive
television viewing, comics reading, obsessive playing of computer
games, Internet surfing, to name some of the apparent
culprits-come under scrutiny. Culture, prejudice, or fear of the
unknown prevents us from asking whether spelling is still a
necessity. Cowardly conformity stops us short from suspecting
that something might be wrong with language or with those
literacy expectations deeply anchored in all known political
programs thrown into our face when our vote is elicited. When
spelling and phonetics are as inconsistent as they are in
English especially, this suspicion led to the examination and
creation of alternative alphabets and to alternative artificial
languages, which we shall examine. But spelling fails even in
languages with more consistent relations between pronunciation
and writing.

Because we inherited, along with our reverence for language, a
passive attitude regarding what is logically permissible under
the guise of literacy, we do not question implicit assumptions
and expectations of literacy. For instance, the belief that
command of language enhances cognitive skills, although we know
that cognitive processes are not exactly reducible to language,
is accepted without hesitation. It is ascertained that literate
people from no matter what country can communicate better and
learn foreign languages more easily. This is not always the
case. In reality, languages are rather loaded systems of
conventions in which national biases and other inclinations are
extensively embodied and maintained, and even propagated, through
speech, writing, and reading. This expectation leads to well
intended, though disputable, statements such as: "You can never
understand one language until you understand at least two"
(signed by Searle).

There is also the implication that literate people have better
access to the arts and sciences. The reason for this is that
language, as a universal means of communication, is consequently
the only means that ultimately explains scientific theories.
Works of art, proponents of language argue, can be reduced to
verbal description, or at least be better accessed through the
language used to index them through labels, classifications,
categories. Another assumption (and prejudice) is that the level
of performance in and outside language is in direct relation to
competence acquired in literacy. This prejudice, from among all
others, will come under closer scrutiny because, though literacy
is declining, language use deviating from that normed by
literacy takes astonishing forms.

Man proposes, man disposes

Knowledge of the connection between languages-taking the
appearance of entities with lives of their own-and people
constituting them-with the appearance of having unlimited
control over their language-is essential for understanding the
shift from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of multiple
means of expression and communication. These means could be
called languages if an appropriate definition of such languages
(and the literacies associated with them) could be provided. In
light of what has been already mentioned, the broader context of
the changes in the status of literacy is the pragmatic framework
of our existence. It is not only that the use of language has
diminished or its quality decreased. Rather, it is the
acknowledgment of a very complex reality, of a biologically and
culturally modified human being facing apparent choices
difficult, if not impossible, to harmonize. Life is faster paced,
not because biological rhythms abruptly changed, but because a
new pragmatic framework, of higher efficiency, came about.

Human interaction extends in our days beyond the immediate
circle of acquaintances, or what used to be the family circle.
This interaction is, however, more superficial and more mediated
by other people and by various devices. The universe of
existence seems to open as wide as the space we can
explore-practically the whole planet, as well as the heavens. At
the same time, the pressure of the narrower reality, of
exceedingly specialized work, through whose product individual
and social identification, as well as valuation take place, is
stronger than ever before. On a different level, the individual
realizes that the traditional mapping from one to few (family,
friends, community) changes drastically. In a context of
globality, the mapping extends to the infinity of those
partaking in it.

Characteristic of the context of change in the status and
function (communication, in particular) of literacy are
fragmentation of everything we do or encounter and the need to
coordinate. We become aware of the increased number and variety
of stimuli and realize that previous explanations of their origin
and possible impact are not satisfactory. Decentralization of
many, if not all, aspects of existence, paralleled by strong
integrative forces at work, is also characteristic of the
dynamics of change. It is not communication alone, as some
believe, that shapes society. More encompassing effective
forces, relatively independent of words, images, sounds,
textures, and odors continuously directed at society's members,
from every direction and with every imaginable purpose, define
social dynamics. They define goals and means of communication as
well.

The gap between the performance of communication technology and
the effectiveness of communication is symptomatic of the
contradictory condition of contemporary humans. It often seems
that messages have lives of their own and that the more
communication there is, the less it reaches its address. Less
than two percent of all the information thrown into mass media
communication reaches its audience. At this level of efficiency,
no car would ever move, no plane could take off, babies could
not even roll over in their cribs! The dependency of
communication on literacy proved to be communication's strength.
It delivered a potential audience. But it proved to be its
weakness, too. The assumption that among literate people,
communication not only takes place, but, based on the implied
shared background, is always successful, was found to be wrong
time and again. Experiences such as wars, conflicts among
nations, communities, professional groups (academia, a highly
literate social group, is infamous in this respect), families
and generations continuously remind us that this assumption is a
fallacy. Still we misinterpret these experiences. Case in point:
the anxiety of the business community over the lack of
communication skills in the young people it employs. That the
most literate segment of business is rationalized away in the
massive re-engineering of companies goes unnoticed.

We want to believe that business is concerned with fundamental
values when its representatives discuss the difficulties
mid-level executives have in articulating goals and plans for
achieving them in speech or writing. The new structural forms
emerging in today's economy show that business-people, as much
as politicians and many other people troubled by the current
state of literacy today, speak out of both sides of their
mouths. They would like to have it both ways: more efficiency,
which does not require or stimulate a need for literacy since
literacy is not adapted to the new socio-economic dynamics, and
the benefits of literacy, without having to pay for them. The
reality is that they are all concerned with economic cycles,
productivity, efficiency, and profit in trying to figure out
what a global economy requires from them. Re-engineering, which
companies also called restructuring or downsizing, translates
into efficiency expectations within an extremely competitive
global economy. By all accounts, restructuring cut the literacy
overhead of business. It replaced literate practical experiences
of management and productive work with automated procedures for
data processing and with computer-aided manufacturing. The
process is far from over. It has just reached the usually placid
working world of Japan, and it might motivate Europe's effort to
regain competitiveness, despite all the social contracts in place
that embody expectations of a past that will never return. In
fact, all boils down to the recognition of a new status of
language: that of becoming, to a greater extent than in its
literate embodiment, a business tool, a means of production, a
technology. The freeing of language from literacy, and the
subsequent loss in quality, is only part of a broader process.
The people opposing it should be aware that the civilization of
illiteracy is also the expression of practical criticism in
respect to a past pragmatic framework far from being as perfect
as literacy advocates lead us to believe.

The pragmatics of literacy established a frame of reference in
respect to ownership, trade, national identity, and political
power. Distribution of ownership might not be new, but its
motivations are no longer rooted in inheritance, rather in
creativity and a selfish sense of business allegiance. One much
circulated observation sums it up: If you think that the
thousands of not yet fully vested Microsoft programmers will
miss their chance to join the club of millionaires to which their
colleagues belong, think again! It is not for the sake of the
owner of a business, or of a legendary entrepreneur, and
certainly not for the sake of idealism. It is for their own sake
that more and more young and less young people use their chance
in this hierarchy-free, or freer, environment in which they
constitute their identity. What motivates them are arguments of
competitiveness, not national identity, political philosophy, or
family pride. All these and many other structural aspects
resulting from the acquired freedom from structural
characteristics of a pragmatic context defined by literacy do not
automatically make society better or fairer. But a distribution
of wealth and power, and a redefinition of the goals and methods
through which democracy is practiced is taking place.

We know, too, that the coercion of writing was applied to what
today we call minorities. Since writing is less natural than
speaking and bears values specific to a culture, it has
alienated individuality. Literacy implies the integration of
minorities by appropriating their activity and culture,
sometimes replacing their own with the dominant literacy in
total disregard of their heritage. "If writing did not suffice to
consolidate knowledge," observed Claude Lévi-Strauss, "it was
perhaps indispensable in affirming domination. [...] the fight
against illiteracy is thus identical with the reinforcement of
the control of the citizen by authority." I shall not go so far
as to state that the current attempt to celebrate multiplicity
and to recognize contradiction brought about by irreducible
differences among races, cultures, and practical experiences is
not the result of literate necessities. But without a doubt,
developments peculiar to the civilization of illiteracy, as this
becomes the background for heterogeneous human experiences and
conflicting value systems, brought multiplicity to the forefront.
And, what is more important, illiteracy builds upon the
potential of this multiplicity.

Beyond the commitment to literacy

What seems to be the issue of putting the past in the right
perspective (with the appearance of historic revisionism) is
actually the expression of pragmatic needs in regard to the
present and the future. The subject, in view of its many
implications, deserves a closer examination outside, but not in
disregard of, the political controversy it has already stirred
up. Writing is a form of commitment that extends from the
Phoenician agreements and Egyptian records, religious and legal
texts on clay and in stone, to the medieval oath and later to
contracts. Written language encodes, at many levels (alphabet,
sentence structure, semantics, etc.), the nature of the relation
among those addressed in writing. A tablet that the Egyptians
used for identifying locally traded commodities addressed very
few readers. A reduced scale of existence, work, and trade was
reflected in very direct notation. For the given context, the
tablets supported the expected efficiency. In the framework of
the Roman Empire, labeling of construction materials-roof tiles,
drainage pipes-distributed within and outside the Empire,
involved more elaborate elements. These materials were stamped
during manufacture and helped builders select what matched their
needs. More people were addressed. Their backgrounds were more
diverse: they functioned in different languages and in
different cultural contexts. Their practical experience as
builders was more complex than that of Egyptian dealers in grain
or other commodities who operated locally. Stamping construction
materials signaled a commitment to fulfill building needs and
expectations. Over time, such commitments became more elaborate
and separated themselves from the product. With literacy, they
became formalized contracts covering various pragmatic contexts.
They bear all the characteristics of literacy. They also become
representative of the conflict between means of a literate
nature and means appropriate to the levels of efficiency
expected in the civilization of illiteracy.

A short look at contracts as we experience them today reveals
that contracts are based on languages of their own, hard to
decipher by even the average literate person. They quantify
economic expectations, legal provisions, and tax consequences.
Written in English, they are expected to address the entire
world. In the European Community, each of the member countries
expects a contract to be formulated in its own language.
Consequently, delays and extra costs can make the transaction
meaningless. Actually, the contract, not only the packaging and
distribution labels, could be provided in the universal language
of machine-readable bar codes. Ours is a pragmatic framework of
illiteracy that results in the generation of languages
corresponding to functions but pertinent to the fast-changing
circumstances that make the activity possible in the first
place. In a world of tremendous competition, fast exchange, and
accelerated growth of new expectations, the contract itself and
the mechanisms for executing it have to be efficient.

Relations to power, property, and national identity expressed in
language and stabilized through the means of literacy were also
embodied in myths, religions, poetry and literature. Indeed,
from the epic poems of ancient civilizations to the ballads of
the troubadours and the songs of the minstrels, and to poetry
and literature, references were made to property and feelings,
to the living and the dead. Records of life were kept and
commitments were reiterated. Today many literates despair at the
thought that these are displaced by the dead poetry or prose of
the computer-generated variety. It is unquestionable that
information storage and access redefined the scope of
commitments and historic records, and ultimately redefined
memory.

From whatever angle we look at language and literacy, we come
back to the people who commit themselves in the practical
experience of their self-constitution. While the relation of
people to language is symptomatic of their general condition, to
understand how and why this relation changes is to understand how
and why human beings change. With the ideal of literacy, we
inherited the illusion that to understand human beings is to
understand human language. It is actually the other way around-if
we understand language as a dynamic practical experience in its
own right. There is a deeper level that we have to explore-that
of the human activity through which we project our being into
the reality of existence, and make it sensible and understandable
to others. It is only in the act of expressing ourselves through
work, contemplation, enjoyment, and wonder that we become what
we are for ourselves and for others. Under pragmatic
circumstances characteristic of the establishment of the species
and its history up to our time, this required language and led
to the need for literacy. As a matter of fact, literacy can be
seen as a form of commitment, one among the successive
commitments that individuals make and the human species enters.
For over 2,500 years, these circumstances seemed to be eternal
and dominated our existence. But as humankind outgrows the
pragmatics based on the underlying structure of literacy, means
different from language, that is, means different from those
constituting the framework of literacy and of literacy-based
commitments become necessary.

A moving target

The context of the subject of change comprises also the
terminology developed around it. The variation of the meanings
assigned to the words literacy and illiteracy is symptomatic of
the various angles from which they are examined. Literacy, as
someone said (I found this credited to both John Ashcroft, once
governor of Missouri, and to Henry A. Miller) has been a moving
target. It has reflected changes in criteria for evaluating
writing and writing skills as the pragmatic framework of human
activity changed through time. Writing is probably more than
5,000 years old. And while the emergence of writing and reading
are the premise for literacy, a notion of generalized literacy
can be construed only in connection to the invention of movable
type (during the 11th century in China, and the early 16th
century in Western Europe), and even more so with the advent of
the 19th century high-speed rotary press.

Within the mentioned time-frame, many changes in the
understanding of what literacy connotes have come about. For
those who see the world through the Book (Torah, Bible, Koran,
Upanishads, Wu Ching), literacy means to be able to read and
understand the book, and thus the world. All practical rules
presented in the Book constitute a framework accessed either
through literacy or oral tradition. In the Middle Ages, to be
literate meant to know Latin, which was perceived as the language
of divine revelation. Parallel to the religious, or
religion-oriented, perspective of literacy, many others were
acknowledged: social-how writing and reading constitute a
framework for social interaction; economic-how writing and
reading and other skills of comprehending maps, tables, and
symbols affect people's ability to participate in economic life;
educational-how literacy is disseminated; legal-how laws and
social rules are encoded in order to ensure uniform social
behavior.

Scholars have looked at literacy from all these perspectives. In
doing so, they have foisted upon the understanding of literacy
interpretations so diverse and so contradictory that to follow
them is to enter a maze from which there is no escape. One of
Will Rogers' lines was paraphrased as: "We are all illiterate,
only about different things." The formula deserves closer
examination because it defines another characteristic of the
context for understanding the relative illiteracy of our times.
The degree of illiteracy is difficult to quantify, but the
result is easy to notice. Everything carried into the
self-constitution of the individual as warrior, lover, athlete,
family member, educator or educated in literacy-based pragmatics
is being replaced by illiterate means. Nobody expected that an
individual who reads Tolstoy or Shakespeare will be a better
cook, or devise better military plans, or even be a better lover.
Nevertheless, the characteristics of literacy affected
practically all pragmatic experiences, conferring upon them a
unity and coherence we can only look back upon with nostalgia.
Champions of sexual encounters, as much as innovators in new
technologies and Olympic athletes are extremely efficient in
their respective domains. Peak performance increases as the
average falls in the range of mediocrity and sub- mediocrity. In
this book I will examine many aspects of literacy pertinent to
what is usually associated with it: the publications people
write and read, communication at the individual and social
levels, as well as many aspects of human activity that we do not
necessarily consider in relation to literacy-military, sports,
sex and family, eating-but which nevertheless were influenced by
the pragmatic framework that made literacy possible and
necessary.

With the evident demise of philosophy as the science of
sciences, began fragmentation of knowledge. Doubt that a common
instrument of access to and dissemination of knowledge exists is
replaced by certitude that it does not. A so-called third
culture, in the opinion of the author who brought it to public
attention, "consists of rendering visible the deeper meanings of
our lives" in ways different from those of literary
intellectuals. This is not C.P. Snow's third culture of
scientists capable of communicating with non-scientific
intellectuals, but the illiterate scientific discourse that
brings fascinating notions into the mainstream, via powerful
metaphors and images (albeit in a trivialized manner). This is
why the relation between science and literacy, as well as
between philosophy and literacy, will be examined with the
intention to characterize the philosophy and science of the
civilization of illiteracy.

But are we really equipped with the means of exploration and
evaluation of this wide-ranging change? Aren't we captive to
language and literacy, and thus to the philosophic and
scientific explanations based on them? We know that the system in
place in our culture is the result of the logocratic view
adopted. The testing of skills rated by score is to a great
extent a measure of comprehension characteristic of the
civilization of literacy. The new pragmatic framework requires
skills related not only to language and literacy, but also to
images, sounds, textures, motion, and virtual space and time.
Knowing this, we have to address the relation between a
relatively static medium and dynamic media. We should look into
how literacy relates to the visual, in general, and, in
particular, to the controversial reality of television, of
interactive multimedia, of artificial images, of networking and
virtual reality. These are all tasks of high order, requiring a
broad perspective and an unbiased viewpoint.

Most important is the comprehension of the structural
implications of literacy. An understanding of the framework that
led to literacy, and of the consequences that the new pragmatic
framework of existence has on all aspects of our lives will help
us understand how literacy influenced them. I refer specifically
to religion, family, state, and education. In a world giving up
the notion of permanency, God disappears for quite a number of
people. Still, there are many more churches, denominations,
sects, and other religious factions (atheist and neo-pagan
included) than at any other time. In the United States of
America, people change life partners 2.8 times during their
lifespan (if they ever constitute a family), and calculate the
financial aspects of getting married and having children with
the same precision that they use to calculate the expected return
on an investment. The state has evolved into a corporation
regulating the business of the nation, and is now judged on its
economic achievements. Presidents of states act as
super-peddlers of major industries on whose survival employment
depends. These heads of state are not shy about giving up the
ideals anchored in literate discourse (e.g., human rights). But
they will raise a big fuss when it comes to copyright
infringement, especially of software. The irony is that copyright
is difficult to define in respect to digital originals. Through
the literacy model, the state became a self- preserving
bureaucratic machine rarely akin to the broad variety of options
brought about by the pragmatic framework of the civilization of
illiteracy.

Many more people than previous records mention become (or remain)
illiterates after finishing the required years of schooling-a
minimum of ten years-and even after graduating from college.
Some people know how to read; even how to write, but opt for
scanning TV channels, playing games, attending sports events, or
surfing the Internet. Aliteracy is also part of the broader
change in the status of literacy. Decisions to forego reading
and writing are decisions in favor of different means of
expression and communication. The new generation is more
proficient in video games than in orthography. This generation
will be involved in high-efficiency practical experiences
structurally similar to the interactive toy and far removed from
the expectation of correct writing. The Internet shapes the
choices of the new generation in terms of what they want to
know, how, when, and for what purpose more than newspapers,
books, and magazines, and even more than radio or television
does. And even more than schools and colleges do. Through its
vast and expanding means and offerings, the Internet connects
the individual to the globe, instead of only talking about
globality. Networking, at many levels and in many ways, is
related to the characteristics of our pragmatic framework. As
rudimentary as it still is, networking excludes everything that
is not fast- paced and to the point.

Can all these examples, part of the context of the discussion of
literacy in our changing world, be interpreted as being in
causal relation to the decline of literacy? That is, the less
people are knowledgeable in reading and writing, or choose not to
read or write, the less they believe in God or the more pagan
they want to be? The more often they divorce, the less they
marry or have children? The more they want or accept a
bureaucratic machine to handle their problems, the more TV
programs they watch and the more electronic games they play, the
more they surf the infinite world of networks? No, not along
this line of one-dimensional, linear, simplistic form of
determinism. A multiplicity of factors, and a multiplicity of
layers need to be considered. They are, however, rooted in the
pragmatic framework of our continuous self- constitution. It is
exhibited through the dynamics of shorter and faster
interactions. It is embodied in the ever wider choices of
ascertaining our identity. It takes the appearance of
availabilities, fragmentation and global integration, of
increased mediation. The dynamics described corresponds to the
higher efficiency that a larger scale of human activity demands.
To call attention to the multi-dimensionality of the process and
to the many interdependencies, which we can finally uncover with
the help of new technologies, is a first step. To evince their
non-linearity, reflecting the meshing between what can be seen
as deterministic and what is probably non-deterministic is
another step in the argument of the book.

Without basing our discussion on human pragmatics, it would be
impossible to explain why, despite all the effort and money
societies invest in education, and all the time allocated for
education-sometimes over a quarter of a lifetime-despite research
of cognitive processes pertinent to literacy, people wind up less
literate, but, surprisingly, not at all less efficient. Some
would argue-the late Alan Bloom, a crusader for culture and
literacy, indeed a brilliant writer of the epilogue of human
culture and nostalgia for it, already did-that without literacy,
we are less effective as human beings. The debate over such
arguments requires that we acknowledge changes in the status of
human beings and of human societies, and that we understand what
makes such changes unavoidable.

The wise fox

The world as it stands today, especially the industrialized
world, is fundamentally different from the world of any
yesteryear, the last decade and century, not to mention the past
that seems more the time of story than of history. Alan Bloom's
position, embraced by many intellectuals, is rooted in the
belief that people cannot be effective unless they build on the
foundation of historically confirmed values, in particular the
great books. But we are at a point of divergences with no
noticeably privileged direction, but with many, many options.
This is not a time of crisis, although some want us to believe
the contrary and are ready to offer their remedies: back to
something (authority, books, some primitive stage of no-ego, or
of the mushroom, i.e., psychedelic drugs, back to nature); or
fast forward to the utopia of technocracy, the information age,
the service society, even virtual reality or artificial life.

Humans are heuristic animals. Our society is one of creativity
and diversity, operating on a scale of human interaction to
which we exponentially add new domains: outer space, whose
dimensions can be measured only in light years, and whose period
of observation extends over lifetimes; the microcosmos, mirroring
the scale in the opposite direction of infinitesimal
differentiations; the new continents of man-made materials, new
forms of energy, genetically designed plants and animals, new
genetic codes, and virtual realities to experience new spaces,
new times, and new forms of mediation. Networking, which at its
current stage barely suggests things to come, can only be
compared to the time electricity became widely available.
Cognitive energy exchanged through networks and focused on
cooperative endeavors is part of what lies ahead as we
experience exponential growth on digital networks and fast
learning curves of efficient handling of their potential.

The past corresponds to a pragmatic framework well adapted to the
survival and development of humankind in the limited world of
direct encounters or limited mediations. In terms pertinent to a
civilization built around the notion of literacy, the current
lower levels of literacy can be seen as symptomatic of a crisis,
or even a breakdown. But what defines the new pragmatic context
is the shift from a literacy- centered model to one of multiple,
interconnected, and interconditioned, distributed literacies. It
is well justified to repeat that some of the most enlightened
minds overlook the pragmatics of bygone practice. Challenged,
confused, even scared by the change, they call for a journey to
the past: back to tradition, to discipline, to the ethics of our
forefathers, to old-time religion and the education that grew out
of it, to permanence, and hopefully to stability. Even those who
wholeheartedly espouse evolutionary and revolutionary models
seem to have a problem when it comes to literacy. All set to do
away with authority, they have no qualms about celebrating the
imperialism of the written word. Other minds confess to
difficulties in coping with a present so promising and, at the
same time, so confusing in its structural contradictions. What we
experience, from the extreme of moral turpitude to a disquieting
sense of mediocrity and meaninglessness, nourishes skeptical, if
not fatalistic, visions. The warning is out (again): We will end
up destroying humankind! Yet another part of the living present
accepts the challenge without caring about the implications it
entails. The people in this group give up their desire to
understand what happens, as long as this makes life exciting and
rewarding. Hollywood thrives on this. So do the industries of
digital smoke- and-mirrors, always a step from fame, and not much
farther from oblivion. Addresses on the Internet fade as quickly
as they are set up. The most promising links of yesterday show
up on the monitor as a "Sorry" message, as meaningful as their
short- lived presence was. Arguing with success is a sure recipe
for failure. Success deserves to be celebrated in its authentic
forms that change the nature of human existence in our
universe.

The future suggested in the labels technocracy, information age,
and service society might capture some characteristics of
today's world, but it is limited and limiting. This future fails
to accommodate the development of human activity at the new scale
in terms of population, resources, adaptation, and growth it has
reached. Within this model, its proponents preserve as the
underlying structure the current set of dependencies among the
many parts involved in human activity, and a stubborn
deterministic view of simplistic inclination. Unreflected
celebration of technocracy as the sole agent of change must be
treated with the same suspicion as its demonization. The current
participation of technology in human activity is indeed
impressive. So are the extent of information processing and
information mining, and the new relation between productive
activities and services. To make sense of disparate data and from
them form new productive endeavors is a formidable task.
Science, in turn, made available enormously challenging
theories and extremely refined models of the world.

But after all is done and said, these are only particular aspects
of a much more encompassing process. The result is a pragmatic
framework of a new condition. Highly mediated work, distributed
tasks, parallel modes, and generalized networking of rather
loosely coordinated individual experiences define this condition.
Within this framework, the connection between input (for
instance, work) and output (what results) is of a different
order of magnitude tfrom that between the force applied on a
lever and the outcome; or that between the energy necessary to
accomplish useful tasks through engines or electric, or
pneumatic devices, no matter how efficient, and the result. In
addition, even the distinction between input and output becomes
fuzzy. The wearable computer provides interoperability and
interconnectedness-an increase in a person's heart rate can be a
result of an increase in physical exertion or cause for
communicating with a doctor's office or for alerting the police
station (if an accident takes place). It might be that the next
interaction will involve our genetic code.

The capacity for language and the ability to understand its
various implications are only relatively interdependent, and
thus only relatively open to scrutiny and understanding. This
statement, as personal as it sounds, and as much as it expresses
probably less resignation than uncertainty, is crucial to the
integrity of this entire enterprise. Indeed, once within a
language, one is bound to look at the world surrounding oneself
from the perspective of that language as the medium for partial
self-constitution and evaluation. Participating in its dynamics
affects what I am able to see and describe. This affects also
what I am no longer able to perceive, what escapes my
perception, or even worse, filters it to the point that I see
only my own thoughts. This dual identity-observer and integral
part of the observed phenomena-raises ethical, axiological, and
epistemological aspects almost impossible to reconcile. Since
every language is a projection of ourselves-as participants in
the human experience, yet as distinct instantiations of that
experience-we do not see the world so much as ourselves in
relation to it, ourselves in establishing our culture, and again
ourselves in taming and appropriating the universe around us.
The fox in Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince says it much
better: "One only understands the things one tames."

"Between us the rift"

Huge industrial complexes where an immense number of workers
participate in the production of goods, and densely populated
urban centers gravitating around factories, make up the image
characteristic of industrial society. This image is strikingly
different from the new reality of interconnected, yet
decentralized, individual activities going well beyond
telecommuting. Various mediating elements contribute to
increasingly efficient practical experiences of human
self-constitution. The computer is one of the varied embodiments
of these mediating elements, but by no means the only one.
Through its functions, such as calculation, word, image, and
information processing, and control of manufacturing, it
introduces many layers between individuals and the object of
their actions. The technology of interconnecting provides means
for distributive task strategies. It also facilitates parallel
modes of productive work. This is a world of progressive
decentralization and interoperative possibilities. All kinds of
machines can be an address in this interconnected world. Their
operations can range from design tasks to computer-aided
manufacturing. Distributed work and cognitive functions
pertinent to it afford practical experiences qualitatively
different from the mechanical sequencing of tasks as we know it
from industrial modes of production.

Obviously, large portions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as
well as part of the European and North American continents, do
not necessarily fit this description in detail. Industrial
activities still constitute the dominant practical experience in
the world. Although nomadic and jungle tribes are part of this
integrated world, the Industrial Revolution has not yet reached
them all. In some cases, the stages leading to agriculture have
not yet been attained. In view of the global nature of human life
and activity today, I submit that despite the deep disparity in
the economic and social evolution of various regions of the
world, it is plausible to assume that centralized modes of
production peculiar to industrial economies are not a necessary
development. Efficiency expectations corresponding to the global
scale of human activity can be reached only by development
strategies different from those embodied in the pragmatic
framework of industrial activity. It is therefore probable that
countries, and even subcontinents, not affected by the
Industrial Revolution will not go through it. Planners with an
ecological bent even argue that developing countries should not
take the path that led industrial nations to augment their
population's living standard to the detriment of the environment
or by depleting natural resources (A German Manifest, 1992).

Industrial production and the related social structures rely on
literacy. Edmund Carpenter formulated this quite expressively:
"Translated into gears and levers, the book became machine.
Translated into people, it became army, chain of command,
assembly line...." His description, made in broad strokes, is to
the point. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,
children and women became part of the labor market. For the very
limited operation one had to perform, no literacy was necessary;
and women and children were not literate. Still, the future
development of the industrial society could not take place
without the dissemination of literacy skills. For instance,
industry made possible the invention, in 1830, of the steel pen
indispensable to the compulsory elementary education that was
later instituted. The production of steel needles seemed to
extend domesticity, but actually created the basis for the sweat
trades following what Louis Mumford called carboniferous
capitalism. Gaslight and electricity expanded the time available
for the dissemination of literacy skills. Housing improvements
made possible the building of the individual library. George
Steiner sees this as a turning point in the sense that a private
context of the experience of the book was created.

As far as national structures were concerned, phenomena
characteristic of the Industrial Revolution cannot be understood
outside the wider context of the formation and consolidation of
nations. Affirmation of national identity is a process intimately
connected to the values and functions of literacy. The production
process of the industrial age of mechanical machinery and
electric power required not brute force, but qualified force.
Administrative and management functions required more literacy
than work on the assembly line. But literacy projected its
characteristics onto the entire activity, thus making a literate
workforce desirable. The market it generated projected the
condition of the industry in the structure of its transactions.
The requirements for qualified work expanded to requirements for
qualified market activities and resulted in the beginnings of
marketing and advertising. That market was based on the
recognition of national boundaries, i.e., boundaries of
efficiency, self-sufficiency, and future growth offering markets
of a size and complexity adequate to industrial output. Nations
replaced the coarse fragmentation of the world. They were no
longer, as Jean-Marie Guéhenno notices, a disguise of tribal
structures, but a political space within which democracy could
be established.

Progression from competing individual life and temporary
congregation in an environment of survival of the fittest to
tribal, communal, local, confederate, and national life is
paralleled by progression in the forms and methods of human
integration. The global scale of human activity characteristic
of our age is not an extension of the linear, deterministic
relations between those constituting a valid human entity and the
life-support system, called environment, that structurally define
industrial society. Discontinuity in numbers (of people,
resources, expectations, etc.), in the nature of the relations
among people, in the forms of mediations that define human
practical experiences is symptomatic of the depth and breadth of
change. The end of nations, of democracy even, might be far off,
but this end is definitory of the chasm before us. The United
Nations, which does not yet comprise the entire world, is a
collection of over 197 nations, and increasing. Some are only
island communities, or newly proclaimed independent countries
brought about by social and political movements. Of the over 240
distinct territories, countries, and protectorates, very few (if
any) are truly autarchic entities. Despite never before
experienced integration, our world is less the house of nations
and discrete alliances among them, and more the civilization of a
species in firm control (too firm, as some perceive) of other
species.

Within the world, we know that there are people still coming out
of an age of natural economy based on hunting, foraging,
fishing, and rudimentary agriculture. While barter and the
minimal language of survival is the only market process in such
places, in reality, the world is already involved in global
transactions. Markets are traded in their entirety, more often
than not without the knowledge of those comprising these markets.
This only goes to show again the precarious nature of national
structures. National independence, passionately fought for, is
less a charter for the future than the expression of the memory
of the past (authentic or fake). Selling or buying extends to
the entire economy, which while still at a stage difficult to
entirely explain, is bound to change in a rhythm difficult to
cope with by those supposed to control it, but inescapable in
the context of world-wide market. That literacy and national
identity share in this condition should not surprise anyone.

Malthus revisited

The Malthusian principle (1798) related growth of populations
(geometric) to food supply increases (arithmetic): "Population,
when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence
increases only in an arithmetical ratio." The weakness of the
principle is probably its failure to acknowledge that the
equation of mankind has more than the two variables it
considers: population and food supply. The experience of
extensive use of natural resources, in particular through
farming, is only one among an increasing number of experiences.
Human beings constitute their own reality not only as one of
biological needs, but also of cultural expectations, growing
demands, and creativity. These eventually affect changes in what
were believed to be primary needs and instincts. In many ways, a
great deal of previously acknowledged sources of protein are
exhausted. But in an ever more impressive proportion, the
acceptable realm of sources of nutrition-proteins included-has
been expanded so as to include the artificial. Hunting and
gathering wild plants (not to mention scavenging, which seems to
predate hunting) were appropriate when linear, sequential
strategies of survival defined human behavior; so were herding
and agriculture, a continuation of foraging under circumstances
of changed subsistence strategies.

Language was formed, and then stabilized, in connection to this
linear form of praxis. Linearity simply reflects the fact that
one person is less effective than two, but also that one's needs
are smaller than those of several. The experience of self-
constitution in language preserves linearity. This preservation
of linearity extends as long as the scale of the community and
its needs and wants allowed for proportional interaction among
its individuals and the environment of their existence.
Industrial society is probably the climax of this optimization
effort.

If the issue were only to feed mankind, the population census
(over five billion people on record as of the moment these pages
are being written, though less than four billion when I started)
and the measure of resources would not yet indicate a new scale.
But the issue is to accommodate geometrically growing populations
and exponentially (i.e., non-linearly) diversifying
expectations. Such expectations relate to a human being
celebrating higher average ages, and an extended period of active
life. We change anatomically, not necessarily for the better: we
see and hear less well and have lower physical abilities. Our
cognitive behavior and our patterns of social interaction change,
too. These changes reflect, among other things, the transition
from direct interaction and co-presence to indirect, mediated
forms of the practical self-constitution of the human being.

The sequential nature of language, in particular its embodiment
in literacy, no longer suits human praxis as its universal
measure. The strategies of linearization introduced through the
experience of literacy were acceptable when the resulting
efficiency accommodated lower and less differentiated
expectations. They are now replaced by more efficient,
intrinsically non-linear strategies made possible by literacies
structurally different from those rooted in the practice of
so-called natural language. Accordingly, literacy loses its
primacy. New literacies emerge. Instead of a stable center and
limited choice, a distributed and variable configuration of
centers and wide choice connect and disconnect areas of common
or disjoint interest. There are still national ambitions, huge
factories to be built, cities to be erected and others to be
expanded, highways to be widened in order to accommodate more
intercity traffic, and airports to be constructed so that more
airplanes can be used for national and international travel.
The inertia of past pragmatics has not yet been annihilated by
the dynamics of a fundamental change of direction. Still, an
integrated, yet decentralized, universe of work and living has
been taking shape and will continue to do so. Interconnection
made possible by digital technology, first of all, opens a wide
range of possibilities for reshaping social life, political
institutions, and our ability to design and produce goods. Our
own ability to mediate, to integrate parts and services
resulting from specialized activities is supported by machines
that enhance our cognitive characteristics.



Captives to literacy

Probably the most shocking discovery we sometimes make is that,
in order to be able to undertake new experiences, we need to
forget, to break the curse of literate memory, and to immerse
ourselves in the structurally amnesiac systems of signs
corresponding to and addressing our senses. Nathaniel Hawthorne's
short story "Earth's Holocaust" was prophetic in this sense. In
this parable, the people of a new world (obviously the United
States of America) bring all the books they inherited from the
old world to a great bonfire. Theirs is not an exercise in
mindless book-burning. They conscientiously discard all the
rules and ideas passed down through millennia that governed the
world and the life they left behind. Old ideas, as well as new
ones, would have to prove their validity in the new context
before they would be accepted. Indeed, the awareness brought
about by theories of the physical world, of the mind, of our own
biogenetic condition made possible practical experiences of
self-constitution that are not like anything experienced by
humans before our time. The realization of relativity, of the
speed of light, of micro- and macro-structures, of dynamic
forces and non-linearity is already translated in new structures
of interactions. Our systems of interconnection- through electric
energy, telephone (wired and cellular), radio, television,
communication, computer networks-function at speeds comparable to
that of light. They integrate dynamic mechanisms inspired by
genetics, physics, molecular biology, and our knowledge of the
micro- and macro-structure.

Our life cycle seems to accept two different synchronizing
mechanisms: one corresponding to our natural condition (days,
nights, seasons), the other corresponding to the perceived scale
and to our striving towards efficiency. The two are less and less
dependent, and efficiency seems to dominate nature. Discovery of
the world in its expanded comprehensive geographic dimensions
required ships and planes. It also required the biological
effort to adapt and the intellectual effort to understand various
kinds of differences. In outer space, this adaptation proves to
be even more difficult. In a world in a continuous flux of newer
and newer distinctions, people constitute, instead of one
permanent and encompassing literacy, several literacies, none of
which bears the status of (quasi)eternal. Differentiation of
human experience is so far reaching that it is impossible to
reduce the variety to one literate language.

In the process of building rational, interpretive methods and
establishing a body of knowledge that can be tested and
practically applied, people often discard what did not fit in
the theories they advanced, what did not obey the laws that these
theories expressed. This was a necessary methodology that
resulted in the progress we enjoy today. But it was also a
deceptive method because what could not be explained was
omitted. Where literacy was instilled, non-linguistic
aspects-such as the irreducible world of magic, mystery, the
esoteric (to name a few)-were done away with. Commenting upon
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Illich and Sanders pointed
out that there is a whole world in Twain's novel that is
inaccessible to the illiterate, but also a world of folklore and
superstition that cannot be understood by those hostage to the
beautiful kingdom of literacy. Folklore in many countries, and
superstition, and mystery in all the varieties corresponding to
human practical self-constitution are definitely areas from
which we might gain better insight into life past, present, and
future. They are part of the context and should not be left out,
even though they may belong to the epoch before literacy.

All in all, since language was and still is the most
comprehensive testimony to (and participant in) our experience
as human beings, we may want to see whether its crisis says
something about our own permanence and our own prejudices
concerning the species. After all, why, and based on what
arguments, do we see ourselves as the only permanence in the
universe and the highest possible achievement of evolution?
Literacy freed us in many respects. But it also made us prisoners
of a number of prejudices, not the least a projection of
self-awareness in direct contradiction to our own experience of
never-ending change in the world.

The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy

In the opinion of foe and friend alike, America (the name under
which the United States of America, appropriating the
identifier of the two continents comprising the New World)
epitomizes many of the defining characteristics of today's
world: market oriented, technologically driven, living on
borrowed means (financial and natural resources), competitive to
the extreme of promoting adversarial relations, and submitting,
in the name of democracy and tolerance, to mediocrity,
demagoguery, and opportunism. Americans are seen as boastful,
boorish, unrealistic, naive, primitive, hypocritical, and
obsessed with money. Even to some of its most patriotic citizens,
the USA appears to be driven by political opportunism,
corruption, and bigotry. As still others perceive the USA, it is
captive to militarism and prey to the seductive moral poison of
its self-proclaimed supremacy. At times it looks like the more it
fails in some of its policies, the more it wants to hear
declarations of gratitude and hymns of glory, as in John Adams'
lines: "The eastern nations sink, their glory ends/ And empires
rise where sun descends." To the peoples just awaking from the
nightmare of communism, the American political slogans have a
familiar, though frightening, self-delusive ring.

On the other hand, Americans are credited with extraordinary
accomplishments in technology, science, medicine, the arts,
literature, sports, and entertainment. They are appreciated as
friendly, open, and tolerant. Their willingness to engage in
altruistic projects (programs for the poor and for children all
over the world), indeed free from discrimination, makes for a
good example to people of other nations. Patriotism does not
prevent Americans from being critical of their own country. To
the majority of the world, America represents a vivid model of
liberal democracy in action within a federation of states united
by a political system based on expectations of balance among
local, state, and federal functions.

Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber once made headlines writing about
the American challenge (Le Défi Américain), more or less about
the danger of seeing the world Americanized. Downtown Frankfurt
(on the river Main) is called Mainhattan because its skyscrapers
recall those of the island between the Hudson and East Rivers.
The Disneyland near Paris, more of an import (the French
government wanted it badly) than an export product, was called a
"cultural Chernobyl." Tourists from all over the crumbled Soviet
Empire are no longer taken to Lenin's Mausoleum but to Moscow's
McDonald's. The Japanese, reluctant to import American-made cars
and supercomputers, or to open their markets to agricultural
goods (except marbled beef), will bend over backwards for
baseball. Add to all this the symbolism of blue jeans, Madonna
or Heavy Metal (as music or comic books), Coca-Cola, the
television series Dallas, the incessant chomping on chewing gum
and bubble-gum popping, Texan boots, and the world-wide sneaker
craze, and you have an image of the visible threat of
Americanization. But appearance is deceitful.

Taken out of their context, these and many other Americanized
aspects of daily life are only exotic phenomena, easy to
counteract, and indeed subject to counteraction. Italians
protested the culture of fast food near the Piazza d'Espagna in
Rome (where one fast food establishment rented space) by giving
out free spaghetti carbonara and pizza. (They were unaware of
the irony in this: the biggest exporter of pizza restaurants is
no longer Italy, but the USA.) The rightist Russian movement
protested McDonald's by touting national dishes, the good old
high-calorie menu of times when physical effort was much greater
than in our days (even in that part of the world). The Germans
push native Lederhosen and Dirndls over blue jeans. The German
unions protest attempts to address structural problems in their
economy through diminishing social benefits with a slogan that
echoes like a hollow threat: American conditions will be met by
a French response, by which they mean that strikes will paralyze
the country. The Japanese resisted the Disney temptation by
building their own lands of technological marvels. When an
athlete born in America, naturalized as Japanese, won the
traditional Sumo wrestling championship, the Japanese judges
decided that this would be his last chance, since the sport
requires, they stated, a spirituality (translated by demeanor)
that a foreign-born sportsman cannot have.

On closer examination, Americanization runs deeper than what any
assortment of objects, attitudes, values, and imitated behavior
tell us. It addresses the very core of human activity in today's
global community. It is easy to understand why America appears
to embody efficiency reached at the expense of many abandoned
values: respect for authority, for environment, for resources,
even human resources, and ultimately human values. The focus of
the practical experience through which American identity is
constituted is on limitless expectations regarding social
existence, standard of living, political action, economic
reward, even religious experience. Its encompassing obsession is
freedom, or at least the appearance of freedom. Whatever the
pragmatics affords becomes the new expectation and is projected
as the next necessity. The right to affluence, as relative as
affluence is in American society, is taken for granted, never
shadowed by the thought that one's wealth and well-being might
come at the expense of someone else's lack of opportunity.
Competitive, actually adversarial, considerations prevail, such
as those manifest in the morally dubious practices accepted by
the legal and political systems. "To the victor go the spoils"
is probably the most succinct description of what this means in
real life.

The American way of life has been a hope and promise for people
all over the world. The mixed feelings they have towards America
does not necessarily reflect this. The entire world is probably
driven by the desire for efficiency that makes such a standard
of living possible more than by the pressure to copy the American
style (of products, living, politics, behavior, etc.). This
desire corresponds to a pragmatics shaped by the global scale of
humankind, and by the contemporary dynamics of human
self-constitution. Each country faces the battle between
efficiency and culture (some going back thousands of years), in
contrast to the USA, whose culture is always in status nascendi.
The American anxiety over the current state of literacy is laden
with a nostalgia for a tradition never truly established and a
fear of a future never thought through. It is, consequently, of
more than documentary interest to understand how America
epitomizes a civilization that has made literacy obsolete.

For the love of trade

As a country formed by unending waves of immigration, America can
be seen, superficially though, as a civilization of many
parallel literacies. Ethnic neighborhoods are still a fact of
life. Here one finds stores where only the native language is
spoken, with newspapers printed in Greek, Hungarian, German,
Italian, Ukrainian, Farsi, Armenian, Hebrew, Romanian, Russian,
Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean. Cable TV caters to these
groups, and so do many importers of products reminiscent of some
country where "food tastes real" and goods "last forever." All of
these carried-over literacies are, in final analysis, means of
self-constitution, bridges between cultures that will be burned
by the third generation. In practicing the literacy of origins,
human beings constitute themselves as split personalities
between two pragmatic contexts. One embodies expectations
characteristic of the context that relied upon literacy-
homogeneity, hierarchy, centralism, tradition. The other, of the
adopted country, is focused upon needs that effect the
transition to the civilization of illiteracy- heterogeneity,
horizontality, decentralism, tradition as choice, but not way of
life.

Aspects of immigration (and in general of human migration) need
to be addressed, not from the perspective of parallel
literacies, but as variations within a unifying pragmatic
framework. The de-culturization of people originating from many
countries and belonging to many nations is probably a unique
feature of America. It impacted all aspects of life, and
continues to be a source of vitality, as well as tension.
Immigrants arrive as literates (some more so than others) only to
discover that their literacy is relatively useless. That things
were not always like this is relatively well documented. Neil
Postman reported that the 17th-century settlers were quite
literate in terms characteristic of the time. Up to 95 percent
of the men were able to read the Bible; among women the
percentage reported is 62. They also read other publications,
some imported from England, and at the beginning of the second
half of the eighteenth century supported a printing industry
soon to become very powerful.

In importing their literacies, the English, as well as the French
and Dutch, imported all the characteristics that literacy
implies and which went into the foundation of the American
government. Over time, in the successive waves of immigration,
unskilled and skilled workers, intellectuals, and peasants
arrived. They all had to adapt to a different culture, dominated
by the British model but moving farther away from it as the
country started to develop its own characteristics. Each national
or ethnic group, shaped through practical experiences that did
not have a common denominator, had to adapt to others. The
country grew quite fast, as did its industry, transportation
system, farming, banking, and the many services made possible
and necessary by the overall economic development. To some
extent, literacy was an integral part of these accomplishments.
The young country soon established its own body of literature,
reflecting its own experience, while remaining true to the
literacy of the former mother country. I say to some extent
because, as the history of each of these accomplishments shows,
the characteristics inherent in literacy were opposed, under the
banner of States' rights, democracy, individuality, or progress.

With all this in mind, it is no wonder that Americans do not like
to hear that they are a nation of illiterates, as people from
much older cultures are sometimes inclined to call them (for
right or wrong reasons). No wonder either that they are still
committed to literacy; moreover, that they believe that it
represents a panacea to the problems raised by fast
technological cycles of change, by new modes of human
interaction, and by circumstances of practical experiences to
which they have to adapt. Educators and business-people are well
aware, and worried, that literacy in the classical sense is
declining. The sense of history they inherited makes them demand
that effort and money be spent to turn the tide and bring
America back to past greatness, or at least to some stability.
Probably the nature of this greatness is misunderstood or
misconstrued, since there is not much in the history of the
accomplishments of the United States that could rank the country
among the cultural giants of past and present civilizations.

Throughout its history, America always represented, to some
degree, a break with the values of the old world. The Europeans
who came to the Dutch, French, and English colonies had at least
one thing in common: they wanted to escape from the pragmatics
of hierarchy, centralized political and religious domination, and
fixed rules of social and cultural life representing a system of
order that kept them in their place. Freedom of religion-one of
the most sought after-is freedom from a dominant, unified
church and its vision of the unconditionally submissive
individual. Cultivating one's own land, another hope that
animated the settlers, is freedom from practical serfdom
imposed by the landowning nobility on those lower on the
hierarchy. John Smith's maxim that those who didn't work didn't
eat was perhaps the first blow to the European values that
ranked language and culture along with social status and
privilege.

Most likely, the immigrants, highborn and low, did not come with
the intention of overthrowing the sense and morals prevailing at
the time. The phase of imitation of the old, characteristic of
any development, extended from religious ceremonies to ways of
working, enjoying, educating, dressing, and relating to outsiders
(natives, slaves, religious sects). In this phase of imitation,
a semi-aristocracy established itself in the South, emulating
the English model. In protesting the taxes and punitive laws
imposed by King George III, the upper-class colonials were
demanding their rights as Englishmen, with all that this
qualifier entailed. Jefferson's model for the free United States
was that the agrarian state best embodied the classic ideals that
animated him. Jefferson was himself the model of literacy-based
practical experiences, a landed aristocrat who owned slaves, a
man trained in the logic of Greece and Rome. His knowledge came
from books. He was able to bring his various interests in
architecture, politics, planning, and administration in focus
through the pragmatic framework for which literacy was adequate.
Although Jefferson, among others, rejected monarchy, which his
fellow citizens would have set up, he did not hesitate to
exercise the almost kingly powers that the executive branch of
government entailed. His activity shows how monarchic centrality
and hierarchy were translated in the new political forms of
emerging democracies, within which elective office replaced
inherited power. In the history of early America, we can see how
literacy carries over the non-egalitarian model as it advanced
equality in people's natural rights and before the law, the power
of rules, and a sense of authority inspired by religion,
practiced in political life, and connected to expectations of
order.

Just as new trees sprout from the trunk of an old tree, so new
paradigms take root within an old one. People immigrated to
America to escape the old models. Challenged by the need to
provide a framework for their own self-identification, they
ended up establishing an alternative context for the unfolding of
the Industrial Revolution. In the process, they changed in more
ways than they could foresee. Politically, they established
conditions conducive to emancipation from the many constraints
of the system they left. Even their patterns of living, speaking,
behaving, and thinking changed. In 1842, Charles Dickens
observed of Americans that "The love of trade is assigned as a
reason for that comfortless custom...of married persons living
in hotels, having no fireside of their own, and seldom meeting,
from early morning until late at night, but at the hasty public
meals. The love of trade is a reason why the literature of
America is to remain forever unprotected: 'For we are a trading
people, and don't care for poetry: though we do, by the way,
profess to be very proud of our poets.'" Dickens came from a
culture that considered literacy one of the highest achievements
of England, so much so that, according to Jane Austen,
Shakespeare could be particularly appreciated by the English
alone (cf. Mansfield Park). She gave cultivation of the mind the
highest priority. Literature was expected to assist in defining
values and pointing out the proper moral and intellectual
direction. France was in a very similar position in regard to
its culture and literature; so were the German lands and Holland.
Even Russia, otherwise opposed to acknowledging the new
pragmatic context of industrial production, was affected by the
European Enlightenment.

De Toqueville, whose journey to America contributed to his fame,
made his historic visit in the 1830's. By this time, America had
time and opportunity to establish its peculiar character, so he
was able to observe characteristics that would eventually define
a new paradigm. The associated emerging values, based on a life
relatively free of historic constraints, caught his attention:
"The Americans can devote to general education only the early
years of life. [...] At fifteen they enter upon their calling,
and thus their education generally ends at the age when ours
begins. If it is continued beyond that point, it aims only
towards a particular specialized and profitable purpose; one
studies science as one takes up a business; and one takes up
only those applications whose immediate practicality is
recognized. [...] There is no class, then, in America, in which
the taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted with
hereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of the
intellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal want
of the desire and power of application to these objects."

Opinions, even those of scholars of de Toqueville's reputation,
are inherently limited in scope. Sent by the French government
to examine prisons and penitentiaries in the New World, he wound
up writing a study of how a highly literate European understood
America's social and political institutions. Many of the
characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy were emerging
during the years of his visit. He highlighted the shortness of
political cycles, the orality of public administration, the
transience of commitments (the little there is of writing "is
soon wafted away forever, like the leaves of the sibyl, by the
smallest breeze"). Severance from the past, in particular, made
this visitor predict that Americans would have to "recourse to
the history of other nations in order to learn anything of the
people who now inhabit them." What we read in de Toqueville is
the expression of the surprise caused by discontinuity, by
change, and by a dynamics that in other parts of the world was
less obvious.

The New World certainly provided new themes, addressed and
interpreted differently by Americans and Europeans. The more
European cities of the Northeast- Boston, New York,
Philadelphia-maintained cultural ties to the Old World, as
evidenced by universities, scholars, poets, essayists, and
artists. Nevertheless, Washington Irving complained that one
could not make a living as a writer in the United States as one
could in Europe. Indeed, many writers earned a living as
journalists (which is a way of being a writer) or as civil
servants. The real America-the one Dickens so lamented-was
taking form west of the Hudson River and beyond the Appalachian
Mountains. This was truly a world where the past did not count.

America finally did away with slavery (as a by-product of the
Civil War). But at the same time, it started undoing some part
of the underlying structure reflected in literacy. The depth and
breadth of the process escaped the full understanding of those
literate Founding Fathers who set the process in motion, and was
only partially realized by others (de Toqueville included). It
clearly affected the nature of human practical experiences of
self-constitution as free citizens of a democracy whose chance to
succeed lay in the efficiency, not in the expressive power, of
ideas. America's industrial revolution took place against a
background different from that of the rest of the world- a huge
island indulging in relative autarchy for a short time. Forces
corresponding to the pragmatics of the post-industrial age
determined a course of opening itself and opening as much of the
world as possible-regardless of how this was to be accomplished.
The process still affects economic development, financial
markets, cultural interdependencies, and education.

"The best of the useful and the best of the ornamental"

Some will protest that over 150 years have gone by and the
American character has been shaped by more than the love of
trade. They will point to the literary heritage of Washington
Irving, Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James. Indeed, 20th century
American writers have been appreciated and imitated abroad.
Faulkner and Hemingway are the best known examples. Today,
American writers of lesser stature and talent are translated
into the various European languages, for the same reasons that
Disneyland was brought to France. Americans will point to
theaters (which presented European plays) and opera houses,
forgetting how late these acquisitions are, instituted when
economic progress was on a sound track. Indeed, the response to
these assertions is simple: the result of other influences is
not a change of course, but a much faster movement in the
direction America pursues.

A good example is given by education. The American colleges and
universities founded in the 18th and early 19th centuries
attempted to follow the traditional model of learning for its
own sake; that is, moral and intellectual improvement through
study of the age-old classics. This lasted until various
interest groups, in particular businessmen, questioned the
validity of an educational program that had little or no
pragmatic value. These schools were in the East-Harvard, Brown,
Yale, Columbia, William and Mary- and the curricula reflected
that of the Old World. In general, only the elite of America
attended them. The newer universities, the so-called Land Grant
colleges, later called state universities (such as Ohio State
University, Texas A & M), established west of the Allegheny
River during the last quarter of the 19th century, did indeed
pursue more pragmatic programs-agriculture and mechanics-to
serve the needs of the respective state, not the nation.

In view of this demand for what is useful, it is easy to
understand why American universities have become high (and
sometimes not so high) level vocational schools, substituting
for what high school rarely provided. Pragmatic requirements and
anti-elitist political considerations collided with the literate
model and a strange hybrid resulted. A look at how the course
offerings changed over time brings clear evidence that logic,
rhetoric, culture, appreciation of the word and of the rules of
grammar and syntax-all the values associated with a dominant
literacy-are relegated to specializations in philosophy,
literature, or written communication, and to a vast, though
confusing, repertory of elective classes, which reflect an
obsession with free choice and a leveling notion of democracy.
Literature, after being forced to give up its romantic claim to
permanency, associates itself with transitory approaches that
meet, with increasing opportunistic speed, whatever the current
agenda might be: feminism, multiculturalism, anti-war rhetoric,
economic upheaval. Human truth, as literary illusion or hope, is
replaced by uncertainty. No wonder that in this context programs
in linguistics and philology languish or disappear from the
curriculum. Economics lost its philosophic backbone and became
an exercise in statistics and mathematics.

When faced with a list of courses that a university requires,
most students ask, "Why do I need...?" In this category fall
literature, mathematics, philosophy, and almost everything else
definable within literacy as formative subject matter or
discipline. Blame for this attitude, if any can be uttered,
should not be put on the young people processed by the
university system. The students conform, as difficult as it might
be for them to understand their conformity, to what is expected
of them: to get a driver's license and a college diploma, and to
pay taxes. The expectation of a diploma does not result from
requirements of qualification but from the American obsession
with equality. America, which revolted against hierarchy and
inequality, has never tolerated even the appearance of
individual superiority. This led to a democracy that opposed
superiority, leveling what was not equal-rights or aptitudes,
opportunities or abilities-at any price. College education as
privilege, which America inherited from the Europe it left
behind, was considered an injustice. Over time, commercial
democracy turned college into another shopping mall. Today,
diplomas, from BA to Ph.D., are expected just for having
attended college, a mere prerequisite to a career, not
necessarily the result of rigorous mental application leading to
quality results. Young adults go to college because they heard
that one can get a better (read higher paying) job with a college
education.

The result of broadening the scope of university studies to
include professions for which only training is required is that
the value of a college diploma (but not the price paid for it)
has decreased. Some say that soon one will need a college diploma
just to be a street cleaner (sanitation engineer). Actually, a
person will not need a diploma, but will just happen to have
one. And the wage of a sanitation worker will be so high
(inflation always keeps pace with demagogy) that a college
graduate will feel more entitled to the job than a high school
dropout. When Thomas Jefferson studied, he realized that none of
his studies would help him run his plantation. Architecture and
geometry were subordinate to a literacy-dominated standard.
Nevertheless, education inspired him as a citizen, as it
inspired all who joined him in signing the Declaration of
Independence.

A context was established for further emancipation. The depth and
breadth of the process escaped the full understanding of those
who set the process in motion, and was at best partially
realized by very few others, de Tocqueville included. It clearly
affected the nature of human practical experiences of
self-constitution as free citizens of a democracy whose chance
to succeed lay in the efficiency of ideas, not in their
expressive power. Inventiveness was unleashed; labor-saving
devices, machinery that did the work of tens and hundreds of men
provided more and more immediate satisfaction than intellectual
exercise did.

Americans do not, if they ever did, live in an age of the idea
for its own sake or for the sake of the spirit. Maintaining
mental faculties or uplifting the spirit are imported services.
In the early history of the USA, the Transcendentalist movement,
of a priori intuitions, was a strong intellectual presence, but
its adherents only transplanted the seed from Europe. Those and
others-the schools of thought associated with Peirce, Dewey,
James, and Royce-rarely took root, producing a flower more
appreciated if it actually was imported. This is not a country
that appreciates the pure idea. America has always prided itself
in its products and practicality, not thinking and vision. "A
plaine souldier that can use a pick-axe and a spade is better
than five knights," according to Captain John Smith. His
evaluation summarizes the American preference for useful over
ornamental.

Paradoxically though, business leaders argued for education and
proclaimed their support for schools and colleges. At a closer
look, their position appears somewhat duplicitous. American
business needed its Cooper, Edison, and Bell, around whose
inventions and discoveries industries were built. Once these were
in place, it needed consumers with money to buy what industries
produced. Business supported education as a right and took all
the tax deductions it could in order to have this right serve
the interests of industry and business. Consequently, in American
society, ideas are validated only at the material level, in
providing utility, convenience, comfort, and entertainment, as
long as these maximize profit. "The sooner the better" is an
expectation of efficiency, one that does not take into
consideration the secondary effects of production or actions, as
long as the first effect was profit. Not the educated citizen,
but the person who succeeded in getting rich no matter how, was
considered the "smart" fellow, as Dickens learned during his
journey through America. Prompted by such a deeply rooted
attitude, Sidney Lanier, of Georgia, deplored the "endless tale/
of gain by cunning and plus by sale." To value success
regardless of the means applied is part of the American
teleology (sometimes in complicity with American theology).

Bertrand Russell observed of Machiavelli that no one has been
more maligned for simply stating the truth. The observation
applies to those who have taken upon themselves the task of
writing about the brave citizens of the free land. Dickens was
warned against publishing his American Notes. European writers
and artists, and visitors from Russia, China, and Japan have
irritated their American friends through their sincere remarks.
Not many Americans refer to Thorston Veblen, Theodore Dreiser,
Henry James, or to Gore Vidal, but the evaluations these authors
made of the American character have been criticized by the
majority of their compatriots whose sentimental vision of
America cannot cope with legitimate observations. Mark Twain felt
that he'd rather be "damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than be
obliged to read James's The Bostonians.

The rear-view mirror syndrome

So why do Americans look back to a time when people "knew how to
read and write," a time when "each town had five newspapers?"
Big businesses, consolidated well before the invention of newer
means of communication and mediation, have large investments in
literacy: newspapers, publishing houses, and especially
universities. But the promise of a better material life through
literacy today rings tragically hollow in the ears of graduates
who cannot find jobs in their fields of study. The advertisement
most telling of this state of affairs is for a cooking school:
"College gave me a degree in English. Peter Kump's Cooking
School gave me a career."

Granted that literacy has never made anyone rich in the monetary
sense, we can ask what the pragmatic framework set up in this
part of the New World did accomplish that literacy could not. In
the first place, escape from one dominant mode embodied in
literate practical experiences facilitated the assertion of other
modes of expression and communication. Peter Cooper, founder of
the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New
York City, made his fortune in railroads, glue, and gelatin
desserts. He was truly illiterate: he could not read. Obviously
he was not unintelligent. Many pioneers had a better command of
their tools than of their pen. They read nature with more
understanding than some university students read books. There are
other cases of people who succeed, sometimes spectacularly,
although they cannot read. The illiterate California businessman
who taught high school social sciences and mathematics for
eighteen years became known because television, for some reason,
saw in him a good case for the literacy cause. People like him
rely on a powerful memory or use an intelligence not based on
literate conventions. Howard Gardner's theory of multiple
intelligences (formerly known as aptitudes) seems to be ignored
by educators who still insist that everyone learn to read and
write-better said, conform to the conventions of literacy-as
though these were the only ways to comprehend others and to
function in life. There are few commentaries that contradict this
attitude. William Burroughs thought that "Language is a virus
from outer space." Probably it feels better to perceive language
like this in view of the many abuses to which language is
subjected, but also in view of the way people use it to deceive.
A more direct criticism states: "The current high profile of
literacy is symptomatic of a speedy, ruthless transition from an
industrial to an information-based economy. [...] Literacy, to
be sure, is a powerful, unique technology. Yet literacy remains
a human invention contained by social contract, and the
maintenance of that contract in education betrays our ideas of
humanity as surely as our use of literacy enforces them" (cf.
Elsbeth Stuckey)

American experience shows that the imposition of a sole model of
higher education, based on literacy, has economic, social, and
cultural consequences. It is very costly. It levels instead of
addressing and encouraging diversity. It introduces expectations
of cultural homogeneity in a context that thrives on
heterogeneity. The literate model of education with which the
country flirted, and which still seems so attractive, negates
one of America's sources of vitality-openness to alternatives,
itself made possible by the stubborn refusal of centralism and
hierarchy. Held in high esteem in the early part of American
history, literacy came to students through schoolhouses in which
Webster's Speller and McGuffey's Reader disbursed more patriotism
(essential to a nation in search of an identity) and more
awareness of what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"
should mean than quality writing or the possibility to select
good books for reading. Literacy with a practical purpose, and
the variety of literacies corresponding to the variety of human
practical experiences, is a discovery made in America.
Understanding pragmatic requirements as opposed to pursuing
literacy for the sake of literacy, at the price of rejecting its
rewards, is where the road forks. But here America follows Yogi
Berra's advice: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

In their search for new values, or when faced with competing
answers to tough questions, people tend to look back to a time
when everything seemed all right. And they tend to pick and
choose the characteristics that led to this perceived state of
affairs. Things were all right, some want to believe, when kids,
plodding along country roads, winter or summer, went to school
and learned to read. Therefore, most people assume that the
environment propitious to literacy will bring back the golden
age. No one wants to see that America was never reducible to
this romantic picture. In the South, education never seemed to
be a mission. Slaves and poor whites remained outside the
idealized stream. Females were not encouraged to study. A
Protestant viewpoint dominated subject matter (recall the
Puritan alphabet primer).

Americans seem intent on ignoring accomplishments outside the
domain of literacy and the dynamics of the non-literate United
States. In admiration of real cultures, Americans do not want to
hear or see that many of them, of proud and ancient ancestry,
started questioning their own values and the education
transmitting them. The practical sense and pragmatism
ascertained in the formation of America were adopted as causes
worth fighting for. In Europe, students protested an education
that did not prepare them for work. Thanks to universal
education-European governments by and large offer publicly
supported higher education, at no cost to the student, through
college and graduate school-more young people received an
education (in the classical sense of the word) and their ranks
flooded the market. They discovered that they were not prepared
for the practical experiences characteristic of the new
pragmatics, especially the new forms of mediations that
characterize work and that are making headway around the world.
In Europe, there is a clear distinction between university
studies and vocational studies. This has prevented universities
from becoming the high-class vocational schools that they are in
America, and has maintained the meaning of the diploma as a
proof of intellectual endeavor. On the other hand, they remain
ivory towers, not preparing students for the practical
experiences of the new pragmatics. Brotlose Kunst (breadless
art) is what the Germans now call such fields of study as
literature, philosophy, musicology, religion, and any other
purely intellectual endeavor.

Looking at a totally different culture, Americans tend to respond
to Japan's economic success and criticism of our system by
saying that our educational system must become more like that of
America's leading competitor. They ignore the fact that Japan's
high rate of productivity has less to do with the nation's high
rate of literacy than does the indoctrination and character
formation that Japanese schooling entails. Fundamental attitudes
of conformity, team mentality, and a very strong sense of
hierarchy, together with an almost sacred sense of tradition, are
instilled through literate means. One does not have to be
literate in any language in order to solder one circuit to
another on an assembly line or to snap together modular
components fabricated by advanced machines. What is necessary,
indeed expected, is an ethic that calls for a sense of duty and
pride in a job well done, a sense met by the social promise of
permanency. All in all, the Japanese system allows for little
variation from the consensus, and even less for the creation of
new models. The only way Japan stepped out of the literate mode
in the manufacturing world is in quality control. Ironically,
this idea was developed by the American Edward Denning, but
rejected by his compatriots, who literally stagnated in a
hierarchic model originating from circumstances of literacy.
This hierarchical model, now in obvious decline, gave to American
businessmen the sense of power they could not achieve through
education or culture.

The Japanese, living in a system that preserved its identity
while actively pursuing plans for economic expansion, formed
strategies of self-containment (severely tested in times of
economic downturn), as well as methods of relating to the rest of
the world. This condition is manifest in their talent for
spotting the most profitable from other countries, making it
theirs, and pursuing avenues of competition in which what is
specifically Japanese (skills, endurance, collusion) and the
appropriated foreign component are successfully joined. Almost
the entire foundation of today's television, in its analog
embodiment, is Japanese. But if for some reason the programming
component would cease to exist, all the marvelous equipment that
makes TV possible would abruptly become useless. In some ways,
Japan has almost no interest in a change of paradigm in
television, such as the revolutionary digital TV, because an
enormous industry, present in almost every home where television
is used, would have to reinvent itself. The expectation of
permanency that permeates literate Japan thus extends from
literacy to a medium of illiteracy. In the American context, of
almost no stable commitments, digital television, along with
many other innovations in computation and other fields, is a
challenge, not a threat to an entire infrastructure. This
example was not chosen randomly. It illustrates the dynamics of
the change from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of many
competing literacies. These emerge in the context of change from
self-sufficient, relatively small-scale, homogeneous
communities to the global world of today, so powerfully
interconnected through television and through digital media of
all kinds. As illiterates, Americans lead other nations in
breakthroughs in medicine, genetics, networking, interactive
multimedia, virtual reality, and inventiveness in general.

Obviously, it is easier to design a course of education assuming
some permanency or maintaining it, regardless of pragmatic
requirements. Diane Ravitch stated that it is hard to define
what education will be needed for the future when we don't know
what skills the jobs of the future will require. An optimal
education, reflecting pragmatic needs of highly mediated
practical experiences of distributed effort and networking, will
have to facilitate the acquisition of new cognitive skills.
Decentralized, non-sequential, non-deterministic experiences
require cognitive skills different from those characteristic of
literacy. Schools used to be able to prepare students to find
their place in the workforce even before graduation. More
schools than ever insist on churning out a strange version of
the literate student who should go on to a college that is more
(though still not enough) vocational school than university. The
university, under the alibi of equal opportunity and more in
consideration of its own agenda, has done more damage to
education and literacy by forcing itself upon Americans as the
only means to attain a better life. The result is crowded
classes in which passive students are processed according to the
industrial model of the assembly line, while the creative
energy of faculty and students is redirected to a variety of
ventures promising what a university cannot deliver. The very
word university acknowledges one encompassing paradigm,
prevalent in the Middle Ages, that the USA practically disposed
of over a century ago. In an age of global reality and many
paradigms, the university is in reality less universal and
increasingly specialized.

In these times of change, America, founded on innovation and
self-reliance, seems to forget its own philosophy of
decentralization and non-hierarchy. By no surprise, the newer
computer technology-based companies took the lead in
decentralizing and networking the workplace, in re-engineering
each and every business. Most business-people, especially in
established companies, are reluctant to address matrix
management methods or to use distributed forms of organization
and decentralized structures. Consequently, after waves of
corporate restructuring and resizing, presidents and chairmen
(not unlike university presidents and school principals) are
kings, and the laborer, when not replaced by a machine, is often
a virtual serf. Surprisingly, the decentralized spirit of
homesteading and the distribution of tasks and responsibilities,
through which much of efficiency is reached, makes slow headway.
But things are changing! If there is an engine at work pulling
the world from its literacy- based pragmatics to the future of
higher efficiency required by the new scale of human activity,
it has the initials USA written on it. And it is-make no mistake
about it-digital.

When not faithful to its own experience of pluralism and
self-motivation, the USA faces the inherent limitations of
literacy-based practical experience in a number of domains, the
political included. America once had a number of political
parties. Now it seems that it cannot effectively get beyond the
literate dualistic model of two antagonistic parties, emulating
the Tories and the Whigs of the empire to which it once
belonged. European countries and several African and Asian states
have multi-party systems that reflect sensitivity to differences
and take advantage of the variety they allow for. Such systems
enfranchise more of a country's citizenry than does the two-
party system in the USA. Every four years, Americans demand
greater choice in elections, but only one state, Alaska,
considers it normal to have more than two parties, and,
incidentally, a governor who is neither Republican nor Democrat.

The USA has a complex about literacy to the extent that every
subject is now qualified as literacy-cultural literacy, computer
literacy, visual literacy, etc.-whether literacy is involved or
not. Literacy has become its own specialty. In addition, new
literacies, effectively disconnected from the ideals and
expectations of classical literacy, have emerged from practical
experiences of human self-constitution in realms where writing
and reading are no longer required. This would not be so bad if
it were not blinding people to the truth about a major
characteristic of humankind. Diversity of expression and
multiplicity of communication modes define new areas of human
accomplishment and open avenues for further unfolding of people's
creative and economic potential. The new condition of language,
in particular the failure of literacy, is at the same time a
symptom of a new stage in human progress. It in no way reflects a
failure of national policy or will. As a matter of fact, the new
stage we are entering is a reflection of the human spirit
unfolding, refusing to be held captive to a dominant mode that
has outlived its usefulness. It may well be that the coming of
age of America is part of this new stage. After all, many
believe that the crisis of language is the crisis of the white
man (cf. Gottfried Benn), or at least of Western civilization.

So, is the USA the epitome of the civilization of illiteracy?
Yes, America is illiterate to the extent that it constituted
itself as an alternative to the world based on the underlying
structures of literacy. The new pragmatic framework that the USA
embodies does not automatically free it from the seductive
embrace of the civilization it negates, and the current angst
over the state of literacy is a manifestation of this. As an
embodiment of the civilization of illiteracy, America
demonstrates how several literacies can work together by
complementing each other. Such a pragmatics succeeds or fails
on its own terms. Whenever the implicit founding principles of
adaptation, openness, exploration and validation of new models,
and pragmatically based institutions are pursued, the result is
the expected efficiency. Sometimes, the price people seem to pay
for it is very high-unemployment, dislocation, retrenchment, a
loss of a sense of permanency that humans long for. The price
includes the ability or willingness to consider all aspects
involved in a situation-political, environmental, social, legal,
religious. These aspects transcend the tangible and necessitate
taking the broad view, which literate civilization allowed for,
over the specialized, narrowly focused, short- sighted, parochial
view. Other times, it looks as though there are no alternatives.
But in the long run, no one would really want to go back to the
way things were 200 years ago.

Book two

From Signs to Language

Languages are very different. So are literacies. The differences
go well beyond how words sound, how alphabets differ, how
letters are put together, or how sentences are structured in the
various languages used around the world. In some languages, fine
distinctions of color, shape, gender, numbers, and aspects of
nature are made while more general statements are difficult to
articulate. Anthropologists noted that in some of the Eskimo
languages many words could be identified for what we call (using
one word) snow and for activities involving it; in Arabic, many
names are given to camel; in Mexico, different names qualify
ceramic pottery according to function, not form: jarro for
drinking, jarra for pouring, olla for cooking beans, cazuela for
cooking stews. The Japanese and Chinese distinguish among
different kinds of rice: still in the paddy, long- grained,
shucked, kernels. George Lakoff mentions the Dyirbal language of
Australia where the category balan includes fire, dangerous
things, women, birds, and animals such as platypus, bandicoot,
and echidna.

In other languages, the effort to categorize reveals associations
surprising to individuals whose own life experiences are not
reflected in the language they observe. The questioning attitude
in the Talmud (a book of interpretations of the Hebrew Torah)
is based on 20 terms qualifying different kinds of questions.
Shuzan is calculation based on the use of the abacus. Hissan,
hiding the Japanese word hitsu that stands for the brush used
for writing, is calculation based on the use of Arabic numerals.
To be in command of a language such as Chinese (to be literate
in Chinese) is different from being literate in English, and
even more different from being literate in various tribal
languages. These examples suggest that the practical experience
through which language is constituted belongs to the broad
pragmatic context.

There is no such thing as an abstract language. Among particular
languages there are great differences in vocabulary, syntax, and
grammar, as well as in the idiosyncratic aspects implicit in
them, reflective of the experience of their constitution.
Despite such differences-some very deep-language is the common
denominator of the species Homo Sapiens, and an important
constitutive element of the dynamics of the species. We are our
language. Those who state that language follows life consider
only one side of the coin. Life is also formed in practical
experiences of language constitution. The influence goes both
ways, but human existence is in the end dependent upon the
pragmatic framework within which individuals project their own
biological structure in the practical act through which they
identify themselves

Changes in the dynamics of language can be traced in what makes
language necessary (biologically, socially, culturally), what
causes different kinds of language use, and what brought about
change. Necessity and agents of change are not the same,
although sometimes it is quite difficult to distinguish between
them. Changed working habits and new life styles are, as much as
the appropriate language characterizing them, symptomatically
connected to the pragmatic framework of our continuous
self-constitution. We still have ten fingers-a structural reality
of the human body projected into the decimal system-but the
dominant number system today is probably binary. This
observation regards the simplistic notion that words are coined
when new instances make them desirable, and disappear when no
longer required. In fact, many times words and other means of
expression constitute new instances of life or work, and thus do
not follow life, but define possible life paths.

There are several sources from which knowledge about language
constitution and its subsequent evolution can be derived:
historic evidence, anthropological research, cognitive modeling,
cultural evaluation, linguistics, and archaeology. Here is a
quote from one of the better (though not uncontroversial) books
on the subject: Language "enabled man to achieve a form of
social organization whose range and complexity was different in
kind from that of animals: whereas the social organization of
animals was mainly instinctive and genetically transmitted, that
of man was largely learned and transmitted verbally through the
cultural heritage," (cf. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, The
Consequence of Literacy). The general idea pertaining to the
social implications of language is restrictive but acceptable.
What is not at all explained here is how language comes into
existence, and why instinctive and genetically transmitted
organization (of animals) would not suffice, or even be
tantamount to the verbally transmitted organization of human
beings. As a matter of fact, language, as perceived in the text
cited and elsewhere in literature, becomes merely a storing
device, not a formative instrument, a working tool of sorts,
even a tool for making other tools and for evaluating them.

Languages have to be understood in a much broader perspective.
Like humans, languages have an evolution in time. What came
before language can be identified. What remains after a certain
language disappears (and we know of some that have disappeared)
are elements as important as the language itself for our better
understanding of what makes language necessary. The disappearance
of a language also helps us realize how the life of a language
takes place through the life of those who made it initially
possible, afterwards necessary, and finally replaced it with
means more appropriate to their practical life and to their
ever-changing condition. Research into pre-linguistic time (I
refer to anthropological, archaeological, and genetic research)
has focused on items people used in primitive forms of work. It
convincingly suggests that before a relatively stable and
repetitive structure was in place, people used sounds, gestures,
and body expressions (face, hands, legs) pretty much the way
infants do. The human lineage, in its constitutive phases, left
behind a wealth of testimony to patterns of action and, later,
to behavioral codes that result in some sense of cohesion.
Distant forebears developed patterns in obtaining food and
adapting to changes affecting the availability of food and
shelter.

Before words, tools probably embodied both potential action and
communication. Many scholars believe that tools are not possible
without, or before, words. They claim that cognitive processes
leading to the manufacture of tools, and to the tool-making
human being (Homo Faber), are based on language. In the opinion
of these scholars, tools extend the arm, and thus embody a level
of generality not accessible otherwise than through language. It
might well be that nature-based "notation" (footprints, bite
marks, and the stone chips that some researchers believe were the
actual tools) preceded language. Such notation was more in
extension of the biological reality of the human being, and
corresponded to a cognitive state, as well as to a scale of
existence, preparing for the emergence of language.

Research on emerging writing systems (the work of Scribner and
Cole, for instance, and moreover the work of Harald Haarmann,
who considers the origins of writing in the notations found at
Vinca, in the Balkans, near present-day Belgrade) has allowed us
to understand how patterns of sounds and gestures became graphic
representations; and how, once writing was established, new human
experiences, at a larger scale of work, became possible.
Finally, the lesson drawn from dying languages (Rosch's studies
of Dyirbal, reported by Lakoff) is a lesson in the foundation of
such languages and their demise. What we learn from these is
less about grammar and phonetics and more about a type of human
experience. We also acquire information regarding the supporting
biological structure of those involved in it, the role of the
scale of humankind, and how this scale changes due to a
multitude of conjectures.

The differentiation introduced above among pre-language
notations, emerging languages, emerging systems of writing, and
dying languages is simultaneously a differentiation of kinds and
types of human expression, interaction, and interpretation of
everything humans use to acknowledge their reality in the world
they live in. Drawing attention to oneself or to others does not
require language. Sounds suffice; gestures can add to the
intended signal. In every sound and in every gesture, humans
project themselves in some way. Individuality is preserved
through a sound's pitch, timbre, volume, and duration; a gesture
can be slow or rapid, timid or aggressive, or a mixture of these
characteristics. Once the same sound, or the same gesture, or the
same sequence of sounds and gestures is used to point to the
same thing, this stabilized expression becomes what can be
defined, in retrospect, as a sign.

Semeion revisited

Interest in various sign systems used by humans reaches well back
to ancient times. But it was only after renewed interest in
semiotics-the discipline dealing with signs (semeion is the
Greek word for sign)-that researchers from various other
disciplines started looking at signs and their use by humans. The
reason for this is to be found in the fast growth of expression
and communication based on means other than natural language.
Interaction between humans and increasingly complex machines also
prompted a great deal of this interest.

Language-oral and written-is probably the most complex system of
signs that researchers are aware of. Although the word language
comprises experiences in other sign systems, it is by no means
their synthesis. Before the practical experience of language,
humans constituted themselves in experiences of simpler means of
expression and communication: sounds, rhythms, gestures,
drawings, ritualized movement, and all kinds of marks. The
process can be seen as one of progressive projection of the
individual onto the environment of existence. The sign I of one's
own individuality-as distinct from other I's with whom
interaction took place through competition, cooperation, or
hostility-is most likely the first one can conjure. It must be
simultaneous with the sign of the other, since I can be defined
only in relation to something different, i.e., to the other. In
the world of the different, some entities were dangerous or
threatening, others accommodating, others cooperating. These
qualifiers could not be simply translated into identifiers. They
were actually projections of the subject as it perceived and
understood, or misunderstood, the environment.

To support my thesis about the pragmatic nature of language and
literacy, a short account of the pre-verbal stage needs to be
attempted here. Very many scholars have tried to discover the
origin of language. It is a subject as fascinating as the origins
of the universe and the origin of life itself. My interest is
rather in the area of the nature of language, the origin being
an implicit theme, and the circumstances of its origination. I
have already referred to what are loosely called tools and to
behavioral codes (sexual, or relating to shelter,
food-gathering, etc.). There is historic evidence that can be
considered for such an account, and there are quite a number of
facts related to conditions of living (changes in climate,
extinction of some animals and plants, etc.) that affect this
stage. The remaining information is comprised of inferences based
on how beings similar to what we believe human beings once were
constituted their signs as an expression of their identity.
These signs reflected the outside world, but moreover expressed
awareness of the world made possible by the human's own
biological condition.

The very first sentence of the once famous Port-Royal Grammar
unequivocally considers speaking as an explanation of our
thoughts by signs invented for this particular purpose. The same
text makes thinking independent of words or any kind of signs. I
take the position that the transition from nature to culture,
i.e., from reactions caused by natural stimuli to reflections
and awareness, is marked by both continuity and discontinuity.
The continuous aspect refers to the biological structure
projected into the universe of interactions with similar or
dissimilar entities. The discontinuity results from biological
changes in brain size, vertical posture, functions of the hands.
The pre- verbal (or pre-discursive) is immediate by its very
nature. The discursive, which makes possible the manifest
thought (one among many kinds) is mediated by the signs of
language. Closeness to the natural environment is definitive of
this stage. Although I am rather suspicious of claims made by
contemporary advocates of the psychedelic, in particular
McKenna, I can see how everything affecting the biological
potential of the being (in this case psilocybin, influencing
vision and group behavior) deserves at least consideration when
we approach the subject of language.

Signs, through which pre-verbal human beings projected their
reality in the context of their existence, expressed through
their energy and plasticity what humans were. Signs captured
what was perceived as alike in others, objects or beings, and
likeness became the shared part of signs. This was a time of
direct interaction and immediateness, a time of action and
reaction. Everything delayed or unexpected constituted the realm
of the unknown, of mystery. The scale of life was reduced. All
events were of limited steps and limited duration. Interacting
individuals constituted themselves as signs of presence, that
is, of a shared space and time. Signs could thus refer to here
and now as immediate instantiations of duration, proximity,
interval, etc., but long before the notions of space and time
were formed. Once distinctions were projected in the experience
of signs, the absent or the coming could be suggested, and the
dynamics of repetitive events could be expressed. It was only
after this self- expression took place that a representational
function became possible: a high-pitched cry not just for pain,
but also for danger that might cause pain; an arm raised not only
as an indication of firm presence, but also of requested
attention; a color applied on the skin not only as an expression
of pleasure in using a fruit or a plant, but also of
anticipated similar pleasures-an instruction to be mimetically
followed, to be imitated.

Being part of the expressed, the individuals projecting
themselves in the expression also projected a certain experience
related to the limited world they lived in. Signs standing for
associations of events (clouds with rain, noise of hooves with
animals, bubbles on a lake's surface with fish) were probably as
much representations of those sequences as an expression of
constituted experience shared with others living in the same
environment. Sharing experience beyond the here and now, in other
words, transition from direct and unreflected to indirect and
reflected interaction, is the next cognitive step. It took place
once shared signs were associated with shared common experiences
and with rules of generating new signs that could report on new,
similar, or dissimilar experiences. Each sign is a biological
witness to the process in which it was constituted and of the
scale of the experience. A whisper addresses one other person,
maybe two, very close to each other. A shout corresponds to a
different scale. Accordingly, each sign is its shorthand history
and a bridge from the natural to the cultural.

Sequences, such as successions of sounds or verbal utterances, or
configurations of signs, such as drawings, testify to a higher
cognitive level. Relations between sequences or configurations
of signs and the practical experience in which they are
constituted are less intuitive. To derive from the understanding
of such sign relations some practical rules of significance to
those sharing a sign system was an experience in human
interaction. Later in time, the immediate experiential component
is present only indirectly in language. The constitution of the
language is the result of the change of focus from signs to
relations among them. Grammar, in its most primitive condition,
was not about how signs are put together (syntax), nor of how
signs represent something (semantics), but of the circumstances
determining new signs to be constituted in a manner preserving
their experiential quality-the pragmatics.

Consequently, language was constituted as an intermediary between
stabilized experience (repetitive patterns of work and
interaction) and future (patterns broken). Signs still preserved
the concreteness of the event that triggered their constitution.
In the use of language, the human being abandoned a great deal
of individual projection. Language's degree of generality became
far higher than that of its components (signs themselves), or of
any other signs. But even at the level of language, the
characteristic function of this sign system was the constitution
of practical experiences, not the representation of means for
sharing categories of experiences. In each sign, and more so in
each language, the biological and the artificial collide. When
the biological element dominates, sign experiences take place as
reactions. When the cultural dominates, the sign or language
experience becomes an interpretation, i.e., a continuation of
the semiotic experience. Interpretation of any kind corresponds
to the never-ending differentiation from the biological and is
representative of the constitution of culture. Under the name
culture as used above, we understand human nature and its
objectification in products, organizations, ideas, attitudes,
values, artifacts.

The practical experience of sign constitution-from the use of
branches, rocks, and fur to the most primitive etchings (on
stone, bone, and wood), from the use of sounds and gestures to
articulated language-contributed to successive changes in
ongoing activity (hunting, seeking shelter, collaborative
efforts), as well as to changes in humans themselves. In the
universe of rich detail in which humans affirmed their identity
through fighting for resources and creatively finding
alternatives, information did not change, but the awareness of
the practical implications of details increased. Each
observation made in the appropriation of knowledge through its
use in work triggered possible patterns of interaction.

Once signs were constituted, sharing in the experience became
possible. Genetic transmission of information was relatively
slow. It dominated the initial phases during which the species
introduced its own patterns within the patterns of the natural
environment. Semiotic transmission of information, in particular
through language, is much faster than genetic inheritance but
cannot replace it. Human life is attested at roughly 2.5 million
years ago, incipient language use roughly 200,000 years ago.
Agriculture as a patterned experience emerged no more than 19,000
years ago, and writing less than 5,000 years ago (although some
researchers estimate 10,000 years). The shorter and shorter
cycles characteristic of self-constitution correspond to the
involvement of means other than genetic in the process of change.
What today we call mental skills are the result of a rather
compressed process. Compare the time it took until motor skills
involved in hunting, gathering, and foraging were perfected to
the extent they were before they started to degenerate,
relatively speaking, as we notice in our days.

The first record is a whip

Signs can be recorded-quite a few were recorded in and on various
materials- and so can language, as we all know. But language did
not start out as a written system. The African Ishango Bone
predates a writing system by some thousands of years; the quipus
of the Inca culture are a sui generis record of people, animals,
and goods previous to writing. China and Japan, as well as
India, have similar pre-writing forms of keeping records.

The polygenetic emergence of writing is, in itself, significant
in several ways. For one, it introduced another mediating
element disassociated from a particular speaker. Second, it
constituted a level of generality higher than that of the verbal
expression that was independent of time and space, or of other
forms of record keeping. Third, everything projected into signs,
and from signs into articulated language, participated in the
formation of meaning as the result of the understanding of
language through its use. Only at that moment did language gain
a semantic and syntactic dimension (as we call them in today's
terminology).

Formally, if the issue of literacy and the constitution of
languages are connected, then this connection started with
written languages. Nevertheless, events preceding written
language give us the perspective of what made writing necessary,
and why some cultures never developed a written language.
Although referring to a different time-frame (thousands of years
ago), this could help us comprehend why writing and reading need
not dominate life and work today and in the future. Or at least
it could help clarify the relation among human beings, their
language, and their existence. After all, this is what we want
to understand from the vantage point of today's world. We take
the word for granted, wondering whether there was a stage of the
wordless human being (about which we can only infer indirectly).
But once the word was established, with the advent of the means
for recording it, it affected not only the future, but also the
perception of the past.

Conquering the past, the word gives legitimacy to explanations
that presume it. Thus it implies some carrying device, i.e., a
system of notation as a built-in memory and as a mechanism for
associations, permutations, and substitutions. But if such a
system is accepted, the origins of writing and reading are
pushed back so far in time that the disjunction of
literate-illiterate becomes a structural characteristic of the
species at one of the periods of its self-definition. Obviously
expanded far in time and seen in such a broad perspective, this
notation (comprising images, the Ishango Bone, quipus, the Vinca
figurines, etc.) contradicts the logocratic model of language.
Mono- and polysyllabic elements of speech, embodying audible
sequences of sounds (and appropriate breathing patterns that
insert pauses and maintain a mechanism for synchronization),
together with natural mnemonic devices (such as pebbles, knots on
branches, shapes of stones, etc.) are pre-word components of
pre-languages. They all correspond to the stage of direct
interaction. They pertain to such a small scale of human
activity that time and space can be sequenced in extension of the
patterns of nature (day-night, very close-less close, etc.).

This juncture in the self-definition of the species occurred when
the transition, from selected natural marks to marking, and
later to stable patterns of sounds, eventually leading to words,
took place. This was an impressive change that introduced a
linear relation in a realm that was one of randomness or even
chaos. If catastrophes occurred (as many anthropologists
indicate), i.e., changes of scale outside the linear to which
human beings were not adapted, they resulted in the disappearance
of entire populations, or in massive displacements. Rooted in
experiences belonging to what we would call natural phenomena,
this change resulted in rudimentary elements of a language. New
patterns of interaction were also developed: naming (by
association, as in clans bearing names of animals), ordering and
counting (at the beginning by pairing the counted objects, one
by one, with other objects), recording regularities (of weather,
sky configurations, biological cycles) as these affected the
outcome of practical activities.

Scale and threshold

Already mentioned in previous pages, the concept of scale is an
important parameter in human development. At this point, it is
useful to elaborate on the notion since I consider scale to be
critical in explaining major transitions in human pragmatics.
The progression from pre-word to notation, and in our days from
literacy to illiteracy is paralleled by the progression of
scale. Numbers as such-how many people in a given area, how many
people interacting in a particular practical experience, the
longevity of people under given circumstances, the mortality
rate, family size-are almost meaningless. Only when relations
among numbers and circumstances can be established is some
meaningful inference possible. Scale is the expression of
relations.

A crude scale of life and death is remote from underlying
adaptive strategies as these are embodied in practical
experiences of self-constitution. Knowledge regarding biological
mechanisms, such as knowledge of health or disease, supports
efforts to derive models for various circumstances of life, as
humans project their biological reality into the reality of
interactions with the outside world. We know, for instance, that
when the scale of human activity progressed to include
domesticated animals, some animal diseases affecting human life
and work were transmitted to humans. Domestication of animals, a
very early practical experience, brought humans closer to them
for longer times, thus facilitating what is called a change of
host for agents of such diseases. The common cold seems to have
been acquired from horses, influenza from pigs, smallpox from
cattle. We also know that over time, infectious diseases affect
populations that are both relatively large and stationary. The
examples usually given are yellow fever or malaria and measles
(the latter probably also transported from swine, where the
disease is caused by the larva of the tapeworm from which the
word measles is derived). Sometimes the inference is made from
information on groups that until recently were, or still are,
involved in practical experiences similar to those of remote
stages in human history, as are the tribes of the Amazon rain
forest. Isolated hunter- gatherers and populations that still
forage (the !Kung San, Hadza, Pygmies) replay adaptive
strategies that otherwise would be beyond our understanding.
Statistical data derived from observations help improve models
based only on our knowledge about biological mechanisms.

The notion of scale involves these considerations insofar as it
tells us that life expectancy in different pragmatic frameworks
varies drastically. The less than 30-year life expectancy
(associated with high infant mortality, diseases, and dangers in
the natural environment) explains the relatively stationary
population of hunter-gatherers. Orders of magnitude of 20 years
higher were achieved in what are called settled modes of life
existing before the rise of cities (occurring at different times
in Asia Minor, North Africa, the Far East, South America, and
Europe). The praxis of agriculture resulted in diversified
resources and is connected to the dynamics of a lower death rate,
a higher birth rate, and changes in anatomy (e.g., increased
height).

The hypotheses advanced by modern researchers of ancestral
language families concerning the relation between their
diffusion over large territories and the expanding agricultural
populations is of special interest here. The so-called Neolithic
Revolution brought about food production in some communities of
people as opposed to reliance on searching, finding, catching or
trapping (as with foragers and hunters). As conditions favored
an increase in population, the nature of the relations among
individuals and groups of individuals changed due to force of
number. Groups broke away from the main tribe in order to
acquire a living environment with less competition for resources.
Alternatively, pragmatic requirements led to situations in which
the number of people in a given area increased. With this
increase, the nature of their relations became more complex.

What is of interest here is the direction of change and the
interplay of the many variables involved in it. Definitely, one
wants to know how scale and changes in practical experiences are
related. Does a discovery or invention predate a change in
scale, or is the new scale a result of it or of several related
phenomena? Polygenetic explanations point to the many variables
that affect developments as complex as those leading to
discoveries of human practical experiences that result in
increased populations and diversified pragmatic interactions.
The major families of languages are associated, as
archaeological and linguistic data prove, with places where the
new pragmatic context of agriculture was established. One well
documented example is that of two areas in China: the Yellow
River Basin, where foxtail millet is documented, and the Yangtzi
River Basin, where rice was domesticated. The Austronesian
languages spread from these areas over thousands of miles
beyond. We have here an interesting correlation, even if only
summarily illustrated, between the nature of human experience,
the scale that makes it possible, and the spread of language.
Similar research bears evidence from the area called New Guinea,
where cultivation of taro tubers is identified with speakers of
the Papuan languages, covering large areas of territory as they
searched for suitable land and encountered the opposition of
foragers.

Natural abilities (such as yelling, throwing, running, plucking,
breaking, bending) dominated a humankind constituted in groups
and communities of reduced scale. Abilities other than natural,
such as planting, cooking, herding, singing, and using tools,
emerge consciously, in knowledge of the cause, when the change of
scale in population and effort required efficiency levels
relative to the community, impossible to achieve at the natural
level. Such abilities developed very quickly. They led to the
diversified means generated in practical experiences involving
elements of planning (as rudimentary as it was at its
beginning), reductionist strategies of survival and well-being
(break a bigger problem into smaller parts, what will become the
divide-and-conquer strategy), and coalition building. These
involved acts of substitution, insertion, and omission, and
continued with combinations of these at progressively higher
levels. At a certain scale of human activity, the experience of
work and the cognitive experience of storing information
pertinent to work differentiated.

Do structural changes bring about a new scale, or does scale
effect structural changes? The process is complex in the sense
that the underlying structure of human activity is adapted to
exigencies of survival fine tuned to the many factors influencing
both individual and communal experiences. That scale and
underlying structure are not independent results from the fact
that possibilities as well as needs are reflected in scale. More
individuals, with complementary skills, have a better chance to
succeed in practical endeavors of increased complexity. Their
needs increase, too, since these individuals bring into the
experience not only their person, but also commitments outside
the experience. The underlying structure embodies elements
characteristic of the human endowment-itself bound to change as
the individual is challenged by new circumstances of life-and
elements characteristic of the nature of human relations,
affecting and being affected by scale. Dynamic tensions between
scale and the elements defining the underlying structure lead to
changes in the pragmatic framework. Language development is just
one example of such changes. Articulated speech emerged in the
context of initial agricultural praxis as an extension of
communication means used in hunting and food gathering. Notation
and more advanced tools emerged at a later juncture. Crafts
resulted from practical experiences made possible by such tools
as work started to become specialized. Writing was made possible
by the cognitive experiences of notation and reading (no matter
how primitive the reading was). Writing emerged as practical
human constitution extended to trade, to beyond the
here-and-now and beyond co-presence. The underlying structure of
literacy was well suited to the sequentiality characteristic of
practical experiences, expression of dependencies, and
deterministic processes.

As already stated, successive forms of communication came about
when the scale of interaction among humans expanded from one to
several to many. Literacy corresponded to a qualitatively
different moment. If language can be associated with the human
scale characteristic of the transition from hunting and foraging
for food to producing it by means of agriculture, literacy can
be associated with the next level of human
interconditioning-production of means of production. One can use
here the metaphor of critical mass or threshold, not to
overwrite scale, but to define a value, a level of complexity,
or a new attractor (as this is called in chaos theory). Critical
mass defines a lower threshold-until this value, interaction was
still optimally carried out by means such as referential signs,
representations based on likeness, or by speech. At the lower
threshold, individuals and the groups they belong to can still
identify themselves coherently. But a certain instability is
noticeable: the same signs do not express similar or equivalent
experiences. In this respect, critical mass refers to number or
amount (of people, resources they share, interactions they are
involved in, etc.) and to quality (differences in the result of
the effort of self-constitution). Former means are rendered
inadequate by practical experiences of a different nature. New
strategies for dealing with inadequacies result from the
experience itself, as the optimization of the sign systems
involved (signals, speech, notation, writing) result from the
same. Notation became necessary when the information to be
stored (inventories, myths, genealogies) became more than what
oral transmission could efficiently handle. Critical mass
explains why some cultures never developed literacy, as well as
why a dominant literacy proves inadequate in our days.

Signs and tools

Practical experiences involving nature led to the realization of
differences: colors that change with seasons, flora and fauna in
their variety, variations in sky and weather. Human need is
externalized through hunting (maybe scavenging), fishing, finding
shelter, and seeking one's own kind, either under sexual drive
or for some collaborative effort. Thus, multiplicity of nature
is met by multiplicity of elementary operations. What resulted
was a language of actions, with elements relevant to the task at
hand. There was no real dialogue. In nature, screeches and
hoots, in finite sequences, signal danger. Otherwise, nature
does not understand human signs, images, or sounds. For
attracting and catching prey, or for avoiding danger, sounds,
colors, and shapes can be involved. What qualifies them as signs
is the infinity of variations and combinations required by the
practical context. Against the background of differences, human
practical experiences resulted also in the realization of
similarities in appearance and actions. Awareness of
similarities was embodied in means of interaction. They became
signs once the experience stabilized in the constitution of a
group coherently integrating the sign in its activity.

Elementary forms of praxis maintained individuals near the
object upon which they acted, or upon which needs and plans for
their fulfillment were projected. Extraction of what was common
to many tasks at hand translated into accumulation of
experience. With experience, a certain distance between the
individual, or group, and the task was introduced. The language
of actions changed continuously. Evaluation started as a
comparison. It evolved into inclinations, repetitive patterns,
and selections until it translated into a rule to be followed.
Interpretation of natural patterns connected to weather (what we
call change of season, storm, drought, etc.), to observations
concerning hunted animals, or digging for tubers, or to
agriculture (as we define it in retrospect) resulted in the
constitution of a repertory of observed characteristics and,
over time, in a method of observation. Once observed, phenomena
were tested for relevancy and thus became signs. They integrated
the observer, who memorized and associated them with successful
patterns of action. In a way, this meant that reading- i.e.,
observation of all kinds of patterns and associations to tasks at
hand-was in anticipation of notation and writing, and probably
one of the major reasons for their progressive appearance. This
reading filtered the relevant, that characteristic-of an
animal, plant, weather pattern-which affected the attainment of
desired goals. Consequently, the language of actions gained in
coherence, progressively involving more signs. Rituals are a
form of sharing and collective memory, a sui generis calendar,
characteristic of an implicit sense of time. They are a training
device in both understanding the signs pertaining to work and
the strategy of action to follow when circumstances changed. In
rituals, the unity between what is natural and what is human is
continuously reaffirmed.

Tools are extensions of the physical reality of the human being.
They are relevant as means for reaching a goal. Signs, however,
are means of self-reflection, and thus by their nature means of
communication. Tools, which can be interpreted as signs, too,
are also an expression of the self-reflective nature of humans,
but in a different way. What defines them is the function, not
the meaning they might conjure in a communicational context. By
their nature, tools require integration. In retrospect, tools
appear to us as instances of self-constitution at a scale
different from the natural scale of the physical world in which
individuals created them. The difference is reflected in their
efficiency in the first place, but also in the implicit
correlations they embody. Some are tools for individual use;
others require cooperation with other persons.

Sign activity at such primitive stages of humankind marked the
transcendence from accidental to systematic. The use of tools
and the relative uniform structure of the tasks performed
contributed to a sense of method. Tools testify to the close and
homogenous character of the pragmatic framework of primitive
humans. The syncretic nature of the signs of practical
experiences were reflected in the syncretism of tools and
signs. What we today call religion, art, science, philosophy, and
ethics were represented, in nuce, in the sign in an
undifferentiated, syncretic manner. Observations of repetitive
patterns and awareness of possible deviations blended.
Externalized in these complex signs, individuals strove towards
making them understandable, unequivocal, and easy to preserve
over time.

Think about such categories as syncretism, understanding,
repetitive patterns in practical terms. A sign can be a beat. It
should be easily perceived even under adverse conditions (noise
from thunder, the howl of animals). Humans should be able to
associate it with the same consequences (Run! should not be
confused with Halt!; Throw! should not be confused with Don't
throw! or some other unrelated action). This univocal
association must be maintained over time. As practical
experiences diversified, so did the generation of signs. Rhythm,
color, shape, body expression and movement, as experienced in
daily life, were integrated in rituals. Things were shown as they
are- animal heads, antlers and claws, tree branches and trunks,
huge rocks split apart. Their transformation was performed
through the use of fire, water, and stones shaped to cut, or to
help in shaping other stones.

It is quite difficult for us today to understand that for the
primitive mind, likeness produced and explained likeness, that
there was no connotation, that everything had immediate
practical implications. What was shared, here and now, or between
one short-lived generation and the next, was an experience so
undifferentiated that sometimes even the distinction between
action and object of action (such as hunting and prey, plowing
and soil, collecting and the collected fruit, etc.) was difficult
to make.

The process of becoming a human being is one of constituting its
own nature. Externalizing characteristics (predominantly
biological, but progressively also spiritual) to be shared
within the emergent human culture is part of the process We have
come to understand that there is no such thing as the world on
one side and a subject reflecting it on another. The appearance,
which Descartes turned into the premise of the rational
discourse adopted by Western civilization, makes us fall captive
to representational explanations rather than to ontogenetic
descriptions. Human beings identify themselves, and thus the
species they belong to, by accounting for similarities and
distinctions. These pertain to their existence, and sharing in
the awareness of these similarities and distinctions is part of
human interaction. As such, the world is constituted almost at
the same time as it is discovered. This contradictory dynamics of
identity and distinction makes it possible to see how language
is something other than the "image of our thoughts," as Lamy
once put it, obviously in the tradition of Descartes. Language
is also something other than the act of using it. We make our
language the way we continuously make ourselves. This making does
not come about in a vacuum, but in the pragmatic framework of
our interdependencies. The transition from directness and
immediateness to indirectness and mediation, along with the
notions of space and time appropriated in the process, is in many
ways reflected in the process of language constitution. The
emergence of signs, their functioning, the constitution of
language, and the emergence of writing seem to point to both the
self- definition and preservation of human nature, as these
unfold in the practical act of the species' self-constitution.

From Orality to Writing

Tracing the origin of language to early nuclei of agriculture,
as many authors do (Peter Bellwood, Paul K. Benedict, Colin
Renfrew, Robert Blust, among them), is tantamount to
acknowledging the pragmatic foundation of the practical
experience of language of human beings. Language is not a
passive witness to human dynamics. Diversity of practical
experience is reflected in language and made possible through the
practical experience of language. The origins of language, as
much as the origins of writing, lie in the realm of the natural.
This is why considerations regarding the biological condition of
the individual interacting with the outside world are extremely
important. Practical experiences of self-constitution in
language are constitutive of culture. The act of writing,
together with that of tool-making, is constitutive of a species
increasingly defining its own nature. Considerations regarding
culture are accordingly no less important than those concerning
the biological identity of the human being.

Let us point to some implications of the biological factor. We
know that the number of sounds, for instance, that humans can
produce when they push air through their mouths is very high.
However, out of this practically infinite number of sounds, only
slightly more than forty are identifiable in the Indo-European
languages, as opposed to the number of sounds produced in the
Chinese and Japanese languages. While it is impossible to show
how the biological make-up of individuals and the structure of
their experience are projected onto the system of language, it
would be unwise not to account for this projection as it occurs
at every moment of our existence. When humans speak, muscles,
vocal chords, and other anatomical components are activated and
used according to the characteristics of each. People's voices
differ in many ways and so subtly that to identify people
through voice alone is difficult. When we speak, our hearing is
also involved. In writing, as well as in reading, this
participation extends to sight. Other dynamic features such as
eye movement, breathing, heartbeat, and perspiration come into
play as well. What we are, do, say, write, or read are related.
The experience behind language use and the biological
characteristics of people living in a language differ to such an
extent that almost never will similar events, even the simplest,
be similarly accounted for in language (or in any other sign
system, for that matter) by different persons.

The first history, or the personal inquiry into the probable
course of past events, rests upon orality, integrates myths, and
ends up with the attempt to refer events to places, as well as
to time. Logographers try to reconstruct genealogies of persons
involved in real events (wars, founding of clans, tribes, or
dynasties, for example) or in the dominant fiction of a period
(e.g., the epics attributed to Homer, or the book of Genesis in
the Bible). In the transition from remembrance (mnemai) to
documented accounts (logoi), human beings acquired what we call
today consciousness of time or of history. They became aware of
differences in relating to the same events.

The entire encoding of social experience, from very naive forms
(concerning family, religion, illness) to very complex rules (of
ceremony, power, military conduct) is the result of human
practice diversified with the participation of language. The
tension between orality and writing is, respectively, an
expression of the tension between a more homogeneous way of life
and the ever diversifying new forms that broke through
boundaries accepted for a very long time. In the universe of the
many Chinese languages, this is more evident than in Western
languages. Chinese ideographic writing, which unifies the many
dialects used in spoken Chinese, preserves concreteness, and as
such preserves tradition as an established way of relating to the
world. Within the broader Chinese culture, every effort was made
to preserve characteristics of orality. The philosophy derived
from such a language defends, through the fundamental principle
of Tao in Confucianism, an established and shared mechanism of
transmitting knowledge.

Unlike spoken language, writing is fairly recent. Some scholars
(especially Haarmann) consider that writing did not appear until
4,000 to 3,000 BCE; others extend the time span to 6,000 BCE and
beyond. To repeat: It is not my intention to reconstitute the
history of writing or literacy. It makes little sense to
rekindle disputes over chronology, especially when new findings,
or better interpretations of old findings, are not at hand or
are not yet sufficiently convincing. The so-called boundaries
between oral and post-oral cultures, as well as between
non-literate, literate, and what are called post-literate, or
illiterate, cultures are difficult to determine. It is highly
unlikely that we shall ever be able to discover whether images
(cave drawings or petroglyphs) antecede or come after spoken
language. Probably languages involving notation, drawings,
etchings, and rituals-with their vast repertory of articulated
gestures-were relatively simultaneous. Some historians of
writing ascertain that without the word, there could be no
image. Others reject the logocratic model and suggest that
images preceded the written and probably even the spoken. Many
speculate on the emergence of rituals, placing them before or
after drawing, before or after writing. I suggest that primitive
human expression is syncretic and polymorphous, a direct
consequence of a pragmatic framework of self-constitution that
ascertains multiplicity.

Individual and collective memory

Anthropologists have tried to categorize the experience
transmitted in order to understand how orality and, later,
writing (primitive notation, in fact) refer to the particular
categories. Researchers point to the material
surroundings-resources, in the most general way-to successful
action, and to words as pertaining to the more general
framework (time, space, goals, etc.). Speculation goes as far as
to suggest that these human beings became increasingly dependent
on artifactual means of notation. As a consequence, they relied
less on the functions of the brain's right hemisphere. In turn,
this resulted in decreased acuteness of these functions. Some
even go so far as to read here an incipient Weltanschauung, a
perspective and horizon of the world. They are probably wrong
because they apply an explanatory model already influenced by
language (product of a civilization of literacy) on a very
unsettled human condition. In order to achieve some stability
and permanence, as dictated by the instinctive survival of the
species, this human condition was projected in various sequences
of signs still unsettled in a language. The very objects of
direct experience were the signs. This experience eventually
settled and became more uniform through the means and
constraints of orality.

Language is not a direct expression of experience, as the same
anthropologists think. In fact, language is also less
comprehensive than the signs leading to it. Before any
conversation can take place, something else-experience within
the species-is shared and constitutes the background for future
sharing. Face to face encounter, scavenging, hunting, fishing,
finding natural forms of shelter, etc., became themselves signs
when they no longer were related only to survival, but embodied
practical rules and the need to share. Sharing is the ultimate
qualifier for a sign, especially for a language.

Tools, cave paintings, primitive forms of notation, and rituals
addressed collective memory, no matter how limited this
collective was. Words addressed individual memory and became
means of individual differentiation. Individual needs and
motivations need to be understood in their relation to those of
groups. Signs and tools are elements that were integrated in
differentiation. To understand the interplay between them, we
could probably benefit from modern cognitive research of
distributed and centralized authority. Tools are of a
distributed nature. They are endlessly changed and tested in
individual or cooperative efforts. Signs, as they result from
human interaction, seem to emanate from anything but the
individual. As such, they are associated with incipient
centralized authority. These remarks define a conceptual
viewpoint rather than describe a reality to which none of us has
or can have access. But in the absence of such a conceptual
premise, inferences, mine or anybody else's, are meaningless.

The distinctions introduced above point to the need to consider
at least three stages before we can refer to language: 1.

integration in the group of one's kind in direct forms of
interaction: touching, passing objects from one to another,
recognition through sounds, gestures, satisfying instinctual
drives; 2.

awareness of differences and similarities expressed in direct
ways: comparison by juxtaposition, equalization by physical
adjustment; 3.

stabilization of expressions of sameness or difference, making
them part of the practical act.

From the time same and different were perceived in their degree
of generality, directness and immediateness was progressively
lost. Layers of understanding, together with rules for
generating coherent expressions, were accumulated, checked
against an infinity of concrete situations, related to signs
still used (objects, sounds, gestures, colors, etc.), and freed
from the demand of unequivocal or univocal meaning. All these
means of expression were socialized in the process of production
(the making of artifacts, hunting, fishing, plowing, etc.) and
self-reproduction until they became language. Once they became
language-talked about things and actions-this language removed
itself from the objects and the making or doing. This removal
made it appear more and more as a given, an entity in itself, a
reality to fear or enjoy, to use or compare one's actions to the
actions of others. The time it took for this process to unfold
was very long-hundreds of thousands of years (if we can imagine
this in our age of the instant). The process is probably
simultaneous to the formation of larger brains and upright
posture. It included biological changes connected to the self-
constitution of the species and its survival within a framework
different from the natural. It nevertheless acknowledged the
natural as the object of action and even change.

The functional need for distinctions explains morphological
aspects; the pragmatic context suggests how the shift from the
scale of one-to-one direct interaction to one-to-many by the
intermediary of language takes place. Concreteness, i.e.,
closeness to the object, is also symptomatic of the limited
shared universe. These languages are very localized because they
result from localized experiences. They externalize a limited
awareness, and make possible a very restricted development of
both the experience and the language associated with it. As we
shall see later on, a structurally similar situation can be
identified in the world today, not on some island, as the reader
might suspect, but on the islands of specialized work as we
constitute them in our economies. Obsessed with (or driven by)
efficiency, and oriented towards maximizing it, we use
strategies of integration and coordination which were not
possible in the ages of language constitution.

But let us get back to the place of the spoken (before the
emergence of notation and the written) and its cultural function
in the lives of human communities. The memory before the word
was the memory of repeated actions, the memory of gestures,
sounds, odors, and artifacts. Structuring was imposed from
outside-natural cycle (of day and night, of seasons, of aging),
and natural environment (riverside, mountainside, valley, wooded
region, grassy plains). The outside world gave the cues.
Participants acted according to them and to the cues of
previous experience as this was directly passed from one person
to another. Long before astrology, it was geomancy (association
of topographical features to people or outcomes of activity) that
inhabited people's reading of the environment and resulted in
various glyphs (petroglyphs, geoglyphs). Initially remembering
referred to a place, later on to a sequence of events. Only with
language did time come into the picture. Remembrance was dictated
minimally by instinct and was only slightly genetic in nature.
With the word, whose appearance implied means for recognizing
and eventually recording words, a fundamental shift occurred.
The word entered human experience as a relational sign. It
associated object and action. Together with tools, it constituted
culture as the unity between who we are (identity), what our
world is (object of work, contemplation, and questioning), and
what we do (to survive, reproduce, change). At this moment,
culture and awareness of it affected practical experiences of
human self-constitution. Simultaneously, an important split
occurred: genetic memory remained in charge of the human being's
biological reality, while social memory took over cultural
reality. Nevertheless, they were not independent of each other.

The nature of their interdependence is characteristic of each of
the changes in the scale of humankind that interests us here.
If we could describe what it takes for individuals to
congregate, what they need to know or understand in order to
hunt, to forage, to begin herding and agriculture, we would
still not know how well they would have to perform. In
retrospect, it seems that there was a predetermined path from the
stage of primitive development to what we are today. Assuming
the existence of such a path, we still do not know at what
moment one type of activity no longer satisfied expectations of
survival and other paths needed to be pursued. Once we involve
the notion of scale in our cognitive modeling, we get some
answers important for understanding not only orality and
writing, but also the process leading to literacy and the
post-literate.

Cultural memory

Memory, in its incipient stages (comparable to childhood, at the
beginning of human culture), as well as in its new functions
today, deserves our entire attention. For the time being, we can
confidently assume that before cultural memory was established,
genetic memory, from genetic code to the inner clock and
homeostatic mechanisms, dominated the inheritance mechanisms
related to survival, reproduction, and social interaction. The
emphasis brought by words is from inheritance to transmission of
experience. Rituals changed; they integrated verbal language and
gained a new status-syncretic projections of the community.
Language opened the possibility to describe efficient courses of
action. It also described generic programs for such diverse
activities as navigating, hunting, fire-making, producing tools,
etc. Expressions in language were of a level of generality that
direct action and the ritual could not reach.

In images preceding words, thought and action followed a circular
sequence: one was embedded in the other. A circular relation
corresponded to the reduced scale of the incipient species: no
growth, input and output in balance. Only when the circle was
opened was a sense of progression ascertained. The circular
framework can be easily defined as corresponding to the identity
between the result of the effort and the effort. Obviously,
chasing and catching prey required a major physical effort. The
reward at this stage was nothing more nor less than satisfied
hunger. Let us divide the result by the effort. The outcome of
this division is a very intuitive representation of efficiency or
usefulness. The circular stage maintained the two variables close
to each other, and the ratio around the value of 1:1.

The framework of linear relations started with awareness of how
efforts could be reduced and usefulness increased. The linear
sequence of activities was deterministically connected-the
stronger the person, the more powerful in throwing, thrusting
and hauling; the longer the legs, the faster the run, etc.
Language was a product of the change from the circular
framework, embodied in foraging, but also a factor affecting the
dynamics and the direction followed, i.e., agriculture. In
language the circle was opened in the sense that sequences were
made possible and generality, once achieved, generated further
levels of generality. From direct interaction coordinated by
instinct, biological rhythm, etc., to interaction coordinated by
melodic sound, movement, fire signals, to communication based on
words, the human species ascertained its existence among other
species. It also ascertained a sense of purpose and progression.

The pragmatics of myths is one of progression. It extends well
into our age, in forms that suit the scale of
humankind-progression from tribal life to the polis, ancient
cities-and its activities. In today's terminology, we can look at
myths as algorithms of practical life. In the ritual, giving
birth, selecting a mate, fruitful sexual relations-all related
to reproduction and death-could be approached within the implicit
circularity of action-reaction. In myths, the word of the
language conveys a relatively depersonalized experience
available to each and all. Since it was objectified in language,
it took on the semblance of rules. In language, things are
remembered; but also forgotten, or made forgotten, for reasons
having to do with new circumstances of work and social life.
Change in experience was reflected in the change of everything
pertinent to the experience as it was preserved in language.
Quite often, in the act of transmitting experience, details were
changed, myths were transmuted. They became new programs for new
goals and new circumstances of work.

Generally speaking, the emergence and cultural acquisition of
language and the change of status of the human being from Homo
Faber (tool-using human) to Homo Sapiens (thinking human) were
parallel processes within the pragmatic framework of linear
relations between actions and results. The pre-language stage of
relatively homogeneous activities, of directness and
immediateness, of relative equality between the effort and the
result progressively came to an end. The need to describe,
categorize, store, and retrieve the content of diversified,
indirect, mediated experience was projected into the reality of
language, within the experience of human self- constitution. The
relevance of experience to the task at hand was replaced by the
anticipated relevancy of structuring future tasks in order to
minimize effort and maximize outcome.

Frames of existence

The oral phase of language made it difficult, if not impossible,
to account for past events. Testimony in communities researched
while still in the oral phase (see Lévi- Strauss, among others)
shows that they could not maintain the semantic integrity of the
discourse. Words uttered in a never-ending now-the implicit
notion of present-seem to automatically reinvent the past
according to the exigencies of the immediate. The past, during
the oral phase of language, was a form of present, and so was the
future, since there are no instruments to project the word along
the axis of time.

Orality is associated with fixed frames of existence and
practical life. The culture of the written word resulted from
the introduction of a variable frame of existence, within which
a new pragmatic framework, corresponding to a growing scale of
human activity, required a stable outline of language. This
outline of language-over short time intervals it appears as a
fixed frame of reference-can be associated with more mobile,
more dynamic frames of existence and practical experiences, whose
output follows the dynamic of the linear relations it embodies.
Work and social interaction-in short, the pragmatic dimension of
human existence-made the recording of language necessary and
impressed linearity upon it.

A cuneiform notation, over 3,500 years old, testifies to a
Sumerian who looked at the nightly skies and saw a lion, a bull,
and a scorpion. More importantly, it demonstrates how a
practical experience constitutes a cognitive filter: what people
saw when they looked at something unknown and for which no name
was constituted, and how disjoint worlds-the earthly environment
and the sky-were put in relation at this phase of language
constitution. This is even more important in view of the fact
that as an isolated language, Sumerian survives only in writing,
a product of that "budding flower" as A. and S. Sherrat
described it, referring to the agricultural heartland of
Southwest Asia where many language families originated.

Writing, which takes place in many respects at a higher cognitive
level than the production and utterance of the word, or than in
pictographic notation, is a multi- relational device. It makes
possible relations between different words, between different
sentences, between images and language. From its incipient phase,
it also related disjoint worlds, but at a level other than that
achieved in Sumerian cuneiform notation. Writing facilitates and
further necessitates the next level of a language, which is the
text, an entity in which its parts lose their individual meaning
while the whole constitutes the message or is conjured into
meaning. The experience already gained in visual records, such
as drawing, rock engravings, and wood carvings, was taken over in
the experience of the written word.

The pictorial was a highly complex notation with a vast number of
components, some visible (the written), some invisible (the
phonetics), and few rules of association. Within the pictorial,
sequences are formed which narrate events or actions in their
natural succession. What comes first in the sequence is also
prior (in time) to everything else, or it has a more important
place in a hierarchy. The male-female relation, or that between
free individuals and slaves, between native and foreign was
embedded here. Even the direction of writing (from left to right,
right to left, top to bottom) encodes important information
about the people constituting their identity in the practical
experience of engraving letters on tablets or painting them on
parchment. The very concrete nature of the pictograms prevents
generalization. Expression was enormously rich, precision
practically impossible to achieve.

The detailed history of writing makes up many chapters in the
history of languages. It is also a useful introduction to the
history of knowledge, aesthetics, and most likely cognitive
science. This history also details processes characteristic of
the beginning of literacy. Probably more than 30,000 years
passed between the time of cave paintings and rock engravings
and the first acknowledged attempt at writing. From the
perspective of literacy, this time span comprised the liberation
of the human being from the pictorially concrete and the
establishment of the realm of conventions, of purposeful
encoding. Abstract thinking is not possible without the cognitive
support of abstract representations and the sharing of
conventions (some implicit) they embody. The wedge-shaped
letters of Sumerian cuneiform, the sacred engraved notations of
Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Chinese ideograms, the Hebrew, Greek,
and Roman alphabets-all have in common the need to overcome
concreteness. They offer a system of abstract notation for
increasingly more complex languages.

Until writing, language was still close to its users and bore
their mark. It was their voice, and their seeing, hearing, and
touching. With writing, language was objectified, freed from the
subject and the senses. The development towards written language,
and from written language to initially limited and then
generalized literacy, paralleled the evolution from satisfying
immediate needs (the circular relation) to extending and
increasing demand (the linear function) of a mediated nature. The
difference between needs related to survival and needs that are
no longer a matter of survival but of social status (power, ego,
fear, pleasure, incipient forms of conviction, etc.) is
represented through language, itself seen as part of the
continuous self-constitution of the human being in a particular
pragmatic framework.

The alienation of immediacy

The term alienation requires a short explanation. Generally, it
is used to describe the estrangement, through work, of human
beings from the object of their effort. Awareness of having
one's life turned into products, which then appear to those who
made them as entities in themselves, open to anybody to
appropriate them in the market, is an expression of alienation.
There are quite a number of other descriptions, but basically,
alienation is a process of having something that is part of us
(our bodies, thoughts, work, feelings, beliefs, etc.) revealed
as foreign. Rooting the explanation of this very significant
process of alienation (and of the concept representing it in
language) in the establishment and use of signs, makes possible
the understanding of its pragmatic implications.

Awareness of signs is awareness of the difference between who we
are and how we express our identity. In the case of signs
representing some object (the drawing of the object or of the
person, the name, social security number, passport, etc.), the
difference between what is represented and the representation is
as much an issue of appropriateness (why we call a table table
or a certain woman Mary) as it is one of alienation. The
conscious use of signs most probably results from the observation
people make that their thoughts, feelings, or questions are
almost always imperfectly expressed. Two things happen, probably
at the same time: 1.

No longer dealing directly with the object, or intended action,
but with its representation, makes it more difficult to share
with others experiences pertinent to the object. 2.

The interpretation being no longer one of the direct object, or
the intended action, but of its representation, it leads to new
experiences, and thus associations-some confusing, and others
quite stimulating. The image was still close to the object; the
confusion regarded actions. Writing is remote from objects,
though actions can be better described since differentiation of
time is much easier. We know by now that moving images, or
sequences of photographs of the action, are even better for this
purpose.

With the written word, even in the most primitive use of it,
events become the object of record. Relations, as well as
reciprocal commitments among community members, can also be put
in the records. Norms can be established and imposed. A
fundamental change, resulting from the increased productivity of
the newly settled communities, is accounted for in writing.
People no longer deal with work in order to live (in order to
survive, actually), but with life dedicated to work. Writing,
more than previously used signs (sounds, images, movements,
colors), estranges human beings from the environment and from
themselves. Some feelings (joy, sadness), some attitudes (anger,
mistrust) become signs and, once expressed, can be written down
(e.g., in letters, wills). In order to be shared, thoughts go
through the same process, and so does everything else pertaining
to life, activity, change, illness, love, and death.

It was stated many times that writing and the settlement of human
beings are related. So are writing and the exchange of goods, as
well as what will become known as labor division. While the use
of verbal language makes possible the differentiation of human
praxis, the use of written language requires the division
between physical and non-physical work. Writing requires skills,
such as those needed for using a stylus to engrave in wax or
clay, quill on parchment, later the art of calligraphy. It
implies knowledge of language and of its rules of grammar and
spelling. There is a great difference between writing skills and
the skills needed for processing animal skins, meat, various
agricultural products, and raw materials. The social status of
scribes proves only that this difference was duly acknowledged.
It should be added here that the few who mastered writing were
also the few who mastered reading. Nevertheless, some historic
reference points to the contrary: in the 13th century,
non-reading subjects were used as scribes because the accuracy
of their undisturbed copying was better than that of those who
read. This reference is echoed today in the use of non-English
speaking operators to key-in texts, i.e., to transfer accumulated
records into digital databases. And while the number of readers
increased continuously, the number of writers, lending their
hands as scribes to real writers, remained small for many
centuries.

Literacy started as an elitist overhead expenditure in primitive
economies, became an elitist occupation surrounded by prejudices
and superstition, expanded after technological progress (however
rudimentary) facilitated its dissemination, and was finally
validated in the marketplace as a prerequisite for the higher
efficiency of the industrial age. Primitive barter did not rely
on and did not require the written word, although barter
continued even after the place of written language became
secure. In barter, people interact by exchanging whatever they
produce in order to fulfill their immediate needs within a
diversified production.

The alienation peculiar to barter and the alienation
characteristic of a market relying on the mediating function of
written language are far from being one and the same. In short,
exchanging is fundamentally different from selling and buying.
Products to be exchanged still bear the mark of those who sweat
to produce them. Products to be sold become impersonal; their
only identity is the need they might satisfy or sometimes
generate. Myth, as a set of practical programs for a limited
number of local human experiences, no longer satisfied
exigencies of a community diversifying its experience and
interacting with communities living in different environments.
This contrast of market forms characteristic of orality and of
incipient writing is related to the contrast between myth
transmitted orally and mythology, associated with the
experience of writing. Language in its written form appeared as a
sui generis social memory, as potential history.

The obsession with genealogies (in China, India, Egypt, among the
Hebrews, and in oral culture in general) was an obsession with
human sequences stored in a memory with social dimensions. It
was also an obsession with time, since each genealogical line is
simultaneously a historic record-who did what, when and where;
who followed; and how things changed. Most of these aspects are
only implicit in genealogy. In oral culture, genealogies were
turned into mnemonic devices, easily adjustable to new
conditions of life, but still circular, and just as easily
transformable from a record of the past into a command for the
future. In its incipient phases as notation and record,
genealogy still relied on images to a great extent (the family
tree), but also on the spoken, maintaining a variability similar
to that of the oral. Nevertheless, the possibility for more
stabilized expression, for storing, for uniformity, and
consistency was given in the very structure of writing. These
were progressively reached in the first attempts to articulate
ideas, concepts, and what would become the corpus of theoria-
contemplation of things translated into language-on which the
sciences and humanities of yesterday, and even some of today,
are based. Theories are in some ways genealogies, with a root
and branches representing hypotheses and various inferences.
Written language extended the permanence of records
(genealogies, ownership, theories, etc.) and facilitated access
through relatively uniform codes.

In the city-states of ancient Greece, writing alerted people
working within the pragmatic constraints of orality to the
dangers involved in a new mechanism of expression and
communication. Writing seemed to introduce its own inaccuracies,
either because of a deliberate attitude towards certain
experiences, or as a result of systematic avoidance of
inconsistency, which ended up affecting the records of facts. As
we know, facts are not intrinsically consistent in their
succession. Therefore, we still use all kinds of strategies to
align them, even if they are obliquely random. In the oral mode,
as opposed to procedures later introduced through writing,
consistency was maintained by a succession of adaptations in the
sequence of conversations through which records were
transmitted. Within oral communication, there is a direct form of
criticism, i.e., the self-adjusting function of dialogue.
Completeness and consistency are different in conversation
(open-ended) than in written text, and even more different in
formal languages.

Memory itself was also at issue. Reliance on the written might
affect memory- which was the repository of a people's tradition
and identity in the age of orality- because it provided an
alternative medium for storage. The written has a different
degree of expression and leaves a different impression than the
oral. Writing, confined to those who read, could also affect
constitution and sharing of knowledge. Writing was characterized
as superficial, not reaching the soul (again, lacking
expressiveness), interfering between the source of knowledge and
the receiver of any lesson about knowledge. Spoken words are the
words of the person speaking them. A written text seems to take
on a life of its own and appears as external, alien. The written
is given and does not account for differences among human
beings; the spoken can be adapted or changed, its coherence
dependent upon the circumstances of the dialogue. There are
societies today (the Netsidik, the Nuer, the Bassari, to name a
few) that still prefer the oral to the written. Within their
pragmatic framework, the live expression of the human uttering
the words in the presence of others conveys more information than
the same words can in writing.

The memory of a literate society becomes more and more a
repository of the various mediations in social life and loses
its relation to direct experience. Things said (what the Greeks
called legomena) are different from things done (dromena). The
written word connects to other words, not to things done. And so
does the sentence, when it acquires its status as a relatively
complete unit of language. But the real change is brought about
by the written, whether on papyrus, clay, scroll or tablet, or in
stone or lead. Such a page connects to other written pages and
to writing in general. Thus, things done disappear in the body
of history, which becomes the collection of writings,
eventually stored on bookshelves. The meaning of history is
expressed in the variability of the connections ascertained from
one text to another. When the here and now of dromena are
expurgated, we remain only with the consciousness of sequences.
This is a gain, but also a loss: the holistic meaning of
experience vanishes.

How much of this kind of criticism, opposing the oral to the
written, is relevant to the phenomena of our time cannot be
evaluated in a simple statement. Language has changed so much
that in order to understand texts originating at the time of this
criticism, we have to translate and annotate them. Some are
already reconstituted from writings of a later time (i.e., of a
different pragmatic framework), or even from translations. There
is no direct correspondence between the literacy of emergent
writing and that of automated writing and reading. In some cases
we have to define a contextual reference in the absence of which
large parts of these recuperated texts make little sense, if
any, to people constituted in literacy and in a pragmatic reality
so different from that of thousands of years ago. Even written
words are dependent on the context in which they are used. In
other words, although it seems that written language is less
alive than conversation, and less bound to change, it actually
changes. We write today, using technologies for word processing,
in ways different from any other practical experience of
writing.

The criticism voiced in Plato's time cannot be entirely
dismissed. Writing became the medium through which some human
experiences were reified. It allowed for extreme subjectivity:
In the absence of dialogue and of the influence of criticism
through dialogue, the past was continuously reinvented according
to goals and values of the writer's present. In
orality-dominated social life, opinion (which Greeks called doxa)
was the product of language activity, and it had to be
immediate. In writing, truth is sought and preserved. What made
Socrates sound so fierce (at least in Plato's dialogues) in his
attacks against writing was his intuition of progressive removal
from the source of thinking, hence the danger of unfaithful
interpretation. Socrates, as well as Plato, feared indirectness
and wrote conclusively about memory and wisdom.

Situated between Socrates and Aristotle, Plato could observe and
express the consequences of writing: "I cannot help feeling,
Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the
creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if
you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." As one
of the first philosophers of writing, Plato could not yet
observe that writing is not simply the transcription of thoughts
(of the words through which and in which humans think), that
ideas are formed differently in writing than in speech, that
writing represents a qualitatively new sign system in which
meanings are formed and communicated through a mechanism once
more mediated in respect to practical reality. The subject of
confidence in language became the central theme of the Sophists'
exercise, of Medieval philosophy, of Romanticism, and of the
literature of the absurd (symptomatically popular in the years
following World War 2).

Moving from the past to the present, we notice that memory is an
issue of extreme importance today, too. Literacy challenges the
reliability of memory across the board, even when memory is the
repository of facts through which people establish themselves in
the world of work. Professionals ranging from doctors, lawyers,
and military commanders to teachers, nurses, and office
personnel rely more on memory than do factory workers on an
assembly line. The paradox is that the more educated a
professional is, the less he or she needs to rely on literacy in
the exercise of his or her profession, except in the initial
learning process, which is made through books. With the advent
of video and cassette tapes or disks, with digital storage and
networks, literacy loses its supremacy as transmitter of
knowledge.

What makes language necessary is also what explains its history
and its characteristics. Language came to life in a process
through which humans projected themselves into the reality of
their existence, identified themselves in respect to natural and
social environments, and followed a path of linear growth.
Orality testifies to limited, circular experiences but
corresponds to an unsettled human being in search of well being
and security. It relied on memory for the most part and was
assimilated in ritual. The written appeared in the context of
several fundamental changes: diversified human praxis,
settlement, and a market that outgrew barter, each related and
influencing the other. Its main result was the division between
mental and physical labor. It made speaking, writing, and
reading-characteristics of literacy, as we know it from the
perspective of literate societies-logically possible. In fact, it
represented only the possibility of literacy, not its beginning.
Once we understand how language works and what were some of the
functions of language that corresponded to the new stage made
possible by writing, we shall also understand how writing
contributed to the future ideal of literacy.



Orality and Writing Today: What Do People Understand When They
Understand Language?

Sitting before your computer, you connect to the World Wide Web.
What is of interest today? How about something in neurosurgery?
Somewhere on this planet, a neurosurgeon is operating. You can
see individual neurons triggering right on your monitor. Or you
can view how the surgeon tests the patient's pattern recognition
abilities, allowing the surgeon to draw a map of the brain's
cognitive functioning, a map essential for the outcome of the
operation. Every now and then the dialogue between surgeon and
assistants is complemented by the display of data coming from
different monitoring devices. Can you understand the language
they are using? Could a written report of the operation
substitute for the real-time event? For a student in
neurosurgery, or for a researcher, the issue of understanding is
very different from what it would be for a lay-person.

Tired of science? A concert is taking place at another Internet
address. Musical groups from all over the world are sending
their live music to this address. As a multi- threaded
performance, this concert enables its listeners to select from
among the many simultaneously performing groups. They sing about
love, hope, understanding...all the themes that each listener is
familiar with. Still, understanding every word the musicians
use, do you understand what is taking place?

Moving away from the Internet, one could visit a factory, a stock
exchange, a store. One could find oneself in subway in any city,
witness a first-grade class in session, or pursue business in a
government office. All these scenarios embody the various forms
of self-constitution through practical activity. It seems that
everyone involved is talking the same language, but who
understands what? In seemingly simpler contexts, what do
individuals understand today when they understand a written
instruction or conversations, casual or official? The context is
our day, which is different from that of any previous time, and,
in particular, different from that of a literacy- dominated
pragmatics. The answers to the questions posed above do not come
easily. A foundation has to be provided for addressing such
questions from a perspective broader than that afforded by the
examples given.

A feedback called confirmation

Understanding language is a process that extends far beyond
knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Where there is no sharing
of experience beyond what a particular language sequence
expresses, there is no understanding. This sounds like a
difficult expectation. To be met, the non-expressed must be
present in the listener, reader, or writer. Language must
recreate the non-expressed, through the sequence heard, read, or
written, and related to it, beyond the words recognized and the
grammar used. Behind each word that people comprehend, there is
either a common practical experience, or a shared pragmatic
framework, or minimally some form of shared understanding, which
constitute what is known as background knowledge. "The limits of
my language mean the limits of my world," Wittgenstein
promulgated. I would rephrase, in an attempt to connect
knowledge and experience, "The limits of my experience are the
limits of my world." Self-constitution in language is such an
experience.

The first level of the indirect relation established between
someone expressing something in language and someone else trying
to understand it is concentrated in a semantic assumption: "I
know that you know." But is it a sufficient condition to continue
a conversation, let's say about a hunted animal, fire, or a tool,
as long as the listener knows what the hunted animal or fire is?
Many who study semantics think that it is, and accordingly
devise strategies for establishing a shared semantic background.
These strategies range from making sure that students in a class
understand the same things when they use the same words, to
publishing comprehensive dictionaries of what they perceive as
the necessary shared knowledge in order to maintain cultural
coherence at the appropriate scale of the group or community in
question. In the final analysis, these strategies correspond to
a semantically based model of cultural education driven by the
Chomskyan distinction between competence and performance. They
identify the problem in the incongruence of our individual
dictionaries (vocabulary), not in the diversity of human
practical experiences. The assumption is that once people
understand what is in language, they apply it (pragmatics as
"uses and effects of signs within the behavior in which they
occur," according to J. Lyons). We know by now that after a
certain stage of unifying influences corresponding to industrial
society, this congruence becomes impossible when the scale of
human experience changes. The examples given at the beginning of
this chapter are evidence of this fact.

What I maintain throughout this book is that language is
constituted in human experiences, not merely applied to them.
Performance predates competence. Recognition, of an utterance, a
written word, a sentence, is itself an experience through which
individuals define each one of themselves. Within a limited scale
of existence and experience, the homogeneity of the circumstance
guaranteed the coherence of language use. As the number of
people increases, and as they are involved in increasingly
varied experiences, they no longer share a homogeneous pragmatic
framework. Consequently, they can no longer assume the coherence
of language. Progressively, ever diversifying practical
experiences cause words, phrases, and sentences to mean more and
different things at the same time. Instantiation of meaning is
always in the experience through which individuals constitute
their identity.

Examination of the various elements affecting the status of
literacy in the contemporary world of fragmented practical
experiences opens a new perspective on language. Within this
perspective, we acknowledge how and when similar experiences
make the unifying framework of literacy possible and necessary.
We also acknowledge from which point literacy is complemented by
literacies and what, if anything, bridges among such literacies.
Direct experience and mediated experience are the two stages to
be considered. In particular, we are interested in language at
the level where direct experience is affected by the insertion
of gestures, sounds, and initial words.

Indirectness implies awareness of a shared reference-the
gesture, the sound, the word-that is simultaneously shared
experience. At this level, there is no generality. Patterns of
activity are patterns of self-constitution: in the act of
hunting, the hunter projects physical abilities (running,
seeing, ability to use the terrain, to grab stones, to target).
In relation to other hunters, he projects abilities pertinent to
coordination, planning, and reciprocal understanding. Within
this pragmatic framework, a level of indirectness is
constituted: confirmation, or what cybernetics identifies as
feedback, in all biological processes. Along this line, the
initial (unuttered and obviously unwritten) "I know that you
know" becomes subsequently "I know that you know that I know."
Coordination and hierarchy within the given task come into the
picture. Indeed, if we consider the experience as the origin of
meaning in language, the sequence of assumptions is even larger:
"I know that you know that I know that you know." It
corresponds to a cognitive level totally different from that of
direct practical experiences.

In a way, this threefold sequence shows how syntax is enveloped
in semantics, and both in the pragmatics that determines them.
Applied to the hunting scene, it says, "I know that you know
that I am over here, opposite you, we are both closing in on a
hunted animal, and I know that you are aware that you might throw
your spear in my direction; but the fact that we share in the
knowledge of who is placed where will help us get the animal and
not kill each other by accident." At a very small scale of human
experiences, the sequence was realized without language. Patterns
of activity captured its essence. At a larger scale, words
replaced signs used for coordination. Writing established frames
of reference and a medium for planning more complex activities.
The language of drawings, for what eventually became artifacts,
confirmed the sequence in the built-in knowledge. The Internet
browser, a graphic interface to an infinity of simultaneous
experiences of sharing information, frees participants from
saying to each other, "Hello. I am here." It facilitates a
virtual community of individuals who constitute the experience
of real-time neurosurgery, or the virtual concert mentioned at
the beginning of this section. In similar ways, new patterns of
work in the civilization of illiteracy constitute our
work-place, school, or government, based on the same pragmatic
assumptions.

Between the primitive hunters and those who in our days identify
their presence by all kinds of devices-a badge, a pager, a
mobile phone, an access card, a password-there is a difference
in the means and forms used to acknowledge the shared awareness
that affects the outcome of the experience. Even the simple act
of greeting someone we think we know implies the whole sequence
of feedback (double confirmation, each participant's awareness,
and shared awareness). This says, probably in too many words:
1.

To understand language means to understand all the others with
whom we share practical experiences of self-constitution. 2.

All the others must realize this implicit expectation of
communication. 3.

Each new pragmatic context brings about new experiences and new
forms of awareness. This understanding can go something along
the line of, "I know that you know that I know that you know"
what the hunted animal is, what fire is, which tool can be used
and how; or in today's context, what surgery is, what a brain is,
what a virtual concert is, what a certain activity in a
production cycle affects, what the function of a particular
government office is. Otherwise, the conversation would stop, or
another means of expression (such as recreating fire, or
demonstrating a tool) would have to be used, as happened in the
past and as frequently happens today: "I know that you know how
to drive a car (or use a computer), but let me show you how."

Confirmation in language, gestures, and facial expression signals
the understanding. Whenever this understanding fails, it fails
on account of the missing confirmation. When this confirmation
is no longer uniquely provided by means characteristic of
literacy-let us recall modern warfare, technology controlling
nuclear reactors, electronic transactions-the need for literacy
is subject to doubt. Since the majority of instruction conveyed
today is through images (drawings), or image and sound
(videotapes), or some combination of media, it is not surprising
that literacy is met with skepticism, if not by those who teach,
at least by those who are taught. In the pragmatics of their
existence they already live beyond the literate understanding.
This applies not only to the Internet, but just as well to
places of work, schools, government, and other instances of
pragmatic activity.

Primitive orality and incipient writing

In addition to the general background of understanding, there are
many levels, represented by the clues present in speech or
writing, or in other forms of expression and communication. For
example, a question is identified by some vocal expression
accepted as interrogation. In writing, the question is denoted by
a particular sign, depending on the particular language. But
other clues, no less important, are more deeply seated. They
refer to such things as intention, who is talking-man, woman,
child, policeman, priest-the context of the talk,
hierarchies-social, sexual, moral-and many other clues. Much
extra-language background knowledge goes into human language and
directs understanding from experience to language use. Dialogue
is more than two persons throwing sentences at each other. It is
a pragmatic situation requiring as much language as
understanding of the context of the conversation because each
partner in the dialogue constitutes himself or herself for the
other. Dialogue is the elementary cell of communication
experience. Within dialogue, language is transcended by the many
other sign systems through which human self-constitution takes
place. Dialogues make it clear that understanding language
becomes a supra- (or para-) linguistic endeavor. It requires the
discovery of the clues, in and outside language, and of their
relationship. But more importantly, it requires the
reconstruction of experience as it is embodied in background
knowledge.

By contrasting primitive orality to incipient writing, we can
understand that the process of establishing conventions is
motivated by the need to overrule concreteness and to access a
new cognitive realm that a different pragmatic context
necessitates. By understanding how experience affects their
relation, we can consider orality and writing in successive
moments of human pragmatics, i.e., within a concrete scale of
humankind. Indeed, when writing emerged, elements of orality
corresponding to a reduced scale of experience were reproduced
in its structure because they were continued at the cognitive
level. In our days, there is a far less pressing need to mimic
orality in written signs. Some will argue that 4 Sale, 4-Runner,
While-U-Wait, and Toys 'R' Us, among other such expressions, are
examples to the contrary. These attempts to compress language
represent ways of establishing visual icons, of achieving a
synthetic level better adapted to fast exchange of information.
We see many more examples in interactive multimedia, or in the
heavy traffic of Internet-based communication. There is no
literacy involved here, and no literacy is expected in decoding
the message. There is a strong new orality, with characteristics
reminiscent of previous orality. But the dominant element is the
visual as it becomes a new icon. The international depiction of
a valentine-shaped heart to represent the word love is one
example in this sense; the icons used in Europe on clothing care
labels are others.

Time reference in texts today is made difficult by the nature of
processes characteristic of our age: numerous simultaneous
transactions, distributed activity, interconnection, rapid
change of rules. These cannot be appropriately expressed in a
written text. In the global world, Now means quite a different
thing for individuals connected over many time zones. Sunrise
experienced on the Web page of the city of Santa Monica can be
immediately associated to poetic text through a link. But the
implicit experience of time (and space) carried by language and
made instrumental in literacy does not automatically refresh
itself.

It took thousands of years before humans became acquainted with
the conventions of writing. It is possible that some of these
conventions were assimilated in the hardware (brain) supporting
cognitive activity and progressively projected in new forms of
self-constitution. The practice of writing and the awareness of
the avenues it opened led to new conventions. Practical
endeavors, originating in the conventions of space and time,
implicit in the written (and the subsequent reading), resulted in
changed conventions. For instance, the discovery that time and
space could be fragmented, a major realization probably not
possible in the culture of orality, resulted in new practical
experiences and new theories of space and time.

Once writing became a practical experience and constituted a
legitimate reality, at a level of generality characteristic of
its difference from gestures, sounds, uttered words or
sentences, associations became possible at several levels of the
text. Some were so unexpected or unusual that understanding such
associations turned into a real challenge for the reader. This
challenge regarding understanding is obviously characteristic of
new levels, such as the self-referential, omnipresent in the
wired world of home pages. In some ways, language is becoming a
medium for witnessing the relation between the conscious,
unconscious, or subconscious, and language itself. The brain
surgery mentioned some pages ago suppressed the patient's
conscious recognition of objects or actions by inhibiting
certain neurons.

The unnatural, nonlinguistic use of language is studied by
psychologists, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence
researchers in order to understand the relation between language
and intelligence. This need to touch upon the biological aspects
of the practical experiences of speaking, writing, or reading
results from the premise pursued. Self-constitution of the human
being takes place while the biological endowment is projected
into the experience. Important work on what are called split-
brain patients-persons who, in order to suppress epileptic
attack, have had the connection between the two brain
hemispheres severed-shows that even the neat distinction
left-right (the left part of the brain is in charge of language)
is problematic. Researchers learned that in each practical
experience, our biological endowment is at work and at the same
time subject to self-reflection. Projecting a word like laugh in
the right field of vision results in the patients' laughing,
although in principle they could not have processed the word.
When asked, such patients explain their laughter through
unrelated causes. If a text says "Scratch yourself," they
actually scratch themselves, stating that it is because
something itches. Virtual reality practical experiences take full
 advantage of these and other clinical observations. The absent
in a virtual reality environment is very often as important as
the present. On the back channels of virtual reality
interactions, not only words but also data describing human
reactions (turning one's head, closing the eyes, gesturing with
the hand) can be transmitted. Once fed back, such data becomes
part of the virtual world, adapted to the condition of the
person experiencing it. This is why interest in cognitive
characteristics of oral communication-of the primitive stages or
of the present-remains important.

Background information is more readily available in oral
communication. In orality, things people refer to are closer to
the words they use. Human co-presence in conversation results in
the possibility to read and translate the word under the guise of
a willingness by others to show what a particular word stands
for. In orality, the experience pertinent to the word is shared
in its entirety. This is possible because the appropriate world
of experience (corresponding to the circular scale of human
praxis) is so limited that the language is in a one-to-one
relation with what it describes. In some ways, the parent-child
relation is representative of this stage in the childhood of
humankind.

In the new orality of the civilization of illiteracy the same
one-to-one relation is established through strategies of
segmentation. The speaker and listener(s) share space and
time-and hence past, present, and, to a certain degree, future.
And even if the subject is not related to that particular space
and moment, it already sets a reference mechanism in place by
virtue of the fact that people in dialogue are people sharing a
similar experience of self-constitution. Far is far from where
they speak; a long time ago is a long time ago from the moment
of the verbal exchange. The acquisition of far, long (or short)
time ago is in itself the result of practical circumstances
leading to a more evolved being. We now take these distinctions
for granted, surprised when children ask for tighter qualifiers,
or when computer programs fail because we input information with
insufficient levels of distinction.

The realization of the frame of time and space occurred quite
late in the development of the species, within the scale of
linear relationships, and only as a result of repeated practical
experiences, of sequences constituting patterns. Once the
reference mechanism for both time and space was acknowledged and
integrated in new experiences, it became so powerful that it
allowed people to simplify their language and to assume much
more than what was actually said. In today's world, space and
time are constituted in experiences affected by the experience of
relativity. Accordingly, the orality of the civilization of
illiteracy is not a return to primitive orality, but to a
referential structure that helps us better cope with dynamism.
The space and time of virtual experiences are an example of
effective freedom from language, but not from the experiences
through which we acquired our understanding of time and space.
Computers able to perform in the space of human assumptions are
not yet on the horizon of current technological possibilities.

Assumptions

Assumptions are a component of the functioning of sign systems. A
mark left can make sense if it is noticed. The assumption of
perception is the minimum at which expression is acknowledged.
Assumptions of writing are different from those of orality. They
entail the structural characteristics of the practical
experiences in which the people writing constitute their
identity. Literate assumptions, unlike any other assumptions in
language, are extensions of linear, sequential experience in all
its constitutive parts. They are evinced in vocabulary, but even
more strongly in grammar. In many ways, the final test of any
sign system is that of its built-in assumptions. Illiteracy is
an experience outside the realm defined by the means and methods
of literacy. The civilization of illiteracy challenges the need
and justification of literate assumptions, especially in view of
the way these affect human effectiveness.

The very fine qualifiers of time and space that we take for
granted today were acknowledged only slowly, and initially at a
rather coarse level of distinction. Despite the tremendous
progress made, even today our experience with time and space
requires some of the repertory of the primitive human.
Movements of hands, head, other body parts (body language),
changes in facial expression and skin color (e.g., blushing),
breathing rhythm, and voice variations (e.g., intonation, pause,
lilt)-all account for the resurrection in dialogue of an
experience much richer than language alone can convey. Such
para-linguistic elements are no less meaningful in new practical
experiences, such as interaction with and inside virtual
environments.

Para-linguistic elements consciously used in primitive
communities, or unconsciously present, still escape our
scrutiny. Their presence in communication among members of
communities sharing a certain genetic endowment takes different
forms. They are not reducible to language, although they are
connected to its experience. Examples of this are the strong
sense of rhythm among Blacks in America and Africa, the sense of
holistic perception among Chinese and Japanese. We can only
conjecture, from words reconstituted in the main language strand
(proto-languages), or in the mother tongue of humankind
(proto-world), that words were used in conjunction with
non-linguistic entities. Whether a mother-tongue or a pre-Babel
language existed is a different issue. The hypothesis mimics the
notion of a common ancestor of the species and obviously looks
for the language of this possible ancestor. More important,
however, is the observation that the practical experience of
language constitution does not eliminate everything that is not
linguistic in nature. Moreover, the para-linguistic, even when
language becomes as dominant as it does under the reign of
literacy, remains significant for the effectiveness of human
activity. The civilization of illiteracy does not necessarily
dig for para-linguistic remnants of previous practical endeavors.
It rather constitutes a framework for their participation in a
more effective pragmatics, in the process involving
technological means capable of processing all kinds of cues.

In a given frame of time and space, para-linguistic signs acquire
a strong conventional nature. The way the word for I evolved
(quite differently than equivalents in different languages of
the world: ich, je, yo, eu, én, ani, etc.), and the way words
relating to two evolved (hands, legs, eyes, ears, parents), and
so forth, gives useful leads. It seems, for instance, that the
pair entered language as a modifier (i.e., a grammatical
category), marked by non-linguistic signs (clasp, repetition,
pointing). Some of the signs are still in use. The grammatical
category and the distinction between one and two are related.
The Aranda population (in Australia) combine the words for one
and two in order to handle their arithmetic. Also, the
distinction singular- plural begins with two. We take this for
granted, but in some languages (e.g., Japanese), there is no
distinction between singular and plural. In addition, it should
be pointed out here that the same signs (e.g., use of a finger
to point, hand signals) can be understood in different ways in
different cultures. Bulgarians shake their head up and down to
signal no, and side to side to signal yes.

Within a given culture, each sign eventually becomes a very
strong background component because it embodies the shared
experience through which it was constituted. In direct speech,
we either know each other, or shall know each other to a certain
extent, represented by the cumulative degrees of "I know that you
know that I know that you know," defining a vague notion of
knowledge within a multivalued logic. This makes speaking and
listening an experience in reciprocal understanding, if indeed
the conversation takes place in a non-linear, vague context
impossible to emulate in writing. Dialogues in the wired world,
as well as in transactional situations of extreme speed (stock
market transactions, space research, military actions), belong to
such experiences, impossible to pursue within the limitations of
literacy.

Orality can be assertive (declarative), interrogative, and
imperative (a great deal more so than writing). In the course of
time, and due to very extended experience with language and its
assumptions in oral form, humans acquired an intrinsic
interactive quality. This resulted from a change in their
condition: on the natural level there was the limited
interactivity of action-reaction. In the human realm, the nucleus
action-reaction led to subsequent sequences through which areas
of common interest were defined. The progressive cognitive
realization that speaking to someone involves their
understanding of what we say, as well as the acknowledged
responsibility to explain, whenever this understanding is
incomplete or partial, is also a source of our interactive bent.
Questions take over part of the role played by the more direct
para-linguistic signs and add to the interactive quality of
dialogue, so long as there is a common ground. This common
ground is assumed by everyone who maintains the idea of
literacy-how else to establish it?-as a necessity, but
understood in many different ways: the common ground as embodied
in vocabulary and grammar, in logic, spelling, phonetics,
cultural heritage. Granted that a common language is a necessary
condition for communication, such a common language is not
simultaneously a sufficient condition, or at least not one of
most efficient, for communication. Interactivity, as it evolved
beyond the literate model, is based on the probability, and
indeed necessity, to transcend the common language expectation
and replace it with variable common codes, such as those we
establish in the experience of multimedia or in networked
interactions. Even the ability to interact with our own
representation as an avatar in the Internet world becomes
plausible beyond the constraining borders of literate identity.

Taking literacy for granted

In preceding paragraphs, we examined what is required, in
addition to a common language, for a conversation to make sense.
Scale is another factor. The scale that defines a dialogue is
very different from the scale at which human self-constitution,
language acquisition and use included, take place. Scale by
itself is not enough to define either dialogue or the more
encompassing language-oriented, or language- based, practical
activity through which people ascertain their biological
endowment and their human characteristics. There is sufficient
proof that at the early stage of humankind, individuals could be
involved only in homogeneous tasks. Within such a framework of
quasi-homogeneous activity, dialogues were instances of
cooperation and confirmation, or of conflict. Diversification
made them progressively gain a heuristic dimension-choosing the
useful from among many possibilities, sometimes against the
logical odds of maintaining consistency or achieving
completeness. A generalized language-supported practical
activity involved not only heuristics ("If it seems useful, do
it"), but also logic ("If it is right/If it makes sense"),
through the intermediary of which truth and falsehood take
occupancy of language experiences. Thus an integrative influence
is exercised. This influence increases when orality is
progressively superseded by the limited literacy of writing and
reading.

The quasi-generalized literacy of industrial society reflected
the need for unified and centralized frameworks of practical
experience, within a scale optimally served by the linearity of
language. In our days, people constitute themselves and their
language through experiences more diverse than ever. These
experiences are shorter and relatively partial. They are only an
instant in the more encompassing process they make possible. The
result is social fragmentation, even within the assumed
boundaries of a common language, which nations are supposed to
be, and paradoxically survive their own predicted end. In
reality, this common language ceases to exist, or at least to
function as it used to. What exists are provisional commitments
making up a framework for activities impossible to carry out as
a practical experience defined by literacy. Within each of these
fast-changing commitments, partial languages, of limited duration
and scope, come into existence. Sub-literacies accompany their
lives. Experience as such opens avenues to more orality, under
post-literate conditions-in particular, conditions of increased
efficiency made possible by technology that negates the
pragmatics of literacy. The most favorable case for the
functioning of language-direct verbal communication-becomes a
test case for what it really means to speak the same language,
and not what we assume a common language accomplishes when
written or read by everyone.

Instances of direct verbal communication today (in the family and
community, when visiting foreign countries, at work, shopping,
at church, at a football stadium, answering opinion polls or
marketing inquiries, in social life) are also instances of taking
for granted that others speak our own language. Many researchers
have attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of communication in
these contexts. Their observations are nevertheless not
independent of the assumed premise of literacy as a necessity and
as a shared pragmatic framework. Some recent research on the
cognitive dimension of understanding language does not realize
how deep the understanding goes. One example given is the terse
instruction on a bottle of shampoo: "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." It
is not a matter of an individual's ability to read the
instructions in order to know how to proceed. One does not need
to be literate, moreover, one does not even need to create
language in order to use shampoo, if one is familiar with the
purpose and use of shampoo (i.e., with the act). Indeed, for
most individuals, the word shampoo on a bottle suffices for them
to use it correctly with no written instructions at all. Icons or
hieroglyphics can convey the instructions just as well, even
better, than literacy can. These, by the way, are coming more
into use in our global economy. It is even doubtful that most
individuals read the instructions because they are familiar not
just with the conventions that go into using shampoo, but,
deeper still, the conventions behind the words of the
instructions. Should an adult, even a literate adult, who was
totally unfamiliar with the concept of washing his or her hair
be presented with a bottle of shampoo, the entire experience of
washing the hair with shampoo would have to be demonstrated and
inculcated until it became part of that adult's
self-constitutive repertory. Such analyses of language only
scrape the surface of how humans constitute themselves in
language.

Literacy forces certain assumptions upon us: Literate parents
educate literate children. A sense of community requires that
its members share in the functionality of literacy. Literate
people communicate better beyond the borders of their respective
languages. Literacy maintains religious faith. People can
participate in social life only if they are literate.
Considering such assumptions, we should realize that the abstract
concept of literacy, resulting from the assumption that a common
language automatically means a common experience, only maintains
false hope. Children of literate parents are not necessarily
literate. Chances are that they are already integrated in the
illiterate structures of work and life to the same degree
children of illiterate parents are. This is not a matter of
individual choice, or of parental authority. On the digital
highway, on which a growing number of people define their
coordinates, with the prevalent sign @ taking over any other
identification, communities emerge independent of location.
Participation in such communities is different in nature from
literate congregations maintained by a set of reciprocal
dependencies that involved spelling as much as it involved
accepting authority or working according to industrial
production cycles.

In all of today's communication, not only is the literate
component no longer dominant, it is undergoing the steepest
percentile fall in comparison to any other form of
communication. In this framework, states and bureaucracies are
putting up a good fight for their own survival. But the methods
and means of literacy on which their entire
activity-regulation, control, self-preservation-is based have
many times over proven inefficient. These statements do not
remove the need to deal with how people understand writing, to
which literacy is more closely connected than it is to speech. To
discover what makes the task of understanding language more
difficult as language frees itself from the constraints of
literacy within the new pragmatic framework is yet another goal
we pursue.

To understand understanding

Incipient writing was pictorial. This was an advantage in that it
regarded the world directly, immediately perceived and shared,
and a disadvantage in that it did not support more than a
potential generality of expression. It maintained notation very
close to things, not to speech. Image-dominated language came
along with a simplified frame of space and time reference.
Things were presented as close or far apart, as successive
events or as distant, interrupted events. Anyone with a minimal
visual culture can read Chinese or Japanese ideograms, i.e., see
mountain, sky, or bird in the writing. But this is not reading
the language; it is reading the natural world from which the
notation was extracted, reconstituting the reference based on the
iconic convention.

Alphabetic writing annihilates this frame of experience based on
resemblance. Unless time is specifically given, or coordinates
in space intentionally expressed, time and space tend to be
assimilated in the text, and more deeply in the grammar. It is a
different communication, mediated by abstract entities whose
relation to experience is, in turn, the result of numerous
substitutions, the record of which is not at the disposal of the
reader. Between tell in English and the root tal (or dal) in
proto-language (with the literal meaning of tongue), there is a
whole experiential sequence available only implicitly in the
language. In the nostratic phylum (root of many languages, the
Indo- European among them), luba stands for thirst; the English
love and the German Liebe seem to derive from it, although when
we think of love we do not associate it with the physical
experience of thirst.

Clues in written language are clues to language first of all, and
only afterwards clues to human experience. Accordingly, reading
a text requires an elaborate cognitive reconstruction of the
experience expressed, and probably a never-ending questioning of
the appropriateness of its understanding. When a text is read,
there is nobody to be questioned, nobody to actively understand
the understanding, to challenge it. The author exists in the
text, as a projection, to the extent that the author exists in
the manufactured objects we buy in order to use (glasses to
drink water, chairs to sit on), or in whose production we
participate in some way. After all, each text is a reality on
paper, or on other means of storage and display. Clues can be
derived from names of writers and from historic knowledge. What
cannot be derived is the reciprocal exchange which goes on
during conversation, the cooperative effort under circumstances
of co- presence.

Regardless of the degree of complexity, the interactive component
of orality cannot be maintained in writing. This points to an
intrinsic limitation relevant to our attempt to find out why
literacy does not satisfy expectations characteristic of
practical experiences requiring interactivity. The metaphoric
use of interactivity, as it is practiced to express an animistic
attitude according to which, for instance, the text is alive, and
we interact with it in reading, interpreting, and understanding
it, addresses a different issue. Difficulties in language
understanding can be overcome, but not in the mechanical effort
of improving language skills by learning 50 more words or
studying a chapter in grammar. Rather, one has to build
background knowledge through extending the experience
(practical, emotional, theoretical, etc.) on which the knowledge
to be shared relies.

But once we proceed in this direction, we step out from the
unifying framework of literacy, within which the diversity of
experiences is reduced to the experience of writing, reading,
and speaking. When this reduction is no longer possible-as we
experience more and more under the new conditions of
existence-understanding language becomes more and more
difficult. At the same time, the result of understanding becomes
less and less significant for our self-constitution in human
experiences. If no other example comes to mind, the reader
should reflect upon the many volumes that accompany the software
you've bought in recent years. Their language is kept simple,
but they are still difficult to comprehend. Once comprehended,
the pay-off is slim. This is why the illiterate strategy of
integrating on-line the instructions one needs to work with
software is replacing literate documentation. These instructions
can be reduced to graphic representations or simple animations.
The framework is specialization, for instance, in providing
instructions in a form adequate to the task. Within specialized
experience, even writing and reading are subject to
specialization. Literacy turns into yet another distinct form of
human praxis instead of remaining its common denominator.

Writing, in this context, makes it clear that language is not
enough for understanding a text. Under our own scrutiny, writing
becomes a form of praxis in itself, contributing to the general
fragmentation of society, not to its unification. This happens
insofar as specialized writing becomes part of the general trend
towards specialization and generates specialized reading. Some
explanation is necessary.

Even when writers strive to adapt their language to a specific
readership, the result is only partially successful, precisely
because the experiences constituted in writing are disjoint.
Indeed, the practical experience to be shared, and the subsequent
practical experience of writing are different, pertinent to
domains not reducible to each other. Sometimes the writer falls
captive to the language (that very specialized subset of
language adapted to a specific field of knowledge) and mimics
natural discourse by observing grammar and rhetoric devices.
Other times, the writer translates, or explains, as in popular
magazines on physics, genetics, arts, psychology. Within this
type of interpretive discourse either details are left out, or
more details are added, with the intention of broadening the
common base. Expressive devices, from simple comparisons (which
should bridge different backgrounds) to metaphors, expose
readers to a new level of experiences. Even if readers know what
comparisons are and how metaphors work, they still cannot
compensate for the unshared part of experience, with whose help
a text makes sense. A legal brief, a military text, an investment
analysis, the evaluation of a computer program are examples in
this sense. The language they are written in looks like English.
But they refer to experiences that a lawyer, or military
officer, or broker, or computer programmer is likely to be
familiar with.

Writers, speakers, readers, and listeners are aware of the
adjustments required to comprehend these and many other types of
documents. While a direct conversation, for which time spent
with others is required, can be a frame for adjustment, a printed
page is definitely less so. The reader can, at best, transmit a
reaction in writing, or write to request supplementary
explanation, that is, to maintain the spirit of conversation. The
experience of writing and reading is becoming less a general
experience or cultural identifier, and more a specialized
activity. Writing can be read by machines. In order to serve the
blind, such machines read instructions, newspaper articles, and
captions accompanying video images. The synthetic voice, as much
as a synthetic eye or nose, a syntactic touch-sensitive device,
or taste translator, operates in a realm devoid of the life that
went into the text (image, odor, texture, taste) and which was
supposed to be contributed by the reader (viewer, smeller,
toucher, taster).

Literacy, projected as a universal and permanent medium for
expression, communication, and signification, nourished a
certain romanticism or democracy of art, politics, and science.
It embodied an axiomatic system: since everybody should speak,
write, and read, everybody can and should speak, write, and read;
everybody can and should appreciate poetry, participate in
political life, understand science. This was indeed relatively
true when poetry, politics, and science were, to a certain
degree, direct forms of human praxis with levels of efficiency
appropriate to the scale of human activity constituted in
linear, homogeneous practical experiences. Now that the scale
changed, dynamics accelerated, mediation increased, and
non-linearity is accepted, we face a new situation.
Paradoxically, the poet, the speech-writer, and the
science-writer not only fail to address everybody, but they, as
part and result of the mechanism of labor division, also
contribute to the generation of partially literate human beings.
In other words, they contribute to the fragmentation of society,
although they are all devoted (some passionately) to the cause
of its unity. In reaction to claims that literacy carried
through time, a general deconstructionist attitude challenges the
permanency of philosophical tractate, of scientific systems, of
mathematics, political discourse and, probably more than
anything else, of literature. The method applied is coherent:
make evident the mechanisms used to create the illusion of
permanence and truth. Texts thus appear as means to an end that
does not directly count. What results is an account of the
technology of expression, embraced by all who grew skeptical of
the universality of science, politics and literature. When each
sign (independent of the subject) becomes its own reference, and
the experience it embodies is, strictly speaking, that of its
making, the deconstructionist project reaches the climax. Nike's
advertisement is not about sneakers, even less about the
celebrities who wear them. It is a rather hermetic
self-referential experience. Its understanding, however, is based
on the fast-changing experience of revealing one's illiterate
identity.

Words about images

The written, as we know, almost constantly appeared together with
other referential systems, especially images. In this respect, a
question regarding what we understand when we understand
language is whether images can be used as an aid to
understanding texts. Doubtless, pictures (at least some of them)
are, by their cognitive attributes, better bearers of
interpretation clues than are some words or writing devices.
Images, more so than texts, can stand in for the absent writer.
To the extent that they follow conventions of reality, pictures
can help the individual reconstitute, at least partially, the
frame of time and space, or one of the two. However, this
represents only one side of the issue. The other side reveals
that images are not always the best conveyors of information,
and that what we gain by using them comes at a cost in
understanding, clarity, or context dependence.

First of all, what is gained through the abstraction of the words
is almost entirely lost through the concreteness of the image.
The very dense medium of writing stands in sharp contrast to the
diluted medium of images. To download text on the network is
quite different from displaying images. If this were the only
reason, we would be alert to the differences between images and
texts. When the complexity of the image reaches high levels,
decoding the image becomes as tedious as decoding texts, and the
result less precise. All this explains why people try to use a
combination of images and words. It also helps in understanding
strategies for their combination. As a strategy of relating
text and image, redundancy helps in focusing interpretation. The
strategy of complementing helps in broadening the
interpretation. Other strategies, ranging from contrasting texts
and images to paraphrasing texts through images, or substituting
texts for images, or images for text, result in forceful ways of
influencing interpretation by introducing explanatory contexts.
A very large portion of today's culture-from the comic strip to
picture novels and advertisements, to soap operas on the
Internet-is embodied in works using such and similar strategies.

What interests us here is whether images can replace the
experience required to understand a text. If the answer is
affirmative, such images would be almost like the partner in
conversation. As products of human experience, images, just like
language, embody that particular experience. This automatically
makes the problem of understanding images more involved than
just seeing them. But we knew this from written language. Seeing
words or sentences or texts on paper (in script or in print) is
only preliminary to understanding. The naturalness of images
(especially those resembling the physical universe of our
existence) makes access to them sometimes easier than access to
written language. But this access is never automatic, and should
never be taken for granted. In addition, while the written word
does not invite to imitation, images play a more active role,
triggering reactions different from those triggered by words.
The code of language and visual codes are not reducible to each
other; neither is their pragmatic function the same.

Research reports are quasi-unanimous in emphasizing that the
usefulness of pictures in increasing text comprehension seems
not to depend on the mere presence of the image, but on the
specific characteristics of the reader. These make clear the
role played by what was defined as background knowledge, without
which texts, images, and other forms of expression stabilized as
languages make little sense, if any, to their readers, viewers,
or listeners. In order to arrive at such conclusions, researchers
went through real-time measurements of the so-called processing
of texts, in comparison to picture-text processing. The paradigm
employed uses eye movement recordings and comprehension measures
to study picture-text interactions. Pictures helped what the
researchers defined as poor readers. For skilled readers,
pictures were neutral when the information was important. The
presence of pictures interfered with reading when the
information in the text was less important. Researchers also
established that the type of text-expository or narrative-is not
a factor and that pictures can help in recall of text details.
This has been known for at least 300 years, if not longer.
Actors in Shakespeare's time were prompted to recall their lines
through visual cues embodied in the architecture of the theater.
After all was measured and analyzed, the only dependable
conclusion was that the effects of images on comprehension of
written language are not easy to explain. Again, this should not
come as a surprise as long as we use literacy-based quantifiers
to understand the limits of literacy. Whether images are
accidental or forced upon the reader, whether the text is
quasi-linear or very sophisticated (i.e., results from practical
experiences of high complexity), the relation does not seem to
follow any pattern. Such experiments, along with many others
based on a literacy premise, proved unsuitable for discovering
the sources and nature of reading difficulties.

Eye movement and comprehension measures used to study
picture-text interactions only confirmed that today there are
fewer commonalties, even among young students (not to mention
among adults already absorbed in life and work) than at the time
of the emergence of writing and reading. The diversification of
forms of human experience, seen against the background of a
relatively stable language adopted as a standard of culture,
hints at the need to look at this relation as one of the possible
explanations for the data, even for the questions that prompted
the experiments in the first place. These questions have bearing
on the general issue of literacy. Why reading, comprehension,
and recall of written language have become more uncertain in
recent years, despite efforts made by schools, parents,
employers, and governments to improve instruction, remains
unanswered. Regardless of how much we are willing to help the
understanding of a text through the use of images, the necessity
of the text, as an expression of a literate practical
experience, is not enhanced. Conclusions like these are not easy
to draw because we are still conditioned by literacy. Experiences
outside the frame of literacy come much more naturally together
because their necessity is beyond the conditioning of our
rational discourse. This is how I can explain why on the
Internet, the tenor of social and political dialogue is
infinitely more free of prejudice than the information provided
through books, newspapers, or TV. These observations should not
be misconstrued as yet another form of technological
determinism. The emphasis here, as elsewhere in the book, is on
new pragmatic circumstances themselves, not on the means
involved.

The research reported above, as any research we hear about in our
days, was carried out on a sample. A sample, as representative
as it can be, is after all a scaled- down model of society. The
issue critical to literacy being the scale of human practical
existence, scaled-down models are simply not suited for our
attempt to understand language changes when the complexity of
our pragmatic self-constitution increases. We need to consider
language, images, sounds, textures, odors, taste, motion, not to
mention sub-verbal levels, where survival strategies are encoded,
and beliefs and emotions are internalized, as they pertain to
the pragmatic context of our existence. Literacy is not adequate
for satisfactorily encoding the complexity and dynamics of
practical experiences corresponding to the new scale that
humankind has reached. The corresponding expectations of
efficiency are also beyond the potential of literacy-based
productivity. Ill-suited to address the mediated nature of human
experience at this scale, literacy has to be integrated with
other literacies. Its privileged status in our civilization can
no longer be maintained.

Korzybski was probably right in stating that language is a "map
for charting what is happening both inside and outside of our
skins." At the new stage that civilization has reached, it turns
out that none of the maps previously drawn is accurate. If we
really want details essential to the current and future
development of our species, we have to recognize the change in
metrics, i.e., in the scale of the charted entity, as well as in
dynamics. The world is changing because we change, and as a
result we introduce new dimensions in this world.

Even when we notice similarities to some past moment-let us take
orality as an example-they are only apparent and meaningless if
not put in proper context. Technology made talking to each other
at long distances (tele-communication) quite easy, because we
found ways to overcome the constraints resulting from the limited
speed of sound. The most people could do when living on two close
hills was to visit, or to yell, or to signal with fire or
lights. Now we can talk to somebody flying on an airplane, to
people driving or walking, or climbing Mount Everest. Cellular
telephony places us on the map of the world as precisely as the
global positioning system (GPS) deployed on satellites. The
telephone, in its generalized reality as a medium for orality,
defies co- presence and can be accessed virtually from anywhere.
Telephony as a practical experience in modern communication
revived orality under circumstances of highly integrated,
parallel, and distributed forms of human activity on a global
scale. On the digital networks that increasingly represent the
medium of self-constitution, we are goal and destination at the
same time. In one click we are wherever we want to be, and to a
great extent what we want to be or are able to do. With another
click, we are only the instantiation of someone else's interest,
acts, knowledge, or questioning. The use of images belongs to
the same broad framework. So does television, omnipresent and, at
times, seemingly omnipotent. We became connected to the world,
but disconnected from ourselves. As bandwidth available for
interacting through a variety of backchannels expands from
copper wire to new fiberglass data highways, a structure is put
in place that effectively resets our coordinates in the world of
global activity. Defying the laws of physics, we can be in more
than one place at the same time. And we can be more than one
person at the same time. Understanding language under such
circumstances becomes a totally new experience of
self-constitution.

Still, understanding language is understanding those who express
themselves through language, regardless of the medium or the
carrier. Literacy brought to culture the means for effectively
understanding language in a civilization whose scale was well
adapted to the linear nature of writing and reading, and to the
logic of truth embodied in language. However, literacy lacks
heuristic dimensions, is slow, and of limited interactivity. It
rationalizes even the irrational, taking into bureaucratic
custody all there is to our life. Common experience, in a
limited framework characteristic of the beginning of language
notation, is bound to facilitate interpretation and support
conflicting choices. Divergent experiences, many driven by the
search for the useful, the efficient, the mediating, experiences
having less in common among themselves, make language less
adapted to our self-constitution, and thus less easy to
understand. In such a context, literacy can be perceived only as
a phenomenon that makes all things it encomapsses uniform;
therefore literacy is resisted. Far from being only a matter of
skill, literacy is an issue of shared knowledge formed in work
and social life. Changes in the pragmatic framework brought
about the realization that literacy today might be better suited
to bridging various fragmented bodies of knowledge or
experiences, than to actually embodying them. Literacy might
still affect the manner in which we use specialized languages as
tools adapted to the various ways we see the world, the manner in
which we try to change it and report on what happens as a
result. But even under these charitable assumptions, it does not
follow that literacy will, or should, continue to remain the
panacea for all human expression, communication, and
signification.

The Functioning of Language

To function is a verb derived from experiences involving
machines. We expect from machines uniform performance within a
defined domain. In adopting the metaphor of functioning to refer
to language, we should be aware that it entails understandings
originating from human interaction involving sign systems, in
particular those eventually embodied in literacy. The argument
we want to pursue is straightforward: identify language
functions as they are defined through various pragmatic
contexts; compare processes through which these functions are
accomplished; and describe pragmatic circumstances in which a
certain functioning mechanism no longer supports practical
experiences at the efficiency level required by the scale of the
pragmatic framework.

Expression, communication, signification

Traditionally, language functions either are associated with the
workings of the brain or defined in the realm of human
interaction. In the first case, comprehension, speech
production, the ability to read, spell, write, and similar are
investigated. Through non-invasive methods, neuropsychologists
attempt to establish how memory and language functions relate to
the brain. In the second case, the focus is on social and
communicative functions, with an increasing interest in
underlying aspects (often computationally modeled). My approach
is different in that it bases language functions in the
practical experience, i.e., pragmatics, of the species. Language
functions are, in the final analysis, sign processes.

Preceding language, signs functioned based on their ontogenetic
condition. As marks left behind-footprints, blood from an open
wound, teethmarks-signs facilitated associations only to the
extent that individuals directly experienced their coming into
being. Cognitive awareness of such marks led to associations of
patterns, such as action and reaction, cause and effect. Biting
that leaves behind teethmarks is an example. Pointers to
objects-broken branches along a path, obsidian flakes where
stones had been processed, ashes where a fire had burned-and,
even more so, symptoms-strength or weakness-are less immediate,
but still free of intentionality. Imitation brought the
unintentional phase of sign experience to an end. In imitative
signs, which are supposed to resemble whatever they stand for,
the mark is not left, but produced with the express desire to
share.

The function best describing signs that are marks of the
originator is expression. Communication is the function of
bringing individuals together through shared experiences.
Signification corresponds to an experience that has signs as its
object and relies on the symbolic level. It is the function of
endowing signs with the memory of their constitution in
practical experiences. Signification expresses the
self-reflective dimension of signs. Expression and
communication, moreover signification, vary dramatically from
one pragmatic framework to another.

Expressions, as simili of individual characteristics and personal
experience, can be seen as translations of these characteristics
and of the experience through which they come into being. A very
large footprint is a mark associated with a large foot, human or
animal. It is important insofar as it defines, within a limited
scale of experience, a possible outcome essential to the
survival of those involved. Expressions in speech are marked by
co-presence. The functioning of language within orality rested
upon a shared experience of time and space, expressed through
here and now. In writing, expression hides itself in the
physical characteristics of the skill. This is how we come, for
example, to graphology-an exercise in associating patterns of the
marks somebody wrote on paper to psychological characteristics.
Literacy is not concerned with this kind of expression, although
literacy is conducive to it and eventually serves as a medium
for graphology. Rather, literacy stipulates norms and
expectations of correct writing. People adopting them know well
that within the pragmatics based on literacy, the efficiency of
practical experiences of self-constitution is enhanced by uniform
performance. As we search in our days for the fingerprints of
terrorists, we experience the function of expression in almost
the reverse of previous pragmatic contexts. Their
marks-identifiers of parts used to trigger explosions, or of
manufacturers of explosives-are accidental. Terrorists would
prefer to leave none.

The analysis can be repeated for communication and
signification. What they have in common is the progressive
scale: expression for kin, expression for larger groups,
collective expression, forceful expression as the scale of
activity increases and individuals are gradually being negated
in their characteristics. Communication makes the process even
more evident. To bring together members of a family is different
from achieving the togetherness of a tribe, community, city,
province, nation, continent, or globe. But as available
resources do not necessarily keep up with increased
populations, and even less with the growth in need and
expectations, it is critical to integrate cognitive resources in
experiences of self-constitution. Communication, as a function
performed through sign systems, reached through the means of
literacy higher levels than during any previous pragmatic phase.
Another increase in scale will bring even higher expectations of
efficiency and, implicitly, the need for means to meet such
expectations. Only as practical experiences become more complex
and integrate additional cognitive resources do changes-such as
from pre-verbal to verbal sign systems, from orality to writing,
and from writing to literacy, or from literacy to post-
literacy-take place. In other words, once the functioning of
language no longer adequately supports human pragmatics in terms
of achieving the efficiency that corresponds to the actual scale
of that pragmatics, new forms of expression, communication, and
signification become necessary.

These remarks concern our subject, i.e., the transitional nature
of any sign system, and in particular that of orality or that of
literacy, in two ways: 1.

They make us aware of fundamental functions (expression,
communication, signification) and their dependence on pragmatic
contexts. 2.

They point to conditions under which new means and methods
pertinent to effective functioning complement or override those
of transcended pragmatic contexts.

As we have seen, prior to language experiences, people
constituted their identity in a phase of circular and
self-referential reflection. This was followed by a pragmatics
leading to sequential, linear practice of language and language
notation. With writing, and especially with literacy,
sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism became
characteristics of the entire practical experience. Writing was
stamped by these characteristics at its inception, as were other
practical activities. With its unfolding in literacy, it
actively shaped further practical experiences. The potential of
experiences sharing in these characteristics was reached in
productive activities, in social life, in politics, in the arts,
in commerce, in education and in leisure.

The advent of higher-level languages and of means for
visualization, expanding into animation, modeling, and
simulation in our day, entails new changes. Their meaning,
however, will forever escape us if we are not prepared to see
what makes them necessary. Ultimately, this means to return to
human beings and their dynamic unfolding within a broader
genetic script. To make sense of any explanatory models
advanced, here or elsewhere, we need to understand the relation
between cultural structure-in which sign systems, literacy, and
post-literate means are identified-and social structure, which
comprises the interaction of the individuals constituting
society. The premise of this enterprise is as follows: Since not
even the originators of the behaviorist model believed that we
are the source of our behavior (Skinner went on record with this
in an interview shortly before his death), we can look at the
individuals constituting a human community as the locus of human
interactions. Language is only one agent of integration among
many. The shift from the natural to the cultural-with its
climax in literacy-was actually from immediacy, circularity,
discreteness, and the physical realm to indirectness,
sequentiality, linearity, and metaphysics. What we experience in
our time is a change of course, to the civilization of
illiteracy, characterized by msny mediating layers,
configuration, non-linearity, distribution of tasks, and
meta-language. In the process, the functioning of language is as
much subject to change as the human beings constituted in
succeeding practical experiences of a fundamentally new nature.

The idea machine

Functioning of language cannot be expressed in rotations per
second (of a motor) or units of processed raw materials (of a
processing machine). It cannot even be expressed in our new
measurement of bits and bytes and all kinds of flops.
Expressions, opportunities for exchange of information, and
evaluations are the output of language (to keep to the machine
model and terminology). But more important is another output,
definitive of the cognitive aspect of human self-constitution:
thoughts and ideas.

We encounter language as we continuously externalize our
biological and cultural identities in the act of living as human
beings. Attempts within primitive practical experiences to
capture language in some notation eventually freed language from
the individual experience through sharing with the entire group
practicing such notation. Even in the absence of the originator
of whatever the notation conveyed, as long as the experience was
shared, the notation remained viable. Constituted in human
praxis, notation became a reality with an apparent life of its
own. It affected interactions as well as a course of action, to
the degree that notation could describe it. Notation predates
writing, addressing small-scale groups involved in relatively
homogenous practical experiences. As the scale grew and
endeavors required different forms of interaction, the written
evolved from various co-existing notations based on constitutive
experiences with their own characteristics. Together with the
experience of writing, an entire body of linear conventions was
established.

Circumstances that made possible the constitution of ideas and
their understanding deserve attention because they relate to a
form of activity that singles out the human being from the
entire realm of known creatures. Ideas, no matter how complex,
pertain to states of affairs in the world: physical, biological,
or spatial reality embodied in an individual's
self-constitution. They also pertain to the states of mind of
those expressing them. Ideas are symptomatic of human
self-constitution, and thus of the languages people have
developed in their praxis. What we want to find out is whether
there is an intrinsic relation between literacy and the
formation and understanding of ideas. We want to know if ideas
can be constituted and/or understood in forms of expression
other than verbal language, such as in drawings, or in the more
current multimedia.

Humans not only express themselves to (enter into contact with)
one another through their sign systems, but also listen to
themselves, and look at themselves. They are at once originators
(emitters, as the information theory model considers them) and
receivers. In speech, signs succeed themselves in a series of
self-controlled sequences. Synthesis, as the generation of new
expression by assembling what is known in new ways appropriate
to new practical experiences, is continuously controlled by
self-analysis.

Pre-verbal and sub-verbal unarticulated languages (at the signal
level of smell, touch, taste, or language of kinesic or proxemic
type) participate in defining sensations directly, as well as
through rudimentary specification of context. The relationship of
articulated language and unarticulated sub-verbal languages is
demonstrated at the level of predominantly natural activities as
well as at the level of predominantly socio- cultural activities.
One example: Under the pragmatic conditions leading to language,
olfaction played a role comparable to sight and hearing,
effectively controlling taste. This changed as experience
mediated through language replaced direct experience. Within the
pragmatics of higher efficiency associated with literacy, the
sense of smell, for example, ended up being done away with. The
decrease of the weight of biological communication, in this case
of chemo-physical nature, is paralleled by the increase of
importance of the immaterial, not substance-bound, communication.
Granted, there are no ideas, in the true definition of the word,
that can be expressed in smell. But practical experiences
involving the olfactory and the gustatory, as well as other
senses, affect areas of human practical experiences beyond
literacy. Identification of kin, awareness of reproduction
cycles, and alarm can all be simulated in language, which slowly
assumed or substituted some of the functions of natural
languages.

Writing and the expression of ideas

When the sign of speech became a sign of language (alphabets,
words, sentences), the process described above deepened. The
concrete (written, stabilized) sign participated in capturing
generality via the abstraction of lines, shapes, intersections,
in wax, in clay, on parchment, or on another medium. The
succession of individual signs (letters, words) was
metamorphosed into the sign of the general. For centuries,
writing was only a container for speech, not operational
language. This observation does not contradict the still
controversial Saphir-Whorf hypothesis that language influences
thinking. Rather, the observation makes clearer the fact that
active influence did not originate from language itself, but is
a result of succeeding practical experiences. Had a recorder of
spoken language, let us imagine, been invented before writing, a
need or use for literacy would have taken very different forms.

Humans did not dispose of a system of signs as a person disposes
of a machine or of elements to be assembled. They were their own
scripts, always re-constituting in notation an experience they
had or might have had. In other words, the functioning of
languages is essentially a record of the functioning of human
beings. The Hebrew alphabet started as shorthand notation
reduced to consonants by scribes who retained only the root of
the word before recording its marks on parchment. Due to the
small scale and shared pragmatics of readers, this shorthand
sufficed. In Mayan hieroglyphics, and in Mesopotamian
ideographs, as well as in other known forms of notation, the
intention was the same: to give clues so that another person
could give life to the language, could resuscitate it. Increased
scale and consequently less homogenous practical experiences
forced the Hebrew scribes to add diacritical marks indicating
vowels. The written language of the Sumerians and Mesopotamians
also changed as the pragmatic framework changed.

That writing is an experience of self-constitution, reflected in
the structure of ideas, might not sound convincing enough unless
the biological component is at least brought up. Derrick de
Kerkhove noticed that all languages written from right to left
use only consonants. The cognitive reading mechanism involved in
deciphering them differs from that of languages using vowels,
too, and written from left to right. Once the Greeks took over
the initially consonantal alphabet of the Phoenicians and
Hebrews, they added vowels and changed the direction of
writing-at the beginning using the Bustrophedon (how the oxen
plow), i.e., both directions. Afterwards, the direction
corresponding to a cognitive structure associated with
sequentiality was adopted. Consequently, the functioning of the
Greek language changed as well. Ideas resulting in the context
of pre-Socratic and Socratic dialogue have a more pronounced
deductive, speculative nuance than those expressed in the
analytic discourse of written Greek philosophy.

One can further this thought by noticing the so-called bias
against the left-hand that is deeply rooted in many languages
and the beliefs they express. It seems that the right (hand and
direction) is favored in ways ranging from calling things right,
or calling servants of justice Herr Richter (Master Right, the
German form of address for a judge), or favoring things done
with the right hand, on the right side, etc. The very idea of
what is right, what is just, human rights, originates from this
preference. The left hand is associated, in a pragmatic and
cognitive mode dominated by the right, with weakness,
incompetence, even sin. (In the New Testament, sinners are told
to go to the left side of God after judgment.) While the
implicit symbolism is worth more than this passing remark, it is
worthwhile noticing that in our days, the domination of the right
in writing and in literacy expectations is coming to an end. The
efficiency of a right-biased praxis is not high enough to
satisfy expectations peculiar to globality. The process is part
of the broader experience through which literacy itself is
replaced by the many partial literacies defining the
civilization of illiteracy.

Since ideas come into being in the experience of language, their
dissemination and validation, critical to the efficiency of
human effort at any given scale, depends on the portability of
the medium in which they are expressed. Through writing, the
portability of language was no longer reducible to the mobility
of those speaking it. Ideas expressed in writing could be tested
outside the context in which they originated. This associated
the function of dissemination through language to the function of
validation in the pragmatic context. A tablet, a papyrus scroll,
a codex, a book, or a digital simile have in common their
condition as a record resulting from practical experiences; but
it is not what they have in common that explains their
efficiency. Portability is telling of pragmatic requirements so
different that nothing before the digital record could be as
pervasive and globally present. Except for a password, we need
nothing with us in order to access knowledge distributed today
through networks. We are freeing ourselves from space and time
coordinates. Literacy cannot function within such broad
parameters. The domain of alternatives constitutes the
civilization of illiteracy.

Future and past

Do we need to be literate in order to deal with the future?
Reciprocally: Is history, as many believe, the offspring of
writing? Moreover, is it a prerequisite for understanding the
present? These are questions that resonate loudly in today's
political discourse and in the beliefs of very many people. Let
us start with the future, as the question raises the issue of
what it takes to deal with it.

Pre-sensing (premonition) is the natural form of diffuse
perception of time. This perception can be immediate or less
immediate. It is extended not from now to what was (stored in
one's memory or not), but to what might be (a sign of danger in
the natural environment, for instance). The indexical signs
participating in these representations are footprints, feathers,
bloodstains. Speech makes premonition and feeling explicit, but
not wholly so. It transforms accumulated signs (past) into the
language of the possible (future). In fact, in the practical
experience of re-constituting the past we realize that each past
was once a future.

Still, as we want to establish some understanding of the
unfolding of the present into the future, we come to realize
that while possibilities expand, the future becomes less and
less determined in its details. Try to tell this to the champions
of technology who predicted the paperless office and who now
predict the networked world. Alternatively, tell this to those
who still constitute their identity in literacy-dependent
practical experiences: politicians, bureaucrats and educators.
Neither of the two categories mentioned seems to understand the
relation between language and the future expressed in it, or in
any sign system, as plans, prophecies, or anticipations.

An idea is always representative of the practical experience and
of the cognitive effort to transcend immediate affection.
Monoarticulated speech (signaling), as well as ideographic
writing, result from experiences involving the
pragmatic-affective level of existence. One cries or shouts, one
captures resemblance in an image when choices are made and
feelings evoked. There are no ideas here, as there is very little
that reaches beyond the immediate. Ideas extend from experiences
involving the pragmatic- rational level. Speech can serve as the
medium for making plans explicit. Drawings, diagrams, models,
and simulations can be described through what we say. Indeed,
before writing the future, human beings expressed it as speech,
undoubtedly in conjunction with other signs: body movement,
objects known to relate to danger and thus to fear, or
successful actions associated with satisfaction. When finally set
in clay tablets or papyrus, the language regarding the future
acquired a different status-it no longer vanished, as the sounds
or gestures used before. Writing accompanies action, and even
lasts past the experience. This permanency gave the written word
an aura that sounds, gestures, even artifacts, could not
achieve. Even repetition, a major structural characteristic of
rituals, could not project the same expectation of permanency as
writing. Probably this is what prompted Gordon Childe to remark
that "The immortalization of a word in writing must have seemed
a supernatural process; it was surely magical that a man long
vanished from the land of the living could still speak from a
clay tablet or a papyrus roll."

Within the context of religion, the aura shifts from the
mytho-magical- transmitted clues for successful action-to the
mystical-the source of the successful clues is a higher
authority. Even social organization, which became necessary when
the scale of humankind changed, was not very effective in the
absence of documents with a prescriptive function. Recognized in
ancient Chinese society, this practical need was expressed in
its first documents, as it was in Hindu civilization, in the
Hebrew and the Greek, and by the civilizations to follow, many
taking an obvious cue from the Roman Empire.

Language use for prescriptive purposes does not necessitate or
even imply literacy. This holds true as much for the past as for
the present. There was a time, corresponding to increased
mobility of people, when only those foreign to a land were
supposed to learn how to write and read. The requirement was
pragmatic: in order to get used to the customs by which the
native population lived, they had to gain access to their
expression in language. Nevertheless, once promises are made-a
promise relates structurally to the future-the record becomes
more and more written, although quite often sealed by the oral,
as we know from oath formulae and from oath gestures that
survived even in our days. In all these, linear relations of
cause-and-effect were preserved and projected as the measure,
i.e. rationality, for the future.

In contemporary society, the language characteristic of the past
is used as a decorum. Global scale and social complexity are no
longer efficiently served by linear relations. Subsequently,
means for formulating ideas regarding the future make literacy
not only one of the many languages of the time to come, but
probably an obstacle in the attempt to more efficiently
articulate ideas for the future. Keep in mind that almost all
people dedicated to the study of the future work on computational
models. The outcome of their effort is shorter and shorter on
text, which is replaced with dynamic models, always global in
nature. Linearity is effectively supplanted by non-linear
descriptions of the many interlocking factors at work. Moreover,
self-configuration, parallelism, and distributive strategies are
brought to expression in simulations of the future.

As far as history is concerned, it is, whether we like it or not,
the offspring of writing. Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders state
bluntly: "The historian's house is on the island of writing....
Where no words are left behind, the historian finds no
foundations for his reconstructions." Indeed, history results
from concern with records that are universally accessible, hence
within the universe of those sharing in literacy. We never know
whether a grammar is a summary of the history of a language, or
its program for the future. Grammars appear in various contexts
because people recognize the need to verify the voices within a
language. Histories appear also, motivated by the same stimulus,
not so much to do justice to some army, general, king or party,
but to maintain coherent records, make them speak in one and
only one voice, and probably link the records to recreate the
continuum from which they emerge.

While the future and the self-constitution of the human being in
new pragmatic contexts are directly related, the past is
connected to human practical experiences in indirect ways. The
unifying element of the various perspectives of the future is in
the new experience. In the absence of such a unifying
perspective, writing history becomes an end in itself,
notwithstanding the power exercised by examples. From the
beginning of the Middle Ages, the written record and the
analytic power of language sufficed for constituting history and
shaping historic experience. But once the methods of historic
research diversified, probably as much as the pragmatics of human
existence did, new perspectives were introduced. Some of these
have practical implications: What were the plants used in
primitive societies? How was water supply handled? How were the
dead disposed of? Other perspectives had ideological, political,
or cultural ramifications. In each of these pragmatically
determined instances, history started escaping the prison of
literacy.

Linguistic archaeology, anthropological and especially
paleoanthropological history, computational history, are only
some of the post-literate forms of practical experiences
constituting a new domain of history. This domain is
characterized by the use of non-traditional tools, such as
genetics, electronic microscopy, computational simulation,
artificial life modeling, and inferences supported by artificial
intelligence. Memetics, or the life of ideas and awareness of
them, pertains no less to the past than to the present and
future. It sprang from genetics and bears the mark of an implicit
Darwinian mechanism. Its focus on ideas made it the catch phrase
of a generation feeling dangerously severed from its relation to
history, and no less endangered by a future falling too fast
upon this generation. Technological extensions of memetics (the
so-called memetic engineering) testify to expectations of
efficiency which history of the literate age never seemed to
care about or even to acknowledge.

Based on the awareness thus gained, we would have to agree that
the relative dissolution of literacy and the associated ideals
of universality, permanency, hierarchy, and determinism, as well
as the emergence of literacies, with the resulting attitudes of
parochialness, transitoriness, decentralization, and
indeterminacy are paralleled by the dissolution of history and
the emergence of specialized histories. Hypertext replaces
sequential text, and thus a universe of connections is
established. The new links among carefully defined fields in the
historic record point to a reality that escapes the story (in
history), but are relevant to the present. The specialized
historian reports not so much about the past, but about
particular aspects of human self-constitution from the past that
are significant in the new frame of current experience. It
sometimes seems that we reinvent the past in patches, only to
accommodate the present pragmatics and to enforce awareness of
the present. The immanent sequentiality and linearity of the
pragmatic framework within which languages emerged and which
made, at a later juncture, literacy and history necessary, is
replaced by non-sequentiality and non-linear relations better
adapted to the scale of humankind's existence today. They are
also better adapted to the complexity of the practical process
of humankind's continuous self-constitution. In addition,
primitive, deterministic inferences are debunked, and a better
image of complexity, as it pertains to the living subject,
becomes available.

As an entry in a database (huge by all means), the past sheds its
romantic aura, only to align itself with the present and the
future. The illiterate attitude, reflected, for instance, in the
ignorance of the story of the past, results not from lack of
writing and reading skills. It is not caused by bad history
teachers or books, as some claim. Decisive is the fact that our
pragmatic framework, i.e. our new practical experiences of
self-constitution, is disconnected from the experiences of the
past.

Knowing and understanding

Probably one of the most important aspects of current pragmatics
is the connection between knowing and understanding. We are
involved in many activities without really understanding how
they take place. Our e-mail reaches us as it reaches those to
whom we send messages, even though most people have no idea how.
The postal system is easier to understand. We know what happens:
letters are delivered to the post office, sorted, and sent to
their destinations by bus, train, plane, or boat. Determining
the paths of an e-mail message is trivial for a machine, but
almost impossible for a human being. As the complexity of an
endeavor increases, chances that individuals constituting
themselves in the activity know how everything works and
understand the various mechanisms involved decrease. Still, the
efficiency of the experience is not diminished. Moreover, it
seems that knowledge and understanding do not necessarily affect
efficiency.

This statement is valid for an increasing number of practical
experiences in the pragmatics of the civilization of
illiteracy-not for all of them. We can conceive of complex
diagnostic machines; but there is something in the practical
experience of medicine, for example, that makes one physician
better than another. We can automate a great deal of other
activities-accounting, tax preparation, design, architecture-but
there is something implicit in the activity that will qualify a
certain individual's performance as above and beyond our most
advanced science and technology. There are managers who know
close to nothing about what their company produces but who
understand market mechanisms to such an extent that they end up
winners regardless of whether they head a bank, a
cracker-producing factory, or a giant computer company. These
managers constitute themselves within the experience of language-
the language of the market more than the language of the product.
Therefore, it is useful to examine the evolution of knowledge
and understanding within succeeding pragmatic frameworks, and
the role language as a mediating element in each of these
frameworks.

The sign of language represents the contradictory unity of the
phonetic and semantic units. Within a limited scale of
experience, literacy meant to know what is behind the written
word, to be able to resuscitate it, and to even give the word new
life. As the scale increases, literacy means to take for granted
what is behind the written word. This implies that dictionaries,
including personal dictionaries, as they are formed in
constituting our language, are congruent. Learning language is
not reducible to the memorization of expressions. The only way
to learn is to live the language. With knowledge acquired and
expressed in language comes understanding.

Humans are not born free of experience. Important parts of it are
passed along in the biological endowment. Others are transmitted
through ever new human interactions, including those of
reciprocal understanding. Neither are humans born free of the
evolutionary cycle of the species. The relative decline of the
olfactory in humans was mentioned some pages ago. With the
relative loss of sensory experience, knowledge corresponding to
the respective sensorial perception diminishes. Linguistic
performance is the result of living and practicing language, of
existence as language. Relating oneself to the world in language
experience is a condition for knowing and understanding it. The
language of the natural surrounding world is not verbal, but it
is articulated at the level of the elementary sensations
(Merleau-Ponty's participative perception) that the world
occasions, when human beings are engaged in the practical
attempt to constitute themselves, or instance, by trying to
change or to master their world. They perceive this world, after
the experience, as stabilized meanings: clouds offer the hope of
rain; thunder can produce fire; running deer are probably pursued
by predators; eggs in a nest testify to birds. The complexity of
the effort to master the world surrounding us increases over
time. Tasks originating in the context leading to literacy are
of a different degree of complexity than those faced in
industrial society and than those we assume today.

Between the senses and speech-hence between nonverbal and verbal
languages-numerous influences play a role. Words obviously have a
cognitive condition different from perceptions and are processed
differently. Speech adds intellectual information to the
sensorial information, mainly in the form of associations,
capable of reflecting the present and the absent. Interestingly
enough, we do not know everything that we understand; and we do
not understand everything that we know. For instance, we might
know that in non-Euclidean geometries, parallels meet. Or that
water, a liquid, is made up of oxygen and hydrogen, two gases. Or
that the use of drugs can lead to addiction. Nevertheless, we do
not necessarily understand how and why and when.

Within the civilization of literacy the expectation is that once
we know how to write something, we automatically know and
understand it. And if by some chance the knowledge is
incomplete, inconsistent, or not maintained, if it loses its
integrity through some corruption, it can be resuscitated
through reading or can be made consistent by comparing it to
knowledge accumulated by others, and eventually redeemed. As
writing has failed us repeatedly within practical experiences
that transcend its characteristics and necessity, we have
learned that the relative stability of the written is a blessing
in disguise. Compared to the variability of the speech, it is
more stable. But this stability turns out to be a shortcoming,
exactly because knowledge and understanding are context
dependent. Within relatively stable contexts this shortcoming is
noticed only at rare intervals. But with the expectation of
higher efficiency, cycles of human activity get shorter.
Increased intensity, the variability of structures of
interaction, the distributed nature of practical involvement,
all require variable frames of reference for knowledge and
understanding. As a result of these pragmatic characteristics, we
witnessed progressive use of language in equivocal and ambiguous
ways. Acceptable, and even adequate, in the practical experience
of poetry, drama and fiction, of disputable relevance in
political and diplomatic usage, ambiguity affects the literate
formulation of ideas and plans pertinent to moral values,
political programs, or scientific and technological purposes.

The same pragmatic characteristics mentioned above make necessary
the integration of means other than language and its literate
functioning in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge.
This addresses concerns raised in the opening lines of this
section. Fast-changing knowledge can be acquired through means
adapted to its dynamics. As these means, such as interactive
multimedia, virtual reality programs, and genetic computation,
change, the experience of accessing knowledge becomes, in
addition, one of understanding the transitory means involved in
storing and presenting it. Many practical experiences are based
on knowledge that no other means, literacy- based means included,
could effectively make available. From advanced brain surgery at
neuronal levels to the deployment of vast networks, which
support not only e-mail but also many other meaningful human
interactions-from space exploration to memetic
engineering-focused understanding and a whole new gamut of highly
efficient practical experiences, involving knowledge never
before available, make up the pragmatic framework of the
civilization of illiteracy.

Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous

At least 700 artificial languages are on record. Behind each of
these there is a practical experience in respect to which
natural language functions in a less than desirable manner.
There is a language on record that addresses
left-hand/right-hand biases. There is one, authored by S. H.
Elgin, in which gender biases are reversed (Láadan). And there
is Inda, a language constructed like a work of art. There are
exotic languages written for certain fictional worlds: J.R.R.
Tolkien's Elvish, or the language of the Klingons of Star Trek
fame, or Anthony Burgess's Nadsat, the language of the yobbs in
A Clockwork Orange. And there are scientifically oriented
attempts to structure a language: James Cooke Brown invented
Loglan to be a logic language. Sotos Ochado (almost 100 years
before Brown) invented a language based on the classifications
of science. Some artificial languages of the past correspond to
obvious pragmatic functions. Ars Magna, designed by Ramon Llul
(celebrated in history books dedicated to precursors of the
digital age), was to be a language of missionaries. Lingua
Ignota, attributed to the legendary Abbess Hildegard, is a
language of practical monastic experiences extended well beyond
the performance of the liturgy.

When we acknowledge these languages we implicitly acknowledge
attempts to improve the performance of language functions. In
some cases, the effort is driven by the goal of transcending
barriers among languages; in others, of getting a better
description of the world, with the implicit hope that this would
facilitate mastery of it. Awareness of the fact that language is
not a neutral means of expression, communication, and
signification, but comes loaded with all the characteristics of
our practical endeavors, prejudices included, motivated attempts
to generate languages reflecting an improved view of the world.
Regardless of the intention, and especially of the success they
had, such languages allow us a closer look at their cognitive
condition, and hence at their contribution to increases in the
efficiency of human practical activities.

Increased expressive power, as in the artificial languages
invented by Tolkien and Burgess, or in the language of the
Klingons, is an objective relatively easy to comprehend.
Propagated by means of literacy and within the literate
experience, such languages are accepted primarily as artistic
conventions. Precision is the last quality they aim for;
expressive richness is their goal. These are languages of
sublime ambiguity. Those seeking precision will find it in
Loglan, or better yet in the languages of computer programming.
Disseminated by means contradicting and transcending the
assumptions of literacy, and within a pragmatics requiring means
of higher efficiency, programming languages, from Cobol and
Fortran to C, C++, Lisp, or Java, are accepted for their
functionality. They are not for poetry writing, as the family of
expressive artificial languages are not for driving a computer
or its peripherals. These are languages of never-failing
univocality. With such languages, we can control the function,
and even the logic of the language. These languages are
conceived in a modular fashion and can be designed to optimally
serve the task at hand. Among the functions pursued are
provability, optimization, and precision. Among the logics that
can be used are classical propositonal logic, intuitionistic
propositional logic, modal logic, temporal logic, and others.

Reflecting human obsession with a universal language, some
artificial constructs advance hypotheses regarding the nature of
universality. Dedicated, like many before him, to the idea of a
universal language, François Sondre (1827) invented a language
based on the assumption that music comes the closest to
transcending boundaries among various groups of people. Imagine
a theory expressed as a melody, communication accomplished by
music, or the music of the law and law enforcement. There is in
such a language enough room for expression and precision, but
almost no connection to the pragmatic dimension of human
self-constitution. If time is, as we know, encoded in music, the
experience of space is only indirectly present. Accordingly,
its functioning might address the universality of harmony and
rhythm, but not aspects of pragmatics which are of a different
nature.

A category of so-called controlled languages is also
establishing itself. A controlled language is a subset
(constrained in its vocabulary, grammar, and style) of a
natural language adapted to a certain activity. Artificial
languages are products inspired and motivated by the functioning
of our so-called natural language. Their authors wanted to fix
something, or at least improve performance of the language
machine in some respect. In order to understand the meaning of
their effort, we should look into how language relates the
people constituted in the language to the world in which they
live. Let's start with the evolution of the word and its relation
to the expression of thoughts and ideas, that is, from the
univocal (one-to-one relation to what is expressed) to the
ambiguous (one-to-many relation).

Systems of univocal signs participate in the production of ideas
only to a small degree. As an outgrowth of signals, initial
signs are univocal. Feathers are definitely not from fish or
mammals; blood stains are from wounds; four-legged animals leave
different marks than biped humans. Polysemy (more than one
meaning assignable to the sign) is a gradual acquisition and
reflects the principle of retroaction of meaning on the carrier:
words, drawings, sounds, etc. A drawing of an animal points to
what is depicted, or to things associated with the animal: the
softness of fur, savage behavior, meat, etc.

Philosophy and literature (and the arts, in general) became
possible only at a certain level of language development brought
about by the practical experience of society confronted with new
tasks related to its survival and further evolution. The
philosopher, for example, resorts to common speech (verbal
language) but uses it in an uncommon way: metasemically,
metaphorically, metaphysically. Ancient philosophy, important
here for its testimony regarding language and literacy, is still
so metaphoric that it can be read as literature, and actually
was enjoyed as such. Modern philosophy (post-Heidegger) shows
how relations (which it points out and dwells upon) have
absorbed the related. As a formalized argumentation, freed of
restrictions characteristic of literacy, but also so much less
expressive than the philosophy of the written word and the
endless interpretations it makes possible, philosophy generates
its own motivations and justifications. Its practical
consequences, within a pragmatics based on different forms of
semiotic functioning than those of literacy, diminish
constantly.

The distance between the verbal and the significance of the idea
is itself a parameter of the evolution from nature to culture.
Words such as space, time, matter, motion, become possible only
after experience in writing. But once written, there is nothing
left of the direct, probably intuitive, human experience of space
and time, of experience with matter in its various concrete
forms, or of the experience of motion (of the human body or
other bodies, some flying, some swimming, running, falling).
Visual representations-other forms of writing-are closer to what
they report about: the Cartesian coordinates for space, the
clock for a cyclical perception of time, etc. They express
particular instances of relations in space or time, or
particular aspects of matter or motion.

The word is arbitrary in relation to the idea it embodies. The
idea itself, getting its life in instances of activity, is
knowledge practically revealed in the order of nature or
thought. In expressing the idea, rational rigor and
expressiveness collide. Synthesizing ideas is an instance of the
self-constitution of the human being. Ideas express the implicit
will of the human being to externalize them (what Marcuse called
"the imperative quality" of thought). Once written, words not
only defy the ephemerality of the sounds of speech, but also
enter the realm of potentially conflicting interpretations.
These interpretations result from the conversion of the way we
use words in different pragmatic contexts.

To be literate means to be in control of language, but it also
means acceptance and awareness of being hostage to the
experiences of the past in which its rules were shaped. When
spelling, for instance, is disassociated from the origin of the
word, a totally arbitrary new realm of language is established,
one in which transitory conventions replace permanency (or the
illusion of permanency), and the appearance of super-temporality
of ideas is questioned. Each idea is the result of choices in a
certain paradigm of existence. Its concrete determination, i.e.,
realization as meaning, comes through its insertion in a
pragmatic context. When the context changes, the idea might be
confirmed, contradicted (it becomes equivocal), or open to many
interpretations (it becomes ambiguous). To give an example, the
idea of democracy went through all these stages from its early
embodiment in Greek society to its liberal application, and even
self-negation, in the civilization of illiteracy. It means one
thing- the power of people-but in different contexts, depending
on how people was defined and how power was exercised. It means
so many things in its new contexts that some people really
wonder if it actually means anything at all anymore.

Literacy made communication of ideas possible within a scale of
humankind well served by linear relations and in search of
proportional growth. But when ideas come to expression in a
faster rhythm, and turn in shorter cycles from the univocal to
the ambiguous stage, the medium of literacy no longer does
justice either to their practical function or to the dynamics of
an individual's continuous self-constitution. Moreover, it seems
that ideas themselves, as forms of human projection, are less
necessary under the new projection of pragmatic circumstances we
examine. What once seemed almost as the human's highest
contribution impacts today's society less and less. We live in a
world dominated by methods and products, within which previous
ideas have, so it seems, cultural significance, at most.
Knowledge is reduced to information; understanding is only
operational. Artificial languages, which keep multiplying, are
more and more geared towards methods and products. In the
interconnected world of digitally disseminated information, we
do not need Esperanto, but rather languages that unify the
increasing variety of machines and programs we use in our new
experiences on the World Wide Web. Efficiency in this world
refers to transactions which do not necessarily involve human
beings. Independent agents, active in business transactions of
what emerges as the Netconomy, act towards maximizing outcome.
Such agents are endowed with rules of reproduction, movement,
fair trade, and can even be culturally identified. Even so, the
Netconomy is more a promise than a reality. The functioning of
such agents allows us to see how the metaphor of language
functioning reverts to its literal meaning in the civilization
of illiteracy.

Making thoughts visible

At a minimum, the object for which the written sign-the word,
sentence, or text-stands is the sign of speech. But writing came
a relatively long way before reaching this condition. In
prelinguistic forms, graphic representation had its object in
reality-the re-presentation of the absent. What is present need
not be represented. The direction impressed on visual
representation is from past to present. What must be retained is
the originating tendency of distancing in respect to the present
and the direct, what I called the alienation of immediacy.
Initial representations, part of a rather primitive repertory,
have only an expressive function. They retain information about
the absent that is not seen (or heard, felt, smelled) for future
relationships between human beings and their environment. The
image belongs to nature. That which is communicated is the way
of seeing or perceiving it, not what is actually seen. The
execution of the written sign is not its realization as
information, as is the case with pictographic representations,
some leading to the making of things (tools, artifacts). What
matters is not how something is written, but what it means. A
relatively small number of signs-the alphabet, punctuation and
diacritical marks-participate in the infinite competence of
writing.

No matter how we conceive of human thought, its stabilization
comes about with that of writing. The present captured in
writing loses its impact of immediate action. No written word
has ever reached the surface without being uttered and heard,
that is, without being sensed. The possibility of meaning
(intended, assigned) stems from the establishment of language
within human praxis. It is not accidental (cf. Leroi-Gourhan)
that spatial establishment (in village-type settlements) and the
establishment of language in writing (also spatial in nature)
are synchronous. But here a third component, the language of
drawings, no matter how primitive, helping in the making of
things related to shelter and to work, needs to be acknowledged,
too.

This is the broader context leading to the great moment of Greek
philosophy in the temporal context of alphabetization, and the
cultural context of all kinds of forms of craftsmanship,
architecture probably in the lead. Socrates, as the philosopher
of thinking and discovering truth through dialogue, defended
oral culture. Or at least that is what Plato wanted us to
believe when he mentioned Socrates' opposition to writing. The
great artisans of Socrates' time shared this attitude. For
building temples, conceiving tools, creating all kinds of useful
objects, writing is not a prerequisite. Heuristics and
maieutics, as methods of questioning human choices, those of
craftsmen included, and generating new options, are essentially
oral. They presuppose the philosopher's, or the architect's,
physical presence. Not too much has changed since, if we
consider how the disciplines of design and engineering are taught
and exercised. But a lot is changing, as design and engineering
practical activities rely more and more on digital processing.
Computational practical experiences, as well as genetic
engineering or memetics, are no longer in continuation of those
founded on literacy.



Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia

The history of culture has recorded numerous attacks against
writing, culminating, probably, in Marshall McLuhan's philosophy
(1964): alphabetic cultures have uniformized, fragmented, and
sequentialized the world, generating an excessive rationalism,
nationalism, and individualism. Here we have, in a succinct list,
the indictment made of Gutenberg's Galaxy. Commenting on E. M.
Forster's A Passage to India, McLuhan remarked: "Rational, of
course, has for the West long meant uniform and continuous and
sequential. In other words, we have confused reason with
literacy, and rationalism with a single technology." That
McLuhan failed to acknowledge the complementary language of
design and engineering, with its own rationality, is a
shortcoming, but does not change the validity of the argument.
The consequences of these attacks-as much as they can be judged
from the historical perspective we have since gained-have
nevertheless not been the abatement of writing or of its
influence. In the same vein, the need to proceed to an
oral-visual culture has been idealistically suggested (Barthes'
well known plea of 1970 can be cited).

There is no doubt that all the plans devised by architects,
artisans, and designers of artifacts belong to a praxis uniting
oral (instructions to those transposing the plan into a product)
and visual cultures. Many such plans, embodying ideas and
concepts probably as daring as those we read in manuscripts and
later in books, vanished. Some of the artifacts they created did
withstand the test of time. Even if the domination of the
written word somehow resulted in a relatively low awareness of
the role drawings played over time, experiences were shaped by
them and knowledge transmitted through them. Drawings are
holistic units of a complexity difficult to compare to that of a
text.

The meaning conferred by the intermediary of writing is brought
about through a process of generalization, or
re-individualization: What is it for the individual reading and
understanding it? It inversely travels the route that led from
speech to writing, from the concrete to the abstract, from the
analytic to the synthetic function of language. At any given
time, it looks as though we have, on the one hand, the finite
reality of signs (alphabet, words, idiomatic expressions) and,
on the other, the practically infinite reality embodied in the
language sequences or ideas expressed. In view of this, the
question arises regarding the source of ideas and the relation
between signs (words, in particular) and their assigned
meanings, or the content that can be communicated using the
language. Meaning is conjured in Western culture through additive
mechanisms, similar to those of mixing pigments. In Eastern
culture, meaning is based on subtractive mechanisms, similar to
those of mixing light.

Alphabetic writing, although more simple and stabilized, is
really more difficult than ideographic writing. The experience
from which it results is one of abstraction. Henceforth, it
subjects the readers of the alphabetic text to the task of
filling the enormous gap separating the graphic sign from its
referent with their own experience. The assumption of the
literate practical experience is that literacy can substitute for
the reference through history or culture. Readers of ideographic
texts have the advantage of the concreteness of the
representation. Even if Chinese characters stand for specific
Chinese words, as John DeFrancis convincingly showed, the
experience of that writing system remains different from that of
Western alphabets. Since every language integrates its own
history as the summary of the practical activity in which it was
constituted, reading in a language of a foreign experience means
that one must step- by-step invent this writing.

Research undertaken in the last 15 years shows that at a certain
stage, aphasia brings on a regression from alphabet to image
reading as design, as pictographic, iconic reading. Letters lose
their linguistic identity. The aphasic reader sees only lines,
intersections, and shapes. Ideas expressed in writing crumble
like buildings shaken by an earthquake. What is still perceived
is the similarity to concrete things. The decline from the
abstract to the concrete can be seen as a socio-cultural accident
taking place against the background of a natural (biological)
accident.

In our days we encounter symptoms similar to those described
above, testifying to a sort of collective aphasia in reverse.
Indeed, writing is deconstructed and becomes graffiti notation,
shorthand statements freed of language, and defying literacy. For
a while, graffiti was criminalized. Later on it was framed as
art, and the market absorbed the new product among the many
others it negotiates. What we probably refused to see is how
deep the literacy of graffiti goes, where its roots are, how wide
the extensions, and how much aphasia in its writing and reading.
After all, it was not only in the New York subway that trains
were literally turned into moving papers or moving books,
issued as often as authority was circumvented. Much of the public
hated graffiti because it obliterated legitimate communication
and a sense of neatness and order that literacy continuously
reinforced. But many also enjoyed it. Rap music is the musical
equivalent of graffiti. Gang rituals and fights are a
continuation of these. Messages exchanged on the data
highways-from e-mail to Web communication-often display the same
characteristics of aphasia. Concreteness is obsessively pursued.
:) (the smiley) renders expressions of pleasure useless, while
(: (the grince) warns of being flamed. On the digital networks
of today's furious exchange of information, collective aphasia
is symptomatic of many changes in the cognitive condition of the
people involved in its practical experiences. Neither
opportunistic excitement nor dogmatic rejection of this
far-reaching experience can replace the need to understand what
makes it necessary and how to best benefit from it. More private
languages and more codes than ever circulate as kilo- and
megabytes among individuals escaping any form of regulation.

On the increasingly rewarding practical experiences of
networking, literacy is challenged by transitory, partial
literacies. Literacy is exposed in its infatuation and
emptiness, although not discarded from among the means of
expression and communication defining the human being. It is
often ridiculed for not being appropriate to the new
circumstances of the practical and spiritual experience of a
humankind that has outgrown all its clothes, toys, books,
stories, tools, and even conflicts.

A legitimate follow-up question is whether the literate
experience of the word contributes to its progressive lack of
determination, or the change of context affects the
interpretation, i.e., the semantic shift from determinate to
vague. Probably both factors play a role in the process. On the
one hand, literacy progressively exhausts its potential. On the
other, new contexts make it simultaneously less suited as the
dominant medium for expression, communication, and signification
of ideas. For instance, the establishment of a vague meaning of
democracy in political discourse leads to the need for strong
contexts, such as armed conflicts, for ascertaining it. In the
last 10 years we have experienced many such conflicts, but we
were not prepared to see them in conjunction with the forces at
work in facilitating higher levels of efficiency according to
the new scale that humankind has reached.

There is also the attempt to use language as context free as
possible-the generalities of all demagogy (liberal,
conservative, left or right, religious or emancipated) can serve
as examples. But so can all the crystal ball readings, palm
readings, horoscopes, and tarot cards, revived in recent years
against the background of illiteracy. None of these is new, but
the relative flourishing of the market of vagueness and
ambiguity, reflective of a deviant functioning of language, is.
Together with illiteracy, they are other symptoms of the change
in pragmatics discussed in this book.

These and other examples require a few more words of explanation
regarding changes in the functions of language. It is known that
the oldest preserved cave drawings are marks (indexical signs)
of an oral context rather than representations of hunting scenes
(even though they are often interpreted as such). They testify
more to those who drew them than to what the drawing is about.
The decadent literacy of mystified messages does the same. It
speaks about their writers more than about their subject, be
this history, sociology, or anthropology. And the increased oral
and visual communication, supported by technology, defines the
post-literate condition of the human cognitive dimension. The
transition from speech to writing corresponds to the shift from
the pragmatic-affective level of human praxis to the
pragmatic-rational level of linear relations among people and
their environment. It takes place in the context of the
evolution from the syncretic to the analytic. The transition from
literacy to literacies corresponds to the pragmatics of
non-linear relations, and results from the evolution from
analytic to synthetic. These affirmations, at least as far as the
civilization of literacy is concerned, apply to the universe of
European cultures and their later extensions. The cultures of
the Far East are characterized by language's tendency to present,
not to explain. The analytical structure of logical thought
(which will be discussed in another chapter) is actually formed
in the sentence structure of speech, which is fundamentally
different in the two cultures mentioned. The imperative energy of
the act of expressing confers on the Chinese language, for
example, a continuous state of birth (speech in the act). The
preeminence of the act in Oriental culture is reflected by the
central position the verb occupies. Concentration around the
verb guides thought towards the relationship between condition
and conditioned.

The experience of logic characteristic of European cultures
(under the distinctive mark of classical Greek philosophy) shows
that the main instrument of thinking is the noun. It is freer
than the verb (tied to the forms it specifies), more stable,
capable of reflecting identity, invariance, and the universal.
The logic founded on this premise is oriented toward the search
for unity between species and genus. European writing and
Oriental ideographic writing have each participated in this
process of defining logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics.
From a historic perspective, they are complementary. Recalling
the history of knowledge and history per se, we can say that the
European Occident achieved the meaning of knowledge and world
control, while the Orient achieved self-knowledge and
self-control. It would seem utopian (and with vast historical,
social, ideological, and political implications) to imagine a
world harmoniously uniting these meanings. However, this would
imply, as the reader can easily surmise, changes in the status
of literacy in both cultures. This is exactly the direction of
the changes we witness, as languages function towards
convergence in the two cultures mentioned.

Literacy is not only a medium of exchange between cultures; it
also sets boundaries among them. This holds true for both
Western and Far Eastern (and any other) civilization. Japan, for
instance, despite the spectacular effort of assimilation and
development of new technologies, maintains inside its national
boundaries a framework quite well suited to its traditional
literacy. Outside, it assimilates other literacies. In different
ways, this holds true for China. It is willing to build its
internal network (Intranet) without connecting it to the
all-encompassing net (Internet) through which we experience some
aspects of globality.

The organization of hierarchy, which made the object of many
studies telling the West why Japan succeeds better in economic
terms, is centered around the unity semmai-kohai, i.e.,
senior-junior. Within the pragmatic framework of a literacy
different from that of the Western world, a logic and ethics
pertinent to the distinction mentioned evolved. The moral basis
of the precedence of the senior over the junior is pragmatic in
nature. The Chinese formula (cho-jo-no-jo) results from a
practical experience encoded not only in language but also in
the system of ranking. In fact, what is acknowledged is both
experience and performance, expressed by the Japanese in the
categories of kyu, referring to proficiency, and dau, referring
to cumulative results. The system applies to economic life,
calligraphy, wrestling (sumo), and flower arrangement (ikebana),
as well as to social rank. In the dynamics of current changes,
such systems are also affected.

From the viewpoint of language functions, we notice that national
language can serve for insulation, while adopted
language-English, in particular-can serve as a bridge to the
rest of the world. Nevertheless, Japanese society, like all
contemporary societies, is more and more confronted with the
world in its globality, and with the need to constitute
appropriate means for expression, communication and signification
pertinent to the global world. While Japan is an example of many
literate prejudices at work, rigidly hierarchic, discriminating
against women and foreigners, dogmatic, it also exemplifies the
understanding of changing circumstances for human practical
experiences of self-constitution as Japanese, and as members of
the integrated world community as well. Consequently, new
literacies emerge within its homogeneous cultural environment,
as they emerge in countries such as China, Korea, and Indonesia,
and in the Arab nations. As a result, we experience changes in
the nature of the relations between the cultures of the Far
East, Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the West. The
process expands, probably more slowly than one might expect, to
the African and South American continents.

Global economy requires new types of relations among nations and
cultures, and these relations need to correspond to the dynamics
of the new pragmatic framework that has emerged against the
background of the new scale of human activity. The identity urge
expressed in the multiculturalism trend of our days will find in
the past its most unreliable arguments. The point is proven by
the naive misrepresentation of past events, facts, and figures
through the activists of the movement. Multiculturalism
corresponds to the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy:
from the uniqueness and universality of one dominating mode to
plurality, not limited to race, lifestyle, or cultures. Whoever
sees multiculturalism as an issue of race, or feminism as one of
gender (against the background of history), will not be able to
design a course of action to best serve those whose different
condition is now acknowledged. A different condition results in
different abilities, and thus different ways of projecting one's
identity in the practical experience of self-constitution. The
past is irrelevant; emphasis is always on the future.

Language and Logic

Around the time computers entered public life, a relatively
unknown writer of science fiction described the world of non A
(A). It is our planet Earth in the year 2560, and what non A
denotes is the non-Aristotelian logic embodied in a
super-computer game machine that rules the planet. Gilbert
Gosseyn (pronounced Go Sane, with an obvious pun intended) finds
out that he is more than just one person.

Anyone even marginally educated in the history of logic will
spontaneously associate the experience described here with
Levy-Bruhl's controversial law of participation. According to
this law, "In the collective representations of primitive
mentality, objects, beings, phenomena can be, in a way we cannot
understand, themselves and something different at the same
time." The relatively undifferentiated, syncretic human
experience at the time of the inception of notation and writing
testifies to awareness of very unusual connections. Research of
artifacts originating with primitive tribes makes clear the
relative dominance of visual thinking and functioning of human
beings along the line of what we would today call multi-valued
logics.

The world of non A, although placed by its author in some
fictional future, seems to describe a logic prevalent in a
remote time. Even today, as anthropologists report, there are
tribes in the Amazon jungles and in remote Eskimo territories
whose members claim to be not only the beings they are, but also
something else, such as a bird, plant, or even a past event.
This is not a way of speaking, but a different way of
ascertaining identity. Inferences in this pragmatic context go
beyond those possible in the logical world of truth and
falsehood that Aristotle described. Multi-valued logic is
probably a good name for describing the production of such
inferences, but not necessarily the explanation we seek for why
it is that self-constitution involves such mechanisms, and how
they work. Moreover, even if we could get both questions
answered, we would still wonder-because our own
self-constitution involves a different logic-what the relation
is between the language experience and the logical framework of
those living in the non A world of ancient times. Practical
experiences with images, dominant in such tribes, explains why
there is a logical continuum, instead of a clear-cut association
with truth and falsehood, or with present and absent.
Multi-valued logics of different types, corresponding to
different pragmatic contexts, were actually tamed when language
was experienced in its written form and thinking was stabilized
in written expressions. Awareness of connections distinctly
integrated in human experience and quantified in a body of
intelligible knowledge progressively clears the logical horizon.
As many-valued logics were subdued, entities were constituted
only as what the experience made them to be, and no longer
simultaneously many different things.

The change from orality to the practical experience of written
language affected many aspects of human interaction. Writing
introduced a frame of reference, ways to compare and evaluate,
and thus a sense of value associated with limited choices.
Orality was controlled by those exercising it. The written,
stabilized in marks on a surface, gave rise to a new type of
questioning, based on its implicit analyticity. Over time
written language led to associations. Some were in relation to
its visual aspect. Other associations were made to writing
patterns, a kind of repetition. Integrative by its nature,
writing stimulates the quest for comparing experiences of
self-constitution by comparing what was recorded. The
expectation of accurate recording is implicit in the experience
of writing. The rather skeletal incipient written language makes
visible connections which within orality faded away.

A very raw definition of logic can be the discipline of
connections-"if something, then something else"-that can be
expressed in many ways, including formal expressions.
Connections established in orality are spontaneous. With writing,
the experience is stabilized and a promise for method is
established. This method leads to inferences from connections.
What I am trying to suggest is that although there is logic in
orality, it is a natural logic, reflecting natural connections,
as opposed to connections established in writing. Writing
provides the X-ray of the elusive body of experience in whose
depths awareness of connections and their practical implications
was starting to take shape.

Time and space awareness are gained relatively slowly. In
parallel, connections to experiences in time and space are
expressed in an incipient awareness of how they affect the
outcome of any practical experience. No less than signs, logic is
rooted also in the pragmatics of human self-constitution, and
probably comes into existence together with them. Co-presence,
of what is different or what is alike, incompatibilities,
exclusions, and similar time or space situations bcome
disassociated from actions, objects, and persons and form a
well-defined layer of experience. Mechanisms of inference, from
objects, actions, persons, situations, etc., evolve from simpler
configurations or sequences of connections. Writing is more
effective than rituals or oral expression in capturing
inferences, although not necessarily in providing a mechanism
for sharing. What is gained in breadth is lost in depth.

As human practical experiences get more effective they also
become more complex. The cognitive effort substitutes more and
more for the physical. Stabilized in inferences based on
increasingly more encompassing cycles of activity-agriculture is
definitely more extensive than hunting or food
gathering-experience is transmitted more and more in its
skeletal form, deprived of the richness of the individual
characteristics of those identified through it. Less information
and more sequences of successful action-this is how from the
richness of connections logic of actions takes shape. The accent
is on time and space, or better yet on what we call, in
retrospect, references. As writing supplants time-based means of
expression and communication (rituals, first of all), temporal
logic begins to lose in importance.

Once the pragmatic horizon of human life changes, literacy, in
conjunction with the logic it houses, constitutes its invisible
grid, its implicit metrics. The understanding of anything that
is not related to our literate self-constitution remains outside
this understanding. Literate language is a reductionist machine,
which we use to look at the world from the perspective of our
own experience. Aware of experiences different from ours, at
least of their possibility, we would like to understand them,
knowing perfectly well that once captured in our experience of
language, their own condition is negated. Oral education
maintained the parent-child continuum, and memory, i.e.,
experience, was directly transmitted. Literacy introduced means
for handling discontinuity and, above all, differences. It
stored, in some form of record, everything pertaining to the
experience. But as record, it constituted a new experience, with
its own inherent values.

As a reductionist device, writing reduces language to a body of
accepted ways of speaking, recording, and reading governed by
two kinds of rules: pertinent to connections (logic), and
pertinent to grammar. The process was obviously more elaborate
and less focused. In retrospect, we can understand how writing
affected the experience of human self-constitution through
language. It is therefore understandable why those who,
following the young Wittgenstein, take the logic of language for
granted, seeing only the need to bring to light what is
concealed in the signs of language, are wrong. Language does not
have an intrinsic logic; each practical experience extracts
logic from the experience and contaminates all means of human
expression by the inference from what is possible to what is
necessary.

Logics behind the logic

The function of coordination resulting from the use of language
evolved over time. What did not change is the structure of the
coordinating mechanism. Logic as we know it, i.e., a discipline
legitimized by literate use of language, is concerned with
structural aspects of various languages. The attempt to explain
how and why conditions leading to literacy were created, after
the writing entered the realm of human experience, can only
benefit from an understanding of the coordinating mechanism of
writing and literacy, which includes logic but is not reducible
to it. This mechanism consisted of rules for correct language
use (grammar), awareness of connections specific to the
pragmatic framework (logic), means of persuasion (rhetoric),
selection of choices (heuristics), and argumentation
(dialectics). Together, they give us an image of how complex the
process of self-constitution is. Separately, they give us insight
into the fragmented experiences of language use, rationality,
conviction, selection, actions, and beliefs. There is a logic
behind the (relative) normal course of events, and also behind
any crisis, if we want to extend the concept of logic so as to
include the rational description or explanation of whatever
might have led to the crisis. And there are logics behind the
logic, as Descartes, the authors of the Port Royale Logic
(actually The Art of Thinking), Locke, and many others saw it.
The logic of religion, the logic of art, of morality, of
science, of logic itself, the logic of literacy, are examples of
the variety people consider and establish as their object of
interest, subjecting such logic to the test of completeness
(does it apply to everything?), consistency (is it
contradictory?), and sometimes transitivity.

Independent of the subject (religion, art, ethics, a precise
science, literacy, etc.), human beings establish the particular
logic as a network of reciprocal relations and functional
dependencies according to which truth (religious, artistic,
ethical, etc.), relevant to the practical experience in more
than one way, can and should be pursued. This logic, an
extension of the incipient awareness of connections, became a
formal system, which some researchers in philosophy and
psychology still believe is somehow attached to the brain (or to
the mind), ensuring its correct functioning. Indeed, successful
action was seen as a result of logic, hard-wired as part of the
biological endowment. Other researchers perceived logic as a
product of our experience, in particular thinking, as this
applies to our self-constitution in the natural world and the
world we ourselves created. As a corpus of rules and criteria,
logic applies to language, but there is a logic of human
actions, a logic of art, a logic of morals, etc., described by
rules for preserving consistency, maintaining integrity,
facilitating causal inference and other relevant cognitive
operations, such as articulating a hypothesis or drawing
conclusions.

An old question sneaks in: Is there a universal logic, something
that in its purity transcends differences in language, in
biological characteristics, in differences, period? The answer
depends on whom one asks. From the perspective assumed so far,
the answer is definitely no. Differences are emphasized, even
celebrated here, precisely because they extend to the different
logics that pertain to various practical experiences. Formulated
as such, the answer is elusive because, after all, logic is
expressed through language, and once expressed, it constitutes a
body of knowledge which in turn participates in practical human
experiences. No stronger proof of this can be given than the
Boolean logic embedded in computer hardware and programming
languages. A more appropriate answer can be given once we notice
that major language systems embody different logical mechanisms
that pertain to language's coordinating function.

The main logical systems require our attention because they are
related to what makes literacy necessary and, under new
pragmatic conditions, less necessary, if not superfluous. Since
the civilization of illiteracy is viewed also from the
perspective of the changes resulting in a new scale of human
praxis, it becomes necessary to see whether in the global world
forces of uniformity or forces of heterogeneity and diversity,
embodied in various literacies and the logic attached to them, or
associated with their use, are at work. As almost all scholars
agree, Aristotle is the father of the logic that applies to the
Western language system. Writing helped to encode his logic of
proper inference from premises expressed in sentences. Literacy
gave this logic a house, and a sense of validity and permanency
that scholars accept almost as religion. For Eastern systems,
contributions of equal value and relevance can be found in the
major writings of ancient China and Japan, as well as in Hindu
documents. Instead of a superficial overview of the subject, I
prefer to quote Fung-Yu-lan's precise observation regarding the
particular focus of Chinese philosophy (which is also
representative of the Far East): "Philosophy must not be simply
the object of cognition, it must also be the object of an
experience." The resulting expression of this endeavor differs
from the Indian, in search of a certain state of mind, not
formulations of truth, and from Western philosophical
statements. It takes the form of concise, often enigmatic, and
usually paradoxical statements or aphorisms. A very good
presentation of this experience is given in a famous text by
Chuang-tzu: "The words serve to fix the ideas, but once the idea
is grasped, there is no need to think about words. I wish I could
find somebody who has ceased to think of words and have him with
me to talk to."

The logic of the Indo-European languages is based on the
recognition of the object-action distinction, expressed in
language through the noun and the verb. For over 2,000 years,
this logic has dominated and maintained the structure of society,
of the polis, to use Aristotle's term. Indeed, he defined the
human as zoon politikon- community (polis), animal (zoon)-and his
logic is an attempt to discover what was the cognitive structure
that ensured proper inference from premises expressed in
sentences. Probably as much as some who today hope for a similar
achievement through formal languages, he wanted logic to be as
independent as possible of the language used, as well as
independent of the particular language spoken by people
belonging to different communities.

Parallel to the language housing Aristotle's logic was a
different system in which the verb (referring to action) was
assimilated in the object, as in the Chinese and Japanese
languages. Every action became a noun (hunting, running,
talking), and a non-predicative language mode was achieved.
Aristotle's construction goes like this: If a is b (The sky is
covered), and if b is c (the cover are clouds), then a is c
(cloudy sky). Non-predicative constructions do not come to a
conclusion but continue from one condition to another, as in
approximately: Being covered, covers being clouds, clouding
being associated with rain, rain...and so on. That is, they are
open-ended connections in status nascendi. We notice that
Aristotelian logic derives the truth of the inference from the
truth of the premise, based on a formal relation independent of
both. In non- predicative logic, language only points to possible
chains of relations, implicitly acknowledging that others are
simultaneously possible without deriving knowledge, or without
subjecting conclusions to a formal test of their truth or
falsehood. To the abstract and formal representation of
knowledge inference, it opposes a model of concrete and natural
representation in which distinctions regarding quality are more
important than quantity distinctions.

Based on observations already accumulated, first of all that
ideographic writing keeps the means of expression very close to
the object represented in language, we can understand why
languages expressed in ideographic writing are not adapted to the
kind of thinking Aristotle and his followers developed and which
culminated in the Western notion of science, as well as in the
Western system of values. The successive rediscovery of Far
Eastern modes of representation and of the philosophy growing out
of this very different way of thinking, as well as of the
interest in subtleties rather uncommon to our culture, resulted
in the many attempts we witness to transcend the boundaries
between these fundamentally different language structures. The
purpose is to endow our language, and thus our thinking and
emotional life, with dimensions structurally impossible within
the Western framework of existence.

The logic of dependency-the Japanese amé-is one of embedded
relations and many conjectures resulting in a logic of actions,
a different way of thinking, and a different system of values.
These are partially reflected in the periodic misunderstandings
between the Western world and Japan. Of course, it can be
simplified as to mean that if a company and an employee accept
it, and they do so since amé is structurally embedded in the
life of people, both parties will be faithful to each other no
matter what. Amé can also be simplified to mean a mutual
relationship within families (all prejudices included), or among
friends. But as we get closer to the practical experience of amé
(Takeo Doi's writing on the "anatomy of dependence" helps us a
great deal in this attempt), we realize that it constitutes a
framework, marking not only distinct decisions (logically
justified), but an entire context of thinking, feeling, acting,
evaluating. It is reflected in the attitude towards language and
in the education system, inculcating dependency as a logic that
takes priority over the individual. Evidently, the only way to
integrate the logic of amé into our logic-if indeed we think
that this is right, moreover that it is possible-is through
practical experience. Although amé seems to point to some limits
inherent in our language, it actually reveals limits in our
self-constitution, as part of establishing a network of
generalized mutual relationships as part of our experience.

It should be added that practically a mirrored phenomenon occurs
in the Far East, where what can be perceived as the limitations
of the language system and the logic it supports (or embodies),
triggered an ever-growing interest in Western culture and many
attempts to copy or to quickly assimilate it in vocabulary and
behavior. From the Indian universe comes not only the mysticism
of the Vedic texts, but also the stubborn preoccupation with the
human condition (both the aspect of conditioning and of what
Mircea Eliade called de-conditioning). This resulted in the
attraction it exercises on many people looking for an
alternative to what they perceive as an over-conditioned
existence, usually translated as pressure of performance and
competitive attitudes. Some opted out of literacy, and generally
out of their culture, in search of liberation (mukti), a
practical experience of lower preoccupation with the useful and
higher spiritual goals, and of obstinate refusal of logic. (Some
really never fully appropriated or internalized the philosophy,
but adopted a lifestyle emulating commercialized models, the
exotic syntax of escapism.)

In short, and trying not to preclude future discussion of these
phenomena, the historic development of language and logic within
the many cultures we know of-more than the Western and Far
Eastern mentioned-bears witness to the very complex relation
between who and what people are: their language and the logic
that the language makes possible and later embodies. The hunter
in the West, and the hunter in the Far East, in Africa, India,
Papua, the fishermen, the forager, etc. relate in different ways
to their environment and to their peers in the community. The way
their relatively similar experiences are embodied in language
and other means of expression plays an important role in forms
of sharing, religion, art, in the establishment of a value
system, and later on education and identity preservation. There
are common points, however, and the most relevant refer to
relations established in the work process, as these affect
efficiency. These commonalties prove relevant to understanding
the role language, in conjunction with logic, exercises on
various stages of social and economic development.

A plurality of intellectual structures

Since scale (of humankind, of groups performing coherent
activities, of activities themselves) plays such an important
role in the dynamics of human self-constitution through
practical activities involving language, it is only fair to
question whether logic is affected by scale. Again, the answer
will depend upon who is asked. Logic as we study it has nothing
to do with scale. An inference remains preserved no matter how
many people make it, or study it, for that matter. But this
reflects the universalistic viewpoint. Once we question the
constitution of logic itself, and trace it to practical
experiences resulting in the awareness of connections, it
becomes less obvious that logic is independent of scale.
Actually, some experiences are not even possible without having
reached a critical mass, and the relation between simple and
complex is not one of progression. But it is certainly a
multi-valued relation, granted with elements of progression.

The practical experience of a tribe (in Africa, North America,
or South America) is defined at the scale of relations inside
the tribe, and between the tribe and the relatively limited
environment of existence. The logic (or pre-logic, to adapt the
jargon of some anthropologists) specific to this scale
corresponds to the dominance of instincts and intuitions, and is
expressed within the visually dominant means of expression and
communication characteristic of what is called the primitive
mentality. From all we know, memory plays a major role in
shaping patterns of activity. The power of discrimination
(through vision, hearing, smell, etc.) is extraordinary;
adaptability is much higher than that of humans in modern
societies. These tribe members live in a phase of disjoint
groups, unaware even of biological commonalties among such
groups, focused on themselves in pursuing survival strategies
not much different from those of other living creatures who
share the same environment. Once these groups start relating to
each other, the practical experiences of self-constitution
diversify. Cooperation and exchange increase, and language, in
many varieties, becomes part of the self-constitution of
various human types.

Languages originate in areas associated with the early nuclei of
agriculture. These are places where the population could
increase, since in some ways the pragmatics was effective enough
to provide for a greater number of people. Probably primitive
agriculture is the first activity in which a scale threshold was
reached and a new quality, constituted in the practical
experience of language, emerged. It is also an activity with a
precise logic embodied in the awareness of a multitude of levels
where connections are critical for the outcome of the activity,
i.e., for the well being of those practicing it. The sacredness
of place, to which the Latin root of the word culture (cultus)
refers, is embodied in the practical activity with everything
pertinent to human experience. Logic captures the connection
between the place and the activity. In a variety of
embodiments-from ways to sequence an action to the use of
available resources, how to pursue a plan, craft tools,
etc.-logic is integrated in culture and, in turn, participates
in shaping it. It is a two-way dependency which increases over
time and results in today's logical machines that define a
culture radically different from the culture of the mechanical
contraption. There are differences in the type of intelligence,
which need to be acknowledged. And there are differences
resulting from the variety of natural contexts of practical
life, which we need to consider. Commonalties of the survival
experience and further development should also be placed in the
equation of human self-constitution.

Within the pragmatics of the post-industrial, the logic extracted
from practical experiences of self-constitution in the world and
the logic constituted in experiences defining the world of the
human are increasingly different. We no longer read the logic of
language and infer from it to the experience, but project our own
logic (itself a practical result of self-constitution) upon the
experience in the world. The algebra of thought, a cross section
of rational thinking that Boole submitted with his calculus of
logics, is a good example, but by no means the only one.
Languages are created in order to support a variety of logical
systems, e.g., autoepistemic, temporal and tense propositional,
modal, intuitionist.

One would almost expect the emergence of a universal logic and a
universal language (attempts were and are made to facilitate
such a universalism). Leibniz had visions of an ideal language,
a characteristica universalis and a calculus ratiocinator. So
did many others, from the 17th century on, not realizing that in
the process of diversification of human experiences, their dream
became progressively less attainable. In parallel, we gave up
the logical inheritance of the past: logic embedded in a variety
of autarchic primitive practical experiences that various groups
(in Africa, Asia, Europe, etc.) had up to our time is rapidly
becoming a cultural reference. The scale that such experiences
embody and the logic appropriate to that scale are simply
absorbed in the larger scale of the global economy. We are
simply no longer in the position to effectively unveil the logic
of magical experiences, not even of those rational or
rationalizable aspects that refer to the plants, animals, and
various minerals used by the peoples preceding us for avoiding
disease or treating illness.

In our days, the cultures swinging from the sacred to the
profane, from the primitive to the over-developed, come closer
together. This happens not because everyone wants this to
happen, not even because all benefit (in fact, many give up an
identity-their own way of life-for a condition of non-identity
that characterizes a certain style of living). The process is
driven by the need to achieve levels of efficiency appropriate
to the scale humankind reached. The various groups of people are
integrated as humans in the first place (not as tribes, nations,
or religions), and consequently a pragmatic framework of
increasing integration is progressively put in place.

The Euro-centrist (or Western) notion that all types of
intelligence develop towards the Western type (and thus the
Western practice of language culminating in literacy) has been
discredited many times. The plurality of intellectual structures
has been acknowledged, unfortunately either demagogically or in
lip-service to the past, but never as an opening to the future.
Literacy eradicated, for valid practical reasons- those of the
Industrial Revolution-heterogeneity, and thus variety from among
the experiences through which people constitute themselves in
the universe of their experience. When those reasons are
exhausted, because new circumstances of existence and work
require a new logic, literacy becomes a hindrance, without
necessarily affecting the role of the logic inhabiting it.

The scale of human life and activity, and the associated
projection of expectations beyond human survival and
preservation, lead less to the need for universal literacy than
to the need for several literacies and for a rich variety of
logical horizons. Since the coordinating mechanism consists of
logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics, the new scale
prompts the emergence of new rhetorical devices, among other
things. It suffices to think about persuasion at the level of the
global village, or about persuasion at the level of the
individual, as the individual can be filtered in this global
village through mechanisms of networking and multimedia
interactivity. Logical mechanisms of mass communication are
replaced by logical considerations of increased individual
communication. Think about new heuristic procedures at work on
the World Wide Web, as well as in market research and in
Netconomy transactions. Consider a new dialectic, definitely
that of the infertile opposition between what is proclaimed as
very good and excellent, as we try to convince ourselves that
mediocrity is eradicated by consensus. Fascinating work in
multi-valued logic, fuzzy logic, temporal logic, and many areas
of logical focus pertinent to computation, artificial
intelligence, memetics, and networking allow progress well
beyond what the science fiction of the world of non A presented
us with.

The logics of actions

Between the relatively monolithic and uniform ideal of a literate
society convinced of the virtues of logic, and the pluralistic
and heterogeneous reality of partial literacies that transfer
logic to machines, one can easily distinguish a change in
direction. Persons with a rather adequate literate culture,
educated in the spirit of rationality guarded by classic or
formal logic, are at a loss when facing the sub-literacies of
specialized practical endeavors, or the illogical inferences made
within new fields of human self-constitution. Let us put their
attitude in some perspective. At various stages in human
evolution-for instance, transition from scavenging to hunting, or
from hunting and foraging to herding and agriculture-people
experienced the effects of the erosion of some behavioral codes
and projected their new condition in new practical patterns. One
type of cohesion represented in the declining behavioral code was
replaced by another; one logic, deferring the code, was followed
by others. When interaction among groups of different types of
cohesion occurred, logic was severely challenged. Sometimes, as
a result, one logic dominated; other times, compromise was
established. Primitive stages are remarkably adaptive to the
environment.

Our stage, remote in many ways from the wellspring (Ursprung),
consists of an appropriated environment within which the effort
is to provide a pragmatic framework for high efficiency. Logic,
rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics interact inside this
framework. In other words, human evolution goes from sensorial
anchoring in the natural world to an artificial (human crafted)
world superimposed on the concrete reality-and eventually
extended into artificial life, one from among the most recently
established fields of scientific inquiry. Within this world,
humans no longer restrict the projection of their natural and
intellectual condition through one (or very few) comprehensive
sign systems. Quite to the contrary, the effort is towards
segmentation, with the aim of reaching not global cohesion, but
local cohesiveness, corresponding to local optima. The
complexity and the nature of the changes within this system
result in the need for a strategy of segmentation, and a logic,
or several, supporting it. In the interaction between a language
and the humans constituted in it, as the embodiment of their
biological characteristics and of their experience, logical
conflicts are not excluded. After all, the logic of actions,
influenced by heuristics as well, and the logic inherent to
literacy are not identical.

Actions bring to mind agents of action and thus the logic
integrated in tools and artifacts. The assumption that the same
logic housed in language is involved in the expression leading
to the making of tools and other objects related to people's
activity went unchallenged for a long time. Even today,
designers and engineers are educated according to an ideal of
literacy that is expected to reflect in their work the
rationality exemplified in the literate use of language.
Complementing most of the development of humankind's language,
drawings have expressed ideas about how to make things and how
to perform some operations that are part of our continuous
experience of self- constitution in practical activity. Each
drawing embodies the logic of the future artifact, no matter how
useful or even how ephemeral. There is a large record of literate
work from which logical aspects of thinking can be derived.
There is a rather small record of drawing, and not too many
surviving artifacts. They were conceived for precise practical
experiences and usually did not outlast the experience, or the
person who embodied it. Roads, houses, tools, and other objects
indeed survived, but it is not until better tools for drawing
itself and better paper became available that a library of
engineering was established.

As a hybrid between art and science, engineering accepts the
logic of scientific discovery only in order to balance it
against the logic of aesthetic expectations. In the pragmatic
framework of the civilization of illiteracy, engineering
definitely has a dominant position in respect to the
self-constitution of the human being in language- based practical
experiences. This is due to the impact it has on the efficiency
of human practical experiences and on their almost endless
diversification.

There is a phase of conflict, a phase of accommodation, and a
phase of complementarity when some means (such as language and
the means for visualization used by designers and engineers)
replace others, if they do not render them useless. In our time
of experiences involving many more people than ever, of
distributive transactions, of heterogeneity, and of interactions
that go beyond the linearity of the sequence, the structural
characteristics of literacy interfere with the new dynamics of
human development as this is supported by very powerful
technologies embodying a variety of logical possibilities. At
this time, the implicit logic of literacy and the new logics (in
the plural) collide in the pragmatic framework.

Within the logic of the literate discourse, followed volens
nolens in this book, it should be clear that the attempt to
salvage literacy is the attempt to maintain linear relations,
determinism, hierarchy (of values), centralization-which fostered
literacy-in a framework requiring non-linearity,
decentralization, distributed modes of practical experiences,
and unstable value (among others). The two frameworks are
logically incompatible. This does not mean that literacy has to
be discarded altogether, or that it will disappear, as cuneiform
notation and pictographic writing did, or that it will be
replaced by drawing or by computer-based language processing. The
linear will definitely satisfy a vast number of practical
activities; so will deterministic explanations and centralism
(political, religious, technological, etc.), and even an elitist
sense of value. But instead of being a universal standard, or
even a goal (to linearize everything that is not linear, to
ascertain sequences of cause and effect, to find a center and
practice centrality), it will become part of a complex system of
relations, free of hierarchy-or at least with fast changing
hierarchies-valueless, adaptive, extremely distributed.

Of no less significance is the type of logic (and for that
matter, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics) housed in
language, i.e., projected from the universe of human
self-constitution in the system of inferences, knowledge, and
awareness of the being characteristic of literate frameworks of
practical experiences. Language successfully captured a
dualistic logic indebted to the values of truth and falsehood,
and supported experiences embodied in the abstract character of
logical rationality. It was complemented by logical symbolism
and logical calculus, very successful in formalizing dualism,
and in eliminating logical models not fitting the dualistic
structure.

Literacy instilled bivalent logic as another of its invisible
layers-something is written or not, the written is right or
wrong-allowing only quite late, and actually in the realm of
logical formalism, the appearance of multi-valued schemes. The
non-linearity, vagueness, and fuzziness characteristic of the
post-industrial pragmatic framework opened avenues of high human
efficiency, better adapted to the scale of humankind that
required efficiency and eventually made efficiency its major
goal. Literacy is ill endowed for supporting multi-valued logic,
although it was always tempted to step in its vast territories.
Even some of the disciplines built around and in extension of
literacy (such as history, philosophy, sociology) are not able
to integrate a logic different from the one seated in the
practical experience of reading and writing. This explains, for
instance, computationalism as a new horizon for science, within
which multi-valued logic can be simulated even if the computer's
underlying structure is that of Boolean logic. The literate
argument of science and multimedia's non-linear heuristic path to
science are fundamentally different. Each requires a different
logic and results in a different interaction between those who
constitute their identity in the practical experience of
scientific experiments and those who constitute their identity in
co- participation.

It took longer in the world of predicative logic and in the
science based on analytic power to accept fuzzy logic and to
integrate it in new artifacts, than it took in the world of
non-predicative logic and in the science based on the power of
synthesis. Within the universe of non-predicative language,
fuzzy logic made it into the design of control mechanisms for
high-speed trains, as well as into new efficient toasters. It was
accepted in Japan while it was still debated among experts in the
Western world, until 1993, when a washing machine integrating
fuzzy logic was introduced in the market. This fact can go on
record as more than a mere example in a discussion regarding the
implications of the global economy for the various language
systems and the logical coordinating mechanisms specific to
each.

Progress in understanding and emulating human thinking shows a
progression from a literacy-based model to a model rooted in the
new pragmatic framework. Rule- based, pattern-matching systems
generalize predicate calculus; neural networking is devoted to
mimicking the way minds work, in a synthetic neuron-plex array;
fuzzy logic addresses the limitations of Boolean calculus and
the nondeterminism of neural networks, and concentrates on
modeling imprecision, ambiguity, and undecidability as these are
embodied in new human practical experiences.

Sampling

Within the civilization of literacy, recollection and the logic
attached to it are predominantly made through quoting. In the
literate framework, to know something means to be able to write
about it, thus reconfirming the logic of writing. Lives are
subject to memories, and diaries are our interpreted life,
written with some reader in mind: the beloved, one's children, a
posterity willing to acknowledge or understand. The literate
means of sharing in successive practical experiences contain the
expected logic and affect both the experience and its
communication. Everything seems to originate in the same
context: to know means to re-live the experience. The literate
gnoseology, with its implicit logic, is based on continuously
remaking, reconstituting the experience as a language
experience. This is why every form of writing based on the
structure embodied in literacy-literary or philosophic,
religious, scientific, journalistic, or political-is actually
rewriting.

The civilization of illiteracy is one of sampling, a concept
originating in genetics. To understand what this means, it is
useful to contrast quotation and sampling. Literate
appropriation in the form of quotation takes place in the
structure of literacy. Sequences are designed to accept someone
else's words. A quote introduces the hierarchy desired or
acknowledged by invoking authority or questioning it. Authorship
is exercised by producing a context for interpretation and
maintaining literate rules for their expression. Interpretations
are determined by the implicit expectation of reproducing the
deterministic structure of literacy, i.e., its inner logic. The
quote embodies centralism by establishing centers of interest
and understanding around the quoted.

Illiterate appropriation corresponds to a dissolution of
hierarchy, to an experience of dissolving it and doing away
with sequence, authorship, and the rules of logical inference.
It questions the notion of elementary meaningful units, extending
choices beyond well formed sentences, beyond words, beyond
morphemes or phonemes (which always mean a lot to linguists, but
almost nothing to the people constituting themselves in literate
language experiences), and beyond formal logic. These
techniques of sampling lead to actual undoing. Rhythms of words
can be appropriated, as writers did long before the technology
of musical sampling became available. So can the structure of a
sentence be appropriated, the feel of a text, or of many other
forms of expression that are not literacy-based (the visual
arts, for instance). Anything pertaining to a written
sentence-and for that matter to music, painting, odor, texture,
movement (of a person, of images, leaves on a tree, stars,
rivers, etc.)-can be selected, decomposed into units as small as
one desires, and appropriated as an echo of the experience it
embodies. Genetic configurations, as they apply to plants and
other living entities, can be sampled as well. Genetic splicing
maintains the relations to the broader genetic texture of plants
or animals. Spliced, a word, a sentence, or a text still
maintains relations to the experience in which it was
constituted.

These relations are enormously relativized, subjected to a logic
of vagueness. When they relate to what we write, they are
empowered by emotional components that the literate experience
expelled from literate expression. There is room for variation,
for spontaneity, for the accidental, where before the rigor and
logic of good writing stood guard against anything that might
disturb. When they relate to a biological structure, they
concern specific characteristics, such as composition or
perisability. Within the culture of sampling, the expectation of
a shared body of literacy and its attached logic are quite out
of touch with the dynamics of discarding the past as having no
other significance than as an extended alphabet from which one
can choose, at random or with some system, letters fitting the
act. The letters are part of a sui generis alphabet, changing as
practical experiences change, interacting with many logical rules
for using them or for understanding how they work. In this new
perspective, interpretation is always another instance of
constituting the language, not only using it. Biological
sampling, along with the associated splicing, also regards the
living as a text. Its purpose is to affect some components in
order to achieve desired qualities related to taste, look,
nutritional value, etc. This is the core of genetic engineering,
a practical experience in which the logic of life, expressed in
DNA sequences and configurations, takes precedence over the
logic of language and literacy, even if the text metaphor, so
prominent in genetics, plays such a major role. It is worth
recalling that the word text derives from the Latin word for to
weave, which was later applied to coherent collections of
written sentences.

Sampling does not necessarily transform everything into the gray
mass of information. In their practical experiences, people
sample emotions and feelings as they sample foods in
supermarkets, sample entertainment programs (television sampling
included), sample clothing, and even partners (for special
occasions or as potential spouses, partners in business, or
whatever else). As opposed to quoting, sampling- periodic,
random, or sequential-results in the severing from what literacy
celebrated as tradition and continuity. And it challenges
authorship. With increased sampling as a practical experience of
diversification, the human being acquires a very specific
freedom not possible within boundaries of the literate
experience. Tradition is complemented by forms of innovation
impossible within a pragmatic framework of progression and
dualistic (true-false) experience. This becomes even more clear
when we understand that sampling is followed by synthesis, which
might be neither true nor false, but appropriate (to some
degree). In the case of music, a device called a sequencer is
used for this purpose. The composite is synthetic. A new
experience, significant in itself at formal levels corresponding
to the constitution of ad hoc languages and their consumption in
the act, becomes possible. The mixmaster is a machine for
recycling arbitrarily defined constitutive units such as notes,
rhythms, or melodic patterns freed from their pragmatic
identity. What is significant is that the same applies to the
biological text, including the biology of the human being. In
some ways, genetic mutation acquires the status of a new means
for synthesizing new plants and animals, and even new materials.

The artistic technique of collage is based on a logic of choices
beyond those of realistic representations. Logical rules of
perspective are negated by rules of juxtaposition. Collage, as a
technique, anticipates the generalized stage of sampling and
compositing. It changes our notion of intellectual property,
trademark, and copyright, all expressions of a logic firmly
attached to the literate experience. The famous case of Dr.
Martin Luther King's plagiarism reflected aspects of primitive
culture carried over to the civilization of illiteracy: there is
no authorship; once something becomes public, it is free to be
shared. In the same vein, there is no Malcolm X left in the
poetry resulting from sampling his speeches, or anyone else's for
that matter.

Post-modern literature and painting result from sampling
exercises governed by an ear or eye keen to our day's vernacular
of machines and alienation. The same applies to plants, fruits,
and microbes insofar as sampling does not preserve previous
identities, but constitutes new ones, which we integrate in new
experiences of our own self-constitution. From the perspective
of logic, the procedure is of interest to the extent that it
establishes domains of logical appropriateness. Logical identity
is redefined from a dynamic perspective. From a pragmatic
viewpoint, certain experiences might be maximized by applying a
certain logic to them. Moreover, within some experiences,
complementary logics-each logic assigned to a precise aspect of
the system-can be used together in strategies of layered
management of the process, or in parallel processes, checked
against each other at defined instances. Strategies for
maximizing market transactions, for instance, integrate various
decision-making layers, each characterized by a different
logical assumption. We experience a process of replacing the
rigid logical framework of literate condition with many logical
frameworks, adapted to diversity.

In conclusion, one more aspect should be approached. Is it enough
to say that language expresses the biological and the social
identity of the human being? To deal with language, and more
specifically with the embodiment of language in literacy, means
to deal with everything that makes the human being the
bio-socio-politico- cultural entity that defines our species. The
logical appears to be an underlying element: bio-logical,
socio-logical, etc. The hierarchy will probably bother some,
since it seems that language assumes a higher place among the
many factors participating in the process of human
self-constitution. Indeed, in order for the human being to
qualify as zoon politikon, as Homo Sapiens, or Homo Ludens
(playful man) or Homo Faber, he or she must first qualify for
the interactions which each designation describes: on the
biological level, with other human beings, within structures of
common interest, in the realm of a human being's own nature.
This is why humans define themselves through practical
experiences involving signs.

At the various levels at which such signs are generated,
interpreted, comprehended, and used to conceive new signs, human
identity is ascertained. This is what prompted Felix Hausdorf to
define the human being as zoon semeiotikon- semiotic animal,
sign-using animal. Moreover, Charles Sanders Peirce considered
semiotics as being the logic of vagueness. Signs-whether
pictures, sounds, odors, textures, words (or combinations),
belonging to a language, diagram, mathematical or chemical
formalism, new language (as in art, political power, or
programming), genetic code, etc.-relate to human beings, not in
their abstraction but in the concreteness of their participation
in our lives and work.

Memetic optimism

John Locke knew that all knowledge is derived from experience.
But he was not sure that the same applies to logic or
mathematics. If we define experience as self- constitutive
practical activity, whose output is the ever-changing identity of
the individual or individuals carrying out the experience, logic
derives from it, as do all knowledge and language. This places
logic not outside thought, but in experience, and raises the
question of logical replication. Dawkins defined the replicator
as a biological molecule that "has the extraordinary property of
being able to make copies of itself." Such an entity is supposed
to have fecundity, fidelity, longevity. Language is a replicator;
or better yet, it is a replicative medium. The question is
whether duplication can take place only by virtue of its own
structural characteristics, or whether one has to consider logic,
for instance, as the rule of replication. Moreover, maybe logic
itself is replicative in nature.

This discussion belongs to the broader subject of memetics. Its
implicit assumption is that memes, the spiritual equivalent of
genes, are subject to mechanisms of evolution. As opposed to
natural evolution, memetic evolution is through more efficient
orders of magnitude, and faster by far.

In experiences of cultural transfer (sharing of experience as a
practical experience itself) or of inheritance-genetic or
memetic, or a combination of both- something like a gene of
meaning was suspected to exist. Were it to exist, that would not
mean, within our pragmatic system, that signification is carried
over through memetic replication, but that practical experiences
of human self-constitution involve the act of conjuring meaning
under the guise of various logics pertinent to sign processes.
Replication is, then, not of information, but of fundamental
processes, conjuring of meaning being one of them. Evolution of
language, as well as of logic, belongs to cultural evolution.
Meme mutation and spread of a reduced scale, such as the scale
of finite artificial languages and limited logical rules, can be
described in equations similar to those of genetics. But once
the scale changes, it is doubtful that we could encode the
resulting complexity in such formalizations.

Be this as it may, expression, communication, and signification,
the fundamental functions of any sign system, regardless of its
logic, are endowed with replicative qualities. Logic prevents
corruption, or at least provides means for identifying it. The
easiest way to understand this statement is to relate it to the
many replications involved in the manipulation of data in a
computer. The Error message announcing corruption of data
corresponds to a replication process that went astray. Like all
analogies, this one is not infallible: a certain logic, against
whose rules the replication is tested, might simply prove to be
inadequate to processes of replication that are different in
nature. Indeed, if the logic implicit in the experience of
literacy were to authenticate semiotic processes characteristic
of the civilization of illiteracy, the Error message of
corruption would overrun the monitor. All that occurs in the
experience of networking and all that defines virtuality pertain
to a logical framework that is by no means a memetic replication
of the Aristotelian or some other logical system intrinsic to the
experience of literacy. Memes residing in the brain's neuronal
structure, as a pattern of pits on a CD- ROM, or in an HTML
(hypertext markup language) Web format can be replicated.
Interactions among minds correspond to a different dynamic realm,
the realm of their reciprocal identification.

Book Three

Language as Mediating Mechanism

Mention the word mediation today, or post it on the Internet.
Swarms of lawyers will come after you. From the many meanings
mediation has acquired over time, dispute resolution is the
practical activity that has appropriated the word. Nevertheless,
in its etymology, mediation attests to experiences that pre-date
lawyers as they pre- date the earliest attempt to introduce laws.

Mediation, along with heuristics, is definitory of the human
species. From all we know, nature is a realm of action and
reaction. The realm of human activity implies a third element,
an in-between, be this a tool, a word, a plan. This applies to
primitive experiences of self-constitution, as well as to
current embedded mediating activities: mediation of mediation ad
infinitum. In each mediation there is the potential for further
mediation. That is, the inserted third can be divided in turn. A
lever used to move a very heavy object can be supplemented by
another one, or two or more, all applied to the task at hand.
Each tool can progressively evolve into a series of tools. Each
individual called upon to mediate can call upon others to
perform a chain of related or unrelated mediations.

The same holds true for signs and language. Mediation is the
practical experience of reducing to manageable size a task that
is beyond the abilities of an individual or individuals
identified through the task. Mediation is a mapping from a
higher scale of complexity to a scale that the persons involved
in a task can handle. This chapter will examine various phases
of mediated human experiences. We shall examine at which
pragmatic junctures language and, subsequently, literacy provide
mediating functions. More important, we will define the
conditions that require mediations for which literacy is no
longer adequate.

Since tools, in their mediating function, will be frequently
brought into the argument, a distinction needs to be made from
the outset: Signs, language, artificial languages, and programs
(for computers and other devices) are all mediating entities.
What distinguishes these from tools is their caoability for
self-replication. They are, as much as humans constituting their
identity in semiotic processes, subject to evolutionary cycles
structurally similar to those of nature. Their evolution is, as
we know, much faster than genetic evolution. The genetic make-up
of the human species has changed relatively little, while the
mediating elements that substantially contributed to the
increase in human efficiency underwent many transformations. Some
of these are no longer evolutionary, but revolutionary, and mark
discontinuities. Genetic continuity is a background for
pragmatic discontinuity. The moments of discontinuity correspond
to threshold values in the scale of human activity. They regard
mediating devices and strategies as dynamic components of the
pragmatic framework.

The power of insertion

Self-constitution in mediating and mediated practical experiences
is different from self-constitution in direct forms of praxis.
In direct praxis, the wholeness of the being is externalized.
But it is the partial being-partial in respect to the human's
biological and intellectual reality-that is projected in mediated
practical experiences. The narrow, limited, and immediate scope
of direct human activity explains why no mediation, or only
accidental mediation (unintended mediation), characterizes the
pragmatic framework. In the long run, mediation results in the
severed relation between individuals and their social and
natural environments. As we shall see, this fact has
implications for literacy. A long chain of mediations separates
the working individual from the object to be worked upon, be
this object raw material, processed goods, thoughts, or other
experiences.

It is not easy to immediately realize the pervasiveness of
mediation and its effects on human activity and
self-constitution. People introduce all the intermediaries they
need in order to maintain efficiency. Because we notice only the
immediate layer with which we come into contact-the tool we use
or the object we act upon-we have difficulty in recognizing the
pervasiveness of mediation. The multitude of intermediaries
involved in fabricating one finished product is far beyond our
direct involvement.

Division, in the context of labor, means to break a task into
smaller parts that are easier to rationalize, understand, and
execute. Division engenders the specialization of each mediating
element. To specialize means to be involved in practical
experiences through which skills and knowledge pertinent to
activity segmented through labor division are acquired. Whether
division of physical work or of intellectual activity, at the
end of the process there is a large number of components which
have to be assembled. Even more important, the quantity of
pieces, the order in which various pieces come together, and the
intermediary sequences of checks and balances (if something does
not work, it is better to find out before the entire product is
assembled) are essential. All these constitute the integration
aspect, which requires the element of coordination through tools
and methods.

The segmentation of work in order to reach higher efficiency is
not arbitrary. The goal is to arrive at coherent units of
simpler work, which in some ways are like the letters of an
alphabet. In this model, production resembles writing different
words by combining available letters. Segmentation of work takes
place concomitant with the effort to conceive of tools
appropriate to each segment in order to ensure the desired
efficiency. In effect, to specialize means to be aware of and to
master tools that correspond to a step in the sequence leading
to the desired result-the final word, in keeping with our
example. Conversely, what sometimes looks like excessive
specialization in our day-e.g., in medicine, physics,
mathematics, electronics, computer science, transportation-is
the result of the propensity of each mediating element to
engender a need for further mediations, which reflect
expectations for efficiency. Simultaneously with the
differentiation of work, language changed, becoming itself more
differentiated.

The efficiency reached in specialization is higher than that of
direct action and of low levels of labor division. With each new
specialization of a mediating element, humans constitute a body
of practical knowledge, in the form of experience, that can be
used again and again. This body of knowledge reflects the
complexity of the task and the scale in which it is exercised.
For instance, stones (the Latin calcula) were used to represent
quantities (just as the early English used stone as a measure of
weight). Over the centuries, this practice led to the body of
knowledge known as calculus and to coherent applications in
various human endeavors. The physical presence of stones gave
way to easier methods of calculation: the abacus, as well as to
marks recorded on bone, shell, leather, and paper, to a number
system, and to symbols for numbers. The vector of change starts
at the materiality and heads towards the abstract-that is, from
objects to signs.

Computers were invented as a tool for calculation, as well as for
other activities. They are the result of the labor of
philosophers, logicians, mathematicians, and finally
technologists, who changed calculation from a physical to a
cognitive practical experience. Boolean logic, binary numbers,
and electronic gates are mediating elements that enhance the
effectiveness of calculation by high orders of magnitude. As
things stand today, computer technology has led to myriad
specialties: design and production of chips; information
processing at various levels; manufacture of components and
their integration as machines; networking; visualization
techniques; the creation of machine languages for rendering the
illiterate input, and on and on. This development exemplifies
the active character of each mediation, especially the open-
endedness of the mediation process.

As an insertion, mediation proves powerful also in terms of the
cognitive awareness it stimulates. Through mediating elements,
such as signs, language, tools, and even ideas, the individual
gets a different perspective on the practical experience. The
distance introduced through mediation, between actions and
results, is one of space-the lever, not the hand, touches the
stone to be moved-and duration-the time it takes to execute an
action. With each inserted third, i.e., with each mediation,
seeds are planted for what will eventually result in a totally
new category of practical experiences: the conception of plans.
The power of insertion is actually that of acquiring a sense and
a direction for the future.

Myth as mediating pre-text

Among the mediating elements mentioned so far, language performs
its role in a particular way. Tools (such as pulleys, levers,
gears, etc.) extend the arms or the legs, that is, the human
body; language extends the coordinating capability of humans.
Words, no matter how well articulated, will not turn the stone or
lift the trunk of the fallen tree. They can be used to describe
the problem, to enlist help, to discuss how the task can be
accomplished, to render intelligible the sequence of
accomplishing it. Once writing was developed, coordination was
extended to apply from those physically present to people who
could read, or to whom a text could be read if one did not have
reading skills.

Language is in extension and succession of the pragmatic phase
of immediate and direct appropriation of objects. As Leonard
Bloomfield-probably a bit hasty in his generalization-observed,
"...the division of labor (...) is due to language." Although
different in nature from physical tools, language is
instrumental: It is applied on something and embodies
characteristics of human beings constituted in a practical
experience that made language possible and necessary.

The mediating nature of early words and early articulated
thoughts derived from their practical condition: medium for
self-constitution (the voice externalizes the anatomy pertinent
to producing and hearing sounds), and medium of exchange of
experience (pertinent to nature or to others in the group). Early
words are a record of the self-awareness of the human, denoting
body parts and elementary actions. They also reflect the
relational nature of the practical experience of those
constituting viable groups. Researchers infer this from words,
identified in proto-languages, that point to an other, or to
coalitions, or to danger. What distinguished words from animal
sounds was their coherence in extending the practical experience
of appropriating a uniform survival strategy.

Cave paintings, always regarded as a sequence of animal
representations, constitute what can be called a coherent image
of a small universe of human life. They are an inventory of a
sort-of fauna as opposed to humans, and as a reference to
animals different from humans-and a statement regarding the
importance of each kind of animal to human beings. By relating
animals and drawings of man and woman, they also show that there
is a third element to be considered: incipient implied symbolism.
This is not to say that we have language, even less a visual
language, articulated in the Paleolithic. But at Lascaux, Niaux,
Altamira, and at the caves in northern China, in images
preserved in the caves along the Lena River in Russia, there are
some patterns, such as the co-presence of bison and horses, and
the hinted association with male and female, for example, which
show that the visual can go beyond the immediate and suggest a
frame of work with mytho-magical elements.

Indeed, myths are singular mediating entities. They convey
experience and preserve it in oral societies. Magic is also a
mediating element, metaphysical in nature. Magic, in the
pre-literacy context, inserts, between humans and everything they
cannot understand, control, or tame, something (actions, words,
objects) that stands for the practical implications of this
failure. An amulet, for example, stands for the lack of
understanding of what it takes to be protected from evil forces.
Spells and gestures intended to scare away demons belong to the
same phenomenon. Though not without purpose, magic is action
with no immediate practical purpose, triggered by events
language could not account for. Myth is a pre-text for action
with a practical, experiential purpose. Each myth contains rules
for successful activity.

The context in which language, as a complex sign system, was
structured was also the context of social mediation: division of
social functions and integration in a cohesive social structure.
In syncretic forms of social life, with low efficiency, and
limited self-consciousness, there is little need for or
possibility of mediation. Once human nature was constituted in
the reality of practical, mytho-magical relations, both labor
division and mediation became part of the new human experience.
Tools for plowing, processing skins, and sharing experience (in
visual or verbal form) kept the human subject close to the
object of work or human relation. It is probably more in respect
to the unknown and unpredictable that mediation, via priests and
shamans in various rituals, was used in forms of magical
practice. Cave paintings, no less than cuneiform, and later
phonetic writing, constituted intermediaries inserted in the
world in which human beings asserted their presence or
questioned the presence of others.

The centralized state, which is a late form of social
organization, the church, and schools are all expressions of the
same need to introduce in a world of differences elements with
uniformizing and integrating power. What we today call politics
simply belongs to the self-constitution of the individual as
member of the politeia, the community. By extension, politics
means to effectively participate in the life of the community.
The nature of this participation changed enormously over time. It
started as participation in magic and ritual, and it evolved in
participation in symbolic forms, such as mancipatio, conventions
embodied in normative acts. In the framework of participation,
we can mention goal determination and forms of organization and
representation, as well as the payment of taxes to support the
mediators of this activity. At the beginning, participation was
an issue of survival; and survival, of natural condition,
remained the unwritten rule of social life for a very long time.
While in oral language there is no mediating element to preserve
the good and the right, in written language, law mediates and
justice, as much as God (actually a plurality of gods and
goddesses) or wisdom, are inserted in community affairs.

Differentiation and coordination

Mediation also implies breaking the immediate connection, to
escape the domination of the present-shared time and space-and
to discover relations characteristic of adjacency, i.e.,
neighboring in time and space. Adjacency can be in respect to
the past, as expressed through the practice of keeping burial
records. It can also be in respect to the future. The magic
dimension of the ritual focused on desired things-weather, game,
children-exemplifies this aspect. The notion of adjacency can
pertain also to neighboring territories, inhabited by others
involved in similar or slightly different practical forms of
experience. Regardless of the type of adjacency, what is
significant is the element that separates the immediate from the
mediated. The expanding horizon of life required means to
assimilate adjacency in the experience of continuous human
self-constitution. Language was among such means and became even
more effective when a medium for storing and
disseminating-writing-was established. In orality-dominated
social life, opinion was the product of language activity, and
it had to be immediate. In writing, truth was sought and
preserved. Accordingly, logic centered around the true-false
distinction.

Literate societies are societies which accept the value of
speaking, writing, and reading, and which operate under the
assumption that literacy can accomplish a unifying function.
Mediation and the associated strategy of integration relied on
language for differentiation of tasks and for coordination of
resulting activities and products. Language projects both a
sense of belonging to and living in a context of life. It
embodies characteristics of the individuals sharing perceptions
of space and time integrated in their practical experiences and
expressed in vocabulary, grammar, and idioms, and in the logic
that language houses.

Language is simultaneously a medium of uniformity and a means of
differentiation. Within continuously constituted language,
individual expression and various non-standard uses of language
(literary and poetic, probably the most notorious of these) are
a fact of life. In the practical constitution of language for
religious or judicial purposes, or in order to give historic
accounts of scientific phenomena, expression is not uniform.
Neither is interpretation. As we know from early attempts at
history, there is little difference between languages used to
describe relations of ownership (of animals, land, shelter) and
texts on astronomy or navigation, for instance. The lunar
calendar and the practical experience of navigation determined
the coherence of writings on the subject. There is very little
difference in the work of people who accounted for numbers of
animals and numbers of stars. Once differentiation of work took
place, language allowed for expressions of differences. Behind
this change of language is the change of the people involved in
various aspects of social life, i.e., their projection into a
world appropriated through practical experiences based on the
human ability to differentiate-between useful and harmful,
pleasant and unpleasant, similar and dissimilar.

In order to distinguish the level at which a language is
practiced, people become aware of language's practical
consequences, of its pragmatic context. Plato's dialogues can be
read as poetry, as philosophy, or as testimony to the state of
language-based practical experiences in use at the time and
place in which he was active. What is not clear is how a person
operating in and constituting himself in the language identifies
the level of an oral or written text, and how the person
interprets it according to the context in which it was written.
The question is of more than marginal importance to our
understanding of how Plato related to language or how people
today relate to language: either by overstating its importance
or by ignoring it to the extent of consciously discarding
language, or certain aspects of it.

Here is where the issue of mediation becomes critical. The
inserted third- person, text, image, theory-should understand
both the language of the reader and the language of the text.
More generally, the third should at any instance understand the
language of the entities it mediates between. States, as
political entities, are constituted on this assumption; so are
legal systems, religion, and education. Each such mediating
entity introduces elements into the social structure that will
finally be expressed in language and assimilated as accepted
value. They will become the norm. The process is sometimes
extremely tight. Retroaction from mediating function to
language and back to action entails progressive fine-tuning,
never-ending in fact, since human beings are in continuous
biological and social change.

Mediations lead to segmentation. The coordination of mediations
is necessary in order to recover the integrality (wholeness) of
the human being in the output of the practical experience.
Mediations, although coordinated by language or other mediating
means, and subject to integration in the outcome of activity,
introduce elements of tension, which in turn require new
mediation and thus progressive specialization. When the sequence
of mediations expands, the complexity of integration can easily
exceed the degree of complexity of the initial task. The
efficiency reached is higher than that of direct action or of
low levels of labor division. With each new mediation, the human
being constitutes a body of practical knowledge that can be used
again and again. The necessary integrative dimension of
mediations makes the strategy of using mediating entities, along
with the appropriate coordination mechanism, socially relevant
and economically rewarding. One can speak of mediation between
rational and emotional aspects of human life, between thought
and language, language and images, thought and means of
expression, communication and signification. Regardless of its
particular aspect, mediation is an experience of cognitive
leverage.

Integration and coordination revisited

From the entire subject of mediation, two questions seem more
relevant to our understanding of literacy and of its dynamics:
1.

Why, at a certain moment in human evolution, does literacy become
the main mediating instrument? 2.

Under which circumstances is language's mediating function
assumed by other sign systems? Let us answer the questions in
the order they are posed.

Language is not the only mediating instrument people use. In the
short account given so far, other mediating entities, such as
images, movements, odors, gestures, objects (stones, twigs,
bones, artifacts) were mentioned. Also mentioned was the fact
that these are quite close to what they actually refer to (as
indexical signs), or to what they depict based on a relation of
similarity (as iconic signs). However, even at this level of
reduced generality and limited coherence and consistency, human
beings can express themselves beyond the immediate and direct.

The cave paintings of the Paleolithic age should be mentioned
again in this respect. The immediate is the cave itself. It is
shelter, and its physical characteristics are perceived in
direct relation to its function. The surprise comes in noticing
how these characteristics become part of the practical
experience of sharing what is not present by involving a
mediating element. The drawings are completions, continuations,
extensions of the ridges of the stone walls of the cave. This is
not a way of speaking. A better quality photograph, not to
mention the actual drawings in the caves, reveals how the lines
of the relief are extended into the drawing and made part of
them. The first layer of exchange of information among people is
comparison, focused on similarities, then on differences. We
infer from here that, before drawing-a practical experience
involving a major cognitive step-the human beings seeking shelter
in the cave noticed how a certain natural configuration-cloud,
plant, rock formation, the trail left by erosion-looked like the
head or tail of an animal, or like the human head, for example.

The completion of this look-alike form-when such a completion was
physically possible-was an instance of practical self-definition
and of shared experience. When the act of completion was
physically performed, probably by accident at the beginning, the
immediate natural (the cave) was appropriated for a new function,
something other than merely shelter. The shape of the wings of
galleries in the Altamira or Niaux caves suggests analogies to
the male-female distinction, a sexual identifier but also a first
step towards distinctions based on perceived differences. The
selection of a certain cave from among others was the result of
an effort, no matter how primitive, to express. Together, this
selected physical structure and the added elements became a
statement regarding a very limited universe of existence and its
shared distinctions. Further on, the animals depicted, the
sequence, the addition of mytho-magical signs (identification of
more general notions such as hand, wound, or different animals)
make the painted cave an expression of an inserted thought about
the world, that is, about the limited environment constituting
the world. In the case of Egyptian pictographic writing, we know
that images were used as mediating devices in such sophisticated
instances as the burial of pharaohs and in their life after
death. In the universe of ideographic languages (such as Chinese
and Japanese), the mediating function of images constituting the
written is different. Combinations of ideograms constitute new
ideograms. Accordingly, self-constitution in language takes over
experiences of combining different things in order to obtain
something different from each of the combined ingredients. In
some ways, the added efficiency facilitated by mediations was
augmented by formal qualities that would eventually establish the
realm of aesthetic practical experiences. This should come as no
surprise, since we know from many practical experiences or the
remote past that formal qualities often translate into higher
functionality.

Language use, which opened access to generality and abstraction,
allowed humans to insert elements supporting an optimized
exchange of information in the structure of social relations,
and to participate in the conventions of social life. There is
not only the trace of the immediate experience in a word, there
is also the shared convention of mediated interactions.
Language, in its development over time, is thus a very
difficult-to-decode dynamic history of common praxis. We
understand this from the way the use of the ax, millstone, or
animal sacrifice expanded, along with the appropriate vocabulary
and linguistic expression, from the universe of the Semites to
the Indo-Europeans. Reconstructed vocabulary from the region of
the Hittite kingdom testifies to the landscape (there are many
words for mountains), to trees (the Hittites distinguished
various species), to animals (leopard, lion, monkey), and to
tools (wheel- based means of transportation).

Language is not only a reflection of the past, but also a program
for future work. The nuclei of agriculture where language
emerged (in China, Africa, southeastern Europe) were also
centers of dissemination of practical experience. Writing, even
when it only records the past, does it for the future. Progress
in writing resulted in better histories, but moreover in new
avenues for future praxis. In the ideal of literacy, the
individual states a program of unifying scope in a social reality
of diverse means and diverse goals. Literacy as such is an
insertion between a rather complex social structure, nature, and
among the members of society. Within a culture, it is a generic
code which facilitates dialogue among the members of the literate
community and among communities of different languages. Its
scope is multidimensional. Its condition is one of mediation.

A major mediating element in the rationale of industrial
society, literacy fulfilled the function of a coordinating
mechanism for mediations made otherwise than through language,
along the assembly line, for instance. Obviously conceived on the
linear, sequential model of time and language, the assembly line
optimally embodied requirements characteristic of complex
integration. Once the reductionist practice of dividing work
into smaller, specialized activities became necessary, the
results of these activities had to be integrated in the final
product. At the level of technology of industrial society,
literacy-based human practical experiences of self-constitution
defined the scope and character of labor division,
specialization, integration, and coordination.

Life after literacy

The answer to the second question posed a few pages back is not
an exercise in prophecy. (I'll leave that to the priests of
futurology.) This is why the question concerns circumstances
under which the dominant mediating function of language can be
assumed by other sign systems. The discussion involves a moving
target because today the notion of literacy is a changing
representation of expectations and requirements. We know that
there is a before to literacy; and this before pertains to
mediations closer to the natural human condition. Of course, we
can, and should, ask whether there is an after, and what its
characteristics might be. Complexities of human activity and the
need to ensure higher efficiency explain, at least partially,
complexities of interhuman relations and the need to ensure some
form of human integration.

What this first assessment somehow misses is the fact that, from
a certain moment on, mediation becomes an activity in itself.
Means become an end in themselves. When individuals constituted
themselves in structurally very similar experiences, mediation
took place through the insertion of rather homogeneous objects,
such as arrows, bows, levers, and tools for cutting and piercing.
Interaction was a matter of co-presence. Language resulted in
the context of diversification of practical human experiences.
Self-constitution in language captured the permanence and the
perspective of the whole into which variously mediated components
usually come together. Later on, literacy freed humans from the
requirement of co-presence. Language's mediating capabilities
relied on space and time conventions built into language
experience over a very long time and interiorized by literate
societies.

Characteristics of writing specific to different notational
systems resulted from characteristics of practical experiences.
Literacy only indirectly reflects the encoding of experience in
a medium of expression and communication. Moreover, the shift
from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of partial
literacies involves the encoding of the experience in media that
are no longer appropriate for literate expression. We write to
tape or to digital storage. We publish on networks. We convert
texts into machine- readable formats. We edit in non-linear
fashion. We operate on configurations or on mixed data types
(that constitute multimedia). Experiences encoded in such media
reflect their own characteristics in what is expressed and how it
is expressed.

Although there are vast qualitative differences in linguistic
performance within a literate society, a common denominator-the
language reified in the technology of literacy-is established.
The expectation is a minimum of competence, supposed to meet
integration requirements at the workplace, the understanding of
religion, politics, literature, and the ability to communicate
and comprehend communication. But as literacy became a socially
desirable characteristic, language became a tool-at least in
some professions and trades-and the command of language became a
marketable skill. For example, during periods of greater
political activity in classical Greece and Rome, the practical
experience of rhetoric was a discipline in itself. Orators,
skilled in persuasion, for which language is necessary, made a
career out of language use. The written texts of the Middle Ages
were also intended to foster the rhetorical skills of the
clergy in presenting arguments. In our time, speechwriters and
ghostwriters have become the language professionals, and so have
priests, prophets, and evangelists (of all religions).

But what is only an example of how language can become an end in
itself has become a very significant development in human
praxis. Not only in professions such as expository writing (for
journalists, essayists, politicians, and scientists), poetry,
fiction, dramaturgy, communications, but also in the practice of
law (normative, enforcement, judicial), politics, economics,
sociology, and psychology has language become a principal tool.
Nevertheless, the language used in such endeavors is not the
standard, national, or regional language, but a specialized
subset, marginally understood by the literate population at
large. While the grammar governing such sub- languages is, with
some exceptions, the grammar of the language from which they are
derived, the vocabulary is more appropriate to the subject
matter. Moreover, while sharing language conventions and the
general frame of language, these sub-languages project an
experience so particular that it cannot be properly understood
and interpreted without some translation and commentary. And
each commentary (on a law, a new scientific theory, a work of
art or poetry) is yet another insertion of a third, which
refers to the initial object sometimes so indirectly that the
relation might be difficult to track and the meaning is lost.

A similar process can be identified in our present relation to
the physical environment. Many things mediate between us and the
natural environment: our homes, clothes, the food processing
industry. Even natural artifacts, such as gardens, lakes, or
water channels, are a buffer against nature, an insertion between
us and nature. Constituted in our language are experiences of
survival and adaptation: the vocabulary of hunting, fishing,
agriculture, animal husbandry, coping with changes in weather
and climate, and coping with natural catastrophes such as floods
and earthquakes. The mediating function of language is different
here than on the production line.

Mediated practice leads to distributed knowledge along successive
or parallel mediations that are not at all literacy-based or
literacy-dependent. Within the global scale of human experience,
it makes sense to use a global perspective (of resources,
factors affecting agriculture, navigation, etc.) in order to
maximize locally distributed efforts. For example: people
involved in various activities must rely on persons specialized
to infer from observation (of plants, trees, animals, water
levels in rivers and lakes, wind direction, changes in the
earth's surface, biological, chemical, atmospheric factors) and
generate predictions regarding natural events (drought, plant or
animal disease, floods, weather patterns, earthquakes). What we
acknowledge here is the new scale of the practical experience of
meteorology, as well as methods of collecting and distributing
information through vast networks of radio, television, and
weather services. Both the means for acquiring the information
and for disseminating it are visual. Local networks subscribe to
the service and receive computer-generated maps on which clouds,
rain, or snow are graphically depicted. The equations of weather
forecasting are obviously different from local observations of
wind direction, precipitation, dew point, etc. The chaotic
component captured and the necessity to visually display
information as it changes over time are not reducible to
equations or direct observation. It is hard to imagine having
weather predicted through very mediated meteorological practice,
and even harder to imagine forecasting earthquakes or volcanic
activity from remote stations, such as satellites. Still,
weather patterns display dynamic characteristics that made the
metaphor of the butterfly causing a hurricane the most
descriptive explanation of how small changes-caused by the
flapping of the butterfly's wings-can result in impressive
consequences-the hurricane. The language of the forecast only
translates into common language the data (the majority in visual
form) that represents our new understanding of natural
phenomena.

There is yet another aspect, which is related to the status of
knowledge and our ways of acquiring, transmitting, and testing
it. Our knowledge of phenomena such as nuclear fusion,
thermonuclear reaction, stellar explosions, genes and genetic
codes, and complex dynamic systems is no longer predominantly
based on inductions from observed facts to theories explaining
such facts. It seems that we project theories, founded on
abstract thinking, onto physical reality and turn these theories
into means of adapting the world to our goals or needs, which
are much more complex than survival. Memetics is but the more
recent example in this respect. It projects the abstract models
of natural evolution into culture, focusing on replicative
processes for the production of phenomena such as ideas,
behavioral rules, ways of thinking, beliefs, and norms.
Mediation probably qualifies for a memetic approach, too.
Theories require a medium of expression, and this is represented
by new languages, such as mathematical and logical formalisms,
chemical notation, computer graphics, or discourse in some
pseudo- language. The formalism of memetics reminds many of us of
formal languages, as well as of the shorthand used in genetics.
The goal is to describe whatever we want to describe through
computational functions or through computable expressions.

Since experiential space and time are housed in our language, we
can account for only a three-dimensional space and a homogeneous
time that has only one direction-from past to future.
Nevertheless, we can conceive of multidimensional spaces and of
non-homogeneous time. To describe the same in language,
especially through literate expression, is not only inadequate,
but also raises obstacles. With the advent of digital
technology, a language of two letters-zero and one-and the
grammar of Boolean logic, we have stepped into a new age of
language, no longer the exclusive domain of the human being.
Such a language introduces new levels of mediation, which allow
for the use of machines by means of sentences, i.e., sequences
of encoded commands triggered by a text written in a language
other than natural language. Physical contact is substituted by
language, inserted in processes of complexity impossible to
control directly or even to relate to in forms characteristic of
previous scientific and technological praxis.

Indeed, there are instances when the speed of a process and the
requirement of sequencing make direct human control not only
impossible, but also undesirable. This mediation is then
continued by sequences automatically generated by machines, i.e.,
mediation generating new mediation. Although the structure of
all these new languages (which describe phenomena, support
programming, or control processes) is inspired by the structure
of natural language, they project experiences which are not
possible in the universe of standard language. New forms of
interaction, higher speeds, and higher precision become
available when such powerful cognitive tools are designed as
custom-made instruments for advancing our understanding of
phenomena that evade analytic or even small-scale synthetic
frameworks.

The discussion of mediation brought up other sign systems that
assume the mediating function characteristic of literacy. Not
only artificial languages-instruments of knowledge and action,
new pragmatic dimensions, in fact-but also natural languages are
increasingly used in a mediating capacity. I would submit to the
reader the observation that the visual, primarily, and other
sensory information are recuperated and used in ways that change
human experience. Where words no longer suffice, visualized
images of the unseen constitute a mediating language, allowing us
to understand phenomena otherwise inaccessible-the micro- or
remote universe, for instance. Touch, smell, and sound can be
articulated and introduced as statements in a series of events
for which written and spoken language are no longer adequate.
Virtual reality is synthesized as a valid simulation of real
reality. Virtual realities can be experienced if we simply put
on body-sensitive gloves, headgear (goggles and earphones),
special footwear, or a whole suit. Powerful computer graphics,
with a refresh rate high enough to maintain the illusion of
space and motion, make a virtual space available. Within this
space, one's own image can become a partner of dialogue or
confrontation. Journeys outside one's body and inside one's
imagination are experienced not only in advanced laboratories,
but also in the new entertainment centers that appeal to
children as well as adults. Such projections of oneself into
something else represent one of the most intriguing forms of
interaction in the networked world. The experience of
self-constitution as an avatar on the Internet is no longer one
of a unique self, but of multiples.

Language guards the entrance to the experience, but once the
human subject is inside, it has only limited power or
significance. Mediations other than through language dominate
here, invoking all our senses and deep levels of our existence,
for which literacy produced only psychoanalytic rhetoric. In
other words, we notice that while language constituted a
projection of the human being in the conventions of abstract
systems of expression, representation, and communication, it also
exercised an impoverishing function in that it excluded the
wealth of senses-possibly including common sense-and the signs
addressing them. Language made of us one monolithic entity. In
the meantime, we have come to realize that the transitions
between our many inner states can be a source of new
experiences.

The answer to the question regarding alternatives to literacy is
that part of the mediating function of language has extended to
specialized languages, and to sign systems other than verbal
language, when those systems are better adapted to the
complexities of heretofore unencountered challenges. Virtual
reality is not a linear reality but an integrating, interacting
reality of non-linear relations between what we do and what
results. Among these newly acquired, different mediating
entities, relations and interdependencies are continuously
established and changed at an ever faster pace. It appears that
once human activity moves from the predominantly object level to
the meta condition (one of self-awareness and
self-interpretation), we have several languages and several
contingent literacies instead of a dominant language and
dominant literacy. When writing is replaced by multimedia along
the communication channels of the networked world, we seem to
enjoy rediscovering ourselves as much richer entities than we
knew or were told about through literate mediation.

The entire transition is the result of pragmatic needs resulting
from the fundamental change in continuous human
self-constitution and the scale in which it is exercised.
Mediations break activities into segments that are more intensive
and shorter than the cycle from which they were extracted.
Therefore, mediation results in the perception of the reality of
faster rhythms and of time contraction. Massive distribution of
tasks, finer levels of parallelism, and more sophisticated
integrating and coordinating mechanisms, result in new pragmatic
possibilities, for which literacy is not suitable, and even
counter-productive. This entire transition comprises another
vector of change: from individual to communal survival, from
direct work to highly mediated praxes, from local to global to
universal, from the visible to the invisible of macro and
micro-universe, from the real to the virtual. Mediation, in its
newest digital forms of enmeshed nature and evolving culture,
causes boundaries to disappear between the elements involved in
practical experiences of our self-constitution.



Literacy, Language and Market

Markets are mediating machines. In our time, the notion of a
machine is very different from that of the industrial Machine
Age associated with the pragmatics of the civilization of
literacy. Today, the term machine is evocative of software rather
than hardware. Machine comprises input and output, process,
control mechanisms, and the expectation of predictable
functioning. Here is where our difficulties start. At best,
markets appear as erratic to us. Market prediction seems to be an
oxymoron. Every time experts come up with a formula, the market
acts in a totally new manner.

An amazing number of transactions, ranging from bargaining at a
garage sale to multi-prong deals in derivatives, continuously
subject the outcome of practical experiences of human
self-constitution to the test of market efficiency. There is
nothing that can escape this test: ideas, products, individuals,
art, sports, entertainment. Like a tadpole, the market seems to
consume itself in transactions. At times, they appear so
esoteric to us that we cannot even fathom what the input of this
machine is and what the output. But we all expect the charming
prince to emerge from the ugly frog!

What can be said, without giving away the end of the story too
early, is that the functioning of this growing mechanism of
human self-evaluation could never take place at its current
dynamics and size in the pragmatic framework of literacy. All
over the world, market processes associated with previous
pragmatic frameworks-barter is one of them-are relived in
bazaars and shopping malls. But if anyone wants to see
practical experiences of the civilization of illiteracy unfolding
in their quasi-pure manner, one has only to look at the stock
market and commodities exchanges and auctions conducted over the
Internet. Moreover, one must try to envision those invisible,
distributed, networked transactions in which it is impossible to
define who initiated a transaction, continued another one, or
brought a deal to an end, and based on what criteria. They, too,
seem to have a life of their own.

Mediating machine also evokes the notion of machine as program.
Although some stockbrokers have second thoughts about how their
role is diminished through the mediation of entities that cannot
speak or write, programmed trading on the various stock
exchanges is a matter of course. Computational economists and
market researchers, who design programs based on biological
analogies, genetics, and dynamic system models, can testify to
the truth of this statement.

Preliminaries

In viewing the market in its relation to the civilization of
literacy, and that of illiteracy, we must first establish a
conceptual frame of reference for discussing the specific role
of language as a mediating element characteristic of the market.
In particular, we should examine the functions filled by
literacy in allowing people to diversify markets and make them
more effective. When the limits of literacy's mediating
capabilities are reached, its efficiency becomes subject to
doubt. This does not happen outside the market, as some
scholars, educators, and politicians would have us believe, or
want to happen. It is within the market that this stage is
acknowledged, rendering intellectual travail itself a product
negotiated in the market, as literacy itself already is.

To establish the desired conceptual frame of reference, I take
the perspective of market as a sign process through which people
constitute themselves. Consequently, transactions can be seen as
extensions of human biology: products of our work embody the
structural characteristics of our natural endowment and address
needs and expectations pertinent to these characteristics. These
products are extensions of our personality and our culture, as
constituted in expectations and values characteristic of the
human species becoming self-aware and defining goals for the
future. With language, and more so with literacy, markets become
interpretive affairs, projective instantiations of what we are,
in the process of becoming what we must be as the human scale
reaches yet another threshold. Human self-constitution through
markets reflects attained levels of productive and creative
power, as well as goals pertinent initially to survival, later
to levels of well-being, and now to the complexity of the global
scale of current and future human activity.

From barter to the trading of commodities futures and stock
options, from money to the cashless society, markets constitute
frameworks for higher transaction efficiency, often equated with
profit. The broad arguments, such as the market as semiosis,
often stumble upon specific aspects: Semiosis or not, practical
experience or not, how come a rumor sends a company's stock into
turmoil while an audited report goes unnoticed? The hidden
structure of the processes discussed throughout this book might
have more to do with explanations and predictive models than the
many clarifications empowered by academic aura.

Products 'R' Us

The reality of the human being as sign-using animal (zoon
semiotikon) corresponds to the fact that we project our
individual reality into the reality of our existence through
semiotic means. In the market, the three entities of sign
processes meet: that which represents (representamen), that
which is represented (object), and the process of interpretation
(interpretant). These terms can be defined in the market
context. The representamen is the repertory of signs that are
identified in the market. These can be utility (usefulness of a
certain product), rarity, quantity, type of material used to
process the merchandise, imagination applied to the conception
and creation of a product, and the technology used and the
energy consumed in the manufacturing process, for example.
People can be attracted by the most unexpected characteristics
of merchandise, and can be enticed to develop addictions to
color, form, brand name, odor. Sometimes the representamen is
price, which is supposed to reflect the elements listed above,
as well as other pricing criteria: a trend, a product's sexiness;
a buyer's gullibility, ego, or lack of economic sense. The price
represents the product, although not always appropriately. The
object is the product itself, be it a manufactured item, an
idea, an action, a process, a business, or an index. Except for
the market based on exchange of object for object, every known
market object is represented by some of its characteristics.
That these representations might be far removed from the object
only goes to show how many mediating entities participate in the
market.

Nothing is a sign unless interpreted as a sign. Someone has to be
able to conjure, or endow, meaning and constitute something (an
idea, object, or action) as part of one's self-constitution.
This is the interpretant-understood as process, because
interpretations can go on ad infinitum. For example: bread is
food; an academic title acknowledges that a course of study was
successfully completed; computers can be used as better
typewriters or for data mining. As a sign, bread can stand for
everything that it embodies: our daily bread; a certain culture
of nourishment; the knowledge involved in cultivating and
processing grain, in making dough, building the ovens, observing
the baking process. Symbolic interpretation, relating to myth or
religion, is also part of the interpretation of bread as a sign.
Interpretation of an academic title follows a similar path:
educational background (university attended, title conferred),
context (there are streets on which mostly lawyers and doctors
live), function (how the title affects one's activity), and
future expectations (a prospective Nobel Prize winner). Likewise
with computers: Intel inside, or Netscape browser, networked or
stand-alone, a Big Blue product, or one put together in the back
alleys of some far Eastern country.

According to the premise that nothing is a sign unless
considered as such, interpretation is equivalent to the
constitution of human beings as the sign, represented through
their product. A product is read as being useful; a product can
be liked or disliked; a product can generate needs and
expectations. Self-constituting individuals validate themselves
(succeed or fail) through their activity as represented by the
product of this activity, be it tangible or intangible, a
concrete object, a process (mediations are included here), an
idea. These readings are also part of the process of
interpretation. A conglomerate of the readings mentioned above is
the mug shot of the abstract consumer, behind whom are all the
others who constitute their individuality through the
transactions that make up the market. A used car or computer
salesman, a small retailer, and a university professor identify
themselves in different ways in and through the market. Each is
represented by some characteristic feature of his or her work.
Each is interpreted in the market as reliable, competent, or
creative in view of the pragmatics of the transaction: Some
people need a good used car, some a cheap, used computer, others
a leather wallet, others an education or counsel. The forms of
interpretation in the market are diverse and range from simple
observation of the market to direct involvement in market
mechanisms through products, exchange of goods, or legislation.

As a place where the three elements-what is marketed (object),
language or signs of marketing (representamen), and
interpretation (leading to a transaction or not)-come together,
the market can be direct or mediated, real or symbolic, closed or
open, free or regulated. A produce market, a supermarket, a
factory outlet, and a shopping mall are examples of real market
space. The market takes on mediated, conventional, and symbolic
aspects in the case where, for example, the product is not
displayed in its three-dimensional reality but substituted by an
image, a description, or a promise. Mail-order houses, and the
stock and futures markets belong here, even though they are
derived from direct, real markets. Once upon a time, Wall Street
was surrounded by various exchanges filled with the odors,
tastes, and textures of the products brought in by ships. It is
now a battery of machines and traders who read signs on order
slips or computer screens but know nothing of the product that is
traded.

In our day, the stock market has become a data processing center.
Pressures caused by the demand for optimal market efficiency
were behind this transformation. Nevertheless, the time involved
in the new market semiosis is as real and necessary as the time
of transactions in the market based on barter or on direct
negotiations; that is, only the amount of time needed to ensure
the cooperation of the three elements mentioned above, as human
beings constitute themselves in the pragmatic context of the
market. The pragmatic context affects market cycles and the speed
at which market transactions take place. This is why a deal in a
bazaar takes quite a bit of time, and digital transactions
triggered by programmed trading are complete before anyone
realizes their consequences. Market regulations always affect the
dynamics of mediations.

The language of the market

Language signs and other signs are mediating devices between the
object represented in the market and the interpretant-the human
beings constituting themselves in the process of interpretation,
including satisfaction of their needs and desires. No matter
what type of market we refer to, it is a place and time of
mediations. What defines each of the known markets (barter,
farmers' markets and fairs, highly regulated markets, so-called
free markets, underground markets) is the type of mediation more
than the merchandise or the production process. Of significance
is the dynamic structure involved. It is obvious that if
anything anticipated our current experience of the market, it
was the ritual.

Objects (things, money, ideas, process), the language used to
express the object, and the interpretation, leading or not to a
transaction, constitute the structural invariable in every type
of socio-economic environment. In the so-called free market
(more an abstraction than a reality) and in rigidly planned
economies, the relation among the three elements is the
variable, not the elements themselves. Interpretation in a given
context can be influenced in the way associations are made
between the merchandise and its representations.

The history of language is rich in testimony to commerce, from
the very simple to the very complex forms of the latter.
Language captures ownership characteristics, variations in
exchange rates, the ever-expanding horizon of life facilitated
through market transactions. It is within this framework that
written records appear, thus justifying the idea that, together
with practical experiences of human self-constitution, market
processes characteristic of a limited scale of exchange of values
are parents to notation, to writing and to literacy.

Expectations of efficiency are instantiated, within a given scale
of human activity, in market quantities and qualities. Nobody
really calculates whether rice production covers the needs of
humankind at any given instance, or if enough entertainment is
produced for the billions living on Earth today. The immense
complexity of the market machine is reflected in its dynamics,
which at a certain level of its evolution could no longer be
handled by, or made subject to the rules and expectations of
literacy. Market processes follow a pattern of self-organization
under the guise of many parameters, some of which we can
control, others that escape our direct influence upon them.
Languages of extreme specialization are part of market dynamics
in the sense that they offer practical contexts for new types of
transactions. Netconomy started as a buzzword, joining net,
network, and economy. In less than one year, the term was used
to describe a distributed commercial environment where extremely
efficient transactions make up an increasing part of the global
economy. But the consequences of the Netconomy are also local:
distribution channels can be eliminated, with the effect of
accelerating commercial cycles and lowering prices. Computers,
cars, software, and legal services are more frequently acquired
through the virtual shops of the Netconomy.

To see how the practical experience of the market freed itself
from language and literacy, let us now examine the market
process as semiosis in its various aspects. As already stated,
in trading products, people trade themselves. Various qualities
of the product (color, smell, texture, style, design, etc.), as
well as qualities of its presentation (advertising, packaging,
vicinity to other products, etc.), and associated characteristics
(prestige, ideology) are among the implicit components of this
trade. Sometimes the object per se-a new dress, a tool, wine, a
home-is less important than the image it projects. Secondary
functions, such as aesthetics, pleasure, conformity, override the
function of fulfilling needs. In market semiosis, desire proves
to be just as important, if not more so, than need. In a large
part of the world, self-constitution is no longer just a
question of survival, but also one of pleasure. The higher the
semiotic level of the market in a context of decadent plenty-the
number of sign systems involved, their extent and variety-the
more obvious the deviations from the rule of merely satisfying
needs.

Human activity that aims at maintaining life is very different
from the human activity that results in surplus and
availability for market transaction. In the first case, a
subsistence level is preserved; in the second, new levels of
self-constitution are made possible. Surplus and exchange,
initially made possible through the practical experience of
agriculture, constituted a scale of human activity that required
human constitution in signs, sign systems, and finally language.
Surplus can be used in many ways, for which sign and later
language differentiation became progressively necessary.
Rituals, adornment, war, religion, means of accumulation, and
means of persuasion are examples of differentiations. All these
uses pertained to settled patterns of human interaction and led
to products that were more than mere physical entities to be
consumed. To repeat, they were projections of individual
self-constitution.

Behind each product is a cycle of conception, manufacture, and
trade, and an attached understanding of utility and permanence.
With the advent of writing and reading, from its rudimentary
forms to the forms celebrated in literacy, and its
participation in the constitution of the market, the avenue was
opened towards using what was produced in surplus to cover the
need to maintain life, so that more surplus could be generated.
The market of merchandise, services, slaves, and ideas was
completed by the market of salaried workers, earning money for
their life's salt, as Roman soldiers did. These belong to the
category of human beings constituting themselves in the
pragmatic framework of an activity in which production (work) and
the means of production separated. The language through which
workers constituted themselves underwent a similar
differentiation. As work became more alienated from the product,
a language of the product also came into being.

The language of products

Exchanging goods pertinent to survival corresponds to a scale of
human praxis that guarantees coherence and homogeneity. People
who have excess grain but need eggs, people who offer meat
because they need fruit or tools, do not require instructions
for using what they obtain in exchange for what they offer. Small
worlds, loosely connected, constitute the universe of their
existence. The rather slow rhythm of production cycles equals
that of natural cycles. A relatively uniform lifestyle results
from complementary practical experiences only slightly
differentiated in structure. Together, these characteristics
constitute a framework of direct sharing of experience. This
market, as limited as it is, forms part of the social mechanism
for sharing experience.

Today's markets, defined by a complexity of mediations, are no
longer environments of common or shareable experience. Rather,
they are frameworks of validation of one type of human
experience against another. This statement requires some
explanation. Products embody not only material, design, and
skills, but also a language of optimal functioning. Thus they
project a variety of ways through which people constitute
themselves through the language of these products. Accordingly,
the market becomes a place of transaction for the many languages
our products speak. The complexity of everything we produce in
the pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy is the
result of expectations made possible by levels of human
efficiency that literacy can only marginally support.

This comes at a cost, in addition to the dissolution of literacy:
the loss of a sense of quality, because each product carries
with itself not only its own language, but also its own
evaluation criteria. The product is one of many from which to
choose, each embodying its own justification. Its value is
relative, and sometimes no value at all dictates the urge to
buy, or the decision to look for something else. Rules of
grammar, which gave us a sense of order and quality of literate
language use, do not apply to products. Previous expectations of
morality were anchored in language and conveyed through means of
literacy. The morality of partial literacies embodied in
competing products no longer appears to participants in the
market as emanating from high principles of religion or ethics,
but rather as a convenient justification for political
influence. Through regulation, politics inserts itself as a
self-serving factor in market transactions.

Transaction and literacy

A visit to a small neighborhood store used to be primarily a way
of satisfying a particular need, but also an instance of
communication. Such small markets were spaces where members of
the community exchanged news and gossip, usually with an
accuracy that would put today's journalism to shame. The
supermarket is a place where the demands of space utilization,
fast movement of products, and low overhead make conversation
counterproductive. Mail-order markets and electronic shopping
practically do away with dialogue. They operate beyond the need
for literacy and human interaction. Transactions are brought to
a minimum: selection, confirmation, and providing a credit card
number, or having it read automatically and validated via a
networked service.

Literacy-based transactions involved all the characteristics of
written language and all the implications of reading pertinent
to the transaction. Literacy contributed to the diversification
of needs and to a better expression of desires, thus helping
markets to diversify and reach a level of efficiency not
possible otherwise. With required education and laws prohibiting
child labor, the productive part of people's lives was somehow
reduced, but their ability to be more effective within modes
adapted to literacy was enhanced. Thus market cycles were
optimized by the effects of higher productivity and diversified
demands. From earliest times (going back to the Phoenician
traders), writing and the subsequent literacy contributed to
strategies of exchange, of taxation- which represents the most
direct form of political intervention in the market-and
regulations regarding many aspects of the constitution of human
beings in and through the market. Written contracts expressed
expectations in anticipation of literacy- supported planning.

There are many levels between the extraction and processing of
raw material and the final sale and consumption of a product. At
each level, a different language is constituted, very concrete
in some instances, very abstract in others. These languages are
meant to speed up processing and transaction cycles, reduce risk,
maximize profits, and ensure the effectiveness of the
transaction on a global level. Literacy cannot uniformly
accommodate these various expectations. The distributive nature
of market transactions cannot be held captive to the centralism
of literacy without affecting the efficiency of market
mediation. The ruin left after 70 years of central planning in
the Soviet Union and its satellite countries-highly literate
societies-is proof of this point. The expected speed of market
processes and the parallelism of negotiations require languages
of optimal functionality and minimal ambiguity. Sometimes
transactions have to rely on visual arguments, well beyond what
teleconferencing can offer. Products and procedures are modified
during negotiations, and on-the-fly, through interactive links
between all parties involved in the effort of designing,
manufacturing, and marketing them. As fashion shows become
prohibitively expensive, the fashion market is exploring
interactive presentations that put the talent of the designer and
the desire of the public one click away from each other.

The expectation of freedom results in the need to ignore national
or political (and cultural and religious) allegiances, which,
after all, means freedom from the literate mode of a national
language, as well as from all the representations and definitions
of freedom housed in literate discourse. Indeed, since sign
systems, and language in particular, are not neutral means of
expression, one individual has to specialize in the signs of
other cultures. There are consulting firms that advise businesses
on the cultural practices of various countries. They deal in
what Robert Reich called symbol manipulation, semiotic activity
par excellence. These firms explain to clients doing business in
Japan, for instance, that the Japanese have a penchant for
exchanging gifts. Business cards, more symbolic than functional,
are of great importance. These consultants will also advise on
customs that fall outside values instilled through literacy,
such as in which countries bribery is the most efficient way to
do business.

Whose market? Whose freedom?

A market captive to moral or political concepts expressed in
literate discourse soon reaches the limits of its efficiency. We
face these limits in a different way when ideals are proclaimed
or negotiations submitted to rules reflecting values attached to
expectations-of a certain standard of living, fringe
benefits-frozen in contracts and laws. Many European countries
are undergoing the crisis of their literate heritage because
outdated working relations have been codified in labor laws.
Contracts between unions claiming to represent various types of
workers are not subject to criteria for efficiency at work in
the market.

On the other hand, the freedom and rights written into the U.S.
Constitution are totally forgotten in the global marketplace by
people who take them for granted. An American-even a member of a
minority group-who buys a pair of brand-name sneakers is totally
ignorant of the fact that the women, and sometimes the children,
making those sneakers in faraway countries earn less than
subsistence wages. It is not the market that is immoral or
opportunistic in such cases, but the people who constitute their
expectations for the most at the lowest cost. Would literacy be a
stronger force than the demand for efficiency in bringing about
the justice discussed in tomes of literature? To read morality
in the market context of competition, where only efficiency and
profit are written, is a rather futile exercise, even though it
might alleviate pangs of conscience. Markets, the expression of
the people who constitute them, are realistic, even cynical;
they call things by their names and have no mercy on those who
try to reinvent an idealized past in the transaction of futures.

For reasons of efficiency only, markets are frameworks for the
self-constitution of human beings as free, enjoying liberties
and rights that add to their productive capabilities. It will
probably irk many people to read here that markets, instances of
terrible tension and amorality, are the cradle of human freedom,
tolerance (political, social, religious, intellectual), and
creativity. To a great extent, it was a fight over market
processes that led to the American Revolution. Now that
Soviet-style communism has fallen, the flow of both goods and
ideas is slowly and painfully taking place, in ways similar to
that in the West, in the former Soviet Bloc. Democratic ideals
and the upward distribution of wealth are on a collision course.
But the compass is at least set on more freedom and less
regulation. Only mainland China remains in the grip of
centralized market control. The struggle between open markets
and the free flow of ideas going on there today can have only
one outcome. It may take time, but China, too, will one day be
as free as its neighbors in Taiwan. Market interaction is what
defines human beings, facilitating the establishment of a
framework of existence that includes others.

Some people would prefer a confirmation of culture as the more
encompassing framework, containing markets but not reducible to
them. Culture itself is an object in the market, subjected to
transactions involving literacy, but not exclusively. Here new
languages are used to expedite the exchange of goods and values.
When literacy reaches the limits of its implicit capabilities,
new transaction languages emerge, and new forms of freedom,
tolerance, and creativity are sanctioned through the market
mechanism. There is a price attached here, too. New constraints,
new types of intolerance, and new obstacles come about. An
example is the preservation of wildlife at the expense of jobs.
Efficiency and wide choice entail a replacement of what are
known as traditional values (perceived as eternal, but usually
not older than 200-300 years) with what many would have a hard
time calling value: mediocrity, the transitory, the expedient,
and the propensity for waste.

The market circumvents literacy when literacy affects its
efficiency and follows its own course by means appropriate to
new market conditions. In the quest for understanding how
markets operate, the further cultivation of explanations
originating from previous pragmatic circumstances is pointless.
The time-consuming detour might result in nostalgia, but not in
better mastery of the complexities implicit in the practical
experience of human self-constitution in the market.

New markets, new languages

With the descriptive model of markets as sign processes, allusion
was made to the open character of any transaction. With the
discussion regarding the many phases through which markets are
constituted, allusion was made to the distributed nature of
market processes. In order to further explain the changed
condition of human self- constitution in the market of a
radically new scale and dynamics, we need to add some details to
both characteristics mentioned.

Like any other sign process, language processes are human
processes. The person speaking or writing a text continues to
constitute his identity in one or the other, while
simultaneously anticipating the constitutive act of listening to
or interpreting the potential or intended readership. Visual,
auditory, tactile, olfactory, verbal, or written expression, as
well as combinations of these, which composes the language of
performance, dance, architecture, etc., are in the same
condition. A viewer or viewers can associate an image with a
text, music, odors, textures, or with combinations of these.
Furthermore, the association can continue and can be conveyed to
others who will extend it ad infinitum, sometimes so far that
the initial sign (which is the initial person interpreting that
sign in anticipation of the interpretation given by others),
i.e., the image, text, or music that triggered the process, is
forgotten.

Expanding this concept to the products of human activity, we can
certainly look at various artifacts from the perspective of what
they express-a need specifically fulfilled by a machine, a
product, a type of food or clothing, an industry; what they
communicate-the need shared by few or many, the way this need is
addressed, what it says about those constituted in the product
and those who will confirm their identity by using it, what it
says about opportunity and risk taking; andwhat they signify-in
terms of the level of knowledge and competence achieved.

This is not to say that the milk we buy from a farmer or in the
supermarket, the shoes, cars, homes, vacation packages, and
shares in a company or options in a stock are all signs or
language. Rather, they can be interpreted as signs standing for
an object (the state of manufacturing, quality of design,
competence, or a combination of these) to be interpreted in view
of the framework for the pragmatics of human self- constitution
that the pragmatics makes possible. There are many instances when
a word simply dies on the lips of the speaker because nobody
listens or nobody cares to continue interpreting it. There are
as many instances when a product dies because it is irrelevant
to the pragmatic framework of our lives. There are other
instances when signs lose the quality of interpretability.

A company that goes public is identified through many qualifiers.
Its potential growth is one of them-this is why
Internet-oriented companies were so highly valued in their
initial public offerings. Potential can be conveyed through
literate descriptions, data regarding patents, market analysis,
or an intuitive element that there is more to this new market
sign than only its name and initial offering price. At a small
scale of human experience, the neighbors wanted to own some of
the action; at a larger scale, literacy conveyed the information
and acted as a co-guarantor. At today's scale, many similar
businesses are already in place, others are emerging; supply and
demand meet in the marketplace where one's risk can be someone
else's gain. Literacy is no longer capable of providing the
background for the dynamics of change and renewal. If literacy
could still control market transactions, Netscape-synonymous with
the Internet browser-would have never made it; nor the companies
that develop software facilitating telephone calls via the
Internet.

In the markets of relative homogeneity, language proved to be an
appropriate means of coordination. For as long as the various
contexts making up today's global market were not as radically
different as they are becoming, literacy represented a good
compromise. But when market transactions themselves shift from
exchanging goods against goods, or the exchange of goods for
some universal substitute (gold, silver, precious stones with
qualities of permanency), or even for a more conventional unit
(money), for more abstract entities, such as the Ecu (the basket
of currencies of the European Community), the Eurodollar, or the
e-money transacted over networks, literacy is replaced by the
literacies of the segmented practical instances of each
transaction. Shares of an Italian or Spanish company, futures on
the American commodities market, bonds for Third World
investment funds-they all come with their own rules of
transaction, and with their own languages.

The specialization that increases market efficiency results in a
growing number of literacies. These literacies bring to the
market the productive potential of companies and their
management value. They encode levels of expected productivity in
farming (and a certain wager on weather conditions),
entrepreneurial risks assumed within the context of progressive
globalization of the economy. In turn, they can be encoded in
programs designed to negotiate with other programs. In addition,
the mechanisms assuring the distributed nature of the market in
the global economy insert other literacies, in this case, the
literacy of machines endowed with search and heuristic
capabilities independent of literacy.

Market simulations trigger intelligent trade programs and a
variety of intelligent agents, capable of modifying their
behavior, and achieve higher and higher transaction performance.
In short, we have many mediations against the background of a
powerful integrative process: the pragmatic framework of a
highly segmented economy, working in shorter production cycles,
for a global world. In this process, almost nothing remains
sequential, and nothing is centralized. Put in different words,
almost all market activity takes place in parallel processes.
Configurations, i.e., changing centers of interest, come into
existence on the ever fluid map of negotiations. Being a
self-organizing nucleus, each deal has its own dynamics.
Relations among configurational nuclei are also dynamic.
Everything is distributed. The relations between the elements
involved are non-linear and change continuously. Solidarity is
replaced by competition, often fiercely adversarial. Thus the
market consumes itself, and the sequels of literacy, requiring
provisional and distributed literacies.

Each time individuals project their identity in a product, the
multi-dimensional human experience embodied in the product is
made available for exchange with others. In the market, it is
reduced to the dimension appropriate to the given context of the
transaction. Human behavior in the market is symptomatic of the
self-awareness of the species, of its critical and self-critical
capabilities, of its sense of the future. The progressive
increase of the abstract nature of market transactions, the
ominous liberation from literacy, and adoption of technologies
of efficient exchange define a sense of future which can be
quite scary for people raised in a different pragmatic context.

We are beyond the disjunctive models of socialist ideologies of
bourgeois property, class differences, reproduction of labor
power, and similar categories that emerged in the pragmatic
framework that made literacy (and human constitution through
literacy) possible and necessary. Property, as much as markets,
is distributed (sometimes in ways that do not conform with our
sense of fairness). People define their place in the continuum
of a society that in many ways does away with the exceptional
and introduces a model based on averaging and resulting in
mediocrity. The human being's self-constitutive power is not
only reproduced in new instances of practical activity, but also
augmented in the pragmatics of surplus creating higher surplus.
Along with the sense of permanency, humans lose a sense of the
exceptional as this applies to their products and the way they
constitute themselves through their work.

Literacy and the transient

When a product is offered with a lifetime warranty and the
manufacturer goes bankrupt within months from the date of the
sales transaction, questions pertaining to ethics,
misrepresentation, and advertisement are usually asked. Such
incidents, to which no one is immune, cannot be discarded since
the experience of market transactions is an experience in human
values, no matter how relative these are. Honesty, respect for
truth, respect for the given word, written or not, belong to the
civilization of literacy and are expressed in its books. The
civilization of illiteracy renders these and all other books
senseless. But it would be wrong to suggest that markets of the
civilization of illiteracy corrupt everything and that, instead
of confirming values, they actually empty values of
significance. Markets do something else: They integrate
expectations into their own mechanisms. In short, they have to
live up to expectations not because these were written down, but
because markets would otherwise not succeed. How this takes
place is a longer story, starting with the example given: What
happens to a lifetime warranty when the manufacturer goes
bankrupt?

The pragmatic framework of human self-constitution in language
through the use of the powerful means of literacy is one of
stability and progressive growth. The means of production
facilitated in this framework are endowed with qualities,
physical, first of all, that guarantee permanency. The
industrial model is an extension of the model of creation deeply
rooted in literacy-dominated human activity. Machines were
powerful and dominating. They, as well as the products they
turned out, lasted much longer than the generation of people who
use them.

After participating in the complex circumstances that made the
Industrial Revolution possible, literacy was stimulated and
supported by it. Incandescent lighting, more powerful than the
gas or oil lamp, expanded the time available for reading, among
other activities. Books were printed faster and more cheaply
because paper was produced faster and more cheaply, and the
printing press was driven by stronger engines. More time was
available for study because industrial society discovered that a
qualified workforce was more productive once machines become more
complicated. All this happened against the background of an
obsession with permanency reflected also in the structure of the
markets. As opposed to agricultural products, subject to weather
and time, industrial products can be accepted on consignment.

Literacy was a mediating tool here since transactions became
less and less homogeneous, and the institution of credit more
powerful due to the disparity between production and consumption
cycles. The scale of the industrial market corresponded to the
scale of industrial economy. Industrial markets are optimally
served by the sequential nature of literacy and the linearity
inherent in its structure. Production cycles are long, and one
cycle follows the other, like seasons, like letters in a word.
Remember when new model automobiles came out in October, and
only in October? A large manufacturer embodied permanence and so
did its product. In this framework, a lifetime warranty reflects
a product's promised performance and the language describing
this performance.

This is no longer the case in the civilization of illiteracy.
From the design of the product, to the materials used and
principles applied, almost nothing is meant to last beyond a
cycle of optimal efficiency. It is not a moral decision, neither
is it a devious plan. Different expectations are embodied in our
products. Their life cycle reflects the dynamics of change
corresponding to the new scale of human self-constitution, and
the obsession with efficiency. Products become transient because
the cycles of relative uniformity of our self-constitution are
shorter.

We know that life expectancy has increased, and it may well be
that people past the peak of their productive capability will
soon represent the majority of the population. Nonetheless, the
increased level of productivity facilitated by mediating
strategies is independent of this change. Longer life means
presence in more cycles of change (which translates into other
changes, such as in education and training, family life). What
was once a relatively homogeneous life becomes a succession of
shorter periods, some only loosely connected. In comparison to
centuries of slow, incremental development, relatively abrupt
change testifies to a new human condition.

Where once literacy was necessary to coordinate the variety of
contributions from many people-who projected as much permanency
in their products, even if the individuals were more literate in
drawing than in writing-new forms of coordination and
integration are now in place. The corresponding pragmatics is
characterized by intension and distribution, and the products
capture the projected sense of change that dominates all human
experiences. Thus conditions were created for markets of the
transient, in which lifetime functioning of ingenious artifacts
is promised, because the lifetime meant is as short as the cycle
of the entire line. The fact that the manufacturer goes bankrupt
is not even surprising since the structural characteristics of
the obsession with efficiency results in manufacturing entities
that last as long (or as short) as the need for their product,
or as long as the functional characteristics of the product
satisfy market expectations. This is how expectations are
integrated in market mechanisms. Since mediation is now
exercised through many literacies integrated in the product, it
is clear why, together with the exhausted lifetime warranty, we
throw away not only manufactured items, but also the literacy
(and literacies) embodied in them. Each transaction in the
transient corresponds to a pragmatics that transforms the
Faustian promise into an advertising slogan.

Market, advertisement, literacy

First, the indictment: "If I were asked to name the deadliest
subversive force within capitalism-the single greatest source of
its waning morality-I should without hesitation name
advertising." These words belong to a commentator of the
ill-reputed supply side economics, Robert L. Heilbroner, but
could have been signed by many sharing in this definition. Now
comes the apologia: "The historians and archaeologists will one
day discover that ads of our times are the richest and most
faithful daily reflections that any society ever made of its
entire range of activities." McLuhan's words, as familiar as
they are, bear the imprint of his original thinking. The issue is
not to take sides. Whether admired or despised, ignored or
enjoyed, advertisement occupies an inordinately important place
in our life today. For anyone who went through the history of
advertisement, it becomes obvious that the scale of this
activity, which is indeed part of the market, has changed
radically.

It used to be true that only 50 to 60 percent of the investment
in advertisement resulted in higher sales or brand recognition.
Today, the 50 to 60 percent has shrunk to less than 2 percent.
But of the 2 percent that impacts the market, 2 percent (or less)
results in covering the entire expense of advertisement. Such
levels of efficiency-and waste, one should add, in full
awareness that the notion is relative-are possible only in the
civilization of illiteracy. The figures (subject to controversy
and multiple interpretation) point to efficiency as much as to
the various aspects of the market. Our concern with
advertisement is not only with how literate (or illiterate)
advertisement is, but also with how appropriate literacy means
can be to address psychological, ethical, and rational (or
irrational) aspects of market transactions.

A look at advertisements through the centuries is significant to
the role of literacy in society and in the world of
merchandising. Word-of-mouth advertising and hanging signs
outside a business reflect the literacy levels of an age of
small-scale market transactions. The advertisements of the end
of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century exemplify the
levels of literacy and the efficiency expected from it for
merchandising in the context and scale of that time. The ads
contain more text than image and address reason more than the
senses. In the age of the magazine and newspaper, advertisers
relied on the power of verbal persuasion. Honesty or value was
not the issue here, only its appearance. The word committed to
paper, black on white, had to be simple and true.

In Europe, advertisement took a different style at this time, but
still reflected value. Manufacturers engaged many well known
artists of the time to design their ads. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec,
El Lissitzky, and Herbert Bayer are among the best known. To the
highly literate but more artistically inclined Europeans of the
time, such ads for upscale products and events were more
appealing. Probably taking their cue from Europe, American
designers experimented with image advertising after World War II,
and graphic design took off in the USA. With the advent of more
powerful visualization media, and based on data from psychology
to support its effectiveness, the image began to dominate
advertising. As ambiguously as an image can be interpreted, its
efficiency in advertising was confirmed in rising sales figures.

In the rare cases when literacy is used today, it is usually for
its visual impact. In an attempt to relate to the qualities of
the black-on-white advertisement of earlier times, Mobil
started a series of ads in the mid-1980's. To those not
semiotically aware, the ad was simply text appealing to the
reader's reason. Literacy rediviva! To people attuned to
semiotics, the ad was a powerful visual device. The simple
tombstone style evoked relations between literacy and values
such as simplicity, honesty, the permanence of the idea, the
dominance of reason. The visual convention was actually stronger
than the literacy element, used as an alibi in these ads.
Indeed, the people who hand out the Clio awards for advertising
were so taken in as to award Mobil a first prize for these ads.

Markets are far from being simple causal phenomena. A market's
easy switch from a well structured, rational interpretation and
ethical conduit, to irrationality and misrepresentation is
revealed in the new forms markets take, as well as in their new
techniques for transactions and the associated advertisement. The
term irrationality describes a contradiction of common sense
rules (or economic theories setting them forth) of exchange of
goods. During the 1980's, this occurred in the oil market, the
art market, the market for adoptable children, and in new stock
market offerings.

The literate discourse of theories or of an advertisement can
only acknowledge the irrationality and suggest explanations.
There are schools of market analysis based on game theory,
psychodrama, cyclical modeling, the phases of the moon, etc.,
etc., each producing newsletters, giving advice, trying to
render understandable economic and financial phenomena difficult
to predict. Language-like explanations and advice are part of
advertising, part of market language, forming its own literacy
and keeping many captive to it. But even the most literate
participant cannot stop the process since the literacy involved
in what some perceive as an aberration is different from the
literacy embodied in the product traded or in its advertisement.
Irrational elements are present in the market, as in life, at
all times, but not to the extent to which the language of the
market reflects hysteria (as on Black Monday in 1987 on the New
York Stock Exchange) or simply ceases its pragmatic function.

We all deplore the continuous shrinking of the intimate sphere
of our lives, but admit, in the act of constituting ourselves in
the space and time of market transactions, the integrating power
that the market exercises, ignoring how close the relation
between the two aspects is. Literacy was once a protective
medium and entailed rules of discretion and decency. Illiteracy
makes us fear; it allows us to become more efficient, but at the
same time we become subject to intrusion by all the means that
capture our identity. People making purchases on-line will not
hesitate to write down their personal data and credit card
numbers, trusting in a sense of privacy that is part of the code
of literate behavior. Of all people, the computer-literate
should realize the power of the Net for searching, retrieving,
and sorting such information for all types of uses imaginable.

In the civilization of illiteracy, advertisement is no longer an
integrative device that addresses a non-differentiated market
but a device that addresses powerful distinctions that can
capture smaller groups, even the individual. "Tell me what you
want to buy or sell and I'll tell you who you are," is a concise
way of declaring how market semiosis X-rays its participants.
The enormous marketing efforts associated with a new brand of
cereal, software, a political campaign, a role in a movie, or a
sports event result in advertisement's becoming a language in
itself, with its own vocabulary and grammar. These are subject
to rapid change because the pragmatics of the activities they
represent change so fast. "Tell me what you buy and I'll tell you
who you are"-mug shots of all of us are taken continuously, by
extremely inventive digital devices, while the market fine-tunes
us. Buying products ended long ago. Products now buy us.

Advertising in the civilization of illiteracy is no longer
communication or illustration. It is an information processing
activity, bizarre at times, extremely innovative in the ability
to cross reference information and fine-tune the message to the
individual. Automatic analysis of data is complemented by
refinement methods that adjust the weight of words in order to
fit the addressee. In the reality of the market and its
attendant advertising, languages pertaining to art, education,
ideology, sexuality, are integrated at a high level of
sophistication in the infinite series of mediations that
constitute the pragmatic framework of human existence. Nothing is
more valuable than the knowledge of who we are. One can risk
stating that brokers of information about each of us will
probably fare best in this market of many competing partial
literacies.

When markets rely more and more on mediations, and market cycles
become faster and faster, when the global nature of transactions
requires mechanisms of differentiation and integration far
beyond the scope of language, literacy ceases to play a
dominating role. The literate message assumed that the human
being is the optimal source of information and the ideal
receiver. The illiterate message can send itself automatically,
as image or as speech, as video or as Internet spamming, whatever
best hits its human target, to people's addresses. Whether we
like it or not, face-to-face negotiations have already become
fax-to-fax and are bound to be converted into
program-to-program dealings. The implications are so far-reaching
that emotional reactions, such as enthusiasm or disgust, are not
really the best answer to this prospect.

Market pragmatics in our civilization is defined by the need to
continuously expand surplus to meet a dominant desire and
expectation driven exchange of goods and services. These desires
and expectations correspond to the global scale of human
interaction for which a dominant literacy is poorly suited.
Hundreds of literacies, representing hundreds of forms of human
self-constitution around the world, are integrated in the
supersign known as the market.

The market-in its narrow sense as transaction, and as a sign
process joining structure and dynamics-focuses all that pertains
to the relation between the individual and the social
environment: language, customs, mores, knowledge, technology,
images, sounds, odors, etc. Through the market, economies are
ascertained or subjected to painful restructuring. Recent years
brought with them turmoil and economic opportunity as an
expression of new pragmatic characteristics. Competition,
specialization, cooperation, were all intensified. An exciting
but just as often disconcerting growth path of economic activity
generated markets of high performance. Just-in-time,
point-of-sale, and electronic interchanges came into being
because the human pragmatic made them necessary.

This is why it is difficult to accept views, regardless of their
public acclaim, that explain the dynamics of economic life
through technological change. The increased speeds of economic
cycles are not parallel but related to the new practical
experiences of human self-constitution. Cognitive resources
became the main commodity for economic experiences. And the
market fully confirms this through mechanisms for accelerated
transactions and through sign processes of a complexity that
technology has really never reached. New algorithms inspired by
dynamic systems, intelligent agent models, and better ways to
handle the issues of opportunity and prediction are the
expression of cognitive resources brought to fruition in a
context requiring freedom from hierarchy, centralism,
sequentiality, and determinism. As exciting as the model of the
economy as ecosystem is (I refer to Rothschild's bionomics), it
remains an essentially deterministic view.

No semiosis triggers forces of economic change. But sign
processes, in the form of elaborate transactions, reflect the
change in the pragmatic condition of the human being. All those
new companies, from fast food chains to microchip makers and
robot providers that convert human knowledge into the new goods
and services, are the expression of the necessity of this
pragmatic change. Diversity and abundance might be related to
competition and cooperation, but what drives economic life,
market included, is the objective need to achieve levels of
efficiency corresponding to the global scale human activity has
reached. Central planning, like any other centralized structure,
including that of businesses, does not come to an end because of
technological progress, but in view of the fact that it prevents
efficient practical experiences.

Markets of the civilization of illiteracy, like the economy for
which they stand, are more and more mediated. They go through
faster cycles, their swings wilder, their interdependency deeper
than ever. The literate experience of the market assumed that
the individual was the optimal source of information and the
ideal receiver. Decision- making was an exclusively human
experience. The illiterate message of complex data processing
and evaluation can send itself automatically and reach whatever
has to be reached in a given context: producers of raw
materials, energy providers, manufacturers, a point-of-sale
unit. As shoppers start scanning their purchases by themselves,
information regarding their buying patterns makes it quickly into
programs in charge of delivery, production, and marketing.
Face-to-face negotiations, many times replaced by fax-to-fax or
e-mail-to-e-mail transactions, are converted into more
program-to-program dealings. Instead of mass markets, we
experience point-cast markets. Their pragmatics is defined by
the need to continuously meet desire and expectation instead of
need. Their dynamics, expressed in nuclei of self-organization,
is in the last instance not at all different from that of the
human beings self-constituted in their reality.

Language and Work

Work is a means of self-preservation beyond the primitive
experience of survival. Actually, one can apply the word work
only from the moment awareness of human self- constitution in
practical experiences emerged from these experiences. Awareness
of work and the beginnings of language are probably very close
to one another.

By work we understand patterns of human activity, not the
particulars of one or another form of work. This defines a
functional perspective first of all, and allows us to deal with
replication of these patterns. Interaction, mutation, growth,
spreading, and ending are part of the pattern. For anyone even
marginally informed, it is quite clear that work patterns of
agriculture are quite different from those of the pre-industrial,
industrial, or post-industrial age. Our aim is to examine work
patterns of the civilization of literacy in contrast to those of
the civilization of illiteracy.

That agriculture was determined, in its specific aspects, by
different topography and climatic biological context is quite
clear. Nevertheless, the people constituting their identity in
experiences of cultivating the land accomplished it in coherent
ways, regardless of their geographic location. Their language
experience testifies to an identifiable set of concerns,
questions, and knowledge which is, despite the fragmented
picture of the world, more homogenous than we could expect. If,
by contrast, one considers a chip foundry of today's high
technology, it becomes clear how chip producers in Silicon
Valley and those in Chinese provinces, in Russia, or in a
developing country of Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa share the
same language and the same concerns.

The example of agriculture presents a bottom-up structure of
pre-literate nature, based mainly on reaction. Reaction slowly
but surely led to more deliberate choices. Experience converged
in repetitive patterns. The more efficient experiences were
confirmed, the others discarded. A body of knowledge was
accumulated and transmitted to everyone partaking in survival
activities. In the case of the chip foundry, the structure is
top-down: Goals and reasons are built in, and so is the critical
knowledge of a post-literate nature required for achieving high
efficiency. Skills are continuously perfected through
reinforcement schemes. Activity is programmed. An explicit
notion of the factory's goals-high quality, high efficiency, high
adaptability to new requirements-is built into the entire
factory system.

In both models, corresponding to real-life situations, language
is constituted as part of the experience. Indeed, coordination
of effort, communication, record keeping, and transmission of
knowledge are continuously requested. As a replicative process,
work implies the presence of language as an agent of transfer.
Language pertinent to the experience of agriculture is quite
different from the language pertinent to the modern production
of chips. One is more natural than the other, i.e., its
connection to the human being's natural stage is stronger than
that of the activity in the foundry. In the chip age of the
civilization of illiteracy, languages of extreme precision become
the means for an efficient practical experience. Their functions
are different from those of natural language, which by all means
still constitutes a medium for human interaction.

All these remarks are meant to provide a relatively comfortable
entry to the aspects of the changing relation between language
and work. The terminology is based on today's fashionable lingo
of genetics, and of memetics, its counterpart. Still, I would
suggest more than caution, because memetics focuses on the
quantitative analysis of cultural dynamics, while semiotics,
which represents the underlying conception, is concerned
primarily with qualitative aspects.

As we have already seen, evolutionary biology became a source of
metaphors for the new sciences of economics, as well as for the
acquisition and dissemination of knowledge, or the replication
of ideas. Many people are at work in the new scientific space of
memetic considerations. The majority are focused on effective
procedures, probably computational in nature, for generating
mechanisms that will result in improved human interactions. As
exciting as all this is, qualitative considerations might prove
no less beneficial, if indeed we could translate them in
effective practical experiences. If the purposeful character of
all living organisms can be seen as an inevitable consequence of
evolution, the dynamics of human activity, reflected in
successive pragmatic frameworks, goes beyond the mechanism of
natural selection. This is exactly where the sign perspective of
human interaction, including that in work, differentiates itself
from the quantitative viewpoint. As long as selection itself is a
practical experience-choose from among possibilities-it becomes
difficult to use selection in order to explain how it takes
place.

In the tradition of analogies to machines-of yesterday or of
today-we could look at work as a machine capable of
self-reproduction (von Neumann's concept). In the new tradition
of memetics, work would be described as a replicative complex
unit, probably a meta-meme. But both analogies are focused
ultimately on information exchange, which is only a limited part
of what sign processes (or semioses, as they are called) are.
This is not to say that work is reducible to sign processes or to
language. What is of interest is the connection between work and
signs, or language. Moreover, how pragmatic frameworks and
characteristics of language experiences are interconditioned is
a subject that involves a memetic perspective, but is not
reducible to it.

Inside and outside the world

Comparisons of the efficiency of direct human practical
experiences to that of mediated forms-with the aid of tools,
signs, or languages-suggest one preliminary observation: The
efficiency of the action mediated through sign systems is higher
than that of direct action. The source of this increase in
efficiency is the cognitive effort to adapt the proper means
(how work is done) to the end (what is accomplished) pursued. In
retrospect, we understand that this task is of a tall order-it
involves observation, comparison, and the ability to conceive of
alternatives. As we learn from attempts involving the best of
science and the best of technology, the emulation of such
cognitive processes, especially as they evolve over time, is not
yet within our reach.

Language, together with all other sign systems, is an integral
part of the process of constitution and affirmation of human
nature. The role it plays in the process is dynamic. It
corresponds to the different pragmatic contexts in which human
beings project their structural reality into the reality of
their universe of life. The biophysical system within which this
projection took and takes place underwent and still undergoes
major changes. They are reflected in the biophysical reality of
the human being itself. To be part of a changing world and to
observe this change places the human being simultaneously inside
and outside the world: inside as part of it, as a genetic
sequence; outside as its conscience, expressed in all the forms
through which awareness, including that of work, is
externalized.

Whether a very restricted (limited by the pragmatic horizon of
primitive human beings), or a potentially universal system of
expression, representation, and communication, language cannot
be conceived independent of human nature. Neither can it be
conceived independent of other means of expression,
representation, and communication. The necessity of language is
reflected in the degree to which evolutionary determination and
self-determination of the individual or of society, correlate.
Language is constituted in human practical experiences. At the
same time, it is constitutive, together with many other elements
of human praxis: biological endowment, heuristics and logic,
dialectic, training. This applies to the most primitive elements
of language we can conceive of, as well as to today's productive
languages. Embodied in literacy, language accounts for the
ever-deepening specialization and fragmentation of human praxis.
The replacement of the literate use of language by the
illiteracy of the many languages dismissing it in work, market
transactions, and even social life is the process to which we
are at the same time witnesses and agents of change.

Sign systems of all kinds, but primarily language, housed and
stored many of the projects that changed the condition of
praxis. The major changes are: from direct to mediated, from
sequential to parallel, from centralized to decentralized, from
clustered (in productive units such as factories) to
distributed, from dualistic (right or wrong) to multi-valued
(along the continuum of acceptable engineering solutions), from
deterministic to non-deterministic and chaotic, from closed (once
a product is produced, the problem-solving cycle is completed)
to open (human practical experiences are viewed as problem
generating), from linear to non-linear. Each of these changes, in
turn, made the structural limits of language more and more
evident. Practical experiences in the design of languages, in
particular the new languages of visualization, are pushing these
limits in order to accommodate new expectations, such as
increased expressiveness, higher processing speed,
inter-operability-an image can trigger further operations.

Globality of human practical experience succeeds against the
background of the emergence of many languages that are very
specific, though global in scope in that they can be applied all
over the world. The chip factory already mentioned-or, for that
matter, an integrated pizza or hamburger production facility-can
be delivered turn-key in any corner of the world. The languages
of mathematics, of engineering, or of genetics might
independently be characterized by the same sequentiality,
dualism, centralism, determinism that made natural language
itself incapable of handling complexities resulting from the new
scale of human activity. Once integrated in practical
experiences of a different nature, such as those of automation,
they all allow for a new dynamics. Obviously, they are less
expressive than language-we have yet to read a DNA sequence
poem, or listen to the music of a mathematical formula-but
infinitely more precise.

We are what we do

In the contemporary world, communication is progressively reified
and takes place more and more through the intermediary of the
product. Its source is human work. Characteristics of the
languages involved in the work are also projected into them. A
new underlying structure replaces that which made literacy
possible and necessary. In the physical or spiritual reality of
the product, specialized languages are re-translated into the
universal language of satisfying needs, or creating new needs,
which are afterwards processed through the mediating mechanisms
of the market. Reification (from the Latin res: transformation
of everything-life, language, feeling, work-into things) is the
result of the alienating logic of the market and its semiosis.

Markets abstract individual contributions to a product. In the
first place, language itself is reified and consumed. Markets
reify this contribution, turning life, energy, doubts, time, or
whatever else-in particular language-into the commodity embodied
in the product. The very high degree of integration leads to
conditions in which high efficiency-the most possible at the
lowest price-becomes a criterion for survival. The consequence
is that human individuality is absorbed in the product. People
literally put their lives, and everything pertaining to
them-natural history, education, family, feelings, culture,
desires-in the outcome of their practical experiences. This
absorption of the human being into the product takes place at
different levels. In the second place, the individual
constituted in work is also reified and consumed: the product
contains a portion of the limited duration of the lives of those
who processed it.

Each form of mediated work depends upon its mediating entities.
As one form of work is replaced by another, more efficient, the
language that mediated is replaced by other means. Languages of
coordination corresponding to hunting, or those of incipient
agriculture, made way for subsequent practical experience of
self-constitution in language. This applies to any and all forms
of work, whether resulting in agricultural, industrial,
artistic, or ideological products. The metaphors of genetics and
evolutionary models can be applied. We can describe the
evolution of work in memetic terminology, but we would still not
capture the active role of sign processes. Moreover, human
reproduction, between its sexual and its cultural forms, would
become meaningless if separated from the pragmatic framework
through which human self-constitution takes place.

To illustrate how language is consumed, let us shortly examine
what happens in the work we call education. In our day, the need
for continual training increases dramatically. The paradigm of a
once-for-life education is over, as much as literacy is over.
Shorter production cycles require changes of tools and the
pertinent training. A career for life, possible while the linear
progress of technology required only maintenance of skills and
slight changes of knowledge, is an ideal of the past. Efficiency
requirements translate into training strategies that are less
costly and less permanent than those afforded through literacy.
These strategies produce educated operators as training itself
becomes a product, offered by training companies whose list of
clients includes fast food chains, nuclear energy producers,
frozen storage facilities, the U.S. Congress, and computer
operations. The market is the place where products are
transacted and where the language of advertising, design, and
public relations is consumed. Training, too, focused more and
more on non-literate means of communication, is consumed.

Literacy and the machine

Man built machines which imitated the human arm and its
functions, and thus changed the nature of work. The skills
needed to master such machines were quite different from the
skills of craftsmen, no longer transmitted from generation to
generation, and less permanent. The Industrial Revolution made
possible levels of efficiency high enough to allow for the
maintenance of both machines and workers. It also made possible
the improvement of machines and required better qualified
operators, who were educated to extract the maximum from the
means of production entrusted to them.

At present, due to the integrative mechanisms that humans have
developed in the processes of labor division, natural language
has lost, and keeps losing, importance in the population's
practical experience. The lower quality of writing, reading, and
verbal expression, as they apply to self-constitution through
work and social life, is symptomatic of a new underlying
structure for the pragmatic framework. Literacy-based means of
expression and communication are substituted, not just
complemented, by other forms of expression and communication. Or
they are reduced to a stereotyped repertory that is easy to
mechanize, to automate, and finally, to do away with. Overseeing
an automated assembly line, serving a sophisticated machine,
participating in a very segmented activity without having a real
overview of it, and many similar functions ultimately means to
be part of a situation in which the subject's competence is
progressively reduced to fit the task. Before being rationalized
away, it is stereotyped. The language involved, in addition to
that of engineering, is continuously compressed, trimmed
according to the reduced amount of communication possible or
necessary, and according to situations that change continuously
and very fast.

Today, a manual for the maintenance and repair of a highly
sophisticated machine or weapon contains fewer words than
images. The words still used can be recorded and associated with
the image. Or the whole manual can become a videotape, laser
disk, or CD-ROM, even network-distributed applications, to be
called upon when necessary. The machine can contain its
computerized manual, displaying pages (on the screen)
appropriate to the maintenance task performed, generating
synthesized speech for short utterances, and for canned
dialogues. Here are some oddly related facts: The Treasury
designs dollar bills that will tell the user their denomination;
cars are already equipped with machines to tell us that we forgot
to lock the door or fasten our seat belt; greeting cards contain
voice messages (and in the future they will probably contain
animated images). We can see in such gadgets a victory of the
most superficial tastes people might have. But once the
gratuitous moment is over, and first reactions fade away, we
face a pragmatic situation which, whether synthesized messages
are used or not, reflects an underlying structure better adapted
to the complexities of the new scale of humankind.

The holographic dollar bill that declines its name might even
become useless when transactions become entirely electronic. The
voice of our cars might end up in a museum once the generalized
network for guiding our automobiles is in place, and all we have
to do is to punch in a destination and some route expectations
("I want to take the scenic route"). Moreover, the supertech car
itself might join its precursors in the museum once work becomes
so distributed that the energy orgy, so evident on the rush-hour
clogged highways, is replaced by more rational strategies of work
and life. Telecommuting is a timid beginning and a pale image of
what such strategies might be. The speaking greeting card might
be replaced by a program that remembers whose birthday it is
and, after searching the mugshot of the addressee (likes rap,
wears artificial flowers, is divorced, lives in Bexley, Ohio),
custom designs an original message delivered with the
individualized electronic newspaper when the coffee is ready. A
modest company manufacturing screensavers, using today's still
primitive applications in the networked world, could already do
this.

Anticipation aside, we notice that work involves means of
production that are more and more sophisticated. Nevertheless,
the market of human work is at a relatively low level of
literacy because human being do not need to be literate for most
types of work. One reason for this is that the new machines
incorporate the knowledge needed to fulfill their tasks. The
machines have become more efficient than humans. The university
system that is supposed to turn out literate graduates for the
world of work obeys the same expectations of high efficiency as
any other human practical experience. Universities become more
and more training facilities for specific vocations, instead of
carrying on their original goal of giving individuals a universal
education in the domain of ideas.

The statement concerning the literacy level does not reflect the
longing of humanists but the actual situation in the manpower
market. What we encounter is the structurally determined fact
that natural language is no longer, at least in its literate
form, the main means of recording collective experience, nor the
universal means of education. For instance, in all its
aspects-work, market, education, social life-the practical
experience of human self-constitution relies less on literacy and
more on images. Since the role of images is frequently mentioned
(formulated differently, perhaps), the reader might suspect this
is only a way of speaking. The actual situation is quite
different. Pictographic messages are used whenever a certain norm
or rule has to be observed. This is not a question of
transcending various national languages (as in airports or
Olympic stadiums, or with traffic signals, or in transactions
pertinent to international trade), but a way of living and
functioning. The visual dominates communication today.

Words and sentences, affected by long-time use in various
social, geographical, and historical contexts, became too
ambiguous and require too much educational overhead for
successful communication. Communication based on literacy
requires an investment higher than the one needed for producing,
perceiving, and observing images. Through images a positivist
attitude is embodied, and a sense of relativity is introduced.
Avoiding sequential reading, time and money consuming
instruction, and the rigidity of the rules of literacy, the use
of images reflects the drive for efficiency as this results from
the new scale of human survival and future well-being. The change
from literacy-oriented to visually-oriented culture is not the
result of media development, as romantic media ecologists would
like us to believe. Actually, the opposite is true. It is the
result of fundamental ways of working and exchanging goods,
within the new pragmatic framework that determined the need for
these media in the first place, and afterwards made possible
their production, dissemination, and their continuous
diversification.

The change under discussion here is very complex. Direct demands
of mediated praxis and the new, highly mediative means of mass
communication (television, computers, telecommunication,
networks), acting as instruments of integrating the individual
in the mechanism of a global economy, are brought to expression
in this mutation. Transition from language to languages, and
from direct to indirect, multimediated communication is not
reducible to abandoning logocentrism (a structural
characteristic of cultures based on literacy) and the logic
attached to it. We participate in the process of establishing
many centers of importance that replace the word, and compete
with language as we know it. These can be found in subculture,
but also within the entrenched culture. One example is the
proliferation of electronic cafés, where clients sipping their
coffee on the West Coast can carry on a dialogue with a friend in
Barcelona; or contact a Japanese journalist flying in one of the
Soviet space missions; or receive images from an art exhibit
opening in Bogota; or play chess with one of the miracle sisters
from Budapest. These experiences take place in what is known
generically as cyberspace.

The disposable human being

While it is true that just as many different curves can be drawn
through a finite number of points, consistent observations can
be subsumed under various explanations. Observations regarding
the role and status of literacy might result in explanations
that put radically different glosses on their results, but they
cannot escape confirming the sense of change defined here. This
change ultimately concerns the identity humans acquire in
illiterate experiences of self-constitution.

Progressively abandoning reading and writing and replacing them
with other forms of communication and reception, humans
participate in another structural change: from centralization to
decentralization; from a centripetal model of existence and
activity, with the traditional system of values as an attraction
point (religious, aesthetic, moral, political values, among
others) to a centrifugal model; and from a monolithic to a
pluralistic model. Paradoxically, the loss of the center also
means that human beings lose their central role and referential
value. This results in a dramatic situation: When human
creativity compensates for the limited nature of resources
(minerals, energy, food supply, water, etc.), either by producing
substitutes or by stimulating efficient forms of their use, the
human itself becomes a disposable commodity, more so the more
limited its practical self-constitution is.

Within the pragmatics characteristic of the underlying literacy,
machines were changed less often; but even when changed, the
human operator did not have to be replaced. A basic set of
skills sufficed for lifelong activity. Engineering was concerned
with artifacts as long lasting as life. The pragmatic framework
of illiteracy, as one of rapid change and progressively shorter
cycles, made the human more easily replaceable. At the new scale
of human activity, the very large and growing commodity of human
beings decreases in value: in its market value, and in its
spiritual and real value. The sanctity of life gives way to the
intricate technology of life maintenance, to the mechanics of
existence and the body-building shops. In the stock market of
spare parts, a kidney or a heart, mechanical or natural, is
listed almost the same way as pork bellies and cement, van
Gogh's paintings, CD players, and nuclear headscrews. They are
quoted and transacted as commodities. And they support highly
specialized work, compensated at the level of professional
football or basketball.

Projected into and among products of short-lived destiny, the
human beings working to make them project a morality of the
disposable that affects their own condition and, finally, the
dissolution of their values. As a result of high levels of work
efficiency, there are enough resources to feed and house
humankind, but not enough to support practical experiences that
redeem the integrity of the individual and the dignity of human
existence. Within a literate discourse, with an embedded ideology
of permanency, the morality of the disposable makes for good
headlines; but since it does not affect the structural
conditions conducive to this morality, it soon gets lost in the
many other literate commentaries, including those decrying the
decline of literacy.

The broader picture to which these reflections belong includes,
of course, the themes of disposable language. If basic skills,
as defined by Harvard professor and Secretary of Labor Robert
Reich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor
Lester Thurow, and many educators and policy-makers, become less
and less meaningful in the fast-changing world of work, it is
easy to understand why little weight can be attached to one or
another individual. Under the guise of basic skills, young and
less than young workers receive an education in reading and
writing that has nothing to do with the emergent practical
experiences of ever shorter cycles. Companies in search of cheap
labor have discovered the USA, or at least some parts of it, and
achieve here efficiencies that at home, under labor laws
originating from a literate pragmatics, are not attainable.
Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, and many Japanese companies train
their labor force in South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, and
other states. The usefulness of the people these companies train
is almost equal to that of the machine, unless the workers are
replaced by automation.

The technological cycle and the human cycle are so closely
interwoven that one can predicate the hybrid nature of
technology today: machines with a live component. As a matter of
fact, it is interesting to notice how progressively machines no
longer serve us, but how we serve them. Entirely equipped to
produce high quality desktop publishing, to process data for
financial transactions, to visualize scientific phenomena, such
machines require that we feed the data and run the program so
that a meaningful output results. In the case in which the
machine might not know the difference between good and bad
typography, for example, the human operator supplies the required
knowledge, based on intangible factors such as style or taste.

Scale of work, scale of language

Within each framework, be that of agriculture, pre-industrial,
industrial, or post- industrial practical experiences, continuity
of means and methods and of semiotic processes can be easily
established. What should most draw our attention are
discontinuities. We are going through such a discontinuity, and
the opposition between the civilization of literacy and the
civilization of illiteracy is suggestive of this. Evidently,
within the new practical experiences through which our own
identity is constituted, this is reflected in fast dynamics of
economic change. Some industries disappear overnight. Many
innovative ideas become work almost as quickly, but this work has
a different condition. Discontinuity goes beyond analogy and
statistical inferences. It marks the qualitative change which we
see embodied in the new relations between work and language.

One of the major hypotheses of this book is that discontinuities,
also described in dynamic systems theory as phase shifts, occur
as scale changes. Threshold values mark the emergence of new
sign processes. As we have seen, practical experiences through
which humans continuously ascertain their reality are affected by
the scale at which they take place. Immediate tasks, such as
those characteristic of direct forms of work, do not require a
division into smaller tasks, a decomposition into smaller
actions. The more complex the task, the more obvious the need to
divide it. But it is not until the scale characteristic of our
age is reached that decomposition becomes as critical as it now
is. In industrial society, and in every civilization prior to it,
the relation between the whole (task, goal, plan) and the parts
(subtasks, partial goals, successive plans) is within the range
of the human's ability to handle it. Labor division is a powerful
mechanism for a divide and conquer strategy applied to tasks of
growing complexity. The generation of choices, and the ability
to compensate for the limited nature of resources as these
affect the equation of population growth, integrate this rule of
decomposition.

Literacy, itself a practical experience of not negligible
complexity, helps as long as the depth of the division into
smaller parts, and the breadth of the integrative travail do not
go beyond litercy's own complexity. When this happens, it is
obvious that even if means belonging to literacy were effective
in managing very deep hierarchies in order to allow for
re-integration of the parts in the desired whole, the management
of such means would itself go beyond the complexity we are able
to cope with. Indeed, although very powerful in many respects,
when faced with many pragmatic levels independent of language,
literacy (through which language attains its optimal
operational power) appears flat. Actually, not only literacy
appears flat, but even the much glorified human intelligence.

Distinctions that result from deeper segmentation of work,
brought about by the requirements of a scale of population and
demand of an order of magnitude exponentially higher than any
experience an individual can have, can no longer be grasped by
single minds. Since the condition of the mind depends on
interaction with other minds within practical experiences of
self-constitution, it results that means of interaction
different from those appropriate to sequentiality, linearity, and
dualism are necessary. This new stage is not a continuation of a
previous stage. It is even less a result of an incremental
progression. The wheel, once upon a time a rounded stone, along
with a host of wheel-based means of practical experiences,
opened a perspective of progression. So did the lever, and
probably alphabetic writing, and the number system. This is why
the old and new could be linked through comparisons, metaphors,
and analogies in a given scale of humankind. But this is also
why, when the scale changes, we have to deal with discontinuity
and avoid misleading translations in the language of the past.

A car was still, in some ways, the result of incremental
progression from the horse-drawn carriage. An airplane, and
later a rocket, are less along a line of gradual change, but
still conceptually close to our own practical experience with
flying birds, or with the physics of action and reaction.
Nevertheless, a nuclear reactor is well beyond such experiences.
The conceptual hierarchy it embodies takes it out of the realm of
any previous pragmatic experience. The effort here is to tame
the process, to keep it within a scale that allows for our use
of a new resource of energy. The relation between the sizes
actively involved-nuclear level of matter compared to the
enormous machinery and construction-is not only beyond the power
of distinction of individual minds, but also of any operators,
unless assisted by devices themselves of a high degree of
complexity. The Chernobyl meltdown suggests only the magnitudes
involved, and how peripheral to them are the literacy-based
experiences of energy management.

The enormous satellite and radio-telephonic network, which
physically embodies the once fashionable concept of ether, is
another example of the scale of work under the circumstances of
the new scale of human activity; and so are the telephone
networks-copper, coaxial, or fiberglass. The conceptual
hierarchies handled by such networks of increasingly generalized
communication of voice, data, and images make any comparison to
Edison's telephone, to letters, or to videotapes useless. The
amount of information, the speed of transmission, and the
synchronicity mechanisms required and achieved in the
network-all participate in establishing a framework for remote
interaction that practically resets the time for all involved and
does away with physical distances. Literacy, by its intrinsic
characteristics, could not achieve such levels.

Finally, the computer, associated or not with networks, makes
this limit to our ability to grasp complexities even more
pressing. We have no problems with the fact that a passenger
airplane is 200 times faster than a pedestrian, and carries, at
its current capacity, 300-450 passengers plus cargo. The
computer chip itself is a conceptual accomplishment beyond
anything we can conceive of. The depth encountered in the
functioning of the digital computer-from the whole it represents
to its smallest components endowed with functions integrated in
its operation-is of a scale to which we have no intuitive or
direct access. Computers are not a better abacus. Some computer
users have even noticed that they are not even a better cash
register. They define an age of semiotic focus, in that symbol
manipulation follows language processing. (The word symbol
points to work become semiotic praxis, but this is not what I am
after here.)

In addition to the complexity it embodies, the computer makes
another distinction necessary. It replaces the world of the
continuum by a world of discrete states. Probably this
distinction would be seen only as qualitative, if the shift from
the universe of continuous functions and monotonic
behavior-whatever applies to extreme cases applies to everything
in between-were not concretized in a different condition of
human self-constitutive practical experience.

In the universe of literacy-based analog expectations,
accumulation results in progress: know more (language, science,
arts), have more (resources), acquire more (real estate). Even
striving-from a general attitude to particular forms (do better,
achieve higher levels)-is inherent in the underlying structure of
the analog. The digital is not linear in nature. Within the
digital, one small deviation (one digit in the phrase) changes
the result of processing so drastically that retracing the error
and fixing it becomes itself a new experience, and many times a
new source of knowledge.

In a written sentence, a misspelling or a typographical error is
almost automatically corrected. Through literacy, we dispose of
a model that tells us what is right. In the digital, the
language of the program and the data on which programs operate
are difficult to distinguish (if at all). Such machines can
manipulate more symbols, and of a broader variety, than the
human mind can. Free of the burden of previous practical
experiences, such machines can refer to potential experiences in
a frame of reference where literacy is entirely blind. The
behavior of an object in a multi- dimensional space (four, five,
six, or more dimensions), actions along a timeline that can be
regressive, or in several distinct and unrelated time frames,
modeling choices beyond the capability of the human mind-all
these, and many more, with practical significance for the
survival and development of humankind are acceptable problems
for a digital computer.

It is true, as many would hasten to object, that the computer
does not formulate the problem. But this is not the point.
Neither does literacy formulate problems. It only embodies
formulations and answers pertinent to work within a scale of
manageable divisions. The less expressive language of zeros and
ones (yes-no, open-closed, white- black) is more precise, and
definitely more appropriate, for levels of complexity as high as
those resulting from this new stage in the evolution. The
generality of the computer (a general-purpose machine), the
abstraction of the program of symbol manipulation, and the very
concrete nature of the data upon which it is applied represent a
powerful combination of reified knowledge, effective procedures
for solving problems, and high resolution capabilities. Those
who see the computer as only the principal technological
metaphor of our time (according to J. D. Bolter) miss the
significance of the new metrics of human activity and its degree
of necessity as it results from awareness of the limits of our
minds (after the limits of the body were experienced in
industrial society).

Edsger Dijkstra, affirming the need for an orthogonal method of
coping with radical novelty, concludes that this "amounts to
creating and learning a new foreign language that cannot be
translated into one's mother tongue." The direction he takes is
right; the conclusion is still not as radical as the new scale of
human activity and the limits of our self-constitution require.
Coming to grips with the radical change that he and many, many
others ascertain, amounts to understanding the end of literacy
and the illiteracy of the numerous languages required by our
practical experience of self- constitution. This conspectus of
the transformation we experience may foster its own forms of
fresh confusion. For instance, in what was called a civilized
society, language acted as the currency of cultural
transactions. If higher level needs and expectations continue to
drive the market and technology, will they eventually become
subservient to the illiterate means they have generated? Or, if
language in one of its illiterate embodiments cannot keep pace
with the exponential growth of information, will it undergo a
restructuring in order to become a parallel process? Or will we
generate more inclusive symbols, or some form of preprocessing,
before information is delivered to human beings? All these
questions relate to work, as the experience from which human
identities result together with the products bearing their mark.

The active condition of any sign system is quite similar to the
condition of tools. The hand that throws a stone is a hand
influenced by the stone. Levers, hammers, pliers, no less than
telescopes, pens, vending machines, and computers support
practical experiences, but also affect the individuals
constituting themselves through their use. A gesture, a written
mark, a whisper, body movements, words written or read, express
us or communicate for us, at the same time affecting those
constituted in them. How language affects work means, therefore,
how language affects the human being within a pragmatic
framework. To deal with some aspects of this extremely difficult
problem we can start with the original syncretic condition of the
human being.

Innate heuristics

Conceptual tools that can be used to refer to the human being in
its syncretic condition exist only to the degree to which we
identify them in language. In every system we know of, variety
and precision are complementary. Indeed, whether human beings
hunt or present personal experiences to others, they attempt to
optimize their efforts. Too many details affect efficiency;
insufficient detail affects the outcome. There seems to be a
structural relation of the nature of one to many, between our
what and our how. This relation is scrutinized in the pragmatic
context where efficiency considerations finally make us choose
from among many possibilities. The optimum chosen indicates
what, from the possibilities humans are aware of, is most
suitable for reaching the goal pursued. Moreover, such an
optimum is characteristic of the pragmatics of the particular
context. For example, hunting could be performed alone or in
groups, by throwing stones or hurling spears, by shooting
arrows, or by setting traps.

The syncretic primitive being was (and still is, in existing
primitive cultures) involved in a practical experience in its
wholeness: through that being's biological endowment, relation
to the environment, acquired skills and understanding, emotions
(such as fear, joy, sorrow). The specialized individual
constitutes himself in experiences progressively more and more
partial. Nevertheless, the two have a natural condition in
common. What distinguishes them is a strategy for survival and
preservation that progressively departs from immediate needs and
direct action to humanized needs and mediated action. This means
a departure from a very limited set of options ("When hungry,
search for food," for example), to multiplying the options, and
thus establishing for the human being an innate heuristic
condition. This means that Homo Sapiens looks for options.
Humans are creative and efficient.

My line of reasoning argues that, while verbal language may be
innate (as Chomsky's theory advances), the heuristic dimension
characteristic of human self- constitution certainly is. In
hunting, for instance, the choice of means (defining the how)
reflects the goal (to get meat) and also the awareness of what is
possible, as well as the effort to expand the realm of the
possible. The major effort is not to keep things the way they
are, but to multiply the realm of possibilities to ensure more
than mere survival. This is known as progress.

The same heuristic strategy can be applied to the development of
literacy. Before the Western alphabet was established, a number
of less optimal writing systems (cuneiform, hieroglyphics, etc.)
were employed. The very concrete nature of such languages is
reflected in the limited expressive power they had. Current
Chinese and Japanese writing are examples of this phenomenon
today. In comparison to the 24-28 letters of Western alphabets,
command of a minimum of 3,000 ideographic signs represents the
entry level in Chinese and Japanese; command of 50,000
ideographic signs would correspond to the Western ideal of
literacy. Behind the letters and characters of the various
language alphabets, there is a history of optimization in which
work influenced expression, expression constituted new frames for
work, and together, generative and explanatory models of the
world were established. The what and the how of language were
initially on an order of complexity similar to that
characteristic of actions. Over time, actions became simpler
while languages acquired the complexity of the heuristic
experience.

The what and the how of mediation tools of a higher order of
abstraction than language, achieved even higher complexities.
Such complexities were reflected in the difference in the order
of magnitude between human work and outcome, especially the
choices generated. Parallel to the loss of the syncretic nature
of the human being at the level of the individual, we notice the
composite syncretism of the community. Individual, relatively
stable, wholeness was replaced by a faster and faster changing
community- related wholeness. Language experiences were part of
this shift. Self-constituted in the practical use of language,
the human being realized its social dimension, itself an example
of the acquired multiplication of choice.

Indeed, within the very small scale of incipient humanity
corresponding to the stage of self-ascertainment (when signs
were used and elements of language appeared), population and
food supply were locked in the natural equation best reflected
in the structural circularity of existence and survival. It is at
this juncture that the heuristic condition applies: the more
animals prey on a certain group, this group will either find
survival strategies (adaptive or other kinds), or indeed cease to
be available as food for others. But once the human being was
ascertained, evidence shows that instead of focusing on one or
few ways to get at its food sources, it actually diversified the
practical experience of self-constitution and survival,
proceeding from one, or few, to many resources. Homo Habilis was
past the scavenging stage and well into foraging, hunting, and
fishing during the pre-agricultural pragmatic frame. What for
other species became only a limited food supply, and resulted in
mechanisms of drastic growth control (through famine,
cannibalism, and means of destroying life), in the human species
resulted in a broadening of resources. In this process, the human
being became a working being, and work an identifier of the
species.

Language acquisition and the transition from the natural
experience of self- constitution in survival to the practical
experience of work are co-genetic. With each new scale that
became possible, sequences of work marked a further departure
from the universe of action-reaction. The observation to be
made, without repeating information given in other chapters, is
that from signs to incipient language, and from incipient
language to stabilized means of expression, the scale of
humankind changed and an underlying structure of practical
experiences based on sequentiality, linearity, determinism (of
one kind or another), and centralism established a new pragmatic
framework. Individual syncretism was replaced by the syncretism
of communities in which individuals are identified through their
work.

Writing was a relatively late acquisition and occurred as part of
the broader process of labor division. This process was itself
correlated to the diversification of resources and types of
practical experiences preserving syncretism at the community
level. Not everyone wrote, not everybody read. The pragmatic
framework suggested necessitated elements of order, ways of
assigning and keeping track of assignments, a certain
centralism, and, last but not least, organizational forms, which
religion and governing bodies took care of. Under these
circumstances, work was everything that allowed for the
constitution, survival, change, and advancement of the human
species. It was expressed in language to the degree such
expression was necessary. In other words, language is another
asset or means of diversifying choices and resources.

Over time, limited mediation through language and literacy became
necessary in order to optimize the effort of matching needs with
availabilities. This mediation was itself a form of work:
questions asked, questions answered, commitments made,
equivalencies determined. All these defined an activity related
to using available resources, or finding new ones. When
productivity increased, and language could not keep up with the
complexities of higher production, variety, and the need for
planning, a new semiosis, characteristic of this different
pragmatic level, became necessary. Money, for example,
introduced the next level of mediation, more abstract, that
translated immediate, vital needs into a comparative scale of
means to fulfill them. The context of exchange generated money,
which eventually became itself a resource, a high level
commodity. It also entailed a language of its own, as does each
mediation. With the advent of means of exchange as universal as
language, the what and how of human activity grew even more
distant. Direct trade became indirect. People making up the
market no longer randomly matched needs and availability. Their
market praxis resulted in an organizing device, and used
language to further diversify the resources people needed for
their lives. This language was still rudimentary, direct, oral,
captive to immediacy, and often consumed together with the
resource or choice exhausted (when no alternative was
generated). This happens even in our day.

In its later constitution in practical activity, language was
used for records and transactions, for plans and new
experiences. The logic of this language was an extension and
instantiation of the logic of human activity. It complemented the
heuristic, innate propensity for seeking new choices. Influenced
by human interaction in the market, and subjected to the
expectation of progressively higher efficiency, human activity
became increasingly mediated. A proliferation of tools allowed
for increased productivity in those remote times of the
inception of language. Eventually tools, and other artifacts,
became themselves an object of the market, in addition to
supporting self-constitutive practical experiences of the humans
interacting with them. As a mediating element between the
processor and what is processed, the tool was a means of work
and a goal: better tools require instructed users. If they use
tools properly, they increase the efficiency of activity and
make the results more marketable. Tools supported the effort of
diversification of practical experiences, as well as the effort
of expanding the subsistence base. The means for creating tools
and other artifacts fostered other languages, such as the
language of drawing, on which early engineering also relied.
Here, an important point should be made. No tool is merely used.
In using it, the user adapts to the tool, becoming to some
extent, the used, the tool of the tool. The same is true of
language, writing, and literacy. They were developed by humans
seeking to optimize their activity. But humans have adapted
themselves to the constraints of their own inventions.

At the inception of writing, the tension between an imposed
written precision (as relative as this might appear from our
perspective today)-keeping language close to the object,
allowing into the language only objects that pictograms could
represent- and a rather diverse, however very unfocused, oral
language resulted in conflicts between the proponents of writing
and the guardians of orality (as documented in ancient Greek
philosophy). The written needed to be freed from the object as
much as the human being from a particular source of protein, or
a particular food source. It had to support a more general
expression (referring to what would become families, types,
classes of objects, etc.), and thus to support practical efforts
to diversify the ways of survival and continuous growth in
number. The oral had to be tamed and united with the written.
Taming could, and did, take place only through and in work, and
in socially related interaction. The practical effort to embody
knowledge resulting from many practical experiences of survival
into all kinds of artifacts (for measuring, orientation,
navigation, etc.) testifies to this. Phonetic writing, the
development of the effort to optimize writing, better imitated
oral language. Personal characteristics, making the oral
expressive, and social characteristics, endowing the written with
the hints that bring it close to speech, are supported in the
phonetic system. The theocratic system of pictographs and what
others call the democratic language of phonetic writing deserve
their names only if we understand that languages are both
constitutive and representative of human experience.
Undifferentiated labor is theocratic. Its rules are imposed by
the object of the practical experience. Divided labor, while
affecting the integrity of those becoming only an instance of
the work process, is participatory, in the sense that its
results are related to the performance of each participant in the
process. Practical experience of language and experience of
divided labor are intrinsically related and correspond to the
pragmatic framework of this particular human scale. Labor
division and the association of very abstract phonetic entities
to very concrete language instantiations of human experience are
interdependent.

The realm of alternatives

In defining the context of change leading from an
all-encompassing literacy to the civilization of illiteracy, I
referred to the Malthusian principle (Population, when
unchecked, increases geometrically, while food sources increase
arithmetically). What Malthus failed to acknowledge is the
heuristic nature of the human species, i.e., the progressive
realization of the creative potential of the only known species
that, in addition to maintaining its natural condition,
generates its own a-natural condition. In the process of their
self-constitution, humans generate also the means for their
survival and future growth beyond the circularity of mere
survival strategies. The 19th century economist Henri George
gave the following example of this characteristic: "Both the
jayhawk and the man eat chicken, but the more jayhawks, the fewer
chickens, while the more men, the more chickens." (Just think
about the Purdue chicken industry!) The formula is flawed.
Humans also intervene in the jayhawk-chicken relation; the number
of animals and birds in a certain area is affected by more
elements than what eats what; and the population increase is
meaningless unless associated with patterns of human practical
experiences. Species frequently become extinct due to human, not
animal, intervention. Despite all this, Henri George's
characterization captured an important aspect of the human
species, as it defined itself in the human scale that made
literacy possible and necessary.

George's time corresponded to some interesting though misleading
messages that followed the pattern of Malthus' law. People were
running out of timber, coal, and oil for lamps, just as we
expect to run out of many other resources (minerals, energy and
food sources, water, etc.). Originators of messages regarding the
exhaustion of such resources, regardless of the time they utter
them, ignore the fact that during previous shortages, humans
focused on alternatives, and made them part of new practical
experiences. This was the case leading to the use of coal, when
the timber supply decreased in Britain in the 16th century, and
this will be the case with the shortages mentioned above: for
lighting, kerosene was extracted from the first oil wells
(1859); more coal reserves were discovered; better machines were
built that used less energy and made coal extraction more
efficient; industry adapted other minerals; and the strict
dependence on natural cycles and farming was progressively
modified through food processing and storage techniques.

The pragmatic framework of current human praxis is based on the
structural characteristics of this higher scale of humankind. It
affects the nature of human work and the nature of social,
political, and national organization within emerging national
states. A retrospective of the dynamics of growth and resource
availability shows that with language, writing and reading, and
finally with literacy, and even more through engineering outside
language experience, a coherent framework of pragmatic human
action was put in place, and used to compensate for the
progressive imbalance between population growth and resources.

Our time is in more than one way the expression of a semiosis
with deep roots in the pragmatic context in which writing
emerged. Engineering dominates today. In trying to define the
semiosis of engineering, i.e. how the relation between work we
associate with engineering and language evolved, we evidence
both continuity-in the form of successive replications-and
discontinuity-in the new condition of the current engineering
work. Our reference can be made to both the dissemination of the
writing system based on the Phoenician alphabet, and the
language of drawing that makes engineering possible.

Phoenician traders supplied materials to the Minoans. The Minoan
burial culture involved the burial of precious objects that
embodied the experience of crafts. These objects were made out
of silver, gold, tin, and lead. In time, increased quantities of
such metals were permanently removed from the market.
Phoenicians, who supplied these materials, had to search farther
and farther for them, using better tools to find and preprocess
the minerals. The involvement of writing and drawing in the
process of compensation between perceived needs and available
resources, and the fact that searches for new resources led to
the dissemination of writing and craftsmanship should be
understood within the dynamics of local economies.

Up to which point such a compensatory action, implying literacy
and engineering skills, is effective, and when it reached its
climax, possibly during the Industrial Revolution, is a question
that can be put only in retrospect. Is there a moment when the
balance was tilted towards the means of expression of and the
communication specific to engineering? If yes, we do not know
this moment; we cannot identify it on historic charts. But once
the potential of literacy to support human practical experiences
of self- constitution in a new pragmatic framework was exhausted,
new means became necessary. To understand the dynamics of the
changes that made the new pragmatic framework of the
civilization of illiteracy necessary is the object of the entire
book. While engineering contributed to them, they are not the
result of this important practical experience, but rather a
cause of how it was and is affected by them. The stream of
diversified experiences that eventually gushed forth through new
languages, the language of design and engineering included,
resulted in the awareness of mediation, which itself became a
goal.

Mediation of mediation

With the risk of breaking the continuity of the argument, I would
like to continue by suggesting the implications of this argument
for the reality to which this book refers: the present. First, a
general thesis derived from the analysis so far: The market of
direct exchange, as well as the market of mediated forms,
reflect the general structure of human activity-direct work vs.
mediated forms of work-and are expressed in their specific
languages. From a certain moment in human evolution, tools, as an
extension of the human body and mind, are used, some directly,
some indirectly. Today we notice how, through the intermediary
of commands transmitted electronically, pneumatically,
hydraulically, thermally, or in some other way, the mediation of
mediation is introduced. Pressing a button, flipping a switch,
punching a keyboard, triggering a relay-seen as steps preparing
for entirely programmed activities-means to extend the sequence
of mediations. Between the hand or another body part and the
processed material, processing tools and sequences of signs
controlling this process are introduced. Accordingly, language,
as related to work, religion, education, poetry, exchange in the
market, etc., is restructured. New levels of language and new,
limited, functionally designed languages are generated and used
for mediating. The language of drawings (more generally the
language of design) is one of them. Relations among these
different levels and among the newly designed languages are
established.

But how is this related to the innate heuristic condition of the
human being and to the working hypothesis advanced regarding the
change in the scale of humanity? Or is it only another way of
saying that technology, resulting from engineering
interpretations of science, defines the path to higher levels of
efficiency, and to the relative illiteracy of our time? The
increase in population and the dynamics of diversification (more
choices, more resources) at this new scale assume a different
dimension. It is irrelevant that resources of one type or
another are exhausted in one economy. As a matter of fact,
Japan, Germany, England, and even the USA (rich in the majority
of resources in demand) have exhausted whatever oil, copper,
tin, diamonds, or tungsten was available. Due to many factors,
farmland in the western world is decreasing, while the
quantities and different types of food consumed per capita have
increased substantially. Faced with the challenge posed by the
national, linear, sequential, dual, deterministic nature of the
pragmatic framework that generated the need for literacy, humans
discover means to transcend these limitations-globality,
non-linearity, configuration, multi-valued logic,
non-determination-and embody them in artifacts appropriate to
this condition.

The new scale necessitated creative work for multiplying
available resources, for looking at needs and availabilities
from a new perspective. Those who see globality in the Japanese
sushi restaurant in Provence or in the Midwest, in the McDonalds
in Moscow or Beijing, in multinational corporations, in foreign
investments mushrooming all over, miss the real significance of
the term. Globality applies to the understanding that we share
in resources and creative means of multiplying them independent
of boundaries (of language, culture, nations, alliances, etc.),
as well as in high efficiency processing equipment. This
understanding is not only sublime, it has its ugly side. The
world would even go to war (and has, again and again) to secure
access to critical resources or to keep markets open. But it is
not the ugly side that defines the effective pragmatics. Nor
does it define the circumstances of our continuous
self-definition in this world of a new dynamics of survival
needs and expectations above and beyond such needs.

Where literacy no longer adequately supports creative work based
on higher levels of efficiency, it is replaced by languages
designed and adapted to mediation, or to work destined to
compensate for an exhausted resource, or by machines
incorporating our literacy and the literacies of higher
efficiency. Hunting and fishing remain as mere sport, and
foraging declined to the level at which people in a country
like the USA no longer know that in the woods there are
mushrooms, berries, and nuts that can be used as food. Even
agriculture, probably the longest standing form of practical
experience, escapes sequentiality and linearity, and adds
industrial dimensions that make agriculture a year-round, highly
specialized, efficient activity. We share resources and even
more in the globality of the life support system (the ecology);
in the globality of communication, transportation, and
technology; and, last but not least, in the globality of the
market. The conclusion is that, once again, it is not any
recent discovery or trend that is the engine of change, from
local to national to global, but the new circumstances of human
experience, whose long-lasting effect is the altered
individual.

Freed from the human operator and replaced by technology that
ensures levels of efficiency and security for which the living
being is not well adapted to provide, many types of work are
simultaneously freed from the constraints of language, of
literacy in particular. There is no need to teach machines
spelling, or grammar, or rules of constructing sentences. There
is even less of a need to maintain between the human being and
the machine a mediating literacy that is awkward, inefficient,
stamped by ambiguity, and burdened by various uses (religious,
political, ideological, etc.). The new languages, whether
interfaces between machines or between humans and machines, are
of limited scope and duration. In the dynamics of work, these new
languages are appropriately adapted to each other. Our entire
activity becomes faster, more precise, more segmented, more
distributed, more complex. This activity is subordinated to a
multi-valued logic of efficiency, not to dualistic inferences or
truth or falsehood.

Some might read into the argument made so far a vote against the
many kinds of activists of this day and age: the ecologists who
warn of damage inflicted on the environment; Malthusians
tireless in warning of upcoming famine; the zero-population-
growth movement, etc. Some might read here a vote for
technocracy, for the advocates of limitless growth, the
optimists of despair, or the miracle planners (free marketers,
messianic ideologists, etc.). None is the case. Rather, I submit
for examination a model for understanding and action that takes
into account the complexity of the problem instead of explaining
complexities away and working, as literacy taught us to, on
simplified models. Mapping out the terrain of the descriptive
level of the relation between language and work under current
pragmatic circumstances will assist in the attempt to plot, in
some meaningful detail, the position so far described.

Literacy and Education

Education and literacy are intimately related. One seems
impossible without the other. Nevertheless, there was education
before the written word. And there is education that does not
rely on literacy, or at least not exclusively. With this in mind,
let us focus, in these preliminary words, on what brought
literacy into education, and on the consequences of their
reciprocal relation.

The state of education, like the state of many other institutions
embodying characteristics of literacy-based practical
experiences, is far from what is expected. Literacy carried the
ideal of permanency into the practical experience of education.
In a physical world perceived as limited in scale and
fragmented, captive to sequentiality, characterized by periodic
changes and intercommunal commitments aimed at maintaining
permanency, literacy embodied both a goal and the means for
achieving it. It defined a representative, limited set of
choices. Within this structure, education is the practical
experience of stabilizing optimal modes of interaction centered
around values expressed in language. Education based on
literacy is adapted to the dynamics of change within the reduced
scale of humankind that eventually led to the formation of
nations-entities of relative self-sufficiency. Within national
boundaries, population growth, resources, and choices could be
kept in balance.

Purposely simplified, this view allows us to understand that
education evolved from its early stages-direct transmission of
experience from one person to another, from one generation to
another-to religion-based educational structures. Filtered by a
set of religious premises, education later opened a window beyond
the immediate and the proximity of life, and evolved, not
painlessly, into schools and universities concerned with
knowledge and scholarship. This, too, was a long process, with
many intermediate steps, which eventually resulted in the
generalized system of education we now have in place, and which
reflects the separation of church and state. Liberal education
and all the values attached to it are the foundational matrix of
the current system of general education.

If you give someone a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If
you give someone an alphabet, every problem becomes one of
literacy and education-this would probably be a good paraphrase,
applicable to the discussions on education in our day. It should
not follow, however, that with the World Wide Web, education is
only a matter of on-line postings of classes and the accidental
matching of educational needs to network availabilities. In our
world of change and discontinuity, the end of literacy, along
with the end of education based on literacy, is not a symptom,
but a necessary development, beyond on-line studies. This
conclusion, which may appear to be a criticism of the digital
dissemination of knowledge, might seem hasty at this point in
the text. The arguments to follow will justify the conclusion.

"Know the best"

Resulting from our self-constitution in a world obsessed with
efficiency and satisfaction, the insatiable effort to exhaust
the new-only to replace it with the newer- puts education in a
perspective different from that opened by literacy. Education
driven by literacy seems to be condemned to a sui generis
catch-up condition, or "damned if you do, damned if you don't."
In the last 30 years, education has prepared students for a
future different from the one education used to shape in a
reactive mode. Under the enormous pressure of expectations
(social, political, economic, moral) it simply cannot fulfill,
unless it changes as the structure of the pragmatic framework
changed, the institution of education has lost its credibility.
Classes, laboratories, manuals, any of the educational methods
advanced, not to mention the living inventory of teachers,
account for contents and ways of thinking only marginally (if at
all) linked to the change from a dominant literacy to numerous
literacies. IBM, fighting to redefine itself, stated bluntly in
one of its educational campaigns, "Since 1900, every institution
has kept up with change, except one: Education."

More money than ever, more ideals and sweat have been invested in
the process of educating the young, but little has changed
either the general perception of education or the perception of
those educated. The most recent laboratory of the high school or
university is already outdated when the last piece of equipment
is ordered. The competence of even the best teachers becomes
questionable just as their students start their first journey in
practical life. The harder our schools and colleges try to keep
pace with change, the more obvious it becomes that this is a
wrong direction to pursue, or that something in the nature of
our educational system makes the goal unreachable-or both of
these alternatives. Some people believe that the failure is due
to the bureaucracy of education. Much can be said in support of
this opinion. The National Institute for Literacy is an example
of how a problem can become a public institution. Other people
believe that the failure is due to the inability of educators to
develop a good theory of education, based on how people learn and
what the best way to teach is. Misunderstanding the implications
of education and setting false priorities are also frequently
invoked. Misunderstanding too often resulted in expensive
government projects of no practical consequence.

Other explanations are also given for the failure of
education-liberalism, excessive democracy in education,
rejection of tradition, teaching and learning geared to tests,
the breakdown of the family. (Listing them here should not be
misconstrued as an endorsement.) It seems that every critic of
today's education has his or her own explanation of what each
thinks is wrong. Some of these explanations go well back,
almost to the time when writing was established: education
affects originality, dampens spontaneity, and infringes upon
creativity. Education negates naturalness during the most
critical period of development, when the minds of young people,
the object of education, are most impressionable.

Other arguments are more contemporary: If the right texts
(whatever right means) were to be taught, using the best methods
to put them in a light that makes them attractive, education
would not lose out to entertainment. Some groups advocate the
digest approach for texts, sometimes presented in the form of
comic strips or Internet-like messages of seven sentences per
paragraph, each sentence containing no more than seven words.
These explanations assume the permanence of literacy. They
concentrate on strategies, from infantile to outlandish, to
maintain literacy's role, never questioning it, never even
questioning whether the conditions that made it necessary might
have changed to the degree that a new structure is already in
place. Educators like to think that their program is defined
through Matthew Arnold's prescription, "Know the best that is
known and thought in the world," an axiom of tradition-driven
self- understanding. This attitude is irrelevant in a context in
which best is an identifier of wares, not of dynamic knowledge.
Some educators would follow Jacques Barzun's recommendation:
"serious reading, serious teaching of reading, and inculcation of
a love for reading are the proper goal of education."
Ideal vs. real

Schools at all levels of education purport to give students a
traditional education and promise to deliver the solid education
of yesteryear. Contrast this claim to reality: Under the
pressure of the market in which they operate, schools maintain
that they prepare students for the new pragmatic context. Some
schools integrate practical disciplines and include training
components. Courses in computer use come immediately to mind.
Some schools go so far as to sign contracts guaranteeing the
appropriateness of the education they provide. In the tradition
of the service industry, they promise to take back pupils unable
to meet the standardized criteria. Every spring, a reality check
is made. In 1996, a poll of 500 graduating seniors revealed that
only 7% succeeded in answering at least 15 of 20 questions
asked. Five of these were on math, the rest on history and
literature-all traditional subject matter.

Experts called to comment on the results of this poll-E.D.
Hirsch, author of Cultural Literacy and active in having his
educational ideas implemented; Diane Ravitch, former Assistant
Secretary of Education; and Stephen Balch, president of the
National Association of Scholars, constitute themselves in the
pragmatic framework of literacy-based education. They declare,
and appropriately so, that educational standards are declining,
that education is failing to produce the type of citizen a
democracy needs. As reputable as they undoubtedly are, these
scholars, and many of those in charge of education, do not seem
to realize what changes have been taking place in the real
world. They live in the richest and probably most dynamic country
in the world, with one of the lowest unemployment rates, and the
highest rate of new business creation, but fail to associate
education with this dynamism. If education is failing, then
something positive must be replacing it.

In modern jargon, one can say that until education is
re-engineered (or should I say rethought?), it has no chance of
catching up with reality. In its current condition of
compromise, education will only continue to muddle along,
upsetting both its constituencies: those captive to an education
based on the literacy model, and those who recognize new
structural requirements.

The reality is that the universality implicit in the literacy
model of education, reflected in the corpus of democratic
principles guaranteeing equality and access, is probably no
longer defensible in its original form. Education should rather
elaborate on notions that better reflect differences among
people, their background, ethnicity, and their individual
capabilities. Instead of trying to standardize, education should
stimulate differences in order to derive the most benefit from
them. Education should stimulate complementary avenues to
excellence, instead of equal access to mediocrity. Some people
may be uneducatable. They might have characteristics impossible
to reduce to the common denominator that literacy-based
education implies. These students might require alternative
education paths in order to optimally become what their abilities
allow them to be, and what practical experience will validate as
relevant and desired, no matter how different.

Equal representation, as applied to members of minority students
or faculty, ethnic groups, sexes or sexual preferences, and the
handicapped, introduces a false sense of democracy in education.
It takes away the very edge of their specific chances from the
people it pretends to help and encourage. Instead of
acknowledging distinctions, expectations of equal representation
suggest that the more melting in the pot, the better for
society, regardless of whether the result is uniform mediocrity
or distributed excellence. Actually the opposite is true: equal
opportunity should be used in order to preserve distinctive
qualities and bring them to fruition.

As a unified requirement, literacy imparts a sense of conformity
and standardization appropriate to the pragmatic framework that
made standardized education necessary. Numerous alternative
means of expression and communication, for which education has
only a deaf ear, facilitate the multiplication of choices. In a
world confronted with needs well beyond those of survival, this
is a source of higher efficiency. The necessary effort to
individualize education cannot, however, take place unless the
inalienable right to study and work for one's own path to
self-improvement is not respected to the same extent as liberty
and equality are.

The globality of human praxis is not a scenario invented by some
entrepreneur. It is the reflection of the scale at which
population growth, shared resources, and choices heading to new
levels of efficiency become critical. In our world many people
never become literate; many more still live at the borderline
between human and animal life, threatened by starvation and
epidemics. These facts do not contradict the dynamics that made
alternatives to literacy necessary. It is appropriate,
therefore, to question the type of knowledge that education
imparts, and how it impacts upon those who are educated.

Relevance

Schools and universities are criticized for not giving students
relevant knowledge. The notion of relevance is critical here.
Scholars claim that knowledge of facts pertaining to tradition,
such as those tested in the graduating class of 1996, are
relevant. Relevant also are elements of logical thinking, enough
science in order to understand the wealth of technologies we
use, foreign languages, and other subject matter that will help
students face the world of practical experience. Although the
subjects listed are qualified as significant, they are never used
in polls of graduating students.

Critics of the traditional curriculum dispute the relevance of a
tradition that seems to exclude more than it includes. They also
challenge implicit hierarchical judgments of the people who
impose courses of study. Multiculturalism, criticism of
tradition, and freedom from the pressure of competition are
among the recommendations they make. Acknowledging the new
context of social life and praxis, these critics fail, however,
to put it in the broader context of successive structural
conditions, and thus lack criteria of significance outside their
own field of expertise.

With the notion of relevance, a perspective of the past and a
direction for the future are suggested. That literacy-based
education, at its inception, was xenophobic or racist, and
obviously political, nobody has to tell us. Individuals from
outside the polis, speaking a different mother tongue, were
educated for a political reason: to make them useful to the
community as soon as possible. Conditions for education changed
dramatically over time, but the political dimension remains as
strong as ever. This is why it can only help to dispense with
certain literate attitudes expressing national, ethnic, racial,
or similar ambitions. It is irrelevant whether Pythagoras was
Greek and whether his geometry was original with him. It is
irrelevant whether one or another person from one or another
part of the world can be credited with a literary contribution,
a work of art, or a religious or philosophic thought. What counts
is how such accomplishments became relevant to the people of the
world as they involved themselves in increasingly complex
practical experiences. Moreover, our own sense of value does not
rest on a sports-driven model-the first, the most, the best-but
on the challenge posed by how each of us will constitute his own
identity in unprecedented circumstances of work, leisure, and
feeling. Relevance applies to the perspective of the future and
to the recognition that experiences of the past are less and less
pertinent in the new context.

What should be taught? Language? Math? Chemistry? Philosophy? The
list can go on. It is indeed very hard to do justice by simply
nodding yes to language, yes to math, yes to chemistry, but not
yes wholesale, without putting the question in the pragmatic
context. This means that education should not be approached with
the aura of religion, or dogmatism, assumed up to now: The
teacher knew what eternal truth was; students heard the lectures
and finally received communion.

All basic disciplines have changed through time. The rhythm of
their change keeps increasing. The current understanding of
language, math, chemistry, and philosophy does not necessarily
build on a progression. Science, for example, is not
accumulation. Neither is language, contrary to all appearance.
Rules learned by rote and accepted as invariable are not needed,
but procedures for accessing knowledge relevant to our dynamic
existence are. To memorize all that education-no matter how
good or bad-unloads on students is sheer impossibility. But to
know where to find what a given practical instance requires, and
how one can use it, is quite a different matter.

Should square dancing, Heavy Metal music, bridge, Chinese cuisine
be taught? The list, to be found in the curriculum of many
schools and colleges, goes on and on. The test of the relevance
of such disciplines (or subjects) in a curriculum should be
based on the same pragmatic criteria that our lives and
livelihoods depend on. New subjects of study appear on course
lists due to structural changes that make literacy useless in
the new pragmatic context. They cannot, however, substitute for
an education that builds the power of thinking and feeling for
practical experiences of increased complexity and dynamism.

Education needs to be shaped to the dynamics of self-constitution
in practical experiences characteristic of this new age of
humankind. This does not mean that education should become
another TV program, or an endless Internet voyage, without aim
and without method. We must comprehend that if we demand literacy
and efficiency at the same time, ignoring that they are in many
ways incompatible, we can only contribute to greater confusion.
Higher education was opened to people who merely need training
to obtain a skill. These students receive precious-looking
diplomas that exactly resemble the ones given to students who
have pursued a rigorous course of education. Once upon a time,
literacy meant the ability to write and read Latin. Therefore,
diplomas are embellished with Latin dicta, almost never
understood by the graduates, and many times not even by the
professors who hand them out. In the spirit of nostalgia,
useless rituals are maintained, which are totally disconnected
from today's pragmatic framework.

The progressively increased mediation that affects efficiency
levels also contributes to the multiplication of the number of
languages involved in describing, designing, coordinating, and
synchronizing human work. We are facing new requirements-those
of parallelism, non-linearity, multi-valued logic, vagueness, and
selection among options. Programming, never subject to wrong or
right, but to optimal choice, and always subject to further
improvement, is becoming a requirement for many practical
experiences, from the arts to advanced science. Requirements of
globality, distribution, economies of scale, of elements
pertinent to engineering, communication, marketing, management,
and of service-providing experiences need to be met within
specific educational programs. The fulfillment of these
requirements can never be relegated to literacy.

We have seen that the broader necessity of language, from which
the necessity of literacy is derived, is not defensible outside
the process of human self-constitution. Language plays an
important role, together with other sign systems, subordinated to
language or not. In retrospect, we gain an understanding of the
entire process: natural instincts are transmitted genetically
and only slightly improve, if degeneration does not occur, in
the interaction among individuals sharing a habitat. The
conscious use of signs takes newborns from the domain of nature
and eventually places them in the realm of culture. In this
realm, life ceases to be a matter of biology only, and takes on
non-natural, social and cultural dimensions. To live as an animal
is to live for oneself and for very few others (mainly
offspring). To live as a human being is to live through the
existence of others, and in relation to others. Established
before us and bound to continue after us, culture absorbs
newcomers who not only begin their existence through their
parents, but who also get to know culture and to adapt to it, or
revolt against it.

Education starts with the experience of the absent, the
non-immediate, the successive. In other words, it implies
experiences resulting from comparisons, imitation of actions,
and formation of individual patterns corresponding to human
biological characteristics. Only much later comes the use of
language, of adjectives, adverbs, and the generation of
conventions and metaphors, some part of the body of literacy,
others part of other languages, such as the visual. With the
constitution of the family, education begins, and so does
another phase in labor division. The initial phase probably
marked the transition from a very small scale of nomadic tribal
life to the scale within which language settled in notation and
eventually in writing. The generality of sequences, words,
phonetics, nouns, and actions was reached in the practical
experience of writing. The language of drawings, resulting from
different experiences and supporting the making of objects,
complemented the development of writing. When the scale of
humankind corresponding to incipient literacy was reached,
literacy became the instrument for imparting experiences
coherent with the experience of language and its use. This
account is inserted here as a summary for those who, although
claiming historic awareness, show no real instinct for history.
This summary says that education is the result of many changes
in the condition of humankind and makes clear that these
alterations continue. They also entail a responsibility to
improve the experience of education and re-establish its
connection to the broader framework of human activity, instead
of limiting education to the requirements of cultural continuity.

It has been said, again and again, that what we are we had to
learn to become. Actually, we are who and what we are through
what we do in the context of our individual and social
existence. To speak, write, and read means to understand what
we say, what we write, and what we read. It is not only the
mechanical reproduction of words or sound patterns, which
machines can also be programmed to perform. The expectation of
speaking, reading, and writing is manifested in all human
interactions. To learn how to speak, write, and read means both
to gain skills and to become aware of the pragmatic context of
interhuman relations that involve speaking, writing, and
reading. It also means awareness of the possibility to change
this context.

To educate today means to integrate others, and in the process
oneself, in an activity-oriented process directed towards
sharing the knowledge necessary to gain further knowledge. Its
content cannot be knowledge in general, since the varieties of
practical experiences cannot be emulated in school and college.
Within the pragmatic framework that made literacy possible, it
sufficed to know how an engine functioned in order to work with
different machines driven by engines. Literacy reflected
homogeneity and served those constituted as literate in
controlling the parameters within which deviations were
allowed. The post-industrial experience, based on an underlying
digital structure, is so heterogeneous that it is impossible to
cope with the many different instances of practical
requirements. The skills to orient us towards where to find what
we need become more important than the information shared.
Ownership of knowledge takes a back seat; what counts is access,
paralleled by a good understanding of the new nature of human
praxis focused on cognition. Education should, accordingly,
prepare people to handle information, or to direct it to
information processing devices. It has to help students develop
a propensity for understanding and explaining the variety in
which cognition, the raw material of digital engines, results
from our experiences.

The unity between the various paths we conceive in projecting our
own biological reality into the reality of the world housing us
and the result of our activity is characteristic of our mental
and emotional condition. It defines our thinking and feeling. At
some moment in time, after the division between physical and
intellectual work took place, this thinking became relatively
free of the result. The abstraction of thinking, once attained,
corresponds to our ability to be in the process, to be aware of
it, to judge it. This is the level of theories. The dynamics of
the present affects the status of theories, both the way we
shape them and how we communicate them. At least in regard to the
communication of theory, but also to some of its generation, it
is worthwhile to examine, in the context of our concern with
education in this age, the evolution of the university.

Temples of knowledge

Education became the institution, the machine of literacy, once
the social role of a generalized instrument of communication and
coordination was established. This happened simultaneously with
the reification of many other forms of human praxis: religion,
the judiciary, the military. The first Western universities
embodied the elitist ideal of literacy in every possible way:
exclusivity, philosophy of education, architecture, goals,
curriculum, body of professors, body of students, relation to the
outside world, religious status. These universities did not care
for the crafts, and did not acknowledge apprenticeship. The
university, more than schools (in their various forms), extended
its influence beyond its walls to assume a leading role in the
spiritual lives of the population, while still maintaining an
aura about itself. This was not just because of the religious
foundation of universities. The university housed important
intellectual documents containing theories of science and
humanities, and encompassing educational concepts. These
documents emphasized the role of a universal education (not only
as a reflex of the Church's catholic drive) in which fundamental
components constructed a temple of knowledge from which theories
were dispensed throughout the Western world. Through its concept
and affirmed values, the university was intended as a model for
society and as an important participant in its dynamics.
Tradition, languages (opening direct access to the world of
classic philosophy and literature), and the arts were understood
in their unity. Engineering and anything practical played no
part in this.

Compared to the current situation, those first universities were
ahead of their time almost to the effect of losing contact with
reality. They existed in a world of advanced ideas, of idealized
social and moral values, of scientific innovation celebrated in
their metaphysical abstraction. There is no need to transcribe
the history of education here. We are mainly interested in the
dynamics of education up to the turn of the century, and would
like to situate it in the discussion caused by the apparent, or
actual, failure of education to accomplish its goals today. When
universities were founded, access to education was very limited.
This makes comparison to the current situation in universities
almost irrelevant. It explains, however, why some people question
the presence of students who would not have been accepted in a
college a century ago, even 50 years ago. Yes, the university is
the bearer of prejudices as well as values.

The relevance of historic background is provided by the
understanding of the formative power of language, of its
capacity for storing ideas and ideals associated with
permanency, and for disseminating the doctrine of permanency and
authority, making it part of the social texture. Religion
insinuated itself into the sciences and humanities, and assumed
the powerful role of assigning meaning to various discoveries and
theories. Education in such universities was for eternity,
according to a model that placed humanity in the center of the
universe and declared it exemplary because it originated from
the Supreme power. The university established continuity through
its entire program, and did so on the foundation of literacy. As
an organization, it adopted a structure more favorable to
integration and less to differentiation. It constituted a
counter-power, a critical instrument, and a framework for
intellectual practice. Although many associate the formula
"Knowledge is power" with the ideology of the political left, it
actually originated in the medieval university, and within
conservative power relations for which literacy constituted the
underlying structure.

Looking at the development of the medieval university, one can
say that it was the embodiment of the reification of language,
of the Greek logos and of the Roman ratio. The entire history of
reifying the past was summarized in the university and projected
as a model for the future. Alternative ways of thinking and
communicating were excluded, or made to fit the language mold
and submit, without exception, to the dominating rationality.
Based on these premises, the university evolved into an
institution of methodical doubt. It became an intellectual
machine for generating and experimenting with successive
alternative explanations of the universe, as a whole, and of its
parts, considered similar in some way to the whole they
constituted.

The circumstances leading to the separation of intellectual and
educational tasks were generated by an interplay of factors. The
printing press is one of them. The metaphors of the university
also played an important role. But the defining element was
practical expectations. As people eventually learned, they could
not build machines only by knowing Latin or Greek, or by
reciting litanies, but by knowing mathematics and mechanics.
Some of this knowledge came from Greek and Latin texts preserved
by Moslem scholars from the desolation following the fall of the
Roman empire. People also had to know how to express their
goals, and communicate a plan to those who would transform it
into roads, bridges, buildings, and much more. Humans could not
rely on Aristotle's explanation of the world in order to find new
forms of energy. More physics, chemistry, biology, and geology
became necessary. Access to such domains was still primarily
through literacy, although each of these areas of interest
started developing its own language. Machines were conceived and
built as metaphors of the human being. They embodied an
animistic view, while actually answering needs and expectations
corresponding to a scale of human existence beyond that of
animistic practical experiences.

Industrial experience, a school of a new pragmatic framework,
would impart awareness of creativity and productivity, as well
as a new sense of confidence. Work became less and less
homogeneous, as did social life. Once the potential of literacy
reached its limits of explaining everything and constituting the
only medium for new theories, universities started lagging
behind the development of human practice. What separates Galileo
Galilei's physics from the Newtonian is less drastic than what
separates both from Einstein's relativity theory, and all three
of these from the rapidly unfolding physics of the cosmos. In
the latter, a different scale and scope must be accounted for,
and a totally new way of formulating problems must be developed.
Humans project upon the world cognitive explanatory models for
which past instruments of knowledge are not adequate. The same
applies to theories in biology, chemistry, and more and more to
sociology, economics, and the decision sciences. It is worth
noting that scale, and complexity therein, thus constitutes a
rather encompassing criterion, one that finally affects the
theory and practice of education.

Coherence and connection

Education has stubbornly defended its turf. While it fell well
behind the expectations of those in need of support for finding
their place in the current pragmatic context, a new paradigm of
scientific and humanistic investigation was acknowledged-
computation. Together with experimental and theoretical science,
computation stimulated levels at which the twin concerns for
intellectual coherence and for the ability to establish
connections outside the field of study could be satisfied.
Computation made it into the educational system without becoming
one of education's underlying structures. The late-in-coming
Technology Literacy Challenge that will provide two billion
dollars by the year 2001 acknowledges this situation, though it
fails to address it properly. In other countries, the situation
is not much better. Bureaucracies based on rules of functioning
pertinent to past pragmatics are not capable of even
understanding the magnitude of change, in which their reason for
being disappears.

In some colleges and private high schools, students can already
access the computer network from terminals in their dormitories.
Still, in the majority, computing time is limited, and assigned
for specific class work, mainly word processing. Too many
educational outlets have only administrative computers for
keeping track of budget execution and enrollment. In most
European countries the situation is even worse. And as far as
the poor countries of the world are concerned, one can only hope
that the disparity will not deepen. If this were the case with
electricity, we would hear an uproar. Computing should become as
pervasive as electricity.

This view is not necessarily unanimously accepted. Arguments
about whether education needs to be computerized or whether
computers should be integrated across the board go on and on
among educators and administrators with a say in the matter. It
should be noticed that failure to provide the appropriate context
for teaching, learning, and research affects the condition of
universities all over the world. These universities cease to
contribute new knowledge. They become instead the darkroom for
pictures taken elsewhere, by people other than their professors,
researchers, and graduate students. Such institutions fathom a
relatively good understanding of the past, but a disputable
notion of the present and the future, mainly because they are
hostages to literacy-based structures of thought and activity,
even when they use computers.

To function within a language means to share in the experiences
which are built into it. Natural language has a built-in
experience of space and time; programming languages contain
experiences of logical inference or of object-oriented
functioning of the world. These experiences represent its
pre-understanding frame of reference. Knowledge built into our
so-called natural languages was for a long time common to all
human beings. It resulted in communities sharing, through
language, the practical experiences through which the community
members constituted themselves in space and time. The continuity
of language and its permanence reflected continuity of
experience and permanence of understanding. Within such a
pragmatic framework, education and the sharing of experience
were minimally differentiated from each other. Progressively,
language experience was added to practical experience and used to
differentiate such an experience in new forms of praxis:
theoretic work, engineering, art, social activism, political
programs. Diversity, incipient segmentation, higher speeds, and
incremental mediations affected the condition of
self-constitutive human experiences. Consequently, literacy
progressively ceased to represent the optimal medium for
sharing, although it maintains many other functions. Indeed,
plans for a new building, for a bridge, for engines, for many
artifacts cannot be expressed in literate discourse, no matter
how high the level, or how well literate competency is served by
education or impacts upon it.

Accelerated dynamics and a generalized practice of mediations, by
means not based on literacy, become part of human praxis in the
civilization of illiteracy and define a new underlying
structure. Language preserves a limited function. It is
paralleled by many other sign systems, some extremely well
adapted to rationalization and automation, and becomes itself
subject to integration in machines adept at sign processing (in
particular information processing). The process can be
exemplified by a limited analogy: In order to explore in depth
the experience embodied in Homer's texts, one needs a knowledge
of ancient Greek. In order to study the legal texts of the Roman
Empire, one needs Latin, and probably more. But in order to
understand algebra-the word comes from the Arabic al-jabr/jebr,
meaning union of broken parts-one really does not need to be
fluent in Arabic.

Literacy embodies a far less significant part of the current
human practical experience of self-constitution than it did in
the past. Still, literacy-based education asserts its own
condition on everything: learning what is already known is a
prerequisite to discovering the unknown. In examining the amount
and kind of knowledge one needs to understand past experience
and to make possible further forms of human praxis, we can be
surprised. The first surprise is that we undergo a major shift,
from forms of work and thinking fundamentally based on past
experience to realms of human constitution that do not repeat
the past. Rather, such new experiences negate it altogether,
making it relatively irrelevant. Freed from the past, people
notice that sometimes the known, expressed in texts, obliterates
a better understanding of the present by introducing a
pre-understanding of the future that prevents new and effective
human practical experiences. The second surprise comes from the
realization that means other than those based on literacy better
support the current stage of our continuous self- constitution,
and that these new means have a different underlying structure.

Searle, among many others, remarked that, "Like it or not, the
natural sciences are perhaps our greatest single intellectual
achievement as human beings, and any education that neglects
this fact is to that extent defective." What is not clearly
stated is the fact that sciences emerged as such achievements
once the ancillary relation to language and literacy was
overcome. Mathematization of science and engineering, the focus
on computational knowledge, the need to address design aspects of
human activity (within sociology, business, law, medicine,
etc.), all belong to alternative modes of explanation that make
literate speculation less and less effective. They also opened
new horizons for hypotheses in astronomy, genetics, anthropology.
Cognitive skills are required in the new pragmatic context
together with meta-cognitive skills: how to control one's own
learning, for example, in a world of change, variety,
distributed effort, mediated work, interconnection, and
heterogeneity.

We do not yet know how to express and quantify the need for
education, how to select the means and criteria for evaluating
performance. If the objective is only to generate attitudes of
respect for tradition and to impart good manners and some form
of judgment, then the result is the emulation of what we think
the past celebrated in a person. In the USA, the bill for
education, paid by parents, students, and private and public
sources, is well over 370 billion dollars a year. In the
national budget alone, 18 different categories of
grants-programs for building basic and advanced skills in
50,000 schools, programs for Safe and Drug-free schools, programs
for acquiring advanced technology, scholarships, and support for
loans-quantify the Federal part of the sum. State and local
agencies have their own budgets allowing for $5,000 to $12,000
per student. If a class of 25 students is supported by $250,000
of funding, something in the equation of financing education
does not add up. The return on investment is miserable by all
accounts. Knowing that close to one million students drop out
each year-and the number is growing-at various stages of their
education, and that to reclaim them would cost additional money,
we add another detail to the picture of a failure that is no
longer admissible. In other countries, the cost per person is
different. In a number of countries (France, Germany, Italy, some
countries in Eastern Europe), students attend school years
beyond what is considered normal in the USA. Germany discusses,
forever it seems, the need to cut schooling. Are 12 or 13 years
of schooling sufficient? How long should the state support a
student in the university? With the reunification of the
country, new needs had to be addressed: qualified teachers,
adequate facilities, financing. Japan, while maintaining a
12-grade system, requires more days of schooling (230 per year
compared to 212 in Germany and 180 in the USA). France, which
regulates even pre-school, maintains 15 years of education.
Still, 40% of French students commit errors in using their
language. When, almost 360 years ago, Richelieu introduced
(unthinkable for the American mentality) the Académie Française
as the guardian of the language, little did he know that a time
would come when language, French or any other, would no longer
dominate people's life and work, and would not, despite money
invested and time spent to teach, make all who study literate.

The new pragmatic context requires an education that results in
abilities to distinguish patterns in a world of extreme
dynamism, to question, to cope with complexity as it affects
one's practical existence, and with a continuum of values.
Students know from their own experience that there is no
intrinsic determination to the eternity and universality of
language-and this is probably the first shock one faces when
noticing how large illiterate populations function and prosper in
modern society. The economy absorbed the majority of the dropout
population. The almost 50% of the American population considered
functionally illiterate partakes, in its majority, in the high
standard of living of the country. In other countries, while the
numbers are different, the general tenor is the same. Well
versed in the literacy of consumption, these people perform
exactly the function expected: keep the economic engine turning.

Plenty of questions

Industrial society, as a precursor to our pragmatic framework,
needed literacy in order to get the most out of machines, and to
preserve the physical and intellectual capability of the human
operator. It invested in education because the return was high
enough to justify it. A qualified worker, a qualified physician,
chemist, lawyer, and businessman represented a necessity for the
harmonious functioning of industrial society. One needed to know
how to operate one machine. Chances were that the machine would
outlast the operator. One needed to study a relatively stable
body of knowledge (laws, medical prescriptions, chemical
formulas). Chances were that one and the same book would serve
father, son, even grandson. And what could not be disseminated
through literacy was taught by example, through the
apprenticeship system, from which engineering profited a lot.
What education generated were literate people, and members of a
society prepared for relations without which machines made
little or no sense at all. The more complex such relations, the
longer the time needed for education, and the higher the
qualifications required from those working as educators.

Education ensured the transmission of knowledge, filling empty
containers sent by parents, from settled families, as incoming
students to schools and colleges. Industrial society
simultaneously generated the products and the increased need for
them. Some would argue that all this is not so simple.
Industrialists did not need educated workers. That is why they
transferred a lot of work to children and women. Reformists
(probably influenced by religious humanism) insisted on taking
children out of the factories. Children were taught to read in
order to uplift their souls (as the claim went). Finally, laws
were enacted that forbade child labor. As this happened, industry
got what it needed: a relatively educated class of workers and
higher levels of productivity from employment that used the
education provided. Under the right pragmatic conditions, an
educated worker proved to be a good investment.

Alan Bloom detailed many of the motives that animated industrial
philanthropists in supporting education. I beg to differ and
return to the argument that industrial society, in order to use
the potential of machine production, had to generate the need for
what it produced. Indeed, the first products are the workers
themselves, projecting into machine-based praxis their physical
attributes, but foremostly skills such as comprehension,
interaction, coordination. All these attributes belong to the
structural condition of literacy.

Industrial products resulting from qualitatively new forms of
human self- constitution were of accidental or no interest to
illiterates. What would an illiterate do with products, such as
new typewriters, books, more sophisticated household appliances?
How would an illiterate interact with them in order to get the
most out of each artifact? And how could coordination with
others using such new products take place? We know that things
were not exactly divided along such clear-cut borders.
Illiterate parents had literate children who provided the
necessary knowledge. The trickle-down effect was probably part
of the broader strategy. But all in all, the philanthropists'
support of education was an investment in the optimal functioning
of a society whose scale necessitated levels high enough for
efficient work. Education was connected to philanthropy, and it
still is, as a form of wealth distribution. But it is not love
for the neighbor that makes philanthropists' support of education
necessary, rather the sheer advantage resulting from money
given, estate or machines donated, chairs endowed. Cynical or
not, this view results from the perception one experiences when
noticing how generosity, well supported by public money, ends up
as a self-serving gesture: donations that resulted in buildings,
scholarships, endowments, and gifts named after the benefactor.
The obsession with permanence-some live it as an obsession with
eternity, others as a therapeutic ego massage-is but one of the
overhead costs associated with literacy.

Lines from the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales come to mind:
"Now isn't it a marvel of God's grace/that an illiterate fellow
can outpace/the wisdom of a heap of learned men?" How a manciple
(probably equivalent to a Residence Life Administrator and
Cafeteria Head combined) would perform today is worth another
tale. Education, as a product of the civilization of literacy,
has problems understanding that literacy corresponds to a
development in which written language was the medium for the
spoken. Nevertheless, it did learn that today we can store the
spoken in non-written form, sometimes more efficiently, and
without the heavy investment required to maintain literacy. As
an industry, with the special status of a not-for-profit
organization, education in the USA competes in the market for
its share, and for high returns. Endowments qualify many
universities as large businesses that are buffered from the
reality of economics.

With or without the aid of philanthropy, learning has to free
itself from its subordination to literacy and restrictive
literate structures, as it previously freed itself from its
subordination to the church, in whose bosom it was nurtured.
Obviously, if this new awareness manifests itself only in
mailing out videotapes instead of printed college catalogues,
then we may ask whether it is educators, or only marketers, who
understand the current dynamics. The same should be asked when
some professors put their courses on tape, in the belief that
canned knowledge is easier for the student to absorb. On-line
classes break with the mold, but they are not yet the answer, at
least as long as they do not belong to a broader vision
reflected in different priorities and appropriate content.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about involving media in
education, but the problem is not the medium for storage and
delivery. Media labs that are covered by dust because they
convey the same useless information as the classes they were
supposed to enhance only prove that a fundamental change is
necessary. Fundamental, for instance, is the skewed notion that
knowledge is transferred from professors-who know more-to
students-who know less. Actually, we face a reality never before
experienced: students know more than their teachers, in some
disciplines. In addition, knowledge still appropriate to a
subject a short time ago-call it history, politics, or
economics, and think about classes in Soviet and East European
studies- has been rendered useless. Physics, mathematics, and
chemistry underwent spectacular renewal. This created situations
in which what the textbooks taught was immediately contradicted
by reality.

Should education compete with the news media? Should it become an
Internet address for unlimited and unstructured browsing? Should
education give up any sense of foundation? Or should
universities periodically refresh their genetic make-up in order
to maintain contact with the most recent theories, the most
recent research techniques, the most recent discoveries? These
are more than enough questions for a pen still writing one word
at a time, or for a mouth answering questions as they pile up.
Without posing these questions-to which some answers will be
attempted at the conclusion of this book-no solution can be
expected. The willingness of educators and everyone affected by
education to formulate them, and many more, would bear witness to
a concern that cannot be addressed by some miraculous,
all-encompassing formula. The good news is that in many parts of
the world this is happening. Finally!

The equation of a compromise

As the scale of humankind changed, and the efficiency of human
practical experience corresponding to the scale ascertained
itself as the new rationality, the practical experience of
self-constitution had to adjust to new circumstances of existence
and activity. There is no magic borderline. But there is a
definite discontinuity between what constituted the relatively
stable underlying structure of literacy and what constitutes the
fast-changing underlying structure of the pragmatic framework.
Because in our own self-constitution literacy is only one among
many media for achieving the efficiency that the new scale
requires, we come to realize, even if public discourse does not
exactly reflect it, that we cannot afford literacy the way we
have until now. And even if we could, we should not. People
recognize, even if only reluctantly, that the literacy machine,
for some reason still called education, endows the new generation
with a skill of limited significance. The resulting perspective
is continuously contradicted by the ever new and ever renewing
human experiences through which we become who we are. Education
based on the paradigm of literacy is, as we have seen, a luxury
which a society, rich or poor, cannot afford. Conditions of
human life and praxis require, instead of a skill and
perspective for the whole of life, a series. Skill and
perspective need to be understood together. Their application
will probably be limited in time, and not necessarily directly
connected to those succeeding them.

Nobody seriously disputes the relevance of studying language, but
very few see language and language-based disciplines as the
prerequisite for the less than life-long series of different
jobs students of today will have. Although colleges maintain a
core curriculum that preserves the role of language and the
humanities, the shift towards the languages of mathematics-a
discipline that has diversified spectacularly-and of visual
representation is so obvious that one can only wonder why the
voices of mathematicians are not heard over those of the Modern
Language Association. Mathematics prepares for fields from
technical to managerial, from scientific to philosophic, and
from design to legal. The realization that calculus is first of
all a language, and that the goal of education is fluency in
it, corresponds to an awareness that musicians had for the
longest time with respect to musical scores, but the champions
of literacy always refused to accept. The same holds true for the
disciplines of visualization: drawing, computer graphics,
design. In today's education, the visual needs to be studied at
least as much as language-dependent subjects.

Against the background of deeper changes, education is focusing
on its on redefinition. The major change is from a container
model of education-the child being the empty container who needs
to be filled with language, history, math, and not much more-to
a heuristic education. Our pragmatics is one of process, as the
pragmatics of education finally should be. Education needs to be
conducive to interaction and to the formation of criteria for
choices from among many options. But change does not come
easily. Still using the impertinence of literacy, some educators
call the container model "teaching students to think." They do
not realize that students think whether we teach them to or not!
Students of all ages are aware of change, and familiar with modes
of interaction, among themselves and with technology, closer to
their condition than to that of their teachers. The majority of
the new businesses on the Internet are instigated by students
and supported by their inventiveness and dedication. They have
became agents of change in spite of all the shortcomings of
education. And students have become educators themselves,
offering environments for conveying their own experience.

To be a child

No one can declare better ways of teaching without considering
the real child. In a world of choice and free movement, children
are more likely to come from families that will consist of a
single parent. Many children will come from environments where
discrimination, poverty, prejudice, and violence have an
overpowering influence. Such an environment is significant for a
society dedicated to democratic ideals. We have to face the fact
that childrearing and education are being transferred from family
to institutions meant to produce the educated person. With the
best of motives, society has created factories for processing
children. These socio-educational entities are accepted quite
obligingly by the majority of the people freed from a
responsibility affecting their own lives. "Everything will be
fine, as long as the education of the new generation basically
repeats the education of the parents," sums up the expectations
regarding these institutions.

Although we know that, generally speaking, cycles (of production,
design, and evaluation) are getting shorter, we maintain
children in education well past the time they even fit in
classroom chairs. One needs to see those adults forced to be
students, full of energy, frustrated that their patience, not
their creative potential, is put to the test. Dropping out of
high school or college is not indicative of a student's
immaturity. Society's tendency to decide what is best for the
next generation has determined that only one type of education
will ensure productive adults. Society refuses to consider
humans in the variety of their potential. From the Projection of
Education Statistics to the Year 2006, we learn that the total
private and public elementary and secondary school enrollment in
the USA will increase from 49.8 million in 1994 to 54.6 million.
Of the 49.8 million in 1994, only 2.5 million graduated high
school, and by the year 2006 the number will not exceed 3
million. Students themselves seem to be more aware of the
excessively long cycle of education than do the experts who
define its methods, contents, and goals. This creates a basis
for conflict that no one should underestimate.

Growing up in an environment of change and challenge is probably
rewarding in the long run. But things are not very simple. The
pressure to perform, peer pressure, and one's youthful instincts
to explore and ascertain can transform a student's life in an
instant. The distance between paradise (support and choice
without worry) and hell (the specter of disease, addiction,
abandonment, disappointment, lack of direction) is also shorter
than prior generations experienced it. Hundreds of TV channels,
the Internet, thousands of music titles (on CD, video, and radio
stations), the lure of sports, drugs, sex, and the hundreds of
fashion labels-choosing can be overwhelming. Literacy used to
organize everything neatly. If you were in love, Romeo and Juliet
was proper reading material. If you wished to explore Greece,
you started with Homer's epics and worked your way up to the
most recent novel by a contemporary Greek writer.

The problem is that drugs, AIDS, millions of attractions, the
need to find one's way in a world less settled and less patient,
do not fit in the neat scheme of literacy. The language of
genetics and the language of personality constitution are better
articulated through means other than books. Heroes, teachers,
parents, priests, and activists are no longer icons, even if
they are portrayed to be better than they were in reality. Bart
Simpson, the underachiever, "mediocre and proud of it," is a
model for everyone who is told that what really counts is to
feel good, period.

Still, some young people go to school or college full of
enthusiasm, hoping to get an education that will guarantee
self-fulfillment. All that is studied, over a long period of
time and at great financial sacrifice, comes not even close to
what they will face. Tehy might learn how to spell and how to
add. But they soon discover that in real life skills other than
spelling and arithmetic are expected. What bigger disappointment
is there than discovering that years of pursing a promise bring
no result? If, after all this, we still want both literacy and
competence for experiences which literacy does not support, and
often inhibits, we would have to invest beyond what society is
willing and able to spend. And even if society were to do so, as
it seems that it feels it must, the investment would be in
imposing useless skills and a primitive perspective on the new
generation, until the time comes when it can escape society's
pressure. Education in our day remains a compromise between the
interests of the institution of education (with tens of thousands
of teachers who would become unemployed) and a new pragmatic
framework that few in academia understand.

One of the elements of this equation is the practical need to
extend education to all, and if possible on a continuous basis.
But unless this education reflects the variety of literacies
that the pragmatic framework requires, admitting everyone to
everything results in the lowest general level of education. The
variety of practical experiences of self-constitution requires
that we find ways to coordinate access to education by properly
and responsibly identifying types of creativity, and investing
responsibility in their development. Continuous education needs
to be integrated in the work structure. It has to become part of
the reciprocal commitments through which the new pragmatic
framework is acknowledged.

To all those dedicated to the human aspects of politics,
business, law, and medicine, who deplore that the technicians of
policy-making can no longer find their way to our souls, all
this will sound terrifying. Nevertheless, as much as we would
like to be considered as individuals, each with our own
dignity, personality, opinions, emotions, and pains, we
ourselves undermine our expectations in our striving for more
and more, at a price lower than what it costs society to
distinguish us. Scale dictates anonymity, and probably
mediocrity. Ignorance of literacy's role in centuries of
productive human life dictates that it is time to unload the
literacy-reflected experiences for which there is no reference
in the new pragmatic context.

Who are we kidding?

Scared that in giving up literacy training we commit treason to
our own condition, we maintain literacy and try to adapt it to
new circumstances of working, thinking, feeling, and exploring.
In view of the inefficiency built into our system of education,
we try to compromise by adding the dimension characteristic of
the current status of human experience of multiple partial
literacies. The result is the transformation of education into a
packaging industry of human beings: you choose the line along
which you want to be processed; we make sure that you get the
literacy alibi, and that we train you to be able to cope with
so-called entry-level jobs. Obviously, this evolves in a more
subtle way. The kind of college or university one attends, or
the tuition one pays, determines the amount of subtlety.
Students accept the function of education insofar as it mediates
between their goals and the rather scary reality of the
marketplace. This mediation differs according to the level of
education, and is influenced by political and social decision
making.

As an industry for processing the new generation, education acts
according to parameters resulting from its opportunistic search
for a place between academia and reality. Education acknowledges
the narrow domains of expertise which labor division brought
about, and reproduces the structure of current human experience
in its own structure. Through vast financial support, from
states, private sources, and tradition- based organizations,
education is artificially removed from the reality of expected
efficiency. It is rarely a universe of commitments. Accordingly,
the gap between the literate language of the university and the
languages of current human practice widens. The tenure system
only adds another structural burden. When the highest goal of a
professor is to be freed of teaching, something is awfully wrong
with our legitimate decision to guarantee educators the freedom
necessary for exercising their profession.

Behind the testing model that drives much of current education is
the expectation of effective ranking of students. This model
takes a literate approach insofar as it establishes a dichotomy
(aptitude vs. achievement) that makes students react to
questions, but does not really engage them or encourage creative
contributions. The result is illustrative of the relation
between what we do and how we evaluate what we do. An
expectation was set, and the process of education was skewed to
generate good test results. This effectively eliminates teaching
and learning for the sake of a subject. Students are afraid they
will not measure up and demand to be taught by the book.
Teachers who know better than the book are intimidated, by
students and administration, from trying better approaches. Good
students are frustrated in their attempts to define their own
passion and to pursue it to their definition of success.
Entrepreneurs at the age of 14, they do not need the feedback of
stupid tests, carried out more for the sake of bureaucracy than
for their well-being. Standardized tests dominated by
multiple-choice answers facilitate low cost evaluations, but also
affect patterns of teaching and learning. Exactly what the new
pragmatics embodies-the ability to adapt and to be proactive-is
counteracted through the experience of testing, and the teaching
geared to multiple-choice instruments.

The uncoupling of education from the experiential frame of the
human being is reflected in education's language and
organization, and in the limiting assumptions about its function
and methods. Education has become a self-serving organization
with a bureaucratic "network of directives," as Winograd and
Flores call them, and motivational elements not very different
from the state, the military, and the legal system. Like the
organizations mentioned, it also develops networks of interaction
with sources of funding and sources of power, some driven by the
same self-preserving energies as education itself. Instead of
reflecting shorter cycles of activity in its own structure, it
tends to maintain control over the destiny of students for longer
periods of time. Even in fields of early acknowledged
creativity-e.g., computer programming, networking, genetics, and
nanotechnology-education continues to apply a policy that takes
away the edge of youth, inventiveness, and risk.

The lowest quality of education is at the undergraduate level in
universities, where either graduate assistants or even machines
substitute for professors too busy funding their research, or
actually no longer attuned to teaching. This situation exists
exactly because we are not yet able to develop strategies of
education adapted to new circumstances of human work and to the
efficiency requirements which we ourselves made necessary. The
"network of recurrent conversations," to use Winograd's
terminology again, or the "language game" that Wittgenstein
attributed to each profession, hides behind the front of
literacy and thus burdens education. Once accreditation
introduces the language game of politics, education distances
itself even more from its fundamental mission. Accreditation
agencies translate concerns about the quality of education into
requirements, such as the evaluation of colleges and
universities based on scores on exit tests taken by students.
These are supposed to reflect academic achievement. In other
cases, such scores are used for assessing financial support. The
paradox is that what negatively affects the quality of education
becomes the measure of reward. Test results are often used in
politicians' arguments about improved education, as well as a
marketing tool. In fact, to prepare students for performance
makes performance a goal in itself. Thus it should come as no
surprise that the most popular book on college campuses-today's
education factories-is a guide to cheating.

Many times comparisons are made between students in the USA and
in Japan or in Western European countries. In many ways these
comparisons are against the pervasive dynamics of integration
that we experience. Still, there are things to consider-for
instance, that Japanese students spend almost the same amount of
time watching TV as American students do, and that they are not
involved in household tasks. Noticeable differences are in
reading. The Japanese spend double the number of hours that
American students do in reading. Japanese students spend more
time on schoolwork (the same 2-to-1 ratio), but much less on
entertainment. Should Japan be considered a model? If we see
that Japanese students rank among the best in science subjects,
the answer seems to be positive. But if we project the same
against the entire development of students, their exceptional
creative achievements, the answer becomes a little more guarded.
With all its limitations, the USA is still more attuned to
pragmatic requirements. This is probably due more to the
country's inherent dynamics than to its educational
institutions. Largely unregulated, capable of adaptive moves,
subject to innovation, the USA is potentially a better network
for educational possibilities.

What caused the criticism in these pages of evaluation is the
indecisiveness that the USA shows-the program for school reform
for the year 2000 is an example of this attitude-and the
difficulty it has in realizing the price of the compromise it
keeps supporting. Once Japanese businesses started buying
American campuses, the price of the compromise became clear.
Universities in the USA were saved from bankruptcy. Japanese
schools, whose structured programs and lack of understanding of
the new pragmatics made for headlines, were able to evade their
own rigid system of education, reputed for being late in
acknowledging the dynamics of change. Abruptly, the
Americanization of world education-study driven by
multiple-choice tests with a dualistic structure-was
short-changed by a Japanization movement. But in the closer
look suggested above, it is evident that the Japanese are
extricating themselves from drastic literacy requirements that
end up hampering necessary accommodations in the traditional
Japanese system of values. Although caution is called for,
especially in approaching a subject foreign to our direct
experience and understanding, the trend expressed is telling in
its many consequences.

What about alternatives?

A legitimate question to be expected from any sensible reader
refers to alternatives. Let us first notice that, due to the new
pragmatic framework, we are more and more in the situation to
disseminate every and any type of information to any imaginable
destination. The interconnectivity of business and of markets
creates the global economy. In contrast, our school and college
systems, as separate from real life, and conceived physically
outside our universe of existence, are probably as anachronistic
as the castles and palaces we associate with the power and
function of nobility; or as anachronistic as the high stacks of
steel mills we associate with industry, and the cities we
associate with social life. Some alumni might be nostalgic for
the Gothic structures of their university days. The physical
reference to a time "when education meant something" is clear-as
is the memory of the campus, yet another good reason to look at
the homecoming party in anticipation of the football game, or in
celebration of a good time (win or lose).

To make explicit the shift from a symbolism of education,
coordinated with the function of intellectual accomplishment, to
a stage when debunking this symbolism, still alive in and
outside Ivy League universities, is an urgent political and
practical goal is only the beginning. There is no justification
for maintaining outmoded structures and attitudes, and investing
in walls and campuses and feudal university domains. As one of
the successful entrepreneurs of this time put it, "anything that
has to do with brick and mortar and its DISPLAY is-to use some
poetic license-dead." The focus has to be on the dynamics of
individual self-constitution, and on the pragmatic horizons of
everyone's future.

Fixing and maintaining schools in the USA, as well as in almost
any country in the world, would cost more than building them
from scratch. The advantage of giving up structures
inappropriate to the new requirements of education is that,
finally, at least we would create environments for interaction,
taking full advantage of the progress made in technologies of
communication and interactive learning. There is no need to
idealize the Internet and the World Wide Web at their current
stage. But if the future will continue to be defined more by
commerce expectations than by educational needs, no one should
be surprised that their educational potential will come to
fruition late.

Humans do not develop at the same pace, and in the same
direction. Each of us is so different that the main function of
education should be not to minimize differences through literacy
and literacy-based strategies that support a false sense of
democracy, but to identify and maximize differences. This will
provide the foundation for an education that allows each student
to develop according to possibilities evinced through the
relations, language-based or not, that people enter into. The
content of education, understood as process, should be the
experience, and the associated means of creating and
understanding it. Instead of a dominant language, with built-in
experiences more and more alien to the vast majority of
students, the ability to cope with many sign systems, with many
languages, to articulate them, adapt them to the circumstance,
and share them as much as the circumstance requires, should
become the goal. Some would counter, "This was attempted with
courses labeled modern math and resulted in no one's
understanding it, or even simple math." There is some truth in
this. The mathematically gifted had no problem in learning the
new math. Students who were under the influence of literate
reasoning had problems. What we need to do is to keep the mind
open, allow for as much accumulation as necessary, and for
discarding, if new experiences demand an open mind and freedom
from previous assumptions. Some students will settle (in math or
in other subjects) for predominantly visual signs, others for
sounds, some for words, for rhythm, for any of the forms through
which human intelligence comes to expression. Interactive
multimedia are only some of the many media available. Other
possibilities are yet to emerge. The Internet is in the same
situation. A framework for individual selection, for tapping into
learning resources and using them to the degree desired and
acknowledged as necessary by praxis, would be the way to go. Not
only literacy, in the accepted sense, but mathematical literacy,
biological, chemical, or engineering literacy, and visual
thinking and expression should be given equal consideration.
Cross-pollination among disciplines traditionally kept in
isolation will definitely enhance creativity by doing away with
the obsessive channeling practiced nowadays.

Education needs to shift from the atomistic view that isolates
subjects from the whole of reality to a holistic perspective.
This will acknowledge types of mediation as effective means of
increasing the efficiency of work, the requirements of
integration, and the distributed nature of practical experiences
in the world today. Collaborative effort needs to be brought to
the forefront of the educational experience. We can define
communities of interest, focused on some body of experience
(which can be incorporated in an artifact, a book, a work of
art, or someone's expertise). Education should provide means for
sharing experiences. A variety of different interests can be
brought into focus through sharing and collaborative learning.
There are many dimensions to such an approach: the knowledge
sought, the experience of the variety of perspectives and uses,
the awareness of interaction, the skills for intercommunication,
and more. Implicit is the high expectation of sharing, while at
the same time maintaining motivations for individual achievement
and individual reward. This becomes critical at a time when it
becomes more and more evident that resources are finite, while
expectations still grow exponentially. The change from a
standardized model, focused on the quick fix that leads to
results (no matter how high a cost), to the collaborative model
of individuality and distinction re-establishes an ethical
framework, which is urgently needed. Competition is not
excluded, but instead of conflict-which in the given system
results in students who cut pages from books so that their
colleagues will fail-we ought to create an environment of
reciprocally advantageous cooperation. How far are we from such
an objective?

In the words of Jacques Barzun, a devoted educator committed to
literacy, education failed to "develop native intelligence." In
an interesting negative of what people think education
accomplishes, he points to the appearance of success: "We
professed to make ideal citizens, super-tolerant neighbors,
agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexually
adept and flawless drivers of cars." All this is nothing to be
ashamed of, but as educational goals, they are quite off the
target. Citizenship in the society of the new pragmatic context
is different from citizenship in previous societies. Tolerance
requires a new way to manifest it, such as the integration of
what is different and complementary. Peace, yes, even peace,
means a different state of affairs at a time when many local
conflicts affect the world. As far as family, sex, and the
culture of the car are concerned, nothing can point more to the
failure of education. Indeed, education failed to understand
all the factors involved in contemporary family life. It failed
to understand sexual relations. Faced with the painful reality of
the degradation of sexual relations, education resorted to the
desperate measure of dispensing condoms, an extension of what
was gloriously celebrated as sex education. The flawless drivers
never heard the criticism voiced by citizens concerned with
energy waste. We made students rely on cheap gasoline and
affordable cars to bring them to school and college, instead of
understanding that education needs to be decentralized,
distributed, and-why not-adapted to the communication and
interaction possibilities of our times. The Green Teens who are
active against energy waste might be well ahead of their
educational system, but still forced to go through it. Moreover,
education should be seen in the broader context of the other
changes coming with the end of the civilization of literacy: the
status of family, religion, law, and government.

While education is related to the civic status of the individual,
the new conditions for the activity of our minds are also very
important. Ideally, education addresses all the facets of the
human being. New conditions of generalized interconnection almost
turn the paradigm of continuing education into continuous
education that corresponds to changes in human experience
unfolding under even more complex circumstances. It might well
happen that for some experiences, we shall have to recuperate
values characteristic of literacy. But better to rediscover them
than to maintain literacy as an ideal when the perspectives for
new forms of ascertaining ourselves as human beings require
more, much more, than literacy.



Book Four

Language and the Visual

Photography, film, and television have changed the world more
than Gutenberg's printing press. Much of the blame for the
decline in literacy is attributed to them, especially to movies
and television. More recently, computer games and the Internet
have been added to the list of culprits. Studies have been
conducted all over the world with the aim of discovering how
film and television have changed established reading habits,
writing ability, and the use and interpretation of language.
Patterns of publishing and distribution of information,
including electronic publication and the World Wide Web (still
in its infancy), have also been analyzed on a comparative basis.
Inferences have been drawn concerning the influence of various
types of images on what is printed and why, as well as on how
writing (fiction, science, trade books, manuals, poetry, drama,
even correspondence) has changed.

In some countries, almost every home has a television set; in
others even more than one. In 1995, the number of computers sold
surpassed that of television sets. In many countries, most
children watch television and films before they learn to read. In
a few countries, children play computer games before ever
opening a book. After they start to read, the amount of time
spent in front of a TV set is far greater than the time
dedicated to books. Adults, already the fourth and fifth
generations of television viewers, are even more inclined to
images. Some images are of their choice-TV programs at home,
movies in the theater, videotapes they buy, rent, or borrow from
the library, CD-ROMs. Other images are imposed on the adult
generations by demands connected to their professions, their
health, their hobbies, and by advertisement. After
image-recording and playing equipment became widely available,
the focus on TV and video expanded. In addition to the ability
to bring home films of one's choice, to buy and rent videotapes,
laser discs, and CD-ROMs on a variety of subjects, we are also
able to produce a video archive for family, school, community,
or professional purposes. We can even avail ourselves of cable
TV to generate programs of local interest. The generalized
system of networking (cable, satellites, airwaves), through which
images can be pumped from practically any location into schools,
homes, offices, and libraries, affects even further the relation
of children and adults among themselves and the relation of both
groups to language and to literacy in contemporary life. Anyone
with access to the printing presses of the digital world can
print a CD-ROM. Access to the Internet is no more expensive than
a magazine subscription. But the Internet is much more exciting
because we are not only at the receiving end.

The subject, as almost all have perceived and analyzed it, is not
the impact of visual technology and computers on reading
patterns, or the influence of new media on how people write. At
the core of the development described so far is the fundamental
shift from one dominant sign system, called language, and its
reified form, called literacy, to several sign systems, among
which the visual plays a dominant role. We would certainly fail
to understand what is happening, what the long-lasting
consequences of the changes we face are, and what the best course
of action is, if we were to look only at the influence of
technology. Understanding the degree of necessity of the
technology in the first place is where the focus should be. The
obsession with symptoms, characteristic of industrial
pragmatics, is not limited to mechanics' shops and doctors'
offices.

New practical experiences within the scale of humankind that
result in the need for alternatives to language confirm that the
focus cannot be on television and computer screens, nor on
advertisement, electronic photography, and laser discs. The issue
is not CD-ROM, digital video, Internet and the World Wide Web,
but the need to cope with complexity. And the goal is to achieve
higher levels of efficiency corresponding to the needs and
expectations of the global scale that humankind has reached.

So far, very few of those who study the matter have resisted the
temptation to fasten blame on television watching or on the
intimidating intrusion of electronic and digital contraptions
for the decline of literacy. It is easier to count the hours
children spend watching TV-an average of 16,000 hours in
comparison to 13,000 hours for study before graduation from high
school-than to see why such patterns occur. And it is as easy to
conclude that by the time these children can be served alcohol in
a restaurant or buy it in stores, they will have seen well over
a million commercials. Yet no one ever acknowledges new
structures of work and communication, even less the
unprecedented wealth of forms of human interaction, regardless of
how shallow they are. That particular ways of working and living
have for all practical purposes disappeared, is easily
understood. Understanding why requires the will to take a fresh
look at necessary developments.

Some of today's visual sign systems originate in the civilization
of literacy: advertisement, theatrical and para-theatrical
performance, and television drama. They carry with them
efficiency expectations typical of the Machine Age. Other visual
sign systems transcend the limits of literacy: concrete poetry,
happening, animation, performance games that lead to interactive
video, hypermedia or interactive multimedia, virtual reality,
and global networks. Within such experiences, a different
dynamics and a focus on distinctions, instead of on
homogeneity, are embedded. Most of these experiences originate
in the practical requirement to extend the human being's
experiential horizon, and the need to keep pace with the dynamics
of global economy.

How many words in a look?

In a newspaper industry journal (Printers' Ink, 1921), Fred R.
Barnard launched what would become over time a powerful slogan:
"One look is worth a thousand words." To make his remark sound
more convincing, he later reformulated it as "One picture is
worth a thousand words," and called it a proverb from China. Few
slogans were repeated and paraphrased more than this one.
Barnard wanted to draw people's attention to the power of
images. It took some years until the new underlying structure of
our continuous practical self-constitution confirmed an
observation made slightly ahead of its time. It should be added
that, through the millennia, craftsmen and the forerunners of
engineering used images to design artifacts and tools, and to
plan and build cities, monuments, and bridges. They realized
through their own experience how powerful images could be,
although they did not compare them to words.

Images are more concrete than words. The concreteness of the
visual makes images inappropriate for describing other images.
However, it does not prevent human beings from associating
images with the most abstract concepts they develop in the
course of their practical or theoretical experience. Words start
by being relatively close to what they denote, and end up so far
removed from the objects or actions they name that, unless they
are generated together with an object or action (like the word
calculator, from calculae, stones for counting), they seem
arbitrary. Reminiscences of the motivation of words (especially
onomatopoeic qualities, i.e., phonetic resemblance to what the
word refers to, such as crack or whoosh) do not really affect the
abstract rules of generating statements, or even our
understanding of such language signs.

Images are more constrained, more directly determined by the
pragmatic experience in whose framework they are generated. Red
as a word (with its equivalencies in other languages: rot in
German, rouge in French, rojo in Spanish,



in Japanese, adom in Hebrew, and

in Russian) is arbitrary in comparison to the color it
designates. Even the designation is quite approximate. In given
experiential situations, many nuances can be distinguished,
although there are no names for them. The red in an image is a
physical quality that can be measured and standardized, hence
made easier to process in photography, printing, and synthesis of
pigments. In the same experiential framework, it can be
associated with many objects or processes: flowers, blood, a
stoplight, sunset, a flag. It can be compared to them, it can
trigger new associations, or become a convention. Once language
translates a visual sign, it also loads it with conventions
characteristic of language-red as in revolution, cardinal red,
redneck, etc.-moving it from the realm of its physical
determination (wavelength, or frequency of oscillation) to the
reality of cultural conventions. These are preserved and
integrated in the symbolism of a community.

Purely pictorial signs, as in Chinese and Japanese writing,
relate to the structure of language, and are culturally
significant. No matter to which extent such pictorial signs are
refined-and indeed, characters in Chinese and Kanji are
extremely sophisticated- they maintain a relation to what they
refer to. They extend the experience of writing, especially in
calligraphic exercise, in the experience conveyed. We can impose
on images-and I do not refer only to Chinese ideograms-the logic
embodied in language. But once we do, we alter the condition of
the image and transform it into an illustration.

Language, in its embodiment in literacy, is an analytic tool and
supports analytic practice quite well. Images have a dominantly
synthetic character and make for good composite tools.
Synthesizing activities, especially designing, an object, a
message, or a course of action, imply the participation of
images, in particular powerful diagramming and drawing. Language
describes; images constitute. Language requires a context for
understanding, in which classes of distribution are defined.
Images suggest such a context. Given the individual character of
any image, the equivalent of a distributional class for a
language simply does not exist.

To look at an image, for whatever practical or theoretical
purpose, means to relate to the method of the image, not to its
components. The method of an image is an experience, not a
grammar applied to a repertory, or the instantiation of rules of
grammar. The power of language consists of its abstract nature.
Images are strong through their concreteness. The abstraction of
language results from sharing vocabulary and grammar; the
abstraction of images, from sharing visual experience, or
creating a context for new experiences.

For as long as visual experience was confined to one's limited
universe of existence, as in the case of the migrating tribes,
the visual could not serve as a medium for anything beyond this
changing universe of existence. Language resulted from the need
to surpass the limitations of space and time, to generate
choices. The only viable alternative adopted was the abstract
image of the phonetic convention, which was easier to carry from
one world to another, as, for instance, the Phoenicians did. Each
alphabet is a condensed visual testimony to experiences in the
meanwhile uncoupled from language and its concrete practical
motivations.

Writing visualizes language; reading brings the written language
back to its oral life, but in a tamed version. Whether the
Sumerian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, or Slavic
alphabet, the letters are not neutral signs for abstract
phonetic language. They summarize visual experiences and encode
rules of recognition; they are related to anthropologic
experience and to cognitive processes of abstracting. The
mysticism of numbers and their meta-physical meanings, of letters
and combinations of letters and numbers, of shapes, symmetry,
etc. are all present. With alphabets and numbers the abstract
nature of visual representation took over the phonetic quality of
language. The concreteness of pictorial representation, along
with the encoded elements (what is the experience behind a
letter? a number? a certain way of writing?), simply vanished
for the average literate (or illiterate) person. This is part of
the broader process of acculturation-that is, breaking through
experiences of language. Experts in alphabets show us the levels
at which the image of each letter constituted expressive levels
significant in themselves. Nevertheless, their alphabetic
literacy is as relevant to writing as much as a good description
of the various kinds of wheels is relevant to the making and the
use of automobiles.

The current use of images results from the new exigencies of
human praxis and developments in visualization technology. In
previous chapters, some of these conditions were mentioned: 1.

the global scale of our activity and existence; 2.

the diversity made possible by the practical experiences
corresponding to this globality; 3.

the dynamics of ever faster, increasingly mediated, human
interaction; 4.

the need to optimize human interaction in order to achieve high
levels of efficiency; 5.

the need to overcome the arcane stereotypes of language; 6.

the non-linear, non-sequential, open nature of human experiences
brought to the fore through the new scale of humankind.

The list is open-ended. The more our command of images improves,
the more arguments in favor of their use. None of these
arguments should be construed as a blank and non-critical
endorsement of images. We know that we cannot pursue theoretic
work exclusively with images, or that the meta-level (language
about language) cannot be reached with images. Images are
factual, situational, and unstable. They also convey a false
sense of democracy. Moreover, they materialize the shift from a
positivist conception of facts, dominating a literacy-based
determinism, to a relativist conception of chaotic functioning,
embodied, for instance, by the market or by the new means and
methods of human interaction. However, until we learn all there
is to know about the potential of images in areas other than
art, architecture, and design, chances are that we shall not
understand their participation in thinking and in other
traditionally non-image-based forms of human praxis.

Images are very powerful agents for activities involving human
emotions and instincts. They shy away from literal truth,
insofar as the logic of images is different from the logic
inhabiting human experiences of self-constitution in language.
Imagery has a protean character. Images not only represent; they
actually shape, form, and constitute subjects. Cognitive
processes of association are better supported visually than in
language. Through images, people are effectively encultured,
i.e., given the identity which they cannot experience at the
abstract level of acculturation through language. The world of
avatars, dynamic graphic representations of a person in the
virtual universe of networks, is one of concreteness. The
individuals literally remake themselves as visual entities that
can enter a dialogue with others.

Within a given culture, images relate to each other. In the
multitude of cultures within which people identify themselves,
images translate from one experience to another. Against the
background of globality, the experience of images is one of
simultaneous distinctions and integration. Distinctions carry the
identifiers of the encultured human beings constituted in new
practical experiences. Integration is probably best exemplified
by the metaphor of the global village of teleconnections and
tele-viewing, of Internet and World Wide Web interactions.

The characteristics of images given here so far need to be
related to the perspective of changes brought about by imaging
technologies. Otherwise, we could hardly come to understand how
images constitute languages that make literacy useless, or
better yet, that result in the need for complementary partial
literacies.

The mechanical eye and the electronic eye

The photo camera and the associated technology of photo
processing are products of the civilization of literacy in
anticipation of the civilization of illiteracy. The metaphor of
the eye, manifest in the optics of the lens and the mechanics of
the camera, could not entirely support new human perceptions of
reality without the participation of literacy. Camera use
implied the shared background of literacy and literacy-based
space representations. The entire discussion of the possibilities
and limitations of photography-a discussion begun shortly after
the first photographic images were produced, and still going on
in our day-is an exercise in analytical practice.

Some looked at photography as writing with light; others as
mechanical drawing. They doubted whether there was room for
creativity in its use, but never questioned its documentary
quality: shorthand for descriptions difficult, but still
possible, in writing. The wider the framework of practical
experiences involving the camera, the more interesting the
testimony of photography proved. This applies to photography in
journalism and science, as well as in personal and family life.
With photography, images started to substitute for words, and
literacy progressively gave way to imagery in a variety of new
human experiences related to space, movement, and aspects of life
otherwise not visible.

Testimony of the invisible, made available to many people
through the photographic camera, was much stronger, richer, and
more authentic than the words one could write about the same.
Early photographs of the Paris sewer system-the latter a subject
of many stories, but literally out of sight-exemplify this
function. Before the camera, only drawing could capture the
visible without changing it into words or obscure diagrams.
Drawing was an interpreted representation, not only in the sense
of selection-what to draw-but also in defining a perspective and
endowing the image with some emotional quality. The camera had a
long way to go before the same interpretive quality was
achieved, and even then, in view of the mediating technology, it
was quite difficult to define what was added to what was
photographed, and why.

Today's cameras-from the disposables to the fully
automated-encapsulate everything we have to know to operate
them. There is no need to be aware of the eye metaphor-which is
undergoing change with the advent of electronic photography-and
even less of what diaphragm, exposure time, and distance are. The
experience leading to photography and the practical experience
of automated photography are uncoupled. To take a picture is no
longer a matter of expertise, but a reflex gesture accompanying
travel, family or community events, and discrete moments of
relative significance. Thus photographic images took over
linguistic descriptions and became our diaries. As confusing as
this might sound, a camera turns into an extension of our eyes
(actually, only one), easier to use than language, and probably
more accurate. In some way, a camera is a compressed language
all set for the generation of visual sentences. If scientific
use of photography were not available, a great deal of effort
would be necessary to verbally describe what images from outer
space, from the powerful electronic microscope, or from under
the earth and under water, reveal to us. In Leonardo da Vinci's
time, the only alternative was drawing, and a very rich
imagination!

The camera has a built-in space concept, probably more explicit
than language has. This concept is asserted and embodied in the
geometry of the lens and is reflected in some of the
characteristics of photographic images. They are, mainly, two-
dimensional reductions of our three-dimensional universe of
experience, also influenced by light, film emulsion, type of
processing, technology and materials used for printing, but
primarily by physical properties of the lens used. Once our
spatial concept improved and progress in lens processing was
made, we were able to change the lens, to make it more adaptive
(wide angle, zoom) to functions related to visual experiences.
We were also able to introduce an element of time control that
helped to capture dynamic events.

Another important change was brought about by Polaroid's concept
of almost instant delivery of prints. It is with this
concept-compressing two stages of photographic representation
into one and, in initial developments, giving up the possibility
of making copies-that we reached a new phase in the relation
between literacy and photography. As we know, the traditional
camera came with the implicit machine-focused conversation: What
can I do with it? The Polaroid concept changed this to a
different query: What can it do for me? This change of emphasis
corresponds to a different experience with the medium and is
accompanied by the liberation of photography from some of the
constraints of the system of literacy. "What can I do?"
concerns photographic knowledge and the selection made by
photographers, persons who constitute their identity in a new
practical experience. "What can it do?" refers to knowledge
embodied in the hardware. The advertisement succinctly describes
the change: "Hold the picture in your hand while you still hold
the memory in your heart." As opposed to a written record, an
instant image is meant for a short time, almost as a fast
substitute for writing.

A more significant change occurs when photography goes
electronic, and in particular, digital. Both elements already
discussed-the significance of the smallest changes in the input
on the result, and the quality aspect of digital vs. analog-are
reflected in digital photography. I insist on this because of the
new condition of the image it entails and our relation to the
realm of the visual. Language found its medium in writing, and
printing made writing the object of literacy. Images could not be
used with the same ease as writing, and could not be transmitted
the way the voice is. When we found ways to have voice travel at
speeds faster than that of sound, by electromagnetic waves used
in telephone or radio transmission, we consolidated the function
of language, but at the same time freed language of some of the
limitations of literacy. Digital photography accomplishes the
same for images.

A written report from any place in the world might take longer
to produce, though not to transmit, than the image representing
the event reported. Connected to a network, an electronic camera
sends images from the event to the page prepared for printing.
The understanding of the image, whose printing involved a digital
component (the raster) long before the computer was invented,
requires a much lower social investment than literacy. The
complexity is transferred from capturing the image to
transmitting and viewing it. Films are used to generate an
electronic simile of our photographic shots. At the friendly
automated image shop, we get colorful prints and the shiny
CD-ROM from which each image can be recalled on a video screen or
further processed on our computers.

From the image as testimony, as literacy destined it to be, to
the image as pretext for new experiences-medium of visual
relativity and questionable morality- everything, and more, is
possible. Images can mediate in fast developing situations-
transactions, exchange of information, conflicts-better than
words can. They are free of the extra burden words bear and
allow for global and detailed local interpretation. Electronic
processing of digital photography supports comparison, as well as
manipulation, of images in view of unprecedented human
experiences requiring such functions. The metaphor of the
one-eye, which the photographic camera embodies, led to a flat
world. Cyclopes see everything flat. Unfortunately, but by no
accident, this metaphor was taken over in computer graphics.
Images on the computer screen are held together by the
conventions of monocular vision. Digital photography can be
networked and endowed with dynamic qualities. But what makes
digital photography more and more a breakthrough, in respect to
its incipient literate phase, is that we can build 3D cameras,
that is, technical beasts with two eyes (and if need be, with
more). This leads to practical experiences in a pragmatic
framework no longer limited to sequences or to reductionist
strategies of representation.

Who is afraid of a locomotive?

The image of a locomotive moving in the direction of the
spectators made them scream and run away when moving pictures
were first shown to the public. Movement enhanced the realism of
the image, captured on film to the extent of blurring the
borderline between reality and the newly established convention
of cinematographic expression. In the movies of the silent era,
the literacy-based realism of the image- actually an
illustration of the script-successfully compensated for the
impossibility of providing the sound of dialogue. The experience
of literacy and that of writing movement onto film were tightly
coupled. Short scenes, designed with close attention to visual
details, could be understood without the presence of the word,
because of the shared background of language. The convention of
cinematography is based on sharing the extended white page on
which the projection of moving images takes place. Humor was the
preferred structure, since the mechanical reproduction of
movement had, due to rudimentary technology and lack of sound, a
comic quality in itself. Later, music was inserted, then
dialogue. Everyone was looking forward to the day when image and
sound would be synchronized, when color movies would become
possible.

It adds to the arguments thus far advanced that cinematographic
human experience, an experience dominantly visual, revealed the
role of language as a synchronizing device, while the mechanics
of cameras and projectors took care of the optical illusion.
Cinematography also suggested that this role could be exercised
by other means of expression and communication as well. Language
is related to body movement, and often participates in the
rhythmic patterns of this movement. Before language, other
rhythmic devices better adapted to the unsettled
self-constitutive practical experience of the Homo Hominis were
used to synchronize the effort of several beings involved in the
endeavor of survival. Although there is no relation between the
experience of cinematography and that of primitive beings on the
move after migrating herds of animals, it is worth pointing out
the underlying structure of synchronicity. The means involved in
achieving this synchronicity are characteristic of the various
stages in human evolution. At a very small scale of existence,
such as autarchic existence, the means were very simple, and
very few. At the scale that makes the writing of movement
possible, these means had become complex, but were dominated by
literacy. With cinematography, a new strategy of synchronization
was arrived at. In many ways, the story of how films became what
they are today is also the story of a conflict between literacy
and image-based strategies of synchronization.

The intermediary phases are well known: the film accompanied by
music ("Don't kill the pianist"), recorded sound, sound
integrated in the movie, stereophonic sound. Their significance
is also known: emulate the rhythm of filmed movement, provide a
dramatic background, integrate the realism of dialogue and other
real sounds in the realism of action, expand the means of
expression in order to synthesize new realities. Some of the
conventions of the emerging film are cultural accomplishments,
probably comparable to the convention of ideographic writing.
They belong, nevertheless, to a pragmatic context based on the
characteristics of literacy. They ensue also from an activity
that will result in higher and higher levels of human
productivity and efficiency. Each film is a mold for the many
copies to be shown to millions of spectators. The personal touch
of handwriting is obfuscated by the neutral camera-a mechanical
device, after all. That the same story can be told in many
different ways does not change the fact that, once told, it
addresses enormous numbers of potential viewers, no longer
required to master literacy in order to understand the film's
content. The experience of filmmaking is industrially defined.
It also bears witness to the many components of human
interaction, opening a window on experiences irreducible to
words; and it points to the possibility of going beyond literacy,
and even beyond the first layers of the visible-that is, to
appropriate the imaginary in the self-constitution of the human
being.

Some of the changes sketched above occurred when cinematography,
after its phase of theater on film, started to compress
language, and to search for its own expressive potential.
Compression of language means the use of images to diminish the
quantity of words necessary to constitute a viable filmic
expression, as well as the effort to summarize literature.
Indeed, in view of the limitations of the medium, especially
during its imitative phase, it could not support scripts based on
literary works that exceeded film's own complexity.
Cinematography had also to deal with the limited span of its
viewers' attention, their lack of any previous exposure to moving
images, and the conditions for viewing a film. When, later on,
filmmakers compressed entire books into 90 to 120 minutes, we
entered a phase of human experience characterized by
substituting written with non- or para-linguistic means.

The generations since the beginning of cinematography learned the
new filmic convention while still involved in practical
experiences characteristic of literacy. Conventions of film, as
a medium with its own characteristics, started to be experienced
relatively recently, in the broader context of a human praxis in
the process of freeing itself from the constraints of literacy.
Films are an appropriate medium for integration of the visual,
the aural, and motion. People can record on film some of their
most intricate experiences, and afterwards submit the record to
fast, slow, entire, or partial evaluation. The experience of
filming is an experience with space and time in their
interrelationship. But as opposed to the space and time
projected in language, and uniformly shared by a literate
community, space and time on film can be varied, and made
extremely personal. Within the convention of film, we can
uncouple ourselves from the physical limitations of our universe
of existence, from social or cultural commitments, and generate
a new frame for action. The love affair between Hollywood and
emerging technologies for creating the impossible in the virtual
space of digital synthesis testifies to this. But we cannot,
after all, transcend the limitations of the underlying structure
on which cinematography is based. Generated near the height of
the civilization of literacy, cinematography represents the
borderline between practical experiences corresponding to the
scale for which literacy was optimal, and the new scale for which
both literacy and film are only partially adequate. It is even
doubtful that the film medium will survive as an alternative to
the new media because it is, for all practical purposes,
inefficient.

Cinematography influenced our experience with language, while
simultaneously pointing to the limits of this experience. A film
is not a visually illustrated text, or a transcription of a
play. Rather, it is a mapping from a universe of sentences and
meanings assigned to a text, to a more complex universe, one of
consecutive images forming (or not) a new coherent entity. In
the process, language performs sometimes as language (dialogue
among characters), other times as a pre-text for the visual
cinematographic text.

Before film, we moved only in the universe of our natural,
physical existence, on the theatrical stage, or in the universe
of our imagination, in our dreams. The synchronizing function of
language made this movement (such as working, going from one
place to another, from one person to another) socially relevant.
Our movement in language descriptions (do this, go there, meet
so-and-so) is an abstraction. Our movement recorded on film is
the re-concretized abstraction. This explains the role of filmed
images for teaching people how to carry out certain operations,
for educating, or for indoctrinating them, or for acquainting
them with things and actions never experienced directly. It also
explains why, once efficiency criteria become important, film no
longer addresses the individual, or small groups; rather, it
addresses audiences at the only scale at which it can still be
economically justified. The industry called Hollywood (and its
various copies around the world) is based on an equation of
efficiency that keys in the globality of the world, of
illiteracy, and of the distribution network already in place. On
an investment in a film of over $100 million, five continents
of viewers are needed, and this is still no guarantee of breaking
even. It is not at all clear whether Dreamworks, the offspring
of the affair between Hollywood and the computer industry, will
eventually create its own distribution channels on the global
digital network.

The temptation to ask whether the language of moving images made
literacy superfluous, or whether illiteracy created the need for
film, and the risk of falling prey to a simplifying
cause-and-effect explanation should not prevent us from
acknowledging that there are many relations among the factors
involved. Nevertheless, the key element is the underlying
structure. Books embody the characteristics of language and
trigger experiences within the confines of these
characteristics. When faced with practical requirements and
challenges resulting from a new scale of existence, the human
being constitutes alternatives better adapted to a dynamics of
change for which books and the experience they entail are only
partially appropriate.

Books in which even literate people sometimes got lost, or for
which we do not have time or patience, are interpreted for us,
condensed in the movie. The fact is that more than a generation
has now had access to established works of fiction and drama, as
well as scientific, historic, or geographic accounts only through
films. A price was paid-there is no equivalent between the book
and film-and is being paid, but this is not the issue here. What
is the issue is the advent of cinematography in the framework in
which literacy ceased to support experiences other than those
based on its structure.

Films are mediating expressions better adapted than language to a
more segmented reality of social existence. They are also
adapted to the dynamics of change and to the global nature of
human existence. They prepared us for electronic media, but not
before generating those strange books (or are they?) that
transcribe films for a market so obsessed with success that it
will buy the rudimentary transcription together with the
paraphernalia derived from the stage design and from the
costumes used by the characters. We can find substitutes for
coal or oil or tin, but seemingly not for success and stars. As
a result, everything they touch or are associated with enters the
circuit of our own practical existence. An American journalist
ended his commentary occasioned by Greta Garbo's death: "Today
they no longer make legends, but celebrities."

Being here and there at the same time

Four generations old (or maybe five), but already the medium of
choice-this statement does not define television, but probably
captures its social significance. It can be said from the outset
that while cinematography is at the borderline between the
civilization of literacy and that of illiteracy, television
definitely embodies the conflict between the two. In fact,
television irreversibly tipped the balance in favor of the
visual. The invention of television took place in the context of
the change in scale of humankind. Primarily, television
occasions the transition from the universe of mechanics and
chemistry, implicit in film making and viewing, to that of
electricity, in particular electronics, and, more recently,
digital technology.

Television, as a product of this change in the structure and
nature of human theoretic and practical experience, results from
the perceived pragmatic need to capture and transmit dynamic
images. Electricity was already the medium for capturing and
transmitting sound at the speed of electrons along telephone
networks. And since images and actions are influenced by the
light we view them in, it followed that light is what we
actually wanted to record and transmit. This is television.
Cumbersome and still owing a lot to mechanics, television
started as a news medium, allowing for almost instantaneous
connection between the source of information and the audience. It
was initially mostly illustrative. Today, it is constitutive, in
the sense that it not only records news, it makes news. It
constitutes a generalized mass-medium supporting entertainment
and ritual (political, religious, military).

Literacy corresponds to the experiences of human self-definition
in the world of classical physics and chemistry. It is based on
the same underlying structure, and projects characteristics of
this experience. Electricity and electronics correspond to very
fast processes (practically instantaneous), high leverage of
human action, diversity, more varied mediating elements, and
feedback. The film camera has the main characteristics of
literacy. It can be compared to the printing press. But the
comparison is only partially adequate since it writes movements
to film, and lets us read them together on the shared white page
called the screen. Between recording the movement and viewing
it, time is used for processing and duplication.

Television is structurally different, capturing movement and
everything else belonging to what we call reality, in order to
make it immediately available to the viewer. Electronic
mediation is much more elaborate, has many more layers than
cinematography, and as a result is much more efficient. Film
mapped from the selected world of movement, in a studio, on the
street, or in a laboratory, to a limited viewership: public in a
movie theater. It requested that people share the screen on
which its images were projected. Television maps from many
cameras to the entire world, and all can simultaneously partake
in its images. Television is distributed and introduces
simultaneity in that several events from several locations can be
broadcast on the TV screen. By comparison, cinematography is
centralized. Filming is limited to the location where it is
being carried on. Cinematography is intrinsically sequential in
that it follows the narrative structure and constitutes a closed
entity. Once edited for showing, the film cannot be interrupted
to insert anything new.

There are still many who see the two as closely related, and
others who see the use of television only as a carrier (of film,
for instance). They ignore the defining fact that film and
television, despite some commonalties, belong to practical
experiences impossible to reconcile. In fact, while film passed
the climax of its attraction, television became the most
pervasive medium. Due to the use of television in education,
corporate communication, sports, artistic and other
performances, such as space exploration and war, television
impacts upon social interaction without being an interactive
medium. A televised event can address audiences close to the
world's entire population. When recording images for television
became possible, television supported continued human
experiences of decentralization, which previous communication
technologies could not provide. The video camera and the video
cassette recorder, especially in its digital version, make each
of us own not only the receivers of the language of images and
sounds, but also emitters, the sources, the private Hollywood
studios. That is, they make us live the language of TV, and
substitute it for literacy. Interactive TV will undoubtedly
contribute even more in this direction.

It is already the case that instead of writing a letter, some
people make a video and send it to family and authorities, and
to TV stations interested in viewer feedback and news stories.
The massive deployment of troops in the Desert Storm operation
made clear how the shift from literate to illiterate
communication integrates video communication. Together with the
telephone, television and video dominated communication patterns
of the people involved. Subsequent troop deployments confirmed
the pattern of illiterate communication.

Among the many networks through which the foundation of our
existence is continuously altered, cable TV plays a distinct
role. Many consider it more important than libraries, probably
for the wrong reasons. Whether living in thickly populated urban
clusters or in remote locations, people are physically connected
through multi- channeled communication networks, and even through
interactive media. Cable TV is often seen only as another entry
to our home for downloading classical programs as well as
pornography and superstition. The full utilization of the
electronic avenue as a multi-lane, bi-directional highway
through which we can be receivers of what we want to accept, and
senders of visual messages to whomever is interested and willing
to interact with these messages, is still more a goal than a
reality. With computer- supported visual communication
integrating digital television, we will dispose of the entire
infrastructure for a visually dominated civilization. In the age
of Internet, wired or wireless networks become part of the
artificial nervous system of advanced societies. Whether in its
modem-based variant, or through other advanced schemes for
transporting digital information and supporting interaction, the
cable system already contributes to the transformation of the
nature of many human practical experiences. These can be
experiences of entertainment, but also of learning, teaching,
even work.

There is a negative side to all this development, and a need to
face consequences that over time can accumulate beyond what we
already know and understand. Children growing up with TV miss
the experience of movement. Jaron Lanier discussed the "famous
childhood zombiehood," an expression of staring into nothing, a
limited ability to see beyond a television image, the desire for
instant gratification, and a lack of basic common sense
appreciation for doing work in order to achieve satisfaction.
Games developed around video technology train children to behave
like laboratory rats that learn a maze by rote. They grow up
accepting the politics of telegenic competition, a poor
substitute for competence and commitment. Their vote is focused
on brands, regardless of whether they regard political choices or
cereals. Addressed en masse, such viewers gel in the mass image
of polls that rapidly succeed one another. That technology makes
possible alternatives to literacy embodied in the visual is
unquestionable. To what extent these alternatives carry with them
previous determinations and constraints, or they correspond to a
new stage in human civilization, is the crux of the matter. The
degree of necessity and thus the efficiency of any new form of
visual expression, communication, or interaction can be
ascertained only in how individuals constitute themselves
through practical activities coherently integrating the visual.
There is no higher form of empowerment than in the fulfillment of
our individual possibilities. Telegenic or not, a president or a
TV star has little, if any, impact on our fulfillment in the
interconnected world of our time.

Television implies a great deal of language, but such language
frees the audience from the requirement of literacy. You do not
need to know how to write or read to watch TV; you need to be in
command of a limited part of spoken language in order to
understand a TV show, even to actively participate in it-from
going on a game show to using cable networks, videotex, or
interactive programs, exploring the Internet, or setting up a
presence on the network.

Growing up with TV results in stereotypes of language and
attitudes representing a background of shared expressions,
gestures, and values. To see in these only the negative, the low
end, is easier than to acknowledge that previous backgrounds,
constituted on the underlying structure of literacy, have become
untenable under the new pragmatic circumstances. Due to its
characteristics, television belongs to the framework of rapid
change typical of the dynamics of needs and expectations within
the new scale of humankind. There are many varied implications
to this: it makes each of us more passive, more and more subject
to manipulations (economic, political, religious), robbing (or
freeing) us from the satisfaction of a more personal relation (to
others, art, literature, etc.). Nobody should underestimate any
of these and many other factors discussed by media ecologists
and sociologists. But to stubbornly, and quite myopically,
consider TV only from the perspective and expectations of
literacy is presumptuous. We have to understand the structural
changes that made TV and video possible. Moreover, we have to
consider the changes they, in turn, brought about. Otherwise we
will miss the opportunities opened by the practical experience of
understanding the new choices presented to us, and even the new
possibilities opened. There is so much more after TV, even on
500 channels and after video-on-demand!

Language is not an absolute democratic medium; literacy, with
intrinsic elitist characteristics, even less. Although it was
used to ascertain principles of democracy, literacy ended up,
again and again, betraying them. Because they are closer to
things and actions, and because they require a relatively
smaller background of shared knowledge, images are more
accessible, although less challenging. But where words and text
can obscure the meaning of a message, images can be immediately
related to what they refer to. There are more built-in checks in
the visual than in the verbal, although the deceptive power of
an image can be exploited probably much more than the power of
the word. Such, and many other considerations are useful, since
the transfer of social and political functions from literacy
(books and newspapers, political manifestos, ceremonies and
rituals based on writing and reading) to the visual, especially
television, requires that we understand the consequences of this
transfer. But it is not television that keeps voters away from
exercising the right to elect their representatives in the
civilization of illiteracy, and not the visual that makes us
elect actors, lawyers, peanut farmers, or successful oilmen to
the highest (and least useful) posts in the government.
Conditions that require the multitude of languages that we use,
the layers of mediation, the tendency to decentralization, to
name a few, resulted in the increased influence of the visual,
as well as in some of the choices mentioned so far.

High definition television (HDTV) helps us distinguish some
characteristics of the entire development under discussion-for
instance, how the function of integration is carried out.
Integration through the intermediary of literacy required shared
knowledge, and in particular, knowledge of writing and reading.
Integration through the intermediary of modern image-producing
technology, especially television and computer-aided visual
communication, means access to and sharing of information.
Television has made countries which are so different in their
identity, history, and culture (as we know the countries of the
world to be) seem sometimes so similar that one has to ask how
this uniformity came about. Some will point to the influence of
the market process- advertisements look much the same all over
the world. Others may note the influence of technology-an
electronic eye open on the world that renders uniform everything
within its range. The new dynamics of human interaction, required
by our striving for higher efficiency appropriate to the scale
of humankind, probably explains the process better. The
similarity is determined by the mechanism we use to achieve this
higher efficiency, i.e., progressively deeper labor division,
increased mediation, and the need for alternative mechanisms for
human integration, that is reflected in TV images. This
similarity makes up the substratum of TV images, as well as the
substratum of fashion trends, new rituals, and new values, as
transitory as all these prove to be.

Literacy and television are not reciprocally exclusive. If this
were not the case, the solution to the lower levels of literacy
would be at hand. Nevertheless, all those who hoped to increase
the quality of literacy by using television had to accept that
this was a goal for which the means are not appropriate.
Language stabilizes, induces uniformity, depersonalizes;
television keeps up with change, allows and invites diversity,
makes possible personalized interaction among those connected
through a TV chain of cameras and receivers. Literacy is a
medium of tedious elaboration and inertia. TV is spontaneous and
instantaneous. Moreover, it also supports forms of scientific
activity for which language is not at all suited. We cannot send
language to look at what our eyes do not see directly, or see
only through some instruments. We cannot anticipate, in
language, processes which, once made possible on a television
screen, make future human experience conceivable. I know that in
these last lines I started crossing the border between
television and digital image processing, but this is no accident.
Indeed, human experience with television, in its various forms
and applications, although not at all closed, made necessary the
next step towards a language of images which can take advantage
of computer technology and of networking.

With the advent of HDTV, television achieves a quality that makes
it appropriate for integration in many practical experiences.
Design (of clothes, furniture, new products) can result from a
collaborative effort of people working at different sites, and
in the manufacture of their design during a live session.
Modifications are almost instantaneously integrated in the
sample. The product can be actually tested, and decisions
leading to production made. Communication at such levels of
effectiveness is actually integrated in the creative and
productive effort. The language is that of the product, a visual
reality in progress. The results are design and production cycles
much shorter than literacy-based communication can support.

HDTV is television brought to a level of efficiency that only
digital formats make possible. The reception of digital
television opens the possibility to proceed from each and every
image considered appropriate to storing, manipulating, and
integrating it in a new context. Digital television reinstates
activity, and is subject to creative programming and
interactivity. The individual can make up a new universe through
the effort of understanding and creative planning. It is quite
possible that alternative forms of communication, much richer
than those in use today, will emerge from practical experiences
of human self-constitution in this new realm. That in ten years
all our TV sets, if the TV set remains a distinct receiver, will
be digital says much less than the endless creative ideas
emerging around the reality of digital television.

Visualization

Whenever people using language try to convince their partner in
dialogue, or even themselves, that they understood a
description, a concept, a proof, and answer by using the
colloquial "I see," they actually express the practical
experience of seeing through language. They are overcoming the
limitations of the abstract system of phonetic language and
returning to the concreteness of seeing the image. Way of
speaking equals way of doing-this sums up one of the many
premises of this book. We extract information about things and
actions from their images. When no image is possible-what does a
thought look like, or what is the image of right, of wrong, of
ideal?-language supports us in our theoretic experiences, or in
the attempt to make the abstract concrete. Language is rather
effective in helping us identify kinds of thoughts, in
implementing social rules that encode prescriptions for
distinguishing between right and wrong, for embodying the just
in the institution of justice, and ideals in values. But the
experience of language can also be an experience of images.

Once we reach the moment when we can embody the abstract in a
concrete theory, in action, in new objects, in institutions, and
in choices, and once we are able to form an image of these,
share the image, make it part of the visual world we live in, and
use it further for many practical or intellectual purposes, we
expand the literate experience in new experiences. So it seems
that we tend to visualize everything. I would go so far as to
say that we not only visualize everything, but also listen to
sounds of everything, experience their smell, touch, and taste,
and recreate the abstract in the concreteness of our
perceptions. The domination of language and the ideal of
literacy, which instills this domination as a rule, was and
still is seen as the domination of rationality, as though to be
literate equals being rational, volens nolens. In fact, the
rationality associated with language, and expressed with its
help, is only a small part of the potential human rationality.
The measure (ratio) we project in our objectification can as
well be a measure related to our perceptive system. It is quite
plausible to suspect that some of the negative effects of our
literate rationality could have been avoided had we been able to
simultaneously project our other dimensions in whatever we did.

The shift from a literacy-dominated civilization to the relative
domination of the visual takes place under the influence of new
tools, further mediations, and integration mechanisms required
by self-constitutive practical experiences at the new human
scale. The tools we need should allow us to continue exploring
horizons at which literacy ceases to be effective, or even
significant. The mediations required correspond to complexities
for which new languages are structurally more adequate. The
necessary integration is only partially achievable through
literate means since many people active in the humanities and
the sciences gave up the obsession of final explanations and
accepted the model of infinite processes.

Images, among other sign systems, are structurally better suited
for a pragmatic framework marked by continuous multiplication of
choices, high efficiency, and distributed human experience. But
in order to use images, the human being had to put in place a
conceptual context that could support extended visual praxis.
When the digital computer was invented, none of those who made
it a reality knew that it would contribute to more than the
mechanization of number crunching. The visionary dimension of
the digital computer is not in the technology, but in the concept
of a universal language, a characteristica universalis, or
lingua Adamica, as Leibniz conceived it.

This is not the place to rewrite the history of the computer or
the history of the languages that computers process. But the
subject of visualization-presented here from the perspective of
the shift from literacy to the visual-requires at least some
explanation of the relation between the visual and the human use
of computers. The binary number system, which Leibniz called
Arithmetica Binaria (according to a manuscript fragment dated
March 15, 1679), was not meant to be the definitive alphabet,
with only two letters, but the basis for a universal language, in
which the limitations of natural language are overcome. Leibniz
tried hard to make this language utilizable in all domains of
human activity, in encoding laws, scientific results, music. I
think that the most intriguing aspect, which has been ignored for
centuries, was his attempt to visualize events of abstract
nature with the help of the two symbols of his alphabet. In a
letter to Herzog Rudolph August von Braunschweig (January 2,
1697), Leibniz described his project for a medal depicting the
Creation (Imago Creationis). In this letter, he actually
introduced digital calculus. Around 1714, he wrote two letters to
Nicolas de Remond concerning Chinese philosophy. It is useful to
mention these here because of the binary number representation
of some of the most intriguing concepts of the Ih-King. Through
these letters, we are in the realm of the visual, and in front of
pages in which, probably for the first time, translations from
ideographic to the sequential, and finally to the digital, were
performed. It took almost 300 years before hackers, trying to
see if they could use the digital for music notation, discovered
that images can be described in a binary system.

This long historic parenthesis is justified by two thoughts.
First, it was not the technology that made us aware of images,
or even opened access to their digital processing, but
intellectual praxis, motivated by its own need for efficiency.
Second, visualization is not a matter of illustrating words,
concepts, or intuitions. It is the attempt to create tools for
generating images related to information and its use. A text on a
computer screen is, in fact, an image, a visualization of the
language generated not by a human hand in control of a quill, a
piece of lead or graphite, a pencil or a pen. The computer does
not know language. It translates our alphabet into its own
alphabet, and then, after processing, it translates it back into
ours. Displayed in those stored images which, if in lead, would
constitute the contents of the lower and upper cases of the
drawers in each typography shop, this literacy is subject to
automation.

When we write, we visualize, making our language visible on
paper. When we draw, we make our plans for new artifacts
visible. The mediation introduced by the computer use does not
affect the condition of language as long as the computer is only
the pen, keyboard, or typewriter. But once we encode language
rules (such as spelling, case agreement, and so on), once we
store our vocabulary and our grammar, and mimic human use of
language, what is written is only partially the result of the
literacy of the writer. The visualization of text is the
starting point towards automatic creation of other texts. It
also leads to establishing relations between language and
non-language sign systems. Today, we dispose of means for
electronically associating images and texts, for
cross-referencing images and texts, and for rapidly diagramming
texts. We can, and indeed do, print electronic journals, which
are refereed on the network. Nothing prevents such journals from
inserting images, animation and sounds, or for facilitating
on-line reactions to the hypotheses and scientific data
presented. That such publications need a shorter time to reach
their public goes without saying. The Internet thus became the
new medium of publication, and the computer its printing press-a
printing press of a totally new condition. Individuals
constituting their identity on the Internet have access to
resources which until recently were available only to those who
owned presses, or gained access to them by virtue of their
privileged position in society.

The visual component of computer processing, i.e., the graphics,
relies on the same language of zeros and ones through which the
entire computer processing takes place. As a result of this
common alphabet and grammar (Boolean logic and its new
extensions), we can consider language (image translations, or
number-image relations such as diagrams, charts, and the like),
and also more abstract relations. Creating the means to overcome
the limitations of literacy has dominated scientific work. The
new means for information processing allow us to replace the
routine of phenomenological observation with processing of
diverse languages designed especially to help us create new
theories of very complex and dynamic phenomena.

The shift to the visual follows the need to change the accent
from quantitative evaluations and language inferences based on
them, to qualitative evaluations, and images expressing such
evaluations at some significant moments of the process in which
we are involved. Let us mention some of these processes. In
medicine, or in the research for syntheses of new substances,
and in space research, words have proven to be not only
misleading, but also inefficient in many respects. New
visualization techniques, such as those based on molecular
resonance, freed the praxis of medicine from the limitations of
word descriptions. Patients explain what they feel; physicians
try to match such descriptions to typologies of disease based on
data resulting from the most recent data. When this process is
networked, the most qualified physician can be consulted. When
experimental data and theoretic models are joined, the result is
visualized and the information exchanged via high-speed broadband
digital networks.

Based on similar visualization techniques, we acquire better
access to sources of data regarding the past, as well as to
information vital for carrying through projects oriented towards
the future. Computed tomography, for instance, visualized the
internal structure of Egyptian mummies. Three-dimensional images
of the whole body were created without violating the casings and
wrappings that cover the remnants. The internal body structure
was visualized by using a simulation system similar to those
utilized in non-intrusive surgery.

The design and production of new materials, space research, and
nano- engineering have already benefited from replacing the
analytical perspective ingrained in literacy-based methods with
visual means for synthesis. It is possible to visualize
molecular structures and simulate interactions of molecules in
order to see how medicine affects the cells treated, the
dynamics of mixing, chemical and biochemical reactions. It is
also possible to simulate forces involved in the so-called
docking of molecules in virtual space. No literacy-based
description can substitute for flight simulators, or for
visualization of data from radio astronomy, for large areas of
genetics and physics.

Not the last among examples to be given is the still
controversial field of artificial intelligence, seduced with
emulating behaviors usually associated with human intelligence
in action. But it should not surprise anybody that while the
dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy requires freedom from
literacy, people will continue to preserve values and concepts
they are used to, or which are appropriate to specific knowledge
areas. Paradoxically, artificial intelligence is, in part, doing
exactly this.

When people grow up with images the same way prior generations
were subjected to literacy, the relation to images changes. The
technology for visualization, although sometimes still based on
language models, makes interactivity possible in ways language
could not. But it is not only the technology of visualization
applied within science and engineering that marks the new
development. Visualization, in its various forms and functions,
supports the almost instantaneous interaction between us and our
various machines, and among people sharing the same natural
environment, or separated in space and time. It constitutes an
alternative medium for thinking and creativity, as it did all
along the history of crafts, design, and engineering. It is also
a medium for understanding our environment, and the multitude of
changes caused by practical experience involving the life
support system. Through visualization, people can experience
dimensions of space beyond their direct perception, they can
consider the behavior of objects in such spaces, and can also
expand the realm of artistic creativity.

The print media, as an overlapping practical experience uniting
literacy and the power of sight, are more visual today than at
any previous time. We are no longer subjected-sometimes with
good reason, other times for dubious motives-to the
sequentiality of literacy-dominated modes of communication. An
entire shared visual language is projected upon us in the form
of comic strips, advertisements, weather maps, economic reports,
and other pictorial representations. Some of these
representations are still printed on paper. Others are displayed
through the more dynamic forms at public information kiosks, or
through interactive means of information dissemination, such as
computer-supported networks and non-linear search environments,
which Ted Nelson anticipated back in 1965. The World Wide Web
embodies many of his ideas, as well as ideas of a number of other
visionaries.

Parallel to these developments, we are becoming more and more
aware of the possibilities of using images in human activities
where they played a reduced role within literacy-civic action,
political debate, legal argumentation. Lawyers already integrate
visual testimony in their cases. Juries can see for themselves
the crime being committed, as well as the results of
sophisticated forensic tests. Human destinies are defended with
arguments that are no longer at the mercy of someone's memory or
another's talent for rhetoric or drama. The citizen is frequently
addressed by increasingly visual messages that explain how tax
dollars are spent and why he or she should vote for one or
another candidate. In becoming the Netizen, he or she will
participate in social interactions fundamentally new in nature.
On the Net, politicians claiming credit for some accomplishment
can be immediately challenged by the real image. Political
promises can be modeled and displayed while the campaign speech
is given. A decision to go to war can be subjected to an instant
referendum while the simulation of the war itself, or of
alternatives, is played on our monitors. But again, to idealize
these possibilities would be foolish. The potential for abusive
use of images is as great as that for their meaningful
application.

Many factors are at work slowing down the process of educating
visually literate individuals. We continue to rediscover the
wheel of reading and writing without advancing comprehensive
programs for visual education. Illustrative visual alternatives,
advanced more as an alibi for the maintenance of
literacy-dominated communication, are by the nature of their
function inappropriate in the context of higher efficiency
requirements. Utilized as alternatives, these materials can be,
and often are, irrelevant, ugly, insignificant, and expensive.
More often than not, they are used not to enhance
communication, but to direct it, to manipulate the addressee. It
will take more than the recognition of the role of the visual to
understand that visual literacy, or probably several such
literacies, comprising the variety of visual languages we need,
less confining, less permanent, and less patterned, are
necessary in order to improve practical experiences of
self-constitution through images. We are yet to address the
ethical aspects of such experiences, especially in view of the
fact that the visual entails constraints different from those
encoded in the letter of our laws and moral principles.

In discussing the transition to the visual, I hope to have made
clear that the process is not one of substituting one form of
literacy for another. The process has a totally different
dynamics. It implies transition from a dominating form of
literacy to a multitude of highly adaptive sign systems. These
all require new competencies that reflect this adaptability. It
also requires that we all understand integrative processes in
order to make the best of individual efforts in a framework of
extremely divided and specialized experiences of
self-constitution. If seeing is believing, then believing
everything we see in our day is a challenge for which we are, for
all practical purposes, ill prepared.

Unbounded Sexuality

"Freedom of speech Is as good as sex." Madonna

The Netizens were up in arms: The Communications Decency Act
must be repealed. Blue ribbons appeared on many Websites as an
expression of solidarity. This Act was prompted by the American
government's attempt to prevent children from accessing the many
pornographic outlets of the Internet. This first major public
confrontation between a past controlled by literate mechanisms
and a future of illiterate unrestricted freedom seemed to be
less about sex and more about democracy. But that the two are
related, and defined within the current pragmatics of human self-
constitution, has escaped both parties to the dispute.

Seeking good sex

In Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, Karl Marx (a product of
the civilization of literacy) addressed alienation: "We thus
arrive at the result that man feels that he acts freely only in
his animal functions-eating, drinking, procreation, or at most
using shelter, jewelry, etc.-while in his human functions, he
feels only animal. What is animal becomes human and what is
human becomes animal." How an analysis of industrial capitalism,
with its underlying pragmatic structure reflected in literacy,
can anticipate phenomena pertinent to the post-industrial, and
reflected in illiteracy, is not easy to explain.

Although he referred to economic self-constitution, his
description is significant in more than one way. Sexuality is of
concern in the civilization of illiteracy insofar as the human
being in its multi-dimensionality is of concern. This might sound
too broad to afford any meaningful inference from the condition
of literacy to the condition of human sexuality, but it is an
existential premise. Through sexuality humans project their
natural condition and the many influences, language included,
leading to its humanization. An understanding of the multiple
factors at work in conditioning human experiences as intimate as
sexual relations, depends upon the understanding of the pragmatic
framework in which they unfold. Child pornography on the Internet
is by no means the offspring of our love affair with technology.
Neither is pornography being invoked for the first time as a
justification for censorship. Nevertheless, the commotion
regarding the Communications Decency Act constitutes a new
experience that is intimately related to the condition of human
existence in today's world.

"SWF seeks unemployed SWM grad student for hideaway weekends,
intimate dinners, and cuddling. Must know how to read, and be
able to converse without extensive use of 'you know' or
'wicked.'" This announcement (dated October 6, 1983) is one
among many that use qualifying initials, but with one twist:
"Must know how to read."-moreover, to be articulate. What over
ten years ago was formulated innocently (hideaway, intimate
dinner, cuddling) would today be expressed quite bluntly:
"Looking for good sex." What does reading, and possibly writing,
have to do with our emotional life, with our need and desire to
love and be loved; that is, what does reading have to do with
sex?

Long before Homo Sapiens ascertained itself, reproduction, and
all it comprises in its natural and and form, ensured survival.
Do literacy, language, or sign systems affect this basic
equation of life? Mating seasons and habits shed some light on
the natural aspect. Colors, odors, mating calls, specific
movements (dances, fights, body language) send sexual signals.
Molecular biology places the distinction between hominids and
chimpanzees at four million years ago. After all this time of
freeing themselves from nature, even to the extent of
self-constitution in the practical experience of artificial
insemination, human beings still integrate color, odor, mating
calls, and particular movements into the erotic. But they also
integrate the experience of their self-constitution in language.
Since the time hominids distinguished themselves, the sexuality
of the species started differentiating itself from that of
animals. For example, humans are permanently attractive, even
after insemination, while animals attract each other only at
moments favorable for reproduction. Along the timeline from the
primitive being to our civilization, sex changed from being an
experience in reproduction to being predominantly a form of
pleasure in itself.

Instead of the immediacy of the sexual urge, projected through
patterns subject to natural cycles, humans experience ever more
mediated forms of sexual attraction and gratification, which are
not necessarily associated with reproduction. An initial change
occurred when humanized sexual drive turned into love, and
became associated with its many emotions. The practical
experience of language played an important part in extending
sexual encounters from the exclusive realm of nature to the
realm of culture. Here they acquired a life of their own through
practical experiences characteristic of the syncretic phase of
human practical experiences, mostly rituals. During the process
of differentiating these experiences-constitution of myths, moral
and ethical self-awareness, theater, dance, poetry-sexual
encounters were subjected to various interpretations.

Beyond immediacy

The birth of languages and the establishment of sex codes, as
primitive as they were, are related to the moment of
agriculture, a juncture at which a certain autonomy of the
species was reached. Rooted in the biological distinction
between male and female, labor division increased the efficiency
of human effort. Divisions were also established, some under the
model of male domination, others under the model of female
domination, pertinent to survival activities, and later on to
incipient social life. Eventually, labor division consecrated
the profession of prostitution, and thus the practice of
satisfying natural urges in a context in which nature was
culturized. The prototypical male-dominated structure of the
sexual relation between man and woman marked the history of this
relation more than female domination did. It introduced
patterns of interaction and hierarchies today interpreted
wholesale as harmful to the entire development of women.

What is probably less obvious is the relation among the many
aspects of the pragmatic context in which such hierarchies were
acknowledged. Moreover, we do not know enough about how these
hierarchies were transformed into the underlying consciousness
of the populations whose identities resulted from experiences
corresponding to the pragmatic context. The implicit thesis of
this book is that everything that made language and writing
possible, and progressively necessary, led to a coherent
framework of human practical experiences that are characterized
by sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism, and
which literacy appropriated and transmits. Consequently, when
the structural framework no longer effectively supports human
self-constitution, the framework is modified. Other aspects of
human existence, among them sexuality, reflect the
modification.

Reading and writing have much to do with our emotional life. They
remove it from the immediacy of drive, hope, pain, and
disappointment and give it its own space: human striving,
desire, pleasure. They are associated with an infinity of
qualifiers, names, and phrases. With language, feelings are
given a means for externalizing, and they are stabilized.
Expectations diversify from there. Structural characteristics of
the context that makes language necessary simultaneously mark
the very object of the self- constitutive experience of loving
and being loved. There are many literary and visual testimonies
to how the erotic was constituted as a realm of its own: From
Gilgamesh, the Song of Solomon, Kama Sutra, Ovid's Art of Love,
through Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, to the erotic
literature of 18th and 19th century Europe, down to the many
current romance novels and handbooks on lovemaking. No matter
which of them is examined, one inference becomes clear: the
pragmatic context of the continuous human self-constitution
effects changes in the way people are attracted to each other.
Love and integration of sexual experiences, in the manifold of
acts through which hominids move from the self-perpetuation
drive to new levels of expectation and new intensities of their
relations, is also pragmatically conditioned.

Writing, as a practical experience of human self-constitution, is
conducive to relations between male and female that are
different from random or selective mating. It is bound to
continue along a time sequence severed from the natural cycle of
mating, reshaped into the marriage contract and the family
alliance. Literacy, as a particular practical experience of
language, regulates the sexual, as it regulates, in a variety of
forms, all other aspects of human interaction. In the literate
erotic experience, expectations pertinent to the pragmatics of a
society in search of alternative means of survival evolve into
norms. The inherited experience of female-male relations,
affected through the experience of rituals, myths, and religion,
is condensed in literacy. Encoding hierarchy, some languages
place women in a secondary position. There is almost no language
in which this does not happen. "Many men and women" is in Arabic
("rijaalan kafiiran wa-nisaa'aa") literally "men many women." In
Japan, women speak a Japanese reserved to their sex alone. In
the English wedding ceremony, the woman had to repeat that she
would "love, honor, and obey" the husband. To this day, Orthodox
Jewish men give thanks to God that He did "not make me a woman."

With the demise of literacy, the sexual experience gets divorced
from procreation. Statistics of survival in the past world of
limited available resources, of natural catastrophes, of
disease, etc., cease to play any role in the illiterate sex
encounters. Sexuality becomes a diversified human experience,
subject to divisions, mediations, and definitely to the
influence of the general dynamics of the world today. As markets
become part of the global economy, so does sexuality, in the
sense that it allows for experiences which, in limited
communities and within prescribed forms of ceremony (religious,
especially), were simply not possible. From the earliest
testimony regarding sexual awareness up to the present,
everything one can imagine in respect to sex has been tried. So
often placed under the veil of secrecy and mystery, sex is no
less frequently and vividly, to say the least, depicted. Yet a
rhetorical question deserves to be raised: Does anyone know
everything about sex?

The land of sexual ubiquity

Borges, in his own way, would have probably mapped the sexual
realm: Freud aside, to know everything about sex would require
that one be everyone who ever lived, lives, and eventually will
live. Such a Borgesian map is indeed detailed but leads no
further than ourselves. Connect all sex-related matter that is on
the Internet today- from on-line striptease and copulation to
legitimate sex education and the passionate defense of love-and
you will still not have more than a partial image of sexuality.
When one considers all the books, videotapes, songs, radio and
television talk-shows, private discussions and public sermons,
the subject of sex would still not be exhausted. If sex were an
individual matter-which it is, to a large extent-how could we
meaningfully approach the subject without the risk of making it a
personal confession, or worse, a pretentious discourse about
something any author would unavoidably know only through the
many and powerful filters of his or her culture? But maybe sex is
less private than we, based on prejudice, ignorance, or
discretion, assume.

Ritualized sex was a public event, sometimes culminating in
orgies. It took a lot of taming, or acculturation, for sex to
become an intimate affair. Myths acknowledged sexual habits and
propagated rules coherent within the pragmatic framework of their
expression. Like myths, many religions described acceptable and
unacceptable behavior, inspired by the need to maintain the
integrity of the community and to serve its goals of survival
through lineage and proprietary rights, especially when ales
began to dominate in society. Art, science, and business
appropriated sex as a subject of inquiry, or as a lucrative
activity. Sex is a driving force for individuals and communities,
an inescapable component of any experience, no matter how remote
from sex.

Sexual ubiquity and the parallel world of self-awareness,
embodied in forms of expression, communication, and
signification different from the actual sexual act, are
connected in very subtle ways. Once sexual experiences are
appropriated by culture, they become themselves a sign system, a
symbolic domain, a language. Each sexual encounter, or each
unfulfilled intention, is but a phrase in this language written
in the alphabet of gestures, odors, colors, smells, body
movement, and rhythm.

We are the sexual sign: first, in its indexical condition-a
definite mark left, a genetic fingerprint testifying to our
deepest secrets encoded in our genetic endowment; second, in
iconicity, that is, in all the imitations of others as they
constitute their identity in the experience of sexuality. As
many scholars have hastened to point out, we are also the sign
in its symbolism. Indeed, phallic and vulvar symbols populate
every sphere of human expression (and obsession). Nevertheless,
our own self-constitution in the sexual act confirms a double
identity of the human species: nature, involved in the struggle
for survival, where the sheer power of numbers and strategies for
coping with everything destructive make for continuous selection
(Darwin's law of natural selection); and culture, in which
humans pursue a path of progressive self-definition, many times
in conflict with the natural condition, or what Freud and his
followers defined as the psychological dimension. The two are
related, and under specific circumstances one dominates the
other. In my opinion, Peirce's encompassing notion that the sign
is the person who interprets it integrates the two levels.

In the pragmatic framework, experiences of self-constitution
result from the projection of natural characteristics in the
activity performed, as well as from the awareness of the goals
pursued, means incorporated, and meanings shared. Does the
pragmatic perspective negate explanations originating from other,
relatively limited, perspectives? Probably not. An example is
furnished by the theories explaining sexuality from the
viewpoint of the conflict between sex (libido) and
self-preservation (ego) instincts, later substituted by the
conflict between life instincts (Eros) and the death instinct
(Thanatos, self-destruction). Such theories introduce a language
layer into a subject which, although acknowledged, was simply
not discussed, except in religious terms (mainly as
prohibitions), or in poetry. As with any other dualistic
representation, such theories also end in speculation, opposing
the experience to the scheme adopted. The scheme functions in
extreme cases, which psychoanalysis dealt with, but explains
sexual normalcy-if such a thing can be defined, or even exists-to
a lesser extent, and inconsistently. The labels remain
unchanged-Eros, Logos, Thanatos-while the world undergoes
drastic alterations. Some of these alterations affect the very
nature of the sexual experience as human beings unfold under new
pragmatic circumstances, some of extreme alienation.

The literate invention of the woman

The case I am trying to make is for the acknowledgment of the
conflict between a new state of affairs in the world and our
perspectives, limited or not by the literate model of sexuality.
The current situation recalls the world before literacy, before
the expectation of homogeneity, and before the attempt to derive
order and complexity through linear progression. The atom of
that sexual world was the genderless human being, a generic
existence not yet defined by sexual differentiation. The
male-female distinction came as a surprise-the realization of
seeing the same and its negative, as in the case of a stone and
the hole that remains after it is unearthed. Some read the
genderless world as androcentric, because the generic human being
it affirmed had a rather masculine bent. The significance of
whatever such a genderless model embodied needs to be
established in the pragmatic realm: how does difference result
from same, if this same is an archetypal body with
characteristics celebrated copiously over time? Painting,
medical illustration, and diagrams, from the Middle Ages to the
17th century, focus on this genderless person, who seems today
almost like a caricature.

The pragmatics of the time period just mentioned were conducive
to a different image of genders. The sense of excitement
associated with human advances in knowing nature certainly
spilled over into every other form of human experience, sex
included. A new scale of mankind required that the efficiency of
human activity increase. This was a time of many innovations and
groundbreaking scientific theories. It was also a time of
diversified, though still limited, sexual experiences, made
possible by a framework of creativity different from the
framework of the Middle Ages. Discoveries in many domains shook
the framework of thinking according to Platonic archetypes,
appropriated by the Catholic Church and used as explanatory
models for all things living or dead. Pragmatics required that
the one-sex model be transcended because limits of efficiency
(in thinking, medical practice, biological awareness, labor
division) were reached within the model. The world of practical
experiences of this time unfolded in the Industrial Revolution.
With literacy established, some sexual attitudes, consonant
with the pragmatic circumstance, were enforced. Others were
deemed unacceptable, and qualified as such in the literate
language of church, state, and education. From the ubiquity of
natural sexuality to what would become sexual self-awareness and
sexual culture, no matter how limited, the journey continued in
leaps and bounds.

To acknowledge the woman as a biological entity, with
characteristics impossible to reduce to male characteristics,
was not due to political pressure-as Thomas Lacquer, a
remarkable writer on the subject, seemed to believe-but to
pragmatic needs. It simply made sense to know how the body
functions, to acknowledge morphology, to improve the quality of
life, however vaguely acknowledged as such, by addressing the
richness of the human being. Interestingly enough, the order in
nature and matter found by science contradicted the new
experience of variety, sexuality included, made possible by the
scientific revolution. A gulf opened between reality and
appearance, motivating a healthy empirical program, well extended
in the realm of sexual encounters.

Back in the medium aevum, Maximus of Torino thought that "the
source of all evil is the woman," probably embodied in the
prototypical Eve. The social importance of women in the context
of the empirical program, leading to the need for generalized
literacy and better knowledge of the human body, discredited this
prejudice of the Middle Ages, and of any age since. Sexuality
made the transition to the two-sex world with a vengeance.
Reproduction still dominated, since incipient industry needed
more qualified workers in its own reproduction cycles, and
productivity triggered the need to maintain consumption. But the
unnatural dimension widened as well. The context was population
growth, limited means of birth control, and levels of production
and consumption characteristic of the pragmatics of high
efficiency.

Those who think that the relation between industry, sexuality,
and reproduction is far-fetched should recall the birth policies
of countries obsessed with industrial growth. In what was
communist Romania, workers were needed to do what there were no
machines to do: to produce for the benefit of the owners of the
means of production. To a similar end, the Soviets handed out
medals to mothers of many children. The government structure,
bearing the characteristics of literacy, clashed with the harsh
pragmatic framework existing in the former communist countries.
The result of the clash was that women avoided birth at all
cost.

Ahead to the past

Longer life and the ability to enjoy the fruits of industry
altered attitudes towards sex, especially reproduction.
Sexuality and marriage were postponed to the third decade of
life as people acquired more training in their quest for a better
life. Children were no longer a matter of continuity and
survival. After decades of denying the strength of nature's
drive towards self-perpetuation of a species, today we again
recognize that sexual life starts very early. But this
realization should not have come as a surprise. Juliet's mother
was worried that Juliet was not married at the age of 13.
Beyond the realization of early sexuality, we notice that
adolescents have multiple sex partners, that the average
American is bound to have 37 sex partners in his or her
lifetime, that prohibitions against sodomy are ignored, and that
half the population is involved in group sex. Statistics tell us
that 25% of the adult population uses pornography for arousal
and another 30% uses contraptions bought in sex shops; 33- 1/3%
of married couples have extra-marital affairs; the average
marriage lasts 5 years; the open practice of homosexuality
increases 15% annually. Incest, bestiality, and sexual practices
usually defined as perverse are reaching unheard of proportions.
It's not that changes in sexual experience take place, but that
practices known from the earliest of times assert themselves,
usually by appealing to the literate notion of freedom. As with
many aspects of the change human society undergoes, we do not
know what the impact of these sex practices will be. Probably
that is the most one can say in a context that celebrates
permissiveness as one of the highest accomplishments of modern
society. Such changes challenge our values and attitudes, and
make many wonder about the miserable state of morality. We
already know about the cause and physical effects of AIDS. We do
not even know how to wonder what other diseases might come upon
humanity if the human relation with animals moves in the
direction of bestiality. "Is this the price we pay for
democracy?" is asked by people accused of having a conservative
leaning. Enthusiasts celebrate an age of unprecedented
tolerance, indulgence, and freedom from responsibility. But no
matter to which end of the spectrum one leans, it should be
clear that these considerations are part of the pragmatics of
sexuality in the civilization of illiteracy. Shorter cycles are
characteristic not only of production, but also of sexual
encounters. Higher speed (however one wants to perceive it),
non-linearity, freedom of choice from many options, and the
transcendence of determinism and clear-cut dualistic distinctions
apply to sexuality as they apply to everything else we do.

Although it is a unique experience, impossible to transmit or
compare, and very difficult to separate from the individual,
sex is widely discussed. Media, politicians, and social
scientists have transformed it into a public issue; hypocrites
turn it into an object of derision; professionals in sexual
disorders make a good living from them. Sex is the subject of
economic prognosis, legal dispute, moral evaluation, astrology,
art, sports, and so on. One should see what is made public on
the World Wide Web. Highly successful networked pages of
pornographic magazines are visited daily by millions of people,
as are pages of scientific and medical advice. Questions
referring to sexuality in its many forms of expression increase
day by day. Questions about sex have also extended to areas
where the sexual seems (or seemed) excluded-science,
technology, politics, the military. For example, the
contraceptive pill, which has changed the world more than its
inventors ever dreamed of, and more than society could have
predicted, has also changed part of the condition of the sexual.
The abortion pill (with a name-RU486-that reminds us of computer
chips) only accentuates the change, as do many scientific and
technological discoveries conceived with the purpose of sexually
stimulating the individual or augmenting sexual pleasure.

Emancipation-social, political, economic, as well as
emancipation of women, children, minorities, nations-has also
had an impact on sexual relations. As such, emancipation results
from different pragmatic needs and possibilities, and reflects
the weaker grip of literate norms and expectations. Emancipation
has reduced some of sexuality's inherent, and necessary,
tension. It freed the sexual experience from most of the
constraints it was subjected to in a civilization striving for
order and control. Still, individual erotic experiences have
often culminated not in the expected revelations, stimulated by
the use of drugs or not, but in deception, even desperation. This
is explained by the fact that, more than any activity that
becomes a goal in itself, sexuality without the background of
emotional contentment constitutes individuals as insular,
alienated from each other, feeling used but not fulfilled. Lines
of a similar sway were written by opponents of sexual
emancipation, and as a suggestion of a price humans pay for
excess. These lines were articulated also by firm believers in
tolerance, free spirits who hardly entertain the thought of
punishment (divine or otherwise).

Concerns over human sexuality result from the role of scale and
the erotic dimension. Within a smaller scale, one does not feel
lost or ignored. Small-scale experiences are constraining, but
they also return a sense of care and belonging. The broader the
scale, the less restrictive the influence of others, but also the
more diminished the recognition of individuality. In the modern
megalopolis, the only limits to one's sexual wishes are the
limits of the individual. Nonetheless, at such a scale,
individuality is continuously negated, absorbed in the anonymity
of mediocre encounters and commercialism. The realization that
scale relates not only to how and how much we produce, and to
changes in human interaction, but also to deeper levels of our
existence is occasioned by the sexual experience of
self-constitution in a framework of permissiveness that
nullifies value. The human scale and the altered underlying
structure of our practical experiences affect drives, in
particular the sexual drive, as well as reproduction, in a world
subjected to a population explosion of exponential proportions.

The entire evolution under consideration, with all its positive
and negative consequences, has a degree of necessity which we
will not understand better by simply hiding behind moral slogans
or acknowledging extreme sexual patterns. No person and no
government could have prevented erotic emancipation, which is
part of a much broader change affecting the human condition in
its entirety. The civilization of illiteracy is representative
of this change insofar as it defines a content for human
experiences of self-constitution, including those related to
sexuality, which mark a discontinuity in sexual patterns. Sex
dreams turn into sex scripts on virtual reality programs within
which one can make love to a virtual animal, plant, to oneself,
projected into the virtual space and time of less than clear
distinctions between what we were told is right and wrong.
Telephone sex probably provides just as much arousal, but against
fees that the majority of callers can hardly afford. Less than
surprising, lesbians and gays make their presence known on the
Internet more than in literate publications. Discussions evolve,
uncensored, on matters that can be very intimate, described in
titillating terms, sometimes disquietingly vulgar, obscene, or
base, by literate standards. But there are also exchanges on
health, AIDS prevention, and reciprocal support. Gay and lesbian
sexuality is freely expressed, liberated from the code language
used in the personal columns of literary publications.

Freud, modern homosexuality, AIDS

The godfather of modern homosexuality is Freud (independent of
his own sexual orientation), insofar as sexual expression
remains a symbolic act. Homosexuality, evading natural selection
and eliciting acceptance as an expression of a deeply rooted
human complex, is part of the ubiquitous sexual experience of the
species. The fact that homosexuality, documented in some of the
earliest writings as a taboo, along with incest and bestiality,
predated Freud does not contradict this assertion. Homosexual
Eros has a different finality than heterosexual Eros. The extent
of homosexuality under the structural circumstances of the
civilization of illiteracy is not only the result of increased
tolerance and permissiveness. Neither is it merely the result of
freedom resulting from an expanded notion of liberal democracy.
It is biologically relevant, and as a biological expression, it
is projected into practical experiences constitutive of
individuals, men or women, acknowledged as different because
their practical experience of self-constitution identifies them
as different. Their experience, though necessarily integrated in
today's global world, has many consequences for them and for
others.

While research has yet to confirm the hypothesis of structural
peculiarities in the brain and genes of homosexuals, the
specifics of the self-constitution process through practical
experiences in a world subject to natural selection cannot be
overlooked. Genetics tells us that the borderline between
genders is less clear-cut than we assumed. Be this as it may,
homosexuality takes place under a different set of biological
and social expectations than do heterosexuality and other forms
of sexuality. It is an act in itself, with its own goal, with no
implicit commitment to offspring, and thus different in its
intrinsic set of responsibilities and their connection to the
social contract. But for this matter, so is heterosexuality
under the protection of the pill, the condom, or any other birth
control device or method, abortion included.

A different sense of future, moreover an expectation of instant
gratification, is established in the sexual experience of
homosexuality. Exactly this characteristic acknowledges the
underlying structure of the pragmatics of high efficiency that
makes homosexual experiences possible, and even economically
acceptable. Acknowledged also is the scale of humankind.
Survival is much less affected by fruitless sexuality than
within a limited scale of existence and activity. The freedom
gained through birth control methods and the freedom to practice
non-reproductive sexual relations, such as homosexual love, are
in some ways similar. It is impossible not to notice that the
development under discussion displays a shift from a domain of
vulnerability in regard to the species-any imbalance in
procreation, under conditions of severe selection, affects the
chances of survival-to the domain of the individual.

The extreme case of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome),
which is transmitted sexually (among other ways), reintroduced
moral concerns at a time when morality was almost dropped from
erotic language and expelled from the human erotic experience.
The frenzy of sexual freedom and the confusion resulting from the
spread of AIDS present contradictory images of a much broader
development that affects human erotic behavior, and probably
much more than that. Nobody, no doomsayer on record, whether
coming from a literate perspective or already integrated in the
pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy, predicted the new
vulnerability which AIDS makes so painfully evident, inside and
outside the homosexual segment of the population. The integrated
global nature of human life brought Africa, with its large
AIDS-infected population, close to countries that reached a
different (not to use the word higher) level of civilization.
AIDS impacted on the sense of invulnerability, assumed by
individuals in industrialized countries as almost a right. This
invulnerability is now drastically tested, despite the enormous
effort to address AIDS. The disease suddenly put globality in a
new light. Statistics connect the sense of danger experienced in
Hollywood by HIV-infected movie stars, fashion designers, and
dancers to the desperation of the disenfranchised in the first
world-drug addicts, the urban poor, and prostitutes-and to the
disenfranchised and working poor of the Third World.

Far from being a new phenomenon, the homosexual and lesbian
preference, or lifestyle as it is euphemistically called,
reaches a status of controversial acceptance in the civilization
of illiteracy. The paradox is that while the choice of
homosexuality over heterosexuality is facilitated by the
pragmatic context of the civilization of illiteracy, the
activism of homosexuality solicits recognition within the
structures characteristic of literacy. It is very ironic that
gay activism, stimulated by the many consequences of the AIDS
epidemic, attempts to reverse time, fighting for equal access to
exactly those means in which the values and prejudices that
condemn homosexuality are embedded. It looks like homosexuals
want to rewrite the book or books in which they are damned,
instead of freeing themselves from them. Homosexuals want their
voice to be heard in church and politics. They want their cause
present in ethical writings, and their rights encoded in new
laws and rules. They want to enlighten others by making their
experience known as art, literature, and social discourse. The
genetic condition of the homosexual choice needs to be
considered together with the variety of contexts pertaining to
the diversity of the civilization of illiteracy that make its
unfolding possible.

There is a need to be aware that, between the function of
procreation and divergent sexual behavior, a whole gamut of
human cultural experience continues to unfold and challenges
settled standards. This experience goes beyond language and the
literate structure of a linear, sequential, hierarchic,
centralized, deterministic pragmatics of limited choice. Human
language, as a projection of human beings living within a
context appropriate to their self-preservation and development,
participated in the taming of our sexual drive. Illiteracy leads
to its endless diversification, affecting sexuality in all its
manifestations, such as patterns of mobility and settlement,
family and community life, social rules, and the encoding of
values in moral, economic, and educational systems.

Orality and sexuality were characterized by immediateness, and a
reduced sense of space and time. Sex equaled instinct. With
writing, and thus the possibility of what later would become
literacy, a new set of underlying elements was acknowledged.
Sexuality was subjected to the experience of accepted rules-the
do's and don'ts appropriate to expectations of efficiency, and
their resulting values, corresponding to the scale of humankind
and the natural condition. Reproduction still dominated
sexuality, while rules of optimal human interaction, encoded in
religion or social expectations, started to permeate erotic
behavior. To a great extent, language in its literate form
expresses the awareness of the various erotic dimensions as they
were socially acknowledged at any given time. Literacy enrolled
sexuality in the quest for higher productivity and sustained
consumption characteristic of the pragmatics associated with the
Industrial Revolution. Once conditions making literacy necessary
are overruled by new conditions, sexuality undergoes
corresponding changes. Basically, sexuality seems to return to
immediateness, as it integrates many mediating elements.
Sexuality unfolds in an unrestricted set of varieties, escaping
some of its natural determination. In keeping with the shorter
and shorter cycles of human activity, sexuality turns into an
experience of transitory encounters. Since it is a form of human
expression, it ascertains its condition as yet another sign
system, or language, among the many participating in the
practical experiences of our new pragmatic context. It now
bridges dramatically between life and death, in a world where the
currency of both life and death is, for all practical purposes,
devaluated.

Sex and creativity

Experts from fields as different as brain research, cognitive
science, and physiology agree that a distinct similarity between
the practical experience of self- constitution in sexual acts and
in creative efforts of art, scientific discovery, and political
performance can be established. It seems that they all involve a
progression, reach a peak, experienced as enormous pleasure and
relief, and are followed by a certain feeling of emptiness. Like
any creative experience, the erotic experience is one of
expression. To express means to constitute oneself authentically,
and to project hope that the experience can impact others. From
this stems the possible language, or semiotics, of the erotic:
how it is expressed, what the erotic vocabulary (of sounds,
words, gestures, etc.) and grammar are. The semiosis of the
erotic includes the participation of the language of sexual
relationships, without being limited to it.

Having reached this understanding, we can apply it to the
observation that Homo Eroticus is a subject who continuously
negates naturalness (from what and how we eat to how we dress,
etc.) while simultaneously regretting the loss. Not surprisingly,
sexuality is continued in the practice of producing, reading,
viewing, and criticizing erotic literature, printed images,
video, film documentaries, CD-ROM, or virtual reality. Real- time
interactive erotic multimedia captures even more attention. In
parallel, humans try to be authentic, unique, and free in their
intimate sphere. They scan through image- dominated books, some
more than vulgar, subscribe to magazines, face their own
sexuality on videotapes, register for sex initiation seminars, or
take advantage of group sex encounters. Millions land on
pornographic Websites or create their own sex messages in the
interconnected world. They do all this in an attempt to free
themselves from natural necessity and from the conformist frame
of literate Eros, including the many complexes explaining
painful real or imaginary failures.

Living in an environment in which science and technology
effectively support human experiences of overcoming the
constraints of space, time, and material existence, humans freed
sexuality from the influence of natural cycles. These, as we
know, can even be altered as pragmatic conditions might require
for sportswomen and ballerinas. New totems and taboos populate
this environment in which Eros, as a reminder of distant phases
of anthropological evolution, continues to be present. Like any
other creative act, the sexual act involves imagination, and the
urge to explore the unknown. It is irrepeatable, yet another
instance of discovering one's identity in the uniqueness of the
experience.

Although continuously programmed through endlessly refined means,
humans maintain a nostalgia for the authentic, but accept, more
often unconsciously than not, a mediocre syntax of the sexual
impressed upon them from the world of celebrity and success.
This syntax is a product of erotic experts, writers, and
imagemakers. It is a contentless semantics-the meaning of
erotic encounters fades in the meaning of the circumstance-and
an absurd pragmatics-sexuality as yet another form of
competition, deliriously celebrated by mass media.

While artificial insemination was a scientific breakthrough, it
is also symptomatic of the process analyzed here, in particular
of the changes in the underlying structure leading to the
civilization of illiteracy. Artificial insemination is part of
this background; so is the entire genetic research that resulted
in our ability to design not only new plants and animals with
expected characteristics, but also human beings. Specialization
reached a point where the market can satisfy a new type of
consumption, in this case represented by artificial
insemination, under acceptable economic conditions. Whether a
pill, or aesthetic insemination, will ever make those who desire
to be artists become creative is still to be seen. (The same
holds true for science, politics, and any other creative
career.) But we have already seen the dissemination of tools
(mainly computer- based) that give many the illusion of becoming
abruptly talented, as some women discover that they are abruptly
fecund because they found the right pill, or the right
gynecologist, to make the impossible happen.

As part of contemporary society's generalized illiteracy, erotic
illiteracy is eloquently illustrated by the pervasiveness of sex
in art. The transition from pornography to artistic pornography
corresponds to the search of those human obsessions that
legitimize art's appropriation of territories considered taboo.
As some see it, once freed from the constraints implicit in the
pragmatic framework relying on literacy, art and sexuality
intensified their reciprocal influence. Aesthetic concerns
changed from elaboration and method to improvisation and process.
The expectation of education or therapeutics gave way to
triggering excitement, more obliquely sexual excitement.
Striptease has moved from the back alleys of bigoted enjoyment
into movie theaters, museums, prime time television, the
Internet. And so has the language of arousal, the voice of
pleasure, the groan of post-coital exhaustion, or disappointment
from teleporn services to the pay-per-session Websites, where
credit card numbers are submitted without fear of their being
used beyond payment for the service. In certain countries still
under a literate regimen, the problem of pornography has been
solved by administrative prohibitions; in others, a solution
arises from blind market logic.

The market acknowledges the various aspects of sexuality in the
civilization of illiteracy through products and services geared
towards all those involved. Many market semioses work in this
direction-from the pornographic sites on the Internet to the red
light districts where risk can be generously rewarded. Sometimes
the market's attention leads to unexpected changes in what is
marketed, and how previous acceptable codes of sexual behavior
are revised and new codes publicly sanctioned. The many forms of
advertisement catering to homosexuals, sexploitation, gendered
sexuality, group experiences, while never using one qualifier or
another, are quite explicit in identifying their public and the
patterns of behavior characteristic for this public. Means used
for this purpose correspond to those of the civilization of
illiteracy. There is, probably, no other medium of more precise
narrow casting of sexual wares, from legitimate to scandalously
base, than that of the networked world.

In the framework of literacy, the erotic (as all other creative
contributions) was idealized in many respects. Language
projected the erotic experience as one that transcended
sexuality, leading to stable and selective male-female
relationships within the boundaries of the family
characteristic of industrial society. In time, various value
representations, symptomatic of a peculiar understanding of the
differences between man and woman, and stored in the language of
customs and rituals, took over the substance of the erotic and
made form predominant. Literacy and the ceremonies celebrating
the erotic-especially marriage and wedding anniversaries-are
connected far beyond what most would accept on first reflection.
The fact that the civilization of illiteracy took over these
ceremonies, and created a service sector able to provide a
substitute for an instance that used to signify commitment only
proves how ubiquitous the expectation of high efficiency is. The
vows that made marriage a social event, sanctioning the implicit
sexual component of the contract, and sometimes celebrating
more prejudice than tolerance, are expectations expressed in
literate language and submitted for public validation. Whether
newlyweds knew what they signed-or did not know how to sign-does
not change the fact that the institution was acknowledged in
the integrating reality of language.

Equal access to erotic mediocrity

Once the homogeneous image of society breaks, and sexuality more
than previously turns into another market commodity
(prostitution, in its hetero- and homosexual forms), once morals
and direct commitments are substituted by rules of efficiency
and population control, the language of the erotic is emptied. It
is useless to accuse people of lower moral standards without
understanding that, under new conditions of human experience,
these standards simply embody ways of achieving the efficiency
that this civilization of illiteracy strives for. To own your
partner, as the marriage certificate is interpreted by some, and
to buy pleasure or perversion as one buys food or clothing, are
two different contexts for the self-constitution of the
individual. It is much cheaper-and I cringe to state this so
bluntly-to buy sexual pleasure, regardless how limited and
vulgar it can be, than to commit oneself to a life of reciprocal
responsibility, and unavoidable moments of inequity. The economic
equation is so obvious that facing it, one ends up discouraged.
But this equation is part of the broader equation of high
expectations defining the illiterate practical experience of
self- constitution in a world of a very large scale. In this
equation, access to pornographic sites on the Internet can
indeed appear to some as an issue of freedom of speech or
freedom of choice.

Even those living outside the platinum and diamond belt of wealth
and prosperity partake in the illiterate expression of sexuality
as this created global markets of prostitution, pornography, and
vulgarity, or widely opened the doors to sexual experimentation.
From food, music, and photography, to video, films, and clothing,
almost everything seems to address sexuality, moreover, to
stimulate it. Crime and sex drive the market (the art market
included) more than anything else. All age groups are addressed
on their own biological and cultural terms; all backgrounds,
including ethnic and religious, are involved in the fabric of
sex messages. One million children are forced yearly into the
sex market, the majority of them from poor countries. People who
do not know how to read or write, and who probably never will,
live under the seduction of the Calvin Klein label and will
imitate the lascivious moves of the models through which they
learn about them. Enormous numbers of people who might not have
appropriate shelter, or enough food, buy Madonna videos and
indulge in the fantasy that sexual freedom embodies in their
particular illiterate expression.

Today, humans no longer share a literate notion of the sexual,
but display a multitude of attitudes and involve themselves in a
variety of experiences, which include the expectation of a
common denominator, such as the family used to be. Humans tamed
their own nature and discovered, at the peak of what seemed to
become a collective sense of invulnerability, that there are
still points of individual vulnerability. Some are reviving
hopes of chastity and clean marriages, of generalized
heterosexuality-in short, of a return to the safe shores of an
idealized erotic experience of the past. Sexuality, however,
always had its bright and dark sides. Suffice it to recall the
explicit images in the ruins of Pompeii, or those in Indian and
Japanese art. Sometimes, not even our most aggressive sex
magazines, porno shops, Hollywood crap, and Internet sites
equal their boldness. But people have managed to hide the dark
side, or at least what could be construed as such, and to
propagate, through literacy, the sublime erotic poem, the clean
erotic novel, the romance, the love songs and dances, and
everything else testifying to the sublime in love. What is new in
the context of the civilization of illiteracy is that one side
no longer excludes the other. To be is to be different, even if
the biological equation of only two sexes seems so limiting.

Becoming more indirect and transitory, human relations affect
sexuality and the ability to cope with what is defined as
deviant erotic behavior in respect to tradition. AIDS will not
turn back events that made the current pragmatic context
necessary. Rather, it will add to the demystifying of love and
sex, and thus effectively bridge between genetic research and
the self-perpetuation drive of the species, rationalized in
formulas meeting higher levels of efficiency, resources, and
human reproduction. Such formulas, more sophisticated than the
progressions Malthus used, are already tested by various
organizations concerned with strategies for avoiding human
self-destruction by overpopulation. A condom is cheaper than
giving birth; all the pills women swallow over a lifetime are
far less costly than taking care of one child. It should not
surprise that Japan, committed to all the values of literacy and
the sexuality attached to them, is reluctant to adopt the pill.
The country has a very low birth rate, so low that its leaders
are justified in fearing that soon Japan will not have enough
people to fuel the economy through production and consumption.
Still, Japan sees a relation between the pill and the state of
morality as part of the cultural homogeneous fabric on which it
relies. Nobody really doubts that the globality of human
experience, to which Japan contributed through its productive
genius probably more than any country, will catch up with it.
Sexually, the literate Japanese are no less daring than the
illiterate Americans.

To continuously tend towards having more at the cheapest price-in
many ways an expression of rape of other people's work and
resources-means to exhaust not only the object, but also the
subject. Rape, one of the most heinous crimes people commit,
generalized in political and economic rape, projects sexuality
and its powerful action even outside the biological realm of
human life. To want all (especially all at once) means to want
nothing in particular. At the end of the total sexual experience
lies nothing but disappointment for some; for others, the next
experience. Profoundly subjective, deeply individual, unique and
irrepeatable, human sexuality has meaning only to the extent
that it remains an integrating factor, relating individual
destiny to that of the species. The similarity between the
creative and sexual acts might explain why changes similar to
those occurring in erotic experience can be identified in the
artistic, scientific, or political practice of the civilization
of illiteracy. Unless we understand the many implications of
such changes, we would only leap into a vortex of wild
conjecture. Family is the part of the experience of human
self-constitution in which such implications are most likely to
have a profound effect.

Family: Discovering the Primitive Future

A paradox has developed: Homosexuals want to establish families
and to have them acknowledged by society. Adults who have
children choose to avoid the family contract. Well over 30% of
the children born in the USA are born out of wedlock. In the
pragmatic equation of human self-constitution, these facts bear
deeper signification.

Commenting before a television camera after a celebrity divorce
trial, an onlooker remarked that there is more communication in
preparing a pre-nuptial agreement than during a marriage. As
exaggerated and imprecise (communication between whom-the couple
or their representatives?) as this remark probably is, it
nevertheless captures some traits of family life in our age.
Indeed, families are constituted on the basis of economic
agreements, mediated by lawyers and financial consultants. The
risk of family breakdown is carefully integrated in the
calculations establishing the viability of the marriage.
Children are part of the calculation-minus the long-lasting
emotional effects-as are the odds for illness, disability, and
liabilities, such as living parents and siblings who might need
assistance, or obligations due to previous marriages. The curves
registering amount of time the recently married spend together
reveals that once the agreement is signed, dialogue shrinks to
less than eight hours a week, which is well below the time spent
watching television-almost seven hours a day-or devoted to
physical exercise. If surfing the Net is part of the newlyweds'
life, there is even less dialogue.

Typically, both partners in the marriage work, and this affects
other aspects of family life besides dialogue. When children
arrive, the time parents spend with them decreases progressively
from the days following birth through the critical years of high
school. It is reported that on the average, youngsters in the USA
get their parents' attention for less than four hours a week. In
some European countries, this time can reach eight to ten hours.
On the Asian sub-continent, many children lose contact with
their parents before the age of six. Statistics show that over a
quarter of the American student population planning to enroll in
college never discuss their high school programs, or necessary
preparation courses, with their fathers. Close to half this
amount never discuss their plans with their mothers (single or
not). The same holds true for students in Italy, France, and
Belgium.

Divorce percentages, abortion rates, number of partners over
one's lifetime, and hours spent with the family in meaningful
exchange of ideas or in common tasks express a condition of the
family that reflects the dynamics of today's human practical
experiences. Over 16 million children under the age of eighteen
years live with one parent (mainly the mother). Economics
(income level, joblessness, opportunity) plays a critical role
in the life of the young and of their progenitors.

All the changes leading to the civilization of illiteracy affect
the experience of family life, and result in radical changes of
the family model itself. Faster rhythms of experiences leading
to casual relationships and to forming a family are on record.
Shorter cycles during which the experience is exhausted result in
increasingly unstable relations and families. Permanence is no
longer the expectation in marriage. Throughout society,
clear-cut distinctions between morally right and wrong are being
replaced by situation ethics. Increased mediation, through
counselors, lawyers, doctors, and financial planners, explains
the new efficiency of the family as short-lived interaction and
cooperation. The factors mentioned characterize the new pragmatic
framework of human existence in which a new kind of
interpersonal commitment is made and a new type of family is
established, not unlike the short-lived corporations that are
exhausted as soon as their product's potential has been reached.

In this pragmatic framework, family-like interactions harking
back to the civilization of literacy, with its hierarchy and
central authority and the promise of stability and security, are
considered the only alternative to the new situation of the
family. The people who consciously seek this alternative
discover that the family is bound by relatively loose
connections and that reciprocally advantageous distributed tasks
replace family unity. Mediated and segmented experiences and
vague commitments, which evolve into a frame of vague morality,
dominate family life today. Marriages of expediency, undertaken
to solve some difficulty-such as resident status in some
countries, health insurance, care for one's old age, better
chances at a career- illustrate the tendency.

Once the conditions for the perpetuation and dissemination of
values associated with literacy are no longer granted, at the
current globally integrated scale of humankind, family life
changes fundamentally. Even the notion of family is questioned.
Family unity, reflected in the coherent pragmatic framework
afforded by literacy, is replaced by individual autonomy and
competition. An array of options greater than the one feasible
at the scale characteristic of agricultural or industrial
economy, presents itself to adults and children in their
practical experiences of self-constitution. Nobody escapes the
temptation of trying and testing in the multiple of choices that
are characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy.

There are many facets to what is called family. The concept
displays ample variety in its perceived or construed meaning.
Sexual instincts manifested as attraction, associated with the
awareness of the consequence of reproduction, might lead the list
in defining what it took to establish a family. At the same level
of importance is the need to establish a viable unity of
economic, cultural, and psychological significance, a framework,
sanctioned by religious and political entities, for carrying out
obligations significant to the community. These, and a number of
additional elements, such as morality based on the pragmatics of
health, inter-generational exchange of information and aid,
social functions ensuring survival and continuity through
cooperation and understanding with other families, are tightly
connected. The nature of this interconnectedness is probably a
much better identifier of what, under given socio- historical
circumstances, is considered and experienced as family.

Togetherness

Dictionaries point to the broader meaning of an extended notion
of family-all living in a household-with the root of the word
extending to all the servants, as well as to blood relations and
descendants of the same progenitor. What is probably missing
from such a definition is the understanding of
interconnectedness, more specifically, awareness of the role
played by agents of connection, among which language, in
general, and literacy, in particular, become relevant.

Much has been written concerning the change from animal-like
sexual drive to the formation of family; much, too, about the
many specific forms of practical experiences through which
families were established and maintained. The history of the
human family captures the nature of the relations between man and
woman, parents and offspring, near and distant kin, and between
generations. Natural aspects of production and reproduction, and
cultural, social, political, and ethnic elements are also
expressed through the family. Its reality extends even to the
area of interdependencies between the language of individuals
constituting families as viable survival units, and the language
of the community within which family is acknowledged. Whether
female- or male-dominated, as the pragmatic context afforded,
the family ascertains a sense of permanency against the
background of need and flux. It is another constitutive practical
experience involving the projection of individual biological
characteristics in the context of life and work, an experience
that progressively extended beyond biology into its own domain
of expectations and values, and finally into its own
effectiveness.

In search of a family nucleus, we arrive at female, male,
offspring. The biological structure is maintained by some bond,
probably a combination of factors pertaining to survival (the
economy of family), emotions, sexual attraction (which includes
psychological aspects), and ways of interacting with the extended
family and with other families (social aspects). But beyond
this, little else can be stated without causing controversy.
Within each family, there is a maternal and a paternal line. In
some family types, mother and father together feed the children,
introduce them to survival tactics, and train their family
instincts. In other cases, only one parent assumes these
functions. The implicit linearity of family relations unfolds
through new family associations.

Anthropological research reports in detail how families are
established. The pragmatic aspect is decisive. In Melanesia, the
goal is to acquire brothers-in-law who will join the woman's
family in hunting, farming, and other activities. Margaret Mead
described the rule of not marrying those one fights. Expressed in
language, this rule has a normative quality. Nevertheless, in
some tribes in Kenya, enemies marry to ensure that they become
friends. The language expressing this strategy is more
suggestive than imperative. Research also documents variations
from the nuclear model. The Nayar, a population in India,
consecrates a family in which children belong to the maternal
line; fathers visit. The woman can have as many lovers as she
desires. The semiosis of naming children reflects this
condition. Rules established over time in some countries are
indicative of peculiar pragmatic requirements: polygamy in
societies where marriage is the only form of protection and
fulfillment for women; polyandry in societies with a high man to
woman ratio; uxorilocation (the new couple resides in the
wife's home territory), and virilocation (the new couple resides
in the husband's home territory).

The scale at which family self-constitution takes place affects
its effectiveness. When this scale reaches a certain threshold
or critical size, structural changes take place. The family, in
its various embodiments, and within each specific pragmatic
framework, reflected these major changes in the human scale of
mankind at many levels. From the first images documenting
families over 25,000 years ago, in the Paleolithic Age, to the
paintings at Sefar (Tassili des Ajjer, 4th century BCE), and to
many other subsequent forms of testimony, we have indicators of
change in family size, the nature of family hierarchy,
inheritance mechanisms, restrictions and prohibitions (incest
foremost), and above all, change in the family condition when the
pragmatic context changes. The testimony extends to cemeteries:
It matters who is buried with whom or close to whom; to the
evolution of words: What Beneviste called glottochronology; to
contracts. Marriage contracts, such as the cuneiform tablet of
Kish, dated 1820 BCE, or contracts documenting the sale of land,
in which the family tree of the sellers is reproduced as
testimony that the entire family accepts the transaction, shed
light on the evolution of family. When Aristotle stated "Each
city is made up of families," he acknowledged that a stage of
stabilized family relations had been reached, well adapted to
the stabilizing pragmatic framework facilitated by the new
practical experience of writing.

By Aristotle's time, togetherness was designated through a name.
The expectation at this scale of human relations was: without a
name there is no social existence. Characteristics of sign
processes pertinent to self-constitution as members of various
family types become characteristic of the family. That is, the
structure of family-based semiotic processes and the structure
of the family are similar. Rudimentary signs, incipient
language, oral communication, notation, and writing are stages
in the semiosis of means of expression and communication. The
sign processes of family develop in tandem.

The quest for permanency

At the time literacy became possible and necessary, it embodied
an idiom of effective relations, both synchronically-at a given
instance of those relations-and diachronically-over time, such
as from one generation to another, each attached to the same use
of language in writing, reading, and speaking. It is precisely
the need to achieve efficiency, in every human endeavor, that
assigns to the family the function of co-guarantor of tradition.
Even before the possibility of literacy, language carried the
do's and don'ts transmitting rules, based on the practical
experience, that ensured survival through cooperation and new
ways to satisfy direct needs and respond to expectations-rules
that affected the efficiency of each practical experience.

The family appropriated these requirements, shaping them into a
coherent framework for efficient togetherness. Directness,
sequentiality, linearity, centralism, cooperation, and
determinism marked the family experience as it marked other
experiences of human self-constitution. Family members relied
directly on each other. As one male assumed the role of
provider, and the female, or females, of caretaker, a certain
structure of dependence was put in place, resulting in hierarchy
and sub- hierarchies. Family activity involved repetitive and
sequential phases related to survival: reproductive cycles of
animals; the progression of seasons and its relation to
agriculture (rainy and dry, cold and hot, long days and short
days). The pragmatics of survival seemed determined; there was
little choice in method and timing. The family took shape in a
world of cause-and-effect, which also determined religious
practices.

The source of each rule for successful family life was direct
practical experience; the test of validity was the
effectiveness appropriate to the specific scale of humanity.
The do's changed over time, as experience confirmed their
efficiency. They became a body of accepted knowledge from which
moral ideals are extracted, laws derived, and political action
inspired within the context of literacy. In the industrial
equation, output (products, end results, increase or profit)
should equal or exceed input (raw materials, energy, human
effort). The don'ts, adopted by religion, law, and rudimentary
medical praxis, were engraved in language even more deeply. They
were encoded together with punishments that reflected the
urgency behind preserving the integrity of the family- based
pragmatic framework, in the experience of the agricultural and,
later on, the industrial model. The association between act and
result was continuously scrutinized in a world of action and
reaction. In a world of experience mediated through literacy,
rules were followed for their own sake; or rather, for the sake
of the permanence that literacy embodied.

That at some time sexual relations outside marriage could be the
cause of so many prohibitions and dire punishment, mainly for
women, does not bear as much significance on the state of morals
as upon the pragmatic implications of the act of infidelity and
wantonness. These implications refer to lineage, continuity, and
inheritance, psychological effects on other family members,
health, and status of offspring born out of wedlock. Rules
regarding family integrity were encoded in the language of
custom, ritual, and myth. Later on they were encoded in the
language of religion, philosophy, ethics, law, science,
ideology, and political discourse. Eventually, they were
recorded in the rules of the market. Filtered over time through a
variety of experiences resulting in success or failure, they are
acknowledged in culture, and adopted in the language of
education, and probably most directly in the language of market
transactions. To give birth meant to continue the sequence and
enhance the chances of survival; to rear children to adulthood
meant to afford new levels of efficiency. More people could be
more effective in ensuring survival in a pragmatic framework of
direct action and immediacy. Beyond a certain scale, it became
effectively impossible to coordinate the complex of families
that went into the entire family. City life, even in early
cities, was not propitious to extended families. During this
period, the strategy of labor division took over
undifferentiated, direct execution of tasks.

Over time, as the scale of human experience changed, community
expectations were reflected in what used to be the domain of the
individual or that of families. The term over time needs some
clarification. The first phases to which we refer are of very
slow change. From the initial indications of family-like
relations up to the establishment of language families, the time
span is greater than 15,000 years. From nuclei practicing
agriculture to the first notation and writing, the time is in the
range of 4,000 to 5,000 years. From then on, the cycles became
more compressed: less than 2,000 years to the time religions
were established, another 1,000 years to settlement in cities.
Each moment marks either progressive changes in the pragmatic
framework or radical change, when the scale of human life and
work required different means to meet efficiency expectations.
Language acquisition, settlement of populations, development of
writing, the emergence of philosophy, science and technology, the
Industrial Revolution, and the civilization of illiteracy are
the six changes in the scale of humankind, each with its
corresponding pragmatic framework. Many agents of influence
contribute to the change from one pragmatic framework to another:
climactic conditions, natural selection, the environment,
religions, communal rules, distribution of resources, and the
experience of the market. Regardless of the difference in
languages, language use is probably the common experience
through which natural changes are acknowledged and social
differentiation effected.

Exactly what made literacy necessary-the need to achieve levels
of efficiency corresponding to the human scale that led to
industrial society-made the corresponding type of family
necessary. Families reproduced the needed working force and
transmitted the literacy required to attain the efficiency of
qualified work. Such work was accomplished in a setting
fundamentally different from that of immediate, direct,
practical experiences with nature (farming, animal husbandry), or
small-scale craftsmanship. Literacy was fostered by the family
as a means of coordination and as a universal language of human
transactions. This is how family fulfills the function of co-
guarantor of education. Conversely, among the forms through which
the future contract of literacy was acknowledged, family is one.
The pragmatic need for permanency reflected in the expectation
of the stable family has many consequences inside and outside
family life. These can be witnessed in the spirit and letter of
contractual obligations people enter under the coordinating
power of the literate commitment. Education, law, politics,
religion, and art are impregnated with this spirit. As the
ultimate family-the homogeneous family of families-the nation
asserts its permanency as a reflection of the permanency of its
constituent atoms. When deterioration occurs in the conditions
that make literacy possible and necessary, many of the
permanencies associated with literacy, including the
interpersonal relations adapted to it, or the homogeneity of
nations, fail. As we entertain the prospect that nations, as
definable political entities, might disappear, we automatically
wonder whether the family, as a definable social entity, will
survive-and if yes, in what form.

What breaks down when family fails?

The downfall of nations and empires has been attributed to the
breakdown of the family. The weakening of family has been cited
as a cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Anti-abortionists and other traditionalists in the United States
blame the breakdown in traditional family values for many of the
social ills of our day. Now that the royal children in Great
Britain are divorced, people wonder how long the monarchy will
last.

One of the symptoms of the civilization of illiteracy is the
perceived breakdown of family. Simultaneously, other
institutions, such as schools, the church, the military,
embodying permanency and stability, are undergoing drastic
reassessment. In a broad sense, a transition from one way of
life to another has been taking place. But things are a little
more confusing since what used to be is not always actually
replaced by something else, but rescaled, turned into a
possibility among many, in a dynamics of ever-expanding
diversity and wider choices. Many have argued that the breakdown
of the traditional family was inevitable. They bring up
cultural, ideological, and socio- economic arguments-from the
liberation of women and children to the exhausted model of the
patriarchal structure. All these arguments are probably partially
right. After previous economies of scarcity and limited means of
production, human experience at the global scale has brought
about a wealth of choices and means of affluence that question
the very premise of the family contract.

In a context of rapid change from the practical experience of
authority to the pragmatics of endless choice, subsumed under
the heading of freedom, the permanency of the family structure
comes under the methodical doubt of our new patterns of praxis.
The tension between choice and authority was experienced in
family life in the specific context of human relations based on
hierarchy and centralism. New questions have a bearing on
sexuality, parent-child relations, interactions among families,
and the whole social fabric. Likewise, the transition of what was
projected as self-control-with elements of self-denial, for the
sake of family, a form of internalized authority-to the
discovery of new frontiers, and the alternative pursuit of self-
indulgence, follows the same path. These new frontiers and
alternatives make values appear relative and undermine the
spirit of sharing implicit in the traditional experience of
family. Sharing is replaced by strategies of coordination and
wealth preservation, all involving many mediating elements, such
as political power, the legal system, taxation, charity.

It is argued, probably with good reason, that the high rate of
divorce-the socially sanctioned breakdown of a family, but
probably only relatively indicative of the breakdown-is not
meaningful unless put in a broader context: how many people still
marry, how many remarry, how much longer people live. The high
rate of divorce at the end of World War II is symptomatic of
events above and beyond the structural characteristics of family
constitution, re-constitution, or breakdown. The rate of divorce
in the years following the war, especially in the last 10-15
years, is nevertheless connected to the underlying structure of
a pragmatic framework within which permanency, whether that of
language, family, values, nations, laws, art, or anything else,
becomes a liability because it affects the dynamics of change.
One out of two marriages-and the proportion is changing quite
fast-ends in divorce. This is, nevertheless, only one aspect of
broader modifications making such a rate more of a qualifier
than an accident in human pairing.

The dynamics of reproduction-births per marriage, average number
of children per family, children living with one parent, infant
mortality-is significant from the perspective of one of the most
important functions of family. In the pragmatic context of
today's integrated world, the need to have many children in order
to maintain continuity and viability is different, even in
Bangladesh, Afghanistan, or Africa, than at any previous time.
The species has practically freed itself from the direct pressure
of natural selection. What is at work, even in areas of extreme
poverty, is a perverted mechanism of interdependencies echoing
what herders in East Africa expressed as: "He who has children
does not sleep in the bush." The family has ceased to be the sole
source of welfare. Its functions are taken over by the
community, the state, even international organizations. The fact
that in some parts of the world this structural change is not
acknowledged, and very high birth rates are on record, shows that
the result of ignoring the pragmatic exigencies of this new age
adds to the burden, not to the solution.

Another phenomenon difficult to assess is the single woman who
decides to give birth. If individual or social material
resources are available, moral and educational needs or
expectations still remain to be addressed. Individualism fostered
to the extreme partially explains the trend, but cannot
satisfactorily indicate the many aspects of this new phenomenon
characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy. If one reads
the statistics, single parenthood appears like a sure winner in
the lottery of poverty and frustration. The problems of children
who will be growing up with a mother single by choice will be
the source of much sociological and psychoanalytical research in
the future. But existence is more than numbers in ledgers, or
psychological predicaments. Self-fulfillment, the instinct to
nurture and to ensure continuity are all at work in such cases.

The homosexual family

No group has done more in the way of forcing us to rethink the
definition and role of family as homosexuals have. Within the
civilization of illiteracy, homosexuals assert their identity in
the public eye. Gay and lesbian groups fight for the
ratification of the homosexual family, which could not even be
conceived of within the pragmatics associated with literacy.
Their fight corresponds to a practical experience that is not
motivated by the self-perpetuation drive of the species, but by
other forces. These are economic, social, and political-the
right to enjoy the same benefits as members of heterosexual
families. Interestingly enough, social principles adopted in the
age when pragmatics required that society support childbirth,
family nurturing, and education are extended today, under
totally different circumstances, in ignorance of the necessities
that were reflected in these principles. A tax deduction was an
expression of social co- participation, since society needed more
people, better educated youth, a stable framework of family
life. The economy and the military could not succeed without the
fresh flesh of new generations.

Gays and lesbians challenge the traditional notion of family in a
context that no longer requires hierarchy and that redefines
roles that have become stereotypes and undemocratic. They
propose a model on a continuum in which each partner can be
provider and assume household duties to any degree. There are no
clear-cut roles, no clear-cut hierarchy, and no long-term
commitments. Children are not the consequence of sexual
relations but of desire and choice. This choice has two aspects
of special significance for the pragmatics of our age. One
concerns the human desire to form an alliance in the form of
family, which seems almost instinctual. It may be difficult to
recognize a natural inclination in a context (homosexuality) that
negates propagation of the species. It is this threat to
survival that caused so many taboos to be placed on
homosexuality in the first place. These taboos took on other
dimensions when encoded in a literacy that ignored the
pragmatics.

The second aspect has to do with the extent to which homosexuals'
desire for a family constitutes its own validity in the
pragmatic framework of our time. To what extent does the desire
to have a family reveal characteristics of human
self-constitution in the current context? In a world in which
there is a high rate of births out of wedlock, a world in which
the traditional family is no guarantee of relationships free of
abuse and exploitation, a world with great numbers of children
in orphanages or in foster care, any desire to place children in
a loving family context is worthy of attention.

What constitutes a family in an age whose pragmatics is not
defined by the values perpetuated in and through literacy? The
new definition might go along these lines: main provider (the
father role); second provider (the mother role), who is also
manager of the household. The two roles are not polarized; each
provider participates in household work and in salaried work
outside the home, as circumstances require. A child is a
dependent under the age of 18 years (or 22 years if in college),
for whom the providers are legally responsible. A grandparent is
qualified through age and willingness to assume the role.
Aunt/uncle is someone with fraternal ties to the providers. The
definitions can go on. In considering these literate definitions,
we can see that they apply to the situation of the current
traditional family as well, in which father and mother both
work, in which a child may live with and be cared for by a
parent's second or third spouse, in which distance from or lack
of blood relations calls for ad hoc relatives. The most vital
implications concern our culture as it has been passed down over
the centuries through literate expression, laden with values
that literacy perpetuates and endows with an aura, in defiance
of the new pragmatics and the new scale in which humans operate.

The homosexual family and its occasional focus on adopting
children reflects the fact that we live in a world of many
options, and consequently of very relative values. Their desire
for a family, under circumstances that are far from being
conducive to family life, is as valid as that of an unmarried
woman who wants to give birth and rear a child (the one-parent
household). It is as valid as the desire of infertile couples who
use every means the market offers to have a child, through
costly medical intervention or by hiring surrogates. In the
civilization of illiteracy, each person forms his or her own
definition of family, just as people form their own definitions
of everything else. The only test of validity is, ultimately,
effectiveness. In the long run, the biological future of the
species will also be affected, one way or another, as part of the
effectiveness equation.

To want a child

The new pragmatics ultimately affects the motives behind forming
a family in the civilization of illiteracy. Marriage, if at all
considered, has become a short-term contract. Its brevity
contradicts marriage's reason for being: continuity and security
through offspring and adaptation to life cycles. The attitudes
with which partners enter the family contract result in a
dynamic of personal relations outside of that sanctioned by
society. Vows are exchanged more as a matter of performance than
of bonding. Natural instincts are systematically overridden
through mediating mechanisms for providing nourishment,
acquiring health care, and settling conflicts. Child rearing is
the result of pragmatic considerations: What does a couple, or
single parent, give up in having a child? Can a mother continue
working outside the home?

In order to correctly qualify answers to these questions, we
would need to acknowledge that many characteristics of the
individuals constituting a family, or seeking alternatives to
it, are reflected in the family experience, or in experiences
that are parallel to it. Economic status, race, religion,
culture, and acculturation play an important role. Literacy
assumed homogeneity and projected expectations of uniformity.
The new pragmatic framework evidences the potential of
heterogeneous experiences. Data indicating that the average
numbers of divorces, single-parent households, number of
partners, etc. vary drastically among groups of different
biological, cultural, and economic backgrounds shows how
necessary it is to realistically account for differences among
human beings.

Let us take a look at some statistical data. But before doing
that, let us also commit ourselves to an unbiased
interpretation, free of any racial prejudice. Almost 60% of
Black children in the USA are living in a one-parent household.
Of these children, 94% live with their mothers. It was
documented that 70% of the juveniles in long-term correctional
facilities grew up without a father. To make any inference from
such data without proper consideration of the many factors at
work would only perpetuate literacy-based prejudices, and would
not lead to a better understanding of the new circumstances of
human self-constitution. Our need to understand the dynamics of
family and what can be done to effect a course of events that is
beneficial to all involved cannot be served unless we understand
the many characteristics of the practical experience of
self-constitution of the Black family, or of any non-standard
Western family.

Under the expectations of literacy, a prototypical family life
was to be expected from all. As the expectation of homogeneity
is overridden by all the forces at work in the civilization of
illiteracy, we should not be surprised by, and even less inclined
to fasten blame on people who constitute themselves in ways
closer to their authenticity. Multiplication of choice is-let me
state again-part of the civilization of illiteracy. Modern,
enlightened laws introduced in some African countries prohibit
polygamous families. With this prohibition in place, a new
phenomenon has occurred: Husbands end up having extra-marital
affairs and support neither their lovers nor their children,
which they did under polygamy. Paradoxically, activists in the
Women's Liberation movement are seriously considering the return
to polygamy, as an alternative to the increasing number of
deadbeat dads and the misery of abandoned wives and children.
There is no necessary relation between the two examples, rather
the realization that within the civilization of illiteracy,
tradition comes very powerfully to expression.

Children in the illiterate family

Nobody can characterize families of the past (monogamous or
polygamous) as unfailingly unified and showing exemplary concern
for offspring. Children, as much as wives and husbands, were
abused and neglected. Concern over education was at times
questionable. The projected ideal of authority and infallibility
resulted in the perpetuation of patterns of experiences from
which we are still fighting to free ourselves. Notwithstanding
these and other failures, we still have to acknowledge that a
shift, from individual and family responsibility to a diffuse
sense of social responsibility, characterizes the process
affecting the status of children. The family in the civilization
of illiteracy embodies expectations pertinent to progressively
mediated practical experiences: from childbirth-an almost
industrial experience-to education; from entering the family
agreement, mediated by so many experts-lawyers, priests, tax
consultants, psychologists-to maintaining a sense of commonalty
among family members; from embodying direct interaction and a
sense of immediacy to becoming instances of segmentation,
change, and interaction, and instances of competition and
outright conflict. The institution of the family must also
counteract sequentiality and linearity with a sense of
relativity that allows for more choices, which the new human
scale makes possible. This new pragmatic framework also allows
for higher expectations.

Like any other institution, the institution of marriage (and the
bureaucracy it has generated) has its own inertia and drive to
survive, even when the conditions of its necessity, at least in
the forms ascertained in the past, are no longer in place. In
short, the breakdown of the family, even if equated with the
failure of the individuals constituting it-children included-is
related to the new structural foundation of a pragmatic
framework for which it is not suited as a universal model, or to
which it is only partially acceptable. This does not exclude the
continuation of family. Rather, it means that alternative forms
of cooperation and interaction substituting the family will
continue to emerge. Just as literacy maintains a presence among
many other literacies, the family is present among many forms of
reciprocal interdependence, some expanding beyond the man-woman
nucleus. To understand the dynamics of this change, a closer
look at how the new pragmatic framework of the civilization of
illiteracy affects experiences pertinent to family is necessary
here.

The history of the family, independent of its various embodiments
(matriarchal, patriarchal, polygamous, monogamous, restricted or
extended, heterosexual or homosexual), is in many respects the
history of the appropriation of the individual by society. The
offspring of primitive humans belonged to nobody. If they
survived to puberty, they continued life on their own, or as
members of the group in which they were born, as nameless as
their parents. Children and parents were amoral and competed for
the same resources. The offspring of the humans constituting
their own identity, and their own universe parallel to that of
nature, belonged more and more to what emerged as the family,
and by extension to the community (tribe, village, parish). The
child was marked, named, nurtured, and educated, as limited as
this education might have been. It was given language and,
through the experience of work, a sense of belonging. In all
known practical experiences-work, language, religion, market,
politics-the succession of generations was specifically
acknowledged. Rules, some pertaining to the preservation of
biological integrity, others to property and social life, were
established in order to accommodate relations between
generations.

Over centuries, family ownership of children decreased while that
of society increased. This is reflected in the various ways
church, school, social institutions, and especially the market
claim each new generation. In this process, mediation becomes
part of family life: the priest, the teacher, the counselor, the
language of advertisement, direct marketing, and much, much more
is insinuated between children and their parents. The process
intensifies as expectancies of better life for less effort become
predominant. Responsibilities, procreation included, are
distributed from the parents to the practical experiences of
genetics. Test tube production of babies is an alternative to
natural procreation. More to come. As a matter of fact, both
procreation and adoption are dominated by strong selective
methods and design procedures. Genetic traits are identified and
matched in the genetic banks of adoptable children. Surrogate
mothers are selected and contracted based on expectations of
behavior and heredity. Sperm banks offer selections from high IQ
or high physical performance bulls. Other mediators specify
ideal cows, surrogate mothers whose offspring are treated like
any other commodity-"satisfaction guaranteed." If the product is
somehow unsatisfactory, the dissatisfied parents get rid of it.

Obviously, the language and literacy expected for the success of
the biochemical reaction in the test tube is different from that
involved in the constitution of the family. It is also different
from the literacy involved in the change from instinctual sexual
encounters to love, procreation, and child rearing. In each of
the procedures mentioned, new languages-of genetics, for
example-introduce levels of mediation that finally affect the
efficiency of procreation. As nightmarish as some of these
avenues might seem, they are in line with the entire development
towards the new pragmatics: segmentation-the task is divided
into sub-tasks-networking-to identify the desired components and
strategies for synthesis-and task distribution. Children are not
yet made on the Internet, but if the distinction between matter
and information suggested by some geneticists is carried
through, it would not be impossible to conceive of procreation
on networks.

A new individuality

The process of mediation expands well further. Family life
becomes the subject of practical experiences involving family
planning, health, psychology, socialized expectations of
education, the right to die. The private family owned their
offspring and educated it to the level of its own education, or
to the level it deemed advantageous, consistent with the
progress of literacy. To the extent that this family was
involved in other experiences, such as religion, sport, art, or
the military, children grew up partaking in them. Once one
aspect of the relation between environment, home, family, and
work changes-for example, living in the city reshapes the nature
of the dependence on the environment, the house is one of
several possible, family members work at different jobs-the
family is made more and more part of a bigger family: society. In
turn, this belonging dissolves into solitary individualism.
Nothing any longer buffers the child from the competitive
pressure that keeps the economic engine running. Industrial
society required centers of population while it still relied on
relatively nuclear families that embodied its own hierarchy. The
human scale reflected in industrial society required the
socialization of family in order to generate an adequate
workforce, as well as the corresponding consumption. With
networking, children as much as adults are on their own, in a
world of interactions that breaks loose from any conceivable
constraints. There is no need to fantasize here, rather to
acknowledge a new structural situation of consequences beyond
our wildest imagination.

Literacy unified through its prescriptions and expectations. It
facilitated the balance between the preserved naturalness and
the socialized aspect of family. It projected a sense of
permanency and shielded the family from the universe of machines
threatening to take over limited functions of the body: the
mechanical arm, the treadmill. As a human medium for practical
experiences involving writing and reading, literacy seemed to
represent a means of resistance against the inanimate. It helped
preserve human integrity and coherence in a world progressively
losing its humanity due to all the factors that the need for
increased efficiency put in place (machines, foremost). It
eventually became obvious that procreation had to be kept within
limits, that there is a social cost to each child and to each
mother giving birth. Moreover, family structural relations
needed to be reconsidered for the expected levels of efficiency
to be maintained and increased, as expectations took over
desires. The new pragmatic framework is established as this
borderline between the possible and the necessary. The
civilization of illiteracy is its expression.

At the family level, the civilization of illiteracy corresponds
to increased segmentation, affecting the very core of family
life, and mediation. The family can no longer be viewed as a
whole by the many mediating entities constituting the market.
The market is with us from birth to death. It deals in every
aspect of life, and extends the pressure of competition in each
moment of our existence. The market segments medical care. It is
most likely that each family member sees a different doctor,
depending on age, sex, and condition. It segments education,
religion, and culture. It is not uncommon that family members
constitute their identity in different religious experiences,
and some of them in none, as it is not uncommon that their
educational needs run the gamut from a modicum of instruction to
never-ending study. They live together, or find togetherness on
the network matrix-one running a business on some remote
continent, the other pursuing solitary goals, and some adapting
to foreign cultures (less than to foreign languages).

The market has broken society into segments and the family into
parts on which it concentrates its message of consumption. There
is not one market entity that views the family as a whole.
Children are targeted on the basis of their economic, cultural,
and racial background for everything from food to clothing to
toys and recreation. And so are their respective natural or
adoptive parents, grandparents, and relatives. We can all decry
this as manipulation, but in fact it corresponds to the objective
need to increase commercial efficiency through narrow marketing.
Accordingly, a new moral condition emerges, focused on the
individual, not on the family. Part of the broader pragmatic
framework, this process stimulates the relative illiteracy of the
partners constituting the family. This illiteracy is reflected
in varied patterns of sexual behavior, in new birth control
strategies, in a different reciprocal relation between men and
women, or between individuals of the same sex, and in as-yet
undefinable codes of family behavior. The condition of the child
in the civilization of illiteracy corresponds to the same
dynamics. Children are less and less cared for at home, often
entrusted to specialized caretakers, and finally started on
their way through the vast machine called the education system.

Discontinuity

It makes no sense to decry the hypocrisy of double (or multiple)
standards and the loss of a morality associated with the misery
of people obliged to remain together by forces they consider
legitimate (religion foremost). In the dynamics of the
civilization of illiteracy, forces kept under the control of
rules and norms established in the practical experience of
literacy are unleashed. It would be difficult to speak about
progress where one sees the demise of family, the erosion of
private life, the increased number of one- parent households, of
early and very early maternity, of incest, rape and increased
child abuse, of obsession with contraceptives or ignorance of
their use, and the threat of sexually transmitted diseases and
drugs. Still, before hurrying value judgments, one would be
better advised to consider the entire picture and to assess what
makes all these occurrences possible, indeed, what makes them
necessary.

It might well be true that what we perceive as the sources of
morality and happiness-the family, children, love, religion,
work, and the satisfaction associated with all of these-are
exhausted. It might well be that fresh sources must be sought, or
invented, or at least not eliminated because they do not fit the
mold of previous choices. Even the thought that morality and
happiness are altogether unnecessary deserves to be considered.
They are loaded with the expectation of permanency and
universality rendered impossible in the new pragmatic framework
of permissiveness, local values, instant gratification, change,
and interconnectedness.

The nuclear family of the civilization of literacy has been
absorbed in the illiterate dynamics of societal functioning. It
is coming out of the experience restructured. On the other hand,
socially acceptable patterns of development are encouraged
through the public education system, where the chief objective
is the socialization of children, not the dissemination of
knowledge. Ethnic characteristics are progressively, although
timidly, acknowledged. The seemingly losing battle against drugs
leads many parents and social researchers to wonder whether
legalization would be more efficient than spending immense
amounts of money and energy to fight the underground market. In
this world of mediation, science and technology make genetic
engineering possible in the form of influencing the profile of
the offspring, ways to avoid what does not fit the fashionable,
ways to induce early in development (almost at the embryonic
stage) preferences and cognitive characteristics.

Together with everything pertaining to the human being
self-constituted in the framework of the civilization of
illiteracy, the family goes public in the stock market of the
many enterprises involved in the self-perpetuation and the well
being of the species. Its value is no longer a matter of those
constituting it, of its goals and means, but of the return on
the investment society makes in it. As a competitive unit within
the pragmatic framework associated with literacy, the family
freed itself from the constraints implicit in literacy that
affect its efficiency. It became a contract, one among the
growing number, in whose expression literacy gives way to the
alternative litigation language of the law, in respect to which,
with the exception of lawyers, everyone else is illiterate.
Favorable taxation supports children-euphemistically called
deductions when they are really additions-but not beyond what is
socially expected of them, at least in the USA: to become agents
of consumption and increased efficiency as soon as possible. In
this sense, the tensions between generations are simply
refocused-society is willing to make available social help in
the form of transitory family substitutes. The problem is not
addressed, only its symptoms. The languages of counseling and
psychiatry at work here are another instance of specialized
literacy. They substitute for family communication while
projecting limited and limiting psychological explanations upon
all those involved.

In an age that expects efficiency to lead to satisfaction, if not
happiness, the family relies on specialists when problems arise:
psychiatrists, counselors, specialized schools. Sometimes the
specialists are imposed when society perceives a need to
intervene, especially in cases of suspected child abuse. It is
reflective of the pragmatics of our time that the elderly
receive attention in the market of mediations and
specializations on a less obvious level. They are considered only
to the extent that they are viable consumers. Once upon a time,
and still in isolated cases, such as the Amish and Mennonites in
the USA, age was to be honored for its own sake, a value kept
alive through literacy. While many elderly enjoy the benefits of
better healthcare and economic sufficiency, they effectively
divorce themselves from the family in enjoying what the market
offers them. Their participation in the family is a matter of
choice more than necessity. The success of the Internet among
the elderly, in need of communication and support groups, is a
very telling phenomenon. Networks of reciprocal support, as
nuclei of self-organization, emerge independent of any form of
social intervention. Their viability is based on this dynamics.

The struggle between the value of life in the civilization of
literacy and that of illiteracy can be seen in hospitals and
nursing homes where the aged are treated on machine-based
analogies, abandoned or entrusted to specialists in the care of
the dying. While aging and death cannot be eliminated, the
market provides ways to avoid them as long as we can afford to.

It used to be that the new generation continued the family
work-farming, carpentry, pottery, law, business, banking,
publishing. This happened in a context of continuity and
relative permanence: the work or business remained relatively
unchanged. Literacy was appropriate for the transfer of know-how,
as it was for the maintenance of family-based values and
successive assumption of responsibilities regarding the family,
moreover the community. These pragmatic elements no longer
exist the way they did.

Today, even within the same generation, the nature of business
evolves, and so does the nature of the values around which
family is established. In addition, ownership changes as well;
businesses are more and more integrated in the market; they
become public entities; their shares are traded with no regard
to the object those shares represent. The consequence is what we
perceive as lack of family continuity and bonding. The new
nature of the family contract is such that its basis of affection
is eroded. Sequentiality of work is replaced by cycles of
parallel activity during which generations compete as
adversaries. This is why the family contract is shifted more and
more to the market, depersonalized, indexed like one among many
commodities. This contract is no longer literacy-bound, but
rooted in circumstances of distributed activities of intense
competition and networking. Once demythified, family relations
are reassessed; continuity is severed. The market acknowledges
the segmentation of family-no longer an economic entity in its
own right-and in turn accentuates it. The baby business, the
infant market, teenagers, and so on to the senior market are well
 focused on their respective segments as these embody not just
age groups, but foremostly expectations and desires that can be
met at the level of each individual.

How advanced the past; how primitive the future

No matter how intense the desire to maintain a neutral discourse
and to report facts without attaching teleological conclusions
to them, it turns out that the language of family, probably more
than the language of science, machines, or even art, religion,
sports, and nourishment, involves our very existence. Where
should somebody place himself in order to maintain some degree
of objectivity? Probably at the level of the structural
analysis. Here, everything affecting the status of family and the
condition of morality appears as a network of changing
interrelations among people involved in the practical
experiences of defining what a human being is. It seems, at
times, that we relive experiences of the primitive past: the
child knew only his or her mother; women started giving birth at
an early age (almost right after menarche); children were on
their own as soon as they could minimally take care of
themselves. But we also build an ideal image of the family based
on recollections of the less distant past: permanent marriages
("until death"), respect for parents, mother cooking meals for
which the whole family sits down, father bringing wood for the
family hearth, children learning by participating, assuming
responsibilities as their maturity permitted. This idealized
image is also the bearer of prejudices: women's subservient
role, the authoritarian model passed from one generation to
another, frustration, unfulfilled talents.

So the paradox we experience is that of a primitive future: more
animality (or, if you want a milder term, naturalness) in
comparison to a civilized (or at least idealized) past. There is
no cause for worry, especially in view of the realization that
despite our success in labeling the world (for scientific and
non-scientific purposes), the majority of human behavior is
determined (as already pointed out) independent of labels. Taking
into account that the notion of permanency is related to
relatively stable frames of reference makes it easier to explain
why the high mobility of our age results in changes, both
physical and psychological, that undermine previous
expectations. Losing the discipline of the natural cycle that
affected human work for centuries, human beings freed themselves
from a condition of subservience, while at the same time
generating new constraints reflected in the nature of their
reciprocal relations. What does it mean to become used to
something-environment, family, acquaintances-when this
something is changing fast, and with it, we ourselves?

The Industrial Revolution brought about the experience of
labor-saving machinery, but also of many new dependencies. In
Henri Steele Commanger's words, "Every time-saving machine
required another to fill the time that had been saved." One
might not agree with this description. But it would be hard to
contradict its spirit by taking only a cursory look at all the
contraptions of illiteracy filling the inventory of the modern
household: radio, photo camera, TV set, video recorder, video
cassette player, WalkmanT, CD player, electronic and digital
games, laser disc player, CD-ROM, telephone, computer, modem.
The one-directional communication supported by some of these
machines affected patterns of interaction and resulted in
audiences, but not necessarily in families, at least not in the
sense acknowledged in practical experiences of family life. With
the two-directional communication, supported by digital networks,
human interaction takes on a new dimension. Choices increase. So
do risks.

Once the substance of one's experience is substituted by
mediations, even the rationale for communication changes, never
mind the form. Families separated by virtue of assignments
(war, business) at remote locations, or in pursuit of various
interests (sport, entertainment, tourism), exchange videotapes
instead of writing to each other, or focus on telephone
conversations meant to signal a point of reference, but not a
shared universe of existence and concerns. They discover e-mail
and rationalize messages to a minimum. Or they become a Web
page, available to whoever will surf by. All these
changes-probably more can be acknowledged-took place concomitant
with changes in our expectations and accepted values. With the
increased gamut of choice, attachment to value decreases. When
all emotions come from soap operas, and all identity from the
latest fashion trend, it becomes difficult to defend notions such
as sensitivity and personality. When love is as short as the
random encounter, and faith as convincing as reading a person's
palm or tarot cards, it is impossible to ascertain a notion of
reciprocal responsibility or the moral expectation of
faithfulness. On the other hand, when the need to achieve levels
of efficiency dictated by a scale of humankind never experienced
before and by expectations and desires in continuous expansion is
as critical as we make it, something is given up-or, to put it
the other way around, somebody has to pay for it. With the sense
of globality-of resources, actions, plans- comes the pressure of
integration of everybody into the global market, and the
expectations of consumption attached to it. Many-to-many
communication is not just a matter of bandwidth on digital
networks, but of self-definition, also.

The family used to reflect the perceived infinity of the universe
of existence., despite the family's finite and determined
internal structure. With the awareness of limited resources, in
particular those of the natural support system, comes the
realization that alternative practical experiences of life and
cooperation become necessary in order to generate new pragmatic
frameworks for increased efficiency and enhanced dynamism. The
indefinite expansion of what people want and the progressive
incorporation of higher numbers of human beings into the market
through which affluence, as much as misery, can be achieved,
results in the devaluation of life, love, of values such as
self-sacrifice, faithfulness, fairness. The moral literate
philosophers of the 19th century-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas
Carlyle, William James-thought that the answer lay in our
recognition that the world is not only for enjoyment. One can
imagine a TV debate (interrupted by commercials, of course)
between them and the romantic proponents of the ideology of
progress-John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, David Hume. It's safe
to wager that the audience would zap over their literate debate,
while they would enjoy the illiterate 30-second spots. None of
the philosophers would establish a Web site, as none would be
terribly excited about the discussion forums on the Internet-not
a place for intellectual debate. Who would read their elegant
prose? To say more at this point would almost preempt the
argument: The family in the civilization of illiteracy
ascertains new forms of human interaction. It departs from the
expectation of conformity for a model that acknowledges many ways
to live together and, even more important, how we transcend our
own nature in this process. We might, after all, be much more
than we know, or trust that we could become.

A God for Each of Us

On the Memetic Algorithms Web page on the Internet, H. Keith
Henson illustrates the lifelike quality of memes by recounting
an episode from his time as a student (University of Arizona,
1960). Having to fill out a form on which religious affiliation
was to be disclosed, he chose the denomination Druid, after
having initially tried MYOB (the acronym for Mind Your Own
Business). As he stated, "It was far too good a prank to keep it
to myself." Replication mechanisms, in addition to a healthy
dose of social criticism, soon had the university record almost
20% of the student body as Reform Druids, Orthodox Druids,
Southern Druids, Members of the Church of the nth Druid, Zen
Druids, Latter-Day Druids, and probably a number of other
variations. Once the question regarding religious affiliation
was removed from the entry form, the chain of replication and
variation was interrupted.

There are many aspects of the relation between religion and
language embedded in the anecdote. In some of the themes to be
discussed in the coming pages, the humorous aspects will
resonate probably less than questions on how religious
experiences extend from early forms of human awareness to the
current day.

Using, or even inventing, advanced technology, asking the most
probing questions, experiencing injustice and pain, being
subjected to antireligious indoctrination, or even repression,
does not result in the abandonment of religion. Ignorance,
primitive living conditions, extreme tolerance and liberalism,
the possibility to freely choose one's religious affiliation
from the many competing for each soul might lead to skepticism,
if not to outright rejection of Divinity. In other words,
conditions that seem to support religious beliefs do not
automatically lead to practical experiences of human
self-constitution as religious. Neither do adverse conditions
generate atheists, or at least not the same kinds. There is no
simple answer to the question of why some people are religious,
some indifferent, and others actively against religion.
Enlightenment did not result in generalized atheism; the pressure
of the church did not generate more believers. Scientific and
technological progress of the magnitude we experience did not
erase the verb to believe from among the many that denote what
people do, or no longer do, in our day. To believe, and this
applies to religion as it applies to all other forms of belief,
is part of the practical experience of human self- constitution.
It involves our projection in a world acknowledging distinctions
that are pragmatically significant and synchronized with the
dynamics of life and work.

The world of nature is not one of belief but of situations. We
humans perceive the world, i.e., project ourselves as entities,
forming images of the surroundings in our mind, through many
filters. One of them is our continuously constituted beliefs, in
particular, our religious faith. Webster's dictionary (probably
as good a source as any reference book) defines religion as
"belief in a divine superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and
worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe."
Religion today is far less a coherent and consistent practical
experience than it was in previous pragmatic frameworks.

The manifold relation between literacy and religion can be
meaningfully understood by explaining the pragmatic context of
the constitution of religion. Its further development into
different theologies, and its embodiment in various churches and
other institutions connected to religion, also help in this
understanding. The centralized and hierarchic structure of
religion, the basic notions around which theology evolves, and
the dynamics of change in religion and theology that reflect
adaptive strategies or goals of changing the world to make it
fit a theology, have a strong bearing on the values that formed
and transformed literacy. Truly, language and religion,
especially language after the experience of writing, developed
practically in tandem. The transition from ritual to myth to
incipient religion is simultaneously a transition from primitive
expression, still tightly connected to body movement, image, and
sound, to a more self- organized system of expression becoming
communication. During the process, presented here in compressed
form, writing appears as a result of interactions between the
experiences of language and religion.

That writing is a premise for pragmatic requirements that will
eventually lead to literacy has already been generously
explained. It has also been pointed out that with writing
emerges the perspective of literacy into whose reality many more
practical experiences will eventually crystallize. Literacy and
religion are intertwined in ways different from those
characteristic of other human practical experiences. In the
historic overview to be provided, these peculiarities will be
pointed out. Expression, as a practical experience of human
self-constitution, interrupts the slow cycle of genetic
replication, and inaugurates the much shorter cycles of memetic
transmission-along the horizontal axis of those living together,
and along the vertical axis in the quickly succeeding sequence
of generations. The role of scale of human experience, the
relation between religious, ethical, aesthetic, political, and
other aspects, the relation between individual and community,
and between right and wrong will also be addressed in their
context. In addition, logical, historic, and systemic arguments
will be employed to clarify what religions have in common.

In anticipation of a short history, it should be clarified that
living in a religion of one God (such as Judaism, Christianity,
Islam), or of many (as the Hindu world entertains), or of a
mixture of pantheism and mysticism (as in the Chinese or Japanese
worlds), even living in animism, does not imply identification
with its history, nor even with its national or ethnic confines
or premises. Islamic enthusiasm and Christian retreat in our day
is not a matter of the validity of one religion over the other,
but rather a matter of their pragmatic significance. United in
accepting Allah as their God, or a broadly defined way of living
according to the Koran, Moslims are far less united than the
less religious, and less homogeneous, Christians. But in giving
up the clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong, and
especially involving relativity in the search for options
leading to higher efficiency, we constitute ourselves in a
framework of vagueness and relativity-different from the
transcendental value of Hinduism, or from the clear-cut values
of contemporary Islam-which can no longer rely on the certainty
embodied in literacy-based praxis, and which leads us to subject
human existence to doubt.

In realizing the broad consequences of a pragmatics based on the
desire to achieve levels of efficiency appropriate to a given
scale of human experience, we can understand why some conflicts
involving forces identifying themselves with religions from the
past against forces of the present appear as religious conflicts.
The most vivid examples can be found in Bosnia-Herzegovina and
in the southern republics of the defunct Soviet Union. Through a
religious past to which they have lost any meaningful
connection, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnians
try to reconnect to the world of experiences to which they
traditionally belong. In the Central Asian conflicts,
allegiances are confused-Sunni from Tadjikistan align themselves
with the Shiites of Iran, while the Uzbeks pursue the hope of a
new pan-Turkish empire.

In a different vein, the sanctity of life celebrated in Taoism,
as well as in Judaism and Christianity, ends at the doors of the
shiny palace of cheap, replaceable values of planned
obsolescence, eventually of the human being itself. In hope of
redemption, many give their lives, probably not understanding
that they close the cycle of potential practical experiences
just as drug addicts, suicidals, and murderers do, obviously in
different contexts and with different motivations. This might
sound too strong, but it is no more extreme than the extremes of
existence and faith, or lack thereof.

Friends and foes of religion will agree that, for better or
worse, it has played an important role in the history of
humankind. The complement to this agreement is less clear: We
cannot define what replaced, or could replace, religion. The new
world order brought about by the downfall of communism in the
Soviet Union and East Europe raises even more questions
regarding religion: Are the extremist-not to say fanatical- forms
of religion that replace official atheism religion or disguised
forms of ethnic or cultural identification? To which extent do
they reflect pragmatic reintegration in the global economy or
safe isolationism? Practical experiences of religious nature were
all affected by a change in their details: different ways of
preserving religious doctrine, a different attitude towards
authority, a change from self-denial to indulgence, but not in
the fundamental acceptance of Divinity.

Characteristics of religions are still in flux. For instance,
religious events embedded in various cultures take on a merely
ceremonial role in today's world, aligning themselves with the
newest in music, imagery, interactive multimedia, and networks.
Believers as well as casual spectators have access to religious
ceremonies through Websites. Probably even more telling is the
appropriation of social, political, and moral causes, as
religion ascertains itself in our time as open, tolerant, and
progressive, or conversely as the guardian of permanent values,
justifying its active role outside its traditional territory.
This ascertainment is dictated by the pragmatic framework of the
dynamic reality in which religion operates, and not by the
memetic replication of its name. This is, of course, the reason
for not limiting our discussion to variation and replication, no
matter how exciting this might appear.

But who made God?

The variety of religions corresponds to the variety of pragmatic
circumstances of human identification. Regardless of such
differences, each time children, or adults, are taught that God
made the world, the oceans, the sun, stars, and moon, and all
living creatures, they ask: But who made God? Trying to answer
such a question might sound offensive to some, impossible to
others, or a waste of time. Still, it is a good entry point to
the broader issue of religion's roots in the pragmatic
framework. The commonalties among the majority of religions, to
which comparative studies (especially those of Mircea Eliade)
point, are significant at the structural level. We have, on the
one hand, all the limitations of the individual human-one among
many, mortal, subject to illness and defeat, object of passion
and seduction, deceitful, limited in understanding of the
various forces affecting one's projection as part of nature, and
as part of the human species. On the other hand, there is the
uniqueness of the immortal, untouchable, impervious, omniscient,
entity (or entities) able to understand and unleash forces far
more powerful than those of nature or of men, an entity (or
entities) upon which depends the destiny of all that exists.
Through belief, all the limitations of the human being are
erased. It is quite instructive, as well as impressive, how every
limitation of the human being, objective and subjective, is
counteracted and given a life of its own in the language housing
the progression from man to gods or to God, on one side, and to
the practice of religion, on the other.

The various gods constituted in the world's religious texts also
recount what people do in their respective environment, natural
or tamed to some degree. They tell about what can go wrong in
their life and work, and what community rules are most
appropriate to the pragmatic context. The value of rain in the
Middle East, the fine- tuning of work to seasonal changes in the
Far East, the significance of hope and submission in the Indian
subcontinent, the increased role of animal domestication, the
extension of farmland, the role of navigation in other parts of
the world are precisely encoded in the various religions and in
their books. These books are bodies of explanations,
expectations, and norms pertinent to practical experiences,
written in very expressive language, ambiguous enough to
accommodate a variety of similar situations, but precise in
their identification of who is part of the shared religious
experience, and who is outside, as foreign and undesirable, or
foreign and subject to enticement.

The plurality of religious experiences

What makes religion necessary is a subject on which it would be
foolish to expect any degree of consensus. What makes it
possible, at least in the forms experienced and documented from
ancient times to the modern, is language, and soon after
language, writing-although Japanese Shintoism, like Judaism,
began before writing-and reading, or more to the point, the
Book. For the Judeo-Christian religions, as well as for Islam,
the Book is the sufficient condition for their development and
persistence. When the Book grew into books, it actually became
the center of religious praxis. This is reflected in the nature
of religious rituals, an extension of mytho-magical experiences
previous to writing. They were all meant to disseminate the Book,
and make its rules and prescriptions part of the life of the
members of the respective community.

The timeline of the practical experience of religious human
self-constitution suggests significant commonalties among the
various religions. The way the notion of God was constituted is
only one of these commonalties. What separates religion from
pre-religious expression (such as animism) is the medium in which
each is articulated. The subject is relatively constant.
Acknowledgment of forces beyond individual understanding and
desire to overcome confusion or fear in facing difficult and
inexplicable aspects of life and death go hand in hand. A
perceived need to pursue avenues of survival which promise to be
successful because of the implied expectation that forces
residing in the unknown would be, if not directly supportive, at
least not actively opposed, is also discernible.

But when rationalizing the coming of age of religion, one
automatically faces the broader issue of the source of religion.
Is it given to humans by some perceived superior force? Does it
result from our involvement with the environment of our
existence and from the limits of our experience? When praxis
began to differentiate, mytho-magical experiences proved
unadaptable to the resulting pragmatic framework.

Farming and animal husbandry replaced scavenging, hunting, and
foraging. Communities started to compete for resources (manpower
included). Efficiency of human work increased, resulting in more
forms of exchange and leading to accumulation of property.
Relations among people within communities became complex to the
extent that arguments, attributed to forces outside direct
practical experiences, were necessary to instill and maintain
order. The process was multi- faceted, and still involved myths,
the magical, and rituals. All three-still retraceable in some
parts of the world-were carried over to religion, progressively
forming a coherent system of explanations and prescriptions
meant to optimize human activity. The sequence is known:
Practical experiences conveyed by example from one individual to
another, or orally from one to several.

Where the unknown forces were ritually conjured in new forms of
human practical self-constitution, these practical experiences
were progressively unified and encoded in forms apt to further
support the new scale achieved in the insular communities around
the world. Abraham, accepted almost equally by Jews, Christians,
and Moslems, lived at around 2,000 BCE and proclaimed the
existence of one supreme God; Moses in the 13th century BCE; the
six sacred texts of the Hindus were compiled between the 17th
and 5th centuries BCE; Taoism-the Chinese religion and philosophy
of the path-came to expression around 604 BCE, and Confucius's
teachings on virtue, human perfectibility, obedience to
Providence, and the role of the sage ruler shortly afterwards;
Buddhism followed within decades, affirming the Four Noble
truths, which teach how to exist in a world of suffering and
find the path to inner peace leading to Nirvana. This listing is
meant to highlight the context in which the practical experience
of religious self-constitution was expressed in response to
circumstances of life and work that necessitated a coherent
framework for human interaction.

The Torah, containing the five books of Moses dedicated to the
basic laws of Judaism, was written around 1,000 BCE. It was
followed by the other books (Prophets and Writings) and form the
Old Testament. The Greeks, referring to all seven books (the
Septuagint), called the entire work ta biblia (books). This
collection of books is dedicated to the theme of creation,
failure, judgment, exodus, exile, and restoration, and
introduced prescriptions for conduct, diet, justice, and
religious rites. The themes were presented against the broad
background in which laws pertinent to work, property, morals,
learning, relations between the sexes, individuals, tribes, and
other practical knowledge (e.g., symptoms of diseases, avoidance
of contamination) were introduced in normative form, though in
poetic language.

The pragmatic framework explains the physics of the
prescriptions: What to do or not do in order to become useful in
the given context, or at least not to be harmful. It also
explains the metaphysics: why prescriptions should be followed,
short of stating that failure to do so affects the functioning
of the entire community. What was kept in writing from the
broader oral elaborations that constituted the covenant
(testament) for practical experience was the result of pragmatic
considerations. Writing was done in consonantal Hebrew, a
writing system then still at its beginning, on parchment scrolls,
and thus subject to the limitations of the medium: How much text
could be written on such scrolls in a size that facilitated
reading and portability.

Between these books and what much later (translations
notwithstanding) came from the printing presses following
Gutenberg's invention, there is a difference not only in size,
but also in sequence and in substance. Over time, texts were
subject to repeated transcriptions, translations, annotation,
revision, and commentary. The book that appeared to be given
once and for all kept changing, and became subject to
interpretations and scrutiny ever so often. Still, there is a
fundamental element of the continuity of its expressed doctrine:
life and work, in order to be successful, must follow the
prescribed patterns. Hence the implicit expectation: read the
book, immerse yourself in its spirit, renew the experience
through religious services meant to extol the word.

But since alternate explanatory systems were progressively
developed-science not the last-parallel to relative fixed
pragmatic frames sanctioned in early religion, a certain
separation of religion from practical experience took place.
Religion consecutively constituted its own domain of human
praxis, with its own division of labor, and its own frame of
reference. Christianity, Islam, the Protestant Reformation, and
various sectarian movements in China, Japan, the Indian
subcontinent (neo- Confucianism, Zen, the Sikh religious
movement) are such developments.

We have heard about such expatiations and hear as well about
conflicts triggered around them, but fail to put these conflicts
in the perspective that explains them. Within a given context, a
new growth triggers reactions. Members of the Baha'i religion (a
faith that began in the 19th century) are subjected to the
repression of Muslims because its program is one of unity of
religions, not subordination of some to others. The expectation
of universal education, or active promotion of equality between
sexes, corresponds to a pragmatics different from that from which
Islam emerged, and for that matter, many other religions. The
Religious Society of Friends, i.e., the Quaker movement, was a
reaction to the corruption of the church as an institution. It
spells out a program in line with the requirements of the time:
reaching consensus in meetings, doing away with sermons,
pursuing a program of education and non-violence. It was also
subjected to repression, as each schism was, by the powers that
were in place.

These and many other developments mark the long, as yet
unfinished, process of transition from religion to theology and
church, and even to business, as well as the process of
permutation of religion into culture, in particular from religion
to secular culture and market. The Book became not only many
different books, but also varied experiences embodied in
organized religion. Alternative perspectives were submitted as
different ways to practice religion within a pragmatic context
acknowledged by religion.

And the word became religion

In the circular structure of survival in nature, there was no
room for metaphysical self-constitution, i.e., no practical need
to wonder about what was beyond the immediate and proximate,
never mind life and death. When the practical experience of
self-constitution made rudiments of language (the language of
gestures, objects, sounds) possible, a sense of time-as
sequences of durations-developed, and thus a new dimension, in
addition to the immediate, opened. This opening grew as awareness
of oneself in relation to others increased in a context of
diversified practical experiences. Acknowledging others, not
just as prey, or as object of sexual drive, but as associates
(in hunting, foraging, mating, securing shelter), and even the
very act of association, resulted in awareness of the power of
coordination. Thus the awareness, as diffuse as it still was, of
time got reinforced. Be-Hu Tung ventured a description of the
process: "In the beginning there was no moral or social order.
People knew only their mothers, not their fathers. Hungry, they
searched for their food. Once full, they threw the rest away.
They ate their food with skin and hair on it, drank blood and
covered themselves in fur and reeds." He described a world in
its animal phase, still dependent on the cycles of nature,
perceiving and celebrating repetition.

Myth and ritual responded to natural rhythms and incorporated
these in the life cycle. Once human self-constitution extended
beyond nature, creating its own realm, observance of natural
rhythms took new forms. This new forms were more able to support
levels of efficiency appropriate to the new condition achieved in
the experience of farming. It was no longer the case that
survival equaled finding and appropriating means of subsistence
in nature. Rather, natural cycles were introduced as a matrix of
work, modulating the entire existence. Once the experience of
religion was identified as such, religious praxis adopted the
same matrix. In almost all known religions, natural cycles, as
they pertain to reproduction, work, celebrations, education, are
detailed. Cooperation and coordination progressively increased.
A mechanism of synchronization beyond the one that only
accommodated natural cycles became necessary. In retrospect, we
understand how rules of interaction established in the
nature-dominated pragmatic framework turned into the
commandments of what would be asserted through written religion.

We also understand how animistic pre-religious practice-embodied
in the use of masks and charms, in worship of the untouched
natural object (tree, rock, spring, animal), and the employment
of objects meant to keep harm away (tooth, bone, plant) took new
forms in what can be defined as the semiotic strategy of
attaching the religious word (more broadly, the Book) to the
life of each member of the religious community. The need to
establish the community, and to identify it through action, was
so pressing that ceremonies were put in place to bring people
together for at least a few times during the year. In Egyptian
hieroglyphics, one can distinguish an affection for coordination
of effort, expressed in the depiction of rowers on boats,
builders of pyramids, warriors. The written word of the Hebrews
was inspired by the experience of hieroglyphics, taking the
notion of coordination to a more abstract level. This level
provided a framework for synchronizing activity that brought
ritual closer to religion. This added a new dimension to
ceremonies based on natural cycles, gradually severing the link
to the practical experience of interaction with nature.

Notation evolving into the written word was still the domain of
the very few. Accordingly, religious reminders were strongly
visual, as well as aural, a state of affairs that continued in
the religions that sprouted from Judaism and established
themselves after the fall of the Roman Empire. The populations
adhering to these religions were largely illiterate, but derived
important characteristics from religions based on the written
word-the Word that was equated with God. Nailed to the doorways
or inscribed over portals, converted into many types of charms,
the words of a religious creed became elements of the
synchronizing mechanism that religion embodied in the pragmatic
framework of its constitution. Prayer punctuated the daily
routine, as it continues to do in our day. The seasons and the
cycles of nature, embodied in the mytho-magical, were
reinterpreted in religious celebrations, which referenced the
natural cycle, and appropriated pre-religious rituals. Cycles of
activity aimed at maintaining and increasing the outcome of work
for survival were thus confirmed. A community's well-being was
expressed by its ability to satisfy the needs of its members and
achieve a pattern of growth. Still heavily dependent upon
natural elements (rain, floods, wind, insects, etc.), as well as
subjected to attacks from neighbors, communities developed
strategies for better use of resources (human included),
storage, and defense mechanisms. These strategies were carefully
encoded in the respective religious covenants.

The religions that have survived and developed seem to gravitate
around a core of very practical writings and associated visual
reminders of the power they invoke in connection to the
pragmatic identity of the community. The book was the standard;
those who constituted the organization of religion-the
priesthood-could usually read the book. Scribes, even some of
the priests, could write and add to the book. The majority
listened and memorized, resorting to better memory than we
exercise today, memory that their practical experience
required. They subscribed to religious patterns, or carried out
rituals on a personal or communal level.

It is helpful to keep in mind that religious involvement was
facilitated by the fact that religion is not only pragmatically
founded, but also pragmatically ascertained and tested. Rules
for farming, hunting, preparing food; rules for hygiene and
family relations; rules for conducting war and dealing with
prisoners and slaves were expressed against the background of an
accepted supreme reference, before evolving into future ethical
rules and legal systems. Those rules which were not confirmed,
progressively lost authority, were "erased" from the people's
memory, and ceased to affect the rhythm of their lives. The
written word survived the oral, as well as the living who
uttered it or wrote it down. This word, abstracted from voice,
gesture, and movement, and abstracted from the individual, was
progressively assigned a more privileged place in the hierarchy.
The writings seemed to have a life of their own, independent of
the scribes, who were believed to be only copiers of everlasting
messages entrusted to them.

Written words express the longing for a unified framework of
existence, thought and action. Within such a framework,
observance of a limited number of rules and procedures could
guarantee a level of efficiency appropriate to the scale at which
human activity took place. This is a world of human practical
experiences transcending natural danger and fear. It is a
universe of existence in which a species is committed to its
further self-definition in defiance of nature while still
dependent upon it. Religion as a human experience appears in
this world as a powerful tool for the optimization of the effort
involved, because it effectively constitutes a synchronizing
mechanism. In the practical experience of religious writing and
the associated experience of reading or listening to a text, the
word becomes an instrument of abstraction. Accordingly, it is
assigned a privileged position in the hierarchy of the many sign
systems in use. Memetic replication appropriately describes the
evolution of religious ideas, but not necessarily how these
ideas are shaped by the pragmatic framework.

Tablets, scrolls, and books are blueprints for effective
self-constitution within a community of people sharing an
understanding of rules for efficient experiences. The outcome is
guaranteed by the implicit contract of those self-constituted as
believers in the supernatural from which the rules supposedly
emanate. In search of authority, this world settled for unifying
motivations. The rules of animal, and sometimes even human,
sacrifice, and those of religious offerings were based on the
pragmatics of maintaining optimal productivity (of herds, trees,
soil), of entering agreements, maintaining property,
redistributing wealth, and endowing offspring. The immediate
meaning of some of the commitments made became obscured over
time as scale changed and the association to nature weakened.
The rules were subsequently associated with metaphysical
requirements, or simply appropriated by culture in the form of
tradition. To ensure that each individual partook in the
well-being of the community, punishments were established for
those violating a religious rule. Immediate punishment and,
later, eternal punishment, although not in all religions, went
hand in hand as deterrents.

The involvement of language, in particular of writing and
reading, is significant. As already stated, the individual who
could decipher the signs of religious texts was set apart. Thus
reading took on a mystical dimension. The division between the
very few who wrote and read and the vast majority involved in
the religious experience diminished over a very long time. More
than other practical experiences, religion introduced the
unifying power of the written word in a world of diversity and
arbitrariness. Under the influence of Greek philosophy, the Word
was endowed with godlike qualities, implicitly becoming a god.
Seen from a given religious perspective, the rest of the world
fails because it does not accept the word, i.e., the religion.
The irreligious part of the world could be improved by imposing
the implicit pragmatics that the religion carried; it could
submit to the new order and cease to be a threat. At this time,
religion entered the realm of the abstract, divorced from the
experience with nature characteristic of religions originating
in the oral phase of human self-constitution. It is at this time
that religion became dogma.

All over the globe, in the worlds of Hinduism, Taoism,
Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and later Islam, the
conflict between communities embracing a certain creed and
others, in pre-religious phases or dedicated to a different
religion, is one of opposing pragmatics in the context of
increased differentiation. In other words, a different religious
belief is a threat to the successful practical self-constitution
of one group. To get rid of the threat is a pragmatic
requirement, for which many wars were fought. Some are still
going on. With each religion that failed, a pragmatic requirement
failed, and was replaced by others more appropriate to the
context of human self- constitution. That these conflicts
appeared under the aegis of conflicting deities, represented by
leaders regarded as representatives of divinity, only goes to
show how close the relation is between the underlying structure
of human activity and its various embodiments.

In a world of unavoidable and even necessary diversity, religion
maintained islands of unity. When interaction increased among
the various groups, for reasons essentially connected to levels
of efficiency required for current and future practical
experiences, patterns of common activity resulted in patterns of
behavior, increased commonalty of language, accepted (or
rejected) values, and territorial and social organization. The
commonalty of language, as well as the commonalty of what would
become, during the Middle Ages, national identity (language and
religion being two of the identifiers), increased steadily.

From among the major changes that religion underwent, the most
significant are probably its reification in the institution of
the church and the constitution of vast bodies of discourse
regarding its intrinsic logic, known as theology. Once asserted
as an institution, religion became the locus of specific human
interaction that resulted in patterns based on the language
(Latin, for some in the Western Christian world, and Arabic in
the Islamic East) in which religion was expressed. Religious
practical experience progressively distanced itself from the
complexities of work and socio- political organization, and
constituted a form of praxis independent of others, although
never entirely disconnected from them. The organization of
religion concerns the pattern of religious services at certain
locations: temple, church, mosque. It concerns the institution,
one among many: the military, the nobility, guilds, banks,
sometimes competing with them. It also concerns education,
within its own structure or in coordination, sometimes in
conflict, with other interests at work.

A multitude of structural environments, adapted to the practical
aspects of religious experience appear, while religion
progressively extricated itself, or was eliminated, from the
pragmatics of survival and existence. The institution it became
dedicated itself to pursuing its own repetitive assignments. At
the same time, it established and promoted its implicit set of
motivations and criteria for evaluation. In many instances, the
church constituted viable social entities in which work, and
agriculture in particular, was performed according to
prescriptions combining it with the practice of faith. Rules of
feudal warfare were established, the day of rest was observed,
education of clergy and nobility were provided. From the Middle
Ages to the never abandoned missionary activity in Africa, Asia,
and North and South America, the church impacted community life
through actions that sometimes flew in the face of common sense.
The effort was to impose new pragmatics, and new social and
political realities, or at least to resist those in place.

Whether in agreement or in opposition, the pattern of religious
experience was one of repeated self-constitution of its own
entity in new contexts, and of pursuing experiences of faith,
even if the activity as such was not religious. In this process,
the church gained the awareness of the role of scale, and
maintained, though sometimes artificially, entities, such as
monasteries, where scale was controllable. Autarchy proved
decreasingly possible as the church tried to extend its
involvement. The growing pragmatic context had to be
acknowledged: increased exchange of goods, reciprocal
dependencies in regard to resources, the continuous expansion of
the world-a consequence of the major discoveries resulting from
long-distance travel. In recent years the challenge has come
from communication-in particular the new visual media-requiring
strategies of national, cultural, social, and even political
integration.

From the scrolls of the Torah and from the sacred texts of the
Rig Veda and Taoism, to the books of Christianity, to the Koran,
to the illuminated manuscripts copied in monasteries, and to the
Bible and treatises printed on the presses of Fust and Schöffer
(Gutenberg's usurpers) in Mainz, Cologne, Basel, Paris, Zurich,
Seville, and Naples-over 4,000 years can be seen as part of the
broader history of the beginning of literacy. This history is a
witness to the process, one of many variations, but also one of
dedication to the permanency of faith and the word through which
it is reified.

Replications of all kinds mark the memetic sequence, and so
religion appears in retrospect as propagation of a special kind
of information, generated in the human mind as it started
labeling what we know, as well as what is beyond our direct
understanding. What did not change, although it was rendered
relative, is the acknowledgment and acceptance of a supreme
authority, known as God, or described through other names such
as Allah and Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge, and the nature of the practical
experience of self- constitution as believer. If Abraham, Moses,
Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, and the Japanese and Indian
religious leaders were alive today, they would probably realize
that if religion had any chance, it could no longer be founded on
the written text of the Book or books, but in the practical
experiences of the civilization of illiteracy. By no accident,
the first category on one of the Web sites dedicated to religion
is entitled Finding God in Cyberspace.

The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms?

The pragmatic requirement of optimally transmitting experience
essential to a group's permanency was recognized as one of the
main functions of language. It should come as no surprise that
education was carried out, if not exclusively then at least to a
high degree, in religion. Neither should it surprise that
religion appropriated literacy as one of its programs once the
scale of human activity that made literacy necessary was
reached. In the context of nation-states that adopted religion as
one of their identifiers, the entire history of the relation
between society and religion can be seen in a different light.
As we know from history, the quest for power frequently brought
state and religion into conflict, although one needed and relied
on the other. In the unifying pragmatic framework of industrial
society, their alliance was sealed in literacy programs. These
were simultaneously programs for higher efficiency and for the
maintenance of values rooted in religious belief, as long as
these did not adversely affect the outcome of work or of market
transactions.

Parallel to the initially dominant religious view of life,
change, origins, and future, alternative views were expressed as
the result of self-observation and observation of the outside
world. Philosophy, influenced by religion and by religious
explanations of the world, of men, of society and its change, is
one example. Sciences would diverge from philosophy, multiplying
alternate models and explanatory contexts. These were usually
carefully construed so as not to collide with the religious
viewpoint, unless they bluntly rejected it, regardless of the
consequences of such an attitude. There were also heresies based
on an individual's notions, or holdovers from past religions.
During the Renaissance, for instance, such holdovers derived
from studies of the Bible, which led to the Reformation. Ideas
not rejected as heresy were usually within the scope of the
church. These ideas were expressed by men and women who founded
orders. They were put into practice by religious activists or
made into new theologies.

There is no religion that does not go through its internal
revisions and through the pain of dividing schisms. On today's
list of religious denominations, one can find everything, from
paganism to cyberfaith. The rational explanation for this
multiplication into infinity is not different from the
explanation of any human experience. Multiplication of choices,
as innate human characteristic, applies to religious experiences
as it does to any other form of pragmatic human
self-constitution. The practical experience of science,
diverging more and more from philosophy and from religious dogma,
also followed many paths of diversification. So did the
unfolding of art, ethics, technology, and politics. The
unifying framework offered by the written word, as interpreted by
the monolithic church, was progressively subjected to
distinctions that the experience of literacy made possible. When
people were finally able to read the Bible for themselves-a book
that the Catholic church did not allow them to read even after
the Reformation-protest started, but it started after the
Renaissance, when political entities were strong enough to defy
the papacy with some degree of success.

The illiterate warriors of centuries ago and the sometimes
illiterate, at least unlettered, worshipper and military
insurgent of today belong to very different pragmatic
frameworks. The former did not have to be able to read or write
in order to fight for a cause superficially (if at all) related
to the Book. One had only to show allegiance to the institution
guarding souls from hell. In the scale characteristic of these
events, individual performance was of extreme importance to the
community, as we know from the stories of King Frederick, Joan
of Arc, Jan Hu?s-or, to change the reference, from the story of
Guru Nanak (the first guru of the Sikhs, a religion prompted by
the Muslims' persecution of Hindus at about the time Columbus
was on his last expedition to the New World), Martin Luther,
George Fox (founder of the Quaker movement), and many others. The
educated faithful of the past probably obtained access to the
established values of culture and to the main paradigms of
science as these confirmed the doctrine defended by the church.
An educated faithful in contemporary society is torn between
accepting a body of knowledge ascertaining permanency, while
experiencing change at a pace for which no religion can prepare
its followers. Indeed, from the unity of education and faith-one
meant to reinforce the other-the direction of change is towards
their contradiction and disparity. The secular web is not only
that of the Internet infidels, but also of a broad segment of
the population that has no need for either.

Challenging permanency and universality

For many, the survival of religion is itself a miracle. For many
more, it is indicative of human aspects not sufficiently
accounted for in science, art, or social and political life. Its
role in a new pragmatic framework of fast change, mediated
activity, alienation, decentralization, and specialization, is
obviously different from that it played in the time of religious
constitution and in a reduced scale of humankind. Religion did
not start out to deceive, but to explain. Its practices, while
seeming violent, empty, extreme, demagogic, cunning, or even
ridiculous at times, fulfill a purpose deemed pragmatic at the
inception. The old and familiar are reassuring, if only by resort
to endurance. The promise of redemption and paradise gain in
attraction the more people face change and uncertainty. While
the original purpose of religion was modified over time, the
practice is kept up precisely because novelty and progress,
especially in their radical form, are difficult to cope with.
Once old values are questioned in the light of succeeding
pragmatic circumstances, under new patterns of
self-constitution, the result is complacency and deception, if
there is no alternative. Religion and literacy ultimately find
themselves in the same predicament.

Religious diversification reflects each new scale at which human
practical experience takes place. Changes in the pragmatic
framework in which people constitute themselves as religious
result in tension between the variability of the elements
involved in work or new aspects of social life and the claims of
the eternal. This tension triggers numerous rethinkings and
consequent rewritings of the books, as well as the generation of
numerous new books of new forms of faith. Christianity and Islam
are revisions; within them other revisions (schisms) took place,
such as the Roman and Orthodox churches, the Sunni and Shiite.
Other sects and religions, schisms, and reformations and
protestations (movements claiming to reconstitute the original
status, whatever that means), are to a great extent rewritings
based on acknowledging new contexts-that is, new pragmatic
requirements. Once upon a time, the Book was supposed to address
everyone in the small community in which it came to expression.
Over time, many books addressed their own
constituencies-adherents to certain teachers, to particular
saints, or to some subset of the religious doctrine-within a
larger community. The success of these sub-groups grew in
proportion to the diversification of human praxis and to the
function of education exercised on a broader and broader scale.

From the religion of small-scale human activity to the churches
of universal ambitions, many modifications in the letter and the
spirit of the respective books occurred. They ultimately reflect
alterations of values that religious institutions had to adapt
to and justify. The tribes that accepted the Book as a unifying
framework- embodiment of tradition which became law-as well as
the followers of the prescriptions in the Hindu scriptures of
Veda and Upanishad, the followers of the Enlightened One
(Buddha), the practitioners of Taoism and Confucianism, also
acknowledged a sense of community. It is the same sense of
community held, at a different scale and with different goals,
by the nation-state.

The spread of religions, parallel to military conquest, resulted
in the spread of the respective religious books, and of the
letters that the books were written in. This is not necessarily
the same as the spread of literacy. Religion established its own
state, the Holy Roman Empire (which is now down to the size of
Vatican City) that transcended national boundaries and
languages, and was considered universal. In the language of
Islam, umma is the world community of Moslems, while wattan is
the Motherland. The Moslem armies, defeated at Poitiers by the
Catholic Charles Martel, were also disseminating the religion,
language, and culture of the world community they envisioned.
The Crusades, in turn, and the religious wars that plagued Europe
did not spread literacy as much as they attempted to defend or
establish the dominance of a way of living meant to ensure an
order that promised eternal life.

In the scale of today's human practical experience, efficiency in
general is almost independent of individual performance. It is
independent of the degree of faith, ethical behavior, family
status, and other characteristics of what religion calls good,
and which ethics appropriates as a desired set of social
expectations. Within a small scale of existence and work, things
belong together: the practical and the spiritual, politics and
morals, the good and the useful. Religion is their syncretic
expression. The need for specialization and mediation changed
the nature of pragmatic relations. Various realms of human
practical experience are severed from each other. As this takes
place, the religiously grounded system of values based on unity
and integration-after all, this is what monotheism, in its
various embodiments, represents-is submitted to the test of new
circumstances of human self-constitution.

Among the many explanations of the events of the late sixties, at
least the phenomenon of the attraction exercised by the various
churches of meditation and their gurus is reflective of the
crisis of monotheism, and of the culture that grew around it. An
increasing number of esoteric, exotic, scientific, or
pseudoscientific sects today bear witness to the same. The
difference is that these sects are no longer isolated, that
almost the entire religious dimension of people is connected to
some sect, be it even one that used to be a dominant church.

Religion-based values or attitudes are carried over into the new
segmented practical experiences of work, family, and society,
and thus into the realm of politics, law, and market relations.
Originating from sexual drive, love is one of the experiences
from which family, friendship, art, and philosophy derived over
time. Once written in the Book as a different form of love, once
ascertained as a practical experience, it bridges between its
natural biological basis and its cultural reality as a
characteristic of a framework of human interaction in which
individuals project their biological and cultural identity.
Written about in religious books, love starts a journey from
naturalness to artifact. Expressed as intelligence, temperament,
appearance, or physical ability (our natural endowment), love is
subjected, in conjunction with the experience of writing the
Book, to a set of expectations expressed as though they
originated from outside the experience.

In this process, there is no passive participant. The written
word is permeated by the structural characteristics of the act
of preferring somebody to somebody else, one course of action
from among many, and, more generally, something over something
else, according to religious values. The implicit expectation of
permanency (of faith, love, or ownership) results from the
pragmatic reasons acknowledged by the Book(s). A consensus
essential for the survival and well being of the community is
reached by acknowledging forces from outside, and accepting
their permanent and quasi-universal nature. In a universe of
immediacy and proximity, change other than that experienced in
natural cycles is not anticipated.

Divinity makes sense only if constituted in practical experiences
from which a notion of eternity and universality result. The
written words exalting unity, uniqueness, eternity, and the
promise of a better future are the result of the practical
experience, since in the realm of nature only the immediate and
the proximate are acknowledged. Forever marked by this
experience of time and space beyond the immediate, the written
language of religion, together with the written language of
observations connected to the awareness of natural cycles (the
moon, the seasons, plagues), remains a repository of the notion
of permanency, universality, and uniqueness, and an instrument
for hierarchical differentiation.

Whenever constituted in activities related to or independent of
religion, language, as a product of and medium for human
identification, projects these structural characteristics upon
whatever the object of practical experience is. Once written, the
word seems to carry into eternity its own condition. With the
advent of literacy, as this is made possible and necessary by a
different scale of human praxis, literacy itself would appear as
endowed with the quality of eternity and universality, triggering
its own sense of exaltation and mission, lasting well into our
day. For millions of citizens from countries south of Russia,
who once gave up their roots to show allegiance to the Soviet
Empire, to return to Arabic writing after being forced to adopt
the Cyrillic means rediscovering and reconnecting to their
eternity. That some of them, caught in the geo- political
confrontation of their neighbors, adopt the Roman alphabet of
their Turkish Moslem brothers, does not change the expectation.

Religion and efficiency

In the literate forms of language experiences, not only religion,
but also science and the humanities, literature, and politics
are established and subjected to the practical test of
efficiency. Each projects a notion of permanency and
universality, which is influenced by the practical experience of
religion, sometimes in contradiction to the archetypal
experience resulting in the notion (or notions) of God (or gods).
Now that the pragmatic framework of the very ample scale of
human practice makes permanency and universality untenable, the
tendency to escape from the confines of religion becomes
evident. There is a strong sense of relativism in science, an
appropriate self- doubt in humanistic discourse, and an
appropriate understanding of the multiplicity and open-endedness
in almost every aspect of our social and political life.

This was not achieved through and in literacy, but in disregard
of it, through the many partial literacies reflecting our
practical self-constitution. The reality of the global nature of
human experience, of interconnectedness, of its distributed
nature, and of the many integrative forces at work, renders the
centralism implied in the Book(s) obsolete for many people. At
the same time, let it also be noted that this reality makes the
Book even more necessary than ever for many, and at different
levels of their practical life. The many religious literacies of
these days-promoting permanent modes of life, exotic and less
exotic codes of behavior, ways of eating and dressing, hopes for
a happy future or some form of afterlife-maintain dualistic
schemes of good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and secular in
a world of extremely subtle and painfully vague distinctions.
The question whether love and reason can undergird community
awareness, social action, political activism, and education if,
as seems to be the case, their connection to faith continues to
decline, belongs to the same dualistic perspective. This
perspective is common to both partisans and enemies of religion.
It used to be the backbone of the ideology of religious
suppression-either under communism, or wherever a dominant
religion takes upon itself the eradication of any other religion.
And it is becoming the argument of the many emancipatory
movements promoting the religions of atheism and agnosticism as
a substitute for religion. The subject is ultimately one of
faith, concerning very intimate aspects of individual
self-assessment, but not necessarily the institution of creed.
Still captive to dualism, brought about and nourished by
experiences constitutive of literacy, we have problems coping
with a world where the enemy is us and where religion is
different from what it was at the time of its inception, or the
time we were first were exposed to it.

In view of these developments, we wonder how the rules and values
established in the original religious framework are to survive.
If the literacy through which these rules come to us is seen
only as a vessel, a means of expressing values and criteria for
evaluation, then any other means could perform the same function.
The Crystal Cathedral of television fame, no less than the Web
sites of many churches, proves the point.

Since we are our language, and we constitute ourselves as
spiritual and physical entities in the experience of language,
writing cannot be seen as a passive medium, nor reading as a
mechanical rendition. Accordingly, the medium through which
religion is expressed affects the religion, changes its
condition. Applied to contemporary religious experience, this
argument is confirmed again and again. From the entire practical
experience of religion, what survives is the liturgy, transformed
into a performance of limited cathartic impact.

Merchandising completes this new condition of faith. For
millennia, a community considered its priests vital to its
survival. In the civilization of illiteracy, the situation is
reversed. Ministers, and to some extent priests, depend on a
community for their survival. Ministers are in the business of
selling themselves as much as they are in the business of
selling their church or even God. Some evangelists remain
independent in the sense that they package their own programs
for presentation to large crowds in tents, in auditoriums, or on
television. These religious enterprises create a vast business
empire around a persona. As long as the enterprise can deliver
what the preacher promises-through his performance act and the
merchandise he sells to the faithful-then the
tele-congregants-no less fascinated by celebrity than the rest of
society-will buy him.

A newer phenomenon is less personality dependent and more
message- oriented, but the goal is the same: ministers need to
make a living. Relying on information polled from hundreds of
middle-class non-churchgoers, some enterprising ministers came
up with a product bound to please: nothing boring or aggressive;
cost- efficiency; comfortable seating; no organ. According to a
study by the Harvard Business School, the resulting church was
the embodiment of the phrase "knowing your customers and meeting
their needs." Church attendance grew by relying on customer
recommendation. Soon, the ministers franchised their operation in
localities with a target market: 25-to-40-year-old seekers ("a
growing market"), with middle to upper middle class salaries.

Other seekers look in different directions. Almost anyone with a
message can establish a religion, and sometimes entire sects are
based on just a few words from the Bible (the Seventh-Day
Adventists, for example, or the snake handlers of the
Appalachians, or the Pentecostals). Participatory forms of
worship are another trend. They may derive inspiration from the
book, but they aim to involve avenues of perception not bound to
literacy: song, dance, meditation, the inhaling of aroma,
touching minerals. Some religions hark back to nature, animism,
and what can be called neo-paganism, as in the Wikka religion.
No matter how far back some of these religions claim to go, they
are religions of the civilization of illiteracy. They do not
repeat the original pragmatic framework but respond to today's
framework of self-constitution and the individual needs or
desires of the people who constitute themselves as religious
through these new manifestations.

While observations made in language can be subjected to
confirmation, religious assumptions are expressed through the
inner reality of language, and are only subject to language
correctness. It is impressive how language houses concepts for
which there is no referent in practical experience, but which
are constituted exactly because some aspects of practical
experience cannot be otherwise explained. In the history of how
ideas, generalities, and abstractions are formed, the experience
of religion is of particular interest. Values and beliefs that
cannot be submitted to the physical senses, but can be
comprehended through language-written, read, sung, danced, and
celebrated-are transmitted through religion.

Many assume that the new status of religion in our day is due not
only to market pressure and obsession with consumption, but also
to the advancement of science. Supposed to debunk the
rationality of faith and offer its own rationality as the basis
of new ways of understanding the origin of life, the role of
human beings, the source of good and evil, and the nature of
transcendence, science introduces a positivist conception of
facts, irreconcilable with that of the relativity of religious
images. Research in artificial intelligence discovered that "97%
of human activity (is) concept- free, driven by control
mechanisms we share not only with our simian forebears, but with
insects." If this is indeed true, the role of rationality,
religious or scientific, in our practical experiences of
self-constitution has to be revisited. The various manifestations
of religion subtly address this need because they recognize
dimensions of human experience that cannot be reduced to
scientific explanations and logic, or cannot be explained
without explaining them away in the process. One interesting
tendency in the civilization of illiteracy is less to assimilate
the new science and technology-as was the case only 20-30 years
ago-and more to subject it to what religion considers right.

Fundamentalism of any kind corresponds to the dynamics of this
illiterate society, in the sense that it promotes a very limited
and limiting subset of the language of religion, in a world
segmented into more religious denominations than ever before. If
over 350,000 registered churches serve the religious needs of the
population in the USA, and almost as many meeting places are
available to small groups of believers, nobody will seriously
argue that people are less religious, rather that they are
religious in a different way, often integrating the latest in
science and technology. Among the most active Internet forums,
religion maintains a presence supported by the best that
technology can offer. With each new scientific theory unveiling
the deeper structure of matter, more subtle forms of
interconnectedness among phenomena, new sources of creativity,
and new limits of the universe, the need for religion changes. To
cope with complexity means either to have a good command of
it-which seems less and less possible-or to accept a benevolent
underwriting. The challenge of complexity generates its own need
for creed. Social, economic, and political realities are not
always encouraging. Integration based on pragmatic motives
increases, as does individual anxiety. No matter how much we
learn about death, we are still not free of its frightening
randomness. Realistically speaking, the belief in an afterlife
and the dedication to cryonics are less far apart than they seem
at first glance.

Religiosity in the civilization of illiteracy

Some will argue, probably with good reason, that religion in the
civilization of illiteracy is but another form of consumerism,
or at least of manipulation. No matter what the religious
occasion, and if it is still indeed of religious motivation, the
market celebrates its highest results in anticipation of
holidays (the former holy days). The 40,000 car dealerships,
many designed as car cathedrals, and almost 35,000 shopping
malls get more visitors during the holiday season than do
churches. In addition, even ceremonies whose significance is
fundamentally different today than during previous periods,
generate more business than religious awareness. The language of
ceremonies is entrusted to consultants in marriage, confirmation,
baptism, bar mitzvah, and death. Texts related to circumstances
of practical experiences different from those of our day are
written and read, or, to be more precise, performed without
either understanding what kind of pragmatics made them necessary
or realizing the discrepancy between past and present
pragmatics. This is why they ring so hollow in our day.

When permanence is exalted, faithfulness promised, acceptance of
biblical or other precepts (of the Koran, of Far Eastern
pantheistic religions) ascertained, literacy and religion are
only mimicked. Talaba, the 100 rubles (or whatever the currency
of choice) per month paid by Shiite missionaries from Iran,
brings many Tadjiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmenians to the new
religious schools of Islam. Chances are that a higher bidder
from another religion would spoil the game. Under the new
pragmatic circumstances of human self-constitution, change,
variety, self-determination, individualism, negation of
authority, divine or secular, and skepticism are decisive for
reaching the levels of efficiency demanded by a dynamic scale of
existence.

Today's world is not one of generalized atheism. It is, rather,
one of many partial religious literacies, sharing in some basic
symbolism, although not necessarily in a unifying framework for
its consistent interpretation. Many do not believe, for reasons
of science or convenience, in the religious explanation of the
origin of the universe and life. Or they do not care for the
message of love and goodness embedded in almost every current
manifestation of faith. They see in every religious book the
handwriting of some groups who, in order to impose their values,
invented the image of a supreme force in order to achieve, if
not authority, at least credibility.

We live in an environment of compromise and tolerance, infinite
distinctions, fast sequences of failure and success, challenged
authority and generalized democracy. In today's huge and
ineffective social mechanism, in the integrated and networked
world, individual failure does not affect the performance of the
system. Illiteracy, while dangerous under circumstances
characteristic for the pragmatic of the recent past, only
marginally affects the levels of efficiency reached.
Religiosity, of consequence in the same pragmatic framework,
plays no role whatsoever in the illiterate practical
experiences of human self-constitution. Calling such assessments
heresies, as some might be inclined to do, does not really
answer the question of whether religious law can still serve,
alone or together with other laws, as the binding tie of
community-as it does not address the broader issues of whether
literacy can serve as the binding tie of community. Because of
their pragmatic nature, characteristics of religion and
structural characteristics of language are fundamentally
similar. If we want to understand the condition of religion
today, we have to specifically address the pragmatic
circumstances of self-constitution within the civilization of
illiteracy.

In the events of tele-evangelism there is no place for literacy.
But the video church, and computer-aided religion, the bible on
CD-ROM, or CD-I, the vacation village for believers, and
religious tourism are mainly forms of entertainment. Their
validity is divorced from the concept of the exalted individual,
critical in the context of a small- scale community.
Consequently, the religious dimension of transcendence is
annihilated. Ours is the time of the eternal instant, not of some
vague eternity promised as reward after the present. Partially
banalized through abuse of the word, concepts such as dignity,
decency, and human values have become the clichés of the video
church, with as many gospels as there are preachers. Religiosity
today differs from the religiosity of previous pragmatic
frameworks insofar as it corresponds to the accentuated
insularity of the individual.

As long as the viewer is only a digit away on his or her remote
control from a pornography channel, from the latest quote on the
stock market, of from a commercial message-for denture adhesive,
gastric relief, and home pregnancy tests-it is difficult, if not
impossible, to distinguish between sanctity and triviality,
righteousness and venality. The global community of tele-viewing
is splitting into smaller and smaller groups. And TV, as a
pulpit of missionary activity, reveals itself as only
syntactically different from the missionary work of
advertisement. Mass religion proves to be as impersonal as the
market. In effect, it severs the relations between religion and
the mysterious, still unexplained aspects of human existence. A
virtual reality package can be as good as the performance of
having the blind see, and the cripple leave the wheelchair to
enter the 100-meter dash. The virtual cathedral, the stadium, and
the mass audience addressed in front of the camera are
themselves of a scale inadequate to both the teaching
disseminated and the nature of religious experience, no matter
how far the effort to change the vocabulary goes.

The language of the books is rooted in experiences to which the
tele-viewer no longer has a direct relation. They cannot be
substituted in a medium adapted to change and variety. The
categories that religious discourse centers on-faith, goodness,
transcendence, authority, sin, punishment-were established in a
pragmatic framework totally different from that of the present.
Today, existence offers variety, immediate satisfaction, and
protection from the whims of nature. The sense of danger has
changed. The equity accumulated by the church in these categories
may be enough to entitle claims of ownership, given people's
inertia, but not to maintain them as effective means of
affecting current practical experiences. It might well be true
that three out of five Americans now believe there is a hell,
and that people in other countries share the same assumption,
but this has no bearing on their self-constitution in the world
of quickly changing scenarios for fulfillment outside faith.
Networking and distributed work are better synchronized with the
pragmatics of high efficiency of our day. Software for
interactive multimedia keeps track of a person's religious
patterns, and provides prayer and interpretation integrated in
the same package.

In its attempt to adapt to a new framework of human activity,
religion adopted social causes (renouncing its metaphysics),
scientific terminology (renouncing agnosticism), or the means of
entertainment (renouncing its asceticism). With each step
outside the boundaries of religion, the transcendental dimension
is sacrificed. This dimension is embedded in the medium of
literacy through which religious practical experience became a
fixture in society. When the word does not satisfy, believers
resort to other means of expression, some older than religion. It
is not unusual to have a religious celebration during the day in
some Catholic churches in Brazil, and at night, on the same
altar, a chicken sacrificed to Yemenyá. The literate
celebration, of European import, and the illiterate sacrifice to
which a different group of believers connects, are impossible to
reconcile. In this framework, freedom of choice, as vulgar or
trivial as those choices might be, takes precedence over
authority. In Brazil, "Graças a Deus!" is paired with the
practice of African cults (Candomblé, Umbanda, Macumba), just as
"Allah-hu-akbar" is with shamanistic or Buddhist celebrations in
Azerbaidjan and Kazakstan. These are particular expressions of
religion in the civilization of illiteracy, as much as TV
evangelism is. For as much as religion was submitted to the word,
performance always seems to get the upper hand.

To blindly ascertain permanence against the background of change
would only further undermine religious practice. This is why the
new religions focus on the immediate and produce the reward as
fast as it is expected. The continuous proliferation of new
religious denominations, soon to be as many as there are people
who constitute the networks of human interaction in today's
pragmatic context, reflects also the ability of the church to
adapt. But this was not religion's reason for being in the
first place, and will not represent more than what actually
happens when we all wear the same shoes, or shirts, or hats but
read a different label on each, when we all eat the same food
that is only packaged differently, when we all vote for the same
politics (or lack of same) while maintaining party affiliations.
When each has his or her own god, God ceases to exist.

With the end of the civilization of literacy, partial religious
literacies emerge, developing their own languages, their own
organizations, their own justification. The heterogeneity of the
world, its intrinsic relativity, and its dynamics of change mark
religious practical experiences in ways not dissimilar to those
of scientific, artistic, political, educational, moral, and many
other experiences. Consumption of the language of religion in
ceremonies and holidays that promote the expectation of more
and cheaper, on which the quest for unlimited satisfaction of
needs and desires is based, does not qualify anyone as religious
or literate. Neither does secularism for that matter, no less
illiterate, and no less subjected to the same expectation of high
efficiency which undermines the core of any religion.

Secular religion

In our day of increased secularism, the extent to which religion
permeates people's lives, whether faithful, indifferent
(neutral), or actively antireligious, is probably difficult to
assess. The separation of church and state is powerfully anchored
in constitutions and declarations of independence, while new
presidents, kings, emperors, state officials, and members of the
judiciary still swear on the books of their religious faith,
invoke their respective gods as the ultimate judge (or help), and
openly, or covertly, participate in the rituals inherited from
theological practical experiences. The dominant symbolism of our
day has a religious aura. It seems that both the faithful and
the secularists of all nuances entered a mutual agreement in
sanctioning what came to be known as civil religion. People
pledge allegiance to the flag, get emotionally carried away when
the national anthem is played, and partake in the celebration of
holidays, never questioning their justification. These elements
of civil religion come to us in perverted forms, divorced from
the pragmatic context within which they were constituted. To
swear on the Bible was specifically prohibited ("You are not to
swear at all, not by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by
earth, for it is his footstool..." Matthew 5:33-36). Swearing-in
ceremonies take place in the open in order to make them
manifest to the gods. In some countries a window is still opened
when an oath of office is recited. Holidays, meant as occasions
of religious recollection, or to instill a sense of solidarity,
remain only what each person makes of them. Even more, in
countries making a point of avoiding the domination of one
religion over another, the holidays of the dominant religion
become the holidays of the entire nation, enjoyed foremostly as
market celebrations.

To notice the contradictory nature of the presence of religion in
contexts of secular practical experiences, some directly
contrary to religious beliefs, means to notice how some of the
motivations of religion expatiate in a context contradicting the
legitimacy of the theological experience in our day and age. This
became clear even within the particular circumstances of
revolutions whose stated goal was to eradicate religion through
state oppression or by education. The French Revolution
discovered, soon after the king and other members of the power
elite were decapitated, that the authority of its ideals,
embodied in the call for liberty, equality, fraternity, was not
enough, despite being housed in the same body of literacy as
religion was, to substitute for the higher authority of
Divinity.

The Soviet Revolution hoped that theater or cinematography would
substitute for religion, or at least for church. Some of its
ideologues experimented with a secular god- building strategy,
inventing a sui generis higher force to which people could
relate, and on which hope could be placed. They tried, very much
in the spirit of the utopian Marx, to deify the collective force
of the working class in order to inspire a religious sense of
community. Enormous energy was invested in designing new rituals.
Many of the atheist artists of the Russian avant-garde served
the cause they thought opened the gates of artistic freedom and
universal love. Their own escape from the realm of literacy into
the realm of imagery-intended to replace the confining texts of
religion and ideology-should have warned them about the
impossibility of the task at hand. Disappointed by their own
naiveté, but incapable of acknowledging failure, some of them
wound up embracing the new civic religion of gods and holidays,
as shallow as the theology around which they were built.

What we identify in all these elements is the continuation of
structural characteristics pertinent to religion and to the
medium of its expression, i.e., literacy in a fundamentally
different context. The encompassing principles of tolerance,
equality, and freedom contradict the spirit on which religion
and literacy were based. They weaken our convictions of what is
right and efficient in view of the desired end, and of
endurance as a group. The decline of morals in a context in which
moral behavior does not affect efficiency is not due to the
decline in religiosity, but to the general perception,
justified or not, that morality and religion do not count; or
that they play no role in making people happy. The sanctity of
life gone, there is little sanctity left in forms of
celebrating it: birthdays, communions, marriage, funerals.
Between birth and death, the audience at our rites of passage
diminishes painfully. We know that death is very personal, but
communities, for pragmatic reasons, used to confront death and
its consequences, many related to inheritance, not relegate it
to specialists in the various aspects of dying. Death is reduced
to a biological event leading only to biochemical
decomposition: No fun, no direct practical significance for
others, except in the inheritance process, a market event for
funeral parlors and pushy clergy.

Appropriation of life events in the civilization of illiteracy
equals the structuring of small languages of post-literate
celebrations, taken over by baptism, communion, and marriage
consultants, all alienated from the religious meaning they had,
moreover from the initial pragmatic motivation. Literacy stood
as the rulebook for all these direct, integrated,
sequentialized, deterministic occurrences. The illiterate
celebrates the randomness and the relative and makes everything
a festival of randomness-crime, deadly disease, a riot, a
bargain, a love affair.

Religion and church tried to instill permanency. Baptism was the
initiation rite that opened the cycle. Confirmation entailed
acceptance in the community. Marriage, once and forever,
introduced a sense of unity and continuity. The last rites freed
one from life for an afterlife in which the deceased still
watched over the living faithful. Today, each of these moments
is associated with a civil ritual: birth is recorded in the town
or city hall. The child must have a social security number by the
age of two. At age five, children must enter school. Children no
longer join the community as responsible members at the age of
12 or 14 years, but they are given rights that they sometimes
cannot handle. Marriage and the establishment of family come much
later than in earlier pragmatic contexts. Extracted from the
religious context, family life is a strange mixture of
biological convenience and contractual obligations. Death, always
the focus of religion, is defined in terms of its effects on
efficiency. The fine distinction between clinical death and
total death only shows how priests, the final witnesses to the
end of a life, are replaced by the technologists who keep the
heart beating under the alibi of "sanctity of life." Life ends
as it begins, as an entry in the record books, for tax purposes.

Japanese parents-to-be might still consult an ekisha (a sort of
fortune teller) in order to choose the proper name for a newborn
infant, already thinking about the marriage (names should fit in
order to ensure harmony); others will have difficulty in
understanding the similarity between choosing a name and the
observance of agricultural cycles, as both were religiously
encoded in minute rules centuries ago. These people will even
cringe at the discourse in a monastery where the priest might
indulge in the discussion of the unity between inner order (of
the individual) and outer order. The fact that mandala, traded
all over the world, once represented that order escapes their
personal experience.

Religions distinguished between nature and cosmos. Whether
explicitly stated or not, nature was seen as earthbound, the
source of our existence, the provider. Cosmos, beyond our reach,
should not be interfered with. The experience of
extraterrestrial research expanded the notion of nature. In
today's integrated world, resources and environmental concerns
also contribute to the expanded notion of nature pertinent to
our activity and life. Our worries about pollution of earth,
oceans, and skies are not religious in nature. Neither is the
distinction between what is feasible and what is desirable. The
Ten Commandments tell us what we should not do, while the devil
called desire whispers into our ears that nothing is forbidden
unless we really do not care for it. The relation between the
wholeness of the being and its parts is subject to maintenance,
just as the automobile is. Once gods were described as jealous
and intolerant. Now they are presented as accommodating a world
of diversified experiences and heterogeneous forms of worship,
including Satanism. Our pragmatic context is one of generalized
pluralism, embodied in the many choices we pursue in the
practical experience of self-constitution. When the pragmatics of
self-constitution can be based on rationality, the churches of
the civilization of illiteracy are houses of secular religion.

A Mouthful of Microwave Diet

Have you ever ordered a pizza over the Internet? It is an
experience in illiterate cooking. The image on the screen allows
clients to prepare the most individualized pizza one can think
of: they decide what the shape, size, and thickness of the crust
will be; which spices and how much; what kind of cheese; and
which toppings. They can arrange these the way they want, layer
them, and control how much tomato sauce, if any, should be used.
Done? Ask your children, or your guests, whether they want to
correct your design. The on-line chef is open to suggestions. All
set? The pizza will be delivered in 20 minutes-or it's free. The
entire transaction is illiterate: selection is made by clicking
an image. With each choice, prices are automatically calculated
and listed. Addition is as error-free as it can get. Taxes are
calculated and automatically transferred to the IRS. A voice
announces over the Internet, "Food is ready! Thank you for your
order. And please visit us again."

No, this is not fantasy. Pizza shops and hamburger joints figure
visibly on the Internet (still in its infancy). Their structure
and functioning, as well as the expectations connected to them,
are what defines them as belonging to the civilization of
illiteracy. But the picture of what people eat and how their
food is prepared is more complicated than what this example
conveys. This chapter will describe how we arrived at this point,
and what the consequences of the fundamental shift from the
civilization of literacy in our relation to food are.

Food and expectations

How does one connect food to literacy? In the first place, how we
eat is as important as what we eat and how we prepare it. There
is a culture of dining, and an entire way of viewing food-from
obtaining raw ingredients to preparation and to eating-that
reflects values instilled in the civilization of literacy. Food
and eating in the civilization of illiteracy are epitomized not
only by the pizza outlet on the Internet, by McDonalds, Burger
King, and the frozen dinner waiting to be thrown into the
microwave oven, but also by the vast industry of efficient
production of primary and secondary foodstuffs, the anonymous,
segmented processing of nutrition. It is not an individual's
literacy that characterizes the meal, but the pragmatic framework
in which people emerge and how they project their
characteristics, including dietary and taste expectations, in
the process.

The hunger-driven primitive human and the spoiled patron of a
good Italian restaurant have in common only the biological
substratum of their need, expressed in the very dissimilar acts
of hunting and, respectively, selecting items from a menu.
Primitive beings are identified by projecting, in the universe of
their existence, natural qualities pertinent to the experience
of feeding themselves: sight, hearing, smell, speed, force.
Restaurant patrons project natural abilities filtered through a
culture of eating: taste, dietary awareness, ability to select
and combine. These two extremes document a commonalty of human
self-constitution. Nevertheless, what is of interest in the
attempt to understand food and eating in the civilization of
illiteracy are actually differences. The nuclei of ancient
incipient agriculture, which were also the places of origin for
many language families, are distinct pragmatic frameworks
relevant also to the experience of cooking. Within agriculture,
absolute dependencies on nature are changed to relative
dependencies, since more food is produced than is needed for
survival. The food of this period is cause for some of the
rituals associated with the elements involved in producing it.
The layers between animal hunger and the new hunger, filter new
experiences of satisfaction or illness, of pleasure or pain, of
self-control or abuse. Symbolism (concerning fertility,
agriculture, power) confirms patterns of successful or failed
practical experiences against the background of increased
awareness of the biological characteristics of the species.
Notation and writing contribute to the change of balance between
the natural and the cultural. But the difference between the
primitive eater and the person who awaits his dinner at a table
derives from the distinctive conditions of their existence.

In the pragmatic framework that constitutes the foundation for
literacy, expectations regarding food were already in place:
slow rhythm, awareness of the environment, environment and
natural cycles, labor division according to sex and age (the
female was usually the homemaker and cook). Food preparation was
characterized by its intrinsic sequentiality, by linear
dependencies among its variables. Cooking was inspired and
supported by the sequence of seasons, local stock, and relative
immediacy of needs, affected by weather conditions, intensity of
effort, and celebration pertinent to seasons or special events.
In short, the relation to food was governed by the same
principles that notation and writing were.

In the civilization of illiteracy, personal attitudes towards
preparing food and eating, whether at home or in a restaurant,
are affected by a different pragmatic framework. Probably more
is known about food in the civilization of illiteracy than at any
other time in the history of agriculture and cuisine. But this
knowledge does not come from the direct experience of the food,
i.e., how it is grown and processed. Human beings in the
civilization of illiteracy know better why they eat than what
they eat. It is not what is in the food that concerns many
people, but what the food is supposed to do for them: maintain
and service the body through the proper balance of vitamins,
minerals, and protein; help people cope with residue; and,
eventually, conjure meaning as a symbol in a universe of
competing symbolisms. Fashion extends to food, too!

People feed themselves today according to expectations different
from those of primitive human beings-hunters, farmers,
craftsmen, and workers involved in pre- industrial experience.
Needs are different, and food resources are different. Many
layers of humanity stand between an individual projecting animal
hunger in a world of competing animals and an individual
expressing desire for French cuisine, in its authentic
variations, in its snobbish form, or in its fast food versions,
fresh or frozen, regular or dietetic. Pizza, spaghetti, falafel,
sushi, tortillas, cold cuts, and egg rolls figure no less on the
list of choices. Many filters, in the form of various taboos and
restrictions, as well as personal tastes, are at work. Meaning
is incidentally elicited as one chooses the recipe of a
celebrity cook, or decides on a certain restaurant.

The hungry primitive human, the human beings working the land in
the agricultural phase, the farmers, craftsmen, soldiers, and
scholars of the pre-industrial age expected only that food would
still their hunger. More is expected from the eating experience
today, and some of these expectations have nothing to do with
hunger. People take it for granted that they can buy any type of
food from anywhere in the world, at any time of the year.
Globality is thus acknowledged, just as the sequence of seasons
is ignored. In between these two extremes is the literate eating
experience, with its own expectations.

The experience of eating reflected a way of life, a way of
self-constitution as civilized, progressive, literate. Here are
the words of Charles Dickens, recorded during his visit to the
United States in 1842. He gave a vivid summary of American eating
habits west of the big eastern cities (Boston, New York) as he
observed them on steamboats and in inns where stagecoaches
stopped for the night in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri. I
never in my life did see such listless, heavy dulness [sic] as
brooded over these meals: the very recollection of it weighs me
down, and makes me, for the moment, wretched. Reading and
writing on my knee, in our little cabin, I really dreaded the
coming of the hour that summoned us to table; and was as glad to
escape from it again as if it had been a penance or a
punishment. Healthy cheerfulness and good spirits forming part
of the banquet, I could soak my crusts in the fountain with Le
Sage's strolling players, and revel in their glad enjoyment: but
sitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward off thirst and
hunger as a business; to empty each creature his Yahoo's trough
as quickly as he can, and then to slink sullenly away; to have
these social sacraments stripped of everything but the mere
greedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against the
grain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection of
these funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all my
life. Dickens was the epitome of the literate experience, and he
was addressing a literate audience that had literate
expectations in the experience of dining: what time meals were
held, who sat where and next to whom, the order in which certain
foods were served, how long a meal should last, what topics
could be discussed. Literate characteristics persist in the
literate frameworks of political and formal dinners: hierarchy
(who sits where), the order in which food is presented, the types
of dishes and eating utensils.

Fishing in a videolake

Many questions come to mind with respect to how, and what, and
when, people eat and drink. Human beings still project their
reality in the environment through biological
characteristics-the ability to see, smell, taste, move, jump,
etc.-but some in unnatural ways. Not only do we help vision with
glasses and hearing with aid devices, but even taste and smell
are helped through the appropriate chemistry, in order to buffer
some odor and enhance others. From odorless garlic to tofu
smelling of pork chops, everything is within the possibility of
biochemistry. At the extreme, nutrition is altogether removed
from the context of nature. This is the case not just with people
who are fed artificially, through tubes, pills, or special
concoctions.

What does this have to do with literacy? How is it influenced, if
at all, by the increased illiteracy of the new condition of
human activity? The answers are far from being trivial. An
editorialist from Germany, a country of solid, if not necessarily
refined, eating instincts, went to great lengths to explain the
alienation of nourishment in our age. The final scene he
described is comic and sad at the same time. Some artificially
obtained nutritive substance, molded in the shape of fish, is
fried and served to a video- literate who eats the food while
watching a videotape about fishing. The ersatz experience of
tele-viewing is probably disconnected from the experience of
river, trees, sunshine, and fish biting the hook, not to mention
the taste of fresh fish. Dwindling stocks of fish is one reason
why we can no longer afford the nourishment that results from
direct involvement with nature. Not everyone can or wants to be a
hunter, a fisherman, or a farmer. The romanticism of literacy,
and of the utopian ideologies it helps express, would lead some
to believe that this is possible, even desirable. But maybe not,
since the new scale of humankind does not go unnoticed, even by
those still clinging to the continuity and permanency embodied
in literacy.

Values, rules, and expectations such as health considerations,
efficiency, and taste are embodied in programs and procedures
for which machines are built, new substances designed, and waste
reprocessed. It might make some people shiver, but about 50% of
a person's average caloric intake is the result of artificial
synthesis and genetic engineering. Louis de Funés (in a 1976
French film directed by Claude Zidi) almost wound up as part of
the food processed at Tricatel, a new factory that produces
tasteless food based on the rules and looks of French cuisine,
which the factory effectively undermines. The comedian,
performing as a food inspector, has to decide what the real
thing is and what is the fake. Competing with this burlesque, a
national program, Awakening of Taste, under the aegis of the
Minister of Culture, was set up to encourage French students in
primary schools to rediscover the true national cuisine. That
such a program parallels the effort of the Académie Française to
maintain the purity and integrity of the language is a
convenient argument concerning the interdependence of the ideal
of literacy and that of haute cuisine.

The movie satirizes the human being's relation to food and
technology. Eating something reminiscent of a fish, whether
farmed or synthetically produced, while having video nostalgia
for fishing is not an exception. In the mental gardens we plant
each spring, when magazines and television shows present images
of the beautiful tomatoes we might enjoy in a few months, there
is a virtual space for every practical experience we gave up in
order to satisfy our desire for more at the lowest price. The
tomato in the civilization of illiteracy, hydroponic or garden
grown, ripens faster, is perfect in form, and tastes almost like
we think it should.

Irony and science fiction aside, we are indeed engineering
proteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals. They are
designed to optimally maintain the human being and enhance his
or her performance. This can be seen as a new phase in the
process of transferring knowledge pertinent to nourishment from
the encompassing and dominating medium of literacy to the many
partial literacies- chemical, biological, genetic-of the
civilization of illiteracy. Having in mind the image of where we
currently stand and the direction in which we are heading, we can
trace human self-constitution with the practical experience of
food.

Language and nourishment

The relation between what people eat, how they prepare their
food, how they serve and how they eat it, is accounted for in
language, especially in its literate use, in many ways.
Experiences of our continuous constitution through work, personal
life, habits, defense, and aggression are expressed through
language and other manifestations of our nature and culture. The
same holds true for such peculiarities as the way people eat,
entertain, dress, make love, and play. Language, as one among
many expressive means, is a medium for representation, but also
for diversifying experiences. It supports the research of new
realms of existence, and participates in the maintenance of the
integrity of human interdependencies as they develop in work,
leisure, and meditation.

When the question "Why are there fewer alcoholics in China,
Korea, Japan, and India?" was asked, answers were sought in
culture. Reformulated as "Why can't Asians tolerate alcohol?"
the question shifted the focus from what we do or do not do- the
filters of exclusion or preference-to biology. Environmental,
cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive characteristics
can be acknowledged once the biological substratum is brought to
light. Many people of Asian origin display an intolerance to
alcohol that is due to a metabolism peculiar to their race. The
intolerance to alcohol is associated with the lack of a
catalytic enzyme, which under normal circumstances does not
affect the functioning of the body. Only when alcohol is consumed
do unpleasant symptoms appear: the face becomes flushed, skin
temperature rises, the pulse quickens. Europeans, black
Africans, and North American Indians are not affected in the
same way. But they are subject to other genetically determined
food sensitivities. For example, lactose intolerance is highest
in Blacks.

The example given above tells us that the projection of
biological characteristics into the universe of people's
existence results in the image of differences among various
groups of people and among individuals. People noticed these
peculiarities before science existed in order to explain them.
Relating the effect to a cause-a certain food or drink-people
incorporate this relation into their body of experiences.
Established connections become rules that are intended to ensure
optimal individual and group functioning. Rules pertaining to
food and ways of eating were eventually encoded and transmitted
through literate means.

In short, patterns of work and life are affected. They point to
various levels at which human practical experiences and the
experience of nourishment are interconditioned. A first level
regards nourishment and our biological endowment. A second level
is nourishment and the environment-what we can afford from the
world surrounding us. A third level is nourishment and
self-consciousness-what best suits our life and work. Over time
the interdependency changes. And at moments when the scale of
mankind reaches a threshold, it is drastically redefined-as in
our times, for instance.

On a larger scale, food- and drinking-related instances prompt
vast servicing activities and the establishment of networks of
distributed tasks. Today, diet engineers, caterers, geneticists,
nutritionists, are set up to provide whatever fits the occasion,
the guest list, dietary prescriptions, and astrological or
medical recommendations. A formal dinner can become a well
mediated activity, with many prefabricated components, including
table manners-if the commissioning party so desires. Associated
or not to the menu, a preparatory seminar in what to wear, how
to use utensils (if more than plastic spoons and knives are
used), what kind of conversation with the entrée, and which jokes
before, or after, or instead of the wine, educates for the event.
In fact, the buffet, a configuration from which each can
assemble his or her menu, not unlike the on-line order form for
the Internet pizza, is more and more preferred. It is less
confining than the literacy-based sequence of the three-course
meals-structured as introduction, thesis, and conclusion, known
under the labels appetizer, main entrée, dessert.

Sequence and configuration revisited

With writing and reading, the experience of feeding oneself and
one's family expanded to partaking in the experience of food
preservation and sharing. French Assyriologist Jean Bottero read
recipes, in cuneiform writing on clay tablets from around 1700
BCE, for food cooked at important occasions for people in power.
That this was "cuisine of striking richness, refinement,
sophistication, and artistry" should not necessarily impress us
here. But the description of the ingredients, some no longer
known or in use, of the sequence, and the context (celebration)
deserve attention: "Head, legs and tail should be singed. Take
the meat. Bring water to boil. Add fat. Onions, samidu, leeks,
garlic, some blood, some fresh cheese, the whole beaten
together. Add an equal amount of plain suhutium." This is a stew
of kid, a meal for an exceptional occasion.

The pragmatic framework that made this cooking possible also made
writing possible and necessary. Over time, this connection
became even closer. Between the experiences of language and that
of eating and drinking, a continuum of interactions can be
noticed. Language distinctions pertinent to the practical
experience of cultivating plants, taking care of animals,
processing milk, and seasoning food expanded from satisfying
needs to creating desires associated with taste. New knowledge is
stimulated by experiences different from nourishment, such as
new forms of work (cooking included), use of new resources, new
tools, and new skills. And so is the expression of logic in the
act of preparing, serving, and eating the food. On reading a book
of recipes from the Tiberian era of the Roman Empire-De Re
Culinaria (The Art of Cooking, attributed to Gaelius Apicius)
and De Re Rustica (by Cato)-one can discern how things have
changed over 1600 years. Apicius expressed many distinctions in
foods and in ways of cooking and eating. He also expressed a
certain concern for health. "Digging one's grave with one's
teeth," as the expression came to life in connection with
gluttony (crisp tongues of larks, dormice marinated in honey,
tasty thighs of ostrich are listed), was replaced by elaborate
recipes to relieve an upset stomach or to facilitate digestion.
The books do not say what everyone ate, and there are reasons to
believe that there was quite a difference between the menu of
slaves and that of their owners. Advances in identifying plants
and in processing food go in tandem with advances in medicine.
Writings from other parts of the world, especially China, testify
to similar developments.

It was already remarked, by no other than Roland Barthes, that
the two basic language systems-one based on ideographic writing,
the second on the phonetic convention-put their characteristic
stamp on the menus of the Far Eastern and Western civilizations.
A Japanese menu is an expression of a configuration. One can
start with any of the dishes offered simultaneously. Combinations
are allowed. Eating is part of the Japanese culture, a practical
experience of self-constitution with strong visual components,
refined combinations of odors, and participation of almost all
senses. It also reflects the awareness of the world in which the
Japanese constitute themselves. Japanese food is focused on what
life on an island affords, plus/minus influences from other
cultures, resulting from the mobility of peoples. The more
concrete writing system of the Far East and the more
down-to-earth nourishment, i.e., the closeness to what each
source of nutrition is (raw fish, seaweed, rice, minimal
processing, strict dietary patterns based on combinations of
nutritional ideograms), are an expression of the unity of the
pragmatic framework within which they result.

A Western menu is a sequence, a one-directional linear event
with a precise culmination. Eating proceeds from the
introduction to the conclusion, "from soup to nuts." A meal has
a progression and projects expectations associated with this
progression. Within the language of our food, there are well
formed sentences and ill- formed sentences, as well as a general
tendency experience gastronomic pleasure. A literate society is
a society aware of the rules for generating and enjoying meals
according to such rules. The rules are based on experiences
transmitted from one generation to the next, not necessarily in
written form, but reflecting the intrinsic sequentiality of
language and its abstract writing system. Goethe fired his cook
(Lina Louise Axthelm) because she could not realize the
distinction between healthy meals and the more sophisticated art
of preparing them according to rules of literacy and aesthetic
distinction.

On cooks, pots, and spoons

Cooking food-a practical experience that followed catching
prey-represents an important moment in human self-definition. As
a form of praxis, it parallels the experience of
self-constitution through language. It extends, as language does,
far beyond satisfying immediate needs, allowing for the
establishment of expectations above and beyond survival. Cooking
implies generality, but also integrates elements of
individuality. Some foods taste better, are more easily digested,
support specific practical experiences. For example, some foods
enhance prowess. When eaten before a hunt, they can trigger lust
for chasing the animal. Some foods stimulate sexual drive,
others induce states of hallucination. Cooking was, in many ways,
a journey from the known into the unknown. Together with the
sensorial experience, intellectual elements were involved in the
process. They are observations, of similarities and
dissimilarities of certain procedures, of substances used, of
the influence of weather, season, tools, etc.; simple
inferences, discoveries-the effect of fire, salt, spices. The
experience of preparing food, together with many other practical
experiences on which it depends or which are connected to it,
opens avenues of abstraction. Cooking improves the quality of
individual life, and thus empowers members of a community to
better adapt to pragmatic expectations.

The constitution of the notion of food quality, as an abstraction
of taste, and crafting of tools appropriate to the activity, is
of special interest. An example: Pottery, in the natural context
where it was possible, became the medium for preserving and
cooking. In other contexts, carved stone, carved wood, woven
branches, or metal was used, for storing or for cooking,
according to the material. Progressively, tools for preparing
and tools for eating were crafted, and new eating habits were
acknowledged. When the multiple interdependency
food-container-cooking-preservation was internalized in the
activity of preparing food, a framework for new experiences was
established. Some of these experiences, such as how to handle
fire, transcend nourishment. The significance of this process
can be succinctly expressed: cooked food, which we need to
associate to the tools used, is food taken out of the context of
nature and introduced in the context of culture. The experience
of cooking involves other experiences and then expands into
other domains unrelated to nourishment. This experience requires
instruments for cooking, but even more an understanding of the
process involved, of the effects of combinations and additions,
and a strategy for delivery to those for whom cooking was
undertaken.

Satisfying hunger in the fight for survival is an individual
experience. Preparation of food requires time. In the experience
of achieving time awareness, cooking played a role not to be
ignored. If time can be used for different purposes by different
people, associated in view of shared goals, then some can tend
to the need of prepared food for others, while in turn partaking
in their effort of hunting, fishing, agriculture, and
craftsmanship. It was a simple strategy of labor assignments,
affected by tribal life, family, rituals, myth, and religion:
knowledge gained in preparing food disseminated without the need
for specialized activity. But once pragmatic circumstances of
life required it, some people assumed the function and thus,
once a critical mass of efficiency was reached, what we today
call the cook was identified. From the not-too- many written
recipes that come down to us through the centuries, as well as
from religious writings containing precise, pragmatically
motivated restrictions, we learn enough about the stabilizing
role of writing upon food preparation. We also gain
understanding of the new functions played by food preparation:
celebration of events, sacrifice to gods, expression of power.

People learn to cook and to eat at the same time. In this
process, they come to share values beyond the immediacy of
plants, fruits, and a piece of meat. Mediations pertinent to the
art of cooking and eating are also part of the language process
and become language. Culinary restrictions, such as those set
down in some religions, are but an example of this process. They
encode practical rules related to survival and well- being, but
also to some conventions beyond the physical reality of the food.
Language makes such rules the rules of the community; writing
preserves them as requirements and thus exercises an important
normative role.

Each pragmatic context determined what was acceptable as food and
the conditions of food preparation, henceforth the condition of
cooks and their particular role in social life. Many cooks,
serving at courts of royalty, in monasteries, in the military,
became the object of folk tales, fiction, of philosophers'
comments. No cook seems to have been highly educated, but all
their clients tried to impress through the food served and the
wines, or other drinks, accompanying them. In such circumstances,
the symbolic function of food indeed takes over the primary
function of satisfying hunger. Thus the cook, like the singer
and the dancer and the poet, contributes his part to what
becomes the art of living. It is probably worth pointing out that
memory devices similar to those used by poets and musicians are
used by cooks, and that improvisation in preparing a meal plays
an important part.

Writing entered the kitchen; and some of the last to resist
literacy, when it became a pragmatic requirement, were those who
cooked for others. Orality is more stubborn, for many reasons,
when it involves the secrecy of food preparation. There are
good reasons for this, some obvious even in our day of cracking
the most guarded secrets. Indeed, labor division does not stop
at the gates of factories. The segmentation of life and labor,
increased mediation, and expectations of high efficiency make
mass production possible. Almost everything people need to feed
themselves, in order to maintain their physical and mental
productive powers with a minimum of investment, is provided in
favor of productive cycles. In the pragmatic framework of the
industrial age, this meant the reproduction of the productive
forces of the worker in a context of permanency. The investment
in education and training was to be recuperated over a lifetime
of work. Nourishment contributed to the same pattern: the family
adapted to the rhythms of the practical experience of industry
related jobs.

At work, at home, in school, at church, and last but not least in
nourishment, acceptance of authority together with the
discipline of self-denial were at work. That literacy, through
its own structural characteristics (hierarchy, authority,
standardization) accentuated all these peculiarities should at
this time be evident. On special occasions, accounted for in the
overall efficiency of effort, nourishment became celebration. It
was integrated in the calendar of events through which authority
was acknowledged: Sabbath, religious holidays, and political
celebrations were motives for a better, or at least different,
menu. Other days were meant to raise the awareness of self-denial
(fish on Friday, for instance).

The cook did not necessarily become a literate person, but he or
she was a product of the literate environment of practical
experiences of pre-industrial and industrial societies. The
tools and the culture of spices, ingredients, matching food and
dishes, of expressing social status in the dinnerware set out,
and the meal, i.e., the structure of the entire statement which
a meal constitutes were all subjected to literacy. Labor
division made the cook necessary, while simultaneously
generating an industrial culture of food. In the equation of the
labor market in industrial society, with literacy as its
underlying structure, eating equals maintenance of productive
and reproductive power. It also means the reproduction of needs
at an increasing scale, as well as their change from needs to
desires triggering the expansion of industrial production.

In the expectations associated with food there is more than only
the voice of hunger. Our system of values, as it was articulated
in the literate use of language, is expressed in our hunger, and
in our particular ways to satisfy it. Based on this observation,
we acknowledge that all the forces at work in structuring
democratic social relations also affect the socialization of our
nourishment. Uniform quality, and access to this common
denominator quality, are introduced in the market, and with them
the possibility of stating and maintaining health standards.
Within the boundaries of the civilization of literacy and its
associated hygiene and health standards, there is little left
that can be identified with the country home that cannot be
industrialized and made uniformly available. Beyond these
boundaries starts a new reality of expectations, of transcended
needs, and of technological means to satisfy them within
standards of quality that reinforce the notion of democracy.

The identity of food

It is the act of mixing ingredients, boiling or stir-frying them,
and the preparation of everything, the testing of different
proportions, of new ingredients, of new combinations that
results in the food we care for so much. The awareness of the
entire process during which humans distanced themselves from
nature is reduced in our understanding to some simple facts:
instead of devouring the hunted animal, humans cooked it,
preserved some parts for other days, learned how to combine
various sources of nutrition (animal and plant), noticed what
was good for the body and the mind. What is generally not
accounted for is the fact that the break from the direct source
of food to the experience of preparing is simultaneous with the
emergence and establishment of language. Consequent changes are
the use of methods for preserving, the continuous expansion of
the food repertory (sources of nourishment), the development of
better artifacts for increasing the efficiency of production and
preparation of foods, and industrial processing. These changes
parallel differentiations in the status of language-based
practical experiences: the appearance of writing, the emergence
of education, progress in crafts, the pragmatic of industrial
society.

With the experience of literacy, human awareness of food
experienced as a necessity, and as an expression of human
personality and identity, increases. Claude Lévi-Strauss, among
others, forcefully dealt with this subject. The basic idea-of
human dimensions expressed in nourishment-becomes more
significant today. None of the many writers infatuated with the
subject have noticed that once the limits of literacy, as
limits of the pragmatics that made it necessary, are reached, we
transcend the age of McDonalds, of synthetic nutritional
substances, and of an infinity of prefabricated foods. This is
also the age of endless variations and combinations. The human
personality and identity are more difficult to characterize. It
is expressed in our nourishment, as well as in how we
dress-choosing from an infinity of available cloths-our sexual
behavior- free to experiment in ever-expanding possibilities:
patterns of family life, education, art, and communication. The
infinity of choices available in the civilization of illiteracy
eradicates any center, and to some extent undermines commonalty,
even at the level of the species.

In this civilization, the investment in self is less
community-related and more an act of individual choice. These
choices are embodied in precise, customized diets based on
individual requirements as defined by dietitians. Computer
programs control personalized recipes and the production of any
meal or menu. The balance of time and energy has changed
totally. Experiences of work, free time, and fitness mix. The
clear borderline between them is progressively blurred. It is
not clear whether one burns more calories today in jogging than
in working, but it is clear that discipline, in particular that
of self-denial, is replaced by unpredictable self-indulgence.
Consequently, to maintain the body's integrity, individual diet
and exercise programs are generated, given a new focus through
the transition from the economy of scarcity to that of
consumption. Illiterate subjects accept that the market decide
for them what and when and how to eat, as well as what to wear,
with whom to pair, and how to feel. The appearance is that of
self-determination. Independence and responsibility are not
instant-mix experiences. Whether embodied in fast food chains, in
microwave nourishment, in the television cooking shows, there is
an illusion of self-determination, continuously reinforced in
the seductive reality of a segmented world of competing partial
literacies.

The appearance is that one can choose from many literacies,
instead of being forced into one. The fact is that we are chosen
in virtue of having our identity constituted and confirmed
within the pragmatic context. Awareness of and interaction with
nature, already affected in the previous age of industrial
processing of basic foods, are further eroded. The immediate
environment and the sources of nutrition it provides are
assimilated in the picture of seasonless and context-free
shelves at the supermarket. Space (where does the food come
from?) and time (to which season does it correspond?)
distinctions, accounted for so precisely in literacy, dissolve in
a generic continuum. One does not need to be rich to have access
to what used to be the food of those who could afford it. One
does not need to be from a certain part of the world to enjoy
what used to be the exotic quality of food. Time and space shrink
for the traveler or TV viewer, as they shrink for the
supermarket patron. They shrink even more for the increasing
number of people shopping through the World Wide Web, according
to formulas custom designed for them. With brand recognition,
brands become more important than the food. The rhythms of
nature and the rhythm of work and life are pulled further apart
by the mediating mechanisms of marketing. The natural identity of
food vanishes in the subsequent practical experience of
artificial reality. There is little that distinguishes between a
menu designed for the team of the space shuttle, for the
military personnel in combat far from home, and the energy
calculations for a machine. A little artificial taste of turkey
for Thanksgiving, or the cleverly simulated smell of apple pie,
makes the difference.

The language of expectations

Beasts of habit, people expect some reminders of taste and
texture even when they know that what they eat or drink is the
result of a formula, not of natural processes. This is why the
almost fat-free hamburger, devised in laboratories for people in
need of nourishment adapted to new conditions of life and work,
will succeed or fail not on the basis of calories, but on the
simulation of the taste of the real thing. This is how the new
Coke failed. Non-alcoholic beer and wine, fat- and sugar-free ice
cream, low cholesterol egg, vegetable ham, and all substitutes
for milk, butter, and cream, to list a few, are in the same
situation. In the fast lane of the civilization of illiteracy, we
expect fast food: hamburgers, fish, chicken, pizza, and Chinese,
Indian, Mexican, Thai, and other foods. The barriers of time and
space are overcome through pre-processing, microwave ovens, and
genetic engineering. But we do not necessarily accept the
industrial model of mass production, reminiscent of literacy
characteristics quite different from those of home cooking.

We cannot afford those long cooking cycles, consuming energy and
especially time, that resulted in what some remember as the
kitchen harmony of smell and taste, as well as in waste and
dubious nutritional value, one should add. A McDonalds
hamburger is close to the science fiction image of a world
consuming only the energy source necessary for functioning. But
the outlet reminds one of machines. It is still a manned
operation, with live operators, geared to offer a uniform
industrial quality. However, the literate structure gives way to
more effective functioning. At intervals defined by a program
continuously tracking consumption, the restaurant is stocked with
the pre-processed items on the menu. None of the cooks needs to
know how to write or read; food preparation is on-line, in real
time. And if the requirements of the pragmatics of the
civilization of illiteracy overcome the current industrial
model, the new McDonalds will be able to meet individual
expectations no less restricted than those of the Internet
pizza providers. If this does not happen, McDonalds and its many
imitators in the world will disappear, just as many of the mass
production food manufacturers have already disappeared.

The mediating nature of the processes involved in nourishment is
revealing. Between the natural and artificial sources of
protein, fats, sugar, and other groups recommended for a
balanced meal and the person eating them with the expectation of
looking, feeling, and performing better, of living longer and
healthier, there are many layers of processing, controlling, and
measuring. Many formulas for preparation follow each other, or
are applied in parallel cycles. After we made machines that
resemble humans, we started treating ourselves as machines. The
digital engine stands for the brain, pump for the heart,
circuits for the nervous system. They are all subjected to
maintenance cycles, clean sources of energy, self-cleaning
mechanisms, diagnostic routines. The end product of food
production-a customized pizza, taco, egg roll, hamburger,
gefilte fish-resembles the "real thing," which is produced at the
lowest possible cost in a market in which literate food is a
matter of the past, a subject of reminiscence.

The new dynamics of change and the expectation of adaptability
and permanence associated with the nourishment of the
civilization of literacy collide at all levels involved in our
need to eat and drink. What results from this conflict are the
beautiful down-sized kitchens dominated by the microwave oven,
the new cookware adapted to the fast food and efficient
nourishment, the cooking instructions downloaded from the
digital network into the kitchen. The interconnectedness of the
world takes rather subtle aspects when it comes to food.
Microwave ovens can perfectly be seen as peripheral devices
connected to the smart kitchens of the post-industrial age, all
set to feed us once we push the dials that will translate a
desire, along with our health profile, into a code number.
Three-quarters of all American households (Barbie's included) use
a microwave oven. And many of them are bound to become an address
on the Internet, as other appliances already are.

The conflict between literate and illiterate nourishment is also
documented by the manner in which people write, draw, film,
televise, and express themselves about cooking and related
matters. This addresses the communication aspects of the
practical experience of what and how we eat. The people who could
go to their back yard for fresh onions or cabbage, get meat from
animals they hunted or tended, or milk their own cow or goat,
belong to a pragmatic framework different from that of people
who buy produce, meat, cheese, and canned and frozen food in a
small store or a supermarket. To communicate experiences that
vanished because of their low efficiency is an exercise in
history or fiction. To communicate current experiences in
nourishment means to acknowledge mediation, distribution of
tasks, networking, and open-endedness as they apply to
communication and the way we feed ourselves or are fed by
others. It also means to acknowledge a different quality.

Once upon a time, writing on food and dining was part of
literature. Food authorities have been celebrated as writers.
But with the advent of nourishment strategies, literate writing
gave way to a prose of recipes almost as idiosyncratic as
recipes for the mass production of soap, or cookbooks for
programming. Some gourmets complained. Food experts suggested
that precision was as good for cooking as temperature gauges.
The understanding of how close the act of cooking is to writing
about it, or, in our days to the tele-reality of the kitchen, or
to the new interactive gadgets loaded with recipes for the
virtual reality cooking game, is often missing. When conditions
for exercising fantasy in the kitchen are no longer available,
fantasy deserts the food pages and moves into the scripts of the
national gourmet video programs and computer games-or on Web
sites. Moreover, when predetermined formulas for bouillons,
salad dressings, cakes, and puddings replace the art of selecting
and preparing, the writing disappears behind the information
added according to regulation, as vitamins are added to milk and
cereals. A super-cook defines what is appropriate, and the
efficient formula turns our kitchens into private processing
plants ensuring the most efficient result. What is gained is the
possibility to assemble meals in combinations of nutritional
modules and to integrate elements from all over the world
without the risk of more than a new experience for our taste
buds. From the industrial age, we inherited processing
techniques guaranteeing uniformity of flavor and standards of
hygiene. The price we pay for this is the pleasure, the
adventure, the unique experience. Food writing is based on the
assumptions of uniformity. In contrast, cooking shows started
exploring the worlds of technological progress, in which you
don't cook because you are hungry or need to feed your family.
You do it for competitive reasons, in order to achieve
recognition for mastering new utensils and learning the names of
new ingredients. In the post-industrial, the challenge is to
break into the territory of innovation and ascertain practical
experiences of cooking, presentation, and eating, freed from
literate constraints.

Coping with the right to affluence

Pragmatic frameworks are not chosen, like food from a menu or
toppings from a list. Practical experiences of human
self-constitution within a pragmatic framework are the concrete
embodiments of belonging to such a pragmatics. A new pragmatic
framework negates the previous one, but does not eliminate it.
Although these points were made in earlier chapters, there is a
specific reason for dealing with them again here. As opposed to
other experiences, nourishment is bound to involve more elements
of continuity than science or the military. As we have already
seen, literacy-based forms of preparing and eating food exist
parallel to illiterate nourishment. This is the reason why some
peculiar forms of social redistribution of food need to be
discussed.

From self-nourishment to being fed

Humanized eating and drinking come with moral values attached to
them, foremost the rule of sharing. Pragmatic rules regarding
cleanliness, waste, and variation in diet are also part of the
experience of nourishment. These associated elements- values,
expectations, rules-are rarely perceived as constituting an
extension of the practical experience through which humanity
distinguishes itself from sheer naturalness. Literacy
appropriates the rules and expectations that acknowledge and
support ideals and values. Once expressed in the literate text,
however, they appear to be extraneous to the process. Changes in
the condition of religion, civic education, family, and the
legal code, as well as progress in biology, chemistry, and
genetics, create the impression and expectation that we can
attach to food whatever best suits the situation morally or
practically. The self-control and self-denial of previous
pragmatic contexts are abandoned for instant gratification.

In the competitive context of the new pragmatics that renders
literacy useless, the sense of a right to affluence developed.
Parallel to this, institutions, founded on literacy-based
experiences, were set up to control equity and distribution.
Against the background of high efficiency that the new
pragmatics made possible, competition is replaced by controlled
distribution, and the experience of self-nourishment is replaced
by that of being fed. Absorbed by tax-supported social programs,
the poor, as well as others who chose giving up responsibility
for themselves, are freed from projecting their biological and
cultural identity in the practical experience of taking care of
their own needs. Thus part of the morality of eating and
drinking is socialized, in the same manner that literacy is
socialized. At the same time, people's illiteracy expands in the
sphere of nourishment. Today, there are more people than ever who
could not take care of themselves even if all the food in the
world and all the appliances we know of were brought into their
homes. Dependencies resulting from the new status of high
efficiency and distribution of tasks free the human being in
relative terms, while creating dependencies and expectations.

The problem is generally recognized in all advanced countries.
But the answer cannot be so-called welfare reforms that result
only in cutting benefits and tightening requirements. Such
reforms are driven by short-sightedness and political
opportunism. A different perspective is necessary, one that
addresses motivation and the means for pursuing individual
self-constitution as something other than the beneficiary of an
inefficient system. The pragmatics that overrides the need for
literacy is based on individual empowerment. As necessary as
soup kitchens are under conditions of centralism and hierarchy,
the dissemination of knowledge and skills that individuals need
in order to be able to provide for themselves is much more
important.

Run and feed the hungry

"Sponsorship for a charitable track event. Funds for Third World
countries threatened by starvation sought. Register support
through your donations." And on a nice sunny weekend, many
kind-hearted individuals will run miles around a city or swim
laps in a pool in order to raise funds for organizations such as
CARE, Oxfam, Action Hunger, or Feed the World. Hunger in this
world of plenty, even in the USA and other prosperous countries,
derives from the same dynamics that results in the civilization
of illiteracy. The scale of humankind requires levels of
efficiency for which practical experiences of survival based on
limited resources are ill suited. Entire populations are
subjected to hunger and disease due to social and economic
inequities, to weather conditions or topological changes, or to
political upheaval in the area where they live. Short of
addressing inequities, aid usually alleviates extreme situations.
But it establishes dependencies instead of encouraging the best
response to the situation through new agricultural practices,
where applicable, or alternative modes of producing food.

Seduced by our life of plenty and by the dynamics of change, we
could end up ignoring starving and diseased populations, or we
could try to understand our part in the equation. Living in an
integrated world and partaking in the pragmatics of a global
economy, people become prisoners of the here and now, discarding
the very disconcerting reality of millions living in misery. But
it is exactly the pragmatic framework leading to the
civilization of illiteracy that also leads to the enormous
disparities in today's world. Many forces are at work, and the
danger of falling prey to the slogans of failed ideology, while
trying to understand misery and hunger in today's world, cannot
be overestimated. Starvation in Africa, South America, in some
East European countries, and in parts of Asia needs to be
questioned in light of the abundance of food in Japan, West
Europe, and North America. Both extremes correspond to changes in
human self-constitution under expectations of efficiency critical
to the current scale of humankind.

If human activity had not changed and broadened its base of
resources, the entire world would be subject to what Ethiopians,
Sudanese, Somalis, Bangladeshis, and many others are facing.
Extreme climatic conditions, as well as decreasing fertility of
the land due usually to bad farming practices, can be overcome by
new farming methods, progress in agricultural technology,
biogenetics, and chemistry. Spectacular changes have come about
in what is considered the most traditional practice through
which humans constitute their identity. The change affected ways
of working, family relations, use of local resources, social and
political life, and even population growth. It resulted in a new
set of dependencies among communities that had afforded autarchic
modes of existence for thousands of years. The environment, too,
has been affected probably as much by scientific and
technological progress as by the new farming methods that take
full advantage of new fertilizers, insecticides, and genetic
engineering of new plants and animals.

Motivated by literacy-based ideals, some countries took it upon
themselves to see that people in less developed lands be
redeemed through benefits they did not expect and for which they
were not prepared. At the global levels of humankind, when the
necessity of literacy declines, dependencies characteristic of
literacy-based interactions collide with forces of integration
and competition. What results is a painful compromise. Hunger is
acknowledged and tended to by enormous bureaucracies: churches,
charities, international aid organizations, and institutions more
concerned with themselves than with the task at hand. They
maintain dependencies that originated within the pragmatics of
the civilization of literacy. The activities they carry out are
inherently inefficient. Where the new dynamics is one of
differentiation and segmentation, the main characteristics of
these experiences are those of literacy: establishment of a
universal model, the attempt to reach homogeneity, tireless
effort to disseminate modes of existence and work of a
sequential, analytic, rationalistic, and deterministic nature.
Consequently, where nourishment from the excess attained
elsewhere is dispensed, a way of life alien to those in need is
projected upon them.

Aid, even to the extent that it is necessary, re-shapes biology,
the environment, the connection among people, and each
individual. Diseases never before experienced, behavioral and
mental changes, and new reliances are generated, even in the name
of the best intentions. In some areas affected by starvation,
tribal conflicts, religious intolerance, and moral turpitude add
to natural conditions not propitious to life. These man-made
conditions cannot and should not veil the fact that human
creativity and inventiveness are prevented from unfolding,
replaced by ready-made solutions, instead of being stimulated.
Empowerment means to facilitate developments that maintain
distinctions and result from differences, instead of uniformity.

Would all the populations facing hunger and disease actually jump
from the illiteracy of the past-a result of no school system or
limited access to education, as well as of a pragmatics that did
not lead to literacy-to the pragmatically determined illiteracy
of the future? The pragmatic framework of our new age corresponds
to the need to acknowledge differences and derive from
heterogeneity new sources of creativity. Each ton of wheat or
corn airlifted to save mothers and children is part of the
missionary praxis commenced long ago when religious organizations
wanted to save the soul of the so-called savage. The answer to
hunger and disease cannot be only charity, but the effort to
expand networks of reciprocally significant work. The only
meaningful pragmatics derives from practical experiences that
acknowledge differences instead of trying to erase them. Access
to resources for more effective activities is fundamentally
different from access to surplus or to bureaucratic mechanisms
for redistribution.

Where literacy never became a reality, no organization should
take it upon itself to impose it as the key to survival and well
being. Our literacy-based medicine, nourishment, social life,
and especially values are not the panacea for the world, no
matter how proud we are of some, and how blind to their
limitations. Human beings have sufficient means today to afford
tending to differences instead of doing away with them. In this
process, we might learn about that part of nourishment that was
rationalized away in the process of reaching higher levels of
efficiency. And we might find new resources in other
environments and in the peculiar self-constitution of peoples we
consider deprived-resources that we could integrate into our
pragmatics.

No truffles (yet) in the coop

Our civilization of illiterate nourishment is based on networks
and distributed assignments. The change from self-reliance to
affluence corresponds, first and foremost, to the change of the
pragmatic context within which the human condition is defined.
We project a physical reality-our body-that has changed over time
due to modifications in our environment, and the transition from
practical experiences of survival to the experience of
abundance. The room for invention and spontaneity expands the
more we discover and apply rules that guarantee efficiency or
limit those preventing it. There might be several dozens of
sauces one can select from, and no fewer cereals for breakfast,
many types of bread, meat, fish, and very many preprocessed
menus. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that all taste
alike. But it would not necessarily be false to ascertain that
behind diversity there are a limited number of changing
formulas, some better adapted to succeed in the marketplace than
others, and some better packaged than others.

Yes, people are nostalgic. More precisely, people are subjected
to the nostalgia- triggering stimuli of mass media: the
attraction of the homemade, homestyle, Mom's secret recipe.
This is not because the majority of us know what these icons of
the past are, but rather because we associate them with what is
no longer possible: reassurance, calm, tradition, protection,
permanence, care. We also hear the voices of those who demystify
the literate cooking of yesteryear: women spent their lifetime
slaving in their kitchens. They did so, the argument goes, to
satisfy males, only too happy to be taken care of. Both voices,
those idealizing and those demystifying the past, should be
heard: We enslaved part of nature and took it upon ourselves to
annihilate animals or, worse, change their genetic structure. In
order to satisfy our appetites, we sacrificed the environment.
And, giving in to gluttony, we effectively changed our genetic
constitution. The truth, if there is any above and beyond the
cultural and economic conditions of cooking, is that transitions
from one scale of humankind to another subjected practical
experiences of self-constitution to fundamental modifications.
Trying to understand some of the patterns of life and work, as
well as patterns of access to food or of preparing it, requires
that we understand when and why such changes take place.

Language stored not only recipes, but also expectations that
became part of our nourishment. The culture of food preparation
and serving, the art of discovering new recipes and enjoying
what we eat and drink, is more than language can convey.
Truffles, the food of kings and nobles, and more recently of
those who can afford them, bear a whole history, obviously
expressed in language. Whether seen as the spit of witches, a
more or less magic aphrodisiac, or a miraculous life-prolonging
food, truffles gain in status because our experience, reflected
in the language pertinent to cooking, led us to regard them from
a perspective different from those who first discovered, by
accident, their nutritive value. It is in the tradition of
orality that fathers whispered to their sons the secret of
places where truffles could be found. Practical experiences
involving writing, and later literacy, raised the degree of
expectancy associated with their consumption. They affected the
shift regarding the eating of truffles from the sphere of the
natural (the pigs that used to find them, and liked them
probably as much as the gourmets, had to be replaced by
specially trained dogs) to the realm of the cultural, where the
interests of human beings prevail over anything else. Through
language processes paralleled by the semiosis of high
gastronomy, truffles enter the market as sign-of a
discriminating palate, of snobbery, or of actually knowing why
truffles are good.

Language and food interact. This interaction involves other sign
systems, too: images, sounds, movements, texture, odor, taste.
Through the influence of language and these other sign systems,
the preparation of food and the appropriate drinks becomes an
art. In the age of illiteracy, the languages of genetics,
biology, and medicine make us aware of what it takes to avoid
malnutrition, what it takes to maintain health and prolong one's
life. Literacy was reinforced in the convention of how people
eat, what, when, and how satisfaction or disappointment was
expressed. In our new nutritional behavior and in our new
values, literacy plays a marginal role (including interaction at
the dining table). The artificial truffle is free of the mystique
of origin, of the method for finding truffles, of secret
formulas (except the trade secret). It is one item among many,
cheap, illusory, and broadly available, as democratic as
artificial caviar or, as Rousseau would have put it, government
by representation.

Identical in so many ways, the cafeterias that extend an
industrial model in a post-industrial context feed millions of
people based on a formula of standardization. Hierarchies are
wiped away. This is no place for truffles. One gets his tray and
follows those who arrived before. There is no predetermined
sequence. All that remains is the act of selection and the
execution of the transaction-an exercise in assemblage not far
removed from composing your own pizza on a computer monitor. When
the language of available nourishment is standardized to the
extent that it is in these feeding environments-elegant coops
stocked with shining metal coffee, tea, and soda dispensers,
refrigerated containers of sandwiches, cake, fruit-the language
of expectations will not be much richer. The increased
efficiency made possible this way accounts for the wide
acceptance of this mediocre, illiterate mode of nourishing
ourselves.

We are what we eat

If we were to analyze the language associated with what, how,
when, where, and why we eat, we would easily notice that this
language is tightly connected to the language of our
identification. We are what, how, why, when, and where we eat.
This identification changed when agriculture started and
families of languages ascertained themselves. It changed again
when the pragmatic framework required writing, and so on until
the identity of the literate person and the post-literate emerged
from practical experiences characteristic of a new scale of
human experiences. Today we are, for quite a broad range of our
social life, an identification number of a sort, an address, and
other information in a database (income, investment, wealth, debt
history) that translates into what marketing models define as
our individual expectations. Information brokers trade us
whenever someone is interested in what we can do for him or her.
Powerful networks of information processing can be used to
precisely map each person to the shelf surface available in
stores, to the menus of restaurants we visit on various
occasions, and to the Internet sites of our journeys in
cyberspace. Our indexical signs serve as indicators for various
forms of filtering calories (how many do we really need?), fats
(saturated or not), proteins, sugars, even the aesthetics of food
presentation, in order to exactly match individual needs and
desires. Scary or not, one can even imagine how we will get
precisely what best suits our biological system, influenced by
the intensity of the tennis game (virtual) we just finished, the
TV program we watched for the last 30 seconds, or the work we
are involved in. To make this happen is a task not so much
different from receiving our customized newspaper or only the
information we want through Pointscape, saving our monitors from
excessive heat and saving us time from useless searches.

In the pragmatic framework where illiteracy replaces literacy,
eating and drinking are freed from the deterministic chain of
survival and reproduction. They are made part of a more
encompassing practical experience. Each time we take a bite from
a hot dog or sandwich, each time we enjoy ice cream, drink wine
or beer or soda, take vitamins or add fiber to our diet, we
participate in two processes: the first, of revising
expectations, turning what used to be a necessity into luxury;
the second, of continuous expansion of the global market present
through what we eat and drink. Many transactions are embodied in
our daily breakfast, business lunch, or TV dinner. With each bite
and gulp (as with each other product consumed), we are
incorporated into the dynamics of expanding the market. The
so-called Florida orange juice contains frozen concentrate from
Brazil. The fine Italian veal microwave dinner contains meat
from Romania. The wildflower honey "Made in Germany" is from
Hungarian or Polish beehives. Bread, butter, cheese, cold cuts,
jams, and pasta could be marked with the flag of the United
Nations if all the people involved in producing them were to be
acknowledged. Meat, poultry, fruits, and vegetables, not unlike
everything else traded in the global market, make for an
integrated world in which the most efficient survives in the
competition for pleasing if not our taste, at least our
propensity to buy.

The efficiency reached in the pragmatic framework of illiteracy
allows people to maintain, within the plurality of languages, a
plurality of dietary experiences, some probably as exotic as the
literacy of ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Aramaic, or cuneiform
writing. Even the recipes of the Roman Empire can be enjoyed in
exclusive settings (as in Saint-Bernard-de-Comminges in the
Pyrénées) or as haute, ready-made cuisine (the Comptesse du
Barry food company offers wild boar in spicy sauce, stuffed duck
in ginger, and sea trout with wild leeks). The Japanese have
their sushi prepared from resuscitated fish flown, in a state of
anabiosis (organic rhythm slowed through refrigeration), from
wherever the beloved delicacies are still available.

The multiplicity of food-related experiences in our time is
representative of segmentation and heterogeneity in the
civilization of illiteracy. It is also an expression of the
subtle interdependencies of the many aspects of human
self-constitution. The democracy of nourishment and the
mediocrity of food are not necessarily a curse. Neither are the
extravagant performances of artist-cooks that fetch a price
equivalent to the average annual salary of a generic citizen of
this integrated world. Difference makes a difference. Feminism,
multiculturalism, political activism (from right to left)-all use
arguments related to how and what we eat, as part of the broader
how and why we live, to advance their causes. If nothing else,
the civilization of illiteracy makes possible choices, including
those pertinent to nourishment, for which we are ill prepared.
The real challenge is still ahead of us. And no one knows how it
tastes.

The Professional Winner

The connections between sports and literacy are far from
obvious. Watching sports events, as a spectator in the stadium,
or in front of the television, does not require the literacy we
associate with libraries, reading and writing, and school
education. One does not need to read in order to see who is
fastest, strongest, or jumps the farthest or highest, or throws
or catches the best. And one does not really need to be literate
in order to become a champion or to make it into a first-league
team. Running, jumping, pushing, throwing, catching, and kicking
are part of our physical repertory, related to our day-to-day
existence, easy to associate with ways through which survival
took place when scavenging, hunting, fishing, and foraging were
the fundamental ways for primitive beings to feed themselves and
to avoid being killed. Even the association of sports and with
mytho-magical ceremonies implying physical performance is easy
to explain without reference to language, oral or written.
Exceptional physical characteristics were, and still are in some
parts of the world, celebrated as expressions of forces beyond
immediate control and understanding. Gods were worshipped
through exceptional physical feats performed by people
worshipping them. In archaic cultures, athletes could even be
sacrificed on the altar of gratitude, where the best were
destined to please the gods.

The initial phases of what was eventually called sport correspond
to establishing those sign systems (gestures, sounds, shapes)
which, in anticipation of language, made language possible and
necessary. This was a phase of syncretism, during which the
physical projection of the human being dominated the intellect.
Running after an animal or from one, and running for play are
different forms of human experience corresponding to different
pragmatic contexts. They have different motivations and
different outcomes. Probably 20,000 years separate these two
experiences in time. In order to reach the level of generality
and abstraction that a competition embodies, the human being had
to undergo experiences of self-constitution within which the
domination of physical over intellectual characteristics changed
drastically. The qualifier sport-a word which seems to have
ascended within the English language of the 19th
century-probably came about in the framework of the division
between secular and non-secular forms of human praxis. Both
maintenance and improvement of the human biological endowment
and mytho-magical practice were based on awareness of the role
the body plays and the recognition of the practical need to
disseminate this awareness. Efficiency was the governing aspect,
not recognized as such, not conceptualized, but acknowledged in
the cult of the body and the attempt to make it part of the
shared culture. The contest (for which the Greeks used the words
athlos) and the prize (athlon, which eventually led to the word
athlete) embody generalizations of those practical situations
through which survival and well-being came about.

As a complex experience, sports involves rational and irrational
components. This is why approaching the relation between
literacy and sports, one has to account for both dimensions.
Sports is approached here from the perspective of the changes
through which it became what it is today: a well defined form of
relaxation, but probably more a competitive type of work
acknowledged in the market like any other product of human
practice.

The immediate connection between physical fitness and the outcome
of practical experiences dominated by physical aspects was
established within very limited, but strongly patterned,
activity. It soon became the measure of survival success, and
thus the rationality shared by the community experiencing the
survival of the fittest is reflected in competition. Athletes
competed in order to please gods; to conjure fertility, rain, or
the extension of life; or to expel demons. The process is
documented in a variety of petroglyphs (cave paintings,
engravings on stone) and in carvings or etchings on animal horn
and metal, as well as in the first written testimony, in which
the role of the stronger, the faster, the more agile was
evinced. Documents from all known cultures, regardless of their
geographic coordinates, have in common the emphasis on the
physical as it acquired a symbolic status.

To understand how some biological characteristics improved
chances of survival means to understand the rationality of the
body. Its embodiment in the culture of physical awareness
facilitated practical experiences of human self-constitution that
would result in sports professions. The irrational element has to
do with the fact that although all males and all females are
structurally the same, some individuals seem better endowed
physically. As with many other aspects of the practical
experience through which each person acknowledges his or her
identity, what could not be clarified was placed in a domain of
explanations where the rationality is lost. This is why
expectations of rain, of longer life, of chasing away evil forces
are associated with sports. The cult of the body, in particular
of body parts, resulted from experiences leading to awareness of
oneself. When the body, or parts of it, became a goal in itself,
the rationality of physical fitness for survival is contradicted
by the irrationality of fitness for reasons other than
individual and communal well-being. Rituals, myths, religion, and
politics appropriated the irrational component of physical
activities. In ancient communities, in the context of a limited
understanding of physical phenomena, attempts were made to infer
from the immediate well-being of the body of competing athletes
to the future well-being of the entire community.

When it comes to physical fitness in the context of survival of
the fittest, can we suppose that a lone human being stands out,
something like the lonely animals on their own until the time
for pairing comes, competing with others, killing and being
killed? Probably not. Scale defines the species as one that
ascertains its self-constitution in cooperative efforts, no
matter how primitive. Up to a certain scale, the only competition
was for survival. It translated into food and offspring. Only
after the agricultural phase, which corresponds to a level of
efficiency of more food than immediately necessary, the element
of competition shifts from survival to ascertainment.
Competition and expectations of performance correspond to the
period of incipient writing, and were progressively acknowledged
as part of the dynamics of communal life. Every other change in
the role of humankind brought with it expectations of physical
fitness corresponding to expected levels of efficiency.

Sports and self-constitution

Gymnastics is an expression of the cult of the body parallel to
that of art. In order to realize its dimensions, it needs to be
seen from this broader perspective, not as a random set of
exercises. It has a physical and a metaphysical dimension, the
latter related to the obsession with ideal proportions that
eventually were expressed in philosophic terms. There are plenty
of explanations to be considered for both the origin of the
practical experience of sports and the forms this experience took
over centuries. Alluding to some explanations, though not in
order to endorse them, will help to show how diversity of sports
experiences resulted in diversity of interpretations.

The basic assumption of this entire book, human self-constitution
in practical experiences, translates into the statement that
sports is not a reflective but a constitutive experience.
Indeed, through running, jumping, wrestling, or otherwise
participating in some game, human beings project themselves
according to physical characteristics and mental coordination
that facilitate physical performance in the reality of their
existence. This projection is a direct way of identifying oneself
and thus of becoming part of an interacting group of people. The
majority of researchers studying the origins of sports identify
these in the experience of survival, thus placing them in the
Darwinian evolutionist frame. When survival skills, maintenance,
and reproduction skills become distinct and relatively
autonomous, they follow recurrent patterns on whose basis social
practice takes place and new ideas are formulated.

From the perspective of today's jogger, running might seem an
individual experience, and to a great extent it is. But
fundamentally, running as a practical experience takes place
among people sharing the notion of physical exercise and
attaching to it social, cultural, economic, and medical meaning.
We create ourselves not only when we write poetry, tend land, or
manufacture machines, but also when we are involved in athletic
experiences. There is in sports, as there is in any other form of
practical experience, a natural, a cultural (what we learn from
others and create with others), and a social (what is known as
communication) dimension. The sports experience appears to us as
the result of the coordination of all these elements. For
someone attending a sports event, this coordination can become an
object of description: this much is due to training, this much
to natural attributes, and this much to social implications
(pride, patriotism). This is why sports events sometimes appear
to the spectator as having a predetermined meaning, not one
resulting from the dynamics of the interaction characteristic of
this human experience. In the mytho-magical stage of human
dynamics, in which the ability of the body was celebrated, the
meaning seemed to drive the entire event more than it occurs
today in a game of hockey or football. Due to the syncretic
nature of such events, rituals addressed existence in its
perceived totality. The specialized nature of games such as
hockey or football leads these to address only one aspect of
existence-the experience of the particular sport. A game can
degenerate from being a competition structured by rules to a
confrontation of nerves, violence, or national pride, or into
sheer exhibitionism, disconnected from the drive for victory.

Although the physical basis for the practical experience of
sports is the same- human beings as they evolved in time-in
different cultures, different recurrent patterns and different
meanings attached to them can be noticed. This statement does not
align itself with explanations of sports given in Freudian
tradition, Marxist theory, or in Huizinga's model of the human
being as playful man (Homo Ludens). It takes into consideration
the contextual nature of any form of human practice and looks at
sports, as it does at any human experience, from the perspective
of a constitutional, not representational, act; in short, from
the pragmatic perspective. When Japanese players kick a ball in
the game called kemari, the recurrent pattern of interaction is
not the familiar football or soccer game, although each player
constitutes his identity in the performance. When the Zen archer
tenses his bow, the pattern, associated with the search for
unity with the universe, is quite different from the pattern of
archery in Africa or of the archery competition at the Olympic
games of the past. The ball games of the Mayans relied on a
mythology which was itself a projection of the human being in
quest of explaining and finding an answer to what distinguishes
the sun from the moon and how their influence affects patterns
of human practice. It is probably easier to look at the
recurrent patterns of interaction of more recent sports
experiences not rooted in the symbolism of the ancient, such as
baseball, aquatic dancing, or ice skating, to understand what
aspect of the human being is projected and what kind of
experience results for the participants (athletes, sports fans,
public, media). The surprising reality is the diversity. People
never exhaust their imagination in devising new and newer forms
of competition involving their physical aptitude. No less
surprising is the pursuit of a standard experience, modeled in
rules for the competition. Some are intrinsic to the effort (the
rules of the game), others to the appearance (expected clothing,
for instance). Parallel to the standard experience, there is
also a deviant practice of sports (nonstandard), in forms of
individual rules, ad hoc conventions, private competition. The
social level of sports and the private level are loosely
connected. To become a professional means, among other things,
to accept the rules as they apply in the standard experience,
within organizations or acknowledged competition. The language
professional is pretty much in a similar situation. Literacy
serves as the medium for encoding the rules.

Language and physical performance

But the subject here is not the similarity between sports and
language, butrather their interrelation. The obvious entry point
is to notice that we use language to describe the practical
experience of sport and to assign meaning to it. As obvious as
this is, it is also misleading in the sense that it suggests
that sports would not be possible without language-an idea
implicit in the ideal of literacy. In ages when written language
emerged, sporting events become part of social life. Visual
representation (such as petroglyphs and the later
hieroglyphics), while not exactly a statement about the
awareness of exercise, contain enough elements to confirm that
not only immediate, purposeful physical activity (running after
a wild animal, for instance) and the exercise and maintenance of
the physical were, at least indirectly, acknowledged. Testimony
to the effect that at a certain moment in time the community
started providing for the physically talented-in the tombs of
the Egyptian Pharaoh Beni Hasan the whole gamut of wrestling is
documented in detail-helps us understand that labor division and
increased efficiency are in a relation that goes far beyond cause
and effect. The specialization, which probably started at that
time, resulted not just from the availability of resources, but
also from the willingness to allocate them in ways that make the
sports experience possible because a certain necessity was
acknowledged.

The pattern of kicking a ball in kemari and the pattern of
language use in the same culture are not directly connected.
Nevertheless, the game has a configurational nature: the aim is
to maintain the ball in the air for as long as possible. Soccer,
even football, are sequential: the aim is to score higher than
the opposing team. In the first case, the field is marked by
four different trees: willow, cherry, pine, and maple. In the
second, it is marked by artificial boundaries outside of which
the game rules become meaningless. The languages of the cultures
in which such games appeared are characterized by different
structures that correspond to very different practical
experiences. The logic embodied in each language system affects,
in turn, the logic of the sports experience. Kemari is not only
non-predicative and configurational, but also infused by the
principle of amé, in which things are seen as deeply
interdependent. Soccer and football are analytical, games of
planning, texts whose final point is the goal or the touchdown.
No surprise then, that mentality, as a form of expressing the
influence of practical experience in some patterned expectation,
plays a role, too.

There are many extremely individualistic forms of competition,
and others of collective effort. While in today's global market
mentality plays a different role than in the past, it still
affects sports in its non-standard form. These and other
differences are relevant to understanding how different
practical experiences constitute different instances of human
objectification, sports being one of these. Even when the sports
instance is disconnected from the experience that made it
necessary, it is still affected by all the structural elements
that define the pragmatic context. Indeed, while there is a
permanency to sports-involvement of the human body-there is also
a large degree of variation corresponding to successive
pragmatic circumstances.

Sport is also a means of expression. During the action, it
externalizes physical capabilities, but also intellectual
qualities: self-control, coordination, planning. Initially,
physical performance complemented rudimentary language.
Afterwards the two took different paths, without actually ever
separating entirely (as the Greek Olympics fully document). When
language reached some of its relative limits, expression through
sports substituted for it: not even the highest literate
expression could capture the drama of competition, the tragedy
of failure, or the sublimity of victory. But more interesting is
what language extracted from the experience of sports. Language
captured characteristics of the sports experience and generalized
them. Through language, they were submitted, in a new form, to
experiences very different from sports: sports for warfare,
athletics for instilling a sense of order, competitions as circus
for the masses. But primarily, people derived from sports the
notion of competitiveness, accepted as a national
characteristic, as well as a characteristic of education, of art,
of the market.

Rationalized in language, the notion of competition introduces
the experience of comparing, later of measuring, and thus opens
the door to the bureaucracy of sports and the institutionalized
aspects we today take for granted. Greeks cared for the winner.
Time-keeping devices were applied to sports later, more
precisely at the time when keeping records became relevant
within the broader pragmatics of documentary ownership and
inheritance. While playing does not require language, writing
helped in establishing uniform rules that eventually defined
games. The institution of playing, represented by organized
competitions, is the result of the institution of literacy, and
reflects pragmatic expectations pertinent to literacy.

In every sports experience, there is a romantic notion of nature
and freedom, reminiscent of the experience of hunting, fishing,
and foraging. But at the same time, sports experiences testify
to changes in the condition of human beings as they relate to
the natural environment, their natural condition, social
environment, and the artificial world resulting from human
practice. Target shooting, or, more recently, Nintendo-type
aiming with laser beams, is at the other end of the gamut. The
circumstances of human experience that made literacy necessary
affected the status of the sports experience as well. The
contest became a product with a particular status; the prize
reflects the sign process through which competition is
evaluated.

Allen Guttman distinguished several characteristics of modern
sports: secularism, equality of opportunity, specialization of
roles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization,
quantification, and quest for records. What he failed to
acknowledge is that such characteristics are not relevant unless
considered in connection to the recurrent patterns of sports
seen against the background of the general pragmatic framework.
Once we make such connections, we notice that efficiency is more
important than the so-called equality of opportunity,
quantification, and bureaucratic organization. The quest for
efficiency appropriate to the new scale of humankind is exactly
what today affects literacy's degree of necessity.

The quest for efficiency in sports becomes evident when we
compare the changes from the very sophisticated, indeed obscure,
rules governing sports performances in ritualistic cultures
(Indian, Chinese, Mayan, Apache) with the tendency to simplify
these rules and make the sports experience as transparent as
possible. When certain African tribes adopted the modern game of
soccer, they placed it in the context of their rituals. The
entire set of premises on which the game is based, and which
pertain to a culture so different from that of the African
tribes, was actually dismissed, and premises of a different
nature were attached as a frame for the adopted game.
Consequently, the Inyanga (witch-doctor) became responsible for
the outcome; the team and supporters had to spend the night
before the game together around a campfire; goats were
sacrificed. In such instances, the ceremony, not the game, is the
recurrent pattern; winning or losing is of secondary importance.
Once such tribes entered literate civilization, the utilitarian
aspect became dominant. If we take European soccer and extend it
to the American game of football, we can understand how new
patterns are established according to conditions of human
practice of a different structural nature. This discussion
cannot be limited to the symbolism of the two games, or of any
other sport. The attached meaning corresponds to the interpreted
practical experience and does not properly substitute for the
recurrent patterns which actually constitute the experience as a
projection of the humans involved.

What is of interest here is that literacy was a powerful
instrument for structuring practical experiences, such as sports
(among others), in the framework of a dynamics of interaction
specific to industrial society. As the cradle of the industrial
age, England is also the place where many sports and experiences
associated with physical exercise started. But once the dynamics
changed, some of the developments that the Industrial Revolution
made necessary became obsolete. An example is national isolation.
Literacy is an instrument of national distinction. By their
nature, sports experiences are, or should be, above and beyond
artificial national boundaries. Still, as past experiences show
(the 1936 Olympics in Berlin was only the climax) and current
experiences confirm (national obsession with medals in more
recent Olympics), sports in the civilization of literacy, like
many other practical experiences, is tainted by nationalism.
Competition often degenerates into an adversarial relation and
conflict. In the physical exercises of ancient Greece, China, or
India, performance was not measured. The patterns were those of
physical harmony, not of comparison; of aesthetics, not of
functionality. In England, sports became an institution, and
performance entered into the record books. Indeed, in England,
the history of competitions was written to justify why sports
were for the upper, educated classes, and should be kept for
amateurs willing to enjoy victory as a reward.

Some games were invented in the environment of the civilization
of literacy and meant to accomplish functions similar to those
fulfilled by literacy. They changed as the conditions of the
practice of literacy changed, and became more and more an
expression of the new civilization of more languages of a limited
domain. In the information age, where much of language is
substituted by other means of expression, sports are an
experience that results primarily in generating data. For someone
attracted by the beauty of a tennis game, the speed of a serve is
of secondary relevance. But after a while, one realizes that
tennis has changed from its literate condition to a condition in
which victory means obliteration of the game. A very strong and
fast serve transforms the game into a ledger of hits and misses.
Quite similar is the dynamics of baseball, football, basketball,
and hockey, all generators of statistics in which the experts
find more enjoyment than from the actual event. The dynamics of
changes in the nature and purpose of sports is related to what
makes the sports experience today another instance in the
process of diversification of languages and the demotion of the
necessity of literacy.

The illiterate champion

The dynamics of the change from the sports experience embodying
the ideal of a harmoniously developed human being to that of
high performance is basically the same as the dynamics of change
behind any other form of human projection. Structurally, it
consists of the transition from direct forms of interaction with
the outside world to more and more mediated interrelations.
Chasing an animal that will eventually be caught and eaten is a
performance directly related to survival. In addition to the
physical aspect, there are other elements that intervene in the
relation hunter-hunted: how to mask the presence of one's odor
from the prey; how to attract game (through noise or lure); how
to minimize energy expended to succeed (where to hit the prey,
and when). Ritual, magic, and superstition were added, but did
not always enhance the outcome.

Running for the maintenance and improvement of physical qualities
is immediate, but still less direct in relation to the outcome
than in hunting. The activity displays an understanding of
connections: What do muscle tone, heartbeat, resilience, and
volition have to do with our life and work, with our health? It
also testifies to our efforts to preserve a certain sense of
time and space (lost in the artificial environments of our homes
or workplaces) and projects sheer physical existence. Running for
pleasure, as we suppose animals do when young and enjoying
security (think about puppies!) is different from running with a
purpose such as hunting an animal, catching someone (friend or
foe), running after a ball, or against a record. Running for
survival is not a specialized experience; running in a war game
implies some specialization; becoming the world champion in
field and track is a specialized effort for whose outcome many
people work. In the first case, the reason is immediate; in the
second, less direct; in the third, mediated in several ways: the
notion of running to compete, the distance accepted by all
involved (athletes, spectators, organizations), the value
attached, the meaning assigned, the means used in training and
diet, the running costume. Before specialization, which is
exclusive commitment to a particular practical experience,
socially acknowledged selection took place. Not everybody had the
physical and mental qualities appropriate to high sports
performance. In the background, the market continuously
evaluates what becomes, to variable degrees, a marketable
product: the champion. In the process, the human being undergoes
alienation, sometimes evinced through pain, other times
ignored-books never read don't hurt. People tend to remember the
festive moments in a champion's life, forgetting what leads to
victory: hard work, difficult choices, numerous sacrifices, and
the hardship inflicted on the bodies and minds engaged in the
effort of extracting the maximum from the athlete.

How literate should an athlete be? The question is not different
from how literate a worker, farmer, engineer, ballerina, or
scientist should be. Sports and literacy used to be tightly
associated in a given context. The entire collegiate sports world
(whose origin in 19th century Britain was already alluded to)
embodies this ideal. Mens sana in corpore sano-a healthy mind in
a healthy body-was understood along the line of the practical
experience involving literacy as a rule for achieving high
efficiency in sports. Some forms of sport are a projection from
language and literacy to the physical experience. Tennis is one
example, and possibly the best known. Such forms of sport were
designed by literates and disseminated through the channels of
literacy. Collegiate sports is their collective name. But once
the necessity of literacy itself became less stringent, such
sports started emancipating themselves from the confinements of
language and developed their own languages. When winning became
the aim, efficiency in specific sports terms became paramount and
started being measured and recorded.

Literates are not necessarily the most efficient in sports where
physical prowess or quick scoring are needed to win: football,
basketball, or baseball, as compared to long-distance running,
swimming, or even the exotic sport of archery. This statement
might seem tainted by stereotype or prejudice to which one falls
prey when generalizing from a distorted past practical
experience (affected by all kinds of rules, including those of
sex and race discrimination). What is discussed here is not the
stereotypical illiterate athlete, or the no less stereotypical
aristocrat handling Latin and his horse with the same elegance,
but the environment of sports in general. People involved in the
practical experience of sports are sometimes seen as
exceptionally endowed physically, and less so intellectually.
This does not have to be so; there is really nothing inherent in
sports that would result in the intellect-physique dichotomy, one
to the detriment of the other. Examples of athletes who also
achieved a high level of intellectual development can be given:
Dr. Roger Bannister, the runner who broke the four-minute mile
barrier; William Bradley, the former basketball player who became
a United States senator; Michael Reed, once defense lineman who
is now a concert pianist; Jerry Lucas, now a writer; Michael
Lenice, a wide receiver who became a Rhodes Scholar. They are,
nevertheless, the exception, not because one kind of experience
is counterproductive to the other, but because the expectations
of efficiency make it very difficult for one and the same person
to perform at comparable levels as athletes and as
intellectuals. Specialization in sports, no less than in any
human activity, requires a focus of energy and talent. Choices,
too, come with a price tag.

While literacy does not result in higher performance in sports, a
limited notion of sports literacy, i.e., control of the language
of sports, allows for improved performance. It is relevant to
analyze how today's sports experience requires the specialized
language and the understanding of what makes higher performance,
and thus higher efficiency, possible. Once sport is understood
as a practical experience of human self- constitution, we can
examine the type of knowledge and skill needed to reach the
highest efficiency. Knowledge of the human body, nutrition,
physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology is important.
Information focused on reaching high performance has been
accumulated for each form of physical exercise. As a result of
the experience itself, as well as through import of pertinent
knowledge from other domains of human activity, expertise
becomes more and more focused. In some ways, the commonalty of
the experience diminished while the specific aspect increased.

For instance, on the basketball court, as we see it in various
neighborhoods, playing is the major goal. Rules are loosely
respected; players exert themselves for the pleasure of the
effort. One meets others, establishes friendships, finds a useful
way of getting physical exercise. On the professional basketball
team, various experts coordinated by a coach make possible an
experience of efficiency predictable to a great extent,
programmable within limits, original to some measure. The effort
to coordinate is facilitated through natural language; but the
expectation of efficiency in achieving a goal-winning the
game-extends beyond the experience constituted in and
communicated through language. Games are minutely diagrammed; the
adversary's plays are analyzed from videotapes; new tactics are
conceived, and new strategies followed. In the end, the language
of the game itself becomes the medium for the new game
objectives. In the last 30 seconds of a very tight game, each
step is calculated, each pass evaluated, each fault (and the
corresponding time) pre-programmed.

Technology mediates and supports sports performance in ways few
would imagine when watching a volleyball team in action or a
runner reaching the finish line. There are ways, not at all
requiring the tools of literacy. To capture recurrent patterns
characteristic of high efficiency performance and to emulate or
improve them, adapt them to the type of sportsperson prepared
for a certain contest, becomes part of the broader experience.
Indeed, boundaries are often broken, rules are bent, and
victories are achieved through means which do not exactly
preserve the noble ideal of equal opportunity or of fairness.

Sports experiences were always at the borderline. A broken rule
became the new rule. Extraneous elements (mystical,
superstitious, medical, technological, psychological) were
brought into the effort to maximize sports performance. The
entire story of drugs and steroids used to enhance athletic
prowess has to be seen from the same perspective of efficiency
against the background of generalized illiteracy. The languages
of stimuli, strategies, and technology are related, even if some
appear less immoral or less dangerous. As drugs become more
sophisticated, it is very difficult to assess which new record
is the result of pure sports and which of biochemistry. And it is
indeed sad to see sportsmen and sportswomen policed in their
private functions in order to determine how much effort, how
much talent, or how much steroid is embodied in a performance.

Stories of deception practiced within the former totalitarian
states of Europe might scare through gruesome detail. People
risked their lives for the illusion of victory and the
privileges associated with it. But after the ideological level is
removed, we face the illiterate attitude of means and methods
intended to extract the maximum from the human being, even at
the price of destroying the person. Whether a state encourages
and supports these means, or a free market makes them available,
is a question of responsibility in the final analysis. Facts
remain facts, and as facts they testify to the commercial
democracy in which one has access to means that bring victory and
reward, just as they bring the desired cars, clothes, houses,
alcohol, food, or art collections. Among the records broken at
the Olympic games in Atlanta is the number of samples collected
for doping control (amounting to almost 20 percent of the number
of athletes).

American football is possibly the first post-modern game in that
it appropriates from the old for use in a new age. Comparing
American football with sports of different pragmatic
frameworks-to tennis, volleyball, or rugby-one can notice the
specialization, mediation, new dynamics, and language of the
game. There are twenty- two positions and special formations for
place kicks, kick-offs, and receiving. There are also support
personnel for different functions: owners, managers, coaches,
trainers, scouts, doctors, recruiters, and agents. The game is
burdened with literacy-based assumptions: it is as totalitarian
as any language, although its elementary repertory is quite
reduced-running, blocking, tackling, catching, throwing, kicking.
Rules implicit in the civilization of literacy-all know the
language and use it according to its rule, sequentiality,
centralism-are observed. The word signal, snap numbers, color
code, and play name are part of the semiosis. It is a minimal
rule experience, which seems a comedy to someone who never
watched it before. The players are dressed in ridiculous gear.
They seem actors in a cheap show, and act according to plans
shared through private code.

As opposed to many games that we can only sketchily retrace to
someplace back in history, we know how all this came about in
American football. The goal was no longer the game, as it was in
its early history as a college sports, but winning. A more
efficient game required more efficient football machines,
specialized in a limited repertory, present only for the
duration of their task. The game acquired a configurational
aspect, takes place at many levels, requires distribution of
tasks, and relies upon networks of communication for maintaining
some sense of integration. Its violence, different from the
staged buffoonery of wrestling, is in sync with the spirit of
belligerence implicit in today's competitive environment: "We
teach our boys to spear and gore.... We want them to plant that
helmet right under a guy's chin." (Woody Hayes, legendary coach
at Ohio State University, better known for its football team than
its academic standards). There is physical involvement, injury,
steroids, drugs, illicit money-and there are statistics. The
spirit of the game is disseminated to other sports and other
aspects of life (business, politics). In the case of baseball,
the statistics are most important. They attach to each gesture
on the field a meaning which otherwise would escape the mind of
the viewer. In games of a more continuous flow (soccer, tennis,
handball), the attraction is in the particular phase, not in the
number of yards gained or the average (hits, home runs,
strike-outs).

The general dynamics of existence and human interaction in the
civilization of illiteracy also marked the dynamics of the
practical experience of sports. Higher speed, shorter
encounters, short action spans-these make the sports event more
marketable in the environment of the new civilization. The more
precise the experience, the less expressive. Almost no one
watched the compulsory ice skating exercises at world
championships, and so they were canceled, but millions enjoy the
dramatics of dancing on ice that is becoming more and more a
show watched around the world. The more extensive the effort,
the less attractive to spectators. A twenty-five kilometer cross-
country competition will never interest as many viewers as a
fast, dangerous downhill race. These characteristics are
definitive of the civilization of illiteracy. People do not want
to learn how to perform at the same level; knowledge is
irrelevant. Performance is what attracts, and it is the only
thing which gains prizes that the winner of the ancient
Olympics, who was also spoiled, never dreamed of. "Winner take
all" is the final rule, and the result is that winning, more
than competing, has become the goal.

The efficiency requirement leads not only to the relative
illiteracy of those involved in sports, but also to a practice
of discriminatory physical selection. In the USA, for instance,
black African-Americans dominate football and basketball, which
have become national obsessions. If equal opportunity were
applied to professional sports as it is to other activities, the
competitions would not be so attractive. The irony of this
situation is that, in fact, black African-Americans are still
entertainment providers in the USA. Regardless of how profitable
professional sports are, the obsession with efficiency
effectively consecrates an important segment of the population to
entertaining the rest. Blacks are also playing in the most
advanced major basketball leagues in the world. In what used to
be the Soviet Union, chances were that the winter sports teams
would be recruited from the Siberian population, where skiing is
a way of life. All over Europe, soccer teams recruit from Spain,
Italy, Africa, and South America. It is easier to attain maximum
efficiency through those endowed with qualities required by the
new goals of the games instead of creating a broad base of
educated athletes.

The public, homogenized through the mediating action of
television, is subjected to the language of the sports
experience and is presented with performance and interpretation
at the same time. Thus, even the mechanism of assigning meaning
is rationalized, taken over by the market mechanism, freed from
the constraints of literacy and reason, and rendered to human
subjects without requiring that they think about it.

Blaming changes in sports, or for that matter in literacy, the
condition of the family, the fast-food curse, television,
increased greed, new technology, or lower levels of education,
results in only partial explanations of the new condition of
sports. Yes, the greatly celebrated champions are illiterate. No
matter how good in their political game of finding excuses and
alibis, colleges care for the high performances of physically
gifted students, recruited only insofar as they add to the
marketability of the institution, not to the academic entry
requirements. Literacy is not a prerequisite for sports
performance. It might actually interfere with it. In the world
of competitions, sportsmen and sportswomen are either jetting
around the globe or traveling from one exhibition game to
another, barely able to breathe, never mind to take care of their
literacy or their private lives. Their language is one of
pitiful limitation, always inferior to the energy spent in the
effort or externalized in frustration when the rules don't work
in their favor. They don't read, they don't write. Even their
checks are signed by others. The description might be somewhat
extreme and sound harsh, and the attitude might seem
impertinent, but after all, it is not because sportsmen and
sportswomen know Shakespeare's sonnets by heart that people
watch baseball, nor because they write novels (or even short
stories) that the public applauds the ice skating dancers, and
even less that they keep diaries, with minimal spelling errors
and full sentences, that spectators die to be on the stand of
the stadium where the drama of football starts in the fall and
ends shortly before another sports takes over the media.

Sports are marketable work, of high intensities and no literate
status. The efficiency of each sport is measured in the
attraction it exercises over many people, and thus in the
ability of a sport to transmit messages of public interest,
insofar as public interest is part of the market process.
Alienated from the expectation of integration, corresponding to
the ideal of the complete human being, sport is as specialized as
any other form of human praxis. Sports constituted their own
domains of competence and performance, and generate expectations
of partial sport literacies. That in the process, because they
address physical attributes and intellectual functions, sports
became a molding machine for the athletes, another nature,
should not go without saying or understanding what it takes to
succeed. All over the world, where efficiency reached levels
corresponding to the new scale of humankind, football,
basketball, soccer, and tennis players, swimmers, runners, and
gymnasts are created almost from scratch. Experts select
children, analyze their genetic history and current condition,
devise training procedures, and control diet, psychology, and
emotional life until the desired performer is ready to compete.

Gentlemen, place your bets!

The investment in sports, as in the stock market, is supposed to
return profit. Successful sportspeople need not testify to how
high their own return is. That this return also means
compromised physical or mental integrity is part of the cynical
equation that the public enthusiastically validates. When
players are traded and contracts are signed, the money they
earn, disproportionate as it seems at times, corresponds, almost
to the last digit, to the number of people who will watch them,
some for the sake and pleasure of the performance, others making
money from a team's victory or an athlete's record. In some
states and countries, whether betting is legal or prohibited, it
is by far the strongest sector of the economy. It takes very
interesting forms, however. One is the direct bet: this horse,
this player, this team.

Betting, with its partial literacy involving its own mediating
elements that render reading and writing useless, is not a new
institution. People were challenged by the odds down through
history. But once the structural change that entailed means of
networking, task distribution, and almost instant access to any
event in the world was in place, the experience of betting
totally took over that of competing. All our unfulfilled desires
and drives are now embodied by those we choose to represent us,
and for whose victory we not only root, but also invest in.
There is an ideal stake-the successful player-and a mundane
stake-the actual wager. Expectation of high figures is an
extension of literate expectations. It embodies the naive
assumption that cultivated minds and challenged bodies unite in
a balanced personality of high integrity. The reason this model
failed over and over need not be restated here. But the point
needs to be made that the ideal stake and the trivial stake are
not independent. This introduces to competition an element of
obscurity in the form of motivations not intrinsic to sports.
The indirect wager represents this element.

The message is the sneaker

The biggest indirect bet is made by marketing and advertising. On
the never- ending table of Olympic records, the most spectacular
performances are dollar signs preceding figures into the
billions. Within the general shift from manufacturing to service
economy characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy, sport
becomes a form of entertainment. New media, replacing the
printed word as the dominant means of communication, makes
possible international viewing of competitions as they happen.
In the past, we were satisfied with the image of the winner. Now
we can own the tape of the game and can retrieve each moment of
any event. More broadband, and soon we will download the running
athlete directly onto our monitors. For a price, of course.

People consume sports. They are able to fly to the Olympics,
wherever the best bid takes them (Barcelona, Atlanta, or
Sydney), even able to pay for forty-five minutes or a whole week
of shaping up with the very best trainers. Facts in the world of
sports, as much as in the rest of our activities, are less
important than the image. The authority and self-discipline, on
which physical education was built, are replaced by the freedom
and opportunity to choose from among many sports events, and by
an attitude of permissiveness and self-indulgence which many
times results in considering the whole world as a sports show.
Sports are used to further many causes and support many
interest groups. On the stage of the events they sponsor, the
world's largest companies compete with feminism, equal
opportunity, AIDS, and various disabilities for the attention
and dollars of the audience. Sponsorship is a highly selective
experience. Nevertheless, it frequently contradicts the slogans
it sets before the public. These are important because the
indirect bet on sports takes into consideration the huge market
of entertainment, and defines within this market the segments it
will address.

Product endorsements, advertising, and public relations are the
media through which marketing places its bets. No less than
500,000 brands were traded in Atlanta. Only to keep track of
them was a major task, described officially as "protecting the
integrity of the Olympic Games and the rights of official
sponsors," but also "detecting attempts at parasitic
marketing." Every square inch on the body of a tennis player or a
track and field athlete can be rented. And is. The better the
manager (not necessarily a player's game), the higher the
endorsement contract. The minute detail picked up by the camera
allows us to see the name of the maker on the watch, the
manufacturer's logo on the socks, a sponsor company's name on
the shirts and headgear, the brand of glucose or mineral water,
the maker of ice or snow for winter games. It seems that the
competition on the court and the competition among those who buy
the space available on cyclists' ware, football players'
uniforms, skiers, swimmers, runners, and chess players are
feeding off one another. When the Canon company chose as its
prime-time advertising actor a tennis player who did not make it
beyond the preliminary games, the bet continued on the waves, on
the screens, on the videotapes, and on any other imaginable
display.

Marshall McLuhan plays year after year in the Superbowl. The
world indeed becomes a village. Moreover, the world has almost
decided that the outcome is less important than the new
commercials, the new thirty-second drama, followed by the
numbers telling us all how much more a second of prime time
costs, and what benefits it might bring. But the message is
actually lost. Here McLuhan was still somehow captive to
literacy, believing there was a message, as we are used to when
writing or reading a text. The message is the sneaker, or
whatever will take over, for its own short turn in the glory of
consumption, the world. The day the object is acknowledged,
between New York and Zambia, Paris and the tribes in the
Brazilian rain forests, Frankfurt and the starving populations
of Africa or Asia, there will be a trade in the original and its
many substitutes, reaching sheer madness. Sports entrusted with
the marketing image are equalled in their persuasive power only
by the entertainment stars, of similar illiterate condition,
singing for the world's hungriest only in order to add one more
marketing craze to their torment.

In these and in other characteristics mentioned, the unnatural
aspect of sports takes over their original, natural component.
It seems almost as though the sports experience is falling into
itself, is imploding, leaving room for the many machines and
gadgets we use at home in order to salvage our degenerating
bodies. Now we still bicycle, ski, climb stairs, and row in the
privacy of our rooms, with our eyes glued to the images of the
very few who still do the real thing, but for reasons less and
less connected with excellence. Soon we will swim in the pools
and ski on the slopes of virtual reality. Some are already
timing their performance. Little do they know that they are
pioneering one of the many Olympic games of the future.

Science and Philosophy-More Questions Than Answers

Words strain, Crack and sometimes break, under the burden, Under
the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will
not stay in place, Will not stay still. T.S. Elliot, Burnt Norton



In some of the most advanced fields of scientific inquiry,
research results are exchanged as soon as they become available.
Obviously, the sluggish medium of print and the long cycles
involved in the review process prior to academic publication do
not come into the picture. On Web sites dedicated to research,
the review process consists of acknowledging, challenging, and
furthering breakthrough hypotheses. It is carried out by real
peers, not by the geriatric or opportunistic hierarchies that
have the publishing process in their firm grip. Frequently,
research is carried out in and through the communication media.
Images, data, and simulations are part of the work and part of
the shared knowledge, already available in formats that can be
inputted for further work or can be technologically tested.

Of course, there are many issues connected to the new dynamics of
science, not the least of which is intellectual property and
integrity. A totally new experience in research and knowledge
dissemination is taking place. The majority of the researchers
involved know that previous models, originating in the pragmatics
of the civilization of literacy, will not provide answers. As
beautiful as the science embodied in the technology of
industrial society is, it will not, not even accidentally,
contribute to the scientific progress in nanotechnology, in
bioinformatics, in fluid dynamics, and in other frontier domains
researched today. Gene expression and protein syntheses are many
working centuries-the total of the years contributed by
researchers to the advancement of their respective fields-ahead
of everything that science has produced in the past. Add to
these accomplishments in the ever-expanding list of modern
sciences, and you get the feeling that humankind is literally
reinventing itself in the civilization of illiteracy.

The list to follow is telling of the shift from the coarse level
of scientific effort corresponding to the industrial operations
of milling and grinding, to a level of atomic and sub-atomic
re-ordering. The same components, differently ordered, can appear
to us as graphite or diamonds, sand or silicon for chips. The
list represents a reality of enormous consequence, confirmed in
the daily commotion of a never-ending series of discoveries.
Life on Mars, molecular self-assembly, protein folding, atomic
resolution imaging, nano-structural materials with unprecedented
properties, quantum devices, advances in neuro-medicine-the list
is a shameless exercise in creating headlines, soon to be
replaced by newer and more creative endeavors. This is why, in
addressing issues of science and philosophy, I do not intend to
offer a catalogue of current research, but to put the subject in
a dynamic perspective. By all means, I want to avoid the danger
of presenting science especially as the agent of change, as
though its own motivations and means could give humankind its
direction and purpose.

Rationality, reason, and the scale of things

The dynamics of change in scientific and philosophic thinking is
not independent of the underlying structure of the pragmatics
that leads to the civilization of illiteracy. Both involve
rationality, which connects human practical experiences to
consistent inferences (sometimes seen as logical conclusion)
and to the ability to predict events (in nature or society),
even to influence and control them. Rationality is connected to
efficiency insofar as it is applied in the selection of means
appropriate to accomplishing goals; or it serves as an
instrument for evaluation of the premises leading to a selected
course of action. In short, rationality is goal oriented. Reason,
in turn, is value oriented; it guides practical experiences of
human self-constitution in the direction of appropriateness.
Rationality and reason are interconditioned. Right and wrong,
good and bad, are the axes along which human action and emotion
can be diagrammed in the matrix of living and working that they
constituted under the guise of literacy.

The process through which human rationality and reason become
characteristics of human self-constitution is long and tortuous.
People defining themselves in different pragmatic contexts enter
into a network of interdependency. At a very small scale of
human existence and activity, rationality and reason were
indistinguishable. They began to differentiate early on, already
during hunting and gathering. But during the long experience of
settlement and taking care of plants and animals, they grew aware
of the distinction between what they were doing and how. With the
culture of artifacts, to which tools belong, reason and
rationality took separate paths. With the advent of science, in
its most primitive forms, documented in ancient China, Egypt,
India, and Greece, rationality and reason often conflicted.
Things can be right, without being good at the same time. There
is a rationality-goal oriented: how to get more goods, how to
avoid losses-with the appearance of reason-actions to please
forces supposed to control nature or matter. Parallel to
science, magic manifested itself through alchemy, astrology, and
numerology, all focused on the attempt to harmonize human beings,
constituted in practical experiences focused on goodness, with
the world housing them. In some cultures, rationality resulted
in the propensity to face, change, and eventually dominate
nature-that is, to submit the environment to a desired order.
Reason aimed at finding practical grounds for harmony with
nature.

After the phase of orality, writing served both of them equally.
It made language a mold for new experiences, a container for
storing knowledge, and an effective means for the practical
experience of evaluation and self-evaluation. The overwhelming
majority of human accomplishments leading to the possibility and
necessity of literacy were connected to the experience of human
self-constitution in writing. The science and philosophy upon
which the scientific revolution and the revival of humanities (in
particular philosophy) of the 16th and 17th centuries took place
are deeply rooted in the pragmatics that made writing necessary.
This revolution is usually summarized through three main
accomplishments. First: a new picture of the universe,
scientifically expressed in heliocentric astronomy and
philosophically a turning point in understanding the role of the
human being in this world. Second: the mathematical description
of motion. Third: the new conceptual framework of mechanics. As
impressive as they are, their meaning is revealed in the fact
that the Industrial Revolution was actually triggered by the
scientific and humanistic renewal embodied in these
accomplishments. The change from an agrarian economy,
appropriate to a relatively reduced scale of population and
work, to industrial production changed efficiency by orders of
magnitude corresponding to those of the critical mass reached
by humankind. All the characteristics of this new
pragmatics-sequentiality, linearity, centralism, determinism
(mechanical in nature), clear-cut distinctions,
interdependencies-contributed to the establishment of literacy.

A lost balance

Within the pragmatic framework of the industrial society, science
progressively assumed the leading role over philosophy. In fact,
science changed from an elitist practical experience strongly
controlled by the guardians of literacy (i.e., religion) to an
experience integrated in society. Philosophy followed an inverse
path, from a generalized attitude of wonder to becoming the
privilege of the few who could afford to contemplate the world.
Generalized in technology, the rationality of science reached its
peak in the civilization of literacy through standardization and
mass production of processed food, means of transportation
(cars, airplanes), home building, and the use of electricity as
the efficient alternative energy source. But the real challenge
was yet to come.

Einstein took a daring guess. "The tragedy of modern men...is
that they created conditions of existence for which, from the
perspective of their phylogenetic development, they are not
adjusted." The lost balance between rationality and reason is
reflected in the image of all the consequences of the Industrial
Revolution that led to the runaway capitalism of the 19th and
20th centuries. Exhaustion of raw materials, air and water
pollution, erosion of productive land, and mental and physical
strain on humans are the concrete results of this imbalance.

But if these consequences were all people and society had to cope
with, the dominance of literacy in science would still be
defensible. The challenge comes from the new scale of humankind
for which the Industrial Revolution model and literacy are no
longer adequate. Efficiency expectations, of an order of
magnitude incompatible with the underlying structure of the
pragmatic framework based on literacy, result in the need for a
new dynamics, for mediation, acknowledgment and use of
non-linearity, vagueness, and non-determinism. Science, as well
as the implicit philosophic component of this new science,
already approached areas of knowledge beyond the borderline
guarded by literacy. On the initial success of micro-physics, the
first non- literacy-based technological challenge for more energy
was met in the form of relatively rudimentary weapons. In the
meanwhile, it became clear that a new physics and a new
chemistry, and a new biology, along with many disciplines
non-existent within literacy, of a systemic focus with quality
and process is what we need. Some of the scientific themes
mentioned already illustrate how science is evolving. They also
illustrate how a new epistemological condition is established,
one that is based on projecting explanatory models upon the
world and testing them for appropriateness and coherence. In the
lead are practical experiences of science driven by cognitive
resources no longer constrained by observation. What is free of
epistemological doubt is that almost all the science that has
emerged has reclaimed interest in the living. These new
sciences, which are philosophies at the same time, are
computationally disclosed biophysics, biochemistry, molecular
biology, genetics, medicine, and knowledge of the micro- and
nano-universe.

Literacy, because of its inherent structural characteristics, is
no longer the appropriate mold for such new experiences, the
proper container for knowledge, or even an effective means of
evaluation. Among many possible literacies, it maintains a
domain of appropriateness, and within this domain it allows for
local performance synchronized with the general expectation of
efficiency. The shift from literacy to literacies-in fact, the
shift to the pragmatic framework of the civilization of
illiteracy- takes place against the background of conflict
between means of restricted efficiency and new means for coping
with larger populations, and with the newly acquired right to
well-being, or even affluence. Almost all new sciences evolve in
new technologies. We are already familiar with some, since we
were told that from science programs (space exploration, genetic
research, biophysics), products as trivial as calculators,
thermal fabric, and new construction materials were made
available at prices affordable in the global economy. We are
getting used to others as they become available: intelligent
materials able to alter their structure, and self-assembling
materials.

Thinking about thinking

One dominant inherited assumption is that thinking takes place
only in language; that is, that language is the medium of
thinking. This is a very difficult subject to deal with because,
despite claims to the contrary, some people (Einstein is most
quoted witness) maintain that they think in images, others in
sounds, others in some combination of shapes, colors, textures,
even odor and taste. Until now, no one could conclusively prove
whether this is a way of speaking or a fact. But the same can be
said of language. That we can express thoughts, sometimes
frustratingly incomplete, in language does not necessarily mean
that we think in language, or only in language. That language is
a medium for explanation and interpretation, well adapted to
support incomplete inductions or deductions, and sometimes
hypothetical thinking (so-called abductions), is not necessarily
the proof that it is the only one. Scientists think in the
language of mathematical or logical formalism, or in some of the
new programming languages, even if they do not carry on dialogue
or try to write poetry or love letters in such languages.

Literacy, as a socially encompassing ideal, states that people
should be literate because people think in language.
Accordingly, proper use of language, as set forth in the rules
of literacy, is a premise for successful thinking. Besides
introducing circularity-the premise turns out to be the
conclusion-this is a strong assumption, with too many
implications for science and for philosophy to be left
unchallenged. The assumption was never entirely proven; and it
is probably impossible to prove, given the strong connection
between all signs participating in thinking processes. Images
call up words, but so do odors, flavors, textures, and sounds.
Words recall or trigger images, music, etc. The integrated
nature of thinking is probably affected by mechanisms of
voluntary decision-making or by genetic mechanisms structured to
accept a certain sign system (language, mathematical formalism,
diagrams) as dominant, without precluding modes of thought
different from those resulting from the premise of literacy.

If defining thinking as language processing resulted in human
experiences possible only under this assumption, there are also
other ways to define thinking which, in turn, may become, if
they haven't yet, necessary and beneficial. In this respect, one
question can be raised: Are thinking machines, i.e., programs
able to autonomously perform operations we associate with human
thinking, excluded from the discussion because they do not
qualify as literate? Many scientific endeavors of our time would
not have started if potential success were to be put to a
literacy test. The area of new materials, able to fix
themselves, and of machines resulting from self-assembly belong
among our examples. Fortunately, science based on alternative
practical human experiences, fairly independent of language and
literacy, discovered that there are alternative ways to define
thinking, and rationality, for that matter. Considering thinking
together with other human traits, such as emotion, sense of
humor, aesthetics, the ability to project ideas through various
media, senses or languages will probably lead to even more
daring scientific research.

Before considering alternative ways to define thinking and the
relation between rationality and human reason, let us look at
the characteristics of thinking in current praxis, science and
philosophy included. The amount of language we need to function
in the workplace and in social life has diminished in comparison
to previous circumstances of human experience. If thinking took
place only in language, that would mean that thinking itself has
diminished. Very few people would be inclined to accept this
conclusion. The small subset of language used in social life and
in professional interaction is representative of the segmented
nature of this life and of the interactions it supports. This
small subset of language, the command of which does not require
literacy skills, is composed of social stereotypes, but is not
sufficient to constitute a medium for thinking. Parallel to the
diminished subset of natural language, the languages of science
and technology expanded as expectations of scientific and
technological efficiency increased. Expressions in the small
subset of natural language that people use in order to function
are generated regardless of the requirement of variety and
change in our reciprocal relations. As canned expressions of
limited function, they are taken over from previous
circumstances, and used independently of what once determined
their need. Chances are that an illiterate neighbor will never be
noticed since everything pertaining to the social status of such
a neighbor is literacy independent: driving, washing clothes,
cooking, banking, telephoning, watching television, connecting
to the Internet. The trained illiterate can perform these tasks
and those pertinent to work perfectly without ever displaying a
literacy handicap. No doubt that the new machines, new
materials, new foods, and new medicines that are more at the
frontiers of science than in the mainstream of living and working
will further affect the need and possibility of a civilization
dominated by more than one of its means of expression and
communication.

People can function as illiterates in societies of extreme
specialization without being noticed as illiterates and without
affecting the efficiency of the system to which they belong
because their own involvement in the functioning of the world in
which they live is changing. Illiterate rationality is no less
goal oriented than any other rationality. It is just expressed
through other means. And it is no less concerned with predicting
the behavior of systems driven by languages of extreme
functionality, working regardless of the literacy of the
operators. Scientific literacy is either stored in skills,
through training, or in the systems operated by people who know
less about their functioning than the machines themselves.

Symptoms such as misuse of words, sloppy language and grammar,
use of stereotypes, the inability and even unwillingness to
sustain dialogue might be telling something about thinking,
too-for instance, that forms of thinking based on sign systems
other than language are more effective, or more appropriate to
what people do in our days; or even that appropriateness in one
particular sign system does not translate into appropriateness
and effectiveness in another practical experience. No wonder
that science, in addition to reasons implicit in the nature of
scientific inquiry, shies away from language, from its
imprecision, ambiguity, and tendency to coalesce in stereotypes,
or become stereotypes under circumstances of patterned use.
Philosophy, by and large, follows the same tendency, although
its alternatives are not comparable to those of science. The
experience of science, and to a more limited degree that of
philosophy, is simultaneously an experience in generating
language capable of handling continuity, vagueness, and fuzzy
relations. Spatial reasoning and replication of phenomena,
usually associated with the living as aspects of common-sense
knowledge, are also constitutive of the new science.

Extremely specialized human practical experiences are no longer
predominantly experiences based on knowledge, but on
constituting the person as information integrator. The
continuous diminution of the need to think corresponds to the
extreme segmentation of work and to the successful technological
integration of various partial contributions resulting from this
highly efficient segmented and mediated work. In one's
individual life, in activities pertinent to self-maintenance
(nourishment, rest, hygiene, enjoyment), the process is the
same. Thinking is focused on selection: cooking one from many
pre-processed meals at home, dressing in one from among many
ready- made clothing items, living in pre-fabricated homes,
washing objects in programmed machines. But the objects embody
someone else's thinking. The reified thinking projected into
gene manipulation, materials, and machines leads to a reduction
of live thinking. People integrate themselves in the information
network, and for a greater part of their existence they act as
information processors: heat something until it pops; snap or
zip to close; press a button that will adjust water temperature
and wash cycle according to the type of clothes. More generally,
people rely on the living machine that adapts to the user,
re-assembles itself as requirements change, and/or fixes itself.
Rationality is more and more integrated in the technology; thus
it is rationalized away from the process of individual
self-constitution. As tremendous as the consequences can be,
they will be infinitely more dangerous if we do not start
thinking about them.

Technology at this level uncouples the past from the present.
Consequently, life and actual existence are alienated.
Individuals do not have to think, they have to integrate
themselves into the program embodying high efficiency
rationality and reason. Today, knowledge of what goes into food,
how preparation affects its qualities, what makes for a good
shirt or sweater, what makes for a good house, what it means to
wash, and how a material is affected by certain chemicals and
water temperatures are rendered irrelevant. What matters is the
result, not the process. What counts is efficiency, not
individual know-how. Thinking is detached from thinking in the
sense that all thinking, and thus rationality, is embodied
outside the self-constituted human being. The appearance is that
this outside thinking and this outside rationality have a life of
their own. Memetic mechanisms are a testimony to the process.

In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience not only the
benefits of high efficiency, but also the self-perpetuating
drive of new pragmatic means. At times it appears that humans do
not compete for achieving higher levels of creativity and
productivity. Affluence appears as a given that takes over the
need to match efficiency expectations characteristic of the
global scale of humankind. To keep pace with technological
progress and with scientific renewal becomes a rationale in
itself, somehow disconnected from human reason. The confusing
rationality of ever- increasing choices is matched by the
frustrating realization that value options literally disappear,
leaving no room for sensible reasoning. As a result, social and
political aspects of human existence are short circuited, in
particular those affecting the status of science and the
condition of philosophy. Frequently, research is questioned as to
whether its goals make sense at all. Only 15 years ago, half of
the population in the USA suspected that science and the
technology it fosters were the cause rather than the cure of
many problems faced in the country, social problems included. The
balance changed, but not the attitude of those captive to
literacy's goals and values, who oppose science and the
humanities instead of seeing them in their necessary, although
contradictory, unity.

Quo vadis science?

Discovery and explanation

From among the many levels at which the issue of language in
relation to science is relevant, two are critical: discovery and
explanation. In all fairness, it should be said that literacy
never claimed to be a way towards scientific discovery, or that
language is the instrument making discovery possible. The main
claim is that access to science, and thus the possibility to
continue scientific work, is primarily through language. This
assertion was correct in the past as long as scientific practice
took place in a homogeneous cognitive context of shared
representations of time and space. Once this context changed,
the built-in language metrics of experience, what is called the
ratio, the shared measure, started to get in the way of new
discoveries and efficient explanations of previous discoveries.
Among the many new codes scientists use today, symbolic
reasoning (used in mathematics, logic, genetics, information
science, etc.) is the most pervasive. All in all, a transition
has been made from a centralized scientific practice to new
experiences, which are quite often independent of each other and
better adapted to the scale of the particular phenomenon of
interest. This independence, as well as sensitivity to scale,
results from different objects of specialized disciplines, from
different perspectives, and from different sign systems
structured as research tools or as medium for constituting
efficient explanatory theories.

Plato would have barred entrance to the Academy to those who did
not master mathematics: "Let no one enter who is not a
mathematician." In today's world, the guardians of science would
require logic, and others the mastery of artificial languages,
such as programming languages, themselves subject to improved
focus (as in object programming) and increased computational
efficiency. In the time of Socrates, "the orator," language was
ascertained to be constitutive of cities, laws, and the arts. In
the time of the Roman poet Lucretius, physics was written in
verse (7,000 lines of heroic hexameter were used to present
Epicurus' atomic theory). Galileo preferred the dialogue,
written in colloquial Italian, to share discoveries in physics
and astronomy with his contemporaries. With Newton, equations
started to replace words, and they became, almost to our time,
the vocabulary of physics. Very similar developments took place
in the evolution of science in China, India, the Middle East. The
emergence of new visual or multimedia languages (of diagrams,
systems of notation, visual representations, mixed data types)
corresponds to the different nature of visual and multimedia
experience. They are steps in the direction of deeper labor
division, increased mediation, and new forms of human
interaction-in particular, of a practice that is more
intensional than extensional.

Time and space: freed hostages

The Encyclopedic tradition centered around the scientific human
being (l'homme scientifique) who it defined through language.
This tradition continued a line of progressive changes in
humankind's scientific experience. We can learn about these
changes by examining the language through which they are
expressed. The syncretic stage of human activity was dominated
by observations and short cycles of action- reaction. Incipient,
rudimentary science was not independent of the human being's
practical projection. Images and, later, names of plants,
animals, mountains, and lakes pertained to the beginning. Only
when the scope of observation broadened and, instead of the
immediate connection, a series of connections was accounted for,
did science become a praxis in itself.

Science was born together with the magical, and would continue to
develop in this symbiosis. Eventually, it joined religion in
opposing the magic. Observation and fear of the observed were
one. Names of stars testify to changes in the language in which
what we call astronomical science is embodied. Obviously there
was little awareness of the mechanics of the cosmos during the
time names changed. Mytho-magical terminology, followed by
zodiac signs of magic origin (in both cases with reference to
the practical activity of people during changing seasons), and by
the Christian names (after the establishment of Christianity),
is a line continued today in detailed catalogs encoding
positions, dynamics, and interrelations in numeric form.

In the experience of observing the sky and in deriving the notion
of duration (how long it took for celestial objects to change
position), humans projected their biological and cognitive
characteristics: seeing, association, comparison. Names were
given and observations were made, of position mainly, but also
of light intensity. With the emergent notion of time,
generalized from the notion of duration, stars were nolonger
related to divinities. Still, astronomical observation was used
to structure monastic life. Stars served as a nighttime clock.
At a time of reduced scientific inquiry (Europe from the 5th
century to the 10th), the observation of the skies, reflected in
maps of various constellations, prepared for future progress in
astronomy. Physical properties, such as intensity of light,
color, and brilliancy, later suggested better names because the
experience in which stars were recognized (navigation, in the
first place) required identification for successful performance.
Magic and science explained success in very different ways. This
was the time when planets were identified through properties
evident to all who needed the sky. The magic layer was projected
as a result of associations people made between qualities
characteristic of persons and the behavior of certain stars,
i.e., the perceived influence they had on events pertinent to
human existence. During the entire process, language served as
an instrument of integration and observation, as well as a means
for logical practice, such as deductions. Molding the experience
of time perception, storing the acquired knowledge, and further
shaping practical experiences of time, language acquired a very
powerful position in the human being's self-constitution in
time. This position would be strengthened by literacy, bound to
generalize distinctions in language and introduce them as
effective means of structuring new expectations. Only when
time-dependent practical requirements, such as those of
relativity, impossible to satisfy within literacy, became
critical was time freed from the captivity of verbal language.

A giant cognitive step bridged the immediacy of the
surroundings-where magic forces were rumored to exist, waiting
for humans to free them-and the notion of space. Geometry-which
literally means to measure land-is relevant as a practical
experience of human self-constitution that unites the concrete
task at hand (surveying, building, decorating, observing the
sky) and the generalization of distance. Measuring land ends up
not only in description of the land, but also in its
reconstitution in the abstract category of space. Language was
part of the process, and for as long as practical experiences in
the immediate surrounding were direct, geometric conventions
remained very close to their practical implications. Once
distinctions beyond direct relations in space were made possible
by the experience of navigation, by settled forms of social life
(leading to future cities), and by strategies for successful
securing and defense of land, the language of geometry changed.
Internally motivated developments, as well as those rooted in
forms of human praxis other than geometry, resulted in the
constitution of many geometric languages.

The languages of the foundations of geometry and of algebraic,
differential, or topological geometry are as different as the
practical experiences from which they are derived. In many
cases, literate language suffices for formulating geometric
problems, but breaks down in supporting the practice of
attempting solutions. Obviously enough, the intuitive visual
aspect of geometry is quite often better adapted to subjects such
as symmetry, higher order spaces, and convexity than is
literacy. Rigid spaces and elastic spaces behave differently
from spaces describable in language. Geometry frequently uses
notations whose referent is rather abstract. The freeing of time
and space from the captivity of language made an impact on the
condition of rationality, where scientific praxis is rooted, and
of reason, where philosophy originates.

Coherence and diversity

Science integrates the results of diversified experiences and
expresses the perceived human need to maintain a coherent
perspective of the whole. As a reaction to the establishment of
a permanent and universal language embodied in the practice of
literacy, partial languages of scientific focus emerged. Those
who knew from their own self-constitution in scientific practice
that global coherence, as preserved in language, and specialized
knowledge conflict, gave up the effort to harmonize the general
framework (of language) and the specialized perspective (of
science). The understanding that the language of science is not
simply a descriptive device, but a constitutive element of
scientific practical experience, did not come easy, especially
since language kept human awareness of space and time captive to
its mechanism of representation. Seemingly, it was less
difficult to notice how measuring some phenomena (especially in
physics) changed the system observed than to understand how a
scientific hypothesis expressed in language created a framework
of subjective science. The subjectivity of the language
description corresponds to a particular practical experience
involving identification through language.

Particular developments in science are not identical in all
scientific branches. Astronomy and geometry evolved differently
from each other and from other sciences. As a result of the
inherent dynamics of conflict between means and goals of
sciences, a phase of liberation from language started. Once
language itself reached its limits in literacy, in respect to
the efficiency of the new human experiences that the current
scale of humankind brought about, new languages were needed.
Breaking the language barrier, with implicit emancipation from
literacy, is a practical experience in itself. In this
experience, two aspects of language come under scrutiny: the
epistemological and the communicational. In the epistemological
status, we evaluate how language is a medium for embodying
science and shaping the perspective of scientific inquiry. The
communicational status refers to language as a medium for sharing
knowledge. The levels of problem formulation, of solutions, of
interpretation, of experiment and validation, and of
communication are quite different. They will continue to
differentiate even more in order to be efficient. The
rationality intrinsic to this new science is no longer reducible
to finding the logos in things and phenomena, or to instill a
logos into techné. This is why the legacy of Francis Bacon-the
prophetic theoretician of experimental science-as well as of
Descartes-whose rules for understanding dominated the literate
phase of humankind's scientific practical experience-literally
cease to be relevant once we move from language to languages,
from literacy to illiteracy.

Computational science

Language is ambiguous, imprecise, and not neutral in respect to
the phenomena observed and accounted for. For these and other
reasons, researchers working within the informational paradigm
needed to synthesize specialized languages designed in such ways
to avoid ambiguity and make higher efficiency of automated
processing possible. Many formal languages have become the new
scientific laboratories of our time, preparing quite well for
the new stage of computational disciplines. In parallel, new
forms of scientific experimentation, which correspond to the
complexity of the phenomena under observation and to their
dynamics, were developed. These forms are known under the name
simulation (sometimes modeling) and consist of observing not
the behavior of the researched aspect of the world, but one or
several of its descriptions.

To observe the explosion of a remote star, a time-span of data
collection that extends well over the age of humankind is
required. Instead of waiting (forever, so to speak), scientists
model astrophysical phenomena and visualize them with the aid of
sophisticated computable mathematical descriptions. These are
better suited to the scale of the phenomena than all the
equipment ever used for this purpose. Radio astronomy is no
longer about the stars seen through human eyes. It is not about
the visible, and it is not burdened by all the history of star
names. Radio-astronomy is about star systems, cosmic physics,
dynamics, even about the notion, so often discarded, of the
beginning of the universe. The geometry of higher (than three)
space dimensions is not about the visible-the surveyed land,
building, or ornament-never mind the magical spirits inhabiting
it. Such geometries submit theoretical constructs supporting a
practice of thinking, explaining, even acting, that is not
possible without the generalization of space dimensions. Whether
in the fiction of Flatland (Edwin Abbott's book about how
different life is in lower-dimension space compared to life in
what we take to be 3-dimensional reality), or in the computer
graphics animated representation of the hypercube, or in the
theories of higher dimension spaces (relating to Einstein's
relativity theory), scientific languages, irreducible to the
general language and non- translatable into it, are at work.

There are quite a number of similar subjects which make evident
the border at which science can no longer rely on language. A
non-language-based rationality- spatial reasoning, for
instance-becomes necessary in this realm of inquiry. As
sciences enter the age of computation, necessities become
possibilities. There are subjects of research in which the
brevity of a process makes impossible its direct observation and
appropriate description in language. Indeed, the universe of
extremely short interactions, of fast exchanges of energy, of
high frequency patterns (which give the appearance of a
continuum), among others, can be approached only with
instruments of observation whose own inertia is lower than that
of the phenomena scrutinized and with a conceptual framework for
which language (of high inertia) is ill equipped.

Language preserves in its structure the experience that made it
necessary; literacy does the same. This is why their
sequentiality conflicts with subjects of configurational
condition. This is also why linearity, inherent in the pragmatics
that formed literacy, conflicts with the inherent non-linearity
of the world. Many other conflicts are at work at the same time:
centrality of work opposed to distribution of tasks; hierarchy
and distributed networking; clear-cut distinctions and vagueness;
deterministic experiences of limited scope opposed to
self-configurational, chaotic processes of infinite adaptation
to new circumstances; dualism as opposed to pluralism (in
scientifically significant forms). At stake is the efficiency of
the effort, as it approaches issues of recuperation mechanisms
in nature and society, strategies of co- evolution (replacing
strategies of dominance) with nature, holistic models made
possible by both increased mediation and powerful integrative
mechanisms. Idealizing all these possibilities would be as
counterproductive as demonizing literacy-based practical
experiences. Nevertheless, we need a better understanding of what
no longer responds to requirements of human self-constitution
under the new scale of humankind, as we need an image of the
alternative practical experiences through which a new
rationality is formed.

In the rapidly expanding context of parallel scientific endeavors
and distributed tasks supported by speedy and reliable networks,
scientific research is liberated from the industrial model.
Instead of centralized institutions sharing in the use of
expensive instruments, there is an increasing number of
experiments taking place all over the world. Tele-presence is
less expressive a name for what researchers actually perform
thousands of miles away from each other, using expensive machines
and various measuring and testing devices. The laboratories that
once served as the place for scientific self-constitution are
replaced by collaboratories, a combination of real instruments,
which can be used more efficiently, and virtual places of
research that allow for more creativity. Real-time interaction
is fundamental to the context of focusing on nano-scale.
Multidisciplinarity is no longer an illusion, but a practical
requirement for the integration that scientific effort requires.

Explaining ourselves away

Systematic domains of human practical experiences are changing
fast. The science of the ever shorter and more intense phenomena
in which the human being of this age is constituted consists of
a body of expressive means in which language either plays a
secondary function or is substituted with forms of expression
other than language. Procedures to capture the coherence of the
phenomena researched now need to be adapted to this reality. The
coherence embodied in language reflects past experiences, but
does not properly explain experiences characterized by new kinds
of coherence. In recent years, a question has come up time and
again: Is there some common element in language, in the possible
messages exchanged in our universe by civilizations different
from ours, in the messages exchanged at the genetic level of our
existence or in the biochemical trails which we associate with
the behavior of ant colonies or beehives? It would be premature
to attempt an answer. As already mentioned, David Hirsch
ascertains that 97% of human activity is concept free. Control
mechanisms in charge of this form of activity are common not only
to humans, but also to lower level biological entities (insects,
for instance). Exploration of cosmic civilizations, genetics,
biochemistry, not to mention memetics, is not necessarily helped
by this answer. Having to explain abstract mathematical concepts
or the behavior of complex systems (such as the human nervous
system), some displaying learning capabilities or
self-organization tendencies, raises the stakes quite high: Do we
explain ourselves away in the effort to emulate the human being?
Replication of ideas (scientific, philosophic, or of any other
type) based on the genetic model inspired by evolutionary
theory, contributes new angles to the subject. But even if we
manage to establish methods for successful replication, have we
captured the characteristics of human self-identification?

In the same vein, another question needs to be addressed: the
mystique of science comes from the realization that the law of
gravity applies everywhere, that electricity does not depend on
the geographic coordinates of the place where people live, that
computation is a universal calculus. Still, science is not value
neutral; one model dominates others; one rationality wins over
others. The truth of a scientific theory and its empirical
adequacy are only loosely related. To accept one science over
another is to the scientist an issue of rationality, while for
those integrating it in their practical experiences, it becomes
an issue of adequacy. This aspect constitutes more than a
cultural or memetic issue. At stake is the fact that the natural
condition of the human being is quite often rationalized away,
regardless of the reason.

The efficiency of science

In recent years language has changed probably more than in its
entire history. Still, these changes are not of the depth and
breadth of scientific and technological praxis. Computer
science, as Dijkstra pointed out, deserves a better name, more in
line with the fundamental change this practical experience
brings about. ("Would anyone call surgery knife science"? he
asked.) We don't have better names for many other fields of new
human experience: artificial life, artificial intelligence,
genetics, qualitative reasoning, and memetics. But we do have
powerful new notation systems, new ways of reasoning (combining
qualitative and quantitative aspects), and fresh methods of
expression (interactive). Consequently, a new human condition
resulting from the practice of science will probably emerge.
This condition will reflect the changed premises of scientific
experiment.

Experimentation joined logical analysis over 350 years ago.
Simulation, the experiment of the civilization of illiteracy, is
becoming the dominant scientific form of expression of the
systematic search for the multitude of elements involved in new
scientific theories and in their applications. A variety of
simulators embody knowledge and doubt. This can be seen in a
broader context. Through simulation, variability is accounted
for, relations are scrutinized, functional dependencies are
tested over a wide array of data critical to the performance of
new systems, or over a wide array of the people involved with
them. After heroically, and necessarily, separating from
philosophy and establishing its own methods, science is
rediscovering the need for the dimension covered by human
reasoning. This is, after all, what the subject matter of
artificial intelligence is and what it ultimately produces:
simulations of our capability to reason. In the same vein,
scientists are concerned with the metaphysics of the beginning of
the universe, and the language of the mind (lingua mentis),
evidently assumed to be different from language as we use it in
the framework of community, cultural, and national existence.

To reflect upon the beginning of the universe or upon the mind
means to constitute oneself, together with the appropriate
language, in a pragmatic context different from community
interaction, cultural values, or national characteristics. The
focus is changed from obsession with quantity to preoccupation
with quality. Qualities are pursued in the attempt to build a
science of artificial reality. As a scientific artifact, this
reality is endowed with characteristics of life, such as change
and evolution over time, selection of the fittest, the best
adapted to that world, and acquisition of knowledge, common
sense, and eventually language. Focused on the model of life as a
property of organization, artificial reality is intent on
generating lifelike behavior: iterative optimization, learning,
growth, adaptability, reproduction, and even self-identification.
Whereas science followed strategies of standardization,
artificial life is focused on generating conditions for
diversity, which eventually foster adaptability. Allocation of
resources within a system and strategies of co-evolution are seen
as resources of incremental performance. Research starts from a
premise that belongs to the realm of reasoning, not rationality:
humans and the problem being solved are continuously changing.

Exploring the virtual

Virtual realities are focused on almost everything that art
pursues: illusion of space, time, movement, projection of human
emotions. Interacting with such a system means that the person
becomes involved in the inside of images, sounds, and movements.
All these are simulated, using animation as the new language of
the science that the moving image embodies. In some ways,
virtual reality becomes a general purpose simulator of a
captivating variable reality, made possible by mediating
elements such as computer graphics images, animation, digital
sound, tracking devices, and quite a number of other elements.
Inside this reality, virtual objects, tools, and actions open
the possibility of practical experiences of self-constitution in
a meta- knowledge world.

Quality in virtual reality is also pursued as scientists try to
give a coherent image of the very first minutes of the universe.
Physics, genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, geology, and all
else integrated in this multi-mediated effort are turned from
science into natural history or philosophic ontology. To explain
why physicists needed an indestructible proton for explaining
matter is not an issue of numbers, precision, or equations, but
of common sense: If protons could decay, mountains, oceans,
stars, and planets would crumble and turn back into neutrons and
electrons, and a reversal of the Big Bang might occur. Is this
predictive rationality? Is validation of this type of
experimentation a subject of language? As a possible explanation,
which facilitates a new array of experiments in computer
simulation, particle accelerators, and radio- astronomic
observations, virtual reality facilitates new forms of human
praxis and is embodied in new theories of physics.

Obviously, the efficiency factor, one of the major elements in
the transition from one dominant literacy to partial literacies,
plays an important role in this endeavor. This generalized
notion of efficiency has several components in the case of
science. One is the efficiency of our attempts to make science
productive. Compared to the efficiency of the lever and the
pulley, the efficiency of the electric engine reaches a different
scale of magnitude. The same applies to our new tools, but in
more dramatic ways. So far, we have managed to make science the
most expensive human endeavor. Its current development appears
to be motivated by a self-perpetuating drive: knowledge for the
sake of knowledge. Science generated technology, which
dramatically affects the outcome of human effort.

The second component factor in the transition to the pragmatics
of the civilization of illiteracy is the efficiency of our
preparation for commanding these new tools, new forms of energy,
and new forms of human interaction. Learning how to operate
simple mechanical devices is different from learning how to
program new tools capable of commanding sophisticated technology
and of controlling tremendous amounts of energy. Although
mediation has increased in human praxis, people do not yet know
how to handle mediation, even less how to adapt education, their
own and their children's, to shorter cycles of scientific and
technological renewal.

Last among the factors at work in the change we are going through
is the efficiency of invention, discovery, and explanation.
Largely supported by society (states invest in science in order
to pursue their goals, as do businesses and various interest
groups), science is under the pressure of performance.

Markets confirm scientific results from the perspective of the
return on investment they promise to deliver. Parallel to the
most advanced and promising scientific endeavors, venture
capital underwrites the industries of the near future.
Insulation of any kind, even secrecy, no matter how stubbornly
pursued and justified, is no longer possible within the economic
dynamics of the present. No matter how hard companies try to
impose secrecy, they fail when faced with the interactivity and
integration of effort characteristic of the new dynamics. The
expectation of change, of shorter cycles of investigation, and
of shorter times for integration of results in the productive
ability of technology is unavoidable. Still, in the USA and in
Europe, there are conflicts between the new dynamics of
scientific and technological progress and the bureaucracy of
science. Driven by motivations characteristic of literate
infatuation with national pride and security, this bureaucracy
extends well beyond science and is hard at work to protect what
is already passé. For science to advance, networks of activity,
distributed tasks, and shared resources, all implying
transparency and access, are essential.

The conflict between scientific goals and morality takes on its
own characteristics in the civilization of illiteracy. Indeed,
scientific results might be right, but not necessarily always
good for humankind. They might support higher efficiency, but
sometimes to the detriment of people obsessed with maintaining
high standards of living. There are many activities-too many to
list-in which humans can be entirely replaced by machines.
Extreme effort, exposure to chemicals, radiation, and other
unfriendly elements could be avoided. However, doing away with
the living person whose identity is constituted in work
experiences makes the activity itself questionable. It is no
longer the case that we only talk about genetic control of
populations, or about mind control, about creating machines
endowed with extreme capabilities, including control of the
people who made them. These are distinct possibilities, to which
we are closer than many believe. Neither science nor technology,
even less philosophy, can afford to ignore the conflict
immanent in the situation, or the danger posed by giving in to
solutions resulting from a limited perspective, or from our
dedication to make real everything that is possible. After all,
we can already destroy the planet, but we do not, or at least not
so radically as it could be destroyed. Short of being paralyzed
by all these dangers, science has to question its own condition.
In view of this, it is far from accidental that sciences in the
civilization of illiteracy rediscover philosophy, or they
re-philosophize themselves.

Quo vadis philosophy?

The language of wisdom

Reflecting upon human beings and their relation to the outside
world (nature, culture, society) constitutes a determined form
of philosophical experience. It involves awareness of oneself
and others, and the ability to identify similarities and
differences, to explain the changing dynamics of existence, and
to project the acquired understanding into the practice of
formulating new questions. Practical implications of
philosophic systems are manifold. Such systems affect scientific,
moral, political, cultural, and other human practical
experiences of self-constitution. They accumulate wisdom more
than knowledge. To this effect, we can say that the classic model
of philosophy remains a science of sciences, or at least the
alma mater of sciences. Philosophic systems are concerned with
human values, not with skills or abilities involved in reaching
goals defined by our rationality. Nevertheless, this status has
been continuously challenged from inside and outside philosophy.
The decline of respect for philosophy probably results from the
perceived omniscient attitude philosophers have displayed and
from their unwillingness to focus on aspects of human reason.

Philosophy has never been a domain for everyone. In our day, it
has become a discourse expressed, if not in painfully contorted
language, in a multitude of specialized languages addressed to a
relatively small circle of interested parties, themselves
philosophers for the most part. The change in the pragmatic
condition of philosophy is reflected in its current linguistic
equivocations. "My philosophy" is an expression used by anyone
to express anything from a tactic in football to investments,
drug use, diet, politics, religions, and much more.

Misunderstood cultural exigencies, originating in the
civilization of literacy, and political opportunism maintain
philosophy as a required subject in universities, no matter what
is taught under its name, who teaches it, or how. Under communism
in East Europe and the Soviet Union, where free choice was out
of question, philosophy was obligatory because it was identified
with the dominating ideology. In most liberal societies,
philosophic abstraction is as much abhorred as lack of money.
Philosophic illiteracy is a development in line with the
deteriorating literacy manifested in our days. But what affects
this change is the new pragmatic framework, not the decline in
writing and reading proficiency.

The specialization of philosophic language, as well as the
integration of logico- mathematical formalism in philosophical
discourse, have not contributed to recuperating the prestige of
philosophy, or of the philosopher, for that matter. Neither did
it contribute to resolving topics specific to the discipline, in
particular, to human experience and conscience. In fact,
philosophy has disappeared in a number of philosophies practiced
today: analytic, continental, feminist, Afro-American, among
others. Each has constituted its own language and even
perspective, pursuing goals frequently rooted in the philosophy
of the civilization of literacy, or in its politics.

The relevance (or irrelevance) of philosophy cannot be
ascertained outside the practice of questioning and answering, a
practice that made philosophy necessary in the first place.
Indeed, as a practice of positioning the human being in the
universe of human experience, philosophy is as relevant as the
practical results of this positioning. There are scientific
theories, such as the theory of relativity in physics or gene
theory in biology, that are as philosophically relevant as they
are scientifically significant. And there are, as well,
philosophic theories of extreme scientific significance. Many
components of Leibniz's system, of Descartes' rationalism, and
Peirce's pragmaticism can be mentioned. Each originates within a
distinct pragmatic framework of practical experiences through
which reason comes to expression and questions specific forms of
rationality.

Philosophy, as we know it from the texts in which it was
articulated, is a product molded through the experience that
initially made writing possible (though not universally
accepted) and, later, literacy necessary. Its fundamental
distinctions- subject/object, rational/irrational, matter/spirit,
form/content, analytic/synthetic, concrete/abstract,
essence/phenomenon-correspond largely to human practical
experiences in the framework of language. The traditional
gnoseological approach reflects the same structure, as does
formal logic, based on Aristotle's syllogistic theory. The
fundamental linguistic distinction of subject/predicate marks-at
least for Western civilization-the entire approach. Expectations
of efficiency pertinent to the human scale leading to the
Industrial Revolution affected the condition of philosophy. At
this juncture, philosophers realized the practical aspect of the
discipline. Marx thought that it would empower people and help
them change the world: "Until now philosophers interpreted the
world; it's time to change it." And change it did, but in ways
different from what he and his followers anticipated. The hard
grip of reified language turned the workers' paradise into a
mental torture chamber.

Once the underlying structure (reflected in the requirements of
literacy) changed, philosophy changed as well, also freeing
itself from the categories of language that molded its
speculative discourse. Nevertheless, its institutions (education,
professional associations and conferences) continue to pursue
goals and functions peculiar to literate expectations. This
prompted a strong movement of philosophic dissidence (Feyerabend
and Lakatos are the main representatives), attuned to the
practical need of a philosophic praxis aware of the relative
nature of its assertions.

Multi-valued logic, the logic of relations, fuzzy set theory, and
computation in its algorithmic and non-algorithmic forms (based
on neural networks) allow philosophers to free themselves from
the various dualisms embedded in the language of philosophy.
Significantly better answers to ontological, gnoseological,
epistemological, and even historic questions have to reflect
such and other cognitively relevant perspectives of knowledge.
Philosophy undergoes a process of mathematization in order to
gain access to science and improve its own efficiency. It has
become logic oriented, more computational. It has adopted
genetic schemes for explaining variation and selection,
extending to the current memetic conversations and methods. It is
not unusual for philosophers to abandon the pattern of rehashing
older theories and views, and to attempt to understand pragmatic
exigencies and their reason. The scientification of philosophy
could not have happened under the scrutiny of language and the
domination of literacy. Neither could we expect, within the
literate framework, anything comparable to Plato's Dialogues, to
the great philosophical systems of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and
Marx, to the literary seduction of Heidegger, Sartre, or Martin
Buber.

In scientific disguise

Developing, parallel to common language (which philosophers
frequently call natural language), different types of sign
systems, humans utilize the latter's mediating force in order to
increase the efficiency of their action. "Give me a fixed point
and I'll move the world" is the equivalent philosophical
statement characteristic of the civilization of the lever and
pulley. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty says in a scornful
tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor
less." "The question is," says Alice, "whether you can make
words mean so many different things." Reading the dialogue from
Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, with the magnificent
works of great philosophers (from Plato to Leibniz, Kant, and
Hegel, Peirce and many more) in mind, one understands Alice's
trouble. With the exception of Wittgenstein, nobody really seems
to have been bothered by the ability people have to make words
mean many things.

Today, we could be directed to a philosophical paraphrase in
which, instead of a fixed point, the need for a sign system (a
language) is spelled out. Adapted to the scope of the conceived
practical experience, such a sign system, when put into
practice, will change the world, will "move" it. Diagrammatic
thinking, the powerful cognitive model Peirce advanced,
exemplifies the idea. Cybernetics, biogenetics, computers, and
research in artificial intelligence and artificial life, as well
as political, social, aesthetic, or religious concepts are
examples of domains where such sign systems have been devised.
They have facilitated forms of human self-constitution that
contribute to the contradictory image of today's world. Such
languages reflect the fundamental process of progressive
mediation, participate in the diversification of the languages
used, and affect the status and value system of the ideal of
literacy. They serve as the scientific disguise of philosophy.
Clarity (difficult to achieve in natural language), evidence,
and certainty seem guaranteed in the language of science. In
addition, objectivity and the ever seductive truth, for which
philosophy was never known, are also apparently within reach.

There is to philosophic discourse an internal reason for its
continuous unfolding: People constituting themselves as
philosophers change as the world they live in changes. Human
reasoning is part of the world; the ability and, moreover, the
desire to think of new questions, attempt answers, and doubt our
own ability to reach the right answer are part of what defines
the human being. The consequences of mediation in philosophy
should not be ignored. Mediation implies, on one hand, a high
degree of integration of human praxis (to the extent of making
individual contribution anonymous), and on the other, a no less
high degree of the subject's independence in respect to the
object of work or reasoning, or the object represented by the
other participants in human praxis. While it seems appropriate
for science to know more and more about a narrower range of
subjects, it contradicts the image of philosophy as it is formed
in language and embodied in the ideal of literacy. Due to this
metaphorically defined deepening of knowledge, each philosopher
is more independent of the other, but more intensely integrated
than ever before due to the necessary interconnection of this
knowledge. The meaning of this paradoxical situation is not easy
to clarify. The overall process has followed two qualitatively
contrary directions: 1) concentration on a precisely delineated
aspect of knowledge or action in order to understand and control
it; 2) abandoning interest in the whole as a consequence of the
assumption that the parts will finally be reunited in the social
integrating mechanism of the market, whether we want it or not.
We now have particular philosophies-of law, ethics, science,
sport, recreation, feminism, Afro-Centrism-but no longer a
comprehensive philosophy of existence.

The scientific disguise of philosophy contributes to its renewed
struggle for legitimacy. It adopts concepts and methods
pertinent to rationality. In order to deal with reason, or to do
away altogether with questions of reasoning, it unfolds in
science and technology. Durkheim tried to apply Darwin's natural
selection model to explain labor division. At present,
philosophers have become memeticians, and examine computational
simulations of Darwinian principles in order to see how ideas
survive and advance. Spencer believed that the increase of the
productive power of work increases happiness. Present-day
philosophers are eager to diagram the relation between work
satisfaction and personality. Some even try to revive Compte's
positivist philosophy, to improve upon past Utopian schemes, or
to invent a calculus of intellectual well-being. Short of a
philosophic inquiry, everything becomes a subject waiting for a
philosopher who does not want to stay within the boundaries of
the history of philosophy.

Once new movements, some better justified than others, and all
reflecting the shift from the authority-based civilization of
literacy to the endless freedom of choice of the illiterate
context, needed a powerful instrument to further their programs,
they chose, or were chosen by, philosophy. Secularism and
pluralism meet within philosophic concerns with the gay
movement, feminism, multi-culturalism, integration of new
technology, implications of aging, the new holisms, popular
philosophy, sexual emancipation, virtuality, and more along this
line. In a way, this reflects the new awareness of efficiency
that permeates philosophic activity, but also its struggle to
maintain its relations to literacy. Legitimate doubt is generated
by the choice of subjects that seem to attract philosophers, and
by the apparent lack of philosophic matter. When the language is
not obscure, the philosopher seems to discuss matters, not really
question reasons, and even less advance ideas or explanatory
models. Wholesale generalizations do not help, but one can
really not escape the feeling that the process through which
philosophy liberates itself from literacy has been less
productive than the similar process of science's emancipation
from language.

A journey through the many philosophically oriented Web sites
reveals very quickly that even when philosophy opts out of the
print medium, it carries over many of the limitations of
literacy. The ability to open philosophic discourse, to adopt
non- linearity, and to encourage dialogue free of the pressure of
tradition is often signaled, but rarely accomplished. The medium
is resisted, not enjoyed as an alternative to classic
philosophical discourse. Such observations have prompted the
opinion that scientists are becoming the most appropriate
philosophers of their own contributions.

Who needs philosophy? And what for?

At this point, one question naturally arises: Is philosophy
relevant after all? Moreover, is it even possible without the
participation of natural language, or at least without this
intermediary between philosophers and their public? In blunter
terms, can we live without it? In the context in which
efficiency expectations translate into a practical experience of
an unprecedented degree of specialization, will philosophy turn
into another mediating activity among people? Or will it be, as
it was considered in the culture of a Romantic ideal, humanity's
self-consciousness, as expressed in Hegel's philosophy? If
indeed philosophy is absorbed into science, what can its purpose
be?

As with literacy, the inclination is to suggest that, regardless
of the new condition of language, philosophy remains possible
and is indeed relevant. As far as its functions are
concerned-mediating activity, humanity's self-consciousness,
corpus of interpretive discourse about humanity and nature-they
remain to be defined in the pragmatic context. It is needless to
reiterate that within each scale of humankind, philosophy
pursued different interests as these proved pertinent to
efficiency expectations. Philosophers never contributed bread to
the table nor artifacts. Their skill was to formulate questions,
especially the very probing questions-"What is what?" and
"Why?"-in their attempt to address the origins of things.
Deciphering the reason of things and actions-in other words,
understanding the world and its apparent order (what the Greeks
called eunomia)-made them simultaneously philosophers and
interpreters of science. "How can we know?" and "How can we
explain?" are subsequent questions, pursued more stringently by
people in search of scientific rationality than by philosophers
per se.

No historic account, no matter how detailed, can do justice to
the definition of philosophy. Its subject changes as human
beings change in the process of their practical
self-constitution. From philosophy, science and all the
humanities (ethics, aesthetics, politics, sociology, law)
evolved. Even our concern with language is of a philosophic
nature. It seems that philosophy is, in the final analysis, the
only authentic domain of abstraction. Its interest is not the
individual, the concrete, the immediate, not even the idea, but
the abstraction of these. Where other domains, such as
mathematics, logic, linguistics, and physics are intent on
understanding the abstract notions around which their domains
are built, on giving them life in the context of practical
experiences, philosophy seems driven by the quest for reaching
the next level of abstraction, the abstraction of abstractions,
and so on. Science uses abstraction as an instrument for
reaching concreteness; philosophy follows the inverse path. There
is always to the philosophic attempt a call for the next step,
into the infinite. Each accomplishment is provisional. To
experiment philosophically means not so much to search
systematically for causes as to never end the inquiry. There are
no right or wrong philosophic theories. Philosophy is cumulative
and self-devouring.

That people will never stop wondering what is what, the more
their own activity will multiply the domain of existing
entities, goes almost without saying. That they will ask again
and again how they can know, how they can be sure that what they
know is true, or at least relevant, is also evident. The species
is characterized by its ability to think, produce and master
tools, acknowledge value, and constitute itself as a community
of shared concern and resources, through its playfulness and
other characteristics (alluded to in terms such as Homo
economicus, Zoon semiotikon, Zoon politikon, Homo ludens).
Probably more than all these partial qualifiers, the species is
the only one known to question everything. As language experience
marked the genetic condition of the human being, questioning
marked it too, probably through language mechanisms in the first
place. When the child articulates the first question, the entire
genetic endowment is at work.

We are who and what we are in our inquisitive interaction with
others. Our minds exist only through this interaction. This
statement says in effect that to philosophize became part of the
process of human self-constitution and identification. The only
referent of philosophy is the human being constituted in
practical experiences. Together with other surviving literacies,
philosophic literacy will be one of many. The philosophy of the
civilization of illiteracy will reflect the circumstances of work
and life characteristic of the pragmatic framework. It will also
be subjected to the severe test of market exigencies as these
reflect efficiency expectations characteristic of the new scale
of humankind. Science can justify itself by the return in
investment in new explanatory models. It also leads to new
technologies and to higher levels of efficiency in human
practical experiences. Philosophy certainly has a different
justification. Philosophic necessity is evasive. Short of living
off the past, as literacy, religion, and art do, it needs to
refocus on reason as the compass of human activity. Focusing on
alternative practical experiences, philosophy can practically
help people to free themselves from the obsession with
progress-seen as a sequence of ever-escalating records (of
production, distribution, expectation)-and moreover, from the
fear of all its consequences. It can also focus people's
attention on alternatives to everything that affects the
integrity of the species and its sense of quality, including the
relation to their environment. When past, present, and future
collapse into the illiterate frenzy of the instant, philosophy
owes to those who question its articulations an honest approach
to the question, "Is there a future?" But as this future takes
shape in the presence of humans partaking in the open world of
networked interactions, banalities will not do.



Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes

Confusing as it is, a snapshot of everything that today goes
under the names art and literature conveys at least a sense of
variety. Forget the never-ending discussions of what qualifies
as art and what does not. And forget the irreconcilable disputes
over taste. What counts are practical experiences of
self-identification as artist or writer, as well as involvement
with artifacts eventually acknowledged within the experience as
art or as literature, i.e., experiences through which the art
public and readership are constituted.

What comes to mind when we think about the art and literature of
the civilization of illiteracy are not illiterate
writers-although they exist-and not illiterate painters,
composers, pianists, dancers, sculptors, or computer artists of
all kinds. Rather, disparate examples of works, each remarkable
in its own way (or altogether unremarkable), but above all
marked by characteristics that distinctly disconnect them from
the literate experience of art and literature capture our
memory. Cautionary note ended. Here are the examples: surviving
Auschwitz translated into a comic book parable populated by cats
(depicting the Nazis) and mice (depicting their victims); a
Grammy Award returned by a famous singing group because someone
else was doing the singing for them; the tear-jerkers from
Disney Studios (a company whose audience is the world), classic
stories or history turned into feminist or politically correct
musicals; paintings by a controversial artist (self-made or made
by the market?), fetching prices as high as overvalued shares of
a new Internet company, after he died of AIDS at an early age;
the never-ending parade of computer animation miracles; the Web
sites of uninterrupted aesthetic frenzy that would have
delighted Andy Warhol, one of the authentic founders of art in
the civilization of illiteracy, if anyone could pinpoint the
beginning of this civilization.

These are examples. Period. Originality, aesthetic integrity,
homogeneity, and artfulness are the exception. The process
through which these examples were produced begs qualifiers
different from art produced under the aegis of literate
expectations. Today, art is produced much faster, embodied-or
disembodied-in and disseminated through more media, and
exhausted in a shorter time-sometimes even before it comes into
being! Cycles of artistic style are abridged to the extreme of
being impossible to define. Artistic standards are leveled as
the democracy of unlimited access to art and literature expands
their public, without effecting a deep rapport, a long-lasting
relation, or a heightened aesthetic expectation. Never before has
more kitsch been produced and more money spent to satisfy the
obsession with celebrity that is the hallmark of this time.
Museums became the new palaces and the new shopping malls,
opening branches all over the world, not unlike MacDonalds and
fashion retail stores. And never before were more technological
and scientific means involved in the practical experience of
art, always on the cutting edge, not only because art is
traditionally associated with innovation. These new experiences
make possible the transition from an individual, private, almost
mystical, experience to a very public activity. Open a virtual
studio on the Web, and chances are that many people will
exercise their calling (or curiosity) on the digital canvas. Not
infrequently, this activity is carried on at the scale of the
integrated world: major concerts viewed on several continents,
attempts to integrate art from all nations into a super-work, the
melange of literatures fused into new writing workshops,
distributed, interactive installations united in the experience
of digital networks. Good taste and bad co-exist; pornography
resides as bits and bytes in formats not different from those of
the most suave examples from art history. The Internet is the
one and only uncensored place left on the earth. All these
phenomena deserve to be understood as testimony to the change of
the condition of human experience, and in the context of change
from a literacy-dominated art to an art of many partial
literacies, of mediations, and of relatively vague notions of
value and significance.

Making and perceiving

Nature and culture meet in artistic practical experiences of
human self- constitution, as they meet in any other human
experience. What makes their meeting extraordinary is the fact
that what we see, or hear, or listen to is the expression of
their intersecting. Through art, humans project sensorial, as
well as cognitive, characteristics. The experience of
structuring a category of artifacts, defined through their
aesthetic condition, and the complementary experience of
self-definition through aesthetically relevant actions
constitute the realm of the artistic. In their interaction with
objects and actions resulting from such experiences, individuals
conjure meaning as they define themselves in respect to the
experiences in a given context. Like any other practical
experience, the production of art belongs to the pragmatic
framework. We are what we do: hunting, running, singing,
drawing, telling stories, creating rhymes, performing a play. In
their respective doings, artists identify themselves through
particular aptitudes and skills: rhythm, movement, voice, sense
of color, harmony, synchronism, contrast. The emergence of
language and the consecutive experience of recording led to the
association of skills with the writing of the language, that is,
drawing and reading it to others, performing it in rituals.

The domain of art seems to be characteristic only of the human
species. Since the practical experience of art is so close to
our biogenetic structural reality, while at the same time
constitutive of a non-existential domain, the making of art and
the cultural appropriation of art are perceived as similar
experiences. Nevertheless, language exercised coordination for
the simple reason that successive motivations of the art
experience-such as the mytho-magical, practical, ritual, sexual,
gnoseologic, political, or economic-and the underlying structure
of art belong to different domains. The underlying structure of
art defines its aesthetics. The underlying structure of magic,
ritual, or the sexual defines their respective condition, as it
expresses human understanding of the unknown, or the many
aspects of sexuality.

The interaction between artist and society, once markets emerged
and art was acknowledged as a product with its own identity,
resulted in specific forms of recurrence: recognition of the
uniqueness of the work, of the artist, and of interpretive
patterns. Once the framework for recognizing artworks as
merchandise was established, transactions in artworks became
transactions in the artist-society relation, with a lot of
give-and-take that was difficult, if not impossible, to encode.
The nature of the relations can be partially understood by
examining behaviors of artists, who are almost always seen as
eccentric, a little off the middle of the road, and behaviors of
the public. There is much instinctive interaction, and even more
learned behavior, mediated through an experience constituted in
and communicated through language.

Looking at a painting-once painting is acknowledged as
artifact-is more than acknowledging its physical reality: the
optical, and sometimes the textual, appearance, or the context
of contemplation. The action of painting, sculpting, dancing,
performing, or writing poetry or a novel is simultaneously an
action of constituting oneself as artist or writer and
projecting this self, as it results from the practical experience
characteristic of such an endeavor, into the social space of
interactions. This is why art is in the first place expression,
and only secondly communication. This is also why looking at a
work is to constitute the individual experience of context, in
the first place, and only secondly to conjure and assign
meaning. In both the action of painting and looking at a
painting, biologically inherited characteristics, together with
learned elements (skills), participate in the process of
constituting the being (the painter and the onlooker, for
instance) as both individual and member of the community.

The natural and the acquired, or learned, interact. And in the
course of time, the natural is educated, made aware of
characteristics connected to culture rather than nature. Two
simultaneous processes take place: 1) the recurrent interaction
of those making art and those acknowledging it in their
practical life; 2) establishment of patterns of interpretation
as patterns of interaction mediated by the artwork. Language
experiences take place in both processes. Consequently, artistic
knowledge is accumulated, and art-related communication becomes
a well defined practical experience, leading to
self-identification such as art historian, art theoretician, art
critic, and the like. The nature and characteristics of the
practical experience of art-related language ought to be
examined so that we can reach an understanding of the
circumstances under which they might change.

Art and language

Language is a multi-dimensional practical experience. In the
interaction between individuals who produce something (in this
case, works of art) and those who consume them,
self-constitution through language makes coordination possible.
Production and consumption are other instances of human
self-constitution. Frequently, integration takes place in the
process of exchanging goods or, at a more general level, values.

Drawing something, real or imaginary, and looking at the drawing,
i.e., trying to recognize the drawn object, are structurally
different experiences. These two practical experiences can be
related in many ways: display the drawing and the object drawn
side-by-side; explain the drawing to the onlookers; attach a
description. Here is where difficulties start to accumulate. The
artifact and the experience leading to it appear as different
entities. Descriptions (what is on paper or on canvas) lead to
identification, but not to interaction, the only reason behind
the artistic experience. Language substitutes its own condition
for the entire physical-biogenetic level of interaction. It
overplays the cultural, which is consequently made to represent
the entire experience.

People speak about works of art, write about art, and read
writings about art as though art had no phylogenetic dimension,
only a phylocultural reality. Language's coordinative function
is relied upon because of the dissimilarity between the practical
experiences of making art and of appropriating it in the cultural
environment. Through cultural experiences, the coordinating
function of language extends to facilitating new forms of
practical experiences associated with making art: instruction,
use of technology, and cooperation peculiar to artmaking. It
also facilitates experiences of appropriation in the art market,
the constitution of institutions dedicated to supporting
education in art, the politics of art, and forms of public
evaluation. Art implicitly expresses awareness, on the part of
artists and public, of how persons interacting through artistic
expression are changed through the interactions.

Language, especially in forms associated with literacy, makes
this awareness of reciprocal influence explicit. In the
civilization of illiteracy, all non-literate means of
information, communication, and marketing (e.g., songs, film,
video, interactive multimedia) take it upon themselves to
reposition art as yet another practical experience of the
pragmatics of high efficiency peculiar to a humankind that
reached yet another critical mass. It was not unusual for an
artist in the literacy-dominated past to go through very long
cycles in preparing for the work, and for the work itself to
unfold after years of effort. It is quite the contrary in the
case of the instantaneous gratification of a video work, of an
installation, or of gestural art. Within the pragmatics of an
underlying structure reflected in literacy, art was as confined
as the experience of language, which represented its
underpinning. The pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy
makes the experience of art part of the global experience.

Many people wonder whether the basic, though changing, relation
between art and language, in particular art and literacy, is
unavoidable-furthermore, whether coordination can be assumed by
a sign system other than literate language. In prelude to
answering this question, I would like to point out that the
influence of language on the arts, and even on the language arts
(poetry, drama, fiction), was hailed by as many as deplored it.
To account for attitudes in favor of or against an art connected
to, or resulting from, high levels of literacy, i.e., of
favoring an art emancipated from the domination of language,
means to account for the change of art and its perceived
meaning. The entire artistic effort to transcend the figurative
and the narrative, to explore the abstract and the gestural, to
explore its own reality, and to establish new languages
testifies to this striving towards emancipation. Ascertaining
that the art- language relation is not inescapable does not
purport the invention of a new relation as an alternative to
what culture acknowledges as the relatively necessary dependence
of the two. As with the case of other forms of practical
experiences discussed against the background of literacy,
examination of directions of change and the attempt to conjure
their meaning is required.

Human beings are agents of change and, at the same time, outside
observers of the process of change. An observer can distinguish
between the recurrent influence of the human biogenetic
structure and the interactions based on this structure. An
observer can also account for the role of the phylocultural, in
particular the interactions this triggers. Restricted to the
literate means of communication that I chose for presenting my
arguments, I want to show that art and its interpretation are no
longer the exclusive domain of literate language. Alternative
domains of creation and interpretation are continuously
structured as we project ourselves in new practical experiences.
Moreover, the eternal conflict inherent in art experiences,
between what is and what unfolds, best expressed in the quest
for innovation, integrates aspects of the conflict between
literacy-dominated pragmatics and pragmatics dominated by
illiteracy. Were I an artist, and were we all visually attuned,
this topic could have been explained through one or several
artworks, or through the process leading to an artwork. The role
of processing current practical experiences of art needs to be
properly highlighted. Exacerbated in the self-consciousness of
art in the age of illiteracy, artistic processes take precedence
over artifacts; the making of art becomes more important than the
result. Artists would say that we exist not only in the
environment of our language projections, but probably just as
much (if not more) in the environment of our art projections.

Impatience and autarchy

The prophets of the end of the arts (Hegel was their most
convincing, but most misunderstood, representative) were so
confused by changes in the arts that, instead of approaching the
dynamics of the process, they concentrated on the logical
possibility that artistic practice is self-devouring and
self-destructive. The initial end-of-the-arts prophecies were
delivered during a time of relatively mild change in the status
of the aesthetic appropriation of reality. Recent prophecies
occurred in a very different context. It was only after World
War I that aesthetic experiences really difficult to connect and
integrate in an accepted explanation changed our notion and
expectations of art. With the experience of disposable language,
which the Dadaist movement submitted to a community already
skeptical of language, came the experience of disposable art.

While literacy supplied a framework for (almost) consistent
representations of values and norms, human practice at the
border between literacy and a-literacy introduced and fostered
inconsistency, believed to be the last resort of individual
freedom. Eclecticism and consumption joined in this experience,
since mixing without system or justification of any kind is like
stating that everything is worth whatever people make of it, and
therefore they want to have it. Re-evaluation of available art,
good or bad, aesthetically relevant or kitsch, significant or
insignificant, is part of this change. Once re-evaluation
started, the processes of artmaking and aesthetic appropriation
grew relatively disconnected. Where language, through literacy as
a generalized medium of interaction, maintained cultural
distinctions, such as the ones embodied in our notions of
perspective, resemblance, and narration, the new art experience
introduced distinctions at the natural level, such as instinct,
energy, choice, and change. For as long as literacy maintained
control and integration, viewers, irritated by conventions
foreign to them, physically attacked works (such as
Impressionist paintings) resulting from artistic practices
different from those congruent to the practice of language and
to the associated expectations of seeing.

Art under the scrutiny of literacy is always model driven. Once
the necessity of literacy as the only integrating mechanism was
challenged by the need to maintain levels of efficiency for
which language is not well equipped, new forms of artistic
appropriation of reality and a new notion of reality itself
became possible. Model was replaced by iconoclasm. Walter
Benjamin captured some of these changes in the formula of "art
in the age of its mechanical reproduction." The end of the aura,
as Benjamin has it, is actually the aura's shift from the
artifact to the process and the artist. It corresponds not to
the end of art's uniqueness, but to the artist's determination to
get rid of all restrictions (of subject matter, material,
technique) and to ascertain artistic freedom as the goal of
artistic experience. But there are yet more possibilities for the
emancipation of artists and their work.

As we enter the age of electronic reproduction, massive
communication that supports interactive multimedia, and
information integration through networks (adapted for pipelining
data and all kinds of images), we encounter such possibilities.
We are also subjected to new experiences-for instance,
simultaneous transmission of art and interpretation, moreover
the possibility to contribute our own interpretation, to become
co-makers of whatever is presented to us through the very
malleable digital media. Technology and change of aesthetic
goals affect the scale of artistic experience, as well as the
relation between artists and the world. Projects such as Walter
de Maria's Lightening Field and Christo's Umbrella project
(extended over California and Japan) are examples of both the
change of scale and of new interpretation processes. They are
also vivid proof that globality permeates art at each level. So
does the sense of rapid change, the acknowledgment and fear of
perishability, and the open-endedness of the practical
experience of making art. I doubt that anyone could have captured
this sense as well as the Web site on which millions of viewers
could experience the wrapping and unwrapping of the Reichstag in
Berlin. Christo and Jeanne-Claude might remain the authors of
record, but the event grew beyond the notion of authorship.

The artistic experience of the civilization of illiteracy is also
characterized by impatience and autarchy. Things happen fast and
relatively independent from one another. Artistic experiment
always embodied characteristics of the practical experience of
human self-constitution. From petroglyphic expression to the art
of our age, this happens again and again, obviously in
context-dependent forms. The Dutch and Flemish Baroque artists
celebrated results of industriousness through mythological
themes. Before that, religion dominated up to and through the
Renaissance. In the context of African, Asian, and South
American art, the forms were different, but the pragmatic stamp
is faultlessly evident. No wonder that in the settled age of
literacy, art had a structure similar to that of the practical
experience of literate language, regardless of the richness of
its forms. It even called for experimental settings reminiscent
of industry, or of the university context, as we know from art
history. And it was sanctioned on the same pragmatic criteria as
any other literate experiment: success (it was useful), or
failure (it was discarded). Accordingly, it implied sequential
development and a rather settled succession of operations. As
artistic experimentation took place in line with all other
experiments characteristic of the pragmatic context of literacy,
it even resulted in an industrial model based on modularity,
which the Bauhaus enthusiastically promoted. A number of shops
produced thousands of ready-made artistic objects with a clear
goal in mind: value through usefulness, function over form,
functionality as aesthetics at work. Artistic practice and
appropriation were coordinated through the still literate
language of the market.

Art in the civilization of illiteracy is less a matter of
invention and discovery, as it was in the civilization of
literacy, and more one of selection, framing, and endless
variation. Since the end of the last century, artists started
breaking away from some of the characteristics implicit in the
literate experience, such as hierarchy, centralism, and
nationalism. This is not a time for rules and laws, unless they
are taken from the books of the past, relativized and integrated
in the tools needed in artistic practice, made into underlying
principles. Appropriation is not of the object, but of the
method, process, and context. The tools of this civilization are
endowed with the literacy required for certain partial
experiences. Artists, instead of acquiring skills, are trained to
master such tools. In his series of ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp
anticipated much more than a style. He anticipated a new kind of
artistic practice and a different interrelation among the
individuals involved in producing-literally selecting from the
infinite repertory of ready- mades and framing-and the
individuals who appropriate the artifact for whatever reason
(aesthetic satisfaction, status, investment, irrational drive to
collect).

Today, artists are more dependent on others involved in the
pragmatic framework of the time. This dependency is the result
of the more integrated nature of human effort. Everything that
is eventually built into the work, regardless of whether this
work is an object, an action, or a process, results from other
human practical experiences. The time of the artist's inventing
his own pigments, making his own canvasses and frames, that is,
the time of the artist's integral ownership and quasi-
independence, was already over with the advent of industrial
production. In the context of mediation and task distribution,
new levels of dependencies are established and reflected in the
work. Video art, photography, film, computer-based installations,
and much of the computer music, interactive multimedia, and
virtual art experiences are examples of such dependencies.
Simultaneously they are examples of the new forms of conflict
and tension that mark the artistic experience. Artistic freedom
and self- determination are only apparent. The limits of the many
elements involved in an artistic experience affect choice and
artistic integrity. Free choice, a romantic notion, is a
delusion under these new circumstances. There is no censorship on
the Internet, but that does not make the medium totally free.

The forms of integration in the guise of new science and
technology are probably less troublesome than integration
through language. They are, however, much more constricting and
restrictive because they derive from elements over which the
artist has little, if any, control. The growth of non-verbal
modes of human expression, communication, and interaction
introduces elements of mediation. These can be seen as
intermediaries, such as images to be integrated, sounds,
political actions (a sit-in is the best known example) that are
involved in the practical experience of art in all its phases.
Formulation of aesthetic goals, in the form of video
improvisations, diagrams, multimedia installations,
computer-generated simulations, interpretation of an artwork
(animation of a painting or sculpture, for example), and
processes of meaning realization and valuation (represented by
market transactions, insurance estimates, political relevance,
ideological tendency, cultural significance) use mediating
elements. None of Christo's elaborate and very comprehensive
projects could have been carried through without such means.
Keijo Yamamoto's widely celebrated virtual performance could not
come into being without an understanding of all that it takes to
establish a Worldwide Network Art.

Art, as a human experience, emphasizes its own transitory nature
and becomes less permanent than in previous stages of artistic
practice, but far more pervasive. Still, to qualify this process
as mere democratization of the arts would be misleading. That
supermarkets are full of meat, oranges, cheese, and all kinds of
graphic signs should not be interpreted as the democratization
of meat, oranges, cheese, or graphic signs. The majority of
artists still strive for recognition. To the extent that their
own recognition as different means that there are people who do
not qualify for the same recognition and reward, there is no
equality in the realm of art. On the other hand, the pressures of
leveling and the iconoclastic component of artistic experience
reduce the passion that drove artists in the past, or at least
changes the focus of this passion. Although the artistic process
has changed in line with other changes in the systematic domain
of human experience in general, it still resists doing away with
the terms for artistic recognition. The uncertainty (including
that of recognition, but not limited to it) projected in the
work qualifies it as an expression of individualism. The
heuristic attempt to establish new patterns of human interaction
through art reflects the uncertainty. To own art that is stored
in units of information and in invisible processing instructions
means something totally different from being in possession of
unique artifacts embodied in matter, regardless of how much they
are affected by the passing of time.

The recurrent phylogenetic and phylocultural structure, on which
the artist-public interaction was built in the pragmatic
framework fostering literacy, is questioned from within artistic
practice. Art is only indirectly affected by the new scale of
humankind, as it tries to acknowledge this scale. But the
efficiency that this scale requires is reflected in the means
available to support experiences of human self-constitution as
artist. Related to scale are the notions of survival and well
being. People do not need art to survive, and the majority of
people on Earth are living proof of this assertion. But in a
broader sense, life that does not have an artistic dimension is
not human. That is what we have learned or what we want to
believe.

To express oneself in forms involving an artistic element is part
of self- constitution as a human being, distinct from the rest of
the natural realm. Moreover, to have access to the richness of
other expressive forms-rhythms, colors, shapes, movements,
metaphors, sounds, textures-is to reascertain a sense of
belonging. In this vein, the right to affluence implicit in the
civilization of illiteracy extends well into the domain of the
aesthetic. New artistic structures and means are continuously
submitted and consumed. Some end up in oblivion; others suggest
dynamic patterns. Freed from the constraints of a dominant
literacy, artistic practice is becoming more and more like any
other form of human experience, emancipated from the obsession of
universality and eternity (embodied in museums and art
collections), from centralism (expressed in such elements as the
vanishing point, the tonal center of music, the architectural
keystone). True, a great deal of narcissism has come to the
forefront. And there is a tendency to break rules for the sake
of breaking them, and to make the act of breaking the rule the
object of artistic interest. In transcending old media
boundaries, production and appropriation come closer together.
The person making the artwork already integrates the
appropriation in the making. Thus a complicity beyond and above
language is established in defiance of time, space, and the
universal. Nevertheless, artists still want to be eternal!

Art establishes itself on a plurality of levels of interaction.
This is its main characteristic, since the cultural level
supported by literacy is breaking the bonds of a generic,
pervasive literacy. Several specialized languages mediate at
various levels. The language of art history addresses
professionals at one level, and laymen at another, through an
array of journals and magazines. Art theory speaks to experts
and, in a different tone, to neophytes who themselves will judge
or produce artworks. The language of materials and techniques
delves into particulars beyond oil, canvas, melody, beat, and
rhythm that a generally literate onlooker or listener would not
readily comprehend.

The art of the civilization of illiteracy partly reprocesses
previous artistic experience. By no accident, the entire modern
movement looked back at ancient art forms and exotic art and
appropriated their themes and structural components. In this
experience, cultural conventions expressed through literacy (such
as the recurrent linear perspective, illusory space, or color
symbolism) are of secondary import. The goal is to account for
the tension between motives (the magical, the sacred, or the
mythic), the realistic image, and abstract extensions. The
experience, which language inadequately reported, but could not
substitute, is the subject of artistic investigation. African
and Chinese masks, Russian icons, Mayan artifacts, Arabic
decorative motifs, and Japanese syllabaries are invoked with the
intention of arousing awareness of their specific pragmatic
context, which in turn will influence new artistic practical
experiences. This is art after art. Evidently, Russian
avant-garde, French cubism, American conceptualism, and all the
other isms cannot be seen as ordinary extensions to experiences
alien to tradition, or as attempts to loosen the ties between art
and literacy in conscious preparation for relative emancipation
from language. This phase has its own, new, recurring
interactions. The post-modern is probably the closest we have
come to the expression of awareness and values about art in art,
a generic hall of mirrors.

Artistic practice led to a change in the structure of the domain:
art assumes a self-referential function and submits the results
to the public at large (literate or not). To look at post-modern
art and architecture as only illustrative of cultural quotes, and
possible self-irony, would mean to miss the nature of the
experience projected in making the new artifacts. It is an
undoing of the past in order to achieve a new freedom (from
norm, ideal, value, morality, even aesthetics). The concept of
art, resulting from the theoretic practice focused on
accumulated artistic experience in its broadest sense, is
subjected to change. Artifacts resulting from the practical
experience of artists constitute a domain congruent to the
aesthetic dimension of human interaction in the social
environment. This art is illiterate in the sense that it refuses
previous norms and values, comments upon them from within, and
projects a very individual language, with many ad hoc rules, and
a vocabulary in continuous change. Think about how, in the
post-modern, the condition and function of drawing change.
Drawing no longer serves as an underlying element of painting,
architecture, or sculpture. Rather, drawing ascertains its own
aesthetic condition. In a broader sense, it is as though art
continuously generates its definition and redefinition, and
allows those involved in artistic practice to constitute
themselves as entities of change more than as manufacturers of
aesthetically relevant objects. In a similar way, harmony is re-
evaluated in the experience of music.

The specializations within artistic practice (e.g., drawing,
harmony, composition) correspond to an incredible
diversification of skills and techniques, to the creation and
adoption of new tools (digital devices included), and awareness
of the market. Those who know the language of an artifact, or of
a series of relatively similar artifacts, are not necessarily
those who will appropriate and interpret the artifact. In this
age, aesthetic expression becomes an issue of information
processing resulting from the systematic deconstruction of the
aesthetic practice of the age dominated by literacy. Images and
sounds are derived from various experiences (photographic,
mechanical, electronic). Spontaneity is complemented by
elaboration. Previous stylistic characteristics- spontaneity is
only the most evident-are reified and framed in new settings
together with the interpretation. They are also reified in
artistic expression as the gesture of making the work and the
act of submitting it to the public with the aim of pleasing,
provoking, criticizing, ridiculing, confounding, challenging,
uplifting, or degrading (intentionally or not).

Post-modern artistic practice results from the display of broken
conventions and rules, or of disparate and sometimes
antagonistic characteristics. Suffice it to point out how the
private (the personal side of art, layout strategies, art of
proportions, drawing, symbolism, harmony, and musical or
architectural composition) becomes public. Real Life, an MTV
series, is the personal drama of five young people trying to make
it in New York City. The script was their day-to-day existence,
the attempt to harmonize their conflicting lifestyles in the
elegant loft that MTV provided. When the director fell in love
with one of the characters, he was brought in front of the
camera's merciless eye. Likewise, the artist-painter, composer,
sculptor, dancer, or film director-submits the secrets of his
experience to the viewer, the listener, and the spectator. The
artifact comes to the market delivered with its self-criticism,
even with a time bomb set for the hour after which the work has
become valueless. The making of art made public is at the same
time its unmaking.

Appropriation, one of the preferred methods of the art
experience, is based on a notion of aesthetic or cultural
complicity. The illiterate public accepts a game of allusions.
The alluded must be present in the work, because in the absence
of a unifying literacy, there is no shared background one can
count on. Insinuations, innuendo, and provocation are practiced
parallel to the quote around which the work establishes its own
identity.

Art is infinitely fragmented today. No direction dominates, or at
least no longer than the 15 minutes of fame that Warhol
prophesied. There is a real sense of artistic glut and a feeling
of ethical confusion: Is anything authentic? The public is lured
into the work, sometimes in ridiculous forms (a painting with
live characters touching the viewers, pinching them, reaching
for pocketbooks, or spitting chewing gum); other times in naive
ways (through mirrors, interactive dialogue on computer screens,
live installations in a zoo, live keyboards in a music hall).
Art is delivered unfinished, as a point of entry, and as an open
challenge to change. To copyright openness and sign it is as
absurd, or sublime, as delivering beautiful empty bars of music
to serve as a score for symphonic interpretation or a multimedia
event.

The copy is better than the original

Within artistic practice, as much as within any other practical
form of human projection, we notice the transition from a
centralized system of reference and values to a system of
parallel values. In the continuum generically qualified in the
market as art- and what cannot be declared art today?-there is a
noticeable need for intrinsic relations of patterns: what
belongs together, and how commonalties are brought about. And
there is a need for disparity and distinction: How do we
distinguish among the plenty accumulated in a never-ending
series of shows when all that changes is the name on the canvas?
The same applies to photography, video art, theater, dance,
minimalist music, and the architecture of deconstruction. An
evident tension results, not different from the one we perceive
in the market of stocks and options. The dilemma is obvious:
where to invest, if at all, unless someone has insider
information (What is hot?). This is not an expression of an
ideal, as the values of literacy marked art to be, but of
alternatives delivered together with the uncertainty that
characterizes the new artistic experience as one of obsession
with recognition in an environment of competition that often
becomes adversarial. (The umbrellas that the Parisians used to
attack Impressionist canvases at the turn of the century are
children's toys in comparison to the means of aesthetic
annihilation used in our time.)

Becoming a practical experience focused on its own condition and
history, this kind of art affects the appropriation of its
products in the sense of increasing artificiality-the shared
phylocultural component-and decreasing naturalness. Accordingly,
interpretive practice is focused on establishing distinctions
(often hair- splitting), more and more within the artistic
domain, in disregard of message, form, ethical considerations,
and even skill. This is the type of art whose photographic
reproduction is always better than the original. This is the
music that always sounds crisper on a compact disk. This is the
art whose simuli of the show, performance, dance, or concert on
television are even better than the production. Meaning comes
about in an individual experience of relating distinctions, not
common experiences.

The specialization of art, no less than the specialization of
sciences and humanities, results in the formation of numerous
networks of recurrent or non-recurrent interaction. Examples of
this are layering, tracing from photo-projection, expanding the
strategies of collage (to include heterogeneous sources), mixing
the elaborate and the spontaneous (in dance, performance, video,
even architecture). The pencil and brush are replaced by the
scanner and by memes of operations favoring minute detail over
meaningful wholes. Music is generated by means of sampling and
synthesizing. We deal with a phenomenon of massive
decentralization-each is potentially an artist-and generalized
integration through networks of interaction, within which
museums, galleries, and auction houses represent major nodes. It
is not unusual to see the walls of a museum become the support
for a work whose life ends with the end of the show, if not
earlier. Many musical compositions never make it to paper,
forever sentenced to tape or compact disk. Composers who do not
know how to read or write music rely on the musical knowledge
integrated in their digital instruments.

With the advent of technological means for the production and
dissemination of images, sounds, and performances begins an age
of a sui generis artistic environment of life that is easy to
adapt to individual preference, easy to change as the preference
changes. The new artistic practice results in the demythification
of artists and their art. Art itself is demythified at the same
time. As a consequence of electronic reproducibility and
infinite manipulation, art forms a new library of images with
memory devices loaded with scanned art, but with no books. Sound
samples are the library of the composer active in the
civilization of illiteracy. Using networking as a matter of
practicability, people could display, in places of living or
work, images from any collection, or listen to music from any
ongoing concert around the globe. They could also change the
selection without touching the display. They could redo each
artwork as they please, painting over its digital double in the
act of appropriating it, probably beyond what any artist of the
past would ever accept, or any artist of the present would care
for. Music could be subjected to similar appropriations. As a
matter of fact, televised images are already manipulated and
r-written. DVD-three letters standing for Digital Video Data-
yet to make it into the everyday jargon reflecting our
involvement with new media, will probably replace the majority
of televised images. With the advent of digital video delivered
via the familiar compact disk format, a tool as powerful as any
TV production facility will support artistic innovation that we
still associate with high budgets and glamorous Hollywood
events.

Art, as much as any other form of human interaction in the
civilization of illiteracy, involves shorter cycles of exchange
and contact at each of its levels: meaning constitution,
symbolism, education, merchandise. The eternity and
transcendence of art, notions and expectations associated with
the literate experience, become nostalgic references of a past
pragmatics. Viewers consume art almost at the rhythm at which
they consume everything else. Art consumes itself, exhausting a
model even before it can be publicly acknowledged as one. In its
new manifestations, not all necessarily in digital format, but
many in the transitory existence of networks, it either comes in
an abundance, which contradicts the literacy-based ideal of
uniqueness, or in short-lived singular modes, which contradicts
the ideal of permanency. Strategies of over-writing,
over-dancing, over-sounding, and over-impression are applied with
frenzy. Grid structures made visible become containers for very
fluid forms of expression, bringing to mind the fluidity of
Chinese calligraphy. Afro-American street dancers, West
European ballet groups, and theaters in which the human body is
integrated into the more comprehensive body of the show,
practice these strategies for different purposes and with
different aesthetic goals. There is also a lot of parody, and
fervor, in expanding one medium into another: music becomes
painting or sculpture; dance becomes image; sculpture lends its
volume to theatrical projects or to 3D renditions, virtual or
real events that integrate the natural and the artificial.

In this vast effort of exploration, authenticity is rarely
secured. Photography, especially in its digital forms, would be
impossible without the industry it created; nor would painting,
sculpture, music, or computer-based interactive art (cyberart,
another name for virtual reality) without the industries they
stimulated. The legitimate market of fakes and the illegitimate
market of originals meet in the illiterate obsession with
celebrity, probably the most fleeting of all experiences. The
extension of art as practice to art as object, resulting from
the aesthetic experience in the space of reproductions better
than originals, is challenged by the intensions of the act
(process). Intensity is accepted more and more as the essence of
the artistic practical experience, impossible to emulate in a
reproduction, and actually excluded in the perfection of a
concert transposed onto a compact disk, for example, or of
images on CD-ROM and DVD disks.

When each of us can turn into a gazelle, a lobster, a stone, a
tree, a pianist, a dancer, an oboe, or even an abstract thought
by donning gloves and goggles, we are projected in a space of
personal fantasy. Creativity in virtual reality, including
creativity of interaction on the Internet, invites play. It can
be in someone's private theater, sex parlor, or drug experience.
As an interactive medium, virtual reality can be turned into an
instrument for knowing others as they unfold their creativity in
the virtual space shared. As opposed to art in its conventional
form, virtual reality supports real-time interactions. The
artist and the work can each have its own life. Or the artist can
decide to become the work and experience the perception of
others. No Rembrandt or Cézanne, not even the illiterate
graffiti artists in the New York subway system could experience
such things.

Surprisingly, this experience is not limited only to non-language
based experiences, but also to the art of writing and reading.
Embodied in avatars, many would-be writers contribute their
images or lines to ongoing fictional situations on chat sites on
the World Wide Web. While art is freeing itself from literacy,
literature does not seem to have the same possibility. Or is
this another prejudice we carry with us from the pragmatic
framework of literacy-defined self-constitution? The borderline,
if any, between art and writing is becoming fuzzier by the hour.

A nose by any other name

The art of the word, of language, as exemplified in poetry,
novels, short stories, plays, and movie scripts, takes place in
a very strange domain of our existence. Why strange? The
languages of poetry and of our routine conversations differ
drastically. How they are different is not easy to explain. Many
a writer and interpreter of poetry, plays, and stories (short or
long) used their wisdom to explain that Gertrude Stein's "A rose
is a rose is a rose," (or for that matter, Shakespeare's "A rose
by any other name...") is not exactly the same as "A nose is a
nose is a nose..." (or "A nose by any other name..."). Although
the similarities between the two are so evident that, without a
certain shared experience of poetry, some of us would qualify
both as identically silly or identically strange, there is a
literary quality that distinguishes them.

The art of written words, usually called literature, involves
using language for practical purposes other than projecting our
common experiences and sharing them on a social level. Nabokov
once told his students that literature was not born on the day
someone cried "Wolf! Wolf!" out of the Neander Valley as a wolf
ran after him (or her). Literature was born when no wolf chased
that person. "Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in
the tall story, there is a shimmering go-between. That
go-between, that prism [Nabokov qualified Proust as a prism] is
the art of literature." This is not the place to discuss the
definition of literature, or to set one forth. It is clear,
nevertheless, that literature is not the mere use of language.
By a definition still to be challenged, there is no literature
outside written language. (The term oral literature is regarded
as a sad oxymoron by linguists who specialize in oral cultures.)
Furthermore, there is no appropriation of the art of language,
of its aesthetic expressiveness, without understanding language,
a necessary but still insufficient condition. (It is insufficient
because to understand language is not equal to using language
creatively). Partisans of literacy will say that there is no
literature without literacy. However, language use in literature
is not the same as language use in daily life, in the
self-constitutive experience of living and surviving.

When human experience is projected in language and language
becomes a medium for new experiences, there is no distinction in
the experience. The syncretic character of language as it is
formed in a particular pragmatic framework corresponds to the
syncretic character of human activity in its very early stages.
Distinctions in language are introduced once this experience of
self-constitution is segmented and various forms of labor
division are brought about by expectations of efficiency. The
scale of humankind, whatever it might be at a given moment, is
reflected in distinctions in the pragmatic framework, which, in
turn, determines distinctions in human expression and
communication through language. Survival becomes a form of human
practice, losing its primeval condition when it implies the
experience of cooperation, and the realization, though limited,
of what transcends immediacy. Killing an animal to satisfy
hunger does not require awareness of needs and the means to
fulfill them, as much as it requires natural qualities such as
instinct, speed, and strength. Noticing that the flesh of an
animal hit by lightening does not rot like the flesh of
slaughtered animals requires a different awareness. The first
reports about the immediate sequence of cause and effect; the
second, about the ability to infer from one practical domain to
another. So does the perceived need to share and expand
experience.

In the oral phase, and in oral cultures still extant, the
immediate and the remote (fear, for example, and the magical
addressed with the hope of help) are addressed in the same
language. The poetry of myths, or what is made of them as
examples of poetry, is actually the poetry of the pragmatics
pertinent to efficiency expectations of a small scale of
humanity conveyed in myth. Rules for successful action were
conveyed orally from one generation to another. Only much later
in time, and due to demand for higher efficiency and the
expanding scale, do different forms of practical experience
separate, but not yet radically. Wolf is wolf, whether it is
running after someone, or it is only a product of someone's
imagination, or it is displayed in a cage in the zoo, or it is
in the process of becoming extinct. Behind each of these
situations lies an experience of conflict, on whose basis
symbolism (rooted in zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, geometric,
astrologic, or religious forms) is established. The use of
language symbols is structurally identical to the use of
astronomic, mathematical, or mytho-magical symbols in that it
uses the conventional nature of the representation in sign
processes (generation of new symbols, associations among
symbols, symbolic inferences, etc.).

Crying wolf started early

Literature results from the perceived need to transcend the
immediate and to make possible an experience in a time and
space of choice, or in the space and time of language itself.
Naming a place Florence, Brugges, Xanadu, Bombay, Paris,
Damascus, Rio de Janeiro, or Beijing in a story derives from a
motivation different from how names were given to real cities,
to rivers, to mountains, even to human beings. Names are usually
identifiers resulting from the pragmatic context. They become
part of our environment, constituting the markers for the
context, the stones and barbwire fence of the borders of the
experiences from which they result. In each name of a person,
place, or animal in what is called real life, as well as in
fiction (poetry, plays, novels), the practical experience of
human self-constitution creeps in.

When readers of a novel, audiences at a play, or listeners at a
poetry recitation say that they learn something about the place,
characters, or subject, they mean that they learn something
(however limited) about the practical experience involved in
constituting that novel, performance, or poem. Whether they
really know about something, or whether they care to know it, is
a different question. Usually, they do not know or care to know
because, being born in a language, moreover being subjected to
literacy, they believe that things are real because they are in
language. They take the world for granted because words describe
it. With such a frame of mind, things become even more real when
they are written about. Some people are educated to accept some
things as more real than others: historical accounts, geographic
accounts, biographies, diaries, books, images on a screen. More
often than not, people walk through Verona in order to see where
Shakespeare's famous pair of enamored adolescent lovers swore
undying love to each other. They wind up in front of some
ridiculous plaque identifying the place. And because the incident
has gone down in writing, they accept the place as real. A
picture taken there seems to extend the reality of Romeo and
Juliet into their lives. The same can be said of Bran Castle and
the fictional Dracula; likewise for the so-called holy places in
Jerusalem, reputed cafés in Paris, or sites associated with the
name of Al Capone. Real life eventually makes the distinction
between fiction, the fiction of fiction, the tourism of the
fiction of fiction, and reality.

There is a borderline between the practice of writing (fiction or
not) and the appropriation of literature by critics, historians
of literature, linguists, tourist organizations, and readers. In
the experience of writing, authors constitute themselves by
projecting, in selected words and sentences, the ability to map
between the world they live in and the world of language. In the
experience of reading, one projects the ability to understand
language and recreate a world in a text, not necessarily the same
world in which writers constitute their identity. The process
comprises a reduction, from the infinity of situations, words,
ideas, characters, stylistic choices, and rhythms, to the
uniqueness of the text, and the extension from one text to an
infinity of understandings of the many components of a printed
book or performed play. In this process, new reductions are made
possible. The history of literature and language is well known
for the stereotypes of systematic scholarly exposition. Literary
critics proceed with a different strategy of reduction; book
marketers end up summarizing a novel in a catch- phrase. What we
learn from this is that there are several ways to encode, decode,
and then encode again thoughts, emotions, reactions, and
whatever else is involved in the experience of writing and
reading.

The history of literature is connected to the diversification of
language in more ways than traditional historic accounts lead us
to believe. Even the emergence of genres and subgenres can be
better understood if we consider the practice of literature in
relation to the many forms of human practice. My intention is not
to endorse the convention of realism, one of the weak
explanatory models that theoreticians and historians of art and
literature have used for a long time. The goal is to explain and
document that various relations between spoken and written
language and the language of literature lead to various writing
conventions. In the syncretic phase of human practice, the
relation was based on identity. In other words, the two forms of
language were not distinguishable. Language was one. Distinctions
in practical experiences resulted in distinctions in the
self-constitution of the human being through a language that
captured similarities and differences, and became a medium for
conventions. These eventually led to symbols. Symbolism was
acknowledged in writing, itself an expression of conventions.

The language of astronomy, agriculture, and alchemy (to refer
here to incipient science, technology, and magic) was only as
remote from normal language as normalcy was from observing
stars, cultivating soil, or trying to turn lead into gold,
conjuring the benevolence of magic forces. Reading today
whatever survived or was reconstituted from these writings is an
experience in poetry and literature. Unless the reader has a
specific interest in the subject matter (as a scientist,
philosopher, historian, or linguist), these writings no longer
recall the wolf, but the art of expression in language. They are
considered poetry or literature, not because they contain wrong
ideas or false scientific hypotheses-their practical experience
is in a pragmatic context to which we have difficulty
connecting-but because their language testifies to an experience
of transcending the borders between human practice and
establishing a systematic, encompassing domain which now seems
grounded in a fictional world. Religious writings (the Old
Testament, Tao) are also examples.

The same happens to the child who saw a wolf (the child did not
really see a wolf, he was bored and wanted attention), started
crying wolf, and when finally adults show up, there is no wolf.
"Oh, he likes to tell stories," or "She has a wild imagination.
She will probably become a writer." In some cases, elves, ghosts,
or witches are blamed for a sudden wind, changes in weather, or
trees creaking in a storm or under the weight of snow, and this
is reported as private fiction. Artistic writing and
appropriation form a domain of recurrences at least as much as
painting, dancing, observing stars, solving mathematical
equations, or designing new machines do. Literature involves a
convention of complicity, something along the line of "Let us not
confuse our lives with descriptions of them," although we may
decide to live in the fiction. As with any convention, people do
not accept it in the letter, spirit, or both, and wind up crying
with the unhappy hero, laughing with the comic character or at
somebody. In other words, people live the fiction or derive some
lesson from it, or identify with characters, in effect,
rewriting them in the ink or blood of their own lives.

Meta-literature

The recurring interaction between a writer (indirectly present)
and a reader takes place through writing and reading. It is
proof of the practicality of the literary experience and an
expression of its degree of necessity. The extent of the
interaction is thus the expression of the part of the practical
experience that is shared, and for what purpose. This is
illustrated by the uses we give to literature: education,
indoctrination, moral edification, illustration, or
entertainment. Becoming who they are, the writer and reader
project themselves in the reading through a process of dual
reciprocal constitution, changing when circumstances change,
objectified in the forms through which literature is
acknowledged. It has a definite learned quality, in contrast to
the arts of images, sounds, and movements, in which the natural
component (as in seeing, hearing, moving) made the art possible.
Accordingly, artistic writing has an instrumental characteristic
and exercises virtual coordination of the experience of assigning
meaning. In some ways, this instrumental characteristic begs
association to music. To someone watching how the process
unfolds, it seems that the recurrent interaction is triggered
less by the dynamics of writing and reading, and more decisively
by what comprises the act of instilling meaning of the
objectified practice of the poem, play, script, novel, or short
story. The fact is that language, more than natural systems of
signs, pertains to an acquired structure of interactions, as
humans progress from one scale to another, within which meaning
is conjured. Language is influenced by the conditions of
existence (human biology), but not entirely reducible to them. It
constitutes as many domains of interaction as there are
experiences requiring language, a subset of language, or
artifacts similar to language.

The claim made from the perspective of literacy was, and still
goes strong, that the universality of language is reflected in
the universality of literature, and thus the universality of
conveying meaning. Actually, to write literature means to
un-write the language of everyday use, to empty it of the
reference to behavior, and to structure it as an instrument of a
different projection of the human being. It means understanding
the process through which meaning is conjured as human
self-constitution takes place. While it is true that when
someone reads a text for the first time, the only reading is one
that refers to the language of that particular reader's
experience (what is loosely called knowledge of language); once
the convention is uncovered, personal experience takes second
place, and a new experience, deriving from the interaction,
begins. The acquaintance makes the interaction possible; but it
might as well stand in the way of its characteristic unfolding
as a literary experience. Sometimes, the language of artistic
wording establishes a self-contained universe of self-reference
and becomes not only the message, but also the context. The
practical experience of writing is discovery of universes with
such qualities. The practical experience of reading is populating
such a universe through personal projection that will test its
human validity. Both writer and reader create themselves and
ascertain their identities in the interaction established
through the text.

It goes without saying that while literature is not a copy
(mimesis) of the world, neither does it literally constitute
something in opposition to it. In a larger framework,
literature is but one among many means of practical human
experiences resulting, like any other form of objectification,
in the alienating process of writing, reading, criticizing,
interpreting, and rewriting. Alienation comes from giving life to
entities that, once expressed, start their own existence, no
longer under the control of the writer or reader. For as long as
language dominated human praxis according to the prescriptions of
literacy, we could not understand how writing could be an
experience in something other than language, or how it could be
performed independent of language-based assumptions. Since the
turn of the century, this situation has changed. Initially, there
was a reaction to language: Dada was born when a knife was used
to select a word from a Larousse dictionary. Between the action
and its successive interpretations, many layers of practical
experiences with language accumulated. The literature of the
absurd went further and suggested situations only vaguely
defined with the aid of language, actually defined in defiance
of language conventions. There is more silence in the plays of
Beckett and Ionesco than there are words.

Before becoming what many readers have regarded as only the
expression of the poetics of self-reference, the experience of
concrete poetry attempted to make poetry visual, musical, or
even tactile. Happening was based on structuring a situation,
with the implicit assumption that our domains of interactions are
not defined only through language. The modern renewal of dance,
emancipated from the condition of illustration and narration,
and from the stifling conventions of classic ballet; the new
conventions of film facilitated by understanding the implicit
characteristics of the medium; and the expressive means of
electronic performances only add to the list of examples
characteristic of a literature trying to free itself from
language and its literate rules. Or, in order to avoid the
animistic connotation (literature as a living entity trying to
do something), we should see the phenomena just mentioned as
examples of new human experiences: constitution of the literary
work as its own language, with the assumption that the process
of appropriation would result in the realization of that
particular language.

A realization, in literature as much as in science, is a
description of a system which would behave as though it had this
description. Accordingly, the day described in Joyce's Ulysses
(Thursday, June 16, 1904) was not a sequential description, but a
mosaic in which rules of language were continuously broken and
new rules introduced. There is no character by the name of
Ulysses in the book. The title and the chapter subtitles were
meant to enforce the suggestion of a parallel to Homer's Odyssey.
("A beautiful title," wrote Furetière almost 300 years ago, "is
the real pimp of the book.") Language-rather, the appearance of
language-provided the geometry of the mosaic. For Joyce, writing
turned out to be a practical experience in segmenting space and
time in order to extract relations (hopeless past, ridiculous
tragic present, pathetic future), an aesthetic goal for which
the common use of language is ill equipped. The allusion to the
Odyssey is part of the strategy, shared in advance with the
critics, a para-text, following the text as a context for
interpretation. But before him, Kafka and others, following a
tradition that claims Cervantes' Don Quixote as a model, seemed
no less challenged by the experience of designing their own
language, ascertaining characters who transcend the conflict put
in words, of using the power of para-text. Dos Passos, Laurence
Sterne, and Hermann Hesse are examples from the same tradition.
Gertrude Stein was a milestone in this development. In poetry,
designing a language of one's own is strikingly evident,
although more difficult to discuss in passing (as I know I am
doing with some of the examples I give). Many poets-Burns comes
easily to mind-invented their own language, with new words and
new rules for using them. Others-and for some reason Vladimir
Brodsky comes first to mind-wrote splendid para-texts (political
articles, interviews, memoirs) that very effectively framed
their poetry and put it in a perspective otherwise not so
evident.

The experience of artistic writing does not happen in a vacuum.
It takes place in a broader frame. To realize and to understand
that there is a connection between the cubist perspective,
Joyce's writing, and the scientific language of relativity theory
will probably not increase reading pleasure. It will change the
perspective of interpretation, though. The connection between
genetics, computational models, and post-modern architecture,
fiction, and political discourse is even more relevant to our
current concern for literature. Recurrences of interactions come
in varieties, and each variety is a projection of the individual
at a precise juncture of the human practical experience of
self-constitution as a writer or reader. Language split, and
continues to split, into languages and sub-languages. Rap
frequently subjects the listener of its rhythmic stanzas to
slang. Gramsci, the Sardinian leftist philosopher, suggested the
need for a language of the proletariat. Pier Paolo Pasolini, an
admirer of Gramsci and a very sophisticated artist, wrote some
of his works in the Friaul dialect and in the argot used by the
poor youngsters of the streets of Rome. His argument was
aesthetic and moral: corrupted by commercial democracy, language
loses its edge, and people living in such a deprived language
environment undergo anthropological mutation. Art, in particular
literature, can become a form of resistance. A new language,
reconnected to the authentic being, becomes an instrument for
new literacy experiences. Tolkien wrote poems in Elvish; Anthony
Burgess made up a language by combining exotic languages (Gypsy,
Malay, Cockney) and less exotic languages (English, Russian,
French, Dutch). An entire magazine (Jatmey) publishes fiction
and poetry written in Klingon.

In a broader perspective, it is clear that in order to
effectively create literary domains, people need instruments and
media for new experiences. Meta-fiction is such an experience.
It unites special types of illustrated novels, photographic
fiction (which proliferates in South America and the Far East),
and comic books. In Further Inquiry, Ken Kesey offers a
documented journey in order to recapture the spirit of the
sixties. Images (including some from Allen Ginsberg's
collection) make the book almost a collective oeuvre. Using
similar strategies, a text of meta-fiction first establishes the
convention of the text as a distinct human construct made up of
words, but which behave differently from informative,
descriptive, or normative sentences that we use in interhuman
communication. The strategy is to place the domain of the
referent in the writings. The writer thus ensures that the
potential reader will have no reason to look for references in
empirical reality. This act of preempting the practice of
reading, based on reflex associations in a different systematic
domain, is not necessarily a warranty that such associations
will not be made.

There are many people who, either due to their cognitive
condition, or to their relative illiteracy, take metaphors
literally. However, the writer makes the effort to establish new
kinds of recurrent, inter-textual, and self-referential relations
that signal the convention pursued. When the act of writing
becomes, overtly or subvertly, the object of the writing
experience, writers, and possible readers with them, move from
the object domain to the meta domain. The writer knows that in
the space of fiction, as much as in the space of the empirical
world, people write on paper, tables are used to set dinner on,
flowers have a scent, subways don't fly. But artistic writing is
not so much reporting about the state of the world as it is
constituting a different world, along with a context for
interactions in this world. The validity and coherence of such
worlds stems from qualities different from those that result
from applying correct grammar, formal structure of arguments,
syntactic integrity, and other requirements specific to the
practice of language within the convention of literacy.

Writing as co-writing (painting as co-painting, composing as
co-composing...)

The post-modern practice of creative writing involves the
intention of interaction in ways not experienced in the
civilization of literacy. The written is no longer the monument
that must not be altered or questioned, continued, or summarized.
Reading, seen in part as the effort to extract the truth from
the text, takes on the function of projecting truth in the
context of text interpretation. Actually, the assumption of this
practical experience of co-creation (literary, musical, or
artistic) has to do with different languages in the practice of
writing and reading (painting and viewing, composing and
listening, etc.), and even of co-writing (co-painting,
co-composing, etc.).

Recent literary work in the medium of hypertext-a structure
within which non- linear connections are possible-shows how far
this assumption extends. A structure and core of characters are
given. The reading involves the determination of events through
determination of contexts. In turn, these affect the behavior of
characters in the fictional world. This can unfold as a literary
work conceived as a game, whose reading is actually the playing:
The reader defines the attributes of the characters, inserts
herself or himself in the plot, and the simulation starts.
Neither the writer nor reader needs to know what programs stand
behind the ongoing writing, and even less to understand how they
work. The product is, in all of these cases, an infinite series
of co- writing. The reader changes dialogues, time and space
coordinates, names and characteristics of participants in the
literary event. No two works are alike. Characteristics of
self-ordering and self-informing-such as "X knows such and such
about Y's peculiarities," or "Group Z is aware of its collective
behavior and possible deviations from the expected"-allow for
the constitution of an entirely artificial domain of fiction,
with rules as interesting to discover as is the mystery behind a
suicide, the complexities of a character's philosophy, or the
existence of yet unknown universes.

This extreme case of the literature of personal language-of
languages as they are formed in the practice of creative
co-writing-was anticipated in the various forms of fantastic
literature. Voyages (anticipated in Homer's epics), explorations
of future worlds, and science fiction have paved the way for the
writing of meta-fiction. This probably explains how Jorge Luis
Borges constituted a meta-language (of the quotes of quotes of
quotes) for allegories whose object are fictions, not realities.
There is no need to be literate to effectively appropriate this
kind of writing, although at some level of reading the literate
allusion awaits the literate reader (at least to tickle his or
her fancy). To a certain extent, it is almost better not to have
read Madame Bovary, with its melodramatic account, because the
constitution of Borges' universe takes place at a different
level of human practice, and in a context of disconnected forms
of praxis.

Co-writing also takes the form of using shared code as a
strategy of literary expression. The many specialized languages
of literary criticism and interpretation- such as comparative
studies, phenomenological analysis, structuralism, semiotic
interpretation, deconstructionism-as difficult and opaque to the
average literate reader as scientific and philosophic languages,
are duplicated in the specialized language of creative
post-modern writing. Reading requires a great deal of
preparation for some of those works, or at least the assumed
shared understanding of the particular language. The writings of
Donald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Barthe are not casual
reading, for sheer enjoyment or excitement. Mastery of the
language, moreover of the language code, as part of the
practical experience it facilitates, does not come from
studying English in high school or college, rather from decoding
the narrative strategy and understanding that the purpose of
this writing is knowledge about writing and reading. The
epistemological made into a subject of fiction-how do we know
what we know?-makes for very dense prose. This is why in this
new stage, it is possible to have readers of a one and only book
(I am not referring to the Bible or Koran), which becomes the
language of that reader. Alice in Wonderland is such a book for
quite a few; so is Ulysses; so are the two novels of William H.
Gass. In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience the
emergence of micro-readership attracted to non-standard
writing. Efficiency considerations are such that the non-standard
practical experience of writing is met by a non-standard
experience of reading books, and other media (including CD-ROM)
that address a small number of people.

The effort to recycle (art or literature) is part of the same
co-writing strategy. The co-writers are authors (recycled) and
readers whose past readings (real or imaginary) are integrated
in the new experience. Recycling (names, actions, narratives,
etc.) corresponds to, among other things, the attempt to
counteract the sequentiality of writing, even the literate
expectation of originality. Taking a piece from a literary work
and using it in its entirety means to almost transform the
language sequence into a configuration. That piece resembles a
painting hung in the middle of a page, or, to force the image,
between the parts of a sonata. It entails its own history and
interpretation, and triggers a mechanism of rejection not
dissimilar to that triggered by organ transplants. The
convention of reading is broken; the text is manipulated like an
image and offered as a collage to the reader. The seams of
different parts sewn together are not hidden; to the contrary, a
spotlight is focused on them. Gertrude Stein best exemplifies
the tendency, and probably how well it synchronized with similar
developments in art (cubism foremost). W. H. Gass masterfully
wrote about words standing for characters, object, and actions;
he invented new worlds where the writer can define rules for
their behavior. Concrete poetry, too, in many ways anticipated
this type of writing, which comes from visual experiences and
from the experiments in music triggered by the dodecaphonic
composers. In concrete poetry, one can even discover the
expression of jealousy between those interacting in the
systematic domain of abstract phonetic languages, and those in
the domain of ideograms. Japanese writers of concrete poetry
seem equally eager to experience the sequential! The effort to
recycle, interpret, visualize, to read and explain for the
reader, and to compress (action, description, analysis)
corresponds to the ever faster interactions of humans and to the
shorter duration of such interactions. The reader is presented
with pieces already known, or with easily understandable images
that summarize the action or the characters. Why imagine, as
writers always expected their readers to do, if one can see-this
seems to be the temptation.

The end of the great novel

The ideal of the great novel was an ideal of a monument in
literacy. Despite the technology for writing, such as word
processing machines and the hypertext programs for interactive,
collaborative authoring, writing the great novel is not only
impossible, but irrelevant. Expectations associated with the
great novel are expectations of unity, homogeneity,
universality. Such a novel would address everyone, as the great
novels of the civilization of literacy tended to do. The extreme
segmentation of the world, its heterogeneity, the new rhythms of
change and of human experiences, the continuous decline of the
ideal embodied in literacy, education included, are arguments
against the possibility of such a novel. An all-encompassing
language, which the practical experience of writing such a novel
implies, is simply no longer possible. We live in a civilization
of partial languages, with their corresponding creative,
non-standard writing experiences, in a disembodied domain of
expression, communication, and signification. If, ad absurdum,
various literary works could talk to each other (as their authors
can and do), they would soon conclude that the shared background
is so limited that, beyond the phrases of socializing and some
political statements (more circumstantial than substantial),
little else could be said.

Furthermore, writing itself has changed. And since there is a
consubstantiality among all elements involved in the experience,
the change affects the self-constitution of the writer, and
subsequently that of the reader. Technology takes care of
spelling and even syntax; more recently it even prompts semantic
choices. This use of technology in creative writing is far from
being neutral. Different rhythms and patterns of association, as
embodied in our practice with interface language-the language
mediating between us and the machine-are projected volens-nolens
into the realm of literature. Moreover, different kinds of
reading, corresponding to the new kinds of human interaction,
become possible. One can already have a novel delivered on tape,
to be listened to while driving to work. The age of the
electronic book brings other reading possibilities to the
public. An animated host can introduce a short story; a hand-
held scanner can pick up words the reader does not know and
activate a synthetic voice to read their definitions from the
on-line dictionary. And this is not all!

Language used to be the medium for bridging between generations
in the framework of homogeneous practical experiences. Edmund
Carpenter correctly pointed out that for the civilization of
literacy, the book-and what, if not the literary book, best
embodies the notion of a book?-"became the organizing principle
for all existence." Yes, the book seemed almost the projection
of our own reality: beginning (we are all born), middle, and end
(at which moment we become memory, the book itself being a form
of memory), followed by new books. Carpenter went on to say,
"Even as written manuscript, the book served as a model for both
machine and bureaucracy. It encouraged a habit of thought that
divided experience into specialized units and organized these
serially and causally. Translated into gears and levers, the book
became machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain of
command, assembly line, etc." Handwriting, typing, dictation,
and word-processing define a context for the practical
experience of self-identification as novelist, poet, playwright,
screenplay author, and scriptwriter. Interaction with
word-processing programs produces a fluidity of writing that
testifies to endless self-correction, and to rewriting driven by
association. Word-processing is cognitively a different effort
from writing with a pen or typewriter. And no one should be
surprised that what is written with the new media cannot be the
same as the works of Shakespeare, Balzac, and Tolstoi, entrusted
by hand to paper. A distributed narrative effort of many people,
via network interaction, is a practical experience above and
beyond anything we could have had in the framework of literacy.

The first comic strip in America (1896) announced the age of
complementary expression (text and drawing). Nobody really
understood how far the genre would go, or how many
literacy-based conventions would be undone in the process.
Comic-strip characters occupied a large part of the memory of
those who grew up with the names of characters from books. The
influence of new media (film, in particular) on the narrative of
the strip opened avenues of experiments in writing. When classics
of literature (even the Bible) were presented in comic-strip
form, and when comic strips were united under the cover of
books, the book itself changed. Structural characteristics of
the strip (fast, dense, focused, short, expressive) correspond
to those of the pragmatic framework of the civilization of
illiteracy.

Does the civilization of illiteracy herald the end of the book?
As far as the practice of creative writing goes, it might as
well, since writing does not necessarily have to take a book
format. Narrative, as we know from oral tradition, can take
forms other than the book. My opinion in regard to books should
not be understood as prophecy. Pointing to alternatives (such as
digital books, electronic publications distributed on networks
and stored on disks), some perhaps not thought through as yet,
keeps the influence of our own framework of reference at a
distance. A video format, as poor and unsatisfying a substitute
as it might seem to someone raised with the book, is a candidate
everyone can name. After all, the majority of the books studied a
generation ago are known to the students of this time mainly
through television and movie adaptations. The majority of
today's children's books are released together with their video
simuli. Computer-supported artifacts, endowed or not with
literary intelligence, are another candidate for replacing the
book. What we know is that paper can be handled only so much and
preserved only so long (even if it is non-acid paper).
Furthermore, it becomes more and more an issue of efficiency
whether we can afford transforming our forests into books, which
humankind, faced with many challenges, may no longer be able to
afford, or which are so disconnected from current pragmatics
that they have lost their relevance.

Today, while still entirely devoted to the ideal of literacy,
societies subsidize literary practical experiences which are
only peripherally relevant to human experience. A large number
of grants go to writers who will probably never be read; many
more to contests (themselves anchored in the obsession with
hierarchy peculiar to literacy) open to students lost in the
labyrinth of an illusion; and even more to schools and seminars
of marginal or very narrow interest, or to publications that
barely justify the effort and expense of their endeavor. From
the perspective of the beneficiaries, awarding such grants is
the right thing to do. In the long run, this altruism will not
save more of the literacy-based literature than highly
specialized contemporary society perceives as necessary in
respect to efficiency requirements facing the world at the
current scale. In labor division, the literate writer and reader
constitute their systematic domain of interaction.

The book will no doubt remain in some form or another (words on
paper or dots on an electronic page of a portable reading
device) as long as people derive pleasure or profit from the
printed word. But as opposed to the past, this is only one among
many literary and non-literary domains of interaction. It is,
for example, very difficult to say whether the artists of the
graffiti movement were writers, using an alphabet reminiscent of
Egyptian hieroglyphs, or painters with words, or both. Keith
Haring, their best known representative, covered every available
square inch-horror vacui-with expressions that constituted a new
systematic domain of interaction among people, as well as a new
space for his own self-constitution as a different type of
artist.

Instead of decrying the end of an ideal, we should celebrate the
victory of diversity. Those who really feel that their destiny
relies on the ideal of literature might choose to give up some
of their expectations, stimulated by the literate model, in order
to preserve the structure within which literacy is possible and
necessary. The demand for more at the lowest price that heralds
the multi-headed creature called the civilization of illiteracy
affects more than the production of clothes and dishes, or of
cars and an insatiable appetite for travel. It affects our ways
of writing, reading, painting, singing, dancing, composing,
interpreting, and acting-our entire aesthetic experience.

Libraries, Books, Readers

Carlyle believed that "The true university is a collection of
books." If books truly represent the spirit and letter of the
civilization of literacy, a description of their current
condition can be instructive. Obviously, one has to accept the
possibility that the civilization of literacy will continue in
some form, or in more than one, that will extend the experience
of the book, as we know it today through its physical form. Or
the civilization of literacy may continue in a totally new form
that responds to the human desire for efficiency. Addressing the
International Publishers Association Congress in June, 1988,
George Steiner tried to identify the "interlocking factors" that
led to the establishment of book culture. The technology of
printing, paper production, and advances in typography that are
associated with the "private ownership of space, of silence, and
of books themselves" are among factors affecting the process.
Another important factor is book aesthetics, the underlying
formal quality of a medium that had to compete with vivid
images, with powerful traditions of orality, and with patterns of
behavior established within practical experiences different from
those of book culture.

Near the end of the 15th century, Aldus Manutius understood that
the new technology of printing could be, and should be, more
than the mere continuation of the tradition of manuscripts. The
artifact of the book, close to what we know today, is mainly his
contribution to the civilization of literacy. Manutius applied
aesthetic and functional criteria that led to the smaller-sized
books we are familiar with. He worked with covers; the hard
cover in thicker cardboard replaced the covers of pinewood used
to protect manuscripts and early printed texts. The understanding
of aesthetics and of the experience of reading led him to define
better layouts and a new typography. His concern with
portability (a quality obsessing contemporary computer
designers), with readability (of no less interest to computer
display experts), and with a balanced visual appearance make him
the real saint of the order of the book.

The book also entails conventions of intellectual ownership. In
their effort to stop the dissemination of heretical books
through print, Philip and Mary, in 1557, limited the right of
printing to the members of the Stationers' Company. In 1585,
copyright for members was introduced; and in 1709, copyright for
authors. From that time on, the book expanded the notion of
property, different from the notion of ownership of land,
animals, and buildings, especially in view of the desire,
implicit in literacy, to literally spread the word. Now that
desktop capabilities and technologies that facilitate print on
demand affordably reproduce print, old notions of property and
ownership need to be redefined. Our understanding of books and
the people who read them, too, needs to be redefined as well.

Today, books can be stored on media other than sheets of paper,
on which words are printed and which are bound between hard or
soft covers. One hundred optical disks can store the entire
contents of the Library of Congress. This means, among other
things, that works of incredible significance cost five cents per
book printed digitally. Another result is that the notion of
intellectual ownership becomes fuzzy. Actually, the word book is
not the proper one to use in the case of digital storage. The
new pragmatics makes it crisply clear that the book is merely a
medium for the storage and transmission of data, knowledge, and
wisdom, as well as a lot of stupidity and vulgarity.

For people who prefer the book format, high-performance printing
presses are able to efficiently provide runs for very precisely
defined segments of the population just waiting for the Great
American Novel that is custom written and produced for one
reader at a time. "Personalized Story Books Starring Your Child,"
screams an advertisement. It promises "Hard cover, full color
illustration, exciting stories with positive image building
storylines." All that must be provided is the child's name, age,
city of residence, and the names of three friends or relatives.
The rest is permutation (and an order form). Grandma did a
better job with her photo and keepsake album, but the framework
of mediation replaced her long ago. Paper is available in all
imaginable quantities and qualities; the technologies of
typesetting, layout, image reproduction, and binding are all in
place.

Nowadays, there is enough private space. The wash of noise is not
a serious obstacle to people who want to read, even if they do
not wear noise cancellation headphones. And never were books
published at more affordable prices than today. Some books
reside on the shelves of the Internet or are integrated in
broader hyper- books on the World Wide Web. A word from one
book-let's say a new concept built upon earlier language
experiences-connects the interested reader to other books and
articles, as well as to voices that read texts, to songs, and to
images. The book is no longer a self-sufficient entity, but a
medium for possible interaction.

At the threshold of the civilization of illiteracy, how many
books are printed? In which medium? How many are sold? Are they
read? How? By whom? These are only some of the questions to be
posed when approaching the subject of books. Even more important
is the "Why?"-in particular, "Why read books?"-the real test of
the book's legitimacy, and ergo, the legitimacy of the
civilization which the book emblemizes. The broader issue is
actually reading and writing, or to be more precise, the means
through which an author can address many readers.

The fine balance of factors involved in the publishing and
success of a book is extremely difficult to describe. The
general trend in publishing can be described as more and more
titles in smaller and smaller editions. Ideally, a good
manuscript (of a novel, book of poetry, plays, essays,
scientific or philosophic writings) should become a successful
book, i.e., one that sells. In the reality of the book business,
many mediating elements determine the destiny of a manuscript.
Most of these elements are totally unrelated to the quality of
writing or to the satisfaction of reading. They reflect market
processes of valuation.

These elements are symptomatic of the book's condition in the
civilization that moves towards the pragmatics of many competing
literacies, almost all contradicting the intrinsic
characteristics of literacy embodied in the book. The life of
books is shorter (despite their being printed on acid-free
paper). Books have a decreasing degree of universality; more
books address limited groups of readers as opposed to a large
general market, not to mention the whole of humankind, as was
once the book's purpose. Books use specialized languages,
depending on their topics. The distinct ways these languages
convey contents frequently contradict the culturally
acknowledged condition of the book, and are a cause of concern to
people who are the products of (or adherents to) a civilization
based on books. More and more books end up as collections of
images with minimal commentary. Some are already delivered
together with a tape cassette or compact disk, to be heard rather
than read, to be seen rather than to engage the reader's mind.
Road Reading is a billboard trademark for recorded books.
Narrated by voices appropriate to the subject (a southern drawl
for a story like To Kill a Mockingbird; a cultivated voice for
Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities), the books compete with
red lights, landscapes, and other signs along the road. Many
books written in our day contain vulgar language and elevate
slang to the qualitative standard of fiction. There are books
that promise the excitement of a game (find the object or the
criminal). A reward, effectively replacing the satisfaction of
reading, will be handed to the lucky finder. The subject of
reading has also changed since the time the Bible and other
religious texts, dramas and poetry, philosophic and scientific
writings were entrusted to the printing press. Melodramatic
fiction, at least 200 years old, paved the way for pulp fiction
and today's surefire bestsellers based on gossip and escapism.

Our goal is to understand the nature of change in the book's
condition, why this change is a cause for concern, as well as
our own relation to books. To do this, we should examine the
transition that defines the identity and role of the writer and
reader in the new pragmatic context.

Why don't people read books?

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" Clarisse McClellan
asks in Fahrenheit 451. (This book is also available in video
format and as a computer game.) Guy Montag, the fireman,
answers, "That is against the law." This conversation defines a
context: The group that still reads is able to pass the benefits
of their experience to people who are not allowed to read books.
In our days, no fireman is paid to set books ablaze. To the
contrary, many people are employed to save deteriorating books
printed in the past. But the question of whether people read any
of the books they buy or receive, or even save from destruction,
cannot be dismissed.

The majority of the books changing hands and actually read are
reference publications. The home contains an increasing number
of radios, television sets, CD players, electronic games, video
cassette recorders, and computers. The shelf space for books is
being taken up by other media. Instead of the personal library,
people consecrate space in their homes for media centers that
consume a great deal of their free time. Instead of the
permanence of the printed text, they prefer the variability of
continually changing programs, of scanning and sampling, and of
surfing the Internet. The digital highway supplies an enormous
amount of reference material. This material is, moreover, kept
up to date, something that is not so easy to accomplish with
bound sets of encyclopedias or even with the telephone book.

Books are not burned, but neither are they read with much
commitment. Scanning through a story or reading the summary on
the flip jacket, filling one's time during a commute or at the
airport is all that happens in most cases. A variety of books
are written for such purposes. Required reading for classes,
according to teachers, cannot exceed the attention span of their
pupils. Growing up under the formative influence of short cycles
and the expectation of quick conclusions to their acts,
youngsters oppose any reading that is not to the point (as they
see it). In most cases, outlines provide whatever knowledge
(information is probably a better word) is needed for a class or
for a final examination. The real filter of reading is the
multiple choice grid, not the satisfaction of immersion in a
world brought to life by words.

All this is almost the end of the story, not the substance of its
arguments. The arguments are manifold and all related to
characteristics of literacy. In the first place, publishers
simply discard the traditional reverence for books. They realize
that a book placed somewhere on the pedestal of adulation,
extended from the religious Book to books in general, keeps
readers away or makes them captive to interpretive prejudices.

How can one be involved in the practice of democracy without
extending it to books, thus giving Cervantes and Whitman a place
equal to that of the cheap, mass- produced pulp literature and
even the videotape? The experience of the book reveals a
double-edged sword, deriving mainly from the perception that the
book, as a vessel, sanctifies whatever it carries. Hitler's Mein
Kampf was such a book in Nazi Germany, and still is for Nazi
revivalists. In the former communist countries, the books of Marx
and Engels were sanctified, printed without end (after careful
editing), and forced upon readers of all age groups, especially
the young. Nobody could argue against even trivial factual
errors that slipped into their writings, into translations, or
into selective editions. Mao's little Red Book was distributed
free to everyone in China. In our day, Hitler and other authors
of the same bent are published. These very few examples follow a
long line of books dealing in indoctrination (religious,
ideological, economic), misrepresentation, and bigotry. As
insidious attempts to seduce for disreputable, if not frankly
criminal causes, they have inflicted damage on humanistic
expectations and on the practice of human-based values.
Champions of literacy point to the classics of history and
enlightenment and to the great writers of poetry, fiction, and
drama as the authentic heritage of the book. How much space do
they occupy on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and homes?
In good faith and without exaggerating, one can easily conclude
that from all the books stored in homes and places of public
access, the majority should probably have never been written,
never mind printed or read. If these books and periodicals were
only repetitive of what had been said and thought previously,
they would not deserve such strong condemnation. The judgment
expressed above refers to words and thoughts whose shallowness
and deceit are consecrated through the associations that the
printed word entails.

Hard facts about books in the new pragmatic context confirm that
people, either due to illiteracy or a-literacy, read less and
use books less and less for their practical experiences. Titles
make it onto the bestseller lists only because they are sold, not
 read. Intrinsic qualities-of writing, aesthetics, the ideas set
forth-are rarely taken into consideration, unless they confirm
the prejudices of their consumers. Books often make it onto the
bookshelf as a status symbol. In the early eighties, everyone in
Italy, Germany, and the USA wanted to display The Name of the
Rose. Or they become a subject of conversation-"It will be made
into a movie." But even such books remain unread to the last
page 70% of the time. Today, by virtue of faster writing and
printing, books compete with the newspaper in capturing the
sensational. The unholy alliance between the film industry,
television, and publishing houses is very adept at squeezing
the last possible drop of sleaze from an event of public interest
in order to catch one more viewer or purchaser of cheaply
manufactured books.

Because of a combination of many factors-long production cycles,
high cost of publishing and marketing, low transparency, rapid
acquisition of knowledge that makes high quality books obsolete
in one or two years, to name a few factors-the book has ceased
to be the major instrument for the dissemination of knowledge
related to practical experiences. First among the factors
affecting the book's role is that the rhythm of renewal and
conversion requires a medium that can keep pace with change.
Prior to the breakdown of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern
Block, the majority of books on politics, sociology, economics,
and culture pertinent to that part of the world became useless
from one day to the next as events and whims rendered their
content meaningless. Once the Eastern Block started to unravel,
even periodicals could not keep pace with events. All around the
world, strikes, various forms of social activism, political
debates, successive reorganizations, new borders, and new leaders
contradicted the image of stability settled in the books of
scholars and even in the evaluations issued by intelligence
agencies.

Not only politics required rewriting. Books on physics,
chemistry, mathematics, computing, genetics, and mind and brain
theory have to be rewritten as new discoveries and technologies
render obsolete facts associated with past observations published
as eternal truth. In some cases, the books were rewritten on
tape, as visual presentations impossible to fit in sentences or
between book covers, or on CD-ROM. More recently, books are
being rewritten as Internet publications or full-fledged Web
sites that can easily be kept current. Photocopies of selected
pages and articles already substitute for the book on the desks
of students, professors, scholars, and researchers. College
students, who are obliged to buy books, don't like to invest in
items that they know will be outdated and useless within a year.
The book will appear in a new edition, either because the
information has been updated or because the publisher wants to
make more money. Students prefer the videotape, so much closer
to tele-viewing, an experience that ultimately forms cognitive
characteristics different from those of reading and writing. Or
they prefer to find material on-line, again a cognitive
experience of a dynamic condition incompatible with the book.

The complexity of human practical experiences is as important as
the dynamics. The pragmatic framework that made literacy and the
book necessary was relatively homogeneous. Heterogeneity entails
a state of affairs for which books can only serve after the
experience, as a repository medium. Even in this documentary or
historic function, books capture less than what other media,
better adapted to sign processes irreducible to literacy, could.
For the experience as such, books become irrelevant, whether we
like it or not. The facts relating to the consequences of the
increased complexity of current pragmatics have yet to be
realized, much less recorded. What is available is the
accumulated human experience with alternate media, not
necessarily cheaper than books, but certainly better adapted to
instances of parallelism and distributed activities.

Books do justice to simultaneous temporal phenomena only at the
expense of capturing their essence. The nature of human praxis
is so radically disconnected from the nature of literacy
embodied in the book that one can no longer rely on it without
affecting the outcome. Practical experiences in which time is of
the essence, and activities that require synchronization or are
based on a configurational paradigm are different in nature from
writing and reading. To open a book, to look for the appropriate
page, and to read and understand the information slows down (or
stops) the process. The sequential nature of literacy misses the
requirement of synchronism and might not even lead to solutions
to questions related to non-sequential connections.

In addition to these major factors, there is the broader
background: Access to knowledge conveyed through literacy
implies a shared literate experience. Shared experience,
especially in open, dynamic societies, can no longer be assumed
as a given. There are cultural as well as physical differences
to be accounted for among all the human beings in the developed
world. There are the visually impaired and physically
handicapped who cannot use books. There are people with
conditions that do not allow for the deciphering of printed
letters and words. These individuals must rely on devices that
read for them, on senses other than sight, and on a good memory.

The decreased interest in books is indicative of a fundamentally
different human practical experience of self-constitution. In
line with the shift from manufacturing to service, books perform
mainly functions of incidental information (when not replaced by
a database), amusement, and filling time. Even if the great
novel, or great epic poem, or great drama were written, it would
go unnoticed in the loud concert of competing messages. It might
be that literature today is passionless, or it might be that the
seduction of commercial success brings everything to the common
denominator of return on an investment, regardless of cultural
reward. Books written to please, books published to satisfy
vanity, and books of impenetrable obscurity did not exactly
trigger reader interest. All in all, good and bad considered,
the general evolution does not testify to less literary talent.
The issue of quality is open to controversy, as it always has
been. Many books reflect a level of literacy that is not exactly
encouraging. Still, literature does not fail on its merits (or
lack thereof). It fails, rather, on the context of its
perception. Like anything else in the civilization of illiteracy,
the multiplication of choices resulted in the annihilation of a
sense of value and of effective criteria for differentiation
within the continuum of writing.

The overall development towards the civilization of illiteracy
suggests that the age of the book is being followed by an age of
alternative media. The promoters of literacy are doing their
best to resist this change. Their motto is "Read anything, as
long as you read." They effectively discount any and all other
means of acquiring knowledge, and totally disenfranchise
individuals who cannot read. There are many avenues to
self-constitution: all our senses-including common
sense-repetition and memory. Some of these avenues are more
efficient than the medium of the book. If they were not, they
would not be succeeding as they do. The champions of literacy
also imply that anything acquired through reading is good. The
harm that can be transmitted through the book medium can be
recorded in volumes. On the collective level, it has led to
persecution and violence, even mass destruction. On the
individual level, it can lead to imbalance. The child who is
forced to read at age three is being deprived of time for
developing other skills essential to his or her physical and
mental well-being. The cognitive repertory of these children is
being stunted by well meaning but misguided parents. It is being
stunted, too, by the market that sells literacy as though there
were no tomorrow despite the fact that literacy has lost its
dominant position in our lives.

Topos uranikos distributed

This book began by contrasting the readers of the past to today's
typical literate: Zizi the hairdresser and her boyfriend, the
taxi driver with the college degree in political science. The
underlying structure of human practical experiences through which
average persons like Zizi and Bruno G., as well as the Nobel
prize winner in genetics, artists, sportsmen and sportswomen,
writers, TV producers, and computer hackers (and many other
professionals), constitute themselves is characterized by a new
type of relations among parts. These relations are in flux.
Whereas many functions associated with human experiences can be
rationalized, levels of efficiency beyond individual
capabilities can be achieved. Thus, one of the main goals is to
harmonize the relation between human experience and the
functioning of devices emulating human activities. This raises
the issue of the altered human condition. In this context, the
relevance of knowledge has changed to the extent that, in order
to function in a world of arbitrary bureaucratic rules designed
to blindly implement a democracy of mediocrity, one has to know
the trivia of prices in the supermarket. Someone has to know how
to access them when they are stored in a memory device, and how
to charge the bill to a credit card number. But no one has to
know the history of cultural values. It actually helps to ignore
value altogether.

The roots of almost everything involved in current practical
experiences are no longer effectively anchored in tradition, but
in the memory of facts and actions extracted from tradition. At
a time when books are merely an interior designer's concept of
decoration, beautifully crafted editions fill the necessary
bookcase. Humanity has reached a new stage: We are less grounded
in nature and tradition. This condition takes some of the wind
out of the sails of memetics. Practical experiences of human
self-constitution extended the human phenotype beyond that of any
other known species. But this extension is not the sum total of
genetic and cultural evolution. It is of a different quality
that neither genetic nor memetic replication suggests, let alone
explains. Our obsession is to surpass the limitations of the
past, cultural as well as natural. That makes us like the many
things we generated in the attempt to reach levels of efficiency
which neither nature nor tradition can support. The hydroponic
tomato, the genetically engineered low-fat egg, the digital
book, and the human being of the civilization of illiteracy have
more in common than one thinks at the mere mention of this
opinion.

The life of books, good or bad, useful or destructive,
entertaining or boring, is the life of those who read them. Free
to constitute ourselves in a framework of human experiences
opened to much more than books, we have the chance of exploring
new territories of human expression and communication, and of
achieving levels of significance. Individual performance in the
civilization of literacy could not reach such levels. But this
formulation is suspect of cheap rhetoric. It begs the question
"Why don't we?" (accomplish all these potentialities). We are so
many, we are so talented, we are so well informed. The
civilization of illiteracy is not a promised land. Interactive
education centers, distributed tasks, cooperative efforts, and
cultivation and use of all senses do not just happen.
Understanding new necessities, in particular the relation
between the new scale of humankind and the levels of efficiency
to be reached in order to effectively address higher
expectations of well being, does not come through divine
inspiration, high-tech proselytizing, or political speeches. It
results from the experience of self-constitution itself, in the
sense that each experience becomes a locus of interactions,
which transcends the individual.

The realization of potential is probably less direct than the
realization of dangers and risks. We are still singing the
sirens' song instead of articulating goals appropriate to our
new condition. One area in which goals have been articulated and
are being pursued is the transfer of the contents of books from
various libraries to new media allowing for storage of
information, more access to it, and creative interaction. The
library, perceived as a form of trans-human memory, a space of
topos uranikos filled with eternal information, was the
collection of ideas and forms that one referred to when in need
of guidance. Robert de Sorbon gave his books to the University of
Paris almost 750 years ago. Little did he know what this gesture
would mean to the few scholars who had access to this
collection. By 1302 (only 25 years after his donation), one of
the readers would jot down the observation that he would need
ten years to read the just under 1,000 books in the library. One
hundred years later, Pembroke College of Cambridge University
and Merton College of Oxford obtained their libraries. The
Charles University in Prague, the universities in Krakow
(Poland), Coimbra (Portugal), Salamanca (Spain), Heidelberg and
Cologne (the future Germany), Basle (Switzerland), and
Copenhagen (Denmark) followed suit. Libraries grew into national
cultural monuments. Museums grew within them and then became
entities in their own right. Today, billions of books are
housed in libraries all over the world. Books are in our homes,
in town and city libraries, in research institutions, in
religious centers, in national and international organizations.
Under the guise of literacy, we are happy to be able to access,
regardless of the conditions (as borrowers or subscribers), this
enormous wealth of knowledge. The library represented the
permanent central storehouse of knowledge.

But the pragmatic framework of human self-constitution moved
beyond the characteristics embodied by both library and book.
Therefore, a new library, representative of many
literacies-visual, aural, and tactile, relying on multimedia, and
models and simulations-and able to cope with fast change had to
come about. This library, to which we shall return, now resides
in a distributed world, accessible from many directions and in
many ways, continuously open, and freed from the anxiety that
books might catch fire or turn into dust. True, the image of the
world limited almost exclusively to reference books does not
speak in favor of the enormous investment in time, money, and
talent for taking the new routes opened by non-linear means of
access to information, rich sensorial content, and interactivity.
Still, in many ways Noah Webster's experience in publishing his
dictionary-a reference for America as the Larousse is for France
and the Duden for Germany-can be retraced in the multimedia
encyclopedias of our day, moreover in the emergence of the
virtual library.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote his prophetic article in the
Atlantic Monthly. He announced, "Wholly new forms of
encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of
associative trails running through them." He went on to
illustrate how the lawyer will have "at his touch the associated
opinions and decision of his whole experience." The patent
attorney could call "the millions of issued patents, with
familiar trails to every point of his client's interest." The
physician, the chemist, the historian will use Bush's modestly
named Memex to retrieve information. The conclusion, in a well
subdued tone, was "Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if
he can better review his shoddy past and analyze more completely
and objectively his present problems."

Written immediately after World War II, Bush's article was
concerned with applying the benefits of scientific research for
warfare in the new context of peace. What he suggested as a
rather independent application is now the reality of on-line
communities of people working on related topics or complementing
each other's work. The benefits of electronic mail, of shared
files, of shared computing power are not what interest us here.
Ted Nelson, whose name is connected to Project Xanadu,
acknowledged the benefits deriving from Bush's vision, but he is
mainly concerned with the power of linking. Nelson learned from
literacy that one can link text to a footnote (the jump-link),
to a quote (the quote-link), and to a marginal note (the
correlink, as he calls it). He designed his project as a
distributed library of ever new texts and images open to
everyone, a medium for authoring thoughts, for linking to
others, for altering texts and images. Multiplicity of
interpretations, open to everyone else, ensures efficiency at
the global level, and integrity at the individual level. He
called his concept a thinker-toy, an environment that supports
dedicated work without taking away the fun. Generalized beyond
his initial scheme, the medium allows people to make notes, by
either writing them, dictating them, or drawing diagrams. Text
can be heard, images animated. Visualization increases
expressivity. Participation of many readers enlarges the library
while simultaneously allowing others to see only what they want
to see. Privacy can be maintained according to one's wishes;
interaction is under the control of each individual. In this
generalized medium, videotapes, films, images from museums, and
live performances are brought together. The rule is simple:
"Accessibility and free linking make a two-sided coin." In
translation: If someone wants or needs to connect to something,
i.e., to use a resource created by someone else, the connection
becomes available to all those to whom it might be relevant.
Relinquishing the right to control links, established in the
first place because one needed them, is part of the Xanadu
agreement. It is part of the living library, without walls and
bookshelves, called the World Wide Web.

Roads paved with good intentions are notorious for leading where
we don't want to wind up. For everyone who has searched for
knowledge in the Web's virtual library, it becomes clear very
soon that no known search engine and no intelligent agent can
effectively distinguish between the trivial and the meaningful.
We have co-evolved with the results of our practical
experiences. Selection neither increases the chances of the
fittest, nor eliminates the biologically unfit. Cultural
artifacts, books included, or for that matter, the zeroes and
ones that are the making of digital texts of all kinds and all
contents, illustrate the thesis no less than the increasing
number of people kept alive who, under Darwin's law, would have
died. These individuals are able to constitute their practical
experiences through means, among which books and libraries do not
present themselves as alternatives. Global networks are not a
habitat for the human mind, but they are an effective medium for
mind interactions of individuals who are physically far from
being equal. Custom access to knowledge available in the virtual
library is the main characteristic, more so than the wealth of
data types and retrieval procedures.

The question posed at the beginning of this section, "Why don't
we?" referring to the creative use of new means, finds one
answer here. As more and more people, within their realms of
needs and interests, become linked to what is pertinent to their
existence and experience, they also enter an agreement of
exchange that makes their linking part of the distributed space
of human memory and creativity. The naked need to enter the
agreement is part of the dynamics of the civilization of
illiteracy. Reading and enjoying a book implied an eventual
return of money to the publisher and the writer. It might also
have affected the reader in ways difficult to evaluate: Some
people believe that good books make better people. Distributed
environments of knowledge, expression, and information change
the relation. From the world of orality-"Tell me and I will
forget"-to that of literacy-"Let me read, but I might not
remember"-a cognitive change, still evident today, took place.
The next-"Involve me and I will understand"-began. The line of
thought continues: Involvement returns value to others.

The Sense of Design

To design means to literally involve oneself in a practical
experience with signs. To design means to express, in various
signs, thoughts, feelings, and intentions pertinent to human
communication, as well as to project oneself in artifacts
appropriate to human practical experiences. In the remote age of
direct practical experiences, there was no design. The practice
of signs entails the possibility to transcend the present. In
nature, future means insemination; in culture, future is
in-signation: putting into sign, i.e., design. In its broadest
definition, design is the self-constitution of the human being
as an agent of change. This change covers the environment,
conceiving artifacts (tools included), shelter, clothing,
rituals, religious ceremonies, events, messages, interpretive
contexts, interactions, and more recently, new materials and
virtual realities. Shakespeare, who would have enjoyed the
intense fervor of our age, gave a beautiful description of
design: "...imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown"
(Midsummer Night's Dream). Although design contains elements
ensuing from experiences involving language, design is
essentially a non-verbal human activity. Its means of expression
and communication are grounded in the visual, but extend to
sound, texture, odor, taste, and combinations of these
(synaesthesia), including rhythm, color, and movement.

To the human being involved in practical experiences of
self-constitution, the realm of nature appears as given. In
counter-distinction and in retrospect, human nature appears as
designed. In some cases, design is an act of selection: something
is picked up from the environment-a stick, stone, plant-and
assigned an a-natural function through implementation: mark
territory, aid an activity, support a structure or the human
body, trap animals or humans, attack or defend against attack,
color skin or clothing. In other cases, selection is followed by
some form of framing, such as the frame of the ritual around a
totem pole, animal sacrifice, mourning, and celebrations of
fecundity and victory. Selection and framing are related to
efficiency expectations. They embody the hope for help from
magic forces and express willingness to pursue goals that
support the individual, family, and community. Between the
present of any experience and the future, the experience of
design bridges in the form of new patterns of interaction
(through tools, artifacts, messages), recurrences, and extensions
of consequences of human activity from the immediate to the
future.

The projection of biology into an experience of long-lasting
consequences implies elements of planning, no matter how
rudimentary, and expectations of outcome. It also leads to new
human relations in family-based interactions, education, shared
values, and patterns of reciprocal responsibility. Random sexual
encounters that reflect natural drives are not designs.
Awareness of reciprocal attraction, shared feelings, and
commitments extending well beyond the physical encounter can be
identified as a design component present even in sexuality.
Between the design component of sexual consequence of the
evolving human being and the design of offspring by selection of
a partner, by selection of genetic traits catalogued in semen
banks, by genetic splicing and mutation, and by all that is yet
to come upon us, there is a difference that reflects the altered
human pragmatic condition.

Of real interest here is how the future is captured in design.
Moreover, we want to know how it unfolds in practical
experiences of design by which human beings extend their reality
from here and now to then and there. In ways different from
language, design gives the human being another experience of time
and space. This experience is for the most part coherent with
that of language. But it can also make individuals constituting
themselves through design work aware of aspects of time that
the language experience misses altogether or makes impossible.
Designs are expressed in drawings and eventually complemented by
models testifying to the experiences of volume, texture, and
motion. The anticipated time dimension is eventually added in
simulations. Design liberates the human being from total
conditioning through language.

Within the convention of design, signs are endowed with a life of
their own, supported by the energy of the persons entering the
convention. This is how human symbolism, of confirmed vitality
and efficiency, is factually established. Symbols integrated in
human experience are given the life of the experience. The entire
heritage of rituals testifies to this. Today the word ritual is
used indiscriminately for any habitual preparation, from bathing
to watching TV to after-game celebrations. Initially, rituals
appeared as dynamic designs centered around episodes of life and
death. Their motivation lay in the practical experience; their
unfolding in connected interactions acquired an aesthetic
quality from the underlying design.

From the earliest known experiences, the implicit aesthetic
component is the optimizing element of the experience. This
aesthetic component extends perceived formal qualities found in
nature to the aesthetics of objects and activities in the realm
of human nature. The language of design expresses awareness of
these formal characteristics. Practical experiences display a
repetitive pattern: the optimal choice (of shapes, colors,
rhythms, sounds, movement) is always pleasing. The quality
through which pleasure is experienced is not reducible to the
elements involved, but it is impossible without them. Selection
is motivated by practical expectations, but guided by formal
criteria. Individuals involved in the earliest pragmatic
framework were aware of this. Other formal criteria make up a
generic background. One of the recurrent patterns of the
practical experience of design is to appropriate the formal
quality associated with what is pleasing in nature and to
integrate it in the optimal shaping of the future. This is how
the aesthetic dimension of human practical experiences resulted
within such experiences.

Notation systems (e.g., the quipu, representational drawings on
stone or on the ground, or hieroglyphics) that eventually became
writing can be classified as design, not lastly in view of their
aesthetic coherence. Only when rules and expectations defined by
verbal language take over notation does writing separate from
design and become part of the broader experience of language. We
can now understand why changes in verbal language, as it
constituted a framework for time and spatial experiences, were
not necessarily reflected in changes in design. By the time
literacy became possible, the underlying structure that led to
it was embodied in the use of language. This is not true, to the
same extent, in the practice of design. It is at this juncture
that design is ascertained as a profession, i.e., as a practical
domain with its own dynamics and goals. By no coincidence,
engineering design emerged in the context of the pragmatics
that began with building pyramids, ziggurats, and temples, and
culminated in the Industrial Revolution in the design of
machines. The broad premise of the Industrial Age is that
everything is a machine: the house, the carriage, stoves, the
contraptions used in literate education, schools, colleges,
institutions, art studios, even nature.

From a relatively focused and homogeneous field of practical
experiences within industrial society, design evolved, in the
civilization of illiteracy, as an overriding concern that
extended to many specialized applications: tool design, building
and interior design (architecture), jewelry design, apparel
design, textile design, product design, graphic design, and to
the many fields of engineering (including computer-aided
design), interactive media and virtual reality, as well as
genetic engineering, new materials design, event design (applied
to politics and various commodities), networking, and education.
Technologies, from primitive to sophisticated, supporting visual
languages made possible complexities for which the intuitive use
of visual expression is not the most effective. Consequently,
the scope of design-oriented practical experiences changed.
Design now affords more integrative projects of higher levels of
synaesthesia, as well as experiences involving variable
designs-that is, designs that grow together with the human being
self-constituted in practical interactions with the designed
world.

In the pragmatic framework based on the digital, design replaced
literacy more than any other practical experience has. The
results of design are different in nature from those of
literacy. As optimistic as one can become about a future not
bound to the constraints of literacy, it takes more to
comprehend the sense of design at a time when evolutionary
progress is paralleled by revolutionary change.

Drawing the future

Drawing starts with seeing and leads to a way of envisioning and
understanding the world different from the understanding
filtered through language. From a cognitive viewpoint, drawing
implies that persons constituting their identity in the act of
drawing know the inside and the outside of what they render. To
draw requires that things grow from their inside and take shape
as active entities. Visible and invisible parts interact in
drawing, surface and volume intersect, voids and fills extend in
the visual expression, dynamically complementing each other.
Each line of a drawing makes sense only in relation to the
others. In contrast to words and sentences, elements of a drawing
conjure understanding only through the drawing. Visual
representation, as opposed to language expression, attains
coherence as a whole, and the whole is configurational. One can
write the word table without ever experiencing the object
denominated. Extracted from direct or mediated experiences,
knowledge about the object and its functions is a prerequisite
for drawing an old table or conceiving a new one. To design
means to express in a language that involves rendering. It also
involves understanding that practical expectations are connected
to the projected object. Consequently, to design means to
experience the table in advance of its physical embodiment. Thus
designing is the virtual practical experience, at the borderline
between what is and what new experiences of self-constitution
require.

In designing, people virtually project their own biological and
cultural characteristics in whatever they conceive. This
corresponds to the reality that design is derived from practical
experiences, extending what is possible to what is desirable.
Functionality expresses this condition, though only partially.
With the emergence of conditions embodied in the underlying
structure reflected in literacy, image and literate
renditions-statements of goal and purpose, descriptions of means,
procedures for evaluation-met. Literacy then effected changes in
the condition of design. These are reflected as general
expectations of permanence, universality, dualism, centralism,
and hierarchy. International style-an expression that really
covers more than the name of a style-reflects these literate
expectations from design.

Is drawing natural? The meaning of such a question can be
conjured only if articulated with its pendant: Is literacy
unnatural or artificial? Everything already stated about drawing
implies that it is not natural, though it is closer to what it
represents than words are. Except for metaphoric qualifications,
there is no such thing as drawing an abstraction of drawing,
although there is abstract drawing. Through drawing, persons
constitute themselves as having the ability to see, to understand
(for instance, the invisible part of objects, how light affects
an image, how color or texture makes an object seem lighter or
rounder), to relate to the pragmatic context as definitory of the
meaning of both the object-real or imagined-and the drawing.
Different contexts make different ways of drawing possible.
Disconnected from the context, drawing is almost like the babble
of a child, or like a fragmented, unfinished expression.
Vitruvius had a culture of drawing very different from that of
the many architects who followed him. Critics who compared him
to Le Corbusier and his architectural renditions, to the
architects of post-structuralism, and to the deconstructivists
and deconstructivist designers declared the drawings of these
architects to be ugly, bad, or inappropriate (Tom Wolfe went on
record with this). At this instance, drawing ceases to be an
adjunct to art; it petitions its own legitimacy.

If we ignore the pragmatic context and the major transition from
a design initially influenced by language-Vitruvius wrote a
monumental work on architecture-the statement stands. But what
we face here is a process in time: from design influenced by the
pragmatics embodied in Vitruvius' work, to design subordinated to
literacy, and finally to design struggling for emancipation as a
new language, in which the critical component is as present as
the constructive impulse to change the world.

Design carries over many formal requirements from practical
experiences subordinated to literacy. But there is also an
underlying conflict between design and language, moreover
between design and literacy. This conflict was never resolved
inside the experience of designing. In society, literacy imposed
its formative structure on education, and what resulted was
design education with a strong liberal arts component. Needless
to say, designers, whether professionals in the field or students
(designers-to-be), resented and resent the assumption that their
trade needs to be elevated to the pedestal of the eternal values
embodied in literacy. Instead of being stimulated to discover
the need for literacy-based values in concrete contexts, design
and design education are subjected to the traditional smorgasbord
of history, language, philosophy, a little science, and many
free choices. Its own theoretic level, or at least the quest for
a theory, is discarded as frivolous. Moreover, the elements
grouped under intuition are systematically explained away,
instead of being stimulated.

Whereas the context of education allows for the artificial
maintenance of literacy- based training programs in design, the
broader context of pragmatic experiences confirms the dynamic
changes design brought about since the profession ascertained
its identity. The conflict between training and engaging prompted
efforts to free design from constraints that affect its very
nature: How do we get rid of the mechanical components of design
(paste-up, rendering, model making)? These efforts came from
outside the educational framework and were stimulated by the
general dynamics of change from the pragmatics of literacy to
the pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy. The change
brought about the emergence of new design tools that open fresh
perspectives for the expression of design: animation,
interactivity, and simulation. It also encouraged designers to
research within the realm of their domain, to inquire into the
many aspects of their concern, and to express their findings in
new designs. The computer desktop and various rapid prototyping
tools brought execution closer to designers. It also introduced
new mediating layers in the design process.

Breakaway

The majority of all artifacts in use today are either the result
of the design revolution at the beginning of the 20th century,
or of efforts to redesign everyday objects for use in new
contexts of practical experiences. From the telephone to the
television set, from the automobile to the airplane and
helicopter, from the lead pencil to the fountain pen and
disposable ball-point pen, from the typewriter to the word
processor, from cash registers to laser readers, from stoves to
microwave ovens-the list can go on and on-a new world has been
designed and manufactured. The next world is already knocking at
the door with robots, voice commanded machines, and even
interconnected intelligent systems that we might use, or that
might use us, in some form. The steam and pneumatic engines
fired by coal, oil, or gas are being replaced by highly
efficient, compact, electric or magneto-electric engines
integrated in the machines they drive, controlled by
sophisticated electronic devices.

There is almost nothing stemming from the age that made literacy
necessary that will not be replaced by higher efficiency
alternatives, by structurally different means. What about the
technology of literacy? One can only repeat what once was a good
advertisement line: "The typewriter is to the pen what the sewing
machine (Remember the machine driven by foot power?) is to the
needle." Remington produced the beautiful Sholes and Glidden
typewriter in the 1870's. It was difficult to decide whether the
ornate object, displaying hand-stenciled polychrome flowers,
belonged in the office or in a Victorian study. Now it is a
museum piece. Compare it to the word processor of today. Its
casing might survive the renewal cycle of two to three years
that hardware goes through. The chip's processing abilities will
double every eighteen months, in accordance with Moore's Law.
The software, the heart and mind of the machine, is improved
almost continuously. Now it provides for checking spelling,
contains dictionaries, checks syntax and suggests stylistic
changes. Soon it will take dictation. Then it will probably
disappear; first, because the computer can reside on the network
and be used as needed, and second, the written message will no
longer be appropriate in the new context. Those who question
this rather pedestrian prediction might want to ask themselves
some other questions: Where is the ornamental ink stand, the
beautiful designs by Fabergé and Tiffany? Where are the fountain
pens, the Gestetner machines? Carbon paper? Are they replaced by
miniature tape recorders or pocket computers, by integrated
miniature machines that themselves integrate the wireless
telephone? Are they replaced by the computer, the Internet
browser, and digital television? Edward Bulwer-Lytton gave us
the slogan "The pen is mightier than the sword." Today, the
function of each is different from what it was when he referred
to them. They became collectibles. The disposable pen is
symptomatic of a civilization that discards not only the pen,
but also writing.

The breakaway of design occurs first of all at structural levels.
It is one thing to write a letter, manuscript, or business plan
with a pencil, quite another to do the same on a typewriter, and
even more different to use a word processor for these purposes,
or to rely on the Internet. The cognitive implications of the
experience-what kinds of processes take place in the mind-cause
the output to be different in each case. No medium is passive.
In each medium, previous experiences and patterns of interaction
are accumulated. The more interaction there is to a process, and
sometimes to a collaborative effort, the more the condition of
writing itself changes. We can think of messages addressed to
many people at once. Think of the Mullah chanting evening
prayers at the top of a minaret; or of the priest addressing a
congregation; of the president of a nation using the powerful
means of television, or of a spammer on the Internet,
distributing messages to millions of e-mail addresses. Each
communication is framed in a context constituting its parameters
of pre-understanding. To the majority, spam means no more than
chopped meat in a can. Even today, over 50% of the world's
people have never used a telephone. And with some 50 million
people on the Internet, Netizenship is more vision than reality.

Design as a semiotic integrative practical experience is a matter
of both communication and context. The possibility to customize
a message so that it is addressed not to an anonymous group (the
believers gathered for the occasion, or members of society eager
to learn about political decisions affecting their lives), but to
each individual, reflecting concern for each one's individual
condition and respect for his or her contribution in a system of
distributed tasks, was opened by design. The semiosis of group
and mass communication is very different from the semiosis of
pointcasting. Technologically, everything is available for this
individualized communication. However, it does not occur because
of the implicit literate expectation in the functioning of
church, state, education, commerce and other institutions. Design
experiences submit the centrality of the writer to reassessment.
One relates to the literate model of one-to-many communication.
This model is based on the assumption of hierarchy, within a
context of sequential interaction (the word is uttered, the
listener understands it, reacts, etc.). In the industrial
pragmatic framework, this was an efficient model. Perfected
through the experience of television, it reached globality. But
scale is not only sheer numbers. More important are
interactions, intensities, the efficient matching of each
individual's needs and expectations. Thus, efficiency no longer
means how many individuals are at the receiving end of the
communication channel, but how many channels are necessary to
effectively reach everyone. A different design can change the
structure of communication and introduce participatory elements.
For those still captive to literacy, the alternative is the
ubiquitous word-processed letter matched to a list in a
database. For those able to re-think and reformulate their goals,
effectiveness means transcending the literate structure.

The challenge begins at knowing the language of the individuals,
mapping their characteristics (cognitive, emotional, physical),
and addressing them specifically. The result of this effort is
represented by individualized messages, addressing in parallel
people who are concerned about similar issues (environment,
education, the role of the family). Moreover, it is possible to
have many people write together, or to combine one person's text
with someone else's image, with animation, spoken words, or
music. In the design effort that takes the lead here,
hierarchies are abolished, and new interactions among people are
stimulated. The design that leads to such patterns of human
experiences must free itself from the constraints of
sequentiality. Such design can no longer be subject to the
duality of good or bad, as frequently related to form (in
particular, typography, layout, coherence). Rather, it covers a
continuum between less appropriate to very well adapted to the
scope of the activity. No longer cast in metal, wood, or stone,
but left in a soft condition (as software or as a variable,
self-adaptive set of rules), the design can improve, change, and
reach its optimum through many contributions from those who
effectively constitute their identity interacting with it. The
user can effectively finish the design by choosing identifiers
and modifying, within given limits, the shape, color, texture,
feel, and even function of the artifact.

There is also a deeper level of knowing the language of the
individuals addressed. At this level, to know the language means
to know the experience. Henceforth, the new design no longer
takes place at a syntactic or a semantic level, but is
pragmatically driven. To reach every individual means to
constitute a context for a significant practical experience:
learning, participation in political decisions, making art, and
many others. But let us be realistic as we experience the urge to
convey a sense of optimism: the common practical experience
involves partaking in the distribution of the wealth and
prosperity generated in this extremely efficient pragmatic
framework. As discouraging as this might sound, in the last
analysis, consumption, extremely individualized, constitutes the
most engaging opportunity for efficient pointcasting. The
questions entertained today by visionaries, innovators, and
venture capitalists placing their bets on the Internet might not
always make this conclusion clear.

Convergence and divergence

Telecommunications, media, and computation converge. What makes
the convergence possible and necessary is a combination of
factors united in the necessity to reach efficiency appropriate
to human practical experiences at the global scale of existence
and work. It is within this broad dynamics and inner dynamics
that design ascertains itself as a force for change from the
civilization of literacy to the civilization of many, sometimes
contradictory, literacies. A shirt used to be mere clothing; the
T-shirt became, in view of many concurrent forces, a new icon, a
sui generis medium of communication. The commercial aspect is
obvious. For example, each university of certain renown has
licensing arrangements with some manufacturer who advertises the
name on the walking billboards of chests, backs, and bellies. The
T-shirt effectively replaces wordy press statements and becomes
an instance of live news. Before Operation Desert Storm got into
full swing, the T-shirt already signaled love for the troops or,
alternatively, anti-war sentiment. Magic Johnson's admission that
he had tested HIV positive was followed, less than two days
later, by the "We still love you" T- shirts in Los Angeles.

The quasi-instantaneous annotation of events is in keeping with
the fast change of attitudes and expectations. Institutions have
inertia; they cannot keep up with the rhythm of the times. The
news, formed and conveyed outside the institution of media,
reads as a manifesto of immediacy, but also as a testimony to
ephemerality. We actually lose our shirts on the immediate, not
on the permanent. Design projects this sense of immediacy and
ephemerality not only through T-shirts or the Internet. The
house, clothes, cars, the Walkman, everything is part of this
cycle. Is design the cause of this, or is it something else,
expressed through design, or to which designers become
accomplice? The shorter fashion cycles, the permanent renewal of
design forms, the 30-second drama or comedy of
advertisement-more appropriate to the rhythms of existence than
never-ending soap-operas-the new VLSI board, the craze for
designer non-alcoholic beer or low-fat pork-all testify to a
renewal speed met by what seems an inexhaustible appetite on the
side of our current commercial democracy. The refresh rate of
images on our TV sets and computer monitors, predicated by the
intrinsic characteristics of technology and human biology, is
probably the extreme at which cycles of change can settle.

To take all this with enthusiasm or trepidation, without
understanding why and how it happens, would contradict the basic
assumption pursued in this book. The pragmatic context of high
efficiency is also one of generalized democracy, extended from
production to consumption. The ubiquitous engine driving the
process is the possibility, indeed necessity, of human
emancipation from all possible constraints. The experience of
design acknowledges that emancipation from constraints does not
ultimately result in some kind of anarchic paradise. The right to
partake in what human experiences generate often takes the form
of taste that is equalized and rendered uniform, and of
ever-expanding choices that ultimately turn out be mediocre.

As a reaction to the implicit system of values of literacy,
related to limited choices, illiterate design expression does
not impose upon the user in design, but involves the user in
choices to be made. In this way, design becomes an indicator of
the state of public intelligence, taste, and interest. It also
points to a new condition of values. The indicator might not
always show a pretty picture of who we are, and what our
priorities are. The honest interpretation of such an indicator
can open avenues to understanding why the Walkman-which seems to
seduce people by an ideal of insulation from others-has the
success it has, why some fashion designs catch on and others
don't, why some car models find acceptance, why movies on
significant themes fail, and why, on a more general level,
quality does not necessarily improve under circumstances of
expectations in continuous expansion. New thresholds are set by
each new design attempt. The wearable computer is yet another
gadget in the open- ended development that unites evolution and
revolution.

The need to achieve high levels of efficiency corresponding to
the current human scale is probably the aspect most ignored.
Efficiency, pre-programmed through design, confirms that human
involvement is expensive (do-it-yourself dominates at all levels
of design), and service more profitable than manufacturing in
developed countries. None of these solutions can be taken
lightheartedly. After all, design bridges to the future, and to
bridge to a world of depleted resources, destroyed ecology, and a
mediocre human condition is not necessarily a good reason for
optimism. The goal of reducing human involvement, especially
when the human is forced into exhausting and dangerous
experiences, is very attractive, but also misleading. To reduce
human involvement, energies different from those of an
individual involved in experiences of self-constitution as a
user need to be provided. Faced with the challenge posed by the
dualistic choice expectations vs. resources, designers often fail
to free themselves from the literate ideology of dominating
nature. Fortunately, design based on co-evolution with nature is
gaining momentum. So is the design of materials endowed with
characteristics usually associated with human intelligence.

The inherent opposition between means and goals explains the
dynamics of design in our time. Extremely efficient methods of
communication lead to information saturation. New methods for
designing result in an apparent overabundance of artifacts and
other products of design. It seems that the driving force is the
possibility to practically meet individual expectations at
levels of productivity higher than those of literacy-based mass
production, and at costs well below those of mass production. The
challenge-how to maintain quality and integrity-is real and
involves more than professional standards. Market-specific
processes, probably well reflected in the notion of profit,
affect design decisions to the extent that often human practical
experiences in the market result in under-designing or
over-designing negotiated items. Changing expectations, as a
consequence of rapidly changing contexts of human experiences,
affect the design cycle even more than the production cycle. The
ability to meet such changes by a built-in design variability
is, however, not only a test of design, but also of its implicit
economic equation.

Enormous segments of the world population are addressed by
design. This fact gives the design experience, taken in its
entirety, a new social dimension. Against the background of the
opportunity to fine-tune designs to each individual without the
need to build on expected literacy, the responsibility of such
an activity is probably unprecedented. Whether designers are
aware of it, and able to work within the boundaries of such an
experience, is a different question.

The new designer

Designs mediate between requirements resulting from human
practical experiences and possibilities (Gibson defined them as
affordances) in nature and society. They embody expectations and
plans for change; and they need to interface between the given
and the desired or the expected. The language of design has an
implicit set of anticipations and a projected endurance.
Aesthetic structuring, culturally rooted and technologically
supported, affects the efficiency of designed items. The
explicit set of expectations is measured against this implicit
set of anticipations. It translates from the many languages of
human practical experiences to the language of design, and from
here to the ways and means of embodying design in a product,
event, message, material, or interaction.

It is interesting to consider the process of designing from as
many perspectives as possible. From the thumbnail sketch to the
many variations of a conceptual scheme, one eliminating the
other, many decisions are arrived at. Design resembles a natural
selection process: one solution eliminates the other, and so on
until a relatively appropriate design emerges. This is the
memetic scheme, successfully translated into design software
programs based on genetic algorithms. In the absence of rules,
such as those guiding literacy, and freed from dualistic
thinking (the clear-cut good vs. bad), the designer explores a
continuum of answers to questions that arise during the design
process. The fact that various solutions compete with each other
confers a certain drama on design. Its open-endedness projects a
sense of change. Its mediating nature explains much of its
engaging aspect. There is an obvious difference between the
design experience within a context of assuming identity between
the body and machines, and the new context of digital cloning of
the human being. Designs in the area of neurobionics, robotic
prosthetics, and even the cyber-body could not have emerged from
any other pragmatic context but the one on which the
civilization of illiteracy is established.

Still, if someone had to choose between the Greek Temple
typewriter of 1890 and today's word processor, thoughtlessly
designed and encased in cheap plastic, the choice would be
difficult. One is an object of distinct beauty, reflecting an
ideal we can no longer support. Its distinction made it
unavailable to many people who needed such an instrument. Behind
or inside the word processor, as behind any digital processing
machine, are standardized components. The entire machine is a
highly modular ensemble. One program is the archetype for all
the word processing that ever existed. The rest is bells and
whistles. Here is indeed the crux of the matter: The ability to
achieve maximum efficiency based on the recognition that raw
materials and energy mean nothing unless the creative mind,
applied to tasks relevant to human experiences of
self-constitution, makes something out of them.

In the line of the argument followed, design sometimes seems
demonized for what we all experience as waste and disdain for
the environment, or lack of commitment to the people replaced by
new machines. That people eventually become addicted to the
products of design-television sets, electronic gadgets, designer
fashion, designer drugs-is an irony soon forgotten. At other
times, design seems idealized for finding a way to maximize the
efficiency of human practical experiences, or for projecting a
challenging sense of quality against the background of our
obsession with more at the lowest price. But it is not so much
the activity as the people who are the activity that make either
the criticism or glorification of design meaningful. This brings
up the identity of the designer in the civilization of
illiteracy.

Designers master certain parts of the vast realm of the visual.
Some are exquisite in visualizing language: type designers,
graphic artists, bookmakers; others, in realizing 3-dimensional
space either as product designers, architects, or engineers.
Some see design dynamically-clothes live the life of the wearer;
gardens change from season to season, year to year; toys are
played with; and animation is design with its own heart (anima).
The variety of design experiences is only marginally controlled
by design principles. There is integrity to design, consistence
and pertinence, and there are aesthetic qualities. But if anyone
would like to study design in its generality, the first lesson
would be that there is no alphabet or rule for correct design,
and no generally accepted criteria for evaluation. Literacy
operates from top (vocabulary, grammar rules, and phonetics are
given in advance) to bottom. Design operates the opposite way,
from the particular context to new answers, continuously adding
to a body of experience that seems inexhaustible.

People expect their environment to be designed (clothes, shoes,
furniture, jewelry, perfume, home interiors, games, landscape)
in order to harmonize with their own design. There are models,
just as in the design process, mainly celebrities, themselves
designed for public consumption. And there is the attempt to live
life as a continuum of designed events: birth, baptism,
communion, graduations (at different moments in the cycle of
designed education), engagement, marriage, anniversaries,
promotions, retirement, estate planning, funerals, estate
execution, and wars. As a designed practical experience
involving a variety of mediations, life can be very efficient,
but probably not rewarding (in terms of quality) at the same
time. The conclusion applies to the result of all design
activities-products, materials, events. They make possible new
levels of convenience, but they also remove some of the
challenges people face and through which human personality
emerges.

The relation between challenges-of satisfying needs or meeting
higher and higher expectations-and the emergence of personality
is quite intricate. Every practical experience expresses new
aspects of the individual. Personality integrates these aspects
over time and is projected, together with biological and cultural
characteristics, in the never-ending succession of encounters of
new situations, and consequently new people. The civilization of
illiteracy shifts focus from the exceptional to the average,
generating expectations affordable to everyone. The space of
choices thus opened is appropriate to the endless quest for
novelty, but not necessarily for the affirmation of the
extraordinary. In most cases, the designer disappears (including
his or her name) in the designed product, material, or event.
Nobody ever cared to know who designed the Walkman, computers,
earth stations, or new materials, or who designs designer jeans,
dresses, glasses, and sneakers, tour packages, and Olympic games.
No one even cares who designs Web sites, regardless of whether
they attract many interactions or turn out to be only ego trips.
Names are sold and applied on labels for their recognition value
alone. No one cares whether there is a real person behind the
name as long as the name trades well on the market in which the
very same bag, watch, sneakers, or frame for glasses, sells
under different identifiers.

This has to be seen in the broader picture of the general
disconnectedness among people. Very few care to know who their
neighbors or colleagues are, even less who the other people are
who namelessly participate in expected abundance or in
ecological self-destruction. Illiteracy indeed does away with
the opaqueness of literacy- based human relations. All the means
through which new practical experiences take place make each of
us subject to the transparency of illiteracy. The result is even
deeper integration of the individual in the shared databank of
information through which our profile of commercial democracy is
drawn. Design endlessly interprets information. Each time we
step out of the private sphere-to visit a doctor or lawyer, to
buy a pair of shoes, to build a house, to take a trip, to search
for information on the Internet-we become more and more
transparent, more and more part of the public domain. But
transparency, sometimes savage in competitive life (economy,
politics, intelligence), does not bring people closer. As we
celebrate new opportunities, we should not lose sight of what is
lost in the process.

Designing the virtual

The experience of design is one of signs and their infinite
manipulation. It takes place in an experiential context that
moved away from the object, away from immediacy and from
co-presence. Some people would say it moved from the real,
without thinking that signs are as real as anything else. When
pushing this experience to its limits, the designer lands in
imaginary territories of extreme richness. One can imagine a city
built underwater, or a spherical house that can be rolled from
location to location, devices of all kinds, clothing as thin as
someone's thought, or as thick as tree bark or a rubber tire.
One can imagine the wearable computer, new intelligent materials,
even new human beings. Once the imagination is opened to fresh
human endeavors-live in an underwater city, wear the lightest or
heaviest clothing, interconnect with the world through what you
wear, interact with new, genetically engineered humans-virtual
space is opened for investigation. Regardless of how a virtual
experience is made possible-drawings, diagrams, combinations of
images and sounds, triggered dreams, happenings, or the digital
embodiment of virtual reality-it escapes literacy-based
constraints and embodies new languages, especially synaesthetic
languages. In fact, if design is a sign focused on the practical
experience, the design of virtual space is one level beyond,
i.e., it is in the meta-sign domain. This observation defines a
realm where the person frees himself from the structures
characteristic of literacy.

In virtuality, the sequentiality of written language is
overwritten by the very configurational nature of the context.
Reciprocal relations among objects are not necessarily linear
because their descriptions are no longer based on the
reductionist approach. This is a universe designed as vague and
allowing for the logic of vagueness. Within virtual space,
self-constitution, hence identification, no longer regards
cultural reference, which is literacy-based, but a changing
self-reference. All attempts to see how a human being would
develop in the absence of language could finally be embodied in
the individual experience of a being whose mind reaches a state
of tabula rasa (clean slate) in the virtual. That such an
experience turns out to be a design experience, not a biological
accident (e.g., a child who grew up among animals, whose
language fails to develop and whose behavior is uncouth), is
relevant insofar as freedom from language can be investigated
only in relation to its consequences pertaining to human
practical experiences.

Virtuality is actually the generic reality of all and any design
practical experience. From among the very many designs in a
state of virtuality, only a small number will become real. What
gives one or another design a chance to transcend virtuality are
contextual dependencies within any defined pragmatic framework.
Designers do not simply look at birds flying and come up with
airplanes, or at fish swimming and come up with boats or
submarines. There are many design experiences that are based on
knowledge resulting from our interaction with nature. But there
are many more that originate in the realm of humanity. There is
nothing to imitate in nature that will lead to the computer, and
even less that will lead to designing molecules, materials, and
machines endowed with characteristics that allow for self-repair
and virtual environments for learning difficult skills. Design
in the civilization of illiteracy relies foremost on human
cognitive resources. Experience, like most of the practical
endeavors of this pragmatic framework, becomes predominantly
computational and disseminates computational means.

Design human praxis, as the dominant factor of change from the
pragmatics embodied in manufacturing to the new experiences of
service economy, effected differentiations in respect to means
of expression and communication, in respect to the role of
representation, and to our position in regard to values. The
electronic data storage and retrieval that complements the role
of print, and progressively replaces it, results from the
experience of design supported by fast and versatile digital data
processing. When, at the social level, representation is
replaced by individual activism, and by the militancy of
interest groups, we also experience a diffusion of politics into
the private, and to a certain extent, its appropriation by
interest groups assembled around causes of short-term impact
that keep changing. This change effects a shift from the
expectation of authority, connected to literacy-based human
experiences, to the slippery authority of individual choice.

The designed world of artifacts, environments, materials,
messages, and images (including the image of the individual) is
a world of many choices, but of little concern for value. Its
life results from the exercise of freedom to choose and freedom
to re- design ad infinitum. Almost everything designed under
these new pragmatic conditions embodies expectations associated
with illiteracy. The object no longer dominates. The impressive
mechanical contraptions, the engines, the shift systems,
articulations, precious finish-they all belong among the
collectibles. Quite to the contrary, the new object is designed
to be idiot-proof (the gentler name is user friendly), reflecting
a generalized notion of permissiveness that replaces discipline
and self-control in our interaction with artifacts.

Design also affects change in our conception of fact and reality,
stimulating the exploration of the imaginary, the virtual, and
the meta-sign. Facts are replaced by their representations and
by representations of representations, and so on until the
reference fades into oblivion. Henceforth, the positivist
expectations ingrained in the experiences of the civilization of
literacy are reconstituted as a frame of relativist
interactions, dominated by images, seconded by sounds (noise
included). Imaging technologies make drawing available to
everyone, exactly as writing was available to those processed as
literates. The photographic camera-drawing with light on film-the
electronic camera, the television camera, the scanner, and the
digitizer are, effectively, means for drawing and for processing
the image in full control of all its components. A sound level
can easily be added, and indeed sound augments the expressive
power of images. Interactivity, involved in the design process,
adds the dimension of change. That literacy, as one of the many
languages of the civilization of illiteracy, uses design in its
various forms to further its own program is clear. Probably less
clear is that the literate experience is itself changed through
such instances. After all, literacy is the civilization that
started with the conventions of writing and grew to the one Book
open to all possible interpretations, as these were generated in
the attempt to effectively conjure its meaning in new pragmatic
contexts. Literacy subjected to all the means that become
possible in the civilization of illiteracy, in particular to
those that design affords, results in the infinity of books,
printed for the potential individual reader (or the very
limited readership that a title or journal tends to have) who
might finally give it one interpretation (equal to none) by
placing it, unopened and unread, on a bookshelf. The radical
description given above might still be far away from today's
reality, but the dynamics of change points in this direction.

On the Internet, we come closer to what emerges as a
qualitatively new form of human interaction. Design is
integrated in the networked world in a number of ways:
communication protocols, hypertext, document and image layout,
structure of interactive multimedia. But no one designer, and no
one company (not even the institution of defense, which supports
networking) can claim that it designed this new medium of human
practical experiences. Many individuals contributed, mostly
unaware that their particular designs would fit in an evolving
whole whose appearance and function (or breakdown) no one could
predict. These kept changing by the year and hour, and will
continue to change for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.

Consider the design of communication protocols. This defies all
there is to literacy. A word spelled correctly is disassembled,
turned into packages that carry one letter at a time (or a
portion of a letter), and given indications where they should
arrive, but not through which route. Eventually, they are
reassembled, after each package travels its own path. But in
order to become a word again, they are further processed
according to their condition. Such communication protocols negate
the centrality and sequentiality of literacy and treat all that
is information in the same way: images, sounds, movements. Many
other characteristics of literacy-dominated pragmatics are
overridden in the dynamic world of interconnections: formal rules
of language, determinism, dualistic distinctions. Distributed
resources support distributed activities. Tremendous parallelism
ensures the vitality of the exponentially increasing number and
types of transactions. Design itself, in line with almost any
conceivable form of practical experience, becomes global.

Enthusiasm aside, all this is still very much a beginning.
Networks, for transportation (trains, buses, airplanes,
highways), for communication (telephone, telegraph,
television), for energy distribution (electric wires, gas
pipelines) were designed long before we knew of computers and
digital processing. In the context in which human cognitive
resources take precedence over any other resources, as we face
efficiency requirements of the global scale of humankind,
connecting minds is not an evolutionary aspect of design, but a
revolutionary step. All the networks mentioned above can
participate in the emergence of humankind's integrated network.
Their potential as more than carriers of voice messages,
electricity, gas, or railway passengers is far from being used
in the ways it can and should be. Design experiences of
integration will make the slogan of convergence, applied to the
integration of telecommunication, media, and computing, a reality
that extends beyond these components. In some curious ways, the
Netizen-the citizen of the digitally integrated world-is a
consequence of our self-identification in practical activities
based on a qualitatively new understanding of design.

Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning



Hölderlin's verse, "There was never so much beginning" (So viel
Anfang war noch nie) captures the spirit of our time. It applies
to many beginnings: of new paradigms in science, of
technological directions, of art and literature. It is probably
most applicable to the beginnings in political life. The
political map of the world has changed more rapidly than we can
remember from anything that books have told us. It is dangerous
to generalize from events not really settled. But it is
impossible to ignore them, especially when they appear to
confirm the transition from the civilization of literacy to the
civilization of illiteracy.

People who deal with the development and behavior of the human
species believe that cooperative effort explains the development
of language, if not its emergence. Cooperative effort is also
the root of human self-constitution as political animals. The
social dimension, starting with awareness of kinship and followed
by commitments to non-kin is, in addition to tool-making, the
driving force of human intellectual growth. Simply put, the
qualifiers political animal (zoon politikon) and speaking animal
(zoon phonanta) are tightly connected. But this relationship does
not fully address the nature of political human experiences.

Different types of animals also develop patterns of interaction
that could be qualified as social, without reaching the
cognitive sophistication of the species Homo Habilis. They also
exchange information, mainly through gestures, noises, and
biochemical signals. Tracking food, signaling danger, and
entrance into cooperative effort are documented aspects of
animal life. None of these qualifies them as political animals;
neither do the means involved qualify as language. Politics, in
its incipient forms or in today's sophisticated manifestations,
is a distinct set of interhuman relationships made necessary by
the conscious need to optimize practical experiences of human
self-constitution. Politics is not equivalent to the formation of
a pack of wolves, to the herding tendency of deer, nor to the
complex relations within a beehive. Moreover, politics is not
reducible to sheer survival strategies, no matter how
sophisticated, which are characteristic of some primates, and
probably other animals.

The underlying structure of the activities through which humans
identify themselves is embodied in human acts, be they of the
nature of tool-making, sharing immediate or remote goals, and
establishing reciprocal obligations of a material or spiritual
nature. Changes in the circumstances of practical experiences
effect changes in the way humans relate to each other. That the
scale of human worlds, and thus the scale of human practical
experience, is changing corresponds to the dynamics of the
species' constitution. Incipient agricultural activity and the
formation of the many families of languages correspond to a time
when a critical mass was reached. At this threshold, syncretic
human interaction was already rooted in well defined patterns of
practical experience. The pragmatic framework shaped the
incipient political life, and was in turn stimulated by it.
Politics emerged once the complexity of human interactions
increased. Political practical experiences are related to work,
to beliefs, to natural and cultural distinctions, even to
geography, to the extent to which the environment makes some
forms of human experiences possible. This is why, from a historic
perspective, politics is never disassociated from economic life,
religion, racial or ethnic identity, geography, art, or science.

The underlying structure of human praxis that determined the need
for literacy also determined the need for appropriate means of
expression, communication, and signification. This becomes even
more obvious in politics, which is embedded in literacy-based
pragmatics. Consequently, once the particular pragmatic
circumstances change, the nature, the means, and the goals of
politics should change as well.

The commercial democracy of permissiveness

The condition of politics in a pragmatic framework of
non-sequentiality, non- linear functional dependencies,
non-determinism, decentralized, non-hierarchic modes of
interaction or accelerated dynamics, extreme competitive
pressure-that is, in the framework of the civilization of
illiteracy-currently escapes definition. State of flux
appropriately describes what such a political experience can be.
What we have today, however, is a conflict between politics
anchored in the pragmatics that is still based on literacy and
politics shaped by forces representing the pragmatic need to
transcend literacy. The conflict affects the condition of
politics and the nature of contemporary political action. It
affects everything related to the social contract and its
implementation: education, exercise of democracy, practice of
law, defense, social policies, and international affairs.

Changes affecting current political experiences are part of a
sweeping dynamics. These changes range from the acknowledged
transition from an industrially based national economy to an
information processing global economy focused on service. Part
of the change is reflected in the transition from national
economies of scarcity (usually complemented by patterns of
preserving and saving) to large, integrated commercial economies
of access, even right, to consumption and affluence.
Established in the context of political movements that focused on
individuality, these integrated economies affect, in turn, the
condition of the individual, who no longer sees the need for
self-restraint or self-denial, and indulges in the commercial
democracy of permissiveness. Consequently, political trials are
met, or avoided, with an Epicurean response: withdrawal from
public life for the pleasures of buying, entertainment, travel,
and sport, which in a not-so-distant past only the rich and
powerful could enjoy. Politics itself, as Huxley prophesied in
his description of the brave, new world, becomes a form of
entertainment, or yet another competitive instant, not far from
the spirit and letter of the stock market, of the auction house,
or the gambling casino.

Political involvement in a democracy of permissiveness is
channeled into various forms of activism, all expressions of the
shift from the politics of authority to that of expanding
freedom of choice. The new experience of increasingly interactive
electronic media is probably correlated to the shift from the
positivist test of facts, as it originated in science and
expanded into social and political life, to the rather relativist
expectation of successful representations, in public opinion
polls, in staged political ceremonies, in the image we have of
ourselves and others. Albeit, the power of the media has already
surpassed that of politics.

All these considerations do not exhaust the process under
discussion. They explain how particular types of activism-from
emancipatory movements (feminist, racial, sexual) to the new
action of groups identified through ethnic origin, lifestyle,
concern for nature-use politics in its newer and older forms to
further their own programs. Openness, tolerance, the right to
experiment, individualism, relativism, as well as attitudinally
motivated movements are all illiterate in nature in the sense
that they defy the structural characteristics of literacy and
became possible only in post- literate contexts. Some of these
movements are still vaguely defined, but have become part of the
political agenda of this period of fervor and upheaval. Literacy,
in search of arguments for its own survival, frequently embraces
causes stemming from experiences that negate it.

The impact of new self-constitutive practical experiences and
definition on digital networks already qualifies these
experiences as alternatives, regardless of how limited an
individual's involvement with them is. Within the realm of human
interaction in the only uncensored medium known, a different
political experience is taking shape. What counts in this new
experience are not anonymous voters lumped into ineffective
majorities, but individuals willing to partake in concrete
decisions that affect their lives in the virtual communities of
choice that they establish. While the mass media, still
connected to the literate nest in which they were hatched,
partake in the functioning of political machines that produce
the next meaningless president, a different political dynamics,
focused on the individual, is leading to more efficient forms of
political practical experiences. There is nothing miraculous to
report in this respect. Notwithstanding, the Internet can be
credited for the defeat of the attempt in 1991 to turn back the
political clock in Russia, as well as for the way it is
influencing events in China, East Europe, and South America.

How did we get here?

Human relations can be characterized, in retrospect, by
recurrences. Distinctions within self-constitutive experiences
occur under the pressure of the realized need to achieve higher
levels of efficiency. Relations, which include a political
component pertinent to cooperative efforts and the need to share
the outcome, have been evinced since the syncretic phase of
human activity. There is no distinct political dimension in the
syncretic pragmatics of immediacy. Incipient political identity,
as any other kind of human self-identification, is foremostly
natural: the strongest, the swiftest, those with the most acute
senses are acknowledged as leaders. The most powerful are
successful on their own account. And this success translates
into survival: more food, more offspring, resilience, ability to
escape danger. Once the natural is humanized, the qualities that
make some individuals better than others were acknowledged in the
realms of nature and human nature. Whether as tribal leaders,
spiritual animators, or priests, they all accomplished political
functions and continuously reaffirmed the reasons for their
perceived authority. Over time, natural qualities lost their
determinant role. Characteristics based on human nature, in
particular intellectual qualities such as communication skills
and management and planning abilities, progressively tipped the
balance. Current textbooks defining politics do not even mention
natural abilities, focusing instead on the art or science of
governing, shrewdness in promoting a policy, and contrivance.

From participatory forms of political life, in which solidarity
is more important than differences among people, to the forms
characteristic of our time of personal and political shift away
from each other, changes have taken place because human practice
made them necessary. Politics was not and is not a passive result
of these changes, some of which it stimulated, others of which
it opposed. The survival drive behind participatory forms was
continuously redefined and became a different kind of assertion:
not just better than other species, but better than those before
us, better than others. Competition shifted from the realm of
nature-man against nature-to the realm of humanity. Once the
element of comparison to the other, or judgment by others, was
introduced, hierarchy was established. Hierarchy put on record
became, with the advent of notation, and more so with the advent
of writing, a component of experience, one of its structuring
elements. It is no longer a here-and-now defined action of
immediacy, but action expanded as progression over generations
and societies, and among various societies. Accordingly, while
solidarity, though permanently subject to redefinition, was
still in the background, the driving forces were quite different.
They resulted from the need to establish a political practice of
efficiency pertinent to the pragmatic framework, henceforth to
the needs of the community.

For as long as human activity was relatively homogeneous, there
was no need for political delegation or for reifying political
goals into rules or organizations. Once diversification became
possible, the task of integration, to which rituals, myths,
religion, assignment distribution, and leadership contributed,
changed. Not only did people involve more of their past in new
practical experiences, but they also started to keep records and
to measure the adequacy of effort, and thus the appropriateness
of their own policies. Attention to their past, present, and
future also allowed them to become aware of the means that
distinguished political practical experiences from all other
experiences (magic, myth, religion). It was a difficult
undertaking, especially under the provisions of centralized,
syncretic authority. The natural, the magical, the religious, the
logical, the economical, and the political mingled. The critical
element proved to be represented by practical expectations. To
implore unknown forces for rain, a successful hunt, or fertility
was very different from articulating expectations related to what
needs to be done to maintain the integrity of work and life.
Initially, these expectations were mixed. They progressively
became more focused, and a sense of accountability, based on
tangible results, embodied in comparisons, was introduced.

While self-constitution is the projection of individual
characteristics (biological, cultural) in a given practical
experience, political practice is to a great extent a projection
of expectations. At each juncture in humankind's practical
experience, the previous expectation is carried over as new
expectations appear. Accordingly, it is expected that a
political leader will embody, in fact or through the symbolism
of authority, natural qualities, cognitive abilities, and
communication skills (rhetoric included), among other
attributes. When these expectations are embodied in specific
functions (tribal chief, judge, army commander, elected
legislator, or selected member of the executive body) and in
political institutions, the projection is no longer that of
individuals, but of the society committed to the goals and means
expressed, to its acknowledged values. Whether indeed each
tribal leader was the fastest, or each judge the most impartial
in ascertaining the damage done by a person who defied rules of
life and work, whether the military leader was the bravest, or
the legislator the wisest, became almost irrelevant after their
political recognition. Expectation overcame reality. This aspect
becomes very significant in the context of literacy. Moreover, it
becomes critical in the transition from the pragmatics on which
literacy is based to a pragmatic framework in respect to which
literacy requirements only hinder.

Political institutions firmly grounded in the assumptions of
literacy still debate whether tele-communting is acceptable,
tele-commerce secure, or tele-banking in the national interest.
While the debates are going on, these new practical experiences
are taking hold in the global economy. Networks, in full
expansion, are altering the nature of human transactions to the
extent that fewer and fewer people participate in elections
because they know that the function of these elections-to present
choice-is no longer politically relevant. There is a need to
bring politics closer to individuals; and this need can be
acknowledged only within structures of individual empowerment, as
opposed to empty representation.

Political activity resulted in norms, institutions, values, and a
consciousness of belonging to society. Not by any stretch of the
imagination is politics a harmonizing activity, because to live
with others, to enter a contract and pursue one's individual
goals within its limitations, means to accept a condition of a
sui generis trade-off. Political experiences involve, in various
degrees, skills and knowledge for giving life and legitimacy to
trade-offs. Language is the blood that flows through the arteries
of the political animal. When tamed by literacy, this language
defines a very precise realm of political life. The heartbeat of
the literate political animal corresponds to a rhythm of life
and work controlled by literacy. The accelerated rhythm that
became necessary under a new scale of experiences requires the
liberation of political language from the control of literacy,
and the participation of many languages in political
experiences.

It should come as no surprise that the expectation of language
skills, even when language changes, in people involved in the
practical experience of politics is carried over from one
generation to another. Regardless of the level of sophistication
reached by a particular language, and of the specific form of
political practice, effective use of powerful means of
expression and communication is required. Even when they did not
know how to write, kings and emperors were regarded as being
better writers than those who could. They would dictate to the
scribe, who created the perception that they probably
translated what higher authorities whispered into their ears.
Even when their rhetoric was weak, the masters of persuasion
they used were seen as only agents of power. Books were
attributed to political leaders; victory in war was credited to
them, as well as to military commanders. Law codes were
associated with their names, and even miracles, when politics
joined the forces of magic and religion (often playing one
against the other). All this and more represent the projection
of expectations.

The particular expectations of literacy confirm values associated
with its characteristics. Politics and the ideals embodied in
the Enlightenment-it carried into action political aspirations
originating in religion-and the Industrial Revolution cannot be
separated. Expectations of permanency, universality, reason,
democracy, and stability were all embodied in the political
experience. New forms of political activism were encouraged by
literacy and new institutions emerged. Awareness of boundaries
among cultures and languages increased. Centralism was
instituted, and hierarchies, some very subtle, others insidious,
were promoted with the help of the very powerful instrument of
language. Within this context, the practical experience of
politics established its own domain and its own criteria for
effectiveness, very different from those in the ancient
city-state or in the pragmatics of feudalism. Identification of
the professional politician, different from the heir to power,
was part of this process. Politics opened to the public and
affirmed tolerance, respect for the individual, and equality of
all people before the law. Political functions were defined and
political institutions formed. Rules for their proper operation
were encoded through literate means. The alliance between
politics and literacy would eventually turn into an incestuous
love, but before that happened, emancipation of human political
experiences would reach a historic climax in the revolutions
that took place during this time.

To celebrate all these accomplishments, while remaining aware of
the many shadows cast upon them by prejudices carried over from
previous political experiences (in regard to sex, race,
religion, ownership), was a task of monumental dimensions. We
can and must acknowledge that human political experiences played
a more important role than in previous social contexts in
maximizing efficiency in the pragmatic framework that made
literacy necessary. It was at this time that the role of
education, and especially the significance of access to it, were
politically defined and pursued according to the efficiency
expectations that led to the Industrial Revolution. The process
was far from being universal. The western part of the world took
the lead. Its political institutions encouraged investment, and
education was such an investment.

Political institutions reflect the pragmatic condition of the
citizen and, in turn, effect changes in the experience of
people's life and work. While the word illiteracy probably first
appeared print in 1876 in an English publication, in 1880
illiteracy in Germany was only one per cent of the population:
"Heil dem König, Heil dem Staat/ Wo man gute Schulen hat!" went
the slogan hailing the king and state where good schools were
the rule. This was the time when Thomas Alva Edison invented the
incandescent light bulb (1879); Alexander Graham Bell, the
telephone (patented in 1876); Nicklaus Otto, the four-stroke gas
engine (1876); Nikola Tesla, the electric alternator (1884).
Nevertheless, before Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, he learned
that only one per cent of all Russians were literate. In many
other parts of the world, the situation was not much better. In
addition, this was also a time when literacy was literally an
instrument of political discrimination. Those not literate were
looked down on, as were women (some held back from literacy and
study), as were nations considered ignorant and of inferior
morals (Russia being one of them).

Reflected in the ability to dominate nature, the growth of
science and the use of effective technological means influenced
the political nature of states, as well as the relation among
nations. Rationality formed the foundation of legality; the state
ascertained priority over individuals-a very direct reflection of
its literate nature. Rules were applied to everyone equally
(which later translated into an effective "all are equal," quite
different from the empty slogans of populist movements). The
rationality in place derived from literacy. To be effective
meant to dominate those who were less effective (citizens,
communities, nations).

Far from being a historic account, these observations suggest
that the literate political animal pursues political goals in
line with the sequential nature of literacy in a context of
centralized power, acknowledged hierarchies, and deterministic
expectations. The political institution is a machine, one among
many of the pragmatics of the Industrial Revolution. It did one
thing at a time, and one part of the machine did not have to
know what the other was doing. Energy was used between input and
output, and what resulted-political decisions, social policies,
regulations-was mass production of whatever the society could
negotiate: lubrication diminished friction. Parties were formed,
political programs articulated, and access to power opened to
many. Two premises were implicit in the literate discourse:
people should be able to express opinions on issues of public
interest; and they should be able to oversee the political
process, assuming responsibility for the way they exercise their
political rights. These two premises introduced an operational
definition of democracy and freedom, eventually encoded in the
doctrine of liberal democracy. They also confirmed the literate
expectation that democracy and freedom, like literacy, are
universal and eternal.

The failure of literacy-based politics takes place on its own
terms. Dictatorships (left-wing and right-wing), nationalism,
racism, colonialism, and the politics of disastrous wars and of
the leveling of aspirations that leads to the mediocrity embodied
in bureaucracy have brought the high hopes, raised during the
climax of literate political action, to the low of indifference
and cynicism we face in our day. Instead of the people's broader
participation in the political process, a hope raised by progress
in making equality and freedom effectively possible, society
faces the effects of the ubiquitous dedication to enjoyment in
corrupted welfare states unable to meet the obligations they
assumed, rightly or not. At times, it seems that the complexity
of political experience prevents even the people's symbolic
participation in government. Volunteering and voting, a right
for which people fought with a passion matched only by their
current indifference, have lost their meaning. There is no proper
feedback to reinforce the will and dedication to participate. It
also seems that in advocating equality and freedom, a common
denominator so low was established that politics can only
administer mediocrity, but not stimulate excellence. From among
all its functions, nationhood, as the embodiment of the
experience of political self-constitution, seems to maintain
only the function of redistribution.

Individual liberty, hard fought for under the many signs of
literacy, appears to be conformistic at best, and
opportunistic. To many citizens, it is questionable whether the
lost sense of community is a fair trade-off for the acquired
right to individualism. The hundreds of millions again and again
seduced by the political discourse of hatred (in fascism,
communism, nationalism, racism, fanaticism) wasted their
hard-won rights in order to take away from others property,
freedom of expression and religion, liberty, dignity, and
eventually life. Politics after Auschwitz was not meant to become
yet another instance of pettifogging. But it did, and we all are
aware of the opportunistic appropriation of tragedy (hunger,
oppression, disease, ecological disaster) in current political
entertainment.

The efficiency expected from political action under the
assumptions of literacy is characteristic of the scale at which
people constitute themselves. The nation is the world, or the
only thing that counts in this world of opportunity and risk. The
rest is, relatively speaking, superfluous. Nations, even those
that acknowledge the need to integrate, try to secure
functioning as autonomous entities. National borders may be
less guarded, but they are maintained as borders of literacy
translated into economic opportunity. When the goal of
autonomous existence is no longer attainable, expansion is the
answer. Ideological, racial, economic and other types of
arguments are articulated in order to justify the extension of
politics in the experience of battle. The two World Wars brought
literate politics to its climax, and the Cold War (the first
global battle) to its final crisis, but not yet to its end, even
though the enemy vanished like a humorless ghost.

A closer look at the systematic aspects of the political
experience of human self- constitution should prepare us for
approaching the current political condition. This should at
least provide elements for understanding all those accumulated
expectations that people have with respect to politics,
politicians, and the institutions through which political goals
are pursued. Political goals are always practical goals,
regardless of the language in which they are expressed or the
rituals attached. As recurrent patterns of human relationships,
political experiences appear to have a life of their own. This
creates the impression that agreements dictated by practical
reasons originate outside the experience, at the initiative of
politicians, due to a certain event, or as the result of random
choice.

Political tongues

Language is the instrument through which political practical
experience takes place. To reconstitute past succeeding
political experiences therefore means to reconstitute their
language(s). The task is overwhelming because politics is mingled
with every aspect of human life: work, property, family, sex,
religion, education, ethics, and art. It is present even in the
interrelations of these aspects because politics is also
self-reflective. That is, the identity of one entity is related
to the identity of others in relation to which
self-identification takes place. The variety of political
experiences corresponds to the variety of pragmatic
circumstances within which humans project their identity.

Individual existence resulting from interaction with others
extends to the realm of politics and is embodied in the
recurrent patterns that make up expectations, goals,
institutions, norms, conflicts, and power relations. The
individual is concealed in all these. In some ways, politics is
a social-educational practice resulting in the integration of
instinctive actions (a-political) and learned modes of practice
with social impact. What constitutes politics is the dynamics of
relations as they become possible and as they unfold as openings
towards new relations. One of the concrete forms of such
relations is the propensity to coalition building. Politics is
contingent upon subjects interacting. Their past (ontogeny) and
present (pragmatics) are involved in these interactions. To a
certain extent, it is a learned form of practice requiring means
for interaction, among which language has been the most
important. It is also a practice of investigation, discovery,
and social testing.

The manifold of political languages corresponds to the manifold
of practical experiences. There are probably as many political
tongues as there are circumstances of self-identification within
a society. But against the background of this variety is the
expectation that word and deed coincide, or at least that they do
not stray too far from each other.

The advent of writing changed politics because it attached
written testimony to it, which became a referential element. As
Socrates and Plato noticed, this was a blessing in disguise.
Since the time writing entered the political sphere, the
practical argument shifted from the fact, argued and eventually
settled, to the record. It became itself a practical experience
of records (of property, law, order, agreements, negotiations,
and allocations for the good of society). The institutions that
emerged after the practical experience of writing operated
within the structure of and in accordance with the expectations
brought about by writing. And soon, as relative as soon can be,
political self-consciousness was established parallel to
political action and pursued as yet another practical
experience.

The many languages of political experience multiply once more in
the new languages of political awareness. Where values were the
final goal of politics, the value of the political experience
itself became a subject of concern. Many political projects were
pursued at this self-reflective level: conceiving new forms of
human cooperation and political organization, advancement of
ideas concerning education, prejudices, emancipation, and law.
This explains, too, why in the sequence of political practical
experiences, expectations did not nullify each other. They
accumulated as an expression of an ideal, forever moving away
from the last goal attained. Without a good understanding of the
process, nobody could account for the inner dynamics of political
change. The same applies to accounting for the role played by
political leaders, philosophers, and political organizations
involved, by virtue of their own goals and functions, in
political life.

Politics in the civilization of illiteracy is not politics out
of the blue sky. Along the continuum of political practical
experiences, it entails expectations generated under different
pragmatic circumstances. And it faces challenges-the major
challenge being the efficiency expected in the new scale of
human experience-for which its traditional means and its
inherited structure are simply not adequate. Political
discontinuity is always more difficult to accept, even
understand. Revolutions are celebrated only after they take
place, and especially after they successfully establish a
semblance of stability.

Can literacy lead politics to failure?

In our time, much is said regarding the perception that the
language of politics and the political practice it seems to
coordinate are very far apart. People's mistrust of politics
appears to reach new heights. The role and importance of
political leaders and institutions apparently have changed. The
most able are not necessarily involved in politics. Their
self-constitution takes place in practical experiences more
rewarding and more challenging than political activism.
Political institutions no longer represent the participants in
the political contract, but pursue their own goals, survival
included. Law takes on a life of its own, more concerned, so the
public perceives, with protecting the criminal, in the name of
preserving civil rights, than upholding justice. Taxes support
extravagant governments and forms of social redistribution of
wealth, more often reflecting a guilt complex over past
inequities than authentic social solidarity. Instead of
promoting meaningful human relationships and addressing the
future, they keep fixing the past. Everyone complains, probably
a phenomenon as old as any relation among people involved in a
sui generis give-and-take interaction. But fewer and fewer are
willing to do something because individual participation and
effort appear useless in the given political structure.

The majority of people look back to some prior political
experience and interpret the past in the light of books they
have read. They fail to realize that the complexity of today's
human experience cannot be met by yesterday's solutions. They are
convinced that if we are faithful to our political heritage, all
problems, credibility and corruption included, will be solved.
They also believe religious systems and their great books
contain all that is needed to meet all imaginable present and
future challenges. Even the very honorable conviction that the
founders of modern democracies prepared citizens to cope with
this unprecedented present cannot go unchallenged. The
Constitution of the United States (1787) as well as the
Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France
(1789) reflect the thinking and the prose of the civilization of
literacy. Similar documents are on record in Latin America,
Europe, India, and Japan. They are as useless as history can be
when new circumstances of human self- constitution are totally
different from the experiences that gave birth to these
documents. Revisionism will not do. The new context requires not
a static collection of admirable principles, but dynamic
political structures and procedures of the same nature as the
pragmatics of shorter cycles of change, non-determinism, high
efficiency, decentralization, and non-hierarchical modes of
operation. As the world reinvents itself as interwoven, it
breaks loose from prescriptions of local significance and
traditional import.

Although the number of emerging nations has increased-and nobody
knows how many more will emerge-we know of no political
documents similar to those articulated in 1776, 1789, 1848, or
even 1870. Nothing comparable to the Declaration of
Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,
even the Communist Manifesto (no matter how discredited it is at
present), whether in substance or style, has accompanied current
political movements. The reason why no such document can emerge
can be connected to the inadequacies of literacy-based politics.
This civilization is no longer one of ideas, religious or
secular. It is characterized by processes, methodologies, and
inventions expressed in various sign systems that have a
dynamics different from that of language and literacy. The ideas
of the civilization of literacy address the mind, soul, and
spirit.

The most one can expect in our time of upheaval and change are
provisions for establishing conditions for unhampered human
interactions in the market and in other domains of human
self-constitution (religion, education, family). Steady
globalization means that the health of national economies,
education, sports, or art matters just as little as national
borders and the theatrics of diplomacy and international
relations. One can hear Dostoyevsky's prophetic line: "If it's
otherwise not possible, make us your servants, but make us
full." It hurts to repeat it, but it will hurt more to ignore it
at a time when nothing grows faster than the urge of millions of
people to emigrate to any developed country willing to take
them, even as second-class citizens, so long as they escape
their current abysmal condition.

The dynamics of change in the world is characterized by the
acknowledged need of many countries to be integrated in the
global economy while preserving or requiring a token of national
identity. State sovereignty is self-delusive in the context of
commercial, financial, or industrial autonomy that is impossible
to achieve. Self- determination, always to the detriment of some
other ethnic group, echoes those tribal instincts that make the
ideal of constitutional government an exercise in futility. The
underlying structure of literacy is reflected in national
movements and their dualistic system of values. The logic of the
good and the bad, more difficult to define in a context of
vagueness, but still pursued blindly, controls the way
coalitions are established, migration of populations is handled,
and national interests defended, while these very nations argue
for integration and free market.

Nevertheless, the language of today's politics is, in the final
analysis, shaped by the pragmatic framework. Its sentences are
written in the language of ledgers; the freedom it purports to
establish is that of commercial democracy, of equal access to
consumption, which happens to be the main political achievement
of recent history. The fact that the nations forming the
European Community gave up sovereignty with respect to the
market proves the point. That they still preserve diplomatic
representation, defense functions, and immigration policies only
attests to the conflict between the politics of the civilization
of literacy and the politics of the civilization of illiteracy.

The great documents of the literate past perpetuate the rhetoric
of the time of their writing. All the structural characteristics
of literacy, valid for the pragmatic framework that justifies
them, deeply mark the letter and spirit of these documents. They
ascertain politics as sequential, linear, and deterministic. They
rejoice in promulgating ideals that correspond to the scale of
humankind in which they guarantee the means that result in the
efficiency of industrial and productive society. Liberté,
egalité, fraternité are shorthand for rights of conscience,
ownership, and individual legal status. They are an expression
of accepted hierarchy and centralism to the degree that these
could be rendered relative as need required. Expectations of
permanency and universality were carried over from earlier
political experiences, or from religion, even though separation
of Church and State was emphatically proclaimed during the French
Revolution, and in revolutions that took place afterwards.
Amendments required by altered circumstances of human
self-constitution in practical experiences not anticipated in
the documents render their spirit relative and solve some of the
problems caused by the limitations mentioned.

Political documents, such as the ones mentioned above, are still
perceived as sacrosanct, regardless of their obvious inadequacy
in the pragmatic context of the civilization of illiteracy. It
is one thing to establish the sanctity of property in a framework
of agricultural praxis, whose politics was inspired by a shared
expectation of cycles parallel to natural cycles. Jefferson
envisioned the land as a vast agrarian state. "We are a people
of farmers. Those who work the fields are the chosen people of
God, if He had a chosen people. In their heart He planted the
real virtue." It is quite another thing to live in a pragmatic
context of new forms of property, some reflecting a notion of
sequential accumulation, others an experience of work with
machines, of humans seen as commodity. It is a new reality to
live in today's integrated world of property as elusive as new
designs, software, information, and ways to process it. To apply
to this context political principles inspired by a movement that
sought independence from England while using slaves brought from
Africa is questionable, at least.

Equality of natural rights, deriving from nature-based cycles, is
quite different from equality of political rights and
responsibilities deriving from a machine-inspired model for
progress. Both of these sources are different from the political
status of people involved in a pragmatics of global networking
and extreme task distribution. One can cautiously make the case
that the major political documents of the past were conceived in
reaction to an intolerable state of affairs and events, not
proactively, in anticipation of new situations and expectations.
These documents are the expression of the need to unify,
homogenize, and integrate forces in a world of relatively
autonomous entities-national states-competing more for resources
and productive forces than for markets. The values reflected
therein correspond to the values on which literacy is founded
and for which literacy-inspired ideologies fought.

But maybe these political documents are exemplary in another way,
let's say as an expression of moral standards that we apparently
lost in the course of 200 years; or of cultural standards for
both society and politicians, standards that can only rarely be
acknowledged today, if at all. If this is the case, which is
difficult to prove, what this seems to suggest is that the price
paid for higher political efficiency is the lost ethics of
politics, or its current deplorable intellectual condition. The
lack of correlation between political practice and language
results from the pragmatic context reflected in the condition of
language itself. While in real life, many literacies are at work,
Literacy (with a capital L) still dominates the structure of
politics. Its rules are applied to forms of human interaction
and evaluation that are not reducible to self-constitution in
language.

Political activity by and large follows patterns characteristic
of the civilization of literacy, despite its own indulgence in
non-linguistic semioses: the use of images, film, and video, or
the adoption of new networking technologies focused on
information exchange. Former expectations that politicians
adhere to standards of the civilization of literacy are carried
over in new political and practical experiences. The expectation
that their literacy should match that of political documents
belonging to the political tradition (the Constitution of the
United States of America, for instance) is paradoxical, though,
since the majority of Americans cannot recall what these
political documents state. And they see no reason to find out.
Their own practical experience takes place in domains for which
the past is of little consequence to their well-being. As things
stand now, the political principles required by the dynamics of
industrial society are embodied in institutions and laws
dedicated to their own preservation.

Free of concern for their own freedom, politically rooted in a
prior pragmatic framework, citizens take freedom for granted in
their new practical experiences and end up evading the
associated civic responsibility. They expect their politicians to
be literate for them. We deal here with a strange mixture of
assumptions: on the one hand, a notion of political life
corresponding to a context of homogeneity and a deterministic
view of the social world; on the other, a realization that
today's world requires specialized political practical
experience, means and methods characteristic of heterogeneous
and non-deterministic political processes. The simmering conflict
is met with the type of thinking that will not solve the problem
because it is the problem.

The coordination of political action through literacy-based
language and methods and the dynamics of a new political
practice, based on the characteristics of the civilization of
illiteracy, simply diverge. As in many other domains of literate
condition, it is as though institutions, norms, and regulations
take on lives of their own, as literate language does,
perpetuating their own values and expectations. They develop as
networks of interaction with an autonomous dynamics, uncoupled
from the dynamics of political life, even from the new pragmatic
context. The tremendous amount of written language (speeches,
articles, forms, contracts, regulations, laws, treatises) stands
in contrast to the very fast changes that make almost every
political text superfluous even before it is cast in the fast
eroding medium of print or in the elusive bits and bytes of
electronic processing.

Many economies have undergone, or realize they must undergo,
profound restructuring. Massive down-sizing, paralleled by
flatter hierarchies and smoother quality control, have affected
economic performance. But very little of this has touched the
sacrosanct centralized state institutions. In the USA alone, 14
departments, 135 federal agencies employing more than 2.1
million civilians and 1.9 million military personnel account for
$1.5 trillion in yearly expenditure. If the economy were as
inefficient as political activity is, we would face a crisis of
global proportion and consequences that are impossible to
anticipate.

This is why today, some citizens would write a Declaration of
Independence that begins with the following line: "We're mad as
hell and we're not going to take it anymore." But this would not
mean that they would vote. When five times more people watch
Married with Children than vote in primaries, one understands
that the morality and intellectual quality of the politician and
citizen correspond closely. Cynical or not, this observation
simply states that in the civilization of illiteracy, political
action and criteria for evaluating politics do not follow the
patterns of political practical experiences peculiar to the
civilization of literacy. Multiplied to infinity, choices no
longer undergird values, but options that are equally mediocre.

The issue of literacy from the perspective of politics is the
issue of the means through which political practice takes place.
A democracy resting solely upon the contribution to political
life in and through literate language is at the same time captive
to language. The experience of language resulted from
developments not necessarily democratic in nature. Embedded in
literacy, past practical experiences pertinent to a pragmatic
context appropriate to a different scale of humankind are often
an obstacle to new experiences. So are our distinctions of sex,
race, social status, space, time, religion, art, and sport. Once
in language, such distinctions simply live off the body of any
new design for political action. Language is not politically
neutral, and even less so is the literate practice of language.
Various minority groups made a very valid point in stating this.
Power relations, established in political practice, often become
relations in the literate use of language and of other means, as
long as they are used according to literacy expectations. It is
not that literacy prevents change; literacy allows for change
within the systematic domain of practices relying on the literate
practical experiences of language. But when literacy itself is
challenged, as it is more and more in our day, it ends up
opposing change.

Discrepancies between the language and actions of politics,
politicians, and political institutions and programs result from
the conflict between the horizon of literacy and the dynamics
for which the literate use of language is ill equipped. If the
formula deterioration of moral standards corresponds to the
failure of politics to meet its constituency's expectations, the
most pessimistic views about the future would be justified,
because politicians are not better or worse than their
constituency. But as with everything else in the new pragmatic
context, it is no longer individual performance that ensures the
success or failure of an activity. Integrating procedures
ascertain a different form of cooperation and competition. Such
processes are made possible by means characteristic of high
efficiency pragmatics, that is, task distribution, parallelism
and reciprocal testing, cooperation through networking, and
automated procedures for planning and management. They are
meaningful only in conjunction with motivations characteristic
of this age. If, on the other hand, the romantic notion that the
best become leaders were true of today's political experience,
we would have cause to wonder at our own stupidity. In fact, it
does not matter which person leads.

Political processes are so complex that the industrial model of
successful stewardship no longer makes sense. Political life in
society does not depend on political competence, people's
generosity, or self-motivation that escapes institutional,
religious, or ideological coercion. The degree of efficiency,
along with the right ascribed to people to partake in affluence,
speaks in favor of political experiences driven by pragmatic
forces. Such forces are at work locally and make sense only
within a context of direct effectiveness. But short of taking
these forces for granted, we cannot escape the need to
understand how they work and how their course can be controlled.

Crabs learned how to whistle

Some of today's political systems are identified as democracies,
and others claim to be. Some are identified as dictatorships of
some sort, which almost none would accept as a qualifier. But no
matter which label is applied, there is an obsession with
literacy in all these systems. "We need literacy for democracy to
survive," says the literacy special interest group. But how do
dictatorships come about in literate populations? The biggest
dictatorship (the Soviet block) was proud of its high literacy
rate, acknowledged by the western world as an accomplishment
impossible to overlook. It fell because the underlying
structural characteristics reflected in literacy collided with
other requirements, mainly pragmatic.

An empire, the fourth in the modern historic succession that
started with the Turkish Empire and continued with the
Austro-Hungarian and British Empires, crumbled. What makes the
fall of the Soviet Empire significant is its own underlying
structure. The former members of COMECON, those East European
countries that, along with the Soviet Union, once formed the
communist block, represent a good case study for the forces
involved in the dynamics of illiteracy. While writing this book,
I benefited from an experiment probably impossible to duplicate.
A rigid structure of human activity, basically captive to a
slightly amended paradigm of the Industrial Revolution, hailing
itself as the workers' paradise, and laboring under the illusion
of messianic collectivism, maintained literacy as its cultural
foundation.

Even the harshest and blindest critics of the system had to
agree that if anything of historic significance could be
attributed to communism, it was its literacy program. Large
segments of the population, illiterate prior to communism, were
taught to read and write. The school system, deficient in many
ways, provided free and obligatory education, much better than
its free medical system. This effort at education was intended
to prepare the new generations for productive tasks, but also to
subject each person to a program of indoctrination channeled
through the powerful medium of literacy. Questioned about his
own ideas for the reform of the orthodox communist system,
Nikita Kruschchev, the maverick leader of the post-Stalin era,
declared: "He who believes that we will give up the teachings of
Marx, Engels, and Lenin deludes himself tremendously. Those who
are waiting for this to happen will have to wait until crabs
learn how to whistle." When, throughout Russia, statues of Lenin
started falling and Marx's name became synonymous with the
failure of communism, people probably started hearing strange
sounds from crustaceans.

The abrupt and unexpected failure of the communist system-an
event hailed as victory in a war as cold as the market can
be-makes for unexpected proof of this book's major thesis. The
breakdown of the Soviet system can be seen as the failure of a
structure that kept literacy as its major educational and
instrumental medium, and relied on it for the dissemination of
its ideological goals inside and outside the block. Literacy, as
such, did not fail, but the structures that literacy entails:
limited efficiency, sequential practical experiences of human
self-constitution in a hierarchic and centralized economy;
deterministic (thus implicitly dualistic) working relations, a
level of efficiency based on the industrial model of labor
division, mediation subjected to central planning without choice
as to the mediating elements; opaqueness expressed in an
obsession with secrecy, and last but not least, failure to
acknowledge the new scale of humankind-in short, a pragmatic
framework whose characteristics are reflected in literacy-all
led to the final result. Indeed, the system acted to counter
integration and globality. It maintained rigid national and
political boundaries under the false assumption that insularity
would allow a controlled and orderly exchange of goods and
ideas, perpetuation and dissemination of an ideology of
proletarian dictatorship, and eventually coexistence with the
rest of the world under the assumption of its progressive
conversion to communist values.

In the doctrine of Marx and Engels, the proletariat appears
endowed with all the qualities associated with Divinity in the
prototypic Book (the Old Testament): omniscience, omnipotence,
and right almost all the time. There is a self-creative moment
in the historic process they described, resulting from political
activism and commitment to change in the world. No one should
lightly discard the Utopian core or the ideal embodied in the
doctrine. After all, nobody could argue against a world of
freedom where each person participates with the best one has to
offer, and is rewarded with everything one needs. Free
education, free medical care, access to art and liberty in a
context of limitless unfolding of talent and harmony with nature,
of shared wealth and emancipation from all prejudices-all this
is paradise on Earth (minus religion).

It should be pointed out that, within the system, the entire
practical human experience related to literacy-and the
accomplishments listed above are literacy- based-was subsidized.
In no other part of the world, and under no other regime, were
so many people subjected to literacy. That the system failed
should not lead anyone to ignore some of the achievements of the
people regimented under a flag they did not care for:
fascinating art, interesting poetry and music, the massive
collection and preservation of folklore, spectacular
mathematics, physics, and chemistry arose from beneath terror
and censorship. To survive as an artist, writer, or scientist
meant to force creativity where almost no room for it was left.
Under no other regime on Earth did people read so much, listen
to music more intensely, visit museums with more passion, and
care for each other as family, friends, or as human beings,
episodes of brutality notwithstanding. It is too simplistic to
accept the line that people read more in East Europe and the
Soviet Union because they had nothing else to do. The pragmatic
framework was set up under the assumption of permanence,
stability, centrality, and universality founded on literacy.

It goes without saying that the misuse of language (in political
discourse and in social life) played its role in the
quasi-unanimous silent rejection of the system, even more in
silent, cowardly complicity with it. When the literate machine of
spying on the individual fell apart, people saw themselves in
the merciless mirror of opportunistic self- betrayal. The records
will stand as a testimony that writing does not lead only to
Solzhenitsyn's novels, Yevtushenko's poetry, Shoshtakovich's
music, and the romantic Samizdat, but also to putrid words about
others, kin included. The opaqueness of literacy partially
explains why this is possible. Something other than the
opaqueness granted by literacy (i.e., complicity established in
society) explains how it became a necessary aspect of that
society. Germans were not better, exceptions granted, than
their fascist leaders; the peoples in the Soviet block were not
better, exceptions granted again, than the leaders they accepted
for such a long time.

But what went relatively unnoticed by experts in East European
and Soviet studies, as well as by governments fighting the Cold
War, is the dynamics of change. The system was economically
broke, but still militarily viable (though overrated) and
over-engaged in security activities-tight control of the
population, economic and political espionage, active attempts to
export its ideology. The structure within which people were to
realize their potential-one of the ideals of communism-had few
incentives. But all this, despite the impact of the yet
unfinished revolution, is only the tip of the iceberg, the
visible side when one looks from the riverbank of the free world
where incentives lead to self-sufficiency and complacency. The
major aspect is that the dynamics of the system was severely
affected by artificially maintaining a pragmatic framework and a
system of values not suited to change. This applies especially to
the major shift-from the industrial model to post-industrial
society, to a context of practical experiences of human
self-constitution freed from the restrictions carried over from
the politics of mind and body control-experienced by the rest of
the western world.

Levels of expectation beyond the satisfaction of immediate needs
(food, clothing, shelter), and of literacy-associated
expectations (education, access to art and literature, travel),
could not be satisfied unless and until levels of efficiency
impossible to reach in the pragmatic context of industrial
societies were made possible by a new pragmatics. Despite the
fact that more writers, more publishing houses, more libraries,
as well as more artists, theaters, opera houses, symphonic
orchestras, research institutes, and more museums than in the
rest of the world were politically and economically supported in
the Eastern Block (almost to the extent that the secret police
was), activities related to literacy had only a short-term
impact on the individuals subjected to or taking advantage of
them. This was proven dramatically by the proliferation of
commercially motivated newspapers and publications (pornography
among them) following the breakdown of the power structure in
various countries of the Block, and followed by an even faster
focus on entertainment television and obsession with consumption.

The main events leading to the breakdown-each country had its own
drama, once the major puppeteer was caught off-guard by events
in the Soviet Union-took place with the nation staring at the TV
screens, seduced by the dynamics of the live transmission for
which literacy and prior literate use of the medium were never
well equipped. The live drama of the hunt for Ceausescu in
Romania, the climax of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events
in Prague, Sofia, and Tirana continued the spirit of the Polish
tele-drama in the shipyards. It then took another turn, during
the attempted coup in the Soviet Union, practically denying the
literate media any role but that of late chroniclers. The
initial lessons in democracy took place via videotape. Various
networks, from WTN (World-Wide Television News) to CNN, but
primarily the backward technology of the fax machine, which
absorbed essential literacy into a focused distribution of
individual messages, provided the rest. As primitive as digital
networks were, and still are in that part of the world, they
played an important role. Not political manifestos or
sophisticated ideological documents were disseminated, but
images, diagrams, and live sequences. In the meanwhile,
entertainment took over almost all available bandwidth. What the
rest of the world consumed in the last fifteen years (along with
fashion, fast food chains, soft drinks, and consumer
electronics) penetrated the lives of those whose revolt took
place under the banner of the right to consume. Here, as in the
rest of the world, the spiritual and the political split for
good. The spiritual gets alimony; the political becomes the
executor of the trust.

What failed the system was the lack of understanding of all the
factors leading to new productive experiences: the framework for
optimal interaction of people, circumstances of progressive
mediation and further specialized human self-constitution, a
practical context of networking and coordination based on
individual freedom and constraints assumed by individuals as
they define their expectations. Parallel to the literate
structure of a politics that failed is the experience of churches
in the Soviet Block. In a show of defiance towards the political
dictatorship, people attended church, itself a mainstay of
literate praxis (independent of the book or books they adopt for
their basic program). Once religion was able to assert its
literate characteristics through the imposition of
constraints-so like those of the political system just
overthrown- churches began to experience the low attendance that
the rest of the world is already familiar with.

No matter how much more quickly events take place in our age, it
is probably still too early to understand all the implications
of the major political event represented by the fall of the
Soviet empire. For instance, in a context of global economy, how
can one correctly evaluate the emergence of new national states
and forceful national movements when the post-national state and
the trans-national world are already a reality? The question is
political in nature. Its focus is on identity. Identity reflects
all the relations through which people constituted themselves as
part of a larger entity-tribe, city, region, nation-defined by
biological and cultural characteristics, shared values,
religion, a sense of common space and time, and a sense of
future.

A world of worlds

"We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians," declared
Massimo d'Azeglio during the first meeting of the Italian
Parliament. A little over 100 years old, the nation-state was
the most tangible product of the political practical experience
in the pragmatic context whose underlying structure is so well
reflected in literacy. Together with the nation-state, the
modern notion of nationality was defined and became a major
force of political life. As part of the political consciousness
in the age of industrial production, national consciousness
played a very precise role, ultimately expressed in all forms of
nationalism. It unified all those whose similarities in
biological characteristics, language, lore, and practical
experiences were constituted in a framework of shared resources
and political goals. Germany came into existence through a
unifying language (Hoch Deutsch) and was consolidated through its
literacy. Italy went through a similar process. In other
instances, nations were born as a result of voluntary political
acts: the United States, the nations declared independent after
the fall of the Soviet Union, Croatia, Macedonia, some of the
Arab countries, and a number of African nation-states, once
colonial powers could no longer afford to resist the force of
change. As with everything pertaining to politics, national
politics entails expectations corresponding to past phases (the
basic passions that once made up tribal solidarity), to
instances of human interaction well overhauled by the new
realities of the integrated world.

What, if any, explanation can one find in the dissolution of
Yugoslavia? Against the background of conflict in
Bosnia-Herzegovina, this question has divided many well
intentioned intellectuals (not only in France) inclined to solve
an absurd situation of genocide. Intellectuals questioned what
appeared to be irreducible religious contradictions between
Catholic and Orthodox Christians, or between Christians and
Moslems. The old conflict between the pro-fascist Croatian Ustash
and the Serbian Chetniks dedicated to the vain goal of a greater
Serbia was also on their minds. They also wondered what the
chances of the new nation-states of Estonia, Lithuania, and
Latvia, and many of the autonomous regions and republics of the
former Soviet Union were. How will the Commonwealth of
Independent States function once goals and purposes of
nation-states take over those assumed in a nebulously defined
commonwealth? And how can one explain the enormous discrepancy
between the attempt to constitute a broad European Community
(actually, the United Markets of Europe), while other parts of
Europe break into small nation-states? How much of the
underlying tribalism, or provincialism, or religious adherence,
or how much of the functions of literacy at work can be read in
the political fervor of nationalistic activism of our day? One
answer, no matter how encouraging, cannot address a full
paragraph of questions. These questions suggest that the
politics of nations is so multifaceted that understanding it
requires not so much rehashing the past but focusing on the broad
picture of its dynamics.

Between the old city-state, the early empire (Roman, Byzantine),
the medieval world of local attachments (pertaining to shared
space used mainly for agriculture, and under the firm grip of
the Papacy), and today's world of mass immigration and human
displacement (for political, economic, religious, or
psychological reasons), we find inserted the settled universe of
nation-states and their respective literacies. In this universe,
literacy and religion undergird the legal system. Politics
defines national identity, subsuming language, ethnicity, ways
of working, culture, superstitions, prejudice, art, and science.
Within the nation-state's borders, citizens are subjected to a
political practical experience of homogeneity, centralism, and
uniformity, required by the efficiency expectations of the
Industrial Revolution. The ideal of cosmopolis, the all-
embracing empire of reason declared by the Stoics, runs counter
to the ideal of the nation-state, which celebrates national
reason and willingness to compete with others.

When the pragmatic circumstances leading to today's global
economy started exercising their action, an all-embracing empire
of a different nature resulted. The new statement says that
Christians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, animists, even atheists,
although bearing a national identity, are part of the global
economy. Not surprisingly, political action and economic
integration each run its own course. Commerce, with all its
imbalances and unfairness, the almost uncontrollable financial
dynamics, and migration of industries take more and more
frequently what appears as the necessary path of globality.
Politics, even when it acknowledges globality, focuses on
national definitions. To an outside observer, a nation's
politics appears insignificant, powerless in comparison to
economic forces, although it claims to control these forces
through monetary policies, labor laws, and trade regulations.
The trans-national world has its own impetus. It continues to
evade political constraints, ascertaining its own life. It was
described from the perspective of its financial and economic
condition as The Borderless World (the title of Kenichi Ohmae's
book), within which nationality counts only marginally. This is
yet another reason for the low interest in public life on the
part of the wealthy in our days.

When the new southern republics freed by the breakdown of the
Soviet Union debate which form of writing they should
adopt-Arabic, Cyrillic, or Roman-and how to define their
respective nations, they still look for national identifiers.
Turkmanis and Uzbekistanis, Latvians and Estonians, Ukrainians
and Georgians, Hungarians and Romanians, and enterprising Poles
comb their territories in search of business opportunities. The
same takes place in many other countries, whose citizens are
obsessed more with prosperity than with sovereignty, with access
to financial means more than with self-determination, and with
cooperative effort, even involving traditional enemies, more
than with a constitutional foundation or universal protection of
human rights. Interestingly enough, while national identity is
more and more superseded by people's a-nationality, many new
countries, emerging as a result of the asserted right to
self-determination, face as their first task not the future but
the past: definition of their national identity. Nevertheless,
the civilization of illiteracy does not promise that Italians
can be made for all these new countries. Rather, these nations
will become, in not necessarily satisfying ways, a-nationals,
citizens of the world economy. Many of them will make up the new
immigrant populations settled in ethnic neighborhoods where
access to consumption will arouse a nostalgia for some remote
homeland.

No one can or should generalize. Many prejudices still heat the
furnaces of hatred and intolerance. Enough citadels from the
past pragmatic framework maintain hopes for expansion and
cultivate a politics appropriate to ages long passed. But
regardless of such unsettling developments, the nation-state
enters an age of denationalization, absorbed into a world of
economic globality, less and less dependent on the individual
and thus less and less subject to political dogma.

Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents

Changes in the condition of human practical experiences effect
changes in the self-identification of the individual and of
groups of people. Emphasis is less and less on nature and shared
living space, and more on connections free of arbitrary borders,
even of elements pertaining to culture and history. New political
experiences, still subjected to expectations carried over from
the past, do not actually continue the past. Accordingly, the
nature of political experiences changes. Assumptions regarding
leadership, organization, planning, and legality are redefined.
Tribal chiefs might well have turned, through the centuries,
into the kings of the Middle Ages, and, with the advent of a new
society, into presidents. There is, nevertheless, no reason to
believe that in a universe of distributed tasks and massive
parallelism, a need for political centralism and hierarchy will
remain. The president, for instance, is the king of the
civilization of literacy; and his wife becomes the queen, in
defiance of all the literate documents that justify presidency.
Executive power, in conjunction with the legislative and
judicial branches, implements ideals of liberal political
democracy as these became essential to the pragmatics of
industrial society. But once new circumstances emerge, the
underlying structure reflected in the power structure undergoes
change as well.

In the spirit of the dynamics of change, one should notice that,
in a framework of non-hierarchic structures, there is no
legitimate need for the presidency. Theoretic arguments, no
matter how rigorous, are after all irrelevant if not based on
related facts. New circumstances already made the function of
president strictly ceremonial in many countries. In other
countries, a president's ability to exercise power is impeded by
laws that make this power irrelevant. Economic cycles, affecting
integrated economies, turn even the most visionary heads of
states (when they happen to be visionary) into witnesses to
events beyond their control. Politics does not happen at levels
so remote from the individual that individuals disconnect
themselves from the political ceremonial. It happens closer and
closer to where ideals and interest crystallize in the form of
new human interactions.

Who would represent the country if the function of head of state
were abolished? How can a country have a consistent political
system? Who would be responsible for implementing laws? Such
questions originate, without exception, within literacy's system
of expectations. The extreme decentralization that is made
possible by the new means of the civilization of illiteracy
requires, and indeed stimulates, different political structures.
Instead of the self-delusion and demagoguery triggered by an
idealized image of the politically concerned citizen, we should
see the reality of citizens pursuing goals that integrate
political elements. Literacy resulted in a politics of
representation that ended up in effectively excluding the
citizen from political decision-making. Rationalized in the
structures of democracy, political ideals are now a matter of
efficient human interaction. A president's performance is
totally irrelevant to the exchange of information on networks of
human cooperative effort. Agreements relevant to the people
involved, executed in view of reciprocal needs and future
developments, result more and more outside political
institutions, for reasons having little to do with them.

The majority of political functions, as they apply to presidents,
congresses, or other political institutions, still originate in
forms characteristic of past political experiences. They are
based on allegiances and commitments contradicted by the
pragmatics of today's world. The fact that heads of states are
also heads of the military (commander-in-chief) comes from the
time when the strongest man became the leader. But in the modern
world of growing emancipation, women are valid candidates as
heads-of-state all over the world. However, sexual bias has kept
women from gaining the military competence that a
commander-in-chief is expected to have. Another example: What is
the reason for a president to be at the funeral of a deceased
head-of- state? Blood ties used to bond kings and nobility more
strongly than political arguments, long before fast
transportation could carry a monarch to the deceased in less time
than it took for decay to set in. A farewell wished today at the
funeral of a Japanese emperor, a Moslem ruler, or an atheistic
president belongs to the spectacle of politics, not to its
substance. The expensive, and delusive, literate performance of
state funerals, oath-taking, inauguration, parades, and state
visits is more often than not an exercise in hypocrisy. These
spectacles please only through their cynical pandering to the
people's desire for circus. Pragmatically relevant commitments
are no longer the privilege of state bureaucracies. When the
historic necessity of states winds up to be no more than the
expression of remote tribal instincts, the literate institution
of state becomes superfluous.

Political idolatry, commercial nationalism, and ethnic vanity
affect politics at many levels. Nationalism, emerging as a form
of collective pride and psychological compensation for repressed
instincts, celebrates gold medals at Olympic games, the number
of Nobel Prize laureates, and achievements in the arts and
sciences with a fervor worth a better cause. Borders of pride
and prejudice are maintained even where they have de facto
ceased to exist. No scientist who achieved results in his or her
field worked in isolation from colleagues living all over the
world. The Internet supports the integration of creative effort
and ideas, beyond borders and beyond national fixations, often
expressed as military priorities rather than as cooperation and
integration. Art is internationally nurtured and exchanged.

Rhetoric and politics

Political programs, very much like hamburgers, cars, alcohol,
sports events, artworks, and financial services, are marketed.
Success in politics is valued in market terms rather than in the
increasingly elusive political impact. The expression "People
vote their pocketbooks" bluntly expresses this fact. But are they
voting? Poll after poll reveals that they are not. Illiterates
used to be excluded from voting, along with women, Blacks in
America and South Africa, and foreigners in a large number of
European countries.

In an ideal world, the best qualified would compete for a
political position, all would vote, and the result would make
everyone happy. How would such an ideal world function? Words
would correspond to facts. The reward of political practical
experience would be the experience itself, satisfying the need
to best serve others, and thus oneself as a member of the larger
social family. This is a Utopian world of perfect citizens whose
reason, expressed in the language of literacy, i.e., made
available to everyone and implicitly guaranteed to be a
permanent medium for interaction, is the guardian of politics.
We see here how authority, of the thinking human being, is
established and almost automatically equated with freedom.
Indeed, the doctrine of individual conformity to rational
necessity was expressed in many pragmatic contexts, but never as
forcefully as in the context that appropriated literacy as one of
its guiding forces.

In the horizon of literacy, the expectation is that the
experience of self- constitution as literate makes people submit
their own nature to the rationale of literacy and thereby find
fulfillment. In short, the belief that to be literate makes one
respect his word, respect others, understand political
expectations, and articulate one's ideas is more of an illusion.
Moreover, if political action could result in having everyone
accept the values of literacy and embody them as their second
nature, conflicts would vanish, people would all share in wealth
and, moreover, would be able to abide by the standards of
democracy. It even follows that the literate need to feel the
obligation of inculcating literacy in others, thus creating the
possibility of changing patterns of human experiences so that
they reflect the demands of reason associated with literacy.
Isaiah Berlin, among others, noted that the belief in a single
encompassing answer to all social questions is indefensible.
Rather, conflict is an overriding feature of the human
condition. This conflict develops between the propensity to
diversity (all the ends pursued) and the almost irrational
expectation that there is one answer-a good way of life-worth
pursuing and which can be attained if the political animal
acknowledges the primacy of reason over passion, and freely
chooses conformity to widely shared values over chaotic
individualism.

Under the pragmatic circumstances of the civilization of
illiteracy, the literate expectation of unanimous or even
majority vote is less than significant. Voting results are as
good an indicator of a society's condition as seismographs are of
the danger of an earthquake. On election days, the results are
known after the first representative sample makes it through the
voting mechanism. Actually, the results are already at hand days
before the election takes place. The means within our reach are
such that it would suffice to commit a short interval of
telephone time so that people who want to vote-and who know why
they vote- can, and without having to go our of their way. Any
other connection, such as the generalized cable infrastructure,
connected to a central data processing unit outfitted for the
event, would do as well. Such a strategy would answer only one
part of the question: making it easy for people to vote. The
second part regards what they are asked to vote for. The
political process is removed from the exciting practice of
offering authentic choice. Literacy-based political action is
opaque, almost inscrutable. Accordingly, the citizen has no
motivation for commitment and no need to express it through
voting. There is a third part: the assumption that voting is a
form of particpating in the power of democracy. No one aware of
the dynamics of work and life today can equate the notion of
majority with democracy. More often than not, efficiency is
achieved through procedures of exception.

Under the circumstances of a global economy of fast change and
parallel practical experiences, no president of a country, no
matter how powerful, and no central political power can
effectively influence events significant to the citizen. The
civilization of illiteracy requires alternatives to centralism,
hierarchy, sequentiality, and determinism in politics. It
especially entails alternatives to dualism, whether embodied in
the two- party system, the legislative and executive opposition,
and lawfulness vs. illegality, for example. This implies a broad
distribution of political tasks, in conjunction with a politics
that takes advantage of parallel modes of activism, networking,
open-ended policies, and self-determination at meaningful levels
of political life. Political fear of vagueness can only be
compared to the fear of a vacuum that once upon a time branded
physics and political doctrines. Faster rhythms of existence and
the acknowledged need to adapt to circumstances of action never
before experienced-scale of politics, globality, scale of
humankind-speak against many of the literate expectations of
politics as a stabilizing form of human practice. Politics, if
true to its call, should contribute to speeding up processes and
creating circumstances for better negotiations among people who
have lost their sense of political adherence, or even lost their
faith in law and order.

In this global world, where scale is of major importance,
politics is supposed to mediate among the many levels at which
people involved in parallel, extremely distributed activities,
partake in globality. Apportionment of goods, as much as the
apportionment of rights pertaining to creative aspects of human
practical experiences, on a scheme similar to auctioning, follow
the dynamics of the market more closely than rigid regulations.
Awareness of this apportionment is a political matter and can be
submitted to the concerned parties in forms of evolving opinions.
Politics has also to address the new forms of property and their
impact on political values in the new pragmatic framework. For
instance, the real power of information processing is in the
interaction of those able to access it. One should not be forced
to apply rules originating from the feudal ownership of
language, or from the industrial ownership of machines, to the
free access to information, or to networks facilitating creative
cooperative efforts. The challenge is to provide the most
transparent environment, without affecting the integrity of
interaction. A specific example in this regard is legislation
against computer hackers. Such legislation, as well as the much
publicized Communication Decency Act, only shifts attention from
the new pragmatic context-unprecedented challenges arising from
very powerful technologies-to one of routine law enforcement.
Administrative reaction is the consequence of the built-in
dualism, based on the clear-cut distinction between good and
bad, characteristic of literacy-based politics.

A positive course of events can originate only from political
experiences of individual empowerment. Wider choice and broader
possibilities involve specific risks. Hacking is by no means an
experience without precedent in past pragmatics. The German war
code was hacked, and nations are very eager to confer honor upon
other hackers of distinction: scientists who break the secrets
of genetic codes, or spies who discover the secrets of the
enemy. Examined from a literate political perspective, hacking,
as a peculiar form of individual self-constitution, can appear as
criminal. In a political experience coherent with the pragmatics
leading to the civilization of illiteracy, hacking appears on a
continuum joining creativity, protest, invention, and non-
conformity, as well as criminal intention. The answer to hackers
is not a code of punishment of medieval or industrial
inspiration, but transparency that will, in the long run,
undermine possible criminal motivations. A society that punishes
creativity, even when relatively misdirected, through its
policies and laws punishes itself in the long run. Someone who
works at his terminal for a company producing goods all over the
world, and pursuing social and economic programs that
effectively touch citizens of many cultures, different faiths,
race, political creed, sexual preference, different history and
different expectations, participates in the politics of the world
more than the institutions and the bureaucrats paid for
functions that they cannot effectively fulfill. It is again
pragmatics that makes us citizens of our small village or town,
that integrates all of us, Netizens included, in the global
world.

Judging justice

This short parenthesis in the discussion of politics can be
justified by the fact that justice is the object of both
politics and law. The practice of law is the practice of politics
on a smaller stage. Political action, involving a new concept of
law and justice, closer to the environment of industrial work,
established not only that all (or almost all) were equal in
respect to the law, but also that justice would take its own
course. In the course of history, the various moments of change
in the pragmatic framework were also moments of change in regard
to the justice system. In incipient political praxis, rulers
administered the law. Even today, a governor or president is the
court of last resort in some legal cases. And law, like
politics, relies on rhetoric, on language as the mediating
mechanism of concepts.

In the course of history, the various moments of change in the
pragmatic framework were also moments of change in regard to
what today we call justice. The more powerful applied their own
ideas of law under circumstances of incipient human practical
experiences. It was the role of the appointed leader, whether in
the magic of ritual, in tribes, in religion, in forms of
settlement, to judge matters under dispute. Law focused on
agreements, commitments, and integrity of the human body, of
property, of goods, and of exchange. In time, the distance
between what was done, affecting the balance of people's rights
and obligation, and the reaction to it increased. A whole body
of mediating elements, religion included, governed action and
reaction. Just as myth and ritual did in their ways, major
religious texts testify to how rules of living together and
preserving life were established and implemented. The scale of
society, reflected in the nature of the pragmatic context,
played a crucial role in the process in respect to what was
considered a crime, the type of punishment, and the swiftness of
punishment.

What is of concern here is the change from the legal code
elaborated in the framework of literacy and legal experience in
the civilization of illiteracy. The institution of law and the
professions involved in it embody expectations of justice under
assumptions of efficiency pertinent to human practical
experiences. New lands were discovered, new property was
created, and machines and people made higher productivity
possible. Rights were fought for, access to education opened, and
the world became a place of new transactions for which the law
of the land, inspired by natural right, no longer sufficed. It
was in this context that literacy stimulated both the practice
of legality and the inquiry into the nature of human rights and
obligations. But it is also in this context that the language of
legal practical experiences commenced its journey into today's
legalese that no ordinary person can understand. Raskolnikov, in
Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, criticized the "legal style"
of those educated as lawyers. "They still write legal papers
that way." Though he remarks that the writing had "a kind of
flourish to it..., yet look how illiterate his writing is." The
criticism could be glossed over, due to its context, if it were
not for an interesting remark: "It's expressed in legal language
and if you use legal language, you can't write any other way."
Trying to cope with ambiguity in language forces the lawyer to
look for precision.

The equivocal condition of the practice of justice is that law
originates in the realm of political experiences, but needs to
be implemented free of politics, i.e., regardless of who is in
power. The blindfolded goddess holding the scales of justice is
expected to be objective and fair. The separation between
judicial and governing entities is probably the highest
achievement of the political system based on literacy. But it is
also the area where, under circumstances of practical
experiences different from those based on the underlying
structure of literacy, the need to change is critical. This
applies to new means of maintaining a just system for people
less affected by the subjectivity of those holding the balance
of power, and more by the ability to process information
relevant to any object of dispute. The blindfolded goddess
already uses X- ray vision in order to substantiate claims and
counterclaims. Modeling, simulation, expert genetic testimony,
and much more became part of the justice routine. Each party in
a trial knows in advance what type of jury best serves its
interests. The context for all these changes sheds light on
their political meaning. If the practical experience of
politics and justice are disconnected, the effectiveness of both
suffers.

Politics stimulated change in respect to the perception of
democracy, civil rights, political authority, and welfare. It
demystified the origin, function, and role of property, and
introduced a generalized level of relativity and uniform value.
Law, on the other hand, supposed to protect the individual,
should therefore be less inclined to trade off fairness for the
lowest common denominator. Comparing this ideal to real legal
practice is an exercise in masochism. The ever increasing, and
fast increasing, human interaction via market mechanisms was
followed by instances of conflict and expectations of
negotiation. Without any doubt, the most pervasive mediating role
is played in our day by legal professionals.

Due to its own self-interested dynamics, the legal profession
insinuates itself in every type of practical experience, from
multinational business to relations between individuals. Lately,
it is involved in finding a place for itself in the world of new
media, involving copyright laws and private rights versus public
access. So one cannot say that law, as opposed to politics, is
not proactive. The problem is that it is so in a context bound
to literacy, and in such a way that style transcends substance.
Latin, reflecting the origin of the western legal experience,
used to be the language of law. Today, few lawyers know Latin.
But they are well versed in their own language.

Legalese is justified by the attempt to avoid ambiguity in a
given situation. There is nothing wrong with this. What is wrong
is when legal language and the procedures encoded in legal
language do not meet the pragmatic expectation, which is justice.
Law and justice are not the same thing. A good case in point is
the recent case of the State of California vs. O. J. Simpson.
The spectacle of the legal procedure showed how a literate
practice ended up convoluting justice. In fact, literate law is
not meant to serve justice. Its purpose is to use the law to
acquit a client. Allan Derschowitz claimed that the lawyer's
duty is to his or her client, not to justice. This statement is
far from the expectation that each member of society has.
Therefore law loses its credibility because it undermines the
notion of the social contract.

Some might say that this state of affairs is nothing new. Even
Shakespeare criticized lawyers. Far from being a wholesale
attack on the profession, the description I have given deserves
to be contrasted to the possibility of effective judicial
mediations in the civilization of illiteracy. Since changes
occur so rapidly, the law of yesterday rarely applies to new
circumstances created today. It used to be, people often find
themselves reminiscing, that laws and rules (the Ten
Commandments, at least) were expected to last and be respected,
in their letter-which was carved in stone-and spirit, forever. No
one will argue that justice is not an eternal desideratum. But
achieving it does not necessarily mean that laws and the methods
of lawyers are eternal. Some actions that society once
accepted-child abuse, sexual harassment, racial
discrimination-are now considered illegal, as well as unjust.
Other crimes (whistling on Sundays, kissing one's spouse in
public, working or operating a business on Sunday) might still be
in some legal books and locally observed, but they are no longer
considered instances of law- breaking. The result of changes
brought about by changing pragmatics is the realization people
have that there is no stable frame of reference, either for
morality (as it is subject to law and law enforcement) or for
legality.

Did lawyers create this situation? Are they a product of new
human relations required by the new pragmatics? Who judges the
legal system in order to determine that its activity meets
expectations? There is no simple answer to any of these
questions. If justice is to affect human practical experiences,
it has to reflect their nature and participate in defining its
own perspective in respect to the rights that people integrate
in new practical experiences of self-definition. It is all well
and good for the legal system to use non-literate means, such as
DNA evidence, videotapes, and access to legal information from
around the world via Internet. But if they are then subjected to
literate pettifogging, all this effort is to no avail.

The programmed parliament

Politics in action means not elections but the daily routine of
hard work on matters of interest to the people represented.
Party affiliation aside, in the end the common good is supposed
to be maintained or improved. Legislative political work
continues a tradition that goes well beyond literacy.
Nevertheless, effective legislation became possible only within
the pragmatic framework that made literacy necessary. Once
literacy itself reached its potential, new means for the
political legislative practical experience became necessary. The
driving force is the expectation that the legislative process
should reflect practical needs emerging in a context of rapid
change over shorter patterns of recurrence. As within the entire
political practical experience, forces at work continuously
collide.

Although literacy-based perspectives and methods for political
legislation are no longer appropriate in handling issues and
concerns stemming from a pragmatics that invalidates the
literate model, politicians seem to be unwilling to realize the
need for change. They find it more useful, and easier to
defend, to legislate improved literacy- based education, for
example, instead of rethinking education in the context of its
necessity. They accept the mediating power of specialized
knowledge, the generalized network of information, use all means
for disseminating their own programs, but work within
constraints originating in the literate practice of politics. It
is hard to believe that in an age of limitless communication,
speakers, mainly in the USA, arguing for the most intricate
programs, will perform before an empty room in Congress. It is
also hard to believe that a language rooted in experiences
established a long time ago, and many times proved ineffective,
is maintained. Procedures, testifying more to the past than the
present, govern the activity of many legislative bodies (not only
in Great Britain, where this legacy translates into a dress code
as outmoded as the British monarchy). As with the executive
political experience and the infatuation of justice, symbolism
overtakes substance.

Nevertheless, under the pressure for higher efficiency, major
changes are taking place. Legislative practical experiences, as
disconnected as they are from new human practical experiences,
are less and less an exercise in convincing writing or in formal
logic. They increasingly reflect the expectations of globality
and often apply mediation, task distribution, and interactivity.
Electronic modeling is applied, simulation methods are tried
out. The new methods of accessing information free the
legislative politician from the time-consuming task of
accumulating data. Consultants and staff members make use of
powerful knowledge filters in order to involve in the political
process only information pertinent to the subject. Politicians
know that knowledge, at the right time and in the right context,
is power. Their new experience, as members of computerized
parliaments of many countries can testify, is that everyone has
the data, but only few know how to process it effectively. In
fact, political parties develop competitive processing programs
that will give politicians pursuing their goals more convincing
arguments in a public debate, or in discussions leading to
legislative vote. The transparency brought about by means in the
civilization of illiteracy ensures public access to the debate.
The competitive edge is provided by the intelligent use of data.
Power, that elusive aspect of any political activity, comes from
the ability to process, not from the amount of information
stored.

All this, kept at a minimum in this presentation, might sound
like anticipation, or dreams for the politician of the future.
It is not. The process is probably still at the beginning, but
unavoidable. It will sooner or later affect such components as
time in office-permanence of a representative reflects
literacy-based expectations- procedures for public evaluation,
candidacy, and voting. It will also require a rethinking of the
relation between politicians and constituents. Rethinking the
motivations and methods of legislation, even its legitimacy, are
goals worthy of being pursued. Increased mediation affects the
connection between facts and political action. Unless balanced
by the use of the new means of communication that allow personal
interaction with each voter, it will continue to alienate
politics from the public. Mass-media politics is already a thing
of the past-not because television is overridden by the Internet,
but because of the need to create a framework for individual
motivation for political action. Political efficiency is based
on human interaction. What counts is not the medium, as this
will continue to change, but what is accomplished through the
medium.

To create a legislative framework that reflects the new nature of
human relations and is appropriate to the pragmatic context
means to understand the nature of the processes leading to the
civilization of illiteracy. Consolidation of bureaucracy is as
counter-indicative of this understanding as is the continuation
of the monarchy and the House of Lords in Great Britain. Both
these phenomena are as convincing as the mass generation of
electoral letters that report on how the political representative
best served his or her constituency. A sense of the process, as
it involves the need to overcome models based on sequentiality,
dualism, and deterministic reaction, can be realized only when
the political process itself is synchronized with the prevalent
pragmatics.

A battle to be won

As a practice of building, changing, and destroying coalitions,
politics today is a summation of human practice. Professional
politicians design strategies for coalition implementation and
identify the most effective interactions for a certain policy.
They develop their own language and criteria for evaluating the
efficiency of their specialized practice and of their mediating
function in a society of many and varied forms of mediation.

The obsession with efficiency, whether applied to politics or
not, is not imposed by forces outside ourselves. The tendency to
transfer responsibility does not result in some curse spoken by
a disappointed politician, philosopher, or educator. The shorter
political cycles that we encounter correspond to the dynamics of
a human practical experience focused on the immediate within the
framework of a global existence. It seems that the transition is
from the small communal life striving for continuity and
permanence, to a global community of interacting individuals,
whose identity itself is variable, prepared to experience
discontinuity and change. Coordinations of actions in this
universe are no longer possible through large integrative
mechanisms, such as language and bureaucratic institutions.
Small differentiating operations, in the nature of coalitions
tested through polling or electronic balloting, and modified in
accordance with the rapid change of political roles, represent
an alternative.

Monarchies embodied the eternity of rule; treaties among monarchs
were supposed to outlast the monarch. The 15-minute access to
political power, far from being a metaphor in some parts of the
world, is as relevant as any other form of celebrity (Warhol's
included), since political processes and power relations are more
and more uncoupled from each other and disconnected from the
obsession with universality and timelessness. A 15-minute
coalition is as critical as access to power, and as useful as
the new principles accepted by the people involved. Instead of
the top- down model of politics, we can experience a combination
of bottom-up and top-down procedures. Under these circumstances,
the making and unmaking of coalitions remains one among very few
valid political functions. The centers of political power-
economics, law, interest groups-constitute poles around which
such coalitions are established or abandoned.

One should ask whether such coalitions do not come into being in
the universal language of literacy. Literacy is defended with
the argument that it is some kind of common denominator. What is
not accounted for is the fact that coalitions are not
independent of the medium of their expression. Literacy-based
coalitions pursue and further goals and actions consistent with
the pragmatic framework that requires them. Needs characteristic
of a pragmatic context incompatible with the structures imposed
by literacy-based practical experiences require other means for
establishing coalitions. When the leaders of the most advanced
industrial states agree on indexing the value of their currency,
or when friend and foe establish a political coalition against an
invasion that could set a precedent and trigger consequences for
the global economy, the means in place might take the appearance
of literacy. In fact, these means are freed from words and
literate articulations. They emerge from data processing and
simulation of behavior in financial markets, virtual reality
scenarios turned into actions for which no script could provide
a description in advance. While politicians might still perform
their script in a literate manner, the centers of power choose
the most efficient means for evaluating each new coalition. As a
consequence, and this is a distinguishing element, there is
little connection between the authority of political
institutions, as it results from their literate premise, and the
dynamics of coalitions, reflecting the pragmatics of the
civilization of illiteracy.

The sense of beginning experienced in our day goes well beyond
the new states, new political means, beyond the science (or art)
of coalition making. It is basically a beginning for the new
zoon politikon, for a political animal that has lost most of its
natural roots and whose human nature is probably better defined
in terms of political instincts than cultural accomplishments.
Culture is by and large discarded. People simply cannot carry
culture with them, but neither can they negotiate their existence
without political means appropriate to a social condition
structurally different from that experienced in the past. The
self-centered individual cannot escape relating to others and
defining himself in reference to them. "We Am a Virtual
Community" is not merely a suggestive title (conceived by Earl
Babble) for an article on Internet interaction, but a good
description of today's political world. The specific forms of
relations, the We Am faction among them, are subject to many
factors, not least to the biological and cognitive redefinition
of the human being. When everything, literally everything, is
possible and indeed acceptable, the political animal has to find
new ways to make choices and pursue goals without facing the
risk of losing identity. This is probably the decisive political
battle that the humans have yet to win.

"Theirs not to reason why"

High precision electronic eyes placed on orbiting satellites
picked up the firing of the rocket and the launch parameters.
Data was transmitted to a computer center for information
processing. The computed information, specifying angles, firing
time, and trajectory, was relayed to antirocket missiles
programmed to intercept enemy attack. The system-consisting of a
vast, distributed, highly interconnected configuration-
incorporates expertise from electronic vision devices, knowledge
encoded in software designed to calculate rocket orbits (based
on launch time, position, angle, speed, weight, meteorological
conditions), fast transmission networks, and automated
positioning and triggering devices.

This integrated system has replaced literacy-based modes of
practical experiences pertinent to war. Instead of manuals
describing the many parameters and operations that military
personnel need to consider, information is contained in computer
programs. These also eliminate the need for long training cycles,
expensive practical exercises, and the continuous revision of
manuals containing the latest information. Distributed knowledge
and interconnectedness have replaced the structure of top-down
command. The system described above contains many mediating
components that allow for highly efficient wars.

Examples similar to the relative annihilation of the infamous
(and ineffective) Scud missiles can be given from other episodes
of the Gulf War, including the 100 hours of the so-called ground
battle. This battle displayed the deadly force of artillery and
tanks, the power of modeling and simulation, and major planning
and testing methods independent of literacy-based military
strategy and tactics. The enemy consisted of an army structured
on the principles derived from the pragmatic framework of
literacy: centralized line of command, rigid hierarchy, modern
military equipment integrated in a war plan that was essentially
sequential and deterministic, and based on a logic of long-term
encounters.

The first war of the civilization of illiteracy

An earlier draft of this chapter-introductory lines excepted-was
written when no one anticipated a conflict involving American
troops in the Arabian Gulf. During this war, theoretic arguments
regarding the institution of the military in the civilization of
illiteracy were tested in the flesh and blood of confrontation,
probably well beyond my, or anybody's, expectations or wishes.
The Gulf War reported by the media resembled a computer game or
a television show. As I watched, I felt as though someone had
lifted part of my text and sent it through the news wires. The
story made for great headlines; but out of context, or in the
context of a reality reduced to the TV screen, its overall
meaning was obscured. In many ways, the armed conflict ended up
trivialized, another soap opera or spectator sport. Other
reports related the frustration of the troops with the limited
number of phone lines. The reports also commented on the
replacement of the traditional letter by videotape as the
preferred method of communication. We also heard about an almost
magical device, called CNX, used to help orient each person
involved in the vast desert theater of war. And we saw or heard
about the exotically named preprocessed and prepackaged food,
about the pastimes of the troops.

The context started coming into focus. This was to become the
first war of the civilization of illiteracy: a highly efficient
(the word takes on an unintended cynical connotation here)
activity that involved non-sequential, massively parallel
practical experiences. These required precise synchronization
(each failure resulted in victims to what was euphemistically
called "friendly fire"), distributed decision-making, intense
mediation, advanced specialization, and task distribution. These
characteristics embodied an ideology of relative value
disengaged from political discourse, and even more from moral
precepts. Nobody expected this war to reinvent the bow and arrow
(documented shortly after human self-constitutive experiences in
language), or even the wheel (originating in the practical
experience of populations whose home was the territory where the
fighting took place). It is possible that some of the military
personnel had heard about the book entitled The Art of War
(written by Sun Tzu in 325 BCE or earlier), or about the books,
some of undisputed notoriety, filling the libraries of military
academies and the better research libraries. But this was not a
war fought for the Book, in the spirit of the Book (Koran or
Bible), or in the way books describe wars. In a way, the Gulf
War was truly the "mother of all battles" in that it rewrote the
rules on war-or did away with them.

All the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy are
retraceable in the practical experience of today's military:
highly mediated praxis through electronic information storage
and retrieval; transition from an economy of wartime scarcity to
a war of affluent means of defense and destruction; shift from
war based on the positivist notion of facts (many requiring
incursions into enemy territory) to a relativistic notion of
image, and the corresponding technology of image processing;
shift from a hierarchical structure of rigid lines of authority
and command to a relatively loose line of context dependent on
freedom of choice extended almost to the individual soldier; a
discipline of austerity and isolation from the non-military
(conditions accepted in the past as part of a military career)
replaced by expectations of relaxation and enjoyment, derived
from the permissiveness and drive for self-satisfaction of
society at large. That some of these expectations could not be
fulfilled was criticized, but not really understood. The hosts of
the American army live by different standards. Muslim law
prohibits alcohol consumption and certain forms of
entertainment, as well as burial of dead infidels in a land
claiming to be holy.

The Gulf War, on its various fronts, was not a conflict of
irreducible or irreconcilable religions, morals, or cultures. It
was a conflict between an artificially maintained civilization
of literacy, in which rich reserves of oil serve as a buffer from
efficiency requirements in all aspects of life, and another
civilization, one that entails the illiteracy of a society and
an energy-hungry, global economy that reflects a dynamics of
high efficiency.

It might well be that the final attack reminded experts in war
history, military strategy, or evolution of tactics of the
surprising maneuver tried by Epaminondas, the Theban commander
(371 BCE) in the battle of Leuctra: instead of a frontal assault,
an attack on one flank. General Schwartzkopf is not Epaminondas.
He succeeded in his mission by allowing for task distribution in
an international army-more of a pain than a blessing-that
resulted in many flanks. Helmuth von Moltke, in the exhausting
Franco- Prussian War (1870-1871), changed the relation to his
subordinate commanders by letting them operate under broad
directives. The generals and commanders of the many armies
involved in the Gulf War took advantage of the power of
networking in order to orchestrate an attack that tested
extremely efficient, and costly, annihilation technology under a
plan that today's computers have simulated many a time over.

But once I confessed that I wrote much of this chapter three
years before the Gulf War, the reader might question whether I
looked at the war through the spectacles of my hypothesis,
seeing what I wanted to see, understanding events as they fit my
explanatory model. I asked myself the same questions and
concluded that presenting the argument as it stood before the
war would shed light on the question and ultimately qualify the
answer.

War as practical experience

"War is a sheer continuation of politics with other means," wrote
Carl von Clausewitz (On War, 1818). It is difficult to argue
against this; but a paraphrase, intended to put the line in
historic perspective, might be appropriate: War is the
continuation of the practical experience of survival in the
context of a society trying to control and adjudicate resources.
Accordingly, combat follows the line of other practical
experiences. The practical experience of hunting-formerly combat
with non-human adversaries-required the weapons eventually
associated with war. These were the tools that primitive humans
used to wrest food for their survival and the survival of their
community. Future aspects of these activities, and the associated
moral values, make us sometimes forget that the syncretic nature
of human beings, i.e., projection of their natural endowment in
the practical act, is expressed in the syncretism of the tools
used. This syncretic condition evolved under the need for labor
division, and one of the main early demands of labor division
resulted in the establishment of the semi-professional and
professional warrior.

As the tools of the martial profession diversified more and more
from working tools, a conceptual component (tactics and
strategy) became part of the praxis. The conceptual component
set forth a sequence to be followed, a logic to be used, and a
method for counteracting enemy maneuvers in order to achieve
victory. Von Clausewitz was the first to explicitly point out
that war continues politics, while other writers on the subject,
living centuries before he did, perceived war as a practical
effort. Two Byzantine emperors, Maurice (539-602) and Leo,
called the Wise (886-911), tried to formulate military strategy
and tactics based on the pragmatic premise. They stipulated that
the pragmatic framework defined the nature of the conflict and
the actual condition of the battle, weapons included. Indeed,
every known change in military materiel in a society has been
synchronized to changes in the status of its practical
experience. The invention of the stirrup by the Chinese (600)
improved the ability of men riding horseback. It opened the
avenue to wars where the backbone of battle formation was no
longer composed of foot soldiers but of warriors on horses.
Mechanical contraptions (e.g., the Trebuchet, acknowledged at
1100, based on releasing a heavy counterweight) for throwing
large stones or missiles, opened the way to what would shift
superior defensive capabilities (through fortifications, city
walls, castles built before the 14th century) to superior
offensive power. This was also the case with the cannons that
the Turks used to conquer Constantinople (1453). But it is not
military practice per se that concerns us here, but rather the
implications of language, in particular literacy.

At a very small scale of human activity, with many autarchic
groups composed of few people, there was little need for
organized combat or specially trained warriors. Incipient,
rudimentary military practical experience, in its basic functions
of aggression and defense, became desirable at a larger scale of
human activity. This experience was simultaneous with the
establishment of language, especially writing. Sun Tzu's book, as
well as many earlier testimonies to battles (mythology,
religious writings, epic poetry, and philosophy), can be
mentioned here. This military practice integrated the means and
skills of survival, such as hunting and safeguarding the
territory from which food was obtained.

Awareness of resources corresponded to awareness of scale. The
scale of human activity in which the constitution of community
member-warrior took place corresponded to increased settlement
of populations, increased demand for resources, higher
productivity, and accumulation of property-all reflected in the
need to expand the practical experience of language beyond the
immediate characteristic of orality. The efficiency of work and
combat was at about an equal level. In a sense, wars lasted
forever; peace was merely respite between conflicts. The notion
of prisoner (usually sold into slavery) confirmed the importance
of human labor and skill for consolidating a community,
producing wealth for those in power, and subsistence for everyone
else. The social constitution of the military was not excepted
from pragmatic requirements of efficiency and mediation, i.e.,
of ensuring the highest efficiency within the given scale of
human experience, as needs and expectations corresponding to this
scale were manifested. While it is true that combat efficiency
was spelled out in units of intentional destruction or
preservation (of life and various artifacts relevant to human
self- constitution), combat efficiency also referred to defenders
whose goal was to make destruction by the enemy less possible
(even impossible).

While individual conflicts did not require the intervention of
language more than orality could provide, conflicts between
larger groups made the need for a coordinating instrument clear.
Human language, through new words and constructs, testified to
the experience of conflicts and the associated mytho-magical
manifestations. Through language, this experience was projected
against the background of many different forms of human praxis.
As a general rule, armies of all types, under every type of
government, acquired a special status in society due to the
function they fulfilled. Written language did not generate
armies; but it served as a prerequisite (even in its most
rudimentary notation forms) for the institution of the military.
Writing introduced many elements that influenced the combat
experience: a record of means and people, a record of actions,
an instrument for planning, a record of consequences. All the
components of the military institution objectify the purpose of
war at a particular time. They also objectify the relations
between a society at war and, during times of peace, between
society and its warriors. Language is the medium through which
objectification takes place. The sequentiality of writing and
the need to express sequences pertinent to conflicts are
consubstantial. Von Clausewitz's line encompasses the extension
in language of the many aspects of wars.

"Did Gideon know how to read Hebrew? Did Deborah?" some people
might ask, referring to leaders of decisive battles documented
in the Old Testament. Others would refer to examples from the
same time that are accounted for in Greek epics and the
chronicles of the Middle East. Roman mythology and the testimony
of Islam do not tell us whether all their warriors wrote or
read. These documents do inform us of the pragmatic
circumstances that led to the institution of the army as a body
constituted in continuation of syncretic practical experiences,
progressively constituting its own domain of existence and its
own reason for being.

From face-to-face conflicts that required almost no language, and
which resulted in the victory of the stronger, to the conflicts
between humans in which much technology-requiring little
language-was also involved, changes parallel to the levels of
literacy occurred. Under the circumstances of wars fought by
armies facing each other, language was the medium for
constituting armies and coordinating action. In order to define
goals, to share plans for achieving victory, and to modify plans
in response to changing conditions, language was as important as
the number of horses, quality of swords and shields, and quality
of ammunition. The profession of warrior, as much as the
profession of hunter, was based on the ability to attack and
defend, and on the skills needed to adapt means to goals within
a changing balance of power. The first wars, and probably the
majority of them, were fought before generalized literacy. The
major warriors-the Egyptian pharaohs Tuthmose III in the battle
for Meggido (1479 BCE), Ramses II battling the Hittites at
Kadesh (1296 BCE), Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, the Spartans under
Leonidas (480 BCE), Alexander the Great (conquering Babylon in
330 BCE), Julius Caesar (49-46 BCE) and Octavian (31 BCE), and
the many Chinese warriors of this period and later-did not need
literacy for their battles as much as for their politics. Their
strategies resulted from the same expectations and pragmatic
requirements that gave rise to the experience of written
language.

Wars were fought on terrain well chosen, by armies composed of
men who carried out orders selected from a limited set of
possibilities. To paraphrase the terminology of generative
grammars, it was a limited war language, with not too many
possible war sentences. Once improved means of work and
production became the means of carrying on war, those in command
could write more war texts, more scripts. As war efficiency
increased, so did the possibility of a breakdown of the effort
due to lack of integration and coordination. The military
structure reflected the characteristics of the human praxis that
fostered written language and, much later, literacy: relatively
limited dynamics, centralized, hierarchical organization, low
level of adaptability, a strictly sequential course of action, a
deterministic mentality. David Oliver convincingly described the
process: "Mechanics is the vehicle of all physical theory.
Mechanics is the vehicle of war. The two have been inseparable."
He refers to the practical demands of warfare in the context
that led to the science of mechanics and eventually to the
beginnings of projectile ballistics. By 1531, Nicolo Tartaglia of
Brescia overcame his disdain for war and devised the gunner's
square, which was perfected 100 years later by none other than
Galileo. In 1688, the French introduced the socket bayonet on
their muskets, which occurred simultaneous to changes in tools
used at the time, i.e., the tools that allowed for manufacturing
the bayonet.

The framework that created conditions for the ideal of literacy
affected the pursuit of war not only in technology, but also in
the way wars were played out. The advancing line of exposed
troops were involved in a dynamics of confrontation that
reflected linearity, a phenomenon prevalent in the practical
experience of civilian life. Destructive power was added until
the enemy was destroyed. Row by row, soldiers stopped to fire
platoon volleys, then continued onto the decisive bayonet charge.
The structure of writing (sequences, hierarchy, accumulation,
closure) and the structure of this particular military
engagement were similar. Literacy as such was registered rather
late as a qualifier of the warrior. But once integrated in the
practical experience of military self-constitution, literacy
changed the nature of making war and enabling higher levels of
efficiency corresponding to the new scale of war. These were no
longer skirmishes among feudal warlords, but major conflicts
between nations. These conflicts diminished in number but grew
in intensity. Their duration corresponded to the relatively long
cycles of production, distribution, and consumption
characteristic of literacy-based practical experiences.

Under the pressure of many types of necessity embodied in human
pragmatics, war was submitted to rules. It was civilized, at
least in some of its aspects. The Catholic Church, preserver of
literacy during the Dark Ages, when many little wars between
feudal lords were carried on, took the lead in this direction. In
order to avoid destruction of crops and lives in the barbarian
societies of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, the only
viable hierarchy tried to tame warriors with the literate rules
that the Church preserved. With their own pragmatic
considerations in mind, rulers accepted these prescriptions. It
took a millennium for people to discover that wars never have
final results. But they also learned that the experience of war
creates knowledge-for example, of means used, weather patterns,
territory, characteristics of the enemy-and creativity-what is
called the art of war. Resulting in death and destruction, wars
are also instances of self-education in one of life's most
unforgiving schools.

The institution of the military

"The draft is the legitimate child of democracy," as Theodor
Heuss defined it. Obligatory military service was introduced
during one of the first modern revolutions- the French levée en
masse (conscription) of 1793. The citizen-soldier replaced
mercenaries and professional soldiers. The call "Aux armes, mes
citoyens" that became a stanza of the French national anthem,
glorified the expectations of the moment. Prussia followed suit
almost immediately, motivated by economic reasons: cheap
manpower for war. During the prolonged process of becoming an
institution, the military enlisted the support of the state it
defended or of those private establishments (church,
landowners, merchants) that needed its services.

Feeding off the means generated by society, the military
institution integrated the practical experience of the people in
its structure and actively pursued courses of action meant to
increase its efficiency. At every juncture of humankind's
continuous change, the military had to prove levels of
efficiency that justified its own existence as a factor in the
active defense of resources. When it was no longer efficient and
weighed too heavily on the socio-economic foundation, it was
eventually overthrown, or the society supporting it stagnated,
as we see happening time and again in military dictatorships.

As one of the many highly structured environments for human
interaction, the military identified itself, as did all other
social mechanisms, through repetitive actions. Each action could
be further seen as a set of tasks, or orders, connected to
motivations or justifications, which anticipate or follow
practical experiences specific to the military. Some were
connected to life within the organization, such as the
possibility to advance in the hierarchy and affect future
activity. These were internal in the sense that they were
affected by the implicit rules adopted by the institution.
Others were external, expressed in the nature of the relation
between the military and society: symbolic status, participation
in power, expectations of recognition.

Evolution of the military resulted in changes in the language
involved in defining and modifying the interactions
characteristic of military practical experience. This language
became progressively more adapted to the goal-win the war-and
less coordinated with civilian language, in which the discourse
of motivations leading to the conflict occurred.
Correspondingly, relations with the outside world-future members
of the military, social and political institutions, cultural
establishments, the church-took place in what appeared to be a
different language.

Changes in the structure of the practical experience of human
self-constitution, as well as changes resulting from a growing
scale, had an influence both inside and outside the military.
When the individuals making up the world constituted themselves
as literate, the functioning of the military assumed the
expectations and characteristics of literacy. What would emerge
as military academies were probably established at this time.
Von Moltke's ideas of changing the nature of relations with
subordinates just predated the many modern advances in war
technology: the use of steam-powered warships (by the Japanese
in their war against the Russians in 1905); the introduction of
radio, telephone, and automotive transportation (all tested in
Word War 1); and even the articulation of the concept of total
war (by Erich Lindendorf). All these correspond to a pragmatic
framework within which literacy was necessary, and literacy's
characteristic reflected upon new practical experiences. The
total war is of the same nature as the expectation of universal
literacy: one literacy replaces all others. There is to the
military institution of the civilization of literacy an
expectation of permanency, embodied in rules and regulations, in
hierarchies, and centralized structure, similar to that of state,
industry, religion, education, science, art, and literature.
There is also an expectation of centralism, and thus hierarchy
and discipline. These characteristics explain why almost all
armies adopt similar literacy-based structures. Guerrilla wars,
in their early manifestations (skirmishes during the American
Revolution) and in their current forms in South America, for
example, are illiterate in that they are not based on the
conventions of literacy. They unfold in a decentralized manner,
and are based on the dynamics of self-organizing nucleii. This
is why military strategists consider them so dangerous today.

Patterns of military action and the language recurrences
associated with these patterns express attitudes and values
pertinent to the pragmatic framework. England, at the height of
its literate experience, had a highly structured, almost
ritualized way of carrying out war. One of the main complaints
during the American Revolution was that the colonials did not
fight according to the rules that literate West Europe had
established over the centuries. Under circumstances of change, as
those leading to the end of the need for a generalized,
all-encompassing literacy, these attitudes and values, expressed
in language and in patterns of military activity, are exhausted,
except where they are carried over to other forms of praxis,
especially to politics and sports.

As is the case with many literacy-based institutions, the
military became a goal in itself, imposing rules on social and
political circumstances, instead of adapting to them. Following
World Wars I and II, the military took control of many countries
under the guise of various political and ideological
justifications. Military, or military-supported, dictatorships,
displaying the same characteristics of centralized rule as
monarchy and democracy under presidents, sprang up where other
modes of government proved ineffective. This happens today in
many parts of the world that are still dedicated to economic and
political models of the past, such as in South America, the
Middle East, and Africa, for example.

From the literate to the illiterate war

The last war fought under the sign of literacy was probably
World War II. The very fact that the last world war came to its
final end after the atomic bomb was deployed is indicative of
the fact that once one aspect of human practical experience is
affected by a change of scale, others are affected as well. While
the millions of victims (the majority of whom were raised in the
expectations of the civilization of literacy) might make us
reluctant to mention literacy, in fact, war's systematic cruelty
and extermination power are the result of literacy
characteristics implicit in the effective functioning of the war
machine and in the articulation of war goals. In the history of
World War II, the chapter about language is probably as
enlightening as the chapters devoted to the new weapons it
brought about: the precursors of modern rocket systems, in
addition to the atomic bomb. Each of the powers involved in this
large-scale war understood that without the integrating force of
literacy, exercised in and around the conflict, the enemy could
not succeed. Many books were written about the escalation of
hostility through the language of political and ideological
discourse. Many prejudices associated with this war were
expressed in exquisitely literate works, supported by formally
perfect, logical arguments. On the other hand, some writers
pointed out the weaknesses of literacy. Roland Barthes, for
example, studied its fascist nature. Others mentioned the
inadequacy of a medium bound to fail because it was so opaque
that it covered thoughts instead of revealing them, validated
false values instead of exposing them for what they were.

The language of politics extended truly into the language of the
conflict. Thanks to radio and newspapers, as well as the
rhetoric of rallies, it was able to address entire nations. The
industrial establishment, upon which the war machine was built,
still embodied the characteristics of the pragmatic framework of
literacy. It was based on the industrial model of intense
manufacturing. Millions of people had to be moved, fed, and
logistically supported on many fronts. The war involved elements
of an economy in crisis, affording much less than abundance.
Germany and its allies, having planned for a Blitzkrieg, threw
all their limited resources into the preparation and execution of
the war. Europe was coming out of the depression resulting from
World War I. The people were promised that victory would bring
the well deserved recompense that had eluded them the first time
around. Against this background, literacy was mobilized in all
the areas where it could make a difference: education,
propaganda, religious and national indoctrination, in the racist
discourse of justifications and in articulating war goals.
Ideological purposes and military goals, expressed in literate
discourse, addressed equally those on the front lines and their
families. Literacy actively supported self- discipline and
restraint, the acceptance of centralism and hierarchy, as well as
the understanding of extended production cycles of intense labor
and relatively stable, although not necessarily fair, working
relations.

All these characteristics, as well as a self-induced sense of
superiority, were reflected in the war. Advanced levels of labor
division and improved forms of coordination of the parties
involved in the large scale experience of factory labor marked
the military experience. The war entailed confrontations of huge
armies that practically engaged entire societies. It combined
strategies of exhaustion (blockades, crop destruction,
interruption of any vital activities) and annihilation. Millions
of people were exterminated. The structure of the army embodied
the structure of the pragmatic framework. Its functioning was
reflective of industrial systems designed to process huge
quantities of raw material in order to mass-manufacture products
of uniform quality.

What made literate language use essential in work and market
transactions made it essential, in forms appropriate to the
goal, to the prosecution of the war. From this perspective, it
should become clear why major efforts were made to understand
this language. Efforts were also made to get information about
tactics and strategy embodied in it, as much ahead of time as
possible, and to use this literate knowledge to devise surprise
or counter-strategies. This is why language became a main field
of operation. Enemies went after military code (not a different
language, but a means of maintaining secrecy) and did not spare
money, intelligence, or human life in their efforts to
understand how the opposing forces encoded their plans. The
brightest minds were used, and strategies of deceit were
developed and applied, because knowing the language of the enemy
was almost like reading the enemy's mind.

At the risk of dealing with the obvious, I should state here
clearly that the language of war is not the same as everyday
language; but it originates in this language and is conceived
and communicated in it. Both are structurally equivalent and
embodied in literacy. To dispose of the enemy's use of language
means to know what the enemy wants to do and how and when. In
short, it means to be able to understand the pragmatics of the
enemy as defined under the circumstances of war, as these
extended the circumstances of life and work. Since language
projects our time and space experience, and since wars are
related to our universe of existence, understanding the language
of the enemy is actually integrated in the combat plan and in a
society's general war effort. Climbing hills to establish a good
offensive position, crossing rivers in a defensive move,
parachuting troops behind enemy lines in a surprise maneuver are
human experiences characteristic of the pragmatic context of
literacy, impossible to relate to the goal pursued without the
shared conventions implicit in language. Some people still
believe that the master coup of World War II was the breaking of
the ciphers of the Enigma machines used by the Germans, thus
making the function of language, in such an effort of millions
of people, the center of the war effort. Polish cryptoanalysts
and the British operation, in which Alan Turing (the father of
modern computing) participated, succeeded in deciphering,
reconstructing, and translating messages that, re-enciphered in
Allied codes (the ULTRA material), decisively aided the war
effort.

By the end of the war, the world was already a different place.
But within the framework of war, and in direct connection to the
changes in practical human self- constitution, a structural shift
to a different dynamics of life and work had started. Various
aspects related to the determinism that eventually resulted in
the war started to be questioned through new practical
experiences: the need to overcome national interests; the need
to transcend boundaries, those boundaries of hate and destruction
expressed in the war; the need to share and exchange resources.
Visionaries also realized that the incremental increase in world
population, despite the enormous number of deaths, would result
in a new scale of human experiences that could not be handled
within a rigid system with few degrees of liberty.

The recent illiterate war in the Arabian Gulf, and the
never-ending terrorist attacks all over the world, can be seen,
in retrospect, as the progeny of the war that brought down the
civilization of literacy. The concept of Blitzkrieg and the
dropping of the A-bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a
foretaste of the quick, efficient, illiterate war.

The Nintendo war (a cliché revisited)

Military all over the world disposes of the highest technology.
Even countries that can afford to maintain outmoded large
armies-because of population density, relatively low salaries,
and the ability to draft the entire population-seek the latest
weapons that scientific discovery and technological progress can
offer. The weapons market is probably the most pervasive of all
markets. Among the numerous implications of this state of
affairs, none is more disconcerting than the fact that human
genius serves the cause of death and destruction. In some
countries, food reserves barely cover needs beyond a season or
two; but the military has supplies to cover years of engagement.

Today the military is in control of the most sophisticated
technology ever created. It is also becoming an institution of a
rather low level of literacy, publicly deplored and politically
questioned. This assertion applies less (but it still applies) to
the command level, and more to its enlisted men and women.
Addressing the topic of language proficiency, Darell Bott
provides an interesting portrait of a person who joins the
military intelligence unit of the National Guard as a linguist.
After training in the Defense Language Institute, the individual
loses 25 percent of his language skills and fails to meet
language proficiency standards. Every effort is made to change
this situation, even before understanding it. Darell Bott's
description does not refer to an accidental, individual failure,
but to the implicit dynamics of military practical experiences in
the civilization of illiteracy. A linguist, of all
professionals, does not choose to lose literate language
proficiency. This proficiency is just not necessary for
attaining the efficiency called for in the military. Not really
understanding this structural condition, armies introduce their
recruits to weaponry-the majority designed for the illiterate
warrior- and to the skills of reading and writing. These skills
dispense ideology, religion, history, geography, psychology, and
sex education in concentrated doses. The situation is
paradoxical: what defines the practical experience of the
military today-high technology, division of tasks, networking,
distributed responsibilities-conflicts with the traditional
expectations of clear lines of command, hierarchy, authority, and
discipline. The means that render useless the characteristics
stemming from literacy-based pragmatics are welcome, but the
human condition associated with them is frightening.

Yes, a literate soldier can be better indoctrinated, subjected to
the inherent arguments of literacy, of rules and authorities to
be obeyed. But the nature of the pragmatics of war has changed:
faster action makes reading-of instructions, commands,
messages-inappropriate, if not dangerous. For focusing on targets
moving at a speed far higher than that afforded by
literacy-based training, one needs the mediation of the digital
eye. Conflicts are as segmented as the world itself, since clear-
cut distinctions between good and bad no longer function
effectively. Centralized military experiences based on
structures of authority and hierarchy are counterproductive in
actual conflicts of complex dynamics.

The war in Vietnam is a good example of this. During this war,
instructions were transmitted from the top of the hierarchy down
to the platoons through commanders not adept at the type of war
Vietnam represented. Even the President of the USA was
effectively involved, more often than not through decisions that
proved detrimental to the war effort. The USA forgot the lesson
of its own pragmatic foundation in imitating, as it did in
Vietnam, the literate wars of Europe in a context of
confrontation characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy.
Memoirs, published too late (Robert MacNamara's is but one
example), reveal how the literate paradigm embodied in the
government and the military kept from the public essential
information that, in retrospect, rendered the loss of so many
human lives meaningless.

The luxury of a standing army and the cost of subjecting soldiers
to long cycles of training, literacy included, belong to the
previous pragmatic framework. The time of the life-long warrior
is over. The experience of war changes as quickly as new weapons
are invented. The new scale of humankind requires global levels
of efficiency impossible to attain if productive forces are
withdrawn from productive experiences. Once upon a time, the
military distinguished itself as a separate body in the social
texture. The civilization of illiteracy reintegrated the military
in the network of assignments and purposeful functions of the
pragmatics of high efficiency. From the complete suit of armor
worn in medieval Europe (before firearms rendered it ineffective)
to the plain-clothes military of today, not only have over 500
years gone by, but, more important, new forms of
self-constitution, and hence identification, became necessary
and real. Sulfur fumes used over 2,000 years ago in the battle at
Delium and the threat of chemical and biological weapons in the
Gulf War are superficially related. The same knowledge that goes
into producing new chemical and biological means used in high
efficiency agriculture and in food preparation goes into chemical
and biological weapons of mass destruction.

This is not a discourse in favor of efficient armies which are of
great help during natural disasters, nor is it a discourse in
favor of destructive wars, no matter who justifies them. If it
sounds like one, it is because the literate description of the
structural background against which, whether we like it or not,
the practical experience of the military takes place, bears the
stamp of literate praxis. In the civilization of illiteracy, the
military has come to acknowledge that there is little that can,
or should, be done to restore literacy as its coordinating
mechanism. Literacy is not necessarily the best system for
achieving optimal military performance at the level facilitated
by new technologies. Neither is it, as some would like to
believe, a means of avoiding war. The literate human being
proved to be a war beast equal, if not superior, to the
illiterate who was subjected to impression and conscription, or
who enlisted as a mercenary.

Current military research attempts to remove human beings from
the direct confrontation that war used to entail. Nothing
affects public support for military action more than body-bags.
These spoil the fun and games that expensive missiles provide,
the reason for which the Gulf War was nicknamed "the Nintendo
War." And missiles fare better among the Netizens, despite their
reluctance to embrace belligerence for settling disputes. Highly
efficient, sophisticated digitally programmed systems do not
relate to space and time the way humans do. This aspect gives the
machines an edge in respect to the implicit coordination
expected in war. The kinds of interaction that military praxis
requires makes literacy inadequate for coordinating the humans
who constitute today's armies. Time is segmented beyond human
perception and control; space expands beyond what a person can
conceive and control. Major components of a war machine are
placed in outer space and synchronized by extremely
time-sensitive devices. The Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbed
Star Wars) was the most advertised example. More trivial
systems, like those used in orienting troops in the desert, are a
matter of routine. The expressive power required for increasing
motivation, and for projecting a rational image of
irrationality, collides with the requirement for speed and
precision essential to accomplishing complex tactical and
strategic plans. Coordination of sophisticated information
systems machines does not have to rely on a language frequently
not precise enough, or fast enough, to accommodate very dynamic
processes. At speeds beyond that of sound at which battles are
fought with airplanes, rockets, satellites, and missiles, a
soldier observing a target would be late in pressing a trigger,
not to mention waiting for the command to fire.

The complexity of war machines is such that even their
maintenance and repair requires means independent of the
language that functions according to the rules of literacy. It
should come as no surprise that the electronic book has already
appeared in the military sphere of human experience. This book
is the digitally stored description of a device, not the printed
book that was once the manual describing it. If the device is an
airplane, or gun system on the airplane, or equipment on a ship,
the weight of manuals needed to explain its functioning, or to
support maintenance and troubleshooting, would keep the airplane
grounded. Any change in such a complex system would require
reprinting of thousands of pages. In its electronic version, the
book is a collection of data manipulated by a computer,
displayed in visual form when necessary, and programmed to make
recognition of the problem and its solution as simple as
possible-idiot-proof, in fact. It is not a sequential collection
of pages indexed in a table of contents and requiring a linear
reading strategy. The electronic book opens to the appropriate
page, and every page is generated only as necessary, according to
the maintenance or repair requirements of the case. Obviously,
the readers addressed by the electronic book are different from
the literate. They are at least partially visual literates who
know how to look at an image and follow pictographic prompts.
Instead of reading, the human operators carry out the required
operation, supervised by the system, counting only on the
feedback from the machine. Under these circumstances,
efficiency expectations make the use of the human being almost a
luxury. The paradigm of self-servicing machines, of circuits
that can fix themselves (von Neumann's genius at work) is
already a reality.

The electronic book-here presented in an application of military
relevance, although there is more to it than that-is one example
from the many that can be given regarding how our good old
verbal literacy is becoming obsolete. Electronic books
constituted over networks (wired or wireless) support a wide
range of collaborative activities. By their nature, military
experiences utilize such activities. Access to resources and to
an unlimited array of possible interactions is essential to
collaboration. Literate expression cannot fulfill these
requirements. Digital formats used in electronic books serve as
a medium for sharing and understanding goals. The subsumation of
individuality to the goal is probably the only specifically
military component that carries over from previous experiences
of war. Nevertheless, this subsumation does not follow the
patterns of centralism and the hierarchy of literacy. The methods
are different in that more initiative than ever before is
required from the soldiers. This initiative is embodied in
alternate means of expression and communication.

In electronically synchronized instruments, programs of
distributed tasks and massive parallel computation replace
literacy and literacy-based actions. Today's technology permits
flying at low altitude and high speed, but limitations of the
human biological system make this dangerous for the pilot. When
reaching a certain speed, the human can no longer coordinate
movements without which low altitude flying becomes suicidal.
But suicide is no alternative to avoiding enemy radar, since
there are no words capable of alerting a pilot to the heat
detector guided missile. Accordingly, languages addressing
machines and vision systems with detection capabilities change
the nature of human involvement in military situations. Again,
these languages make the participation of literate language less
and less significant.

Literacy-based means cannot provide for the expected
coordination. Mediation takes place among many distributed,
loosely interconnected devices; efficiency increases due to the
many resources integrated in such powerful and ubiquitous
systems. I give these examples-rudimentary in comparison to the
Nintendo war we watched on our television screens a few years
ago-from the viewpoint of someone who believes in life, peace,
and human understanding, but also as one who sees a progressive
discarding of literacy from one of the most language-dependent
forms of human interaction and coordination. As with everything
liberated from language and literacy, military practice was
dehumanized. This consequence is likely to be welcomed in its
more general significance-let machines kill machines. Just as in
factories and offices, the human being is replaced by programs
endowed with knowledge mediated by something other than
literacy. What changes the structure of military activity, and
language's participation in it, are the new languages embodied in
the technology. That computer-game simulations of flight or
target-shooting are basically equivalent to the systems of
precision and destruction used in the Gulf War need not be
repeated. But that players of computer games grow up with skills
expected from jet pilots and from operators of extremely
productive technology deserves attention and thought.

Do weapons speak and write and read? Do they understand the
language of the officer who decides when they are to be fired?
Is an intelligent weapon system capable of interpreting whether
a legitimate target should indeed be wiped out, even if at the
time of its use, circumstances would speak against destroying it
on moral grounds? I ask these questions-which can only be
answered with a "No"-on purpose. The literate attitude,
according to which military praxis is one of command and
execution requiring language, presents us with a contradiction.
Non-military practical experience is more and more mediated by
many languages and synchronized in a vast network of distributed
assignments. If military experiences were to remain
literacy-based, this would be equal to maintaining different
pragmatic structures and pursuing goals of disparate
efficiency. It is true that the literacy still involved in the
military is reflected in structures of hierarchy, a relative
expectation of centralism (in the USA, as in many other
countries, the President is the commander-in-chief), and
dependency on deterministic models. Nevertheless, the
expectation of efficiency makes critical the need to adopt
essentially non-hierarchic, self-management structures promoting
coordination and cooperative efforts within a distributed network
of different assignments. In the partial literacy of the
military, a redefinition of the process of goal- setting and the
pursuit of assignments other than destruction, such as relocation
of refugees or aiding vast populations subjected to natural
disasters, continuously takes place. Security is another area of
self-constitution that derives benefits from military praxis.
The smaller and more distributed wars through which terrorism
seeks to accomplish its goals have resulted in small armies of
highly trained security personnel to protect the civilian
public. Combat is truly global. But as opposed to the small war
of the Middle Ages, the illiterate terrorist respects no rules
and no higher authority.

No army could have changed the world more than the new system of
human relations geared toward achieving levels of efficiency
corresponding to numbers of people in pursuit of satisfying
their needs, and of others achieving levels of prosperity never
before experienced. Armies, as much as schools and universities,
as much as the nations they are supposed to defend, as much as
the nuclear family, and all the activities related to them and
all the products they generate, correspond to the structure of
praxis of a loosely connected world with patterns of human
practical experiences marked by individual success and dependent
on personal performance.

The look that kills

Smaller, more deployable, as efficient as possible-this
description sums up the characteristics of new weapons on the
wish-list of almost any army in the world. On a more specific
basis, defense officials have sketched some research and
development objectives. Here are some, obviously all subject to
obsolescence:

Worldwide all-weather forces for limited warfare, which do not
require main operating bases, including a force that is
logistically independent for 30 days

Tracking of strategically relocatable targets

Global command control, communications, and intelligence (C3I)
capabilities to include on-demand surveillance of selected
geographical areas and real-time information transfer to command
authorities

Weapon systems that deny enemy targeting and allow penetration of
enemy defenses by managing signatures and electronic warfare

Air defense systems to overmatch threat systems

Weapons that autonomously acquire, classify, track, and destroy
targets

Reduction of operations and support resources requirement by 50%
without impairing combat capability

Expected are a force powered by electricity (ecological
concerns), robotic tanks and aerial vehicles, and-this is not
science fiction-bionically enhanced soldiers with embedded
chips, able to sleep when commanded, and an exoskeleton system
allowing individuals to carry 400 pounds around the battlefield
(compared to the mere 100 they carry now). General Jerry C.
Harrison even formulated the following order: "Okay guys, let's
shoot number 49. Tune in your goggles to see but not be seen."
The look that kills (the proud accomplishment of
university-based research) becomes reality.

The only comment that can follow such a description is that all
the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy are
embodied in the expectations of military efficiency. Globality,
interconnectedness, open-ended goals and motivations, reduced
human involvement, and many partial literacies are all here,
presented in specific expectations. The questionable aspect is
the implicit theme of the permanence of the institution of the
military, probably the most resilient legacy of the civilization
of literacy. What the technology of the civilization of
illiteracy requires is the command of the abstractions (the
language) driving it, the partial literacy associated with this
language, pertinent to military or any other use. As one of the
partial literacies of this time, military literacy defines the
domain of action and the interpretation of such actions. It is
relevant, for instance, that disarmament treaties not be
formulated without military language, i.e., without the military
experts, the ones we want to release from their functions. Each
such treaty either discards a part of the language of weapons
and associated technologies, or makes it less relevant, as it
opens new avenues for increased military efficiency.

The new organization of the military is one of confronting
technologies and associated military literacy. Accordingly, to
talk about orders given by an officer, whether a weapon
understands such orders, and all similar logocentric examples,
means to still look at the military from the perspective of a
civilization from which it continuously distances itself.
Artificial eyes (radar, vision systems), odor detectors,
touch-sensitive devices, speed sensors, and many other digital
devices free the human being from confrontation and
progressively eliminate death from the equation of war. Those
who compare the photographic images of previous wars to animation
on computer game terminals compare a condition of direct
confrontation, of our own nature, and of the realization of the
limited condition of life to that of mediated experiences. The
night sky lit up by tracers, the eerie video-game-like actions,
the targets seen through remote cameras are of a realm different
from that of destruction and blood, where moral concern is
triggered. The expectation is pragmatic, the test is efficiency.

The survival of the military institution in its literate
structure and the lack of understanding of just what makes
literacy unnecessary in the pragmatic framework of today's
global world are not the same thing. The first aspect refers to
the immense inertia of a huge mechanism; the second involves the
difficult task of freeing ourselves, as products of literate
education, from ourselves. Recognition of such a fundamental
change does not come easy. Universities, bastions of literacy,
producing the illiterate technology of war, are caught in the
dilemma of negating their own identity, or becoming agents of
illiterate action. We hang on to the ideal of literacy, as well
as to the so-called necessity of strong defense-which reflects
literacy-based values such as national borders in a global
world-because we are not yet ready to cope with a new dynamics
of change that is not militarily determined, but which results
from structural necessities of a socio-economic nature. The
political map of the world changed drastically in recent years
because factors affecting the pragmatic framework of human
practical experience, at the scale we reached today, are at work.
Globality is not a dream, a political goal, a Utopian project,
but a necessity resulting from this new scale.

Book Five

The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the
Age of the Web

Collapse and catastrophe as opposed to hope and unprecedented
possibilities- these are the party lines in the heated
discussions centered on the dynamics of ongoing changes in which
the whole world is involved. Paul Virilio is quite expressive in
his formulation of the problem: "An accompanying evil...is the
end of writing, as it unfolds through image technology,
cinema/film, and television screen. [...] We don't read anymore,
we hardly write each other, since we can call each other on the
phone. Next, we will no longer speak! I'd really like to say:
this will indeed be the silence of the lambs!" No less powerful
in their assertions are those who see chances for social renewal
in interactions not embodied in the rules of literacy. The
electronic forum of the European Commission, involved in Project
Information Society, lists Ten Bones of Contention from which I
chose the following: "The system we are stuck with and
frantically trying to fix comes from another time and an
entirely different set of circumstances. It is changing
massively in front of our noses and needs to be completely
rethought and radically overhauled." The statement is less
expressive than Virilio's, but no less intolerant.

As discussions continue to bring up extremely important aspects
of the conflict marking this time of discontinuity, the billions
of people populating our world today constitute themselves
through a broad variety of practical experiences. A list of these
experiences-from primitive patterns of hunting and gathering food
to eye movement command of remote systems and applications
driven by voice recognition in the world of nanotechnological
synthesis-would only augment the confusion. Given this broad
pragmatic spectrum, no one could seriously project the future as
one of virtual communities, or of an electronic democracy,
without sounding overly naive or directly stupid. We know how
far we have come, but we do not really know where we are.

In advancing a comprehensive pragmatic perspective, I chose to
undertake an elaboration well beyond the short-breathed
argumentation peculiar to this moment in time. The advantage of
this approach deserves to be shared. Endorsing one perspective
or another, such as the California Ideology-defined by its
critics as "global orthodoxy concerning the relation between
society, technology, and politics"-or alternatives-the so-called
European model, or the transactional structure, or neo- Marxian
solutions, to name a few-is not an option. Indeed, the argument
of this book is that answers cannot result from infatuation with
technology, cultural self-replication, models based on
biological mechanisms, unfocused bionomic elaborations, or
incessant criticism of capitalism. Affirmations of a deep nature,
above and beyond the rhetoric of intellectual controversy and
political discourse, must originate from those affirmative
actions through which our identity as individuals, communities,
and society are established. The metaphor of the interactive
future is the expression of a simple thesis: At the global
scale, human interaction, as the concrete form of engaging
infinitely diverse cognitive resources, is the last available
resource on which the future of the species can depend.

Transcending literacy

Transcending literacy takes place in the practical experiences of
the pragmatics of high efficiency corresponding to the global
scale of humankind. This scale affects the constitution of human
communities and the interaction between individuals and
community. As has already been mentioned, Bedouins in the Sahara
Desert and Indians in the Andes Mountains are no less hooked up
to television than people living in technologically highly
developed countries. More important, the identities of peoples in
less developed societies on the global map of economic and
political interdependencies are already subject to the most
advanced processing techniques. In the ledgers of the global
economy, their existence is meticulously entered with respect to
what they can contribute and through what they need and can
afford. People constituting virtual communities, in Silicon
Valley, Japan, France, Israel, and any other place on this globe,
are subject to integration in the global scale through different
means and methods.

The expansion of non-literacy based human practical experiences
of self- constitution raises legitimate concern regarding the
social status of the individual and the nature of community
interdependencies. Children, for example, are subjected to more
images than language. They have the tendency to perceive time as
a continuous present and expect gratification to be as
instantaneous as it appears on television, or as easy to achieve
as connecting to exciting Web sites. They wind up experts in
interactive games and in controlling extremely fast processes.
Disconnected from culture and tradition, they are extremely
adaptable to new circumstances and in a hurry to ascertain their
version of independence. Sex, drugs, rap music, and membership in
cults or gangs are part of their contradictory profile. These
adolescents are the pilots of the Nintendo wars, but also the
future explorers of outer space, the physicists, biologists, and
geneticists who create new materials and subject machines of
breathtaking complexity to tasks in which every millionth of a
second is essential to the outcome. They are also the future
artists and record-breaking athletes; they are computer
programmers and designers of the future. And they will be the
service providers in an economy where change, predicated by the
need to swiftly match outcome to ever-increasing demand, cannot
be met by means burdened by the inertia and heavy-handedness of
literacy.

As data make clear, such individuals are bound to be less
involved in community life and less committed to the ethics of
the past. Moral absolutes and concern for others do not play a
major role in their lives, which are shaped by practical
experiences tending towards self-sufficiency, sometimes confused
with independence. In view of all these characteristics, which
reflect the decreasing role of literacy-based human
experiences, the question often asked is how will the relation
between the community and extremely efficient individuals,
constituted in relatively insular experience, be shaped?
Moreover, what will the status of community be? In this respect,
it is important to know what forces are at work, and to what
extent our own awareness can become a factor in the process.

In our day, many people and organizations deplore the state of
urban life (in the USA and around the world), high unemployment,
the feeling of disenfranchisement that individuals, and
sometimes whole communities, have. Immigrants of all the
countries they landed in; guest workers in the European
Community; the young generation in Asia, Africa, and the
countries that once made up the Eastern Block; the minorities in
the USA; the unemployed around the world-each of these groups
faces problems reflecting the relation between them as a
different entity and the society as a whole. Immigrants are not
necessarily welcome, and when accepted, they are expected to
integrate. Guest workers are required to work at tasks with which
citizens of the host country do not want to dirty their hands.
The young generation is expected to follow in their parents'
footsteps. One minority group will have problems with another,
and with society at large, in which they are supposed to
integrate. The unemployed are expected to earn their benefits
and eventually to accept whatever job is available. Literacy
implied expectations of homogeneity. Immigrants were taught the
language of their new homeland so they could become like any
other citizen. Guest workers, defined by their status in the
labor market, were expected to gradually become unnecessary and
to peacefully return to their native countries. Young people,
processed through education, and the unemployed, after being
offered some short retraining, would be absorbed in the machine
called national economy.

In respect to community, the historic sequence can be summarized
as follows: individuals loosely connected to their peers;
individuals constituting viable entities for survival; transfer
of individual attributes (self-determination, choice) to the
community; integration in centralized community; distribution of
tasks; decentralization. Each step is defined by the extent of
an individual's optimal performance: from very high individual
performance, essential to survival, to distributed
responsibility, until society takes over individual
responsibility. Liberal democracy celebrates the paradox of
socialized individualism. In this respect, it ends the age of
political battles (and, as we hear, the age of history), but
opens the age of increased access to abundance. Commercial
democracy is neither the result of political action nor the
expression of any ideology. Within its sphere of action, the
boundaries between the individual and the very unsettled
community represent the territory of conflict. Moral
individualism succeeds or fails within a framework of
adversarial human relations. Since moral individualism is
actually the underpinning of liberalism-"Do what's best for
yourself"-the liberty it advances is that of competitive access
to abundance. Socialized individualism accepts the state only as
purveyor of rights and possibilities (when the Hegelian notion of
the priority of the state over the individual is accepted de
facto), not as moral instance.

The transition to a pragmatics in which individual performance
becomes marginal, in view of the many coordinating mechanisms
ensuring redundancies that obliterate personal participation, is
definitive of this process. The relative significance of
malfunctions-breakdown in the legal and social system, for
example-as instances of self-awareness and new beginnings,
prompted by the need to remedy past practices, is different in
each of the stages mentioned. So is the possibility of change and
renewal. Creativity in current pragmatics is less and less an
issue of the individual and more the result of orchestrated
efforts in a large network of interactions. The underlying
structure of the civilization of illiteracy supports a
pragmatics of heterogeneity, distributed tasks, and networking.
Human practical experiences of self-constitution no longer
generate uniformity, but diversity. There is no promise of
permanency, even less of stable hierarchies and centralism. We
face new problems. Their formulation in literate form is
deceptive; their challenge in the context of illiteracy, in which
they emerge, is unprecedented. This is what prompts concerns
about the civilization of illiteracy.

Being in language

The two aspects of human self-constitution through
language-individual and community (society)-derive from the
basic issue of social interrelationships. One's language is not
independent of the language of the society, despite the fact
that, in a given society, people identify themselves through
noticeable peculiarities in the way they speak, write, read, and
carry on dialogue. Elements pertaining to language are
integrated in the human's biological structure. Still, language
does not emerge, as the senses do, but is progressively
acquired. The process of language acquisition is at the same
time a process of projecting human abilities related to
language's emerging characteristics. Regardless of the level of
language acquired, language overwrites the senses. It projects
integrated human beings-a unity of nature and language-prone to
identify themselves in the culture that they continuously shape.

While nature is a relatively stable system of reference, culture
changes as humans change in the process of their various
activities. To be within a language, as all human beings are,
and in a community means to participate in processes of
individual integration and social coordination. Individual
language use and social use of language are not identical.
Individuals constitute themselves differently than communities
do. That in each community there are elements common to the
individuals constituting it only says that the sum total of
individual practical experiences of language is different from
the language characteristic of the social experience. The
difference between the language of the individual and the
language of a community is indicative of social relationships. A
more general thesis deserves to be entertained: The nature and
variety of human interactions, within and without practical
experiences of self-constitution in language, describe the
complexity of the pragmatic framework. These interactions are
part of the continuous process of identification as individuals
and groups in the course of ascertaining their identity as a
particular species.

Acknowledged forms of relationships in work, family life, magic,
ritual, myth, religion, art, science, or education are evinced
through their respective patterns. Such patterns, circumscribed
by human self-constitution in the natural and cultural context,
are significant only retroactively. They testify to the human
being's social condition and express what part of nature and
what part of culture is involved in this condition. The
primordial significance of these two phenomena lies in the
expression of practical experiences followed, not preceded, by
cognition. Active participation of individuals in practical
experiences of language acknowledges their need to identify
themselves in the patterns of interrelation mentioned. People do
not get involved with other people because either party may be
nice. Involvement is part of the continuous definition of the
individual in contexts of conflict and cooperation, of
acknowledging similarity and difference. Any dynamics, in
biology or in culture, is due to differences.

People take language for granted and never question its
conventions. As a natural, inherited (in Chomsky's view)
attribute, rather like the human senses, language is not
reinvented each time practical experiences of constitution
through language take place. Neither is its usefulness
questioned-as happens with artifacts (tools in particular)-each
time our practical experience reaches the limits of language. The
breakdown of an artifact-i.e., its inappropriateness to the task
at hand-suggests the possible experience of crafting another.
The breakdown of language points to limits in the human
experience, not in its accessories. Malfunctioning of language
points to the biological endowment and the ways this is
projected in reality through everything people do. This is not
true in respect to other, less natural, sign systems: symbols,
artificial languages, meta-languages.

What changes from one scale of humankind, i.e., from one
situation of matching needs to means for satisfying them, to
another is the coefficient of the linear equation, not the
linearity as such. A small group of people can survive by
combining hunting, fruit gathering, and farming. The effort to
satisfy a relatively bigger group increases only in proportion
to the size of the group. In the known moments when a critical
mass, or threshold, was reached (language acquisition,
agriculture, writing, industrial production, and now the
post-industrial), the expectation of higher efficiency
corresponding to each scale of human experiences triggered
changes in the pragmatic framework. The awareness of language's
failure derives from practical experiences for which new
languages become necessary.

Miscommunication is an instance of language not suitable to the
experience. Lack of communication points to limitations of the
humans involved in an activity. Miscommunication makes people
question (themselves, others) about what went wrong, why, and
what, if anything, can be done to avoid practical consequences
affecting the efficiency of their activity. Other forms of
language malfunction can affect people as individuals or as
members of a community in ways different from those peculiar to
communication. The failure of political systems, ideologies,
religion(s), markets, ethics, or family is expressed in the
breakdown of patterns of human relations. We keep alive the
language of those political systems, ideologies, religions, and
markets even after noticing their failure, not by accident or
through oversight but because all those languages are us, as we
constitute ourselves as participants in a political process,
subjects of ideological indoctrination, religious believers,
commodities in the market, family members, and ethical citizens.
The inefficiency of these experiences reflects our own
inefficiency, more difficult to overcome than poor spelling,
etymological ignorance, or phonetic deafness.

The wall behind the Wall

An appropriate example of the solidarity between language
experience and the individual constituted in language is
provided by the breakdown of the East European block, and even
more pointedly by the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Nobody
really suspected that once the infamous Berlin Wall came down,
the people who lived to the east of it, trained and educated in
and for a pragmatic framework whose underlying structure was
reflected in their high degree of literacy, would remain captive
to it as their legal, social, and economic conditions changed.
Despite the common language- German is the language through which
national unity was ascertained-East Germans are prisoners of the
structural characteristics of the society projected on them
through literacy: centralism, clear-cut distinctions,
determinism, strong hierarchical structures, and limited choice.
The invisible but powerful inner conditioning of the East
Germans' literacy-categorically superior to that of their
Western brothers and sisters-is not adequate to the new
pragmatics attained in West Germany and raises obstacles to
East Germany's integration in a dynamic society. The illiterate
pragmatics of high efficiency, associated with high expectations
that seem to outpace actual performance, was foisted on East
Germans by the well intentioned, though politically
opportunistic, government from across a border that should never
have existed.

Things are not different in other parts of the world-Korea,
Hungary, Romania, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Croatia,
Serbia, etc., where the rhythms of pragmatic developments and
social, political, economic, national, and cultural developments
are totally desynchronized. The best poetry was written in East
Europe; most of the books ever written were read by its people.
It is impossible to ignore that the best theater in the world,
the most elaborate cinematography, the best choirs and dance
ensembles, and even the highest level of mathematical theory,
physics, and biology became possible in a context of
restriction, oppression, and disregard of individuals and their
creativity. It is also impossible not to finally realize that the
strength built on literacy-based structures was deceiving and
self-deceiving.

In the not-too-distant past, the people of these countries read
books, attended concerts and operas, and visited museums. Now,
if they are not in misery, they are as obsessed with indulging
in everything they could not have before, even if this means
giving up their spiritual achievements. Consumption is the new
language, even before a basis for efficient practical
experiences is put in place, and sometimes instead of it. The
old relation between the language of the individual and the
language of society displayed patterns of deception and
cowardice. The new emergent relation expresses patterns of
expectation well beyond the efficiency achieved, or hoped for, in
this integrated world of extreme competitive impact. The wall
behind the Wall is embodied in extremely resistant patterns of
human interaction originating in the context of literacy- based
pragmatics. With this example in mind, it is critical to
question whether there are alternatives to the means of
expression people use and to the social program they are
committed to-democracy. The experience of language today is very
different from that of the time when the Jacobins asserted a
notion of democracy as the general will (1798), under the
assumption of a literate background shared by all people.

The message is the medium

Language is a form of social memory. When saying something or
listening to some utterance, we assume a uniform use of words
and of higher level linguistic entities. As stored testimony to
similar practical experiences, language, stabilized in literacy,
became a medium for averaging them. The patterns of human
relations captured in language make people aware, in retrospect,
of the relevance of these patterns to human efficiency. So it
seems that we constitute ourselves as our own observations about
how we interact. These observations are identified as cognition,
because it is through interaction that we know each other and
know how, what, and when our immediate and less immediate needs
are satisfied. The paradigm of literacy asserts that human
self-constitution takes place in language, moreover that it could
effectively happen only in language, expressed in written forms
and made available through reading. Indeed, knowledge was
derived from praxis implying human interaction that integrated
language-based exchanges of information. This knowledge shaped
political, ideological, religious, and economic experiences, as
well as efforts to improve the technology used, and even broaden
the scientific perspective. The dimension of future is intrinsic
to life, from where it extends to language and literacy, as it
extends to artifacts, work, and pragmatic expectations.

The practical experience of language, as any other semiotic
practical experience, embodies agreements regarding the nature
and condition of whatever is constituted in language, human
identity included. The projection of the biological and cultural
characteristics on the world of our life and action establishes
elements of reference. The ability to see, hear, and smell, and
the ability to use tools are acknowledged as humans interact.
Ability and performance differ widely. Self-evaluation and
evaluation by others in the process of defining and achieving
goals of common interest are quite distinct. Language mediates,
hence it makes commitments part of the experience. When these
are not carried through, language can become a substitute medium
for confrontation.

Experiences of agreement and experiences of confrontation are
part of the patterns of interrelationship that define how the
language of individuals and the language of the community are
related. Socialization of language leads to paradoxical
situations: humans self-constituted in the language experience
perceive their own language as though confrontation is not among
themselves, but among their languages. Only a few years ago, we
heard about how much Americans and Russians liked each other,
although the language of politics and ideology was one of
conflict. Now we hear how Ossies (East Germans) and Wessies
(West Germans) have strong feelings about each other (one side
is described as lazy, the other as arrogant; one side as
cultivated, the other as ignoramuses; some as honest, the others
as corrupt) although the language they both share is the same
(though not quite). Iranians and Arabs, Armenians and
Georgians, and Serbs and Croats could add to this subject more
than we want to know about the language of prejudice.

Shortly before Malthus issued his equation of population growth
in relation to the growth of subsistence means, Rousseau stated
a law of the inverse proportion between size of population and
political freedom. Rousseau ascertained that the strength of
those exercising power over others increases as the number of
those subjected to power increases. The inverse proportion has
to do with the influence each individual has in the political
process-the more people, the weaker each voice. Scale is
critical, but so is understanding the relation between the
underlying structure of the pragmatics that defines the role of
language and how this role is carried out. Practical experiences
of power concentration are supported by literacy, whose implicit
structure and expectation is centralism and representation.
Literacy generates instances of conflict as well as institutions
that regulate the nature of agreements and disagreements.
Bureaucracy, the expression of these institutions, is the
offspring of the incestuous relation between literacy and
democracy.

A new scale of humankind, for which literacy-based practical
experiences are not adequate, and within which democracy-the
power of the people-can no longer be exercised (as Rousseau
pointed out), poses many challenges. Among them: What, if
anything, should replace literacy? What could replace democracy?
How do we free ourselves from the choking grip of bureaucracy?
Even before attempting an answer, the notion that the cultural
experience of literacy and the social experience of democracy
have reached their potential and are due for replacements has to
be understood.

In a different vein, the understanding that literacy participates
in power, of which people become aware in a given cultural and
social context, triggers another reaction: means of expression
and communication different from those originating under the
aegis of literacy participate in pragmatic processes that result
in access to power. It is not what a political leader says, but
how. Powerful images, sophisticated directing, and inspired
stage design or selection of backdrops become the message itself.
This is why "The message is the medium," a not irreverent
reversal of McLuhan's famous formula, phrases the altered nature
of the relation between language and the world. Interactions in
the networked world exemplify this rephrasing even better. The
redefined relationship between the many languages of our new
practical experiences and reality is expressed in the means and
values of the civilization of illiteracy.

Written into the pompous architecture of Mitterand's palaces and
monuments in Paris, and into the "new" Berlin reflecting the
medieval notion of centralized power-to the tune of hundreds of
billions of dollars-the message of literacy is turned into the
medium of brick-and-mortar. In an age of task distribution and
decentralization, the appropriate alternative is virtual
environments and an advanced infrastructure for access to
cognition. "The message is the medium" translates into the
requirement of overcoming infatuation with the past, never mind
trying to reinvent it. The statement demands that we create
alternative media that support the empowerment of individuals,
not the further consolidation of power structures that were
relevant in the past but which prevent the unfolding of the
future.

From democracy to media-ocracy

Democracy is a domain of expectations. Humans constitute
themselves as members of a democracy to the extent that their
practical experiences acknowledge equality, freedom, and
self-determination. The concept of democracy has varied
enormously over time. In ancient societies, it acknowledged
equality of the demos, and that free men-not slaves, not
women-were entitled to vote. Subject to many emancipations,
democracy denotes the right of people to elect their government
(based on the general will set forth by the Jacobins, as
mentioned above). How this self- government actually
works-through direct or indirect representation, in forms of
government based on the division of power between the executive
and legislative, or under monarchies-is itself a matter of
practical experiences pertinent to democracy. The democracy of
human misery and neglect is quite different from the democracy of
affluence. Equal access to work, education, health care, and
art, and equal access to drugs, murder, joblessness, ignorance,
and disease are far from being similar. A small town-meeting in
Vermont or one in a Swiss canton, effectively governing life in
town, is quite different from the forms of political
self-governance in countries where the central power effectively
overrides any self-governance. The same can be said of the
overriding power of other factors-the economy, for instance.

Democracy is a major form of social and political experience. The
power of the majority, expressed in votes, is only one of its
possible manifestations. When only a minority of the population
votes, the so-called majority ceases to be representative, no
matter what the formal rules say. We live by democratic practices
of delusion, and multiply, enthusiastically, their effect
through the literate discourse of democracy. As a domain of
expectations, mirroring hope implicit in literacy, democracy
conjures meaning only if it is paralleled by democratic
participation in social and political experiences. When one of
the two terms of this critical equation diminishes-as is the case
with participation-democracy diminishes in the same proportion.
There are many reasons for decreasing participation. In
countries where effective democracy was replaced by democratic
demagoguery, changes, such as those brought about by
revolutions, revolts, and reforms, initially mobilize the
people, almost to the last citizen. We are still observing a
phenomenon symptomatic of democracy in East Europe and the
republics of the former Soviet Union. From the almost unanimous
enthusiasm over renewal, leading to formal conditions for
democracy, individual participation in government is slowly
diminishing. What are the causes of this phenomenon, which is
paralleled by diminishing interest in religion, art, and
solidarity?

Many answers are given, and even more hypotheses are advanced:
psychological fatigue, lack of democratic tradition, egotism,
desire to catch up with affluent societies. From the
perspective of the relationships characteristic of an
individual's literate language and literacy programs of societies
claiming to be democratic, the answer should be sought in the
conflict between literacy-based values and the expectations of
efficiency characteristic of the new scale of humankind.
Efficiency made possible by a pragmatics emancipated from the
structural characteristics reified in literacy converted
democracy into commercial democracy. People can buy and sell
whatever they want. Their equality is one of access to the
market of affluence; their freedom is sealed in the mutually
acknowledged right to plenty. Democratization, which people
believe is taking place all over the world, is a process of
absorbing newer and newer groups of people into prosperity, into
the superficial culture of entertainment (including sports
competition), and into a government that guarantees the right to
wealth and consumption.

This description can easily become suspect of moralizing instead
of tight analysis. Literacy embodies certain expectations from
democratic institutions. Like other institutions, this type is
also subjected to the test of efficiency. When the institutions
of democracy fail this test, they are, in the language of
democracy, diverted to consolidating not democracy, as a
practical experience of the people, but the institution.
Bureaucracies are generated as a diversion of democracy from its
social and political focus in an incestuous love with the
language in which its principles are enunciated. Mediation
insinuates itself between the people and the institutions of
democracy.

Media generalize the role of the literate system of checks and
balances and, as mass-media, becomes a participant in the
equation of power. Taking full advantage of means that
characterize the civilization of illiteracy-the power of images,
instantaneous access to events, the power of networking,
communicative resources of new technologies-the media play a
double role: representative of the people and representative of
power. Since their own domain of experiences is representation,
the media depend on the efficiency of the practical experiences
of people's self-constitution in productive activities. Mass
media activity is carried not by its own motivations, but by
those of the market, whose locus it becomes. Consequently, the
equation of democracy becomes the equation of competition and
economic success. The media select and endorse causes and
personalities appropriate to the process of marketing democracy.
Instead of government, and the responsibilities associated with
it, democracy becomes the people's right to buy, among other
things, their government and the luxury of transferring their
democratic responsibilities to its institutions.

Media bashing is a favorite sport of politicians whenever things
don't work the way they expect. It is also practiced by the
public, especially in times of economic uncertainty or during
political developments that seem out of control (wars, violent
mass demonstrations, elections). Bashing or not, criticism of
the media reflects the fact that media expanded their
participation in power. The practical experience of public
relations, an outgrowth of media participation in power, uses the
methods of the media to promote causes and personalities as
products best suited for a certain need: support hungry
children, elect a sheriff, endorse a tax hike or reduction, etc.,
etc. The domains of competence and ability are effectively
disconnected from the domain of representation. Literacy-based
methods of establishing hierarchies and influencing choices are
enforced by new technologies for reaching targets, even in the
most saturated contexts of information dissemination. Advisers
committed only to the success of their endeavors use the
discriminating tools of the market in order to adapt the message
to all those who care to play the muddled game of democracy.

Information brokerage, feedback strategies, symbolic social
engineering, mass media, psychology, and event design form an
eclectic practical experience. Calling it by a certain
name-media-ocracy-is probably tendentious. But the shoe seems to
fit. From all we know, the effort of this activity does not go
towards promoting excellence or persuading communities that
democracy entails quality and defending self-government from
corruption. It rather focuses on what it takes to convince that
mediocrity adequately reflects the quest for equality, and is
the most people can expect if they are not dedicated to the
exercise of their rights. The literate and illiterate means used
to defend democracy, and the entire political system built on
the democratic premise, make it only more evident that
democracy, an offspring of language-based practical experiences,
is far from being the eternal and universal answer, the climax of
history. Indeed, the scale of humankind renders impossible
participation in power through the definition of ideals and
goals, as well as awareness of the consequences of human
actions. Alternative forms of participating in democracy need to
be found in the characteristics of the pragmatics corresponding
to the new scale. Such alternatives have to embody the
distributed nature of work, better understanding of the
connection (or lack thereof) between the individual and the
community, awareness of change as the only permanence, and
strategies of co-evolution, regarding equally all other people
and the nature to which humans still belong. Democracy is the
offspring of human experiences based on the postulate of
sameness. The alternatives derive from the dynamics of
difference.

Self-organization

Time, energy, equipment, and intellect have been invested in the
research of artificial life. Knowledge derived from this
research can be used to advance models of individual and social
life. This knowledge tells us that diversity and
self-organization, for instance, prompted by structural
characteristics and externalized through emerging functions,
maintain the impetus of evolution in a living system. Obviously,
humans belong to such a system. In the past, we used to focus on
social forms of variable organization. Within such forms,
iterative optimization and learning take place as an expression
of internal necessities, not as a result of adopted or imposed
rules of functioning.

The entire dynamics of reproduction that marks today's states
and organizations in the business of population control, needs
to be reconnected to the pragmatic context. As a result, we can
expect that communities structured on such principles are endowed
with the equivalent of social immune systems, able to recognize
themselves and to counteract social disease. Reconnection to the
pragmatic context needs to be understood primarily as a change
of strategy from telling people what has to be done to engaging
them in the action. All the promises connected to the
fast-growing network of networks are based on this fundamental
assumption. A social immune system ought to be understood as a
mechanism for preventing actions detrimental to the effective
functioning of each and every member of the community. Social
disease entails connotations characteristic of a system of good
and bad, right and wrong. What is meant here is the possibility
that individual effort and pragmatic focus become disconnected.
Reconnection mechanisms are based on recognition of diversity and
definition of unity, means, goals, and ideals.

Adaptability results from diversity; so does the ability to
allocate resources within the dynamic community. More than in
the past, and more than today, individuals will partake in more
than one community. This is made possible by means of interaction
and by shared resources. Today's telecommuting is only a
beginning when we think of the numbers of people involved and
the still limited scope of their involvement. The old notion of
community, associated mainly with location, will continue to give
way to communities of interests and goals. Virtual communities
on the Internet already exemplify such possibilities. The major
characteristic of such self-organizing social and cultural cells
is their pattern of improvement in the course of co-evolution,
which reflects the understanding that political and social
aspects of human interaction change as each person changes.

The model described, inspired by the effort to understand life
and simulate properties pertinent to life through simulations,
applies just as much to the natural as to the artificial. Global
economy, global political concerns, global responsibility for the
support system, global vested interests in communication and
transportation networks, and global concern for the meaningful
use of energy should not lead to a world state- not even
Boorstin's Republic of Technology will do-but to a state of many
worlds. Complexities resulting from such a scale of political
practical experiences are such that self-destruction, through
social implosion, is probably what might happen if we continue
to play the game of world institutions. The alternative
corresponds to decentralization, powerful networking associated
with extreme distributions of tasks, and effective integrating
procedures.

In more concrete terms, this means that individuals will
constitute their identity in experiences through which their
particular contribution might be integrated in different actions
or products. They will share resources and use communication
means to optimize their work. Access to one another's knowledge
through means that are simultaneously open to many inquiries is
part of the global contract that individuals will enter, once
they acknowledge the benefits of accessing the shared body of
information and the tools residing on networks. Self-organizing
human nuclei of diverse practical experiences will allow for the
multiplicity of languages of the civilization of illiteracy,
freedom from bureaucracy, and more direct co-participation in the
life of each social cell thus constituted.

Advanced specialized knowledge, empowering people to pursue their
practical goals with the help of new languages (mathematical
notation, visualization, diagramming, etc.), usually insulates
the expert from the world. If circumstances are created to
meaningfully connect practical experiences that are relevant to
each other, fragmentation and synthesis can be pursued together.
We are very good at fragmentation-it defines our narrow
specialties. But we are far less successful in pursuing
synthesis. The challenge lies in the domain of integration.

Since human activity reflects the human being's
multi-dimensionality, it is clear that nuclei of overlapping
experiences, involving different perspectives, will develop in
environments where resources are shared and results constitute
the starting point for new experiences. The identity of people
constituting themselves in the framework of a pragmatics that
ensures efficiency and diversity reflects experiences through
many literacies, and survival skills geared towards
co-evolution, not domination. Co-evolving technology is only an
example. From the relatively simple bulletin boards of the early
1960's to the Internet and Web of our day, co-evolution has been
a concrete practical instance of the constitution of the
Netizen. Michael Hauben, who coined the term, wanted to describe
the individuals working towards building a cooperative and
collective activity that would benefit the world at large.
Conflicts are not erased. The Net community is not one of
perfection but of anticipated and desired diversity, in which
imperfection is not a handicap. Its dynamics is based on
differences in quantity and quality, and its efficiency is
expressed in how much more diversity it can generate.

The solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution?

The inadequacy of literacy and natural language, undoubtedly the
main sign system of the human species, is brought more
forcefully to light against the background of new forms of
practical experiences leading to human self-constitution through
many sign systems. Extremely complex pragmatic circumstances,
predicated by needs that long ago surpassed those of survival,
make the limits of literacy-based language experiences stand
out. This new pragmatics demands that literacy be complemented
with alternative means of expression, communication, and
signification. The analysis of various forms of human activity
and creativity can lead to only one conclusion: the patterns of
human relationships and the tools created on the foundation of
literacy no longer optimally respond to the requirements of a
higher dynamics of human existence.

Misled by the hope that once we capture extensions in
language-everything people do in the act of their practical
self-identification-we could infer from these to intensions-how
a particular component unfolds-we have failed to perceive the
intensional aspects of human actions themselves. For instance, we
know of the diverse components of the practical experience of
mathematics-analytic effort, rationality, symbolism, intuition,
aesthetics. But we know almost nothing about each component.
Some simply cannot be expressed in language; others are only
reduced to stereotype through literate discourse. Does the power
of a mathematical expression rely on mathematical notation, or
on aesthetic quality? How are these two aspects integrated?
Where and how does intuition affect mathematical thinking?

The same criteria apply, but more critically, to social
activities. Interactions among people involve their physical
presence; their appearance as beautiful, or fit, or appropriate;
their capability to articulate thoughts; their power of
persuasion; and much more. Each component is important, but we
know very little about the specific impact each one has.
Surprised at how dictators come to power, and even more by mass
delusion, with or without television as part of the political
performance, we still fail to focus on what motivates people in
their manifestations as racists, warmongers, hypocrites, or, for
that matter, as honest participants in the well-being of their
fellow humans. When the argument is rotten but the mass follows,
there is more at work than words, appearance, and psychology.
Language has projected the experience involved in our cultural
practice, but has failed to project anything particularly
relevant to our natural existence. Thus patterns of cultural
behavior expressed in language seem quite independent of the
patterns of our biological life, or at least appear to have
acquired a strange, or difficult to explain, independence.

We must give serious thought to our obsession with
invulnerability, easy to conceptualize and express in language.
It is, for instance, embodied in the medicine of the
civilization of literacy. The abrupt revelation of AIDS, marking
the end of the paranoia of invulnerability, might help us
understand the ramifications of the uncoupling of our life in
the domain of culture-where human sexuality belongs-and our life
in the domain of nature-where reproduction belongs. Magic
reflected the attempt to maintain a harmonious relation with the
outside world. It has not yet been decided whether it is
medicine-the reified experience of determinism applied in the
realm of individual well being-or a parent's embrace that calms
a baby's colic; or whether the psychosomatic nature of modern
disease is addressed by the technology of healthcare in our days.
What we already know is that populations were decimated once new
patterns of nourishment and hygiene were imposed on them. When
an attained balance was expelled by a foreign form of balance,
life patterns were affected. This happened not only to
populations in Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but also
in the native populations of the American continents. Medical
concepts resulting from analytic practical experiences of
self-constitution-many reified in the medicine of the
civilization of literacy-defy the variety of possible balances
and embody the suspicion that "The solution is the problem."

Literacy, when applicable, works very well, but it is not the
universal answer to humankind's increasingly complex
pragmatics. In the fortunate position of not having totally
abandoned experiences with sign systems other than language,
people have been able to change the patterns of training,
instruction, industrial production, modern farming, and
healthcare. Patterns of practical understanding of domains which
for a very long time were concealed by literacy are also
affected: pattern recognition, image manipulation, design. As a
result, new methods for tackling new areas of human experience
are becoming possible. Instead of describing images through
words, and defining a course of action or a goal through a text,
and then having the text control the use of visual elements,
people use the mediating power of design systems with
integrated planning and management facilities. A new product, a
new building, and concepts in urban planning are generated while
the pertinent computer program computes data pertinent to cost,
ecological impact, social implications, and interpersonal
communication. The practice of transcending literacy, while still
involving literacy, also resulted in the development of new
skills: visual awareness, information processing, networking,
and new forms of human integration, far less rigid than those
characteristic of integration exclusively through verbal
language.

There is no need to eliminate literacy, as there is no need to
reduce everything to literacy. Where it is still applicable,
literacy is alive and well. On the Internet and World Wide Web,
it complements the repertory of means of human interaction
characteristic of computer-mediated communication. Television
holds a large audience captive in one-way communication. The
ambition of the World Wide Web is to enable meaningful
one-to-one and one-to-many interactions.

The civilization of illiteracy is one of diversity and relies on
the dynamics of self- organization. But in order to succeed,
several conditions need to be met. For instance, we have not yet
developed in appropriate practical experiences of human self-
constitution the ability to think in media other than natural
language. Like many beginners in a new language, people still
translate from one language to another. When this does not work,
they look for help in the language they know, instead of
formulating questions in the alternative language in which they
suspect they can be answered. After intuition was eliminated by
rationality and system, only minor effort is made towards
understanding how intuition comes about, whether in mathematics,
medicine, sports, the arts, market transactions, war skills,
food preparation, and social activities.

In the civilization of literacy, people were, and to a great
extent still are, able to ignore some forms of human
relationships without affecting the general outcome of human
practice. Within the new scale and dynamics, human civilization
relies on the interplay of more elements. The timing involved in
integrating this diversity is much more difficult to accomplish
through literacy-based methods, even though timing is critical
to the outcome. Literacy captures the rough and linear level of
relations. New practical experiences of higher efficiency
require finer levels and tools adequate to non- linear phenomena
for dealing with the parallel processes involved in the self-
constitution of individuals and of society.

From possibilities to choices

If the multiplication of possibilities were not to be met by
effective ways of making choices, we would be sucked into the
whirlwind of entropy. In practice, this translates into an
obvious course of events: allowing for new possibilities, which
sometimes take the appearance of alternatives, means to disallow
certain known and practiced options of confirmed output. For
example, where democracy is taken over by bureaucracy, the town
meeting fulfills only a decorative function. There is nothing of
consequence in the American President's State of the Union
address, or in the conventions where political parties nominate
candidates for the Presidency. With the choice of local and
national political representation, the possibility to directly
participate in power is precluded.

The possibility of using sign systems other than language is far
from being a novelty. Even the possibility of achieving some
form of syncretism is not new by any means. What is new is the
awareness of their potential malfunctioning and of the potential
for losing control over forms of praxis that become highly
complex. From among the many ways the relation between the
individual and the community is manifested, the condition of the
legal system is probably the best example. Whether independent,
constituting a domain of regulations and checks with its own
motivations, or part of other components of social and political
life, the institution of justice encodes its typologies,
classifications, and rules in laws. This domain parallels one of
human interactions where expected values are permanently
subjected to the scrutiny of the pragmatic activity. Integrity
of the individual and his lawfully acquired goods, the binding
nature of commitments, and prohibition of misrepresentation or of
rules essential to the well being of the community are rules on
which legal experience developed. Right and wrong, once
identified under circumstances of direct practical experience
through consequences for the community's well being, are now
constituted in a domain with a life and rules of its own.
Killing, stealing, and misrepresentation are actions well defined
in the written texts of the law. But the law itself, anchored in
literacy, consequently detached itself from the real world and
now constitutes its own reality and motivations. Since this is
the case, it is no surprise that legal practice turns out to be
nothing more than interpretations of texts and attempts to use
language to bring about an outcome based on chimera, not
reality.

The legal system reacts to innovation by forcing rules
originating in other pragmatic frameworks-the strong evidence of
DNA analysis is only one example-to fit its own criteria of
evaluation. Instead of constituting a proactive context for the
unfolding of the human genius, legal praxis ends up defending
only its own interests. The jury system in the USA might appear
to many people as an expression of democracy. In the pragmatic
context in which the jury system originated, even the notion of
peer made sense, since it applied to a reduced and relatively
homogeneous community. Today, the jury has become part of the
odious equation of the dispute between lawyers. The jury is
selected to reflect the lowest common denominator so that its
members, mostly incompetent, can be manipulated in the
adversarial game of the performance produced under the generic
label of justice.

As an extension of literate language, the experience of legal
language builds on its own rules for efficient functioning and
establishes criteria for success that corrupt the process of
justice. It is a typical example of malfunctioning, probably as
vivid as the language of politics. Judicial and political praxes
document, from another angle, how democracy fails once it
reaches the symbolic phase manifested in the bureaucracy of the
legal system and of reified power relations.

Coping with choice

Self-definition implies the ability to establish a domain of
possibilities. But possibilities do not present themselves
alone. In the transition from the civilization of literacy to
the new civilization of illiteracy, the global domain of
possibilities expands dramatically, but the local, individual
domains probably narrow in the same proportion. This happens
because what at the global level looks like a multiplication of
choices, at the level of the individual appears as a matter of
effective selection procedures. As long as there is little to
choose from, selection is not a problem.

The primitive family had few choices regarding nourishment,
self-reproduction, and health. Choices increased as the
practical experiences of self-constitution diversified.
Migrating populations chose from among selections different from
those available to settled human beings. The first known cities
embodied a structure of relations for which written language was
appropriate. The megalopolis of our day embodies a universe of
choices on a different scale. Within such a domain of
possibilities, there are no effective selection procedures.
Reduction from practically infinite choices to a finite number
of realizations is at best a matter of randomness and exposure.
Inversely, the slogan "Act locally, think globally" can easily
lead to failure. Many accomplishments that are successful on a
local scale would fail if applied globally if they do not
integrate awareness of globality from the beginning.

Within literacy, the expectation that literate people receive, by
virtue of knowledge of language, good selection
procedures-considered as universal and permanent as literacy
itself-was part of its multi-layered self-motivation. In the
civilization of illiteracy, this expectation gives way to
pursuing consecutive choices, all short-term, all of limited
scope and value-free, which even seem to eliminate one's own
decision. It appears that choices grab individuals. This explains
why one of the main drives in the world today is towards greater
numbers of people seeking to live in cities. Once a choice is
exhausted, the next follows as a consequence of the scale, not as
a result of searching for an alternative. This applies as well
to professional life, itself subject to the shorter cycles of
renewal and change.

The powerful mechanism of social segmentation, the result of the
many mediating mechanisms in place, makes the problem of coping
with choice look like another instance of democracy at work.
Let's consider some of these choices: to distribute, or not to
distribute, condoms to high school and junior high school
students; to confirm or deny the right to end one's life
(pro-choice or pro-life); to expand heterosexual family
privileges to homosexual cohabitation; to introduce uniform
standards of testing in education. These examples are removed
from the broader context of human self-constitution and
submitted, through the mechanism of media- ocracy, more to market
validation than to a responsible exercise of civic
responsibility.

Mediation mechanisms characteristic of the civilization of
illiteracy cause the choices that a community faces to become
almost irrelevant on the individual level. In the new universe
of possibilities, expanding as we speak, human beings are giving
up autonomy and self-determination, as they participate in
several different communities. They share in the apparent
choices of society insofar as these match their own
possibilities and expectations. But they often have the means to
live outside a society when their choices (regarding peace, war,
individual freedom, lifestyle, etc.) are different from those
pursued by states. Citizens of the trans-national world partake
in the dynamics of change to a much higher degree than do people
dedicated to the literate ideals of nationalism and ethnicity.

We can fly to the moon (and people will, either as participants
in the space program or as paying passengers). We can afford
partaking in unique events- concerts, contests, auctions-some in
person, others through the electronic means they can afford.
Each individual can become president or member of some
legislative body; but only some can afford applying for these
positions. Whether through wealth, intelligence, sensitivity,
race, gender, age, or religion, we are not equal in our
possibilities, although we are equal in our rights. Coping with
choice involves matching goals and means of achieving them.
Literacy is a poor medium for this operation, which takes place
between individuals and the many communities to which they
belong. The various languages of the pragmatic identification of
all those involved in coping with choice operate more
effectively.

The network of interrelations that constitute our practical
existence and the patterns of these relations will continue to
change and become globally more complex and locally more
confined. While we gain global freedom, we lose local dynamics.
At the particular level at which we input our mediating
performance, we are in almost total control of our own
efficiency. Each of the many service providers for industry,
physicians, lawyers, or writers is an example of local choices
reflected in the increased productivity of those they service
and of their own output. At higher levels, where these services
are integrated-regardless of whether they provide rust control,
X-ray processing, graphic design, or accounting-choices become
more limited. Consequently, coordination becomes critical. The
strategy of outsourcing is based on the notion that maximum
efficiency requires specialization that companies cannot
achieve. If the process continues in the same direction,
coordination will soon be the most difficult problem of
practical experience. This is due to the complexity that
integration entails, and to the fact that there are no effective
procedures for simplifying it. The simpler each task, the more
complex the integration. Short of submitting a law that reflects
this situation, another thesis can be formulated: Overall
complexity is preserved regardless of how systems are
subdivided, or tasks distributed. Complexity is transferred from
the task to the integration.

Trade-off

Awareness of possibilities is more direct than that of
complexities. Trading choice and self-determination for less
concern and higher rewards in terms of satisfying needs and
desires is not an exciting alternative. Language has not brought
the promised awareness of the world, but has made possible a
strategy of confinement. The loss of language seems to trouble
mainly people who work at language dissemination, maintenance,
and awareness. However, after taking language for granted for a
long time, people notice those instances when, in need of a word
or trying to function in a world of language conventions,
language is not up to the task. Faced with unprecedented
experiences in scientific experimentation, large-scale
communication, radical political change, and terrorism, people
observe that they do not have the language for these phenomena.
They look for words and ultimately realize that those words,
assumed to exist, cannot be found because the pragmatic framework
requires something other than language. In contrast to tools,
like the ones we keep around the house or see mechanics and
plumbers using, language is not taken away or lost because we
are our language. What is lost from language is a certain
dimension of human being and acting, of appropriating reality
and producing and exchanging goods, of acknowledging our
experience and sharing it with others.

Cultural, historical, economic, social, and other developments
contribute to our notion of literacy. Its crisis is symptomatic
of everything that made literacy necessary and is based on the
particular ways in which literate societies function. This
statement does not suggest that the crisis of literacy implies a
cultural or economic crisis. For instance, women's emancipation
did not start with the emancipation of language. In Japanese, in
which the man-woman distinction goes so far as to require that
women use a different vocabulary than men, women's emancipation
could hardly be considered. As an expression of a specific type
of social relations, this distinction in language maintains a
status against which women might feel entitled to react.

Many other patterns of human interaction, which prompt practical
action for change, are deeply seated in language. Watching our
children, upon whom we impose literacy, grow, we almost always
count the words they learn and evaluate their progress in
articulating desires, opinions, and questions. What we neglect
to ask is what kind of world does language bring to them in the
process of learning language? What kind of practical experiences
does language make possible? When children break loose of our
language, it is almost too late to understand the problem.
Language use seems so natural that its syntactic and
value-loaded conventions are not questioned. We accept language
as it is projected on us. It comes with gods or God, goodness,
right, truth, beauty, and other values, as well as distinctions
(sexual, racial, generational) that are held to be as eternal as
we were taught that language itself is. We project language on
our children only in order to be challenged by them through their
own language, pretty much attuned to their different pragmatic
frame of reference.

As a framework within which parents, and ultimately society, want
children to think, communicate, and act, language appears to
have two contradictory characteristics: liberty and constraint.
The all-encompassing change we are witnessing concerns both. In
order to function effectively in a society of very specialized
patterns of interaction, people realize that a trade-off between
liberties and constraints is inescapable. On the level of social
and cultural life, people realize that constraints, represented
by accepted prejudices and ideologies, impinge upon their limited
space of decision-making and infringe upon individual integrity.
Language turned out to be not only the medium for expressing
liberating ideals, but also a stubborn embodiment of old and new
prejudices. It is also the instrument of deception, and bears in
its ideal of literacy the most evident deception of all-literacy
as a panacea for every problem the human species faces, from
poverty, inequity, and ignorance to military conflict, disease,
starvation, and even the inability to cope with new developments
in science and technology. Interestingly enough, Netizens
believe the same thing regarding the Internet! In their campaign
for free choice of literacy, they are just as dogmatic about
their type of literacy as the Modern Language Association, for
example, is about the old-fashioned kind.

We can accept that this world of enormously diversified forms of
human practice (corresponding to the diversity of human beings)
requires more than one type of literacy. But this is not yet
sufficient condition for changing the current premise of
education if the avenues of gaining knowledge are not developed.
The assumption that language is a higher level system of signs
is probably correct, but not necessarily significant for the
inference that in order to function in a society, each member has
to master this language. To free ourselves of this inference
will take more than the argument founded on the efficiency of
illiterate and aliterate individuals who constitute their
identity in realms where literacy does not dominate, or ceased
being entirely necessary.

Learning from the experience of interface

The exciting adventure of artificially replicating human
characteristics and functions is probably as old as the
awareness of self and others. Harnessing tools and machines in
order to maximize the efficiency of praxis was always an
experience in language use and craftsmanship. So far, the most
challenging experience has been the use of computers to
replicate the ability to calculate, process words and images,
control production lines, interpret very complex data, and even
to simulate aspects of human thinking.

Programming languages serve as mediating entities. Using a
limited vocabulary and very precise logic, they translate
sequences of operations that programmers assume need to be
executed in order to successfully compute numbers, process
words, operate on images, and even carry out the logical
operations for playing chess and beating a human opponent at the
game. A programming language is a translation of a goal into a
description of the logical processes through which the goal can
be achieved. Computer users do not deal with the programming
language; they address the computer through the language of
interface: words in plain English (or any other language for
which interface is designed), or images standing for desired
goals or operations. The entire machine does not speak or
understand an interface's high-level language. The interaction
of the user with the machine is translated by interface programs
into whatever a machine can process. Providing efficient
interfaces is probably as important as designing high level
abstract programming languages and writing programs in those
languages. Without such interfaces, only a limited number of
people could involve themselves in computing. The experience of
interface design can help us understand the direction of change
to which the new pragmatics commits us. At the end of the road,
the computer should physically disappear from our desks. All that
will be needed is access to digital processing, not to the
digital engine. The same was true of electricity. Once upon a
time it was generated at the homes or workplaces where the
people who needed it could use it. Now it is made available
through distribution networks.

Natural language accomplished the function of interface long
before the notion came into existence. Literacy was to be the
permanent interface of human practical experiences, a unifying
factor in the relation between the individual and society.
Ideally, interface should not affect the way people constitute
themselves; that is, it should be neutral in respect to their
identity. This means that people can change and tasks can vary.
The interface would account for the change and would accommodate
new goals. Even in their wildest dreams, computer scientists and
researchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence,
who work with intelligent interfaces, do not anticipate such a
living interface. Interfaces affect the nature of practical
experiences in computing. As these become more complex, a
breakdown occurs because interfaces do not scale up. Instead of
supporting better interactions, an interface can hamper them and
affect the outcome of computing. Language has performed quite
well under the pressure of scaling up. It grows with each new
human practical experience and can adapt to a variety of tasks
because the people constituted in language adapt. In the intimate
relation between humans and their language, language limits new
experiences by subjecting them to expectations of coherence.
Language's expressive and communicative potential reaches its
climax as the pragmatics that made it possible and necessary
exhausts its own potential for efficiency. Literate language no
longer enhances human abilities in practical experiences outside
its pragmatic domain. Literacy only ends up limiting the scope
of the experience to its own, and limits human growth.

Many impressive human accomplishments, probably the majority of
them, are testimony to the powerful interface that literate
language is. But these accomplishments are equal testimony to
what occurs when the interface constitutes its own domain of
motivations, or is applied as an instrument for pursuing goals
that result in a forced uniformity of experiences. If literacy
had been a neutral mediating entity, it would have scaled up to
the new scale of humankind and the corresponding efficiency
expectations, once the threshold was reached. Successive forms of
religious, scientific, ideological, political, and economic
domination are examples of powerful interface mechanisms. To
understand this predicament, we can compare the sequence of
interfaces connected to the experience of religion to the
sequence of computer-user interfaces. Notwithstanding the
fundamental differences between these two domains of practical
experience, a striking similarity has to be acknowledged. Both
start as limited experiences, open to the initiated few, and
expand from a reduced sign system on interactions to very rich
multimedia environments. From a limited secretive domain to the
wide opening afforded by a trivial vocabulary, both evolve as
double-headed entities: the language of the initiated
individuals interfaced with the language of the individuals
progressively integrated in the experience. No one should
misconstrue this comparison, meant only to illustrate the
constitutive nature of the experience of interfacing. We could
as well focus on the experiences of economics, politics,
ideology, science, fashion, or, even better, art.

The experience of literacy resulted in some consistency, but also
in lost variety. Every language of interaction (interface) that
disappeared took with it into oblivion experiences impossible to
resuscitate. The relation between the individual and community,
once very rich at various levels, grew weaker the more literacy
took over. Literacy norms this relation, shaping it into a
multiple-choice quiz. Information processing techniques applied
on literacy-controlled forms of social interaction require even
further standardization in order to be efficient. As a result,
the individual is rationalized away, and the community becomes a
locus for data management instead of a place for human
interaction. The process exemplifies what happens when interface
takes over and interacts with itself.

The various concerns raised so far only reiterate how important
it is to understand the nature of interface processes. But
experience gained in computational research of knowledge points
to other aspects critical to the relation between the individual
and society. Humans constitute themselves in a variety of
practical experiences that require alternatives to language.
Powerful mathematical notations, diagrams, visualization
techniques, acoustics, holography, and virtual space are such
alternative means. Non-linear association and cognitive paths,
until now embodied in hypertext structures that we experience on
the World Wide Web, belong to this category, too. Processing
language is not equivalent to integrating these alternative
means.

Cognitive requirements put severe restrictions on experiences
grounded in means different from language, on account of the
intensity and nature of cognitive processes, as well as of
memory requirements. The genetic endowment formed in
language-based practical experiences of self-constitution is not
necessarily adapted to fundamentally different means of
expression. Communication requires a shared substratum, which is
established in an acculturation process that takes many
generations. Enhanced by the new media, communication does not
become more precise. Programs are conceived to enable the
understanding of language. Everything ever written is scanned
and stored for character recognition. Images are translated into
short descriptions. A semantic component is attached to
everything people compute. Hopes are high for using such means
on a routine basis, though the compass might be set on some
elusive direction. Even when machines will understand what we ask
them to do-that is, when they integrate speech and handwriting
recognition functions in the operating system-we will still have
to articulate our goals. A technology capable of automating many
operations that human beings still perform will increase output,
and thus the efficiency of the effort applied. But the real
challenge is to figure out ways to optimize the relation between
what is possible and what is necessary. Procedures that will
associate the output to the many criteria by which humans or the
machine determine how meaningful that output is, are more
important than raw technological performance. Until now,
literacy has not proven to be the suitable instrument for this
goal.

People and language change together. Individuals are formed in
language; their practical experiences reshape language and lead
to the need for new languages. If we cannot uncouple language
and the human being, especially in view of the parallel
evolution of genetic endowment and linguistic ability, we will
continue to move in the vicious cycle of expression and
representation. The issue is not language per se, but the claim
that representation is the dominant, one might say exclusive,
paradigm of human activity. Neither science nor philosophy has
produced an alternative to representation.

There is more to physical reality than what language can lay
claim to. And there is much more to the dynamics of our
existence in a world whose own dynamics integrates it while
extending far beyond it. Skills needed to function in the
physical world-skills which children and newborn animals
display-are only partially represented in language. The entire
realm of instinctive behavior belongs here. This includes
coordination and the very rich forms of relating to space, time,
and other living beings. Advanced biological and cognitive
research (Maturana's work leads in this area) shows that various
organisms survive without the benefits of representation. Very
personal human experiences-among them, pain, love, hate, and
joy-happen without the benefits and constraints of language
representation.

There are skills for which we have no representation in language.
Various tags are used to name them under the heading of
parapsychology, magic, and non-verbal communication. Once these
are described through their results only, they cause reactions
ranging from doubt to ridicule. The unusual and inexplicable
performances of individuals called idiots savants belong to this
category. An idiot savant hears a piano concerto and replays it
masterfully, although he or she cannot add two and two. A
matchbox falls and the idiot savant can state, without looking at
the box, the exact number of matches that fell out. These are
feats that are on record. Some idiots savants are able to go
through long sequences of phone numbers, produce complete
listings of prime numbers, and execute incredible multiplication
and division. Researchers can only observe and record such
accomplishments. For other inexplicable phenomena, we simply
have no concept available: the amazing last moments before
death, the power of illusion, and the visualization aptitudes of
some individuals. Researchers have accumulated data on the power
of prayer and faith, and on paranormal manifestations. It is not
the intention of this book to venture explanations of these
phenomena, but to point out the great variety of experiences
which could be integrated into human praxis but are not, merely
because they still defy explanation in language.
Functioning in a world that we read through the glasses of
literacy makes us often blind to what is different, to what
literacy does not encompass. A realm of fact and possible
abstraction, difficult to compare with the world of existence
that language reports about, remains to be explored. When the
Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman reported on a
difference in machine and human computation, this report pointed
to aspects for which language was not prepared to serve as a
useful interface, and to a realm different from representation.

Crises, catastrophes, and breakdowns testify to the borders of a
given pragmatic context. They are references as to how far such
a context can extend. Beyond the context begins the universe of
fundamental change and revolution, constitutive of a new
framework. The really interesting level of language, and of any
other sign system, is not the referential level but the level of
constituting new worlds. These worlds do not necessarily extend
the old one. Telecommuting is an extension of the previous
pattern of work. Cooperative real-time practical experiences are
more than the sum of individual contributions. They are
constitutive of non-linear forms of complementarity. The virtual
office is but another form of office. Virtual community is a
constitutive experience. Nothing of what we have learned in
experiences of broadcasting is pertinent to the participatory
aspect of human self-constitution in an environment of fluidity
and unsettled patterns of interaction. The goal is not to inform,
but to enable and empower. The elaborate combinations of
chemicals concocted to increase the effectiveness of medicine,
of construction materials, or of electronic components continues
earlier patterns. Atomic manipulation, intended to synthesize
intelligent materials and self-repairing substances and devices,
constitutes a new domain of practical experiences.

Each of these examples belongs to a pragmatic framework different
in nature from the one that defined literacy and which literacy
embodies and forces upon our experience. Centrism-Euro-, ethno-,
techno- or any other kind-as well as dualism- good and bad, right
and wrong, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly-and hierarchy have
exhausted their potential. The attempt to measure the emergent
pragmatics against ideals that do not originate from within them
can only result in empty slogans firmly entrenched in the
avatars of machine-age ideologies. As we experience it at the
juncture between literacy and illiteracy, the legacy of language
is not only accomplishments but also the diversion from what the
world is to descriptions that stand for it in our minds, books,
and social concerns. The networks of objects and their
properties (qualifiers of objects) exist in the civilization of
literacy only through language: things are real insofar as they
are in language. To overcome this perception is a challenge well
beyond the power of most individuals. What emerges in the new
pragmatic framework of distributed practical experience and of
cooperative, parallel human interactions is a human being
self-constituted in a plurality of interconditioning means of
expression, communication, and signification. We might just be on
the verge of a new age.
A Sense of the Future

Beyond literacy begins a realm which for many is still science
fiction. The name civilization of illiteracy is used to define
direction and to point out markers. The richness and diversity
of this realm is indicative of the nature of our own practical
experiences of self-constitution. The landscape mapped out by
these experiences is simultaneously its own Borgesian map. One
marker along the road from present to future leaves no room for
doubt: the digital foundation of the pragmatic framework. But
this does not mean that the current dynamics of change can be
reduced to the victorious march of the digital or of technology,
in general.

Having challenged the model of a dominant sign system-language
and in its literate experience-we suggested that a multitude of
various sign processes effectively override the need for and
justification of literacy in a context of higher efficiency
expectations. We could alternatively define the pragmatic
framework of the civilization of illiteracy as semiotic in the
sense that human practical experiences become more and more
subject to sign processes. The digital engine is, in final
analysis, a semiotic machine, churning out a variety of signs.
Nevertheless, the semiotization of human practical experiences
extends beyond computers and symbolic processing.

As we have seen, in all human endeavors, semiotic awareness is
expressed in choices (of means of expression and communication)
and patterns of interaction. Successive fashion trends, no less
than the new media, global interaction through networks,
cooperative work, and distributive configurations are semiotic
identifiers. Interfaces are semiotic entities through which
difficult aspects of the relation between individuals and
society are addressed. More precisely, to interface means to
advance methods and notions of a new form of cultural
engineering, that has the same condition as genetic engineering,
although not necessarily based on its mechanism, as the
proponents of memetics would like us to believe.

No matter how spectacular new technologies are, and how fast the
rate of their adoption, pragmatic characteristics that make the
quantum leap of efficiency possible within the new scale of
humankind remain the defining element of the dynamics of change.
To make this point clear no argument is superfluous, and no stone
of doubt or suspicion should be left unturned. Our concern is
not with the malignant rhetoric against technology of a probably
insane Unabomber, for example. It is with a false sense of
optimism focused on fleeting embodiments of human creativity, not
on its integration in meaningful experiences. Whether a
spectacular multimedia program, a virtual reality environment,
genetically based medicine, broadband human interaction, or
cooperative endeavors, what counts are the human cognitive
resources, in the form of semiotic processes irreducible to
language and literacy, at work under circumstances of globality.

Cognitive energy

It is impossible to tire of acknowledging applications from which
many will people benefit, but which many resent even before
these applications become available. They all become possible
once they transcend the pragmatic framework of the civilization
of literacy because they are based on structurally different
means of expression, communication, and signification. We have
all witnessed some of these applications: sensors connected to
unharmed nervous terminals allow the quadriplegic to move. A
child in a wheelchair who exercises in virtual reality can be
helped to function independently in the world that qualifies his
condition as a handicap. Important skills can be acquired by
interpolating patterns of behavior developed in the physical
world in the rough draft of the simulated world. People are
helped to recover after accidents and illness, and are supported
in acquiring skills in an environment where the individual sets
the goals. In Japan, virtual reality helps people prepare for
earthquakes and tests their ability to cope with the demand for
fast response. Interconnected virtual worlds support human
interactions in the space of their scientific, poetic, or
artistic interest, or combinations thereof, stimulating the
hope, as naive as it may sound, for a new Renaissance.

Not everything need be virtual. Active badges T transmit data
pertinent to an individual's identification in his or her world.
Not only is it easier to locate a person, but the memory of
human interaction, in the form of digital traces, allows people
and machines to remember. You step into a room, and your
presence is automatically acknowledged. The computer lets you
know how many messages are waiting for you, and from whom. It
evaluates how far you are from the monitor and displays the
information so you can see it from that distance. It reminds you
of things you want to do at a certain time. Details relevant to
our continuous self-constitution through extremely complex
practical experiences play an important role in making such
interactions more efficient. A personal diary of actions,
dialogues, and thinking out loud can be automatically recorded.
Storing data from the active badge and from images captured
during a certain activity is less obtrusive than having someone
keep track of us. This is a new form of personal diary,
protected, to the extent desired, from intrusion or misuse.
This diary collects routine happenings that might seem
irrelevant-patterns of movement, dialogue, eating, reading,
drawing, building models, and analyzing data. The record can be
completed by documenting patterns of behavior of emotional or
cognitive significance, such as fishing, mountain climbing,
wasting time, or dancing- according to one's wish. At the end of
the day, or whenever requested, this diary of our living can be
e-mailed to the writer. One can review the events of a day or
search for a certain moment, for those details that make one's
time meaningful.

In the world beyond literacy and literacy-based practical
experiences, we can search for artistic events. A play by
Shakespeare can be projected onto the screen of our eyes, where
the boundary between reality and fiction starts. The play will
feature the actors of one's choosing. The viewer can even
intercalate any person in the cast, even himself or herself, and
deliver a character's lines. Sports events and games can be
viewed in the same way. In another vein, we can initiate
dialogues with the persons we care for, or get involved in the
community we choose to belong to. Belonging, in this new sense,
means going beyond the powerless viewing of political events that
seem as alien as almost all the mass-media performances they are
fed with. Belonging itself is redefined, becoming a matter of
choice, not accident. Belonging goes beyond watching the news
and political events on TV, beyond the impotence we feel with
respect to the huge political machine. All these can happen as a
private, very intense experience, or as interaction with others,
physically present or not. To see the world differently can
lead to taking another person's, or creature's, viewpoint. How
does a recent immigrant, or a visitor from abroad, perceive the
people of the country he has landed in? What do human beings
look like to a whale, a bee, an ant, a shark? We can enter the
bodies of the handicapped to find out how a blind person
negotiates the merciless world of speeding cars and people in a
hurry. The empathy game has been played with words and theatrics
in many schools. But once a person assumes the handicapped body
in a simulated universe, the insight gained is no longer based
on how convincing a description is, but on the limits of
self-constitution as handicapped. People can learn more about
each other by sharing their conditions and limitations. And,
hopefully, they will ascertain a sense of solidarity beyond
empty expressions of sympathy.

That all these semiotic means-expression in very complex dynamic
sign systems-change the nature of individual practical
experiences and of social life cannot be emphasized enough.
Everything we conceive of can be viewed, criticized, felt,
sensed, experienced, and evaluated before it is actually
produced. The active badge can be attached to a simulated
person- an avatar-let loose to walk through the plans for a new
building, or on the paths of an expedition through mountains. The
diary of space discovery is at least as important as the
personal diary of a person working in a real factory, research
facility, or at home. Before another tree is cut, before another
riverbed is moved, before a new housing development is
constructed, before a new trail is opened, people can find out
what changes of immediate and long-term impact might result.

It is possible to go even a step beyond the integrated world of
digital processing and to entrust extremely complicated
processes to neural networks trained to perform functions of
command, control, and evaluation. Unexpected situations can be
turned into learning experiences. Where individuals sometimes
fail-for instance under emotional stress-neural networks can
easily perform as well as humans do, without the risks
associated with the unpredictability of human behavior. The
active badge can be connected, through a local area network of
wall-mounted sensors that collect information, to a neural
network-based procedure designed to process the many bits and
pieces of knowledge that are most of the time wasted. People
could learn about their own creativity and about cognitive
processes associated with it. They can derive knowledge from the
immense amount of their aborted thoughts and actions. Ubiquity
and unobtrusiveness qualify such means for the field of medical
care, for the support of child development, and for the growing
elderly population. With the advent of optical computers, and
even biological data processing devices, chances will increase
for a complete restructuring of our relation to data,
information processing, and interhuman relationships.
Individuals will ascertain their characteristics more and more,
thus increasing their role in the socio-political network of
human interaction.

Some people still decide for others on certain matters: How
should children play? How should they study? What are acceptable
rules of behavior in family and society? How should we care for
the elderly? When is medical intervention justified? Where does
life end and biological survival become meaningless? These people
exercise power within the set of inherited values that
originated in a pragmatic context of hierarchy associated with
literacy. This does not need to be so, especially in view of the
many complexities hidden in questions like the ones posed above.
Our relation to life and death, to universality, permanence,
non-hierarchical forms of life and work, to religion and
science, and last but not least to all the people who make up our
world of experiences, is bound to change. Once individuality is
redefined as a locus of interaction through rich sign systems,
not just as an identity to be explained away in the generality
that gnoseologically replaces the individual, politics itself
will be redefined.

Literacy is not all it's made out to be

Enthusiasm over technology is not an argument; and semiotics,
obfuscated by semiologues, is not a panacea. George Steiner
pointed out that scientists, who "have been tempted to assert
that their own methods and vision are now at the center of
civilization, that the ancient primacy of poetic statement and
metaphysical image is over." This is not an issue of criteria
based on empirical verification, or the recent tradition of
collaborative achievement, correctly contrasted to the apparent
idiosyncrasy and egotism of literacy. The pragmatic framework
reflects the challenge of efficiency in our world of increased
population, limited resources, and the domination of nature. This
framework is critical to the human effort to assess its own
possibilities and articulate its goals. Let us accept Steiner's
idea-although the predicament is clearly unacceptable-that
sciences "have added little to our knowledge or governance of
human possibility." Let us further accept that "there is
demonstratably more insight into the matter of man in Homer,
Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky than in the entire neurology of
statistics." This, if it were true, would only mean that such an
insight is less important to the practical experience of human
self-constitution than literacy-based humanities would like us
to believe.

Literary taste or preference aside, it is hard to understand the
epistemological consequence of a statement like "No discovery of
genetics impairs or surpasses what Proust knew of the spell or
burden of lineage." All this says is that in Steiner's practical
experience of self-constitution, a pragmatics other than genetics
proves more consequential. Nobody can argue with this. But from
the particular affinity to Proust, one cannot infer that
consequences for a broader number of people, the majority of
whom will probably never know anything about genetics, are not
connected to its discoveries. We may be touched by the elegant
argument that "each time Othello reminds us of the rust of dew
on the bright blade, we experience more of the sensual,
transient reality in which our lives must pass than it is the
business or ambition of physics to impart." After all the
rhetoric that has reverberated in the castle of literacy, the
physics of the first three minutes or seconds of the universe
proves to be no less metaphysical, and no less touching, than
any example from the arts, literature, or philosophy that
Steiner or anyone else can produce. Science only has different
motivations and is expressed in a different language. It
challenges human cognition and sentiment, and awareness of self
and others, of space and time, and even of literature, which
seems to have stagnated once the potential of literacy was
exhausted. The very possibility of writing as significantly as
the writers of the past did diminishes, as the practical
experience of literate writing is less and less appropriate to
the new experiences of self-constitution in the civilization of
illiteracy.

The argument can go on and on, until and unless we settle on a
rather simple premise: The degree of significance of anything
connected to human identity-art, work, science, politics, sex,
family-is established in the act of human self-constitution and
cannot be dictated from outside it, not even by our humanistic
tradition. The air, clean or polluted, is significant insofar as
it contributes to the maintenance of life. Homer, Proust, van
Gogh, Beethoven, and the anonymous artist of an African tribe are
significant insofar as human self-constitution integrates each or
every one of them, in the act of individual identification.
Projecting their biological constitution into the world- we all
breathe, see, hear, exercise physical power, and perceive the
world-humans ascertain their natural reality. The experience of
making oneself can be as simple as securing food, water, and
shelter, or as complex as composing or enjoying a symphony,
painting, writing, or meditating about one's condition. If in
this practical experience one has to integrate a stick or a
stone, or a noise, or rhythm in order to obtain nourishment, or
to project the individual in a sculpture or musical piece, the
significance of the stick or stone or the noise is determined in
the pragmatic context of the self-constitutive moment.

Many contexts confirm the significance of literacy-based
practical experiences. History, even in its computational form
or in genetic shape, is an example. Literacy made quite a number
of practical experiences possible: education, mass media,
political activism, industrial manufacture. This does not imply
that these domains are forever wed to literacy. A few contexts,
such as crafts, predated literacy. Information processing,
visualization, non-algorithmic computation, genetics, and
simulation emerged from the pragmatics that ascertained
literacy. But they are also relatively independent of it.
Steiner was correct in stating that "we must countenance the
possibility that the study and transmission of literature may be
of only marginal significance, a passionate luxury like the
preservation of the antique." His assertion needs to be extended
from literature to literacy.

The realization that we must go beyond literacy does not come
easy and does not follow the logic of the current modus
operandi of the scholars and educators who have a stake in
literacy and tradition. Their logic is itself so deeply rooted in
the experience of written language that it is only natural to
extend it to the inference that without literacy the human being
loses a fundamental dimension. The sophistry is easy to catch,
however. The conclusion implies that the practical experience of
language is identical to literacy. As we know, this is not the
case. Orality, of more consequence in our day than the majority
are aware of, and in more languages that do not have a writing
system, supports human existence in a universe of extreme
expressive richness and variety.

Many arguments, starting with those against writing enunciated in
ancient times and furthered in various criticisms of literacy,
point to the many dimensions of language that were lost once it
started to be tamed and its regulated use enforced upon people.
Again, Steiner convincingly articulates a pluralistic view:
"...we should not assume that a verbal matrix is the only one in
which articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable.
There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not
on language, but on other communicative energies, such as the
icon or the musical note." He correctly describes how
mathematics, especially under the influence of Leibniz and
Newton, became a dynamic language: "I have watched topologists,
knowing no syllable of each other's language, working
effectively together at a blackboard in the silent speech common
to their craft."

Networks of cognitive energy

Chemistry, physics, biology, and recently a great number of other
practical experiences of human self-constitution, formed their
own languages. Indeed, the medium in which experiences take
place is not a passive component of the experience. It is
imprinted with the degree of necessity that made such a medium a
constitutive part of the experience. It has its own life in the
sense that the experience involves a dynamics of exchange and
awareness of its many components. The cuneiform tablets could
not hold the depth of thinking of the formulas in which the
theory of relativity is expressed. They probably had a better
expressive potential for a more spontaneous testimony to the
process of self-identification of the people who projected
themselves in the act of shaping damp tablets, inscribing them,
and baking them to hardness. Ideographic writing may well
explain, better than orality, the role of silence in Taoism and
Buddhism, the tension of the act of withdrawal from speech and
writing, or the phonetic subtleties at work when more than 2000
ideographs were reduced to the standard 600 signs now in use.
The historic articulation of the Torah, its mixture of poetry
and pragmatic rules, is different in nature from the writings, in
different alphabets and different pragmatic structures,
reflected in the language of the New Testament or of the Koran.

Writing under the pragmatics of limited human experiences, and
writing after the Enlightenment, not to mention today's
automated writing and reading, are fundamentally different.
Gombrich recalls that Gutenberg earned a living by making amulet
mirrors used by people in crowds to catch the image of sacred
objects displayed during certain ceremonies. The animistic
thought marks this experience. It is continued in the moving
type that Gutenberg invented, yet another mirror to duplicate the
life of handwriting, which type imitated. Printed religious
texts began their lives as talismans. After powerful printing
presses were invented, writing extends a different thought-
machines at work-in the sequence of operations that transform raw
materials into products.

All the characteristics associated with literacy are
characteristics of the underlying structure of practical
experiences, values, and aspirations embodied in the printing
machines. The linear function, replicated in the use of the
lever, was generalized in machines made of many levers. It was
also generalized in literacy, the language machine that renders
language use uniform. Writing originated in a context of the
limited sequences of human self-constitutive practical
experiences embodied in the functioning of mechanical machines.
The continuation of the sequential mode in more elaborate
experiences, as in automated production lines, will be with us
for quite a while. Nevertheless, sequentiality is increasingly
complemented by parallel functioning. Similar or different
activities carried through at the same time, at one location or
at several, are qualitatively different from sequential
activities. Self-constitution in such parallel experiences
results in new cognitive characteristics, and thus in new
resources supporting higher efficiency. The deterministic
component carried over from literacy- based practical experiences
reflects awareness of action and reaction. Its dualistic nature
is preserved in the right/wrong operational distinctions of the
literate use of language, and thus in the logic attached to it.

Pragmatic expectations of efficiency no longer met by conceptual
or material experiences based on the model embodied in literacy
have led to attempts to transcend determinism, as well as linear
functions, sequentiality, and dualism. A new underlying
structure prompts a pragmatics of non-linear relations, of a
different dynamics, of configurations, and of multi-valued
systems. A wide array of methods and technologies facilitates
emancipation from the centralism and hierarchy embodied in
literacy-based pragmatics. The pragmatic framework of the
civilization of illiteracy requires that the centralism of
literacy be replaced through massive distribution of tasks, and
non- hierarchic forms of human interactions. Augmented by
worldwide networking, this pragmatics has become global in
scope. Probably just as significant is the role mediation plays
in the process. As a specific form of human experience, mediation
increases the effectiveness of praxis by affording the benefits
of integration to human acts of self-constitution. Mediation
replaces the analytic strategy inherited through literacy,
opening avenues for reaching a sense of the whole in an
experience of building hypotheses and performing effective
synthesis. In order to realize what all this means, we can think
of everything involved in the conception, design, manufacturing,
distribution, and integration of computers in applications
ranging from trivial data management to sophisticated
simulations. The effort is, for all practical purposes, global.

The brightest minds, from many countries, contribute ideas to
new concepts of computation. The design of computers involves a
large number of creative professionals from fields as varied as
mechanical engineering, chip design, operating systems,
telecommunications, ergonomy, interface design, product design,
and communication. The scale of the effort is totally different
from anything we know of from previous practical experiences.
Before such a new computer will become the hardware and software
that eventually will land on our desks, it is modeled and
simulated, and subjected to a vast array of tests that are all
the expression of the hypothesis and goals to be synthesized in
the new product.

Some people might have looked at the first personal computers as
a scaled- down version of the mainframes of the time. Within the
pragmatics associated with literacy, this is a very good
representation. In the pragmatics we are concerned with, this
linear model does not work, and it does not explain how new
experiences come about. Chances are that the mass-produced
machines increasingly present in a great number of households
reach a performance well above those mainframes with which the
PC might have been compared.

Representing the underlying structure of the pragmatics of the
civilization of illiteracy, the digital becomes a resource, not
unlike electricity, and not unlike other resources tapped in the
past for increasing the efficiency of human activity. In the
years to come, this aspect will dominate the entire effort of
the acculturation of the digital. Today, as in the Industrial
Age of cars and other machines, the industry still wants to put
a computer on every desk. The priority, however, should be to
make computation resources, not machines, available to everyone.
Those still unsure about the Internet and the World Wide Web
should understand that what makes them so promising is not the
potential for surfing, or its impressive publication
capabilities, but the access to the cognitive energy that is
transported through networks.

Bumps and potholes

Expectations stemming from the civilization of literacy differ in
their condition from those of the cognitive age. Infinitely more
chances open continuously, but the risks associated with them
are at least of the same order of magnitude as the changes.
Walking along a road is less risky than riding a horse,
bicycling, or driving a car. Flying puts the farthest point from
us on the globe within our reach, but the risks involved in
flight are also greater. Cognitive resources integrated in our
endeavors contribute to an efficiency higher than that provided
by hydropower, steam engines, and electric energy. With each new
step in the direction of their increased participation in our
praxis, we take a chance.

There is no reason to compare simulations of the most complex and
daring projects to successful or failed attempts to build new
cities, modify nature, or create artifacts conceived under
cognitive assumptions of lesser complexity than that achieved in
our time. A failed connection on today's Internet, or a major
scam on the Web, should be expected in these early stages of the
pragmatic framework to which they belong. But we should at no
moment ignore the fact that cognitive breakdowns are much more
than the crash of an operating system or the breakdown of a
network application.

We learn more about ourselves in the practical experiences of
constituting the post-literate languages of science, art, and
the humanities than we have learned during the entire history of
humankind. These languages-very complex sign systems indeed-
integrate knowledge accumulated in a great variety of
experiences, as well as genetically inherited and rationally and
emotionally based cognitive procedures. Changes in the very
fabric of the human being involved in these practical experiences
are reflected in the increased ability to handle abstraction,
refocus from the immediate to the mediated, and enter interhuman
commitments that result from the practice of unprecedented means
of expression, communication, and signification.

During the process, we have reached some of our most critical
limitations. Knowledge is deeper, but more segmented. To use
Steiner's words once again, there is a "gap of silence" between
many groups of people. Our own efficiency made us increasingly
vulnerable to drives that recall more of the primitive stages of
humankind than all that we believed we accumulated through the
humanities. The new means are changing politics and economic
activity, but first of all they are changing the nature of human
transactions. And they are changing our sense of future.

Let us not forget Big Brother, not to be brushed away just
because the year 1984 has come and gone, but to be understood
from a viewpoint Orwell could not have had. If the means in
question are used to monitor us, too bad. In the emerging
structures of human interaction, to exercise control, as done in
previous societies, is simply not possible. It is not for the
love of the Internet that this constitutes a non-regulated domain
of human experiences. Rather it is because by its nature, the
Internet cannot be controlled in the same way our driving,
drinking, and social behavior are controlled. The opportunity
for transparency afforded by systems that replace the domination
of literacy is probably too important to be missed or misused.
The dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy results from its
implicit condition. We can affect some of its parameters, but not
its global behavior. For instance, the integration required by
parallelism and the massive distribution of tasks cannot take
place successfully if the network of interactions is mined by
gates, filters, and veils of secrecy, by hierarchic control
mechanisms, and by authorization procedures. Imagine if a
person's arms, eyes, ears, or nostrils had to obtain permission
to participate in the self-constitution of the whole human
being. Individuals in the new pragmatic context are the eyes,
arms, brains, and nostrils of the complex human entity involved
in an experience that integrates everyone's participation. It is
an intense effort, not always as rewarding as we expect it to
be, a self-testing endeavor whose complexity escapes individual
realization. Feedback loops are the visible part of the broader
system, but not its essential part.

The authenticity of each and every act of our self-making
contributes to the integrity of the overall process-our
ascertainment through what we do. Relative insularity and a
definite alienation from the overall of the system's
goals-meeting higher demands by higher performance-are part of
the picture described. Complemented by a sense of
empowerment-the ability to self-determine-and a variety of new
forms of human interaction, the resulting human pragmatics can be
more humane than the pragmatics of the huge factories of
industrial society-commuters rushing from home to job to
shopping mall, to entertainment. It is not Big Brother who will
be watching. Each and every individual is part of the effort,
entitled to know everything about it, indeed wanting to know and
caring. Without transparency that we can influence, the effort
will not succeed. We are our own active badge. The record is of
interest in order to justify the use of our time and energy, but
foremost to learn about those instances when we are less
faithful to ourselves than our newly acquired liberty affords.
It is much easier to submit to outside authority, as literacy
educates us to do. But once self-control and self-evaluation, as
feedback mechanisms under our own control become the means of
optimization, the burden is shifted from Big Brother,
bureaucracies, and regulations to the individual.

It is probably useful at this point to suggest a framework for
action in at least some of the basic activities affected by the
change brought about in the civilization of illiteracy. The
reason for these suggestions is at hand. We know that literate
education is not appropriate, but this observation remains a
critical remark. What we need is a guide for action. This has to
translate into positive attitudes, and into real attempts to
meet the challenge of present and shape the future in full
awareness of forces at work.

The University of Doubt

Literacy-based education, as all other literacy experiences,
assumes that people are the same. It presumes that each human
being can and must be literate. Just as the goal of industry was
to turn out standardized products, education assumes the same
task through the mold of literacy. Diplomas and certificates
testify how like the mold the product is. To those who have
problems with writing or reading, the labels legasthenic and
dyslexic are applied. Dyscalculus is the name given to the
inability to cope with numbers. The question of why we should
expect uniform cognitive structures covering the literate use of
language or numbers, but not the use of sounds, colors, shapes,
and volume, is never raised. Tremendous effort is made to help
individuals who simply cannot execute the sequentiality of
writing or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing similar is
done to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined to
means different from literacy.

In order to respond to the needs of the pragmatics of high
efficiency leading to the civilization of many literacies,
education needs first of all to rediscover the individual, and
his or her extensive gamut of cognitive characteristics. I use
the word rediscover having in mind incipient forms of education
and training, which were more on a one-to- one or one-to-few
basis. Education also needs to reconsider its expectation of a
universal common denominator, based on the industrial model of
standardization. Rather than taming and sanitizing the minds of
students, education has not only to acknowledge differences in
aptitudes and interests, but also to stimulate them. Every known
form of energy is the expression of difference and not the result
of leveling.

During this process of re-evaluation, the goals of education will
have to be redefined, methods of education rethought, and
content reassessed. A new philosophy, embodied in a dynamic
notion of education, has to crystallize as we work towards
educational alternatives that integrate the visual, the kinetic,
the aural, and the synesthetic. In the spirit of the pragmatic
context, education ought to become an environment for
interaction and discovery. Time taken with reiterations of the
past deserves to be committed to inferences for the present,
and, to the extent possible, for the future.

Some of the suggestions to be made in the coming lines might
sound utopian or have the ring of techno-babble. Their purpose
is to present possibilities, not to conjure up miraculous
solutions. The path from present to future is the path of human
practical experiences of self-constitution. To achieve goals
corresponding to the requirements and expectations of the
civilization of no dominant literacy, education needs to give up
the reductionist perspective that has marked it since generalized
education became the norm. Education has to recognize its
students as the individuals they are, not as some abstract or
theoretic entity. Basic education should be centered around the
major forms of expression and communication: language, visual,
aural, kinetic, and symbolic. Differences among these systems
need to be explored as students familiarize themselves with each
of them, as well as combinations. Concrete forms of
acculturation should be geared towards using these elements, not
dispensing instructions and assigning exercises. Each student
will discover from within how to apply these systems. Most
important, students will share their experiences among
themselves. There will be no right or wrong answer that is not
proven so by the pragmatic instance.

Fundamental to the educational endeavor is the process of
heuristic inquiry, to be expressed through programs for further
investigation. These programs require many languages: literate
inquiry, mathematics, chemistry, computation, and so on. By
virtue of the fact that people from different backgrounds enter
the process, they bear the experience of their respective
languages. Relevance to the problem at hand will justify one
approach or another. Frequently, the wheel will be re-invented.
Other times, new wheels will emerge as contributions of
authentic ingenuity and inventiveness. In their interaction,
those involved in the process share in the experience through
which they constitute themselves at many levels. One is to
provide access to the variety of perspectives reflecting the
variety of people.

Interactive learning

Education has to become a living process. It should involve
access to all kinds of information sources, not only to those
stored in literate formats. These resources have their specific
epistemological condition-a printed encyclopedia is different
from a database. To access a book is different from accessing a
multimedia knowledge platform. Retrieval is part of the practice
of knowledge and defines a horizon for human interaction. All
these differences will become clear through use, not through mere
assertion or imitation. The goal of education cannot be the
dissemination of imitative behavior, but of procedures. In this
model of education, classes are groups of people pursuing
connected goals, not compartments based on age or subject, even
less bureaucratic units. A class is an expression of interest,
not the product of statistical distribution based on birth and
zoning. The physical environment of the class is the world, and
not the brick and mortar confined room of stereotyped roles and
interactions. This might sound hollow, or too grandiose, but the
means to make this happen are progressively becoming available.

Here is one possible scenario: Students approach centers of
interactive education after the initial phase of acculturation.
Perhaps the word center recalls one of the characteristics of
the civilization of illiteracy. By their own nature, though,
these centers are distributed repositories of knowledge stored
in a variety of forms- databases, programs pertinent to various
human practical experiences, examples, and evaluation
procedures. With such a condition, such centers lend themselves
to making refreshable knowledge available in all imaginable
formats. On request, its own programs (known as intelligent
agents) search for appropriate sources through the guidance of
those in need, independent of them, or parallel to them. Requests
are articulated in voice command: "I would like to know ...." Or
the requests can be handwritten, typed, or diagrammed. Such
interactive education centers are simultaneously libraries of
knowledge, heuristic environments, laboratories, testing
grounds, and research media. The hybrid human-machine machine
that constitutes their nucleus alters as the individual involved
in the interaction changes.

As we all know, the best way to learn is to teach. Students
should be able to teach their neural network partners subjects
of interest to their own practical experiences. In many cases,
the neural networks, themselves networked with others, will
become partners in pursuing practical goals of higher and higher
complexity. The fact that students interact not based on their
address and school district, not based on homogeneity criteria
of age or cultural background, but on shared interests and
different perspectives gives this type of education a broader
social significance: There is nothing we do that does not affect
the world in its entirety. Repeating these words ad nauseam will
not affect the understanding of what this means, as one practical
endeavor of global consequential nature can.

In the model suggested, interests are identified and pursued, and
results are compared. Questions are widely circulated. What
students appropriate in the process are ways of thinking,
procedures for testing hypotheses, and means and methods for
ascertaining progress in the process. Professional educators,
aware of cognitive processes and freed from the burden of
administrative work, no longer rehash the past but design
interactive environments for students to learn in. Teachers
involve themselves in this interaction, and continue to evolve
as knowledge itself evolves. Instead of inculcating the
discipline of one dominant language, they leave open choices
for short and long-term commitments, their own included.

Not having to force themselves to think in an imposed language,
students are freed from the constraints of assigned tasks. They
are challenged by the responsibility to make their own choices
and carry them through. In the process, differences among
students will become apparent, but so will the ability to
understand how being different, in a context of cooperative
interactions, is an asset and not a liability. Motivation is
seeded in the satisfaction of discovery and the ability to easily
integrate in a framework of practical experiences that are no
longer mimicked in education, but practiced in discovery.

Footing the bill

Instead of an education financed by the always controversial
redistribution of social resources, interactive learning will be
supported by its real beneficiaries. That a biogenetics company,
for instance, can do this better than an organization engaged in
bureaucratic self-perpetuation is a fair assumption. Freed from
the costs associated with buildings and high administrative
overhead, education should take place in the environment of
interactions characteristic of the pragmatic framework. As
extensions of industries and services, of institutions and
individual operations, education would cease to be training for
a hypothetical employer. Like the practical experience for which
it is constituted, education points to the precise reward and
fulfillment, not to vague ideals that prove hollow after the
student has paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn them.
Vested in the benefits of a company whose potential depends on
their future performance, students can be better motivated. Will
business cooperate? As things stand now, business is in the
paradoxical situation of criticizing the inadequacies of an
education that has many of the same characteristics as outmoded
ways of doing business.

Once students reach a level of confidence that entitles them to
attempt to continue on their own or to associate with the
company, the alumni of such educational experiences have better
control over their destinies and can follow the cognitive path of
their choosing. There will be analytically oriented and
synthetically oriented individuals, many embracing the
experience of articulating hypotheses and testing them. Some will
follow cognitive inclinations to induction, to making
observations and drawing generalizations. Others will follow the
path of deduction, noticing general patterns and seeing how they
apply in concrete cases. Others will follow abductions, i.e.,
applying knowledge about a representative sample in order to
infer for a broader collection of facts or processes.

No cognitive path should be forbidden or excluded, as long as
human integrity, in all aspects, is maintained and human
interaction supported in the many possible forms it can assume.
Motivation reflected in integrity is the element that will bring
individual direction into focus. As it is practiced today,
education cultivates motivations that exclude integrity and the
development of skills appropriate to understanding that you can
cheat your teacher but not yourself without affecting the
outcome. In the current system of education, integrity appears
as something incidental to the experience. Collaboration on a
project of common interest introduces elements of reciprocal
responsibility in respect to the outcome. Since outcome affects
everyone's future, education is no longer a matter of grades,
but of successful collaboration in pursuing a goal.

In order to accomplish these goals-obviously in a greater number
of manifestations than the ones just described-we need to free
education from its many inherited assumptions. Progress can no
longer be understood as exclusively linear. Neither can we
continue to apply a deterministic sequence of cause and effect in
domains of non-deterministic interdependencies, characteristic
of distributed cooperative efforts. Neither hierarchy nor
dualism can be cultivated in the educational environment because
the dynamics of association and interaction is based on patterns
of changing roles within a universe focused on optimal
parameters, not threatened by the radical disjunction of success
vs. failure. Complexity must be acknowledged, not done away with
through methods that worked in the Industrial age but which fail
in the new pragmatic context.

Unless and until one discovers through practical experience the
need for a different viewpoint, for values outside the immediate
object of interest, nothing should be imposed on the individual.
Shakespeare and Boole are neither loved, nor understood, nor
respected more by those who were forced to learn how to spell
their names, learn dates by heart, or learn titles of works,
fragments of plays or logical rules. The very presence of art
and science, sport and entertainment, politics and religion,
ethics and the legal system in educational forms of interactive
media, books, artworks, databases, and programs for human
interaction opens the possibility for discoveries. As serious as
all these matters are, no education will ever succeed without
making its students happy, without satisfaction. In each
instance of education, good or bad, the human being, as a
natural entity, is broken in. Tension will always be part of
education, but instead of rewarding those more adept at
acculturation, education should integrate complementary moments.
No, I do not advocate interactive study from the beach or from a
remote mountain ski resort; and I am not for extending human
integration in the world of practical experiences around the
clock. But as education frees itself from the industrial
model-factory-like buildings, classes that correspond to shifts,
holidays and vacation time-it should also let students make
choices that are closer to their natural rhythms. Instead of
physical co-presence, there should be interactive and cooperative
creativity that does not exclude the playful, the natural, and
the accidental.

If all this sounds too far-fetched to bring about, that is
because it is. Even if the computer giants of the world were to
open interactive learning centers tomorrow, it would be to
little avail. Students will bring with them attitudes rooted in
traditional expectations. There is more consensus in our world
for what is right with the current system of education than for
what can or should be done to change it. But with each nucleus
of self-organization, such as on-line classes on subjects
pertinent to working on the network, seeds are sown for future
development. In our time, when the need for qualified people
surges in one field or another-computational genetics,
nanotechnology, non-linear electronic publishing-the model I
presented is the answer. Waiting for the educational system to
process students and to deliver them, at no cost to the
corporations that will employ them, is no longer an acceptable
strategy. Instead of endowing university chairs dedicated to the
study of the no longer meaningful, corporations should invest in
training and post-academic life-long learning.

To preach that in order to be a good architect one has to know
history and biology and mathematics, and to know who Vitruvius
was, equals preaching the rules of literacy in a world that
effectively does not need them. To create an environment for the
revelation of such a need, if indeed it is acknowledged as humans
discover new ways to deal with their questions, is a very
different task. How much reading, how much writing, mathematics,
drawing, foreign language, or chemistry an architect needs is the
wrong question. It assumes that someone knows, well in advance of
the changing pragmatic context, what is the right mixture and
how future human practical experiences will unfold. The
ingredients change, the proportions change, and the context
changes first of all.

As opposed to the current hierarchy, which proclaims drawing or
singing as extraneous but orthography and reading as necessary,
education needs to finally acknowledge complementarity. It has
to encourage self-definition in and through skills best suited
to practical experiences of self-constitution in a world that has
escaped the cycle of repetition, and pursues goals unrelated to
previous experiences. Instead of doing away with or
rationalizing intuition, or being suspicious of irrationality,
education will have to allow the individual to pursue a search
path that integrates them. Students should be able to define
goals where intuition, and even irrationality and the
subconscious, are applicable. They should be freed from the
constraints and limitations of the paradigm of problem solving,
and engaged in generating alternatives.

A wake-up call

All this relies heavily on the maturity of the student and the
ability of educators to design environments that stimulate
responsibility and self-discipline. The broad-stroke educational
project sketched up to here will have to address the precise
concerns connected to how and when education actually starts,
what the role of the family should be-if the family remains a
valid entity-and how variety and multiplicity will be addressed.
In today's words and expectations, even in today's prejudices,
education is of national interest in one main respect: to equip
students with skills so they can contribute to the national
coffers in the future. But the arena of economic viability is the
global economy, not an economy defined by national boundaries.
The trans-national marketplace is the real arena of competition.
Re-engineering, far from being finished, made it quite clear
that for the sake of efficiency, productive activities are
relocated without any consideration for patriotism or national
pride, never mind human solidarity and ethics.

In today's world, and to some extent in the model described so
far, the unfolding of the individual through cultivation of the
mind and spirit is somehow lost in the process of inculcating
facts. It is its own reward to enjoy subtleties, or to generate
them, to partake in art, or be part of it, to challenge the
mind, or indulge in the rich world of emotions. Prepared for
work that is usually different from what educators, economists,
and politicians anticipate, people face the reality of work that
becomes more and more fragmented and mediated. On the assembly
line, or in the "analysis of symbols" (to use Robert Reich's
term), work is, in the final analysis, a job, not a vocation.
Physicians, professors, businessmen, carpenters, and burger
flippers perform a job that can be automated to some degree.
Depriving work of its highest but often neglected
motivation-the unfolding of individual abilities, becoming an
identity in the act- negates this motivation. Replaced by
external rationale-the substance of commercial democracy-the
decline of inner motivation leads to lack of interest, reduced
commitment, and declining creativity. Education that processes
humans for jobs promises access to abundance, but not to
self-fulfillment. The decline of family, and new patterns of
sexuality and reproduction, tell us that expectations, sublime on
their own merit, of improved family involvement will be the
exception, not the rule. Accordingly, the challenge is to
understand the nature of change and to suggest alternatives,
instead of hoping that, miraculously or by divine intervention of
the almighty dollar (or yen, franc, mark, pound, or combinations
thereof), families will again become what literacy intended they
should be. If the challenge is not faced, education will only
become a better machine for processing each new generation.

Many scholars of education have set forth various plans for
saving education. They do not ignore the new pragmatic
requirements. They are unaware of them. Therefore, their
recommendations can be classified as more of the same. The sense
of globality will not result from taking rhymes from Mother
Goose (with its implicit reference and culturally determined
rhythm) and adding to them the Mother Goose of other countries.
The Victorian and post-Victorian vision transferred upon
children, the expectation of "everything will be fine if you
just do as you're told," reflects past ideals handed down
through the moralizing fiction of the Industrial Age.

The most ubiquitous presence in modern society is the television
set. It replaced the book long ago. Notwithstanding, TV is a
passive medium, of low informative impact, but of high
informative ability. Digital television, which extends the
presence of computers, will make a difference, whether it is
implemented in high resolution or not. Television in digitally
scalable formats is an active medium, and interactivity is its
characteristic. Education centers will integrate digital
television, and open ways to involve individuals regardless of
age, background and interests. We can all learn that there are
several ways of seeing things, that the physics of time and music
report on different aspects of temporal characteristics of our
experience in the world. The movement of a robot, though
different from the elegant dance of a ballerina, can benefit
from a sense and experience of choreography, considered by many
incompatible with engineering. The new media of interaction that
are embodied in educational centers should be less obsessed with
conveying information, and more with allowing human
understanding of instances of change.

But these are only examples. What I have in mind is the creation
of an environment for exploration in which knowledge of
aesthetic aspects is learned parallel to scientific knowledge.
The formats are not those of classes in the theory or history of
art, or of similar art oriented subjects. As exploration takes
place, aesthetic considerations are pursued as a means of
optimizing the effort. It is quite clear that as classes
dynamically take shape, they will integrate people of different
ages and different backgrounds. Taking place in the public
domain of networked resources, this education will benefit from
a sense of creative competition. At each moment in time,
projects will be accessible, and feedback can be provided. This
ensures not only high performance from a scientific or
technological viewpoint, but also aesthetic relevance.

The literacy-based educational establishment will probably
dismiss the proposals set forth as pie-in-the-sky, as
futuristic at best. Its representatives will claim that the
problem at hand needs solutions, not a futuristic model based on
some illusory self- organizing nuclei supported by the economy.
They will argue that the suggested model of education is less
credible than perfecting a practice that at least has some
history and achievements to report. The public, no matter how
critical of education, will ask: Is it permissible, indeed
responsible, to assume that a new philosophy of education will
generate new student attitudes, especially in view of the reality
of metal detectors installed in schools to prevent students from
carrying weapons? Is it credible to describe experiences in
discovery involving high aesthetic quality, while mediocrity
makes the school system appear hopelessly damned? Self-motivation
is described as though teenage pregnancy and classes where
students bring their babies are the concern of underpaid
teachers but not of visionaries. More questions in the same vein
are in the air. To propose an analogy, selling water in the
desert is not as simple as it sounds.

We can, indeed, dream of educational tools hooked up to the
terminals at the Kennedy Space Center, or to the supercomputers
of the European Center for Research of the Future. We can dream
of using digital television for exploring the unknown, and of
on-line education in a world where everyone envisions high
accomplishments through the use of resources that until now were
open to very few. But unless society gives up the expectation of
a homogeneous, obligatory education that forces individuals who
want-or do not want-to prepare themselves for a life of practical
experiences into the same mold, education will not produce the
desired results. Good intentions, based on social, ethnic, or
racial criteria, on love of children, and humanistic ideals, will
not help either. While all over the world real spending per
student in public education and private institutions increased
well above the levels of inflation, fewer students do homework,
and very few study beyond the daily assignment. This is true not
only in the USA but also in countries with high admission
standards for college, such as France, Germany, and Japan.

Translated into the language of our considerations, all this
means that education cannot be changed independent of change in
society. Education is not an autonomous system. Its connections
to the rest of the pragmatic context are through students,
teachers, parents, political institutions, economic realities,
racial attitudes, culture, and patterns of behavior in our
commercial democracy. In today's education, parochial
considerations take precedence over global concerns. Bureaucratic
rules of accumulated imbecility literally annihilate the changes
for a better future of millions of students. What appears as the
cultivation of the mind and spirit is actually no more than the
attempt to polish a store window while the store itself lost its
usefulness long ago. It makes no sense to require millions of
students to drive daily to schools that can no longer be
maintained, or to pass tests when standards are continuously
lowered in order to somehow justify them.

Consumption and interaction

In view of the fundamental changes in patterns of human activity,
not only students need education, but practically everyone, and
probably educators first of all. Connection to education centers
needs to be different from the expectation of children sitting
in a class dominated by a teacher. On the interactive education
networks, age no longer serves as a criterion. Learning is
self-paced, motivated by individual interests and priorities and
by the perspectives that learning opens. A sense of common
interest is expressed through interaction, unfolding through a
diversity of perspectives and ways of thinking and doing.
Nothing can help generations that are more different and more
antagonistic than ours to find a common ground than an experience
of education emancipated from hierarchies, freed of
authoritarian expectations, challenging and engaging at the same
time. Education will be part of the continuous self-definition of
the human being throughout one's entire life.

Whether we like it or not, the economy is driven by consumer
spending. This does not automatically mean that we can or should
let the feedback loop follow a course that will eventually lead
to losing the stability of the system to which we belong. If
consumption were to remain the driving force, however, we would
all end up enjoying ourselves to death. But the solution to this
state of affairs is not to be found in political or educational
sermonizing. To blame consumption, expectations of abundance, or
entertainment will not help in finding answers to educational
worries. Education will have to integrate the human experience
of consumption and facilitate the acquisition of common sense. A
sense of quality can be instilled by pursuing cooperative
projects involving not only the production of artifacts, but
also self-improvement. Generations that grow up with television
as their window to reality cannot be blamed for lack of interest
in reading, or for viewing reality as a show interrupted by
thirty-second messages. Young minds acquire different skills,
and education ought to provide a context for their integration
in captivating practical experiences, instead of trying to
neutralize them. Television is here for good, although changes
that will alter the relation between viewers and originators of
messages will change television as well.

The cognitive characteristics and motor patterns of couch
potatoes and moderate viewers in the age of generalized TV and
interactive networking are very different from those of people
educated as literate. These characteristics will be further
reshaped as digital television becomes part of the networked
world. Where reading about history, or another country, is
marginally relevant to praxis in the new context of life and
work, the ability to view, understand images, perceive and effect
changes, and the ability to edit them and reuse, to complete
them, moreover to generate one's own images, is essential to the
outcome of the effort. Without engaging the student, education
heads into oblivion. As difficult as it is to realize that there
are no absolute values, unless this realization is shared by all
generations, we will face more inter- generational conflicts than
we already face. Television is not the panacea for such
conflicts, but a broad ground for reaching reciprocal awareness
of what it takes to meet an increasingly critical challenge.
Sure, we are focused here on a television that transcended its
mass communication industrial society status, and reached the
condition of individual interaction.

Understanding differences cannot be limited to education, or
reduced to a generalized practice of viewing TV (digital or
not). It has to effectively become the substance of political
life. While all are equal with respect to the law, while all are
free and encouraged to become the best they can be, society has
to effectively abandon expectations of homogeneity and
uniformity, and to dedicate energies to enhancing the
significance of what makes its members different. This
translates into an education freed from expectations that are
not rooted in the process of self-affirmation as scientists,
dancers, thinkers, skilled workers, farmers, sportspeople, and
many other pragmatically sanctioned professionals. The direction
is clear: to become less obsessed with a job, and more concerned
with a work that satisfies them, and thus their friends and
relatives. The means and methods for moving in this direction
will not be disbursed by states or other organizations. We have
to discover them, test, and refine, aware of the fact that what
replaces the institution of education is the open-ended process
through which we emerge as educated individuals.

Does education henceforth become a generic trade school? For
those who so choose, yes. For others, it will become what they
themselves make of it through their involvement. Remaining an
open enterprise, education will allow as many adjustments as
each individual is willing to take upon oneself for the length of
one's life. The education of interactive skills, of
visualization technologies, of methods of search and retrieval,
of thinking in images, sounds, colors, odors, textures, and
haptic perception requires contexts for their discovery, use,
and evaluation which no school or university in the world can
provide. But if all available educational resources are used to
establish learning centers based on the paradigms of
interactivity, data processing, multimedia, virtual reality,
neural networks, and genetic engineering, using powerful carriers
such as digital TV or high-speed and broadband networks, we will
stop managing a bankrupt enterprise and open avenues for
successful alternatives.

As humanity ages, and societies have to cope with a new age
structure, education will have to focus also on how to
constitute one's identity past the biological optimum. Among the
fastest growing segments on the Internet, the elderly represent a
very distinct group, of high motivation, and of abilities that
can better benefit society.

Access to knowledge in the form of interactive projects, pursued
by classes constituted of individuals as different as the world
is, is not trivial, and obviously not cheap. The networked
world, the many challenges of new means of communication already
in place, the new medium of digital TV-closer to reality than
many realize- and computers, are already widely available. A
major effort to provide support to many who are not yet
connected to this world, at the expense of the current
bureaucracy of education, will provide the rest. Instead of
investing in buildings, bureaucracies, norms, and regulations,
instead of rebuilding crumbling schools, and recycling teachers
who intellectually died long ago in the absence of any real
challenge, we can, and should, design a global education system.
Such a system will effect change not only in one country, not
only in a group of rich countries, but all over the world. The
practice of networking and the competence in integrating work
produced independently in functional modules can be attained by
tackling real problems, as these are encountered by each person,
not invented assignments by teachers or writers of manuals.

Education can succeed or fail only on the terms of efficiency
expected in our pragmatic framework. Scores, religiously
accounted for in literacy-based political life, are irrelevant.
Practical experiences of self-constitution are not
multiple-choice examinations. They involve the person in his
entirety, and result in instances of personal growth and
increased social awareness. A global world requires a live global
system of education that embodies the best we can afford, and is
driven by the immense energy of variety.

Unexpected opportunities

We have heard the declaration over and over: This is the age of
knowledge. The statement describes a context of human practical
experiences in which the major resources are cognitive in
nature. In the civilization of literacy, knowledge acquisition
could take place at a slow pace, over long periods of time. The
interlocking factors that defined the pragmatic context were
such that no other gnoseological pattern was possible. Knowledge
arising from practical experiences of industrial society
progressively contributed to making life easier for human beings.
Eventually, everything that had been done through the power of
human muscle and dexterity-using mainly hands, arms, and
legs-was assigned to machines and executed using energy
resources found in the environment. Cognition supported the
incremental evolution of machines through a vast array of
applications. Human knowledge allowed for the efficient use of
energy to move machines which executed tasks that might have
taken tens, even hundreds of men to perform.

To make this more clear, let us compare some of the tasks of the
Machine Age with those of the Age of Cognition we live in.
Within industrial pragmatics, the machine supplanted the muscle
and the limited mechanical skills needed for processing raw
materials, manufacturing cars, washing clothes, or typing.
Discoveries of more sources of coal, gas, and oil kept the
machine working and led to its extension from the factory to the
home. Literacy, embodying characteristics of industrial
pragmatics, kept pace with the demands and possibilities of the
Machine Age. In our age, computer programs supplant our thinking
and the limited knowledge involved in supervising complex
production and assembly lines that process raw materials or
synthesize new material. Computer programs are behind the
manufacture of automobiles; they integrate household
functions-heating, washing clothes, preparing meals, guarding our
homes. Publishing on the World Wide Web relies on computers. The
scale of all these efforts is global. Many languages, bearing
the data needed by each specific sub-task, go into the final
product or outcome. Older dependencies on natural resources and
on a social model shaped to optimally support industrial praxis
are partially overcome as the focus changes from permanence to
transitory communities of interest and to the individual- the
locus of the Cognitive Age.

Cognitive resources arise from experiences qualitatively
different from those of the Machine Age. Digital engines do not
burn coal or gas. Digital engines burn cognition. The source of
cognition lies in the mind of each human being. The resources of
the Machine Age are being slowly depleted. Alternative resources
will be found in what was typically discarded. Recycling and the
discovery of processes that extract more from what is available
depend more on human cognition than on brute force processing
methods. The sources of cognition are, in principle, unlimited.
But if the cognitive component of human practical experiences
were to stagnate or break down for some unimaginable reason, the
pragmatics based on the underlying digital process of the Age of
Cognition would break down. To understand this, one need only
think of being stuck in a car on an untravelled road, all
because the gasoline ran out. Compare this situation with what
would happen if the most complex machine, more complicated than
anything science fiction could describe, came to a halt because
there was no human thought to keep it going.

In the current context, the dynamics of cognition, distributed
between processing information and acquiring and disseminating
knowledge, stands for the dynamics of the entire system of our
existence. Embodied in technologies and processing procedures,
cognition contributes to the fundamental separation of the
individual human from the productive task, and from a wide
variety of non-productive activities. It is not necessary that
an individual possess all knowledge that a pragmatic experience
requires. This means, simply, that operators in nuclear power
plants need not be eminent physicists or mathematicians. Neither
do all workers in a space research program need to be rocket
scientists. A programmer might be ignorant of how a disk drive
works. A brain surgeon does not know how the tools he or she
uses are made. Each facet of a pragmatic instance entails
specific requirements. The whole pragmatic experience requires
knowledge above and beyond what the individuals directly involved
can or should master. Instead of limited knowledge uniformly
dispensed through literate methods, knowledge is distributed and
embodied in tools and methods, not in persons. The advantage is
that programs and procedures are made uniform, not human beings.
For example, data management does not substitute for advanced
knowledge, but a data management system as such can be endowed
with knowledge in the form of routines, procedures, operation
schemes, management, and self-evaluation.

Just as everyone kept the mechanical engine going, everyone,
layperson or expert, contributes to the functioning of the
digital engine. The only source of cognition that we can count
on is within people self-constituted through practical
experiences involving the digital. This does not mean that
everyone will become a thinker and everyone will produce
knowledge. Two sources of knowledge are relevant in the Age of
Cognition within which the civilization of illiteracy unfolds.
One source is the advanced work of experts and researchers, in
areas of higher abstraction, way beyond what literacy can
handle. The other, much more critical, source is to be found in
common- sense human interaction, in day-to-day human experience.

We know that the knowledge of experts will continue to be
integrated in the pragmatics of this age. The specific
motivations of human practical experiences resulting in
knowledge have to be recognized and stimulated. And we must also
be aware of circumstances that could have a negative effect on
these experiences.

We know less about the second source of knowledge because in
previous pragmatic contexts it was less critical, and widely
ignored. In particular, we do not know how to tap into the
infinite reservoir of cognitive resources that are manifested
through the routine work and everyday life of the overwhelming
portion of the world's population. Taken individually, each
person can contribute cognitive resources to the broader
dynamics of the world. But these individual contributions are
random, difficult to identify, and do not necessarily justify
the effort of mining them. In our lives, many decisions and
choices are made on the basis of extremely powerful procedures of
which we, as individuals, are almost never aware. There is a
grain of genius in some of the most mundane ways of doing
things. Here the nodal points of integration in the
multi-dimensional array that constitutes the globality of
humankind are what counts. Delving into the dynamic collective
persona makes such an effort worthwhile.

Years ago, in a dialogue with a prominent researcher in
education, who used to maintain interactive simulations for
youngsters who logged in at his institute, I discussed the then
fashionable Game of Life (developed by John Horton Conway). As
an open-ended simulation of the rules of birth and death, and
based on the theory of cellular automata, the game required
quite a bit of thinking. There is no winner or loser in the Game
of Life. Although the rules of the game are relatively simple,
highly complex forms of artificial life arise on the matrix: a
cell going from empty to full describes birth, from full to
empty, death. Satisfaction in playing is derived from reaching
complex forms of life.

The idea we discussed was to make the game widely available on
the network. The hundreds of thousands of players would leave
traces of cognitive decisions that, over time, would add up to
an expression of the intelligence of the collective body who
shared an interest in the game. The cognitive sum total is of a
Gestalt nature-much higher than the sum of its parts. That is,
the sum has a different qualitative condition, probably
comparable to that of the experts and geniuses, or even much
higher! Considering all the instances of human application to
tasks that range from being frankly useless to highly
productive, one can surmise that the second source of knowledge
and intelligence is much more interesting than that of the
dedicated thinkers. There is more to what we do and how we
choose than rationality and thinking, never mind literate
rationality.

This collective persona need not comprise the entire population
of the world (minus the knowledge professionals). It would help
to start with groups formed ad hoc, groups which share an
interest in a certain activity, such as playing games, or surfing
for a particular piece of information, from the trivial "How do I
get from here to there?" to whatever people are looking
for-football scores, pornography, crossword puzzles, recipes,
investment information, support in facing a certain problem,
love, inter- generational conflicts, religion-anything. The
challenge comes in capturing the cognitive resources at work,
making inferences from the small or vast collective bodies of
common focus, and coming up with viable procedures that can be
utilized to enhance individual performance-all this without
shaping future individual performance into grotesque repetitive
patterns, no matter how successful they might be.

If there is validity to the notion that we are in the age of
knowledge, we cannot afford to limit ourselves to the knowledge
of a few, no matter how exceptional these few are. The
civilization of illiteracy transcends the literate model of
individual performance considered a guarantee of the performance
of society at large.

As practical experiences become more complex, breakdowns can be
avoided only at the expense of more cognitive resources. We know
that it took millennia before primitive notation progressed to
writing and then to generalized literacy. In the Age of
Cognition, we cannot afford such a long cycle for integrating
human cognitive resources. Marvin Minsky once pointed out how
much mind activity is lost in the leisure of watching football
games on TV. While relaxation is essential to human existence,
nobody can claim, in good faith, that what has resulted from the
enormously increased efficiency of cognition-based practical
experiences is not wasted to a great extent. Short of giving up,
one has to entertain alternatives. But alternatives to this
situation cannot be legislated. It is clear that within the
motivations of the global economy, the need to identify and tap
more sources of cognition will result in ways to stimulate human
interaction. Watching TV probably generates thoughts that only
die on the ever larger screens in our homes. Surfing the Web,
where millions of hits are counted on the pornography sites-not
on mathematics or literature sites-is also a waste and a source
of mediocrity. Mouse potatoes are not necessarily better than the
couch variety.

If we could derive cognition even from the many experiences of
human self- constitution in computer games, we could not only
further the success of the industry that changed the way humans
play, but gain some insight into motivations, cognitive and
emotional aspects of this elementary form of human identity.
Above and beyond the speculation on playful man (Homo Ludens),
there are quantifiable aspects of competition, satisfaction, and
pleasure. And as the Internet effectively maps our journey
through a maze of data, information, and sources of knowledge, we
can ask whether such cognitive maps are not too valuable to be
abandoned to marketing experts, instead being utilized for
understanding what makes us tick as we search for a word, an
image, an experience. Data regarding how and what we buy is not
always representative of what we are. For many people, buying a
book or a work of art, a fashionable shirt, a home, or a car is
only an experience in mediation performed by the agents of these
objects. But there are authentic experiences in which no one can
replace us human beings. Games belong to this domain, and so do
joking and interactions with friends. No agent can replace us.
Within such authentic moments of self-constitution, cognitive
resources of exceptional value are at work.

Many people from very different locations and of different
backgrounds might simultaneously be present on a certain Web
site, without ever knowing it. The server's performance could
suggest that there is quite a crowd at a Web site, but it cannot
say who the others are, what they are looking for, what kind of
cognition drives the digital engine of their particular
experiences.

While the medium of networking is more transparent than literacy
experiences, it still maintains a certain opaqueness, enhanced
by the firewalls meant to protect us from ourselves. Many
individuals present at the same time on a Web site is not a
situation one can duplicate in literacy, in which the ratio was
one reader to one book, or one magazine, or even one videotape
(although more than one can watch it on the family TV set, in a
class, or on an airplane). Thousands of viewers simultaneously
landing on a Web site is a chance and a challenge. We should
accordingly think of methods for identifying ourselves, to the
extent desired, and declare willingness to interact. This next
level of self-constitution and identification is where the
potential of rich interactions and further generation of
cognition becomes possible. Tapping into cognitive resources in
such situations is an opportunity we should not postpone.

Burning cognition, digital engines allow us to reach efficiency
that is higher by many orders of magnitude in comparison to the
efficiency attained by engines burning coal and oil. But the
experience introduces the pressure of accelerated accumulation of
data, information processing, and knowledge utilization. To
understand the intimate relation between the performance of the
digital engine and our own performance, one has only to think of
a coal-burning steam engine driving a locomotive uphill. The
civilization of illiteracy is a rather steep ascent, facing many
obstacles-our physical abilities, limited natural resources,
ecological concerns, ability to handle social complexity. To
pull the brake will only make the effort of the engine more
difficult, unless we want to tumble downhill, head first.
Feeding the furnace faster is the answer that every sensible
engineer knows. This would sound like a curse, were it not for
the excitement of discovery, including that of our own cognitive
resources.

Analogy aside, what drives the digital engine is not abstract
computing cycles of faster chips, but human cognition embodied
in experiences that support further diversification of
experiences. It has yet to be the case that we had enough
computing cycles to burn and we did not know what to do with the
extra computing power available. On the contrary, human
practical experiences are always ahead of technology, as we
challenge ourselves with new tasks for which the chips of
yesterday and the memory available are as inappropriate as the
methods and means of literacy.

Bio-electric signals associated with the activity of our minds
have been measured for quite a number of years. We learned from
such measurements that minds are constituted in anticipation of
our practical experience of self-identification as human beings.
The idea seemed far-fetched, despite the strong scientific
evidence on which it was ultimately founded. Cognition is
process, and bio-electric signals are indicative of cognitive
processes in our minds. Sensors attached to the skin, such as
through a simple finger glove, can read such signals. In effect,
they read unfolding mind processes based on our cognitive
resources. Feeding digital engines hungry to burn cognition, we
arrive not only at mind-controlled prosthetic devices for people
with disabilities, but also at a mind-driven painter's brush, or
desktop film directing, allowing us to get involved with
cinematographic projects of scripting and affecting variations of
the plot. From pinball games to tennis and skiing, from virtual
bowling to virtual football, our thoughts make new experiences
possible. For those affected by disabilities, this is a
qualitatively new horizon. Einstein, but many others as well, was
quite convinced that only 10 percent of our cognitive abilities
are effectively engaged in what we do. As the digital engine
burns more and more cognition, this number will change, as
probably our physical condition, already marked by forms of
degeneration, will change too.

If, by using only one-tenth of our cognitive resources, we reach
the level of possibilities open to us, it is not too hard to
imagine what only one more tenth might bring. The civilization
of illiteracy, with all the dangers and inequities it has to
address, is only at its beginning. That its duration will be
shorter than the one preceding it is another subject.

1982-1996: Providence RI; Rochester NY; Bexley OH; New York NY;
Little Compton RI; Wuppertal, Germany.


***



Literacy in a Changing World

During the writing of this book, several articles were published
and lectures presented on themes pertinent to the subject. None
was taken over in this work. Among these are:

J. Deely and M. Lenhard, editors. The Civilization of Illiteracy,
in Semiotics 1981. New York: Plenum, 1983.

H. Stachowiak, editor. Pragmatics in the Semiotic Framework, in
Pragmatik, vol. II. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986.

La civilization de l'analphabetisme, in Gazette de Beaux-Arts,
vol. iii, no. 1430, March 1988, pp. 225- 228.

Writing is Rewriting, in The American Journal of Semiotics, vol.
5, no. 1, 1987, pp. 115-133.

Sign and Value. (Lecture)Third Congress of the International
Association of Semiotic Studies, Palermo, Italy, June 25-29,
1984.

The Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) Sixth Annual Meeting of
the Semiotic Society of America, Vanderbilt University,
Nashville, October 1-4, 1981.

Philosophy in the Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) XVII
World Congress of Philosophy, Montreal, August, 1983.

Values in the Post-Modern Era: The Civilization of Illiteracy.
(Lecture) Institute Forum, Rochester Institute of Technology,
November 9, 1984.

A Case for the Hacker. (Lecture) University of Oregon, Oct. 27,
1987.

Communication in a time of integration and awareness. (Lecture)
New York University, April, 1989.

De plus ça change... Creativity in the context of scientific and
technological change. (Lecture) University of Michigan, January,
1993.

The bearable impertinence of rationality. (Lecture)
Multimediale, the1st International Festival of Multimedia,
February, 1993.

From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence
of writing and early written documents, the following proved
useful in defining the position stated in this book:

John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk.
Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1989.

David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors.
Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of
Reading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer
to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee.
Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions,
1986.

Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of the
TV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991.

Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems
and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling.
Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.

Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt/Main:
Campus Verlag, 1990.

David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind
(3rd edition). New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.

Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford
University Press,1987.

Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden:
Brandsetter, 1963.

R. Hooker. Reading the Past. Ancient Writing from Cuneiform to
the Alphabet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: Taplinger
Publishing Co., 1981.

Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer.
Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974.

Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: Academic
Press, 1976.

Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of
Printing 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976.

Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY:
Association for Education in Journalism, 1972.

Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York:
Knopf, 1970.

Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago.
Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985.

Andrew Sherrat, editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Archaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980.

Peirce's pragmatic perspective was extracted from his writings.
In the absence of a finished text on the subject, various
scholars chose what best suited their own viewpoint. A selection
from an unusually rich legacy of manuscripts and published
articles was made available in The Collected Papers of Charles
Sanders Peirce (eight volumes). Volumes 1-6 edited by Charles
Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; volumes 7-8 edited by A. Burks.
Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1931-1958.

The standard procedure in citing this work is "volume.paragraph"
(e.g., 2.227 refers to volume 2, paragraph 227).

Important references to Peirce's semiotics are found in his
correspondence with Victoria, Lady Welby. This was published by
Charles Hardwick as Semiotics and Significs. The Correspondence
between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomington
and London: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Peirce's manuscripts are currently being published in a new
edition, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A Chronological
Edition (E. Moore, founding editor; Max A. Fisch, general editor;
C. Kloesel, Director), Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1984-present.

Peirce's pragmaticism was defined in a text dated 1877, during
his return journey from Europe aboard a steamer, "...a day or
two before reaching Plymouth, nothing remaining to be done except
to translate it into English," (5.526): "Considerer quels sont
les effets pratiques que nous pensons pouvoir être produits par
l'objet de notre conception. La conception de tous ces effets est
la conception complète de l'objet."

In respect to Peirce, his friends William James and John Dewey
wrote words of appreciation, placing him "in the forefront of
the great seminal minds of recent times," (cf. Morris R. Cohen,
Chance, Love, and Logic, Glencoe IL: 1954, p. iii). C. J. Keyser
stated, "That this man, who immeasurably increased the
intellectual wealth of the world, was nevertheless almost
permitted to starve in what in his time was the richest and
vainest of lands is enough to make the blood of any decent
American boil with chagrin, indignation, and vicarious shame,"
(cf. Portraits of Famous Philosophers Who Were Also
Mathematicians, in Scripta Mathematica, vol. III, 1935).

C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look (An Expanded
Version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution).
Cambridge: At the University Press, 1965 (first printed in 1955).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). From the few works
published during his lifetime, reference is made to Dissertatio
de Arte Combinatoria (Leipzig, 1666). G.H. Parkinson translated
some works in Leibniz Logical Papers (London, 1966). Another
edition considered for this book is by Gaston Grua, Leibniz.
Textes inédits (Paris, 1948), which offers some of the many
manuscripts in which important ideas remained hidden for a long
time.

Humberto R. Maturana. The Neurophysiology of Cognition, in
Cognition: A Multiple View (P. Garvin, Editor). New York:
Spartan Books, 1969.

Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela. El árbol del
conocimiento, 1984. The work was translated as The Tree of
Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding.
Boston/London: Shambala New Science Library, 1987.

Terry Winograd. Understanding Natural Language. New York:
Academic Press, 1972.

-. Language as Cognitive Process. Reading MA: Addison-Wesley,
1983.

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and
Cognition. A New Foundation for Design. Norwood NJ: Ablex
Publishing Corporation, 1986.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1980.

George Lakoff. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. (What
Categories Reveal about the Mind). Chicago/London: The
University of Chicago Press, 1987.

"The point is that the level of categorization is not independent
of who is doing the categorizing and on what basis" (p. 50).

With his seminal work on fuzzy sets, Lotfi Zadeh opened a new
perspective relevant not only to technological progress, but
also to a new philosophic perspective.

Fuzzy Sets, in Information and Control, 8 (1965), pp. 338-353.

Fuzzy Logic and Approximate Reasoning (in Memory of Grigore
Moisil), in Synthèse 30 (1975), pp. 407- 428.

Coping with the impression of the real world, in Communications
of the Association for Computing Machinery, 27 (1984), pp.
304-311.

George Steiner. Language and Silence. New York: Atheneum, 1967.

-. After Babel. Aspects of Language and Translation. London:
Oxford University Press, 1975.

-. Real Presence: Is There Anything in What We Say?
London/Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989.

-. The End of Bookishness? in The Times Literary Supplement, July
8-14, 1988, p. 754.

Marshall McLuhan. The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of
Typographic Man. Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1962.

Ivan Illich. Deschooling Society. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Illich states bluntly: "Universal education through schooling is
not feasible" (Introduction, p. ix).

Ivan Illich and Barry Sanders. The Alphabetization of the Popular
Mind. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.

Y. M. Lotman. Kul'tura kak Kollektvinji Intellekt i Problemy
Iskusstuennovo Razuma (Culture as collective intellect and
problems of artificial intelligence). Predvaritel'naya
Publicacija, Moskva: Akademija Nauk SSSR (Nauchinyi Soviet po
Kompleksnoi Problemi Kibernetika), 1977.

Jean Baudrillard. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton,
Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.


The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Mittelmaß und Wahn. Gesammelte
Zerstreuungen. Frankfurt am Main: 1988.

Norbert Wiener. The Human Use of Human Beings. Cybernetics and
Society. 1st ed. New York: Avon Books, 1967.

Wiener was very concerned with the consequences of human
involvement with machines and the consequences of the
unreflecting use of technology. "Once before in history the
machine had impinged upon human culture with an effect of the
greatest moment. This previous impact is known as the Industrial
Revolution, and it concerned the machine purely as an alternative
to human muscle" (p.185).

"It is fair to say, however, that except for a considerable
number of isolated examples, this industrial revolution up to
present [ca. 1950] has displaced man and beast as a source of
power, without making any great impression on other human
functions" (p. 209).

Wiener goes on to describe a new stage, what he calls the Second
Industrial Revolution, dominated by computing machines driving
all kinds of industrial processes. He notes: "Let us remember
that the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings it
may have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent of
slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must
accept the economic conditions of slave labor" (p. 220).

"What can we expect of its economic and social consequences? In
the first place, we can expect an abrupt and final cessation of
the demand for the type of factory labor performing purely
repetitive tasks. In the long run, the deadly uninteresting
nature of the repetitive task may make this a good thing and the
source of leisure necessary for a man's full cultural
development. It may also produce cultural results as trivial and
wasteful as the greater part of those so far obtained from the
radio and the movies" (p. 219).

Nick Thimmesch, editor. Aliteracy. People Who Can Read but Won't.
Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Policy
Research, 1983. Proceedings of a conference held on September 20,
1982 in Washington, DC.

According to William A. Baroody, Jr., President of the American
Enterprise Institute, the aliterate person scans magazines,
reads headlines, "never reads novels or poetry for the pleasures
they offer." He goes on to state that aliteracy is more
dangerous because it "reflects a change in cultural values and a
loss of skills" and "leads to knowing without understanding."

Marsha Levine, a participant in the conference noted that
although educators are concerned with universal literacy, many
people read less or not at all: "A revolution in technology is
having an impact on education...they [technological means]
increase the level of literacy, but they might undermine the
practice of what they teach."

At the same conference, an anonymous participant posed a sequence
of questions: "Exactly what advantage do reading and literacy
hold in terms of helping us to process information? What does
reading give us that is of some social advantage that cannot be
obtained through other media? Is it entirely certain that we
cannot have a functioning society with an oral-aural method of
communication, where we use television and its still unexploited
resources of communication? [...] Is it impossible to conceive of
a generation that has received its knowledge of the world and
itself through television?" (p. 22).

John Searle. The storm over the university, in The New York
Review of Books, 37:19, December 6, 1990, pp. 34-42.

Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters. Trans.
Walter Hamilton. Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.

In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments
against writing: "It will implant forgetfulness in their souls
[of people, M.N.]: they will cease to exercise memory because
they rely on that which is written, calling these things to
remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of
external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon,
a potion; some translate it as recipe, M.N.] not for memory, but
for reminder" (274-278e. p. 96). (References to Plato include the
Stephanus numbers. This makes them independent of the particular
edition used by the reader.)

Claude Lévi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1967.

The author continues Socrates' thought: "It [writing] seems to
have favored the exploitation of human beings rather than their
enlightenment" (p. 298).

From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergence
of writing and early written documents, the following proved
useful in defining the position stated in this book:

John Hladczuk, William Eller, and Sharon Hladczuk.
Literacy/Illiteracy in the World. A Bibliography. New York:
Greenwood Press, 1989.

David R. Olson, Nancy Torrance, and Angela Hildyard, editors.
Literacy, Language, and Learning: The Nature and Consequences of
Reading and Writing. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985.

Robert Pattison. On Literacy: The Politics of the Word from Homer
to the Age of Rock. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Gerd Baumann, editor. The Written Word: Literacy in Transition.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Literacy Committee.
Illiteracy in America: Extent, Causes and Suggested Solutions,
1986.

Susan B. Neuman. Literacy in the Television Age. The Myth of the
TV Effect. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1991.

Edward M. Jennings and Alan C. Purves, editors. Literate Systems
and Individual Lives. Perspectives on Literacy and Schooling.
Albany: SUNY Press, 1991.

Dr. Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift.
Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1990.

David Diringer. The Alphabet. A Key to the History of Mankind.
3rd edition. New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1968.

Colin H. Roberts. The Birth of the Codex. London: Oxford
University Press, 1987.

Martin Koblo. Die Entwicklung der Schrift. Wiesbaden:
Brandsetter, 1963.

Donald Jackson. The Story of Writing. New York: Taplinger
Publishing Co., 1981.

Hannsferdinand Dobler. Von der Keilschrift zum Computer.
Schrift, Buch, Wissenschaften. Munich: Bertelsmann, 1974.

Colin Clair. A History of European Printing. New York: Academic
Press, 1976.

Lucien Paul Victor Febre. The Coming of the Book. The Impact of
Printing 1450-1800. Trans. David Gerard. London: N.L.B., 1976.

Karlen Mooradian. The Dawn of Printing. Lexington, KY:
Association for Education in Journalism, 1972.

Warren Chappel. A Short History of the Printed Word. New York:
Knopf, 1970.

C.P. Snow. The Two Cultures and a Second Look. An expanded
version of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.
Cambridge: At the University Press, 1959.

John Brockman. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific
Revolution. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

A recent criticism of the book, by Phillip E. Johnson, on the
World Wide Web, states that the scientists contributing to the
book "tend to replace the literary intellectuals rather than
cooperate with them."

Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1987.

Antoine de St. Exupéry. The Little Prince. Trans. Katherine
Woods. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1943.

Helmut Schmidt, ex-Chancellor of West Germany, Marion Gräfin
Dönhoff, editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Edzard Reuter, ex-CEO of
Daimler-Benz, along with several prominent German intellectuals
and politicians, met during the summer of 1992 to discuss issues
facing their country after reunification. In their Manifesto,
they insisted that any concept for a sensible future needs to
integrate the notion of renouncing (Verzicht) and sharing as
opposed to growing expectations and their export through economic
aid to Third World countries. See Ein Manifest: Weil das Land
sich ändern muß (A Manifesto. Because the country needs to
change), Reinbeck: Rowohlt Verlag, 1992

Jean-Marie Guéhenno. La Fin de la Démocratie. Paris: Flammarion,
1993.

Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld. New York:
Outerbridge and Dienstfrey/Ballantine, 1970.

Nathaniel Hawthorne. Earth's Holocaust, in The Complete Short
Stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Garden City NY: Doubleday & Co.,
1959.

George Steiner. The end of bookishness? in Times Literary
Supplement, July 8-14, 1988.

"To read classically means to own the means of that reading. We
are dealing no longer with the medieval chained library or with
books held as treasures in certain monastic and princely
institutions. The book became a domestic object owned by its
user, accessible at his will for re-reading. This access in turn
comprised private space, of which the personal libraries of
Erasmus and of Montaigne are emblematic. Even more crucial,
though difficult to define, was the acquisition of periods of
private silence" (p. 754).

Thomas Robert Malthus. An Essay On the Principle of Population,
1798, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. E.A. Wrigley and
David Souden, editors. London: W. Pickering, 1986.

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorn Clemens). The Annotated Huckleberry
Finn: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. With introduction,
notes, and bibliography by Michael P. Hearn. New York: C.N.
Potter and Crown Publishers, 1981.

"Twain drives home just how strongly we are chained to our own
literacy through Huck's illiterate silence" (p. 101). "Thus
Twain brings into focus the trap of literacy. There is a whole
world in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy.
They can't, for ironic example, read this marvelous work, The
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And yet we must recognize a world
rich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty,
that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained to
letters" (p. 105).

George Gilder. Life After Television: The Coming Transformation
of Media and American Life. New York: Norton, 1992.

Neil Postman. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to
Technology. New York: Knopf, 1992.


America-The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy

John Adams. Letters from a Distinguished American: Twelve Essays
by John Adams on American Foreign Policy, 1780. Compiled and
edited by James H. Hutson. Washington, DC: Library of Congress,
1978.

-. The Adams-Jefferson: the Complete Correspondence between
Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams (Lester J. Cappon,
editor). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.

Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber. The American Challenge. Trans.
Robert Steel. With a foreword by Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. New
York: Atheneum, 1968.

Neil Postman. Rising Tide of Illiteracy in the USA, in The
Washington Post, 1985.

"Whatever else may be said of the immigrants who settled in New
England in the 17th century, it is a paramount fact that they
were dedicated and skillful readers.... It is to be understood
that the Bible was the central reading matter in all households,
for these people were Protestants who shared Luther's belief that
printing was 'God's highest and extremest act of Grace, whereby
the business of the Gospel is driven forward.' But reading for
God's sake was not their sole motivation in bringing books into
their homes."

Lauran Paine. Captain John Smith and the Jamestown Story. London:
R. Hale, 1973.

Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1950.

Charles Dickens. American Notes. New York: St. Martin's Press,
1985.

The book is a journal of Dickens's travels from Boston to St.
Louis, from January through June, 1842.

Alexis de Toqueville. Democracy in America, Vol. 1 (Henry Reeve
text as revised by Francis Bowen). New York: Vintage Books,
1945.

Several other writers have attempted to characterize the USA, or
at least some of its aspects:



Jean Baudrillard. Amérique. Paris: Grasset, 1986.



-. America. Chris Turner, London/New York: Verso, 1988.



Gerald Messadie. Requiem pour superman. La crise du mythe
américain. Paris: R. Laffont, 1988.



Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Liberalismo y Jacobinismo. Buenos
Aires: Ediciones Depalma, 1967.

In practically all her novels, Jane Austen extols the improvement
of the mind (especially the female mind) through reading; see
especially Pride and Prejudice, Vol. 1, chapter 8. (New York: The
New American Library, 1961, p. 35).

Thomas Jefferson. Autobiography, in Writings. New York: The
Library of America/Literary Classics of the United States, 1984.


Jefferson's father placed him in the English school when Thomas
was five years old, and at age nine in the Latin school, where
he learned Latin, Greek, and French until 1757. In 1758,
Jefferson continued two years of the same program of study with
a Reverend Maury. In 1760, he attended the College of William
and Mary (for two years), where he was taught by a Dr. William
Small of Scotland (a mathematician). His education consisted of
Ethics, Rhetoric, and Belles Lettres. In 1762, he began to
study law.

Joel Spring. The American School 1642-1990. 2nd ed. New
York/London: Longman, 1990.

Benjamin Franklin's model academy embodied his own education. "
'...it would be well if [students] could be taught every thing
that is useful, and every thing that is ornamental. But Art is
long, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos'd that
they learn those things that are likely to be most useful and
most ornamental.' [...] Franklin's early life was a model for
getting ahead in the New World [...] The 'useful' elements in
Franklin's education were the skills learned in apprenticeship
and through his reading. The 'ornamental? elements,... were the
knowledge and social skills learned through reading, writing, and
debating" (p. 23).

Theodore Sizer, editor. The Age of the Academics, New York:
Teachers College Press, 1964.

"The academy movement in North America was primarily a result of
the desire to provide a more utilitarian education as compared
with the education provided in classical grammar schools" (p.
22). Lester Frank Ward. The Psychic Factors of Civilization.
2nd ed. New York: Johnson Reprint Corp, 1970. "The highest duty
of society is to see that every member receives a sound
education" (p. 308).

Transcendentalism: "A 19th century New England movement of
writers and philosophers who were loosely bound together by
adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in
the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man,
and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the
revelation of deepest truths." The main figures were Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller (cf.
Encyclopedia Britannica, Micropedia. 1990 ed.

Paul F. Boller. American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860. An
Intellectual Inquiry. New York: Putnam, 1974. Major
philosophers of pragmatics:

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Although no finished work
deals explicitly with his pragmatic conception, this conception
permeates his entire activity. His semiotics is the result of the
fundamental pragmatic philosophy he developed.

John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey bases his pragmatic conception on
the proven useful. This explains why this conception was labeled
instrumentalism or pragmatics of verification. Among the works
where this is expressed are How We Think (1910), Logic, the
Theory of Inquiry (1938), Knowing and Known (1940).

William James (1842-1910). James expressed his pragmatic
conception from a psychological perspective. His main works
dedicated to pragmatism are Principles of Psychology (1890),
Pragmatism (1907), and The Meaning of Truth (1909).

Josiah Royce (1855-1916). He is the originator of a conception he
called absolute pragmatics.

John Sculley, ex-CEO of Apple Computer, Inc took the bully pulpit
for literacy (at President-elect Clinton's economic summit in
December, 1992), stating that the American economy is built on
ideas. He and other business leaders confuse ideas with
invention, which is their main interest, and for which literacy
is not really necessary.

Sidney Lanier. The Symphony, 1875, in The Poems of Sidney Lanier.
(Mary Day Lanier, editor). Athens: University of Georgia Press,
198.

Thorstein Veblen (1857-1929). American economist and social
scientist who sought to apply evolutionary dynamic approach to
the study of economic constructions. Best known for his work The
Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), in which he coined the term
conspicuous consumption.

Theodore Dreiser. American Diaries, 1902-1926. (Thomas P. Riggio,
editor). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982.

-. Sister Carrie (the Pennsylvania Edition). Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981.

-. Essays. Selected magazine articles of Theodore Dreiser: Life
and art in the American 1890's. (Yoshinobu Hakutani, editor). 2
volumes. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
1985-1987.

Henry James. The American Scene. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907.

-. The Bostonians. London: John Lehmann Ltd. 1952.

"I wished to write a very American tale," James wrote in his
Notebook (two years prior to the publication of the novel in
1886). He also stated, "I asked myself what was the most salient
and peculiar point of our social life. The answer was: the
situation of women, the decline of the sentiment of sex...."

Henry Steele Commager. The American Mind. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1950.

In the section aptly entitled "The Literature of Revolt,"
Commager noticed that the tradition of protest and revolt
(dominant in American literature since Emerson and Thoreau)
turned, at the beginning of the 20th century (that is, with the
New Economics), into an almost unanimous repudiation of the
economic order. "...most authors portrayed an economic system
disorderly and ruthless, wasteful and inhumane, unjust alike to
working men, investors, and consumers, politically corrupt and
morally corrupting," (p. 247). He goes on to name William Dean
Howell (with his novels), Sinclair Lewis, Theodore Dreiser, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and others. In the same vein,
Denis Brogan (The American Character), J.T. Adams (Our Business
Civilization), Harold Stearns (America: A Reappraisal), Mary A.
Hamilton (In America Today), André Siegfried (America Comes of
Age) are also mentioned.

Howard Gardner. Frames of Mind: Theory of Multiple
Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Diane Ravitch. The Schools We Deserve. New York: Doubleday,1985.

Peter Cooper (1791-1883). Self-taught entrepreneur and inventor.
As head of North American Telegraph Works, he made a fortune
manufacturing glue and establishing iron works. In 1830, his
experimental locomotive made its first 13-mile run.

The Corcoran case. The incredible secret of John Corcoran, 20/20,
ABC News, April 1, 1988. (Text by byTranscripts: Journal
Graphics, Inc. pp. 11-14.)

Noah Webster. The American Spelling Book: containing an easy
standard of pronunciation. Being the first part of a
Grammatical Institute of the English Language. Boston: Isaiah
Thomas and Ebenezer T. Andrews, 1793.

William Holmes McGuffey. McGuffey's Newly Revised Eclectic First
Reader: containing progressive lessons in reading and spelling
(revised and improved by Wm. H. McGuffey). Cincinnati: Winthrop
B. Smith, 1853. It is doubtful that all the clever remarks
attributed to Yogi Berra came from him. What matters is the dry
sense of humor and logical irreverence that make these remarks
another form of Americana.

Akiro Morita, et al. Made in Japan. New York: Dutton, 1989.

United We Stand, the political interest group founded by H. Ross
Perot, is probably another example of how difficult it is, even
for those who take an active stand (no matter how
controversial), to break the dualistic pattern of political life
in the USA. This group became the Reform Party.

Gottfried Benn. Sämtliche Werke. (Gerhard Schuster, editor).
Vols. 3-5 (Prosa). Stuttgart: Klett Cotta, 1986.

Benn maintains that the language crisis is actually the
expression of the crisis of the white man.

Andrei Toom. A Russian Teacher in America, in Focus, 16:4,
August 1996, pp. 9-11 (reprint of the same article appearing in
the June 1993 issue of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior and
then in the Fall 1993 issue of American Educator).

Among the many articles dealing with American students' attitudes
towards required subject matter, this is one of the most
poignant. It involves not literature, philosophy, or history, but
mathematics. The author points out not only the expectations of
students and educational administrators, but also the methods in
which the subject matter is treated in textbooks. Interestingly
enough, he recounts his experience with students in a state
university, where generalized, democratic access to mediocrity is
equated with education.


From Orality to Writing

Peter S. Bellwood. Prehistory in the Indo-Malaysian Archipelago.
Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1985.

Andrew Sherrat, Editor. The Cambridge Encyclopedia of
Archaeology. New York: Crown Publishers, 1980.

Eric A. Havelock. Schriftlichkeit. Das griechische Alphabet als
Kulturelle Revolution. Weinheim: Verlag VCH, 1990.

Ishwar Chandra Rahi. World Alphabets, Their Origin and
Development. Allahabad: Bhargava Printing Press, 1977.

Current alphabets vary in number of letters from 12 letters of
the Hawaiian alphabet (transliterated to the Roman alphabet by
an American missionary) to 45 letters in modern Indian
(Devnagari). Most modern alphabets vary from 24 to 33 letters:
modern Greek, 24; Italian, 26; Spanish, 27; modern Cambodian, 32;
modern Russian Cyrillic, 33. Modern Ethiopian has 26 letters
representing consonants, each letter modified for the six vowels
in the language, making a total of 182 letters.

Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the
World. London and New York: Methuen, 1982.

The comparison between orality and writing has had a very long
history. It is clear that Plato's remarks are made in a
different pragmatic framework than that of the present. Ong
noticed that: "...language is so overwhelmingly oral that of all
the many thousands of languages-possibly tens of thousands-spoken
in the course of human history, only around 106 have even been
committed to writing to a degree sufficient to have produced
literature, and most have never been written at all" (p.7). Ong
also refers to pictographic systems, noticing that "Chinese is
the largest, most complex, and richest: the K'anglisi dictionary
of Chinese in 1716 AD lists 40,545 characters" (p. 8).

Recently, the assumption that Chinese writing is pictographic
came under scrutiny. John DeFrancis (Visible Speech. The Diverse
Oneness of Writing Systems. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1989, p. 115) categorizes the Chinese system as morphosyllabic.

Harald Haarman. Universalgeschichte der Schrift. Frankfurt:
Campus Verlag, 1990.

David Diringer. The Alphabet: A Key to the History of Mankind.
2nd ed. New York: Philosophical Library, 1953.

-. The Story of Aleph Beth. New York/London: Yoseloff, 1960.

-. Writing. Ancient Peoples and Places. London: Thames of Hudson,
1962.

Ignace J. Gelb. A Study of Writing. Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1963.

Gelb, as well as Ong, assumes that writing developed only around
3500 BCE among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Many scripts are on
record: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan or
Mycenean Linear B, Indus Valley script, Chinese, Mayan, Aztec,
and others.

Ritual: a set form or system of rites, religious or otherwise.

Ralph Merrifield. The Archaeology of Ritual and Magic. London: B.
T. Ratsford, 1987.

Catherine Bell. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992.

Rite: a ceremonial or formal, solemn act, observance, or
procedure in accordance with prescribed rule or custom, as in
religious use (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary).

Roger Grainger. The Language of the Rite. London: Darton, Longman
& Todd, 1974.

Mythe-rite-symbole: 21 essais d'anthropologie littéraire sur des
textes de Homère. Angers: Presses de l'Université d'Angers,
1984.

Weltanschauung: one's philosophy or conception of the universe
and of life (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary). A particular
philosophy or view of life; a conception of the world (cf. The
Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English).

Francesco d'Errico. Paleolithic human calendars: a case of
wishful thinking? in Current Anthropology, 30, 1989, pp.
117-118.

He regards petroglyphs were looked at as a possible mathematical
conception of the cosmos, a numbering or even a calculation
system, a rhythmical support for traditional recitation, a
generic system of notation.

B.A. Frolov. Numbers in Paleolithic graphic art and the initial
stages in the development of mathematics, in Soviet
Anthropology and Archaeology, 16 (3-4), 1978, pp. 142-166.

A. Marshack. Upper paleolithic notation and symbol, in Science,
178: 817-28, 1972.

E.K.A. Tratman. Late Upper Paleolithic Calculator? Gough's Cave,
Cheddar, Somerset, in Proceedings, University of Bristol,
Speleological Society, 14(2), 1976, pp.115-122.

Iwar Werlen. Ritual und Sprache: Zum Verhältnis von Sprechen und
Handeln in Ritualen. Tübingen: Narr Verlag, 1984.

Inner clock, or biological clock, defines the relation between a
biological entity and the time-based phenomena in the
environment. As with the so-called circadian cycles (circadian
meaning almost the day and night cycle, circa diem), rhythms of
existence persist even in the absence of external stimuli. The
appearance, at least, is that of an inner clock.

The notion of genetic code describes a system by which DNA and
RNA molecules carry genetic information. Particular sequences of
genes in these molecules represent particular sequences of amino
acids (the building blocks of proteins) and thereby embody
instructions for making of different types of proteins. On the
same subject, but obviously at a deeper level than a dictionary
definition, is James D. Watson's celebrated book, The Double
Helix: a personal account of the discovery of the structure of
DNA. (A new critical edition, including text, commentary,
reviews, original papers, edited by Gunther S. Stent). London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981.

Homeostasis: the tendency towards a relatively stable
equilibrium between interdependent elements of the human body.
Physiological processes leading to body equilibrium are
interlocked in dynamic processes.

References to the oral phase of language in Claude Lévi-Strauss:
La Pensée Sauvage (1962). Translated as The Savage Mind. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1966. Le Cru et le Cuit (1964) The
Raw and the Cooked. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York:
Harper and Row, 1970.

Andrew and Susan Sherrat (quoted by Peter S. Bellwood, Op.cit): A
distinction accepted is that between unvocalized (Hebrew,
Arabic) and vocalized alphabets (starting with the Greek, in
which the vowels are no longer omitted). Some languages use
syllabaries, reuniting a consonant and a following vowel (such as
in the Japanese Katakana: ka, ke, ki, ko, ku). When two
different conventions are applied, the writing system is hybrid:
the Korean language has a very powerful alphabet, hangul, but
also uses Chinese characters, but pronouned in Korean. The
hangul system (15th century) expressed, for Koreans, a desire for
self- identity.

Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translated
from the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.

In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates arguments
against writing: "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls
[of people, M.N.]; they will cease to exercise memory because
they rely on that which is written, calling these things to
remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of
external marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon,
a potion; some translate it as recipe] not for memory, but for
reminder" (274-278e).



Oraltity and Language Today: What Do People Understand When They
Understand Language?

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated
by D.F. Pears and B.F. Guinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1961.

Amos Oz refers to self-constitution in language as follows: "...a
language is never a 'means' or a 'framework' or a 'vehicle' for
culture. It is culture. If you live in Hebrew, if you think,
dream, make love in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew in the shower, tell
lies in Hebrew, you are 'inside'. [...] If a writer writes in
Hebrew, even if he rewrites Dostoevksy or writes about a Tartar
invasion of South America, Hebrew things will always happen in
his stories. Things which are ours and which can only happen with
us: certain rhythms, moods, combinations, associations,
longings, connotations, atavistic attitudes towards the whole of
creation, and so forth," (Under This Blazing Light, Cambridge,
England: University Press, 1979, p. 189).

J. Lyons. Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977.


Semantics requires that one "abstract from the user of the
language and analyze only the expressions and their designata"
(Vol. 1., p.115).

Noam Chomsky. The distinction between competence and performance
in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1965. Many scholars noticed the dualism inherent in the Chomskyan
theory. Competence is "the speaker- hearer's knowledge of his
language;" performance is "the actual use of language in concrete
situations" (p.4).

Noam Chomsky started to formulate the idea of the innate
constitution of a speaker's competence in the famous article A
review of B.K. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in Language, 35 (1959),
an idea he has developed through all his scholarly work. In the
review, he considered the alternatives: language is learned
(within Skinner's scheme of stimulus-response), or it is somehow
innate. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge MA: MIT
Press, 1965), Reflections on Language (London: Fontana, 1976),
and Rules and Representations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), the
thought is constantly refined, though not necessarily more
convincing (as his critics noticed).

Roman Jakobson. Essais de Linguistique Générale, Paris: Editions
de Minuit, 1963.

Jakobson refused to ascertain any "private property" in the
praxis of language. Everything in the domain of language "is
socialized" (p. 33).

Feedback: "The property of being able to adjust future conduct by
past performance" (Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human
Beings, p.47).

In 1981, Martin Gardner and Douglas Hoffstaedter shared a column
in Scientific American, which Hoffstaedter called Metamagical
Themes. In his first article, he defined self-reference: "It
happens every time anyone says 'I' or 'me' or 'word' or 'speak'
or 'mouth.' It happens every time a newspaper prints a story
about reporters, every time someone writes a book about writing,
designs a book about design, makes a movie about movies, or
writes an article about self-reference. Many systems have the
capability to represent or refer to themselves, or elements of
themselves, within the system of their own symbolism"
(Scientific American, January, 1981, vol. 244:1, pp. 22-23).
Hofstaedter finds that self-reference is ubiquitous.
Para-linguistic elements are discussed in detail in Eduard
Ataian's book Jazyk i vneiazykovaia deistvitelnost: opyt
ontologicheskovo sravnenia (Language and paralinguistic activity,
an attempt towards an ontological comparison). Erevan: Izd.
Erevanskovo Universiteta, 1987.

Luciano Canepari. L'internazione linguistica e paralinguistica,
Napoli: Liguori, 1985.

Canepari insists on prosodic elements.

The pragmatic aspect of arithmetic is very complex. Many more
examples relating to the use of numbers and their place in
language can be found in Crump (the examples given are referenced
in The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1990, pp. 34 and 37).

Face-to-face communication, or iteration, attracted the attention
of semioticians because codes other than those of language are
at work. Adam Kendon, among others, thought that non-verbal
communication captures only a small part of the face-to-face
situation. The need to integrate non-verbal semiotic entities in
the broader context of a communicative situation finally leads to
the discovery of non-verbal codes, but also to the question of
how much of the language experience is continued where language
is not directly used. Useful reading can be found in Aspects of
Non-Verbal Communication (Walburga Raffler-Engel, Editor),
Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1980.

Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates
Language. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1994. (His book
appeared eight years after this chapter was written.)

As opposed to pictograms, which are iconic representations (based
on likeness) of concrete objects, ideograms are composites
(sometimes diagrams) of more abstract representations of the
same. Chao Yuen Ren (in Language and Symbolic Systems,
Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968) shows how Chinese
ideograms for the sequence 1,2,3 are built up: yi, represented as
-; ér as -

; san as -

.

François Cheng. Chinese Poetic Writing, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1982. (Translation by D.A. Riggs and J.P.
Seaton of L'écriture poétique chinoise, Paris: Editions du Seuil,
1977).

"The ideogram for one, consisting of a single horizontal stroke,
separates (and simultaneously unites) heaven and earth" (p. 5).
He goes on to exemplify how, "By combining the basic
strokes,...one obtains other ideograms." The example given is
that of combining [one] and [man, house] to obtain [large, big]
and further on [sky, heaven].

On protolanguage: Thomas V. Gamkredlidze and V.V. Ivanov, The
Early history of Indo-European Languages, in Scientific
American, March 1990, pp.110-116.

Reading by machines, i.e., scanning and full text processing
(through the use of optical character recognition programs) led
some companies to advertise a new literacy. Caere and
Hewlett-Packard, sponsors of Project Literacy US and Reading is
Fundamental came up with the headline "We'd Like to Teach the
World to Read" to introduce optical character recognition
technology (a scanner and software), which makes machine reading
(of texts, numbers, and graphics) possible. In another ad, Que
Software depicts English grammar, punctuation and style books,
and the dictionary opposite a red key. The ad states:
"RightWriter improves your writing with the touch of a hot key."
The program is supposed to check punctuation and grammar. It can
also be customized for specific writing styles (inquiry to your
insurance agent, answer to the IRS, complaints to City Hall or a
consumer protection agency). As a matter of fact, the phenomena
referred to are not a matter of advertisement slogans but of a
new means for reading and even writing. A program such as
VoiceWorks (also known as VoiceRad) was designed for radiologists
 who routinely review X-rays and generate written reports on
their findings. Based on patterns recognized by the physician,
the program accepts dictation (from a subset of natural language)
and generates the ca. 150-word report without misspelling
difficult technical terms. VoiceEm (for Emergency Room doctors)
is activated by voice clues (e.g., "auto accident"), displaying
a report from which the physician chooses the appropriate words:
"(belted/non-belted,) (driver/passenger) in (low/moderate/high)
velocity accident struck from (rear/head-on/broadside) and
(claims/denies) rolling vehicle." Canned medical and legal
phrases summarize situations that correspond to circumstances on
record. When the doctor states "normal throat," the machine
spells out a text that reproduces stereotype descriptions:
"throat clear, tongue, pharynx without injections, exudate
tonsilar hypertrophy, teeth normal variant." The 1,000-word
lexicon can handle the vast majority of emergencies. Those
beyond the lexicon usually surpass the competence of the
doctor.

The subject of visual mnemonic devices used in the
interpretation of Shakespeare's plays is marvelously treated in
Frances A. Yates's book The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth: Penguin
Press, 1966). She discusses Robert Fludd's memory system of
theater, from his Ars memoriae (1619), based on the
Shakespearean Globe Theater. In ancient Greece, orators
constructed complex spatial and temporal schemata as aids in
rehearsing and properly presenting their speeches.


Functioning of Language

Research on memory and language functions in the brain is being
carried out at the University of Minnesota, Institute of Child
Development. Work is focused on individuals who are about to
undergo partial lobotomies to treat intractable epilepsy. The
goal is to provide a functional map of the brain.

"History remains a strict discipline only when it stops short, in
its description, of the nonverbal past." (Ivan Illich and Barry
Sanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, p. 3).

Derrick de Kerkhove, Charles J. Lumsden, Editors. The Alphabet
and the Brain. The Lateralization of Writing.
Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1988.

In this book, Edward Jones and Chizato Aoki report on the
different cognitive processing of phonetic (Kana) and
logographic (Kanji) characters in Japanese (p. 301).

André Martinet. Le Langage. Paris: Encyclopédie de la Pléiade,
1939.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris:
Gallimard, Bibliothèque des Idées, 1945.

André Leroi-Gourhan. Moyens d'expression graphique, in Bulletin
du Centre de Formation aux Recherches Ethnologiques, Paris, No.
4, 1956, pp. 1-3.

-. Le geste et la parole, Vol. I and II. Paris: Albin Michel,
1964-1965. -. Les racines du monde, in Entretiens avec
Claude-Henri Rocquet. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1982.

Gordon V. Childe. The Bronze Age. New York: Biblio and Tannen,
1969.

John DeFrances. The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy. 1983.

Marshall McLuhan. Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man. New
York: McGraw Hill 1964.

In many of his writings, Roland Barthes suggested
characteristics of the oral and visual culture. The distinction
between the two preoccupied him.

Klingon is a language crafted by Marc Okrand, a linguist, for use
by fictional characters. The popularity of Star Trek explains
how Klingon spread around the world.

By eliminating sources of ambiguity and prescribing stylistic
rules, controlled languages aim for improved readability. They
are easier to maintain and they support computational processing,
such as machine translation (cf. Willem-Olaf Huijsen,
Introduction to Controlled Languages, a Webtext of 1996).

An example of an artificial language of controlled functions and
logic is Logics Workbench (LWB), developed at the University of
Berne, in Switzerland. The language is available through the WWW.

Drawing: The trace left by a tool drawn along a surface
particularly for the purpose of preparing a representation or
pattern. Drawing forms the basis of all the arts.

Edward Laning, The Act of Drawing, New York: McGraw Hill, 1971.

Design: Balducinni defined design as "a visible demonstration by
means of those things which man has first conceived in his mind
and pictured in the imagination and which the practised hand can
make appear."

"Before Balducinni, its primary sense was drawing." (cf. Oxford
Companion to Art). More information is given in the references
for the chapter devoted to design.

Alan Pipes, Drawing for 3-Dimensional Design: Concepts,
Illustration, Presentation, London: Thames and Hudson, 1990.

Thomas Crump. The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Referring to Yoshio Yano's article of 1973, in Japanese,
entitled Communication Life of the Family, Crump writes:
"...age, in the absence of other overreaching criteria,
determines hierarchy: this rule applies, for instance, in Japan,
and is based on the antithesis of semmai-kohai, whose actual
meaning is simply senior-junior. The moral basis of the
precedence of the elder over the younger (cho-yo-no-jo)
originated in China, and is reflected in the first instance in
the precedence of siblings of the same sex, which is an
important structural principle within the family" (p. 69).

On the issue of context affecting language functions, see George
Carpenter Barker, Social Functions of Language in a
Mexican-American Community. Phoenix: The University of Arizona
Press, 1972.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. The Disuniting of America. Reflections
on a Multicultural Society. New York: W.W. Norton, 1992.

Sneja Gunew and Jan Mahyuddin, Editors. Beyond the Echo.
Multicultural Women's Writing . St. Lucia: University of
Queensland Press, 1988.

Stephen J. Rimmer. The Cost of Multiculturalism. Belconnen, ACT:
S.J.Rimmer, 1991.

Language and Logic

A.E. Van Vogt. The World of Null-A. 1945. The novel was inspired
by a work of Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity. An
Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics
(1933).

Walter J. Ong seems convinced that "...formal logic is the
invention of Greek culture after it had interiorized the
technology of alphabetic writing, and so made a permanent part of
its noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabetic
writing made possible" (Op. cit., p. 52). He reports on A.R.
Luria's book, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and Social
Foundations (1976). After experiments designed to define how
illiterate subjects react to formal logical procedures (in
particular, deductive reasoning), Luria seems to conclude that
no one actually operates in formally stated syllogisms.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés
inférieures. Paris: Alcan, 1910. (Translated as How Natives
Think by Lilian A. Clave, London: Allen & Unwin, 1926.)

Lévy-Bruhl reconnects to the notion of participation that
originates in Plato's philosophy and applies it to fit the
so-called pre-logic mentality.

Anton Dumitru. History of Logic. 4 vols. Turnbridge Wells, Kent:
Abacus Press, 1977.

In exemplifying the law of participation, Dumitru gives the
following example: "In Central Brazil there lives an Indian
tribe called Bororó. In the same region we also find a species of
parrots called Arara. The explorers were surprised to find that
the Indians claimed to be Arara themselves. [...] Put
differently, a member of the Bororó tribe claims to be what he
actually is and also something else just as real, namely an
Arara parrot" (vol. 1, pp. 5-6).

René Descartes (1596-1650), under his Latinized name Renatus
Cartesius, sees logic as "teaching us to conduct well our reason
in order to discover the truths we ignore" ("qui apprend à bien
conduire sa raison pour découvrir les vérités qu'on ignore").
For Descartes, mathematics is the general method of science.
Oeuvres de Descartes. Publiées par Charles Adam and Paul Tannery,
Eds. 11 vols. Nouvelle présentation en co-édition avec le Centre
National de la Recherche Scientifique. Paris: Vrin. 1965-1973
(reprint of the 1897-1909 edition). In English, the rendition by
Elizabeth S. Haldane and George R.T. Ross was published in
London, Cambridge University Press, 1967.

"Logic is the art of directing reason aright, in obtaining the
knowledge of things, for the instruction both of ourselves and
of others. It consists of the reflections which have been made on
the four principal operations of the mind: conceiving, judging,
reasoning, and disposing" (Port Royal Logic, Introduction).

John Locke (1632-1704) was looking for simple logical elements
and rules to compound them. Certainty is not the result of
syllogistic inference. "Syllogism is at best nothing but the art
of bringing to light, in debate, the little knowledge we have,
without adding any other to it." An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (London, 1690) sets an empirical, psychologically
based perspective of logic.

George Boole (1815-1864) conceived of a logical calculus, in An
Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the
Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London,1854),
which eventually became the basis for digital computation.

Fung-Yu-lan. Précis d'histoire de la philosophie chinoise. Paris:
Plon, 1952.

"It is very difficult for somebody to understand fully Chinese
philosophical works, if he is not able to read the original
text. The language is indeed a barrier. Due to the suggestive
character of Chinese philosophical writings, this barrier gets
more daunting, these writings being almost untranslatable. In
translation, they lose their power of suggestion. In fact, a
translation is nothing but an interpretation" (p. 35).

Chang-tzu. cf. Anton Dumitru, Op.cit., p. 13.

Kung-Fu-tzu (551-479, BCE), whose Latinized name is Confucius,
expressed the logical requirement to "rectify the names." This
translates as the need to put things in agreement with one
another by correct designations. "The main thing is the
rectification of names (cheng ming) [...] If the names are not
rectified, the words cannot fit; if the words do not fit, the
affairs [in the world] will not be successful. If these affairs
are not successful, neither rites nor music can flourish. If
rites and music do not flourish, punishments cannot be just. If
they are not just, people do not know how to act." The conclusion
is, "The wise man should never show levity in using words;"
(Lun-yu, cf. Wing-Tsit-chan, A Source Book in Chinese
Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Logic in his view is thinking about
thinking. The whole logical theory of the syllogism is
presented in the Analytica Priora. The Analytica Posteriora gives
the structure of deductive sciences. The notion of political
animal is part of the Aristotelian political system (cf.
Politics).

Takeo Doi. Amae no kozo. Tokyo: Kobundo. 1971. (Translated as The
Anatomy of Dependence by John Bester, Tokyo/New York: Kodansho
International and Harper & Row,1973.)

Vedic texts, the collective name for Veda, defined as the science
(the root of the word seems to be similar to the Greek for idea,
or the Latin videre, to see) of direct intuition, convey the
experience of the Rsis, ancient sages who had a direct
perception of things. The writings that make up Veda are: Rig
Veda, invocatory science; Yajur Veda, sacrificial; Sama Veda,
melody; Atharva Veda, of incantation. In each Veda, there is a
section on the origin of the ritual, on the meaning, and on the
esoteric aspect.

Mircea Eliade. Yoga. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.

"India has endeavoured...to analyze the various conditioning
factors of the human being. ...this was done not in order to
reach a precise and coherent explanation of the human being, as
did, for instance, Europe of the 19th century,... but in order
to know how far the zones of the human being go and see whether
there is anything else beyond these conditionings" (p. 10).

The logic of action, as part of logical theory, deals with
various aspects of defining what leads to reaching a goal and
what are the factors involved in defining the goal and testing
the result.

Raymond Bondon, in Logique du social (translated by David and
Gillian Silverman as The Logic of Social Action: An
Introduction to Sociological Analysis, London/Boston: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1981), gives the subject a sociological perspective.
Cornel Popa, in Praxiologie si Logica (Praxiology and Logic,
Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1984) deals with social action.
Authors such as D. Lewis, A. Salomaa, B.F. Chelas, R.C. Jeffrey,
and Jaako Hintikka, whose contributions were reunited in a volume
celebrating Stig Kanger, pay attention to semantic aspects and
conditional values in many-valued propositional logics (cf.
Logical Theory and Semantic Analysis, edited by Soren Stenlund,
Dordrecht/Boston: Reidel, 1974).

The term culture originates in human practical experiences
related to nature: cultivating land, breeding and rearing
animals. By extension, culture (i.e., cultivating and breeding
the mind) leads to the noun describing a way of life. In the
late 18th century, Herder used the plural cultures to distinguish
what was to become civilization. In 1883, Dilthey made the
distinction between cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften,
addressing the mind) and natural sciences. The objects of
cultural sciences are man-made and the goal is understanding
(Verstehen). For more information on the emergence and use of
the term culture, see A.L. Kroeber and C. Kluckholm, Culture: a
Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions, in Peabody Museum
Papers, XLVII, Harvard University Press, 1952.

Ramon Lull (Raymundus Lullus, 1235-1315) suggested a mechanical
system of combining ideas, an alphabet (or repertory) and a
calculus for generating all possible judgments. Called Ars Magna
(The Great Art), his work attracted both ironic remarks and
enthusiastic followers.

Athanasius Kircher, in Polygraphia nova et universalis ex
combinatoria arte detecta (New and universal polygraphy
discovered from the arts of combination, Rome, 1663), tried to
introduce an arithmetic of logic.

George Delgarus, in Ars signorum (The art of signs, London,
1661), suggested a universal language of signs.

John Wilkins dealt with it as a secret language (1641, Mercury,
or the Secret and Swift Messenger, and 1668, An Essay Towards a
Real Character and a Philosophical Language).

Lotfi Zadeh introduced fuzzy logic: a logic of vague though
quantified relations among entities and of non- clear-cut
definitions (What is young? tall? bold? good?).

Felix Hausdorf/Paul Mongré. Sant 'Ilario. Gedanken aus der
Landschaft Zarathustras. 1897. p. 7

W.B. Gallie (Peirce's Pragmatism, in Peirce and Pragmatism,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1952) noticed that Peirce, "in the
Pragmaticism Papers, approaches the subject of vagueness from a
number of different sides. He claims, for instance, that all our
most deeply grounded and in practice indubitable beliefs are
essentially vague" (cf. Peirce, 5.446). According to Peirce,
vagueness is a question of representation, not a peculiarity of
the object of the representation. He goes on to specify that the
source of vagueness is the relation between the sign and the
interpretant ("Indefiniteness in depth may be termed
vagueness," cf. MSS 283, 141, 138-9). Additional commentary in
Nadin, The Logic of Vagueness and the Category of Synechism, in
The Monist, Special Issue: The Relevance of Charles Peirce, 63:3,
July, 1980, pp. 351-363.

Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976.

-. The Extended Phenotype. New York: Oxford University Press,
1982.

Elan Moritz, of the Institute for Memetic Research, provides the
historic and methodological background to the subject in
Introduction to Memetic Science.

E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge:
Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975.

Mihai Nadin. Mind-Anticipation and Chaos (from the series
Milestones in Thought and Discovery). Stuttgart/Zurich: Belser
Presse. 1991.

"Minds exist only in relation to other minds" p. 4. The book was
based on a lecture delivered in January,1989 at Ohio State
University.


Language as Mediating Mechanism

Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976.

-. The Extended Phenotype. New York: Oxford University Press,
1982.

Elan Moritz, of the Institute for Memetic Research, provides the
historic and methodological background to the subject in
Introduction to Memetic Science., a Webtext.

E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge:
Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975.

Mediation: a powerful philosophic notion reflecting interest in
the many ways in which something different from what we want to
know, understand, do, or act upon intercedes between the object
of our interest, action, or thought.

G.W. Hegel. Hegels Werke, vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein
von Freunden des Verewigten, vols. I-XIX. Berlin. 1832-1845,
1887

The dialectics of mediation includes a non-mediated mode,
generated by the suppression of mediation, leading to the
Thing-in-itself: "Dieses Sein ist daher eine Sache, die an und
für sich ist die Objektivität" (vol. V, p. 171) (This being is,
henceforth, a thing in itself and for itself, it is objectivity.)
Everything else is mediated.

In all post-Hegelian developments-right wing (Hinrichs, Goeschel,
Gabler), left-wing (Ruge, Feuerback, Strauss), center (Bauer,
Köstlin, Erdmann)-mediation is a major concept.

Emile Durkheim. De la Division du Travail Sociale. 9th ed. Paris:
Presses Univérsitaires de France, 1973. (Translated as The
Division of Labor in Society by W.D. Halls. New York: Free Press,
1984).

Michel Freyssenet. La Division Capitaliste du Travail. Paris:
Savelli, 1977.

Elliot A. Krause. Division of Labor, A Political Perspective.
Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

Gunnar Tornqvist, Editor. Division of Labour, Specialization, and
Technical Change: Global, Regional, and Workplace Level. Malmo,
Sweden: Liber, 1986.

Marcella Corsi. Division of Labour, Technical Change, and
Economic Growth. Aldershot, Hants, U.K.: Avebury/Brookfield VT:
Gower Publishing Co., 1991.

Leonard Bloomfield. Language. 1933. rpt. New York: Holt, Rinehart
& Winston. 1964.

In this work, the author maintains that the division of labor,
and with it the whole working of human society, is due to
language.

Charles Sanders Peirce. "Anything that determines something else
(its interpretant) to refer to an object to which itself refers
(its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a
sign, and so on ad infinitum" (2.303). "Something which stands
to somebody in some respect or capacity" (2.228).

Other sign definitions have been given: "In the language,
reciprocal presuppositions are established between the
expression (signifier) and the expressed (signified). The sign is
the manifestation of these presuppositions," (A. J. Greimas and
J. Courtés, Semiotics and Language. An Analytical Dictionary,
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, p. 296; translation
of Sémiotique. Dictionnaire Raisonné de la Théorie du Langage,
Paris: Classique Hachette, 1979).

According to L. Hjelmslev, the sign is the result of semiosis
taking place at the time of the language act. Benveniste
considers that the sign is representative of another thing, which
it evokes as a substitute.

Herbert Marcuse. The One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideology
of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translated
from the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton.
Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.

Regarding cave paintings, see:

Mihai Nadin. Understanding prehistoric images in the
post-historic age: a cognitive project, in Semiotica, 100:2-4,
1994. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter. pp. 387-405 B.
Campbell. Humankind Emerging. Toronto: Little, Brown & Co.,1985.

W. Davis. The origins of image making, in Current Anthropology,
27 (1986). pp. 193-215.

Luigi Bottin. Contributi della Tradizione Greco-Latina e
Arabo-Latina al Testo della Rhetorica di Aristotele. Padova:
Antenore, 1977.

Marc Fumaroli. L'Age de l'Éloquence: Rhétorique et 'Res
Literaria' de la Renaissance au Seuil de l'Époque Classique.
Geneva: Droz and Paris: Champion, 1980.

William M.A. Grimaldi. Aristotle, Rhetoric: A Commentary. New
York: Fordham University Press, 1980- 1988.

Rhetoric is generally seen as the ability to persuade. Using many
kinds of signs (language, images, sounds, gestures, etc.),
rhetoric is connected to the pragmatic context. In ancient
Greece and Rome, as well as in China and India, rhetoric was
considered an art and practiced for its own sake. Some consider
rhetoric as one of the sources of semiotics (together with logic,
hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language (cf. Tzvetan
Todorov, Théorie du Symbole, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1977). Gestures
are a part of rhetoric. Quintillian, in De institutione
oratoria, dealt with the lex gestus (law of gesture). In the
Renaissance, the code of gesture was studied in detail. In our
days of illiterate rhetoric based on stereotypes and
increasingly compressed messages, gestures gain a special status
indicative of the power of non-literacy-based ceremonies. The
rhetoric of advertisement pervades human interaction.

George Boole (1815-1864) conceived of a logical calculus, in An
Investigation of the Laws of Thought on which are founded the
Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities (London, 1854),
which eventually became the basis for digital computation.

Howard Rheingold.Virtual Reality. New York: Summit Books, 1991.

Rheingold offers a description that can substitute for a
definition: "Imagine a wraparound television with programs,
including three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you can
pick up and manipulate, even feel with your fingers and hands.
Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and actively
exploring it, rather than peering at it from a fixed perspective
through a flat screen in a movie theater, on a television set,
or on a computer display. Imagine that you are the creator as
well as the consumer of your artificial experience, with the
power to use a gesture or a word to remold the world you see and
hear and feel" (p. 16).

In an Internet interview with Rheingold, Sherry Turkel points out
that computers and networks are objects- to-think-with for a
networked era. She predicts, "I believe that against all odds and
against most current expectations, we are going to see a rebirth
of psychoanalytic thinking" (cf. Brainstorms,
http://www.well.com, 1996).


Literacy, Language, and Market

Reference is made to the works of Margaret Wheatley (Management
and the New Science); Michael Rothschild (Bionomics); Bernardo
Huberman (Dynamics of Collective Actions and Learning in
Multi-agent Organizations); Robert Axtel and Joshua Epstein
(creators of Sugarscape, a model of trade); and Axel
Leijonhufvud (Multi-agent Systems), all published as Webtexts.

Transactions as extensions of human biology evince the complex
nature of human interactions. Maturana and Varela indirectly
refer to human transactions: "Coherence and harmony in relations
and interactions between the members of a human social system
are due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, in
an ongoing social learning which their own social (linguistic)
operation defines and which is possible thanks to the genetic
and ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity of
the members" (Op. cit., p.199). They diagram the shift from
minimum autonomy of components (characteristic of organisms) to
maximum autonomy of components (characteristic of human
societies).

A Walk Through Wall Street, in US News and World Report, Nov. 16,
1987, pp. 64-65. One from among many reminiscences by Martin
Mayer, author of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Men and Money.

"Wall Street as price setter for the country dealt with much more
than pieces of paper. Commodities markets proliferated. The fish
market was on the East River at Fulton; the meat market on the
Hudson just to the north.... The 'physicals' of all commodities
markets were present...there were cotton sacks in the warehouse
of the Cotton Exchange, coffee bags stored here for delivery
against the contracts at the Sugar and Coffee Exchange on
Hanover Square and often a smell of roasting coffee.

"In the 1950's, this was a male world-women were not allowed to
work on the floor of the Stock Exchange, let alone become
members. The old-timers explained with great sincerity that there
was no ladies room."

The report points out that today Wall Street "sees less of the
real world outside, depends more on abstract information
processed through data machinery and more than ever responds to
forces far from its borders."

Zoon semiotikon, the semiotic animal, labeled by Paul Mongré
(also known as Felix Hausdorf).

Charles S. Peirce gave the following definitions: Representamen:
a Sign is a Representamen of which some interpretant is a
cognition of a mind (2.242). Object: the Mediate object is the
object outside the Sign; ...the sign must indicate it by a hint
(Letter to Lady Welby, December 23, 1908). Interpretant: the
effect that the sign would produce upon any mind (Letter to Lady
Welby, March 14, 1909).

In reference to the symbolic nature of market transactions,
another Peircean definition is useful: "Symbols grow. They come
into being by development out of other signs.... We think only in
signs.... If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughts
involving concepts" (2.307).

The pragmatic thought is, nevertheless, inherent in any sign
process. Markets embody sign processes in the pragmatic field.

Winograd and Flores state bluntly "A business (like any other
organization) is constituted as a network of recurrent
conversations" (Op. cit., p. 168).

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (with the assistance of Takashi Hikino)
Scale and Scope. The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism.
Cambridge MA/London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 1990.

"...the modern industrial Enterprise...has more than a production
function." (p. 14). Chandler further notes that "expanded output
by a change in capital-labor ratios is brought about by economies
of scale which incorporate economies of speed.... Wholesalers
and retailers expand to exploit economies of scale" (p. 21).

James Gordley. The Philosophical Origins of Modern Contract
Doctrine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Mariadele Manca Masciadri. I Contratti di Baliatico, 2 vols.
Milan: (s.n.), 1984.

John H. Pryor. Business Contracts of Medieval Provence. Selected
Notulae from the Cartulary of Girard Amalric of Marseilles,
1248. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1981.

ECU: In 1979, the process of European unification led to the
creation of the European Monetary System (EMS), with its coin
being the European Currency Unit (ECU) and the Exchange Rate
Mechanism (ERM). As a basket of European currencies, the ECU
serves as a reserve currency in Europe and probably beyond. It
is not the currency of choice for international transactions, and
as of the Maastricht negotiations, which affirmed the need for a
Community currency, the ECU was not adopted for this purpose.
Although predominant weight in the basket (over 30%) is given to
the German mark, the ECU is designed on the assumption that it
is quite improbable that a certain currency will move in the same
direction against all others. Therefore, exchange rates are
statistically stabilized.

Michael Rothschild. Bionomics: Economy as Ecosystem. Webtext,
1990.

Robert L. Heilbroner. The Demand for the Supply Side, in The New
York Review of Books, June 11, 1981, p.40.

He asks rhetorically: "How else should one identify a force that
debases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If the
barrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, were
devoted to some other purpose-say the exaltation of the public
sector-it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosive
element that it is. But as the voice of the private sector it
escapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point out
that a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from its
own doings, not from that of its governing institutions."


Literacy and Education

Will Seymour Monroe. Comenius and the Beginnings of Educational
Reform. New York: Arno Press, 1971, (originally printed in
1900).

Adolphe Erich Meyer. Education in Modern Times. Up from Rousseau.
New York: Avon Press, 1930.

Linus Pierpont Brockett. History and Progress of Education from
the Earliest Times to the Present. New York: A.S. Barnes, 1860.
(Originally signed "Philobiblius," with an introduction by Henry
Barnard.)

James Bowen. A History of Western Education. 3 Vols. London:
Methuen, 1972-1981.

Pierre Riché. Education et culture dans l'occident barbare 6-8
siècles. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962.

Bernard Bischoff. Elementärunterricht und probationes pennae in
der ersten Hälfte des Mittelalters, in Mittelalterliche Studien
I, 1966, pp. 74-87.

James Nehring. The Schools We Have. The Schools We Want. An
American Teacher on the Frontline. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass,
1992.

Irenée Henri Marron. A History of Education in Antiquity. New
York: Sheed and Ward, 1956.

Jacques Barzun. The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning
(Morris Philipson, Editor). Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1991.

The review mentioned was written by David Alexander, Begin Here,
in The New York Review of Books, April 21, 1991, p. 16.

Polis (Greek) signifies settled communities that eventually
evolved into cities.

The City-State in Five Cultures. Edited with an introduction by
Robert Griffeth and Carol G. Thomas. Santa Barbara CA: ABC-Clio,
1981.

J.N. Coldstream. The Formation of the Greek Polis: Aristotle and
Archaeology. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984.

Individual and Community: The Rise of the Polis, 800-500 BC. New
York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Will Durant. The Story of Civilization. Vol 4, The Age of Faith.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1950.

In 825, the University of Pavia was founded as a school of law.
The University of Bologna was founded in 1088 by Irnevius, also
for the teaching of law. Students from all over Latin Europe came
to study there. Around 1103, the University of Paris was
founded; by the middle of the 13th century, four faculties had
developed: theology, canon law, medicine and the seven arts. (The
seven liberal arts were comprised of the trivium-grammar,
rhetoric, and logic-and the quadrivium-arithmetic, geometry,
music, and astronomy.) Some time in the 12th century, a studium
generale or university was established at Oxford (pp 916-921).

The name university derives from the fact that the essences or
universals were taught (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th
Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 12, 1990.

Logos: (noun, from the Greek, from the verb lego: "I say"): word,
speech, argument, explanation, doctrine, principle, reason;
signified word or speech.

Ratio (from the Latin "to think"): reason, rationale; signified
measure or proportion.

Some of the work linking the early knowledge of the Latin and
Greek heritage of European thought, especially that part shut
off to Christendom in Moorish Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo,
Tunis, Sicily, and Spain, was transmitted by the Jews, who
translated works in Arabic to Latin. The Moslems preserved the
texts of Euclid and works dealing with alchemy and chemistry. In
1165, Gerald of Cremona studied Arabic in Spain in order to
translate works of Aristotle (Posterior Analysis, On the Heavens
and the Earth, among others), Euclid (Elements, Data),
Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga, Galen, works of Greek astronomy
and Greco-Arabic physics, 11 books of Arabic medicine and 14
works of Arabic astronomy and mathematics from the Arabic to
Latin. Beginning 1217, Michael Scot translated a number of
Aristotle's works from the Arabic to Latin (cf. Will Durant, Op.
cit., pp. 910-913).

Galileo Galilei. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche (Two New
Sciences: Including Centers of Gravity and Force of Percussion,
translated, with a new introduction and notes, by Stillman
Drake) Toronto: Wall & Thompson. 1989

-. Galileo's Early Notebooks. The Physical Questions (translated
from the Latin, with historical and paleographical commentary,
by William A. Wallace). Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame
Press. 1977

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In 1687, he published Philosophiae
Principia Mathematica, in which he offered explanations for the
movement of planets. In this work, the abstraction of force (of
attraction) is constituted and a postulate is formulated: every
particle of matter in the universe attracts every other with a
force whose magnitude depends directly upon the product of their
masses and inversely upon the square of the distance between the
two.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published in 1916 his contribution as
Die Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, in which he
referred to the attraction of massive objects. The cosmic reality
of such objects and of huge distances and high velocities is
quite different from the mechanical universe under consideration
by Galileo and Newton. Movement of planets cause the curving of
space. Einstein's theory shows that the curvature of space time
evolves dynamically. Newton's theory turned out to be an
approximation of Einstein's more encompassing model.

John Searle. The Storm Over the University, in The New York
Review of Books, 37:19, December 6, 1990, pp. 34-42

Mathematization: the use of mathematical methods or concepts in
particular sciences or in the humanities. The conception of
mathematics as a model for the sciences as well as for the
humanities has been repeatedly expressed throughout history. In
some cases, mathematization represents the search for abstract
structures. Today mathematization is often taken to mean modeling
on computer programs.

Académie Française: French library academy established by
Cardinal Richelieu in 1634. Its original purpose was to maintain
standards of literary taste and to establish the literary
language. Membership is limited to 40 (Encyclopedia Britannica,
15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 1, 1990. p. 50).

Alan Bloom. The Closing of the American Mind. How Education Has
Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students.
New York: Simon and Schuster. 1987

"Those despised millionaires who set up a university in the midst
of a city that seems devoted only to what they had neglected,
whether it was out of a sense of what they themselves had issued,
or out of bad conscience about what their lives were exclusively
devoted to, or to satisfy the vanity of having their names
attached to the enterprise," (p. 244).

Bart Simpson, the main character of the animated cartoon series
of the same name, created by Matt Groening. Bart was first
sketched in 1987; the television series first aired in the winter
of 1990.

Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores. Understanding Computers and
Cognition. A New Foundation for Design. Norwood NJ: Ablex
Publishing Corporation, 1986.

"Organizations exist as networks of directives and commissives.
Directives include orders, requests, consultations, and offers;
commissives include promises, acceptances, and rejections" (p.
157).

They state also: "In fulfilling an organization's external
commitments, its personnel are involved in a network of
conversations" (p. 158).

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Philosophical Investigations (Translation by
G.E.M. Anscombe of Philosophische Untersuchungen). Oxford: Basil
Blackwell. 1984 (reprint of the 1968 edition)

If a multiple choice test in World History (given in June, 1992
at Stuyvesant High School in New York City) asks whether the
Holocaust is an Italian revolutionary movement, and if Mein Kampf
was Hitler's body guard or his summer retreat, why should anyone
be surprised that American students show no better choices than
those they are supposed to choose from?

Steve Waite. Interview with Bill Melton, Journal of Bionomics,
July 1996.

Family: Discovering the Primitive Future

Statistics on family in the USA and the world are a matter of
public record. The processing and interpretation of data, even
in the age of electronic processing, takes time once data has
been collected. The Statistical Handbook on the American Family
(Phoenix AZ: The Orynx Press, 1992), for instance, deals with
trends covering 1989-1990. The numbers are intriguing. Well over
85% of the adult population married by the time of their 45th
birthday, but only around 60% are currently married. 10% are
divorced and almost as many widowed. The general conclusions
about the family are: There is a decline in marital stability
with over one million children per year affected by the divorce
of their parents. Less than 20% of the people see marriage as a
lifetime relationship. The POSSLQ (persons of opposite sex
sharing living quarters) is well over 5% of the population. The
size of the average American household shrank from 3.7 persons
over 40 years ago to 2.6 recently. Interracial marriages, while
triple in number compared to 1970, include slightly below 2% of
the population.

A.F. Robertson. Beyond the Family. The Social Organization of
Human Reproduction. Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1991.

Martine Fell. Ça va, la famille? Paris: Le Hameau, 1983.

Nicolas Caparros. Crisis de la Familia. Revolución del Vivir.
Buenos Aires: Ediciones Pargieman, 1973.

Adrian Wilson. Family. London: Travistock Publications, 1985.

Charles Franklin Thwing. The Family. An Historical and Social
Study. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1887.

Edward L. Kain. The Myth of Family Decline. Understanding
Families in a World of Rapid Social Change. Lexington MA:
Lexington Books, 1990. Herbert Kretschmer. Ehe und Familie. Die
Entwicklung von Ehe und Familie im Laufe der Geschichte.
Dornach, Switzerland: Verlag am Goetheanum, 1988.

André Burguière, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Martine Segalen,
Françoise Zonabend, Editors. Histoire de la famille (preface by
Claude Lévi-Strauss)..Paris: Armand Colin, 1986.

Family is established in extension of reproductive drives and
natural forms of cooperation. Regardless of the types leading to
what was called the family nucleus (husband and wife), families
embody reciprocal obligations. The formalization of family life
in marriage contracts was stimulated by writing.

J.B.M. Guy. Glottochronology Without Cognate Recognition.
Canberra: Department of Linguistics Research, School of Pacific
Studies, Australian National University, 1980.

Although the processes leading to the formation of nations is
relatively recent, nations were frequently characterized as an
extended family, although the processes reflect structural
characteristics of human practical experiences different from
those at work in the constitution of the family.

Martin B. Duberman. About Time. Exploring the Gay Past. New York:
Gay Presses of New York City, 1986.

Jeffrey Weeks. Against Nature. Essays on History, Sexuality, and
Identity. London: Rivers Oram, 1991.

Bernice Goodman. The Lesbian. A Celebration of Difference.
Brooklyn: Out & Out Books, 1977.

Jean Bethke Elshtain. Against Gay Marriage, in Commonweal,
November 22, 1991, pp. 685-686.

Brent Hartinger. A Case for Gay Marriage, in Commonweal, November
22, 1991, pp. 675, 681-686.

Not in The Best Interest (Adoption by Lesbians and Gays), in Utne
Reader, November/December, 1991, p. 57.

William Plummer. A Mother's Priceless Gift, in People Weekly,
August 26, 1991, pp. 40-41.

Nelly E. Gupta and Frank. Feldinger. Brave New Baby (ZIFT
Surrogacy), in Ladies Home Journal, October, 1989, pp. 140-141.

Mary Thom. Dilemmas of the New Birth Technologies, in Ms., May,
1988, pp. 4, 66, 70-72.

Cleo Kocol. The Rent-A-Womb Dilemma, in The Humanist,
July/August, 1987, p. 37.

Marsha Riben. A Last Resort (excerpt from Shedding Light on the
Dark Side of Adoption), in Utne Reader, November/December, 1991,
pp. 53-54.

Lisa Gubernick. How Much is that Baby in the Window? in Forbes,
October 14, 1991, pp. 90-91.

Self-sufficiency, reflecting contexts of existence of limited
scale, marks the Amish and Mennonite families. The family
contract is very powerful. Succeeding generations care for each
other to the extent that the home always includes quarters for
the elderly. Each new generation is endowed in order to maintain
the path of self-sufficiency. The Amish wedding (the subject of
Stephen Scott's book of the same title, Intercourse PA: Good
Books, 1988), as well as the role the family plays in educating
children (Children in Amish Society: Socialization and Community
Education, by J.A. Hosteter and G. Enders Huntington, New York:
Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971) are indicative of this family
life.

Andy Grove. Only the Paranoid Survive. New York: Doubleday, 1996.


The CEO of Intel, one of the world's most successful companies,
discussed the requirement of genetic update and his own,
apparently dated, corporate genes.

Adam Smith. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (D.D. Raphael and A.L.
Macfie, Editors). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976.

David Hume. A Treatise of Human Nature (L.A. Selby-Bigge,
Editor). 2nd edition. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1978.

-. Inquiries concerning human understanding and concerning the
principles of morals (L.A. Selby-Bigge, Editor). Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975.

Takeo Doi. Amae no kozo. Tokyo: Kobundo, 1971. Translated as The
Anatomy of Dependence by John Bester. Tokyo/New York: Kodansho
International and Harper & Row, 1973.



A God for Each of Us

The following books set forth the basic tenets of their
respective religions:

Bhagavad Gita: part of the epic poem Mahabharata, this Sanskrit
dialog between Krishna and Prince Arjuna poetically describes a
path to spiritual wisdom and unity with God. Action, devotion,
and knowledge guide on this path.

Torah: the books of Moses (also known as the Pentateuch); for
Chistians, the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis,
Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. These describe the
origin of the world, the covenant between God and the people of
Israel, the Exodus from Egypt and return to the Promised Land,
and rules for religious and social behavior. Together with the
books labeled Prophets and Writings, they make up the entire
Old Testament. The controversy among Jews, Roman Catholics,
Eastern Christians, and Protestants about the acceptance of some
books, the order of books, and translations reflect the
different perspectives adopted within these religions.

New Testament: the Christian addition to the Bible comprises 27
books. They contain sayings attributed to Jesus, his life story
(death and resurrection included), the writings of the apostles,
rules for conversion and baptism, and the Apocalypse (the end of
this world and the beginning of a new one).

Koran (al Qur'an): the holy book of the Moslems, is composed of
114 chapters (called suras). Belief in Allah, descriptions of
rules for religious and social life, calls to moral life, and
vivid descriptions of hell make up most of the text. According
to Moslem tradition, Mohammed ascended the mount an illiterate.
He came down with the Koran, which Allah had taught him to
write.

I-Ching: attributed to Confucius, composed of five books,
containing a history of his native district, a system for
divining the future (Book of Changes), a description of
ceremonies and the ideal government (Book of Rites), and a
collection of poetry. In their unity, all these books affirm
principles of cooperation, reciprocal respect, and describe
etiquette and ritual rules.

Mircea Eliade, Editor-in-Chief.The Encyclopedia of Religion ().
New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Mircea Eliade (with I. P. Couliano and H.S. Wiesner). The Eliade
Guide to World Religions. San Francisco: Harper, 1991.

Eliot Alexander. The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters,
and Others. New York: New American Library, 1990.

P. K. Meagher, T.C. O'Brien, Sister Consuelo Maria Aherne.
Encyclopedic Dictionary of Religion. 3 Vols. Corpus City
Publications, 1979.

In regard to the multiplicity of religions, the following works
provide a good reference:

John Ferguson. Gods Many and Lords Many: A Study in Primal
Religions. Guildford, Surrey: Lutterworth Educational, 1982.

Suan Imm Tan. Many Races, Many Religions. Singapore: Educational
Publications Bureau, 1971-72.

H. Byron Earhart. Religions of Japan: Many Traditions within One
Sacred Way. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984.

John M. Reid. Doomed Religions. A Series of Essays on Great
Religions of the World. New York: Phillips & Hunt, 1884.

Although no precise statistics are available, it is assumed that
ca. three billion people acknowledge religion in our days. The
numbers are misleading, though. For instance, only 2.4% of the
population in England attends religious services; in Germany,
the percentage is 9%; in some Moslem countries, service
attendance is close to 100%. The "3-day Jews" (two days of Rosh
Hashana and 1 day of Yom Kippur, also known as "revolving door"
Jews, in for New Year and out after Atonement Day), the Christian
 Orthodox and Catholics of Christmas and Easter, and the
Buddhists of funeral ceremonials belong to the vast majority
that refers to religion as a cultural identifier. Many priests
and higher order ecumenical workers recite their prayers as epic
poetry.

Atheism. The "doctrine that God does not exist, that existence of
God is a false belief" (cf. M. Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion,
vol. 1, pp 479-480). Literature on atheism continuously
increases. A selection showing the many angles of atheism can
serve as a guide:

The American Atheist (periodical). Austin TX: American Atheists.

Gordon Stein, Editor. An Anthology of Atheism and Rationalism.
Buffalo NY: Prometheus Books, 1980.

Michael Martin. Atheism: A Philosophical Analysis. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1990.

Jacques J. Natanson. La Mort de Dieu: Essai sur l'Athéisme
Moderne. Paris: Presses Univérstaires de France, 1975.

Robert A. Morey. The New Atheism and the Erosion of Freedom.
Minneapolis: Bethany House Publishers, 1986.

James Thrower. A Short History of Western Atheism. London:
Pemberton Books, 1971.

Robert Eno. The Confucian Creation of Heaven. Philosophy and the
Defense of Ritual Mastery. Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1990.

Ronald L. Grimes. Research in Ritual Studies. A Programmatic
Essay and Bibliography. Chicago: American Theological Library
Association; Metuchen NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1985.

Evan M. Zuesse. Ritual Cosmos. The Sanctification of Life in
African Religions. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1979.

Godfrey and Monica Wilson. The Analysis of Social Change. Based
on observations in Central Africa. Cambridge: The University
Press, 1968.

"A pagan Najakunsa believes himself to be dependent upon his
deceased father for health and fertility; he acts as if he were,
and expresses his sense of dependence in rituals" (p. 41).

References for the study of myths are as follows:

Eliot Alexander. The Universal Myths: Heroes, Gods, Tricksters,
and Others. New York: New American Library, 1990.

Jane Ellen Harrison. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion.
New York: Arno Press, 1975.

Walter Burkert. Ancient Mystery Cults. Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1987.

John Ferguson. Greek and Roman Religion: A Source Book. Park
Ridge NJ: Noyes Press, 1980.

Arcadio Schwade. Shinto-Bibliography in Western Languages.
Leiden: Brill, 1986.

Japanese Shintoism began before writing.

Hinduism: With one of the highest number of followers (ca. 650
million), Hinduism is an eclectic religion. Indigenous elements
and Aryan religions, codified around 1500 BCE in the Rig Veda,
Sama Veda, Yajor Veda, Atharva Veda, Aranyakas, Upanishads,
result in an amalgam of practices and beliefs dominating
religious and social life in Indiat The caste system classifies
members of society in four groups: priests (Brahmins), rulers,
farmers, and merchants, laborers (on farms or in industry).
Devotion to a guru, adherence to the Vedic scriptures, the
practice of yoga are the forms of religious action. The divine
Trinity of Hinduism unites Brahma (the creator), Vishna (the
preserver), and Shiva (the destroyer).

Taoism: In the Tao Te Ching (Book of the Way and Its Virtue), one
reads: "The Tao of origin gives birth to the One. The One gives
birth to the Two. The Two gives birth to the Three. The Three
produces the Ten Thousand Things." With some background in Tao,
the poetry becomes explicit: The One is the Supreme Void,
primordial Breath. This engenders Two, Yin and Yang, the duality
from which everything sprung once a ternary relation is
established. Tao is poetic ontology.

Confucianism: Stressing the relationship among individuals,
families, and society, Confucianism is based on two percepts: li
(proper behavior) and jen (cooperative attitude). Confucius
expressed the philosophy on which this religion is based on
sayings and dialogues during the 6th-5th century BCE. Challenged
by the mysticism of religions (Taoism, Buddhism) in the area of
its inception, some followers incorporated their spirit in
new-Confucianism (during the period known as the Sung dynasty,
960-1279).

Judaism: Centered on the belief in one God, Judaism is the
religion of the Book (the Torah), established at around 2000 BCE
by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Judaism promotes the idea of human
improvement, as well as the Messianic thought. Strong
dedication to community and sense of family are part of the
religious practice.

Islam: The contemporary religion with the highest number of
adherents (almost 9000 million Muslims on record), and growing
fast, Islam celebrates Mohammed, who received the Koran from
Allah. Acknowledged at 610, Islam (which means "submission to
God") places its prophet in the line started with Abraham,
continued with Moses, and redirected by Jesus. The five pillars
of Islam are: Allah is the only God, prayer (facing Mecca) five
times a day, giving of alms, fast of Ramadan, and pilgrimage to
Mecca.

Christianity: in its very many denominations (Roman Catholic,
Greek Orthodox, Protestant, which split further into various
sects, such as Baptist, Pentecostal, Episcopal, Lutheran, Mormon,
Unitarian, Quakers), claims to have its origin in Jesus Christ
and completes the Old Testament of the Hebrews with the New
Testament of the apostles. It is impossible to capture the many
varieties of Christianity in characteristics unanimously
accepted. Probably the major celebrations of Christianity (some
originating in pre-Christian pagan rituals related to natural
cycles), i.e., Christmas and Easter, better reflect elements of
unity. Christianity promotes respect for moral values, dedication
to the family, and faith in one God composed of three elements
(the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit).

Bahai of Bahá'i: ascertains the unity of all religious doctrines
as these embody ideals of spiritual truth. The name comes from
Baha Ullah (Glory of God), adopted by its founder Mirza Husain
Ali Nuri, in 1863, in extension of the al-Bab religion.
Universal education, equality between male and female, and world
order and peace are its goals. The religion is estimated to have
5 million adherents world-wide.

Richard Wilhelm. I Ging; Das Buch der Wandlungen.
Düsseldorf/Köln: Diedrichs, 1982.

Wilhelm states that, in the context described, Fuh-Hi emerged:
"He reunited man and woman, ordered the five elements and set
the laws of mankind. He drew eight signs in order to dominate the
world." The eight signs are the eight basic trigrams of I Ging,
the Book of Changes (which attracted Leibniz's attention).

King Frederick Barbarossa (Frederick I of the Holy Roman Empire,
1123-1190). Well known for challenging the authority of the Pope
and for attempting to establish German supremacy in religious
matters.

Joan of Arc (1412-1431). A plowman's daughter who, as the story
goes, listened to the voices of saints Michael, Catherine, and
Margaret. Thus inspiring the French to victory over British
invaders, she made possible the coronation of Charles II at
Reims. Captured by the English, she was declared a heretic and
burned at the stake. In 1920, Pope Benedict XV declared her a
saint.

Jan Hus (1372-1415). Religious reformer whose writings exercised
influence over all the Catholic world. In De Ecclesia, he set
forth that scripture is the sole source of Christian doctrine.

Martin Luther (1483-1546). A priest from Saxony, a scholar of
Scripture, and a linguist, who is famous for having attacked
clerical abuses. Through his writings (The 95 Theses), he
precipitated the Reformation.

Moslem armies defeated the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, led
by Charles Martel, at Poitiers (cf. J.H. Roy, La Bataille de
Poitiers, Octobre 733, Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

Crusades: a series of military expeditions taking place from 1095
to 1270) intent on reclaiming Jerusalem and the holy Christian
shrines from Turkish control.

David Kirsch poses the questions: Is 97% of human activity
concept-free, driven by control mechanisms we share not only
with our simian forebears, but with insects? (Today the Earwig,
Tomorrow the Man? in Artificial Intelligence, 47:1-3, Jan. 1991,
p. 161).

The Bible on CD-ROM is a publication of Nimbus Information
Systems (1989). The CD-Word Interactive Biblical Library (1990),
published by the CD-Word Library, Inc. offers 16 of the world's
most used Bible texts and reference sources (two Greek texts,
four English versions).

Secular god-building in the Soviet Union: Ob ateizme i religii.
Sbornik Statei, Pisem i drughich materialov (About atheism and
religion. Collected articles, letters, and other materials) by
Anatoli Vasilevich Lunacharskii (1875-1933), Moscow: Mysl, 1972.
This is a collection of articles on atheism and religion, part
of the scientific-atheistic library. See also Maxim Gorky,
Untimely Thoughts (translated by Herman Erolaev). New York: P.S.
Ericksson, 1966.

Ernest Gellner, Scale and Nation, in Scale and Social
Organization (F. Barth, editor).

"Max Weber stressed the significance of the way in which
Protestantism made every man his own priest" (p. 143).

Glen Tinder. Can we be good without God? in Atlantic Monthly,
December, 1989.

Michael Lewis. God is in the Packaging, in The New York Times
Magazine, July 21, 1996, pp. 14 and 16.

Lewis describes pastors using marketing techniques to form
congregations. The success of the method has led to branch
congregations all over the USA.

Tademan Isobe, author of The Japanese and Religion, states: "The
general religious awareness of the Japanese does not include an
ultimate God with human attributes, as the God of Christianity.
Instead, Japanese sense the mystery of life from all events and
natural phenomena around them in their daily lives. They have
what might be called a sense of pathos" (cf. Web positing of
August, 1996, http://www.ariadne.knee.kioto-u.ac.jp).



A Mouthful of Microwave


From a strictly qualitative perspective, the amount of food
people eat is represented by numbers so large that we end up
looking at them in awe, without understanding what they mean. The
maintenance of life is an expensive proposition. Nevertheless,
once we go beyond the energetic equation, i.e., in the realm of
desires, the numbers increase exponentially. It can be argued
that this increase (of an order of magnitude of 1,000) is higher
than that anticipated by Malthus. On the subject of what, how,
and why people eat, see:

Claudio Clini. L'alimentazione nella storia. Uomo, alimentazione,
malattie. Abano Terme, Padova: Francisci, 1985.

Evan Jones. American Food. The Gastronomic Story. Woodstock NY:
Overlook Press, 1990.

Nicholas and Giana Kurti, Editors. But the Crackling is Superb.
An Anthology on Food and Drink by Fellows and Foreign Members of
the Royal Society. Bristol, England: A. Hilger, 1988.

Carol A. Bryant, et al. The Cultural Feast. An Introduction to
Food and Society. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1985.

Hilary Wilson. Egyptian Food and Drink. Aylesbury, Bucks,
England: Shire, 1988.

Reay Tannahill. Food in History. New York: Stein and Day, 1973.

Charles Bixler Heiser. Seed to Civilization. The Story of Food.
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Margaret Visser. Much Depends on Dinner. The Extraordinary
History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos,
of an Ordinary Meal. Toronto, Ont.: McClelland and Stewart, 1986.

Esther B. Aresty. The Delectable Past. The Joys of the Table,
from Rome to the Renaissance, from Queen Elizabeth I to Mrs.
Beeton. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1978.

Maria P. Robbins, Editor. The Cook's Quotation Book. A Literary
Feast. Wainscott NY: Pushcart Press, 1983.

The Pleasures of the Table (compiled by Theodore FitzGibbon). New
York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Charles Dickens. American Notes. New York: St. Martin's Press,
1985. (pp. 154-155). On the symbolism of food, informative
reading can be found in:

Carol A. Bryant. The Cultural Feast: An Introduction to Food and
Society. St. Paul: West Publishing Co., 1985.

Lindsey Tucker. Stephen and Bloom at Life's Feast: Alimentary
Symbolism and the Creative Process in James Joyce's Ulysses.
Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984.

In L'aile ou la cuisse (Wing or Drumstick), a 1976 French film
directed by Claude Zidi, Luis de Funés became, as the French
press put it, "the Napoleon of gastronomy" fighting the barbarian
taste of industrial food, seen as a real danger to the authentic
taste of France.

At the initiative of the Minister of Culture, a Conseil National
des Arts Culinaires (CNAC) was founded in 1989. Culinary art and
gastronomic heritage were made part of the French national
identity. Awakening of Taste (Le reveil du goût) is a program
launched in the elementary schools. A curriculum originating from
 the French Institute of Taste is used to explain what makes
French food taste good. The CNAC provides a nationwide inventory
of local foods. A University of Taste (Centre de Goût) would be
established in the Loire Valley.

Jean Bottero. Mythes et Rites de Babylone. Paris: Librairie
Honoré Champion, 1985.

Reallexikon der Assyriologie. Vol. III, Getränke (Drinks), pp.
303-306; Gewürze (Spices), pp. 340-341; Vol. VI, Küche
(Cuisine), pp. 277-298. Berlin/New York, Walter de Gruyter, 1982.

La Plus Vieille Cuisine du Monde, in L'Histoire, 49, 1982, pp.
72-82.

M. Gabeus Apicius. De re conquinaria (rendered into English by
Joseph Sommers Vehling, New York: Dover Publications, 1977)
first appeared in England in 1705, in a Latin version, based on
the manuscripts of this work dating to the 8th and 9th
centuries. Apicius was supposed to have lived from 80 BCE to 40
CE. This book has since been questioned as a hoax, although it
remains a reference text.

Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. De re rustica. (12 volumes on
agriculture. Latin text with German translation by Will
Richter). München: Artemis Verlag, 1981.

Roland Barthes. Empire of Signs. New York: Hill and Wang. 1982.
(Originally published in French as L'Empire des Signes, Geneva:
Editions d'Art Albert Skira, S.A.

"The dinner tray seems a picture of the most delicate order: its
frame containing, against a dark background, various objects
(bowls, boxes, saucers, chopsticks, tiny piles of food, a little
gray ginger, a few shreds of orange vegetable, a background of
brown sauce)...it might be said that these trays fulfill the
definition of painting which according to Piero della Francesca
is merely demonstration of surfaces and bodies becoming even
smaller or larger according to their term" (p. 11).

"Entirely visual (conceived, concerted, manipulated for sight,
and even for a painter's eye), food thereby says that it is not
deep: the edible substance is without a precious heart, without a
buried power, without a vital secret: no Japanese dish is
endowed with a center (the alimentary center implied in the West
by the rite which consists of arranging the meal, of surrounding
or covering the article of food); here everything is the
ornament of another ornament: first of all because on the table,
on the tray, food is never anything but a collection of
fragments, none of which appears privileged by an order of
ingestion; to eat is not to respect a menu (an itinerary of
dishes), but to select, with a light touch of the chopsticks,
sometimes one color, sometimes another, depending on the kind of
inspiration which appears in its slowness as the detached,
indirect accompaniment of the conversation...." (p. 22).

The writings of the various religions (Koran, Torah, New
Testament) contain strictures and ceremonial rules concerning
food. For cooking and eating restrictions in various cultures,
see Nourritures, Sociétés et Religions: Commensalités
(introduction by Solange Thierry). Paris: L'Harmattan, 1990.

On the microwave revolution in cooking, see:

Lori Longbotham. Better by Microwave. New York: Dutton, 1990.

Maria Luisa Scott. Mastering Microwave Cooking. Mount Vernon NY:
Consumers Union, 1988.

Eric Quayle. Old Cook Books: An Illustrated History. New York:
Dutton. 1978; and Daniel S. Cutler. The Bible Cookbook. New
York: Morrow, 1985, offer a good retrospective of what people
used to eat.

In World Hunger. A Reference Handbook (Patricia L. Kutzner, Santa
Barbara CA: ABC-Clio, 1991), the author gives a stark
description of the problem of hunger in today's world:

"With more than enough food in the world to feed everyone,
hundreds of millions of men, women, and children still go
hungry" (p. ix).

It is not the first time in history that starvation and famine
affect people all over the world. What is new is the scale of
the problem, affecting well over one billion human beings. In
June, 1974, in the Assessment of the World Food Situation,
commissioned by the United Nations Economic and Social Council,
the situation was described in terms still unchanged: "The causes
of inadequate nutrition are many and closely interrelated,
including ecological, sanitary, and cultural constraints, but the
principal cause is poverty. This in turn results from
socioeconomic development patterns that in most of the poorer
countries have been characterized by a high degree of
concentration of power, wealth, and incomes in the hands of
relatively small elites of national and foreign individuals or
groups. [...] The percentage of undernourished is highest in
Africa, the Far East, and Latin America; the hunger distribution
is highest in the Far East (in the range of 60%). Of the hungry,
the majority (up to 90%) is in rural areas.



Data is collected and managed by the World Food Council. The
Bellagio Declaration, Overcoming hunger in the 1990's, adopted
by a group of 23 prominent development and food policy planners,
development practitioners, and scientists noticed that 14 million
children under the age of five years die annually from hunger
related causes.

Among the organizations created to help feed the world are CARE,
Food for Peace, OXFAM, Action Hunger, The Hunger Project, Save
the Children, World Vision, the Heifer Project. This list does
not include the many national and local organizations that feed
the hungry in their respective countries and cities.


Science and Philosophy: More Questions than Answers

T.S. Elliot. Burnt Norton, in V. Four Quartets. London: Faber &
Faber, 1936.

For information on the development of science and philosophy in
early civilizations, see:

Shigeru Nakayama and Nathan Sivin, Editors. Chinese Science:
Exploration of an Ancient Tradition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1973.

Karl W. Butzer. Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt: a Study in
Cultural Ecology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976.

Heinrich von Staden. Herophilus: The Art of Medicine in Early
Alexandria. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press,
1989.

The Cultural Heritage of India, (in 6 volumes). Calcutta:
Ramakrishna Mission, Institute of Culture, 1953.

James H. MacLachlan. Children of Prometheus: A History of
Science and Technology. Toronto: Wall & Thompson, 1989.

Isaac Asimov. Asimov's Biographical Encyclopedia of Science and
Technology. The Lives and Achievements of 1195 Great Scientists
from Ancient Times to the Present. Garden City NY: Doubleday,
1972. Fritz Kraft. Geschichte der Naturwissenschaft. Freiberg:
Romback, 1971.

G.E.R. Lloyd. Methods and Problems in Greek Science Cambridge
University Press, 1991.

Robert K.G. Temple. China, Land of Discovery. London: Patrick
Stephens, 1986.

Temple documents discoveries and techniques such as row
cultivation and hoeing ("There are 3 inches of moisture at the
end of a hoe,"), the iron plow, the horse harness, cast iron, the
crank handle, lacquer ("the first plastic"), the decimal system,
the suspension bridge as originating from China. In the
Introduction, Joseph Needham writes: "Chauvinistic Westerners, of
course, always try to minimize the indebtedness of Europe to
China in Antiquity and the Middle Ages" (p.7).

What is of interest in the story is the fact that all these
discoveries occur in a context of configurational focus, of
synthesis, not in the sequential horizon of analytic Western
languages. In some cases, the initial non-linear thought is
linearized. This is best exemplified by comparing Chinese
printing methods, intent on letters seen as images, with those
following Gutenberg's movable type. Obviously, a text perceived
as a holistic entity, such as the Buddhist charm scroll (printed
in 704-751) or the Buddhist Diamond Sutra of 868 (cf. p. 112)
are different from the Bibles printed by Gutenberg and his
followers. Contributions to the history of science from India
and the Middle East also reveal that many discoveries celebrated
as accomplishments of Western analytical science were
anticipated in non-analytical cultures.

Satya Prakash. Founders of Science in Ancient India. Dehli:
Govindram Hasanand, 1986.

G. Kuppuram and K. Kumudamani, Editors. History of Science and
Technology in India. Dehli: Sundeep Prakashan, 1990.

Seyyed Hossein Nasr. Islamic Science. Persia. Tihran: Surush,
1987.

Charles Finch. The African Background to Medical Science: Essays
in African History, Science, and Civilization. London: Karnak
House, 1990.

Magic, myth, and science influence each other in many ways.
Writings on the subject refer to specific aspects (magic and
science, myth as a form of rational discourse) or to the broader
issues of their respective epistemological condition.

Richard Cavendish. A History of Magic. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 1977.

Gareth Knight. Magic and the Western Mind: Ancient Knowledge and
the Transformation of Consciousness. St. Paul: Llewellyn
Publications, 1991.

Umberto Eco. Foucault's Pendulum. New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1989.

In this novel, Umberto Eco deals, in a light vein, with the
occult considered as the true science.

Jean Malbec de Tresfel. Abrège de la Théorie et des véritables
principes de l'art appelé chymie, qui est la troisième partie ou
colonne de la vraye medecine hermetique. Paris: Chez
l'auteur,1671.

Adam McLean. The Alchemical Mandala. A Survey of the Mandala in
the Western Esoteric Traditions. Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes Press,
1989.

Titus Burckhardt. Alchemie, Sinn und Weltbild. London: Stuart &
Watkins, 1967. Translated as Alchemy. Science of the Cosmos,
Science of the Soul, by William Stoddart.
Longmead/Shaftesbury/Dorest: Element Books, 1986.

Marie Louise von Franz. Alchemy. An Introduction to the Symbolism
and the Psychology. Toronto: Inner City Books, 1980.

Neil Powell. Alchemy. The Ancient Science. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1976.

Stanislas Klossowski de Rola. Alchemy. The Secret Art. London:
Thames and Hudson, 1973.

J.C. Cooper. Chinese Alchemy. The Taoist Quest for Immortality.
Wellingborough, Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1984.

Robert Zoller. The Arabic Parts in Astrology. The Lost Key to
Prediction. Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions International
(distributed by Harper & Row), 1989.

Dane Rudhyar. An Astrological Mandala. The Cycle of
Transformation and Its 360 Symbolic Phases. 1st ed. New York:
Random House, 1973.

Cyril Fagan. Astrological Origins. St. Paul: Llewellyn
Publications, 1971.

Percy Seymour. Astrology. The Evidence of Science. Luton,
Bedfordshire: Lennard, 1988.

Rodney Davies. Fortune-Telling by Astrology. The History and
Practice of Divination by the Stars. Wellingborough,
Northamptonshire: Aquarian Press, 1988.

"Astrological herbalism distinguished seven planetary plants,
twelve herbs associated with signs of the zodiac and thirty-six
plants assigned to decantates and to horoscopes" cf.
Lévi-Strauss, Le cru et le cuit, p. 42. Ruth Drayer.
Numerology. The Language of Life. El Paso, TX: Skidmore-Roth
Publications, 1990.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Nobel prize laureate, 1921.

He discusses the conditions of existence for which we are not
adjusted in Über den Frieden, Weltordnung und Weltuntergang (O.
Norden and H. Norden, Editors.), Bern. 1975, p. 494.

In a letter to Jacques Hadamard (1945), Einstein explained: "The
words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not
seem to play any role in my mechanisms of thought. The physical
entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain
signs and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily'
reproduced or combined" cf. A Testimonial from Professor
Einstein, in The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical
Field, edited by J. Hadamard, Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1945, p. 142.

Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines, Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1990.

"Rather than defining intelligence in terms of its constituent
processes, we might define it in terms of its goal: the ability
to use symbolic reasoning in the pursuit of a goal" (p. 17).

Alan Bundy, The Computer Modelling of Mathematical Reasoning. New
York: Academic Press, 1983.

Allan Ramsey. Formal Methods in Artificial Intelligence.
Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

M. Reinfrank, Editor. Non-Monotonic Reasoning: Second
International Workshop. Berlin/New York: Springer Verlag, 1989.
 Titus Lucretius Carus. De rerum natura (edited with translation
and commentary by John Godwin). Warminster, Wiltshire, England:
Aris & Phillips,1986.

-. The Nature of Things. Trans. Frank O. Copley. 1st ed. New
York: Norton., 1977.

Epicurus, called by Timon "the last of the natural
philosophers," was translated by Lucretius into Latin. His
Letter to Herodotus and Master Sayings (Kyriai doxai) were
integrated in De rerum natura (On Nature). A good reference book
is Clay Diskin's Lucretius and Epicurus, Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1983.

Galileo Galilei. Discorsi e dimostrazioni matematiche (Two New
Sciences: Including Centers of Gravity and Force of Percussion,
translated, with a new introduction and notes, by Stillman
Drake). Toronto: Wall & Thompson, 1989.

-. Galileo's Early Notebooks. The Physical Questions (translated
from the Latin, with historical and paleographical commentary,
by William A. Wallace). Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame
Press, 1977.

Starting out as a dictionnaire raisonné of the sciences, the
arts, and crafts, the Encyclopédie became a major form of
philosophic expression in the 18th century. Philosophers
dedicated themselves to the advancement of the sciences and
secular thought, and to the social program of the Enlightenment.
The Encyclopédie showcased new directions of thought in all
branches of intellectual activity. The emergent values
corresponding to the pragmatic condition of time, tolerance,
innovation, and freedom, were expressed in the Encyclopedic
writings and embodied in the political program of the revolutions
it inspired. One of the acknowledged sources of this orientation
is Ephraim Chamber's Cyclopedia (or an Universal Dictionary of
Arts and Sciences), London, 1728.

The examination of star naming is in some ways an exercise in the
geology of pragmatic contexts. The acknowledgment of what is
high, over, above, and beyond the observer's actions suggested
power. The sequence of day and night, of seasons, of the
changing weather is a mixture of repetitive patterns and
unexpected occurrences, even meteorites, some related to wind,
fire, water. Once the shortest and the longest days are
observed, and the length of day equal to that of night (the
equinox), the sky becomes integrated in the pragmatics of human
self-constitution by virtue of affecting cycles of work.
Furthermore, parallel to the mytho-magical explanation of what
happens follows the association of mythical characters, mainly
to stars. Saturn, or Chronos, was the god of time, a star known
for its steady movement; Jupiter, known by the Egyptians as
Ammon, the most impressive planet, and apparently the biggest.
Details of this geology of naming could lead to a book. Here are
some of the names used: Mythomagical: Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, Uranus, Pluto; Zodiacal: Gemini, Capricorn, Sagittarius,
Scorpio, etc.

Space: limitless, 3-dimensional, in which objects exist, events
occur, movement takes place. Objects have relative positions and
their movement has relative directions. The geometric notion of
space expands beyond 3-dimensionality.

Paradigm: Since the time Thomas Kuhn published The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions (1962), the concept of paradigm was
adopted in philosophic jargon. The underlying thesis is that
science operates in a research space dominated by successive
research models, or paradigms. The domination of such a paradigm
does not make it more important than previous scientific
explanations (paradigms are not comparable). Rather it effects a
certain convergence in the unifying framework it ascertains.

Logos: ancient Greek for word, was many times defined, almost
always partially, as a means to express thoughts. By
generalization, logos became similar to thought or reason, and
thus a way to control the word through speech (legein). In this
last sense, logos was adapted by Christianity as the Word of
Divinity.

For a description of holism, see Holism-A Philosophy for Today,
by Harry Settanni (New York: P. Lang, 1990).

Techné: from the Greek, means "pertaining to the making of
artifacts" (art objects included).

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Statesman and philosopher,
distinguished for establishing the empiric methods for
scientific research. Intent on analytical tools, he set out
methods of induction which proved to be effective in the
distinction between scientific and philosophical research. In The
Advancement of Learning (1605) and especially Novum Organum
(1620), Bacon set forth principles that affected the development
of modern science.

René Descartes (1596-1650): Probably one of the most influential
philosophers and scientists, whose contribution, at a time of
change and definition, marked Western civilization in many ways.
The Cartesian dualism he developed ascertains a physical (res
extensa) and a thinking (res cogitans) substance. The first is
extended, can be measured and divided; the second is
indivisible. The body is part of res extensa, the mind
(including thoughts, desires, volition) is res cogitans. His
rules for the Direction of the Understanding (1628), influenced
by his mathematical concerns, submitted a model for the
acquisition of knowledge. The method of doubt, i.e., rejection
of everything not certain, expressed in the famous Discourse on
Method (1637), together with the foundation of a model of science
that combines a mechanic image of the universe described
mathematically, are part of his legacy.

Edwin A. Abbot. Flatland. A Romance of Many Dimensions. By a
Square.

A broad-minded square guides the reader through a 2-dimensional
space. High priests (circular figures) forbid discussing a third
dimension. Abruptly, the square is transported into spaceland and
peers astonished into his 2-dimensional homeland.

Spatial reasoning: a type of reasoning that incorporates the
experience of space either in direct forms (geometric reasoning)
or indirectly (through terms such as close, remote, among
others).

Linearity: relation among dependent phenomena that can be
described through a linear function.

Non-linearity: relations among dependent phenomena that cannot be
described through a linear function, but through exponential and
logarithmic functions, among others.

Jackson E. Atlee. Perspectives of Non-Linear Dynamics.
Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

S. Neil Rasband. Chaotic Dynamics of Non-Linear Systems. New
York: Wiley, 1990.

Coherence: the notion that reflects interest in how parts of a
whole are connected. Of special interest is the coherence of
knowledge.

Ralph C.S. Walker. The Coherence Theory of Truth: Realism,
Anti-Realism, Idealism. London/New York: Routledge, 1989.

Alan H. Goldman. Moral Knowledge. London/New York: Routledge,
1988.

A major survey, focused on the contributions of Keith Lehrer and
Laurence Bon Jour, was carried out in The Current State of the
Coherence Theory. Critical Essays on the Epistemic Theories of
Keith Lehrer and Laurence Bon Jour, with Replies (John W.
Bender, Editor, Dordrecht/Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1989).

David Kirsch. Foundations of Artificial Intelligence. (A special
volume of the journal Artificial Intelligence, 47:1-3, January
1991. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Self-organization is a dominant topic in artificial life
research. The Annual Conference on Artificial Life (Santa Fe)
resulted in a Proceedings in which self-organization is amply
discussed. Some aspects pertinent to the subject can be found
in:

H. Haken. Advanced Synergetics: Instability Hierarchies of
Self-Organizing Systems and Devices. Berlin/New York: Springer
Verlag, 1983.

P.C.W. Davies. The Cosmic Blueprint. London: Heinemann, 1987.

G. M. Whitesides. Self-Assembling Materials, in Nanothinc, 1996.
http://www.nanothinc.com/webmaster @nanothinc.com

More information on self-assembling materials and nanotechnology
can be found on the Internet at
http://www.nanothinc.com/webmaster @nanothinc.com and at
http://www.foresight.org/webmaster@foresight.org.

Richard Feynman, in a talk given in 1959, stated that "The
principles of physics...do not speak against the possibility of
maneuvering things atom by atom. [...] The problems of chemistry
and biology can be greatly helped if our ability to...do things
on an atomic level is ultimately developed, a developmet which I
think cannot be avoided." (cf. http://www.foresight.org).

Preston Prather. Science Education and the Problem of Scientific
Enlightenment, in Science Education, 5:1, 1996.

The money invested in science is a slippery subject. While direct
funds, such as those made available through the National Science
Foundation, are rather scarce, funding through various government
 agencies (Defense, Agriculture, Energy, NASA) and through
private sources amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars. How
much of this goes to fundamental research and how much to applied
science is not very clear, as even the distinction between
fundamental and applied is less and less clear.

Ernst Mach. The Science of Mechanics (1883). Trans. T.J.
McCormick. LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1960.

Henri Poincaré. The Foundations of Science (1909). Trans. G.B.
Halsted. New York: The Science Press, 1929.

N.P. Cambell. Foundations of Science (1919). New York: Dover,
1957.

Bas C. van Fraasen. The Scientific Image. Oxford: Clarendon
Press,1980.

Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1976.

-. The Extended Phenotype. New York: Oxford University Press,
1982.

Elan Moritz, of the Institute for Memetic Research, provides the
historic and methodological background to the subject in
Introduction to Memetic Science.

E.O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis. Cambridge:
Belknap/Harvard University Press, 1975.

Mihai Nadin. Mind-Anticipation and Chaos (from the series
Milestones in Thought and Discovery). Stuttgart/Zurich: Belser
Presse, 1991.

-. The Art and Science of Multimedia, in Real-Time Imaging (P.
Laplante & A. Stoyenko, Editors). Piscataway NJ: IEEE Press,
January, 1996.

-. Negotiating the World of Make-Believe: The Aesthetic Compass,
in Real-TIme Imaging. London: Academic Press, 1995.

"Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways;
the point is to change it," Karl Marx (cf. Theses on Feuerbach
(from Notebooks of 1844-1845). See also Writings of the Young
Marx on Philosophy and Society, Garden City NY: Anchor Books,
1967, p. 402.

Paul K. Feyerabend. Against Method. Outline of an Anarchistic
Theory of Knowledge. London: Verson Edition,1978.

-. Three Dialogues on Knowledge. Oxford, England/Cambridge MA:
Blackwell,1991.

Imre Lakatos. Philosophical Papers, in two volumes (edited by
John Worrall and Gregory Currie). Cambridge, England/New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1978.

-. Proofs and Refutations. The Logic of Mathematical Discovery
(John Worrall and Elie Zahar, Editors). Cambridge, England/New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Multivalued logic: expands beyond the truth and falsehood of
sentences, handling the many values of the equivocal or the
ambiguous.

Charles S. Peirce ascertained that all necessary reasoning is
mathematical reasoning, and that all mathematical reasoning is
diagrammatic. He explained diagrammatic reasoning as being based
on a diagram of the percept expressed and on operations on the
diagram. The visual nature of a diagram ("composed of lines, or
an array of signs...") affects the nature of the operations
performed on it (cf. On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution to
the Philosophy of Notation, in The American Journal of
Mathematics, 7:180-202, 1885).

Brockman, John. The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific
Revolution. (A collection of essays with Introduction written by
John Brockman.) New York: Simon & Schuster. 1995

Here are some quotations from the contributors: Brockman
maintains that there is a shift occurring in public discourse,
with scientists supplanting philosophers, artists, and people of
letters as the ones who render "visible the deeper meanings of
our lives, redefining who and what we are."

"We're at the stage where things change on the order of decades,
and it seems to be speeding up...." (Danny Hillis)

Auguste Compte, in whose works the thought of Positivism is
convincingly embodied, attracted the attention of John Stuart
Mill, who wrote The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Compte
(Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1871). Some of Compte's early
writings are reproduced in The Crisis of Industrial Civilization
(Ronald Fletcher, Editor, London: Heinemann Educational, 1974).

Stefano Poggi. Introduzione al il Positivisma. Bari: Laterza,
1987.

Sybil de Acevedo. Auguste Compte: Qui êtes-vous? Lyons: La
Manufacture, 1988.

Emil Durkheim. De la division du travail social. 9e ed. Paris:
Presses univérsitaires de France, 1973. (Translated as The
Division of Labor in Society by W.D. Halls, New York: Free Press,
1984.

Durkheim applied Darwin's natural selection to labor division.

Herbert Spencer (1820-1903): very well known for his essay,
Progress: Its Laws and Cause (1857), attempted to conceive a
theory of society based on naturalist principles. What he defined
as the "super- organic," which stands for social, is subjected to
evolution. In his view, societies undergo, cycles of birth-
climax-death. Productive power varies from one cycle to other
(cf. Principles of Sociology, 1876-1896).



Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes

Art Speigelman. Maus. A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon
Books, 1986; and Maus II: A Survivor's Tale-And Here My Troubles
Began. New York Pantheon Books, 1991.

Started as a comic strip (in Raw, an experimental Comix magazine,
co-edited by Speigelman and Françoise Monly) on the subject of
the Holocaust, Maus became a book and, on its completion, the
Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a show to the artist.
Over 1500 interlocking drawings tell the story of Vladek, the
artist's father. The comic book convention was questioned as to
its appropriateness for the tragic theme.

Milli Vanilli, the group that publicly acknowledged that the
album Girl You Know It's True, for which it was awarded the
Grammy for Best New Artist of 1989, was vocally interpreted by
someone else. The prize winners, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus,
credited for the vocals, were hardly the first to take advantage
of the new means for creating the illusion of interpretation. As
the 'visual entertainment," they became the wrapper on a package
containing the music of less video-reputed singers. Their
producer, Frank Tarian (i.e., Franz Reuther) was on his second
"fake." Ten years earlier, he revealed that the pop group Boney
M. was his own "mouthpiece." Image-driven pop music sells the
fantasy of teen idol to a musically illiterate public. Packaged
music extends to simulations of instruments and orchestras as
well.

Beauty and the Beast is the story of a handsome prince in 18th
century France turned into an eight-foot tall, hideous, hairy
beast. Unless he finds someone to love him before his 21st
birthday, the curse cast upon him by the old woman he tried to
chase away will become permanent. In a nearby village, Maurice, a
lovable eccentric inventor, his daughter Belle, who keeps her
nose in books and her head in the clouds, and Gaston, the macho
of the place, go through the usual "he (Gaston) loves/wants her;
she does not care for/shuns him, etc." As its 30th full-length
animation, this Walt Disney picture is a musical fairy tale that
takes advantage of sophisticated computer animation. Its over one
million drawings (the work of 600 animators, artists, and
technicians) are animated, some in sophisticated 3-dimensional
computer animation. The technological performance, resulting
from an elaborate database, provided attractive numbers, such as
the Be Our Guest sequence (led by the enchanted candelabra,
teapot, and clock characters, entire chorus lines of dancing
plates, goblets, and eating utensils perform a musical act), or
the emotional ballroom sequence. Everything is based on the
accepted challenge: "OK, go ahead and fool us," once upon a time
uttered by some art director to the computer-generated imagery
specialists of the company. The story (by Mme. Leprince de
Beaumont) inspired Jean Cocteau, who wrote the screenplay for
(and also directed) La Belle et La Bête (1946), featuring Jean
Marais, Josette Day, and Marcel André.

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Seduced by the relation to history, he
produces allegories in reference to myth, art, religion, and
culture. His compositions are strongly evocative, not lacking a
certain critical dimension, sometimes focused on art itself,
which repeatedly failed during times of challenge (those of Nazi
Germany included).

Terminator 2 is a movie about two cyborgs who come from the
future, one to destroy, the other to protect, a boy who will
affect the future when he grows up. It is reported to be the most
expensive film made as of 1991 (over 130 characters are killed),
costing 85 to 100 million dollars; cf. Stanley Kauffmann, The New
Republic, August 12, 1991, pp. 28-29.

Kitsch: defined in dictionaries as gaudy, trash, pretentious,
shallow art expression addressing a low, unrefined taste.
Kitsch-like images are used as ironic devices in artworks
critical of the bourgeois taste.

The relation between art and language occasioned a major show
organized by the Société des Expositions du Palais de Beaux-Arts
in Brussels. A catalogue was edited by Jan Debbant and Patricia
Holm (Paris: Galerie de Paris; London: Lisson Gallery; New York:
Marian Goodman Gallery). Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831). Ästhetik (Hrsg. von Friedrich Bassenge). Berlin:
Verlag das Europäische Buch, 1985.

Dadaism: Hans Arp defined Dada as "the nausea caused by the
foolish rational explanation of the world" (1916, Zurich).
Richard Huelsenbeck stated that "Dada cannot be understood, it
must be experienced" (1920). More on this subject can be found
in:

Raoul Hausmann. Am Anfang war Dada. (Hrsg. von Karl Riha &
Gunter Kampf). Steinbach/Giessen: Anabas-Verlag G. Kampf, 1972.

Serge Lemoine. Dada. Paris: Hazan, 1986.

Dawn Ades. Dada and Surrealism Reviewed. London: Arts Council of
Great Britain, 1978.

Hans Bollinger, et al. Dada in Zurich. Zurich: Kunsthaus Zurich,
1985.

Walter Benjamin. Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction is
a translation of Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit: drei studien zur Kunstsoziologie.
Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963.

Walter de Maria's Lightning Field project was carried out with
the support of the Dia Art Foundation, which bought the land and
maintains and allows for limited public access to the work. As
the prototypical example of land-art, this lattice of lightning
rods covers an area of one mile by one kilometer. Filled with
400 rods placed equidistantly, the lightning field is the
interplay between precision and randomness. During the storm
season in New Mexico, the work is brought to life by many bolts
of lightning. The artist explained that "Light is as important
as lightening." Indeed, during its 24-hour cycle, the field goes
through a continuous metamorphosis. Nature and art interact in
fascinating ways.

Christo's latest work was entitled Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin,
July 1995. Regarding Christo's many ambitious projects, some
references are:

Erich Himmel, Editor. Christo. The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, Paris
1975-1985. New York: Abrams, 1990.

Christo: The Umbrellas. Joint project for Japan and the USA, 25
May - 24 June, 1988. London: Annely Juda Fine Art, 1988.

Christo: Surrounded Islands. Köln: DuMont Buch Verlag, 1984.
Christo: Wrapped Walkways, Loose Park, Kansas City, Missouri,
1977-1978. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1978.

Christo: Valley Curtain, Riffle, Colorado. New York: H.N. Abrams,
1973.

The Bauhaus, a school of arts and crafts, founded in 1919 in
Weimar, by Walter Gropius. Its significance results from the
philosophy of education expressed in the Bauhaus program, to
which distinguished artists contributed, and from the impressive
number of people who, after studying at the Bauhaus, affirmed its
 methods and vision in worlds of art, architecture, and new
educational programs. Among the major themes at Bauhaus were the
democratization of artistic creation (one of the last romantic
ideas of our time), the social implication of art, and the
involvement of technology. Collaborative, interdisciplinary
efforts were encouraged; the tendency to overcome cultural and
national boundaries was tirelessly pursued; the rationalist
attitude became the hallmark of all who constituted the school.
In 1925, the Bauhaus had to move to Dessau, where it remained
until 1928, before it settled in Berlin. After Gropius, the
architects Hans Mayer (1930-1932) and Mies van der Rohe
(1932-1933) worked on ascertaining the international style
intended to offer visual coherence and integrity. In some ways,
the Bauhaus was continued in the USA, since many of its
personalities and students had to emigrate from Nazi Germany
and found safe haven in the USA.

Leon Battista Alberti (15th century) wrote extensively on
painting and sculpture: De pictura and De Statua were translated
by Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972). Alberti's writings on
the art of building, De re aedificatoria, was translated by
Joseph Rykwert, Neil Leach, and Robert Tavernor (10 volumes,
Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1988).

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968). Intently against those who were
"intoxicated by turpentine," he pursued a "dry art." From the Nu
descendant un escalier, considered "an explosion in a fireworks
factory" to his celebrated ready-mades, Duchamp pursued the call
to "de-artify" art. Selection became the major operation in
offering objects taken out of context and appropriating them as
aesthetic icons. He argued that "Art is a path to regions where
neither time nor space dominate."

Happening: An artistic movement based on the interaction among
different forms of expression. Allan Kaprow (at Douglas College
in 1958) and the group associated with the Reuben gallery in New
York (Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Whitman, Hausen)
brought the movement to the borderline where distinctions
between the artist and the public are erased. Later, the movement
expanded to Europe.

Andy Warhol. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: from A to B and Back
Again. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975.

-. Strong Opinions. New York: McGraw Hill, 1973.

Andy Warhol is remembered for saying that in the future,
everyone will be a celebrity for 15 minutes.

Vladimir (Vladimirovich) Nabokov. Lectures on Literature. Edited
by Fredson Bowers, introduction by John Updike. New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980-1981.

"A rose is a rose is a rose...," now quite an illustrious (if not
trite) line, originated in Gertrude Stein's poem Sacred Emily.
But "...A rose by any other name/would smell as sweet." from
Shakespeares Romeo and Juliet can be seen as a precursor.

Symbolism is a neo-romantic art movement of the end of the 19th
century, in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and positivist
attitudes permeating art and existence. Writers such as
Beaudelaire, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, Huysmans, composers (Wagner,
in the first place), painters such as Gauguin, Ensor, Puvis de
Chavannes, Moreau, and Odilon Redon created in the spirit of
symbolism. At the beginning of the 20th century, symbolism
attempted to submit a unified alphabet of images. Jung went so
far as to identify its psychological basis.

James Joyce (1882-1941). Ulysses. A critical and synoptic (though
very controviersial) edition, prepared by Hans Walter Gabler
with Wolfgang Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: Garland
Publishers, 1984.

Antoine Furetière. Essais d'un Dictionnaire Universel. Geneva:
Slatkine Reprints, 1968 (reprint of the original published in
1687 in Amsterdam under the same title).

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). 2000 Pagine de Gramsci. A cura di
Giansiro Ferrata e Niccolo Gallo. Milano: Il Saggiatore, 1971.

-. Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings. (Edited by David
Forgacs and Geoffrey Newell-Smith; translated by William
Boelhower). Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

-. Le Ceneri di Gramsci. Milano: Garzanti, 1976.

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975). Turc al Friul. Traduzione e
introduzione di Giancarlo Bocotti. Munich: Instituto Italian di
Cultura, 1980. Ken Kesey. The Further Inquiry. Photographs by
Ron Bevirt. New York: Viking Penguin, 1990.

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880). Madame Bovary. Paris: Gallimard,
1986.

-. Madame Bovary. Patterns of provincial life. (Translated, with
a new introduction by Francis Steegmuller). New York: Modern
Library, 1982.

Donald Barthelme. Amateurs. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux,
1976.

-. The King. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.

-. The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine or The Hithering Thithering
Djinn. New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1971.

Kurt Vonnegut. Breakfast of Champions or, Goodbye Blue Monday!
New York: Delacorte Press, 1973.

-. Galapagos. A Novel. New York: Delacorte Press, 1985.

-. Fates Worse than Death. An Autobiographical Collage of the
1980's. New York: G.P. Putnam's, 1991.

John Barth. Chimera. New York: Random House, 1972.

-. The Literature of Exhaustion and the Literature of
Replenishment. Northridge CA: Lord John Press, 1982.

-. Sabbatical. A Romance. New York: Putnam, 1982.

William H. Gass. Fiction and the Figures of Life. New York:
Knopf, 1970.

-. Habitations of the Word: Essays. New York: Simon and Schuster,
1985.

-. In the Heart of the Heart of the Country and Other Stories.
New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Gary Percesepe. What's Eating William Gass?, in Mississippi
Review, 1995.

Gertrude Stein's writing technique is probably best exemplified
by her own writing. How to Write, initially published in 1931 in
Paris (Plain Editions), states provocatively that "Clarity is of
no importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what you
mean no matter what you mean nor how clearly you mean what you
mean." In an interview with Robert Haas, 1946) in Afterword,
Gertrude Stein stated that "Any human being putting down words
had to make sense out of them," (p. 101). "I write with my eyes
not with my ears or mouth," (p. 103). Moreover: "My writing is
as clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on and
disappear."

Gertrude Stein. How to Write (with a new preface by Patricia
Meyerowitz). New York: Dover Publications, 1975.

The author shows that "the innovative works of an artist are
explorations" (p.vi).

-. Useful Knowledge. Barrytown NY: Station Hill Press, 1988.

-. What are Masterpieces? New York: Pitman Publishing Corp., 1970
(reprint of 1940 edition).

Edmund Carpenter. They Became What They Beheld. New York:
Outerbridge and Dienstfrey/Ballentine, 1970.

The author maintains that the book became the organizing
principle for all existence, a model for achieving bureaucracy.

It seems that the first comic strip in America was The Yellow
Kid, by Richard F. Outcault, in the New York World, 1896. Among
the early comic strips: George Harriman's Krazy Kat (held as an
example of American Dadaism); Windsor McKay's Little Nemo in
Slumberland; Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirated.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). Il Futurismo was written
in 1908 as the preface to a volume of his poetry and was
published in 1909. Its manifesto was set forth in the words "We
declare that the splendor of the world has been increased by a
new beauty: the beauty of speed." Breaking with the livresque
past, the Italian Futurism took it upon itself to "liberate this
land from the fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists,
guides, and antiquarians." The break with the past was a break
with its values as these were rooted in literate culture.

Dziga Vertov (born Denis Arkadievich Kaufman,1986-1954). Became
known through his innovative montage juxtaposition, about which
he wrote in Kino-Glas (Kino-Eye). The film We (1922) is a fantasy
of movement. Kino-Pravda (1922-1925) were documentaries of
extreme expressionism, with very rich visual associations.

Experiments in simultaneity are also experiments in the
understanding of the need to rethink art as a representation of
dynamic events.

Michail Fyodorovich Larionov (1881-1964). Russian-born French
painter and designer, a pioneer in abstract painting, after many
experiences in figurative art and with a declared obsession with
the aesthetic experience of simultaneity. Founder of the
Rayonist movement-together with his wife, Natalia Goncharova
(1881-1962), painter, stage designer, and sculptor-Larionov went
from a neo-primitive painting style to cubism and futurism in
order to finally synthesize them in a style reflecting the
understanding of the role of light (in particular, as rays). His
Portrait of Tatline (1911) is witness to the synthesis that
Rayonism represented.

Fernand Léger (1881-1955). Machine Aesthetics, 1923.

"La vitesse est la loi de la vie moderne." (Speed is the modern
law of life.)


Libraries, Books, Readers

In his Introduction to A Carlyle Reader, (Cambridge University
Press, 1984), G.B. Tennyson is unequivocal in his appreciation:
"No one who hopes to understand the nineteenth century in England
can dispense with Carlyle," (p. xiv). Since nineteenth century
England is of such relevance to major developments in the
civilization of literacy, one can infer that Tennyson's thought
applies to persons trying to understand the emergence and
consolidation of literacy. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote Signs
of Times. (He took the title from the New Testament, Matthew
16:3, "O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky, but
can ye not discern the sign of the times?") He condemns his age
in the following terms: "Were we required to characterize this
age of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to call
it, not a Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age. It
is the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense of
that word; the age which, with its whole undivided might,
forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting means
to ends. Nothing is done directly, or by hand; all is by rule and
calculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helps
and accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is in
readiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, and
thrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven from
his workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one," (cf.
Reader, p. 34). Parallels to the reactions to new technology in
our age are more than obvious.

New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Cultural Impact of an Encounter, a
major public documentary exhibit at the New York Public Library,
September 1992-January 1992, curated by Anthony Grafton, assisted
by April G. Shelford.

At the other end of the spectrum defined by Carlyle's faith in
books comes a fascinating note from Louis Hennepin (1684): "We
told them [the Indians] that we know all things through written
documents. These savages asked, 'Before you came to the lands
where we live, did you rightly know that we were here?' We were
obliged to say no. 'Then you didn't know all things through
books, and they didn't tell you everything'"

A. Grafton, A. Shelford, and N. Siraisi,The Power of Tradition
and the Shock of Discovery, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1992.

In comparison to Carlyle's criticism of mechanical mediation of
the Industrial Age comes this evaluation of the Information Age
or Post-Industrial Age:

"In the industrial age, when people need to achieve something, do
they have to go through a series of motions, read manuals, or
become experts at the task? Not at all; they flip a switch.... It
isn't necessary to know a single thing about lighting; all one
needs to do is flip a switch to turn the light on. [...] To take
care of a number of tasks, you push a button, flip a switch, turn
a dial. That is the age of industry working at its best, so that
you don't have to become an electrical engineer or physicist to
function effectively.

"To get the information you need...do you need to go on-line or
open a manual? Unfortunately, most of us right now end up going
through a series of activities in order to get the precise
information we need. In the age of information...you will be
able to turn on a computer, come up with the specific question,
and it will do the work for you." (cf. Address by Jeff Davidson,
Executive Director of the Breathing Space Institute of Chapel
Hill, before the National Institute of Health, Dec. 8, 1995;
reprinted in Vital Speeches, Vol. 62, 06-01-1996, pp. 495, and
in the Electric LibraryT.)

George Steiner. The End of Bookishness? (edited transcript of a
talk given to the International Publishers' Association Congress
in London, on June 14, 1988) in Times Literary Supplement, 89-14,
1988, p. 754.

Aldus Manutius, the Elder (born Aldo Manuzio, 1449-1515): Known
for his activity in printing, publishing, and typography,
especially for design and manufacture of small pocket-sized books
printed in inexpensive editions. The family formed a short-lived
printing empire (ending in 1597 with Aldus Manutius, the
Younger) and is associated with the culture of books and with
high quality typography.

Ray Bradbury. Fahrenheit 451. An abridged version appeared in
Galaxy Science Fiction (1950) under the title The Fireman.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945). Mein Kampf (translated by Ralph
Manheim) Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.

Mao (1893-1976). Comrade Mao Tze-tung on imperialism and all
reactionaries are paper tigers. Peking: Foreign Language Press,
1958.

Umberto Eco. The Name of the Rose (translated by William Weaver).
San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1983. Originally published
in Italy as Il nome della rosa. Milano: Fabbri-Bompiani, 1980.

Topos uranikos, in Plato's philosophy is the heavenly place from
which we originally come and where everything is true. Vilém
Flusser wrote that, "The library (transhuman memory) is presented
as a space (topos uranikos)" cf. On Memory (Electronic or
Otherwise), in Leonardo, 23-4, 1990, p. 398.

Great libraries take shape, under Libraries, in Compton's
Encyclopedia (Compton's New Media), January 1, 1994

Noah Webster (1758-1843) wrote The Compendious Dictionary of the
English Language, in 2 volumes, in 1828. He was probably
inspired by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who wrote his Dictionary
of the English Language in 1755.

Larousse de la Grammaire. Paris: Librairie Larousse. 1983

Dudens Bedeutungswörterbuch: 24,000 Wörter mit ihren
Grundbedeutungen (bearbeitet von Paul Grebe, Rudolf Koster,
Wolfgang Müller, et al). Zehn Bänden. Mannheim: Bibliographisches
Institut. 1980

Vannevar Bush. As We May Think, in The Atlantic Monthly, A
Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics. vol. CLXXVI,
July-Dec., 1945.

The blurb introducing the article states: "As Director of the
Office of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. VANNEVAR BUSH
has coordinated the activities of some six thousand leading
American scientists in the application of science to warfare. In
this significant article, he holds up an incentive for
scientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men of
science should then turn to the massive task of making more
accessible our bewildering store of knowledge," (p. 101). In many
ways, this article marks the shift from a literacy-dominated
pragmatics to one of many new forms of human practical
activity.

Ted Nelson. Replacing the Printed Word: A Complete Literary
System, in Information Processing 80. (S.H. Lavington, Editor).
Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1980, pp.
1013-1023.

Rassengna dei siti piu' utilizzati, and Bibliotechi virtuali, in
Internet e la Biblioteca,
http://www.bs.unicatt.it/bibliotecavirtuale.html, 1996.

The Infonautics Corporation maintains the Electric LibraryT on
the World Wide Web.



The Sense of Design

The term design (of Latin origin) can be understood as meaning
"from the sign," "out of the sign," "on account of the sign,"
"concerning the sign," "according to the sign," "through the
medium of the sign." All these possible understandings point to
the semiotic nature of design activity. Balducinni defined design
as "a visible demonstration by means of lines of those things
which man has first conceived in his mind and pictured in the
imagination and which the practised hand can make appear." It is
generally agreed that before Balducinni's attempt to define the
field, the primary sense of design was drawing. More recently,
though, design is understood in a broad sense, from actual design
(of artifacts, messages, products) to the conception of events
(design of exhibitions, programs, and social, political, and
family gatherings).

"Nearly every object we use, most of the clothes we wear and many
things we eat have been designed," wrote Adrian Forty in Objects
of Desire. Design and Society since 1750 (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1986; paperback edition, New York: Thames and Hudson,
1992, p. 6).

International Style: generic name attached to the functionalist,
anti-ornamental, and geometric tendency of architecture in the
second quarter of the 20th century. In 1923, Henri-Russel
Hitchcock and Philip Johnson organized the show entitled
International Style-Architecture Since 1922, at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. Among the best known architects who
embraced the program are Gerrit T. Rietveldt, Adolf Loos, Peter
Behrens, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, and
Eero Saalinen.

H. R. Hitchcock and P. Johnson. The International Style. New
York: Norton, 1966.

Jay Galbraith. Designing Complex Organizations. Reading MA:
Addison-Wesley, 1973.

Devoted to the art of drawing, a collection of lectures given at
the Fogg Museum of Harvard University in March, 1985, Drawing
Defined (Walter Strauss and Tracie Felker, Editors, New York:
Abaris Books, 1987) is a good reference for the subject. Richard
Kenin's The Art of Drawing: from the Dawn of History to the Era
of the Impressionists (New York: Paddington Press, 1974) gives a
broad overview of drawing.

Vitruvius Pollio. On Architecture (Edited from the Harleian
Manuscripts and translated into English by Frank Granger).
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Marcus Cetius Faventius. Vitruvius and Later Roman Building
Manuals. London: Cambridge University Press. 1973. This book is
a translation of Faventius' compendium of Vitruvius' De
Architectura and of Vitruvius' De diversis fabricis
architectonicae. Parallel Latin-English texts with translation
into the English by Hugh Plommer.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965). One of the
most admired and influential architects and city planners whose
work combines functionalism and bold sculptural expression.

Since the time design became a field of study, various design
styles and philosophies crystallized in acknowledged design
schools. Worthy of mention are the Bauhaus, Art Deco, the Ulm
School (which continued in the spirit of the Bauhaus), and
Post-modernism. A good source for information on the becoming of
design is Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design,
Harmondsworth, 1960.

The Scholes and Glidden typewriter of 1873, became, with
refinements, the Remington model 1 (Remington was originally a
gun and rifle manufacturer in the state of New York.)
Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol. 12,
1990. pp. 86-87). See also History of the Typewriter (reprint of
the original history of 1923). Sarasota FL: B. R. Swanger,1965.

Peter Carl Fabergé (1846-1920). One of the most renown
goldsmiths, jewelers, and decorative artists. After studying in
Germany, Italy, France, and England, he settled in St. Petersburg
in 1870, where he inherited his father's jewelry business.
Famous for his inventiveness in creating decorative objects-
flowers, animals, bibelots, and especially the Imperial Easter
Egg-Fabergé is for many the ideal of the artist-craftsman.

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). American painter, craftsman,
decorator, designer and philanthropist who became one of the
most influential personalities in the Art Nouveau style who made
significant contributions to glassmaking. Son of Charles Louis
Tiffany (1812-1902), the jeweler, he is well known for his
significant contributions to glassmaking.

Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873): British
politician, poet, and novelist, famous for The Last Days of
Pompeii. (Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, Micropedia, Vol.
7, 1990. p. 595).

James Gibson. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979.

In our days, design is focused on major themes: design integrity
(promoting exemplary forms of typography and form studies, as
with the Basel School and its American counterparts), design
function (of concern to industry-oriented schools), computation
based on design. Originating from Gibson's studies in the
psychology of man-nature relations, the ecological approach in
design has its starting point in affordance. Thus many designers
reflect concern for an individualized approach to the
understanding of affordance possibilities.

Costello, Michie, and Milne. Beyond the Casino Economy. London:
Verso, 1989.

D. Hayes. Beyond the Silicon Curtain. Boston: South End Press,
1989.

Mihai Nadin. Interface design: a semiotic paradigm, in Semiotica
69:3/4. Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter, 1988, pp. 269-302.

-. Computers in design education: a case study, in Visible
Language (special issue: Graphic Design- Computer Graphics),vol.
XIX, no. 2, Spring 1985, pp. 282-287.

-. Design and design education in the age of ubiquitous
computing, in Kunst Design & Co. Wuppertal: Verlag Müller +
Busmann, 1994, pp. 230-233.

Kim Henderson. Architectural Innovation: The reconfiguration of
existing product technologies, in Administrative Science
Quarterly, vol. 35, January, 1990.

M. R. Louis and R. I. Sutton. Switching Cognitive Gears: From
habits of mind to active thinking. Working Paper, School of
Industrial Engineering, Stanford University, 1989.

Patrick Dillon. Multimedia Technology from A-Z. New York: Oryx
Press, 1995.



Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning

Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843). So viel Anfang war noch nie, in
Poems. English and German. Selected verses edited, introduced,
and translated by Michael Hamburger. London/Dover NH: Anvil Press
Poetry, 1986.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963). Brave, New World. New York: Modern
Library, 1946, 1956

Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931). Noted for inventing, among other
things, the phonograph and the incandescent bulb.

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922). Inventor of the graphophone.
He is credited with inventing the telephone and took out the
patent on it.

Otto Nicklaus Otto (1832-1891). Inventor of the four-stroke
engine applied in the automotive industry.

Nikola Tesla (1856-1943). Inventor of the electric alternator.

Lev Nikolaievich Tolstoy (1828-1910). War and Peace. Trans.
Louise and Aylmer Maude. New York: Oxford University Press,
1965. This is a translation of Voina i Mir, published in Moscow
at the Tipografia T. Ros, 1868.

The Declaration of Independence was approved by a group
delegates from the American colonies in July, 1776, with the
expressed aim of declaring the thirteen colonies independent of
England.

Signed at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, after much
dispute over representation, the Constitution of the United
States of America entered into effect once all thirteen states
ratified it. Its major significance derives from its
ascertainment of an effective alternative to monarchy. The system
of checks and balances contained in the Constitution is meant to
preserve any one branch of government from assuming absolute
authority.

The Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen was approved by
the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789 and declares the
right of individuals to be represented, equality among citizens,
and freedom of religion, speech, and the press. The ideals of
the French Revolution inspired many other political movements on
the continent.

Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in a year of many
popular uprisings all over Europe against conservative
monarchies, the Communist Manifesto of 1848 expresses the
political program of a revolutionary movement: workers of the
world united, leading the way to a classless society. The
Romantic impetus of the Manifesto and its new messianic tone was
of a different tenor from the attempts to implement the program
in Russia and later on Eastern Europe, China, and Korea.

Married...with Children: A situation comedy at the borderline
between satire and vulgarity, presenting a couple, Al and Peggy
Bundy, and their teenage children, Kelly and Bud, in life-like
situations at the fringes of the consumer society.

Born in 1918, Alexander Solzhenitsyn became known as a writer in
the context of the post-Stalin era. His books, A Day in the Life
of Ivan Denisovitch (1962), The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975),
The Oak and the Calf (1980), testify to the many aspects of
Stalin's dictatorship. In 1974, after publishing Gulag
Archipelago (about life in Soviet prison camps), the writer was
exiled from his homeland. He returned to Russia in 1990.

Yevgeni Alexandrovich Yevtushenko: A rhetorical poet in the
tradition of Mayakovsky's poetry for the masses. During the
communist regime, he took it upon himself to celebrate the
official party line, as well as to poeticallly unveil less
savory events and abusive practices. His poetry is still the best
way to know the poet and the passionate human being. See also
Yevtushenko's Reader. Trans. Robin Milner-Gulland. New York:
E.P. Dutton, 1972.

Dimitri Dimitrevich Shostakovich (1906-1975): For a very long
time the official composer of the Soviet Union. After his death,
it became clear how deeply critical he was of a reality he seemed
to endorse. He created his harmonic idiom by modifying the
harmonic system of classical Russian music. See also Gunter
Wolter. Dimitri Shostakovitch: eine sowjetische Tragödie.
Frankfurt/Main, New York: P. Lang, 1991.

There is no good definition of Samizdat, the illegal publishing
movement of the former Soviet Block and China. Nevertheless, the
power of the printed word-often primitively presented and always
in limited, original editions-remains exemplary testimony to the
many forces at work in societies where authoritarian rules are
applied to the benefit of the political power in place. From a
large number of books on various aspects of Samizdat, the
following titles can be referenced:

Samizdat. Register of Documents (English edition). Munich:
Samizdat Archive Association. From 1977.

Ferdinand J. M. Feldbrugge. Samizdat and Political Dissent in the
Soviet Union. Leyden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1975.

Claude Widor. The Samizdat Press in China's Provinces,
1979-1981. Stanford CA: Hoover Institution, Stanford University,
1987.

Nicolae Ceausescu (1918-1989). His life can be summed up in John
Sweeney's statement: "In Ceausescu's Romania, madness was
enthroned, sanity a disease" cf. The Life and Evil Times of
Nicolae Ceausescu, London: Hutchinson, 1991, p. 105.

Berlin Wall. Erected in August, 1961, the wall divided East and
West Berlin. Over the years, it became the symbol of political
oppression. Hundreds of people were killed in their attempt to
escape to freedom. The political events in East Europe of Fall,
1989 led to destruction of the wall, a symbolic step in the not
so easy process of German reunification. See also: J. Ruhle, G.
Holzweissig. 13 August 1961: die Mauer von Berlin (Hrsg von I.
Spittman). Köln: Edition Deutschland Archiv, 1981.

Red. B. Beier, U. Heckel, G. Richter.9 November 1989: der Tag der
Deutschen. Hamburg: Carlsen, 1989.

John Borneman. After the Wall: East Meets West in the New Berlin.
New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Political unrest, due to intense resentment of the Soviet
occupation, and economic hardship led to the creation of an
independent labor union, the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) in 1980. In
1981, nationwide strikes brought Poland to a standstill. Martial
law was imposed and Solidarity was banned in 1982 after dramatic
confrontations at the Gdansk shipyards. Reinstated in 1989,
Solidarity became a major political factor in the formation of
the new, non-communist government.

Massimo d'Azeglio (1798-1866): I miei ricordi. A cura di Alberto
M. Ghisalberti. Torino: Einaudi, 1971.

Germany has a rather tortuous history behind its unification.
After the peace of Westphalia (1648) ending the Thirty Years'
War, a sharp division between Catholic and Protestant states
arose. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo (1815), the German
Confederation (led by Austria) prepared the path towards future
unification. In 1850, the attempt to form a central government
was blocked, to be resuscitated after the Franco-Prussian War
(1870-1871). On his defeat of Ludwig II of Bavaria, the Prussian
Wilhelm I became the first emperor of a unified Germany in 1871,
and Bismarck his first chancellor.

Prepared by Garibaldi's conquest of the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies (1860), the creation of the Kingdom of Italy by Victor
Emmanuelle (1861) ended with the seizure of Rome (1870) from the
control of the Vatican. Italy became a republic in 1946.

The establishments of various Arab states is a testimony to the
many forces at work in the Arab world. The victory of the
Allies in World War 1 brought about the dissolution of the
Ottoman Empire. Modern Turkey was established in 1920, ruled
initially by a Sultan, becoming a republic in 1923 under the
presidency of Kamal Atatürk. At around the same time, Syria
(including Lebanon) fell under the mandate of the French League
of Nations. Lebanon became a separate state in 1926. Iraq was
established as a kingdom in 1921, falling under the same status
as Syria within the British League of Nations. Saudi Arabia was
created in 1932, and Jordan became an independent kingdom in
1946. The history of national definition and sovereignty in the
Middle East is far from being closed.

For information on the Ustasha organization in Croatia, see
Cubric Milan's book Ustasa hrvatska revolucionarna organizacija,
Beograd: Idavacka Kuca Kujizevne Novine, 1990.

Chetniks (in Serbia), see A Dictionary of Yugoslav Political and
Economic Terminology (cf. Andrlic Vlasta, Rjecnik terminologije
jugoslavenskog politicko-ekonomskog sistema, published in 1985,
Zagreb: Informator). The reality of the breakdown of the country
that used to be Yugoslavia is but one of the testimonies of
change that renders words and the literate use of language
meaningless.

Omae Kenichi. The Borderless World. Power and Strategy in the
Interlinked World Economy. New York: Harper Business, 1990.

Isaiah Berlin. The Crooked Timber of Humanity. Chapters in the
History of Ideas. London: John Murray, 1990.

Fedor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky (1821-1881). Author of Crime and
Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie), Trans. David McDuff,
Harmondsworth: Viking, 1991.

Toqueville noticed that "...scarcely any question arises in the
United States which does not become, sooner or later, a subject
of judicial debate.... As most public men are, or have been,
legal practitioners, they introduce the customs and the
technicalities of their profession into the affairs of the
country.... The language of the law becomes, in some measure, a
vulgar tongue" cf. Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America.

Gary Chapman. Time to Cast Aside Political Apathy in Favor of
Creating a New Vision for America, in Los Angeles Times, Aug.
19, 1996, p. D3.

Edward Brent (writing as Earl Babble). Electronic Communication
and Sociology: Looking Backward, Thinking Ahead, in American
Sociologist, 27, Apr. 1, 1996, pp. 4-24.


"Theirs not to reason why"

A professional description of the initial strike in the Gulf War
gives the following account: "In the blitz that launched Desert
Storm, Apache and special forces helicopters first took out two
early warning radar stations. This opened a corridor for 22
F-15E aircraft following in single file to hit Scud sites in
western Iraq. Also, 12 stealth F-117A fighters, benefiting from
Compass Call and EF-111 long-distance jamming, hit targets in
Baghdad, including a phone exchange and a center controlling air
defenses. Other such underground centers were hit in the south.
Tomahawk missiles took out power plants. All this occurred
within 20 minutes.

"About 40 minutes into the assault, a second wave of strike
'packages' of other aircraft, including 20 F-117As, attacked.
They were guided by AWACs (airborne warning and control systems)
crafts, which had been orbiting within a range of Iraqi radar
for months. Coalition forces flew 2399 sorties the first day,
losing only three planes." cf. John A. Adam, Warfare in the
information age, in IEEE Spectrum, September, 1991, p. 27.

One more detail: "The architects of the huge raid are the Central
Commander, Lieutenant General Charles A. Horner, and Brigadier
General C. Glosson, an electrical engineer by training. For
months they have overseen complete war games and rehearsed
precision bombing in the Arabian expanse," p. 26.

Sun Tzu. The Art of War. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Boston & London:
Shambala Dragon Editions,1988.

"Military action is important to the nation-it is the ground of
death and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it is
imperative to examine it" p. 41.

"Speed is the most important in war," Epaminondas of Thebes.
Battle of Leuctra, 371 BCE.

Helmuth von Moltke (1800-1891). Geschichte des
deutsch-französischen Krieges von 1870-1871. The Franco-German
War of 1870-1871. Trans. Clara Bell and Henry W. Fischer. New
York: H. Fertig, 1988. Reprint of the version published in New
York by Harper in 1892.

Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831).Vom Kriege. Michael Howard and
Peter Paret, Editors. On War. Princeton NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1976.

Theodor Heuss (1884-1963). Theodor Heuss über Staat und Kirche.
Frankfurt/Main: P. Lang, 1986.

C. W. Groetsch. Tartaglia's Inverse Problem in a Resistive
Medium, in The American Mathematical Monthly, 103:7, 1996, pp.
546-551.

Roland Barthes. Leçon, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978.

The book is based on the lecture delivered at the inauguration of
the Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France on
January 7, 1977.

"But Language-the performance of a language system-is neither
reactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist, for
fascism does not prevent speech, it compels speech."

Alan Mathison Turing (1913-1954). British mathematician, one of
the inventors of the programmable computer. During World War 2,
Turing worked at the British Foreign Office, helping crack the
German secret military code.

William Aspray and Arthur Burks, Editors. Papers of John von
Neumann on Computing and Computer Theory. Cambridge MA: MIT
Press; Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers, 1987. Charles Babbage
Institute Reprint Series for the History of Computing, Vol. 12.

John Condry, TV: Live from the Battlefield, in IEEE Spectrum,
September, 1991.

Regarding the role of imagery and how it effectively replaces the
written word, the following example is relevant: An Israeli
visiting Arizona talked to his daughter in Tel Aviv while
simultaneously watching the news on the Cable News Network
(CNN). The reporter stated that a Scud missile had been launched
at Tel Aviv, and the father informed the daughter, who sought
protection in a shelter. "This is what television has become
since its initial adoption 40 years ago...The world is becoming a
global village, as educator Marshall McLuhan predicted it would.
Imagery is its language" p. 47.

Darrell Bott. Maintaining Language Proficiency, in Military
Intelligence, 21, 1995, p. 12.

Charles M. Herzfeld. Information Technology: A Retro- and
Pro-spective. Lecture presented at the Battelle Information
Technology Summit. Columbus OH, 10 August 1995. Published in
Proceedings of the DTIC/Battelle Information Technology SummIT.

Linda Reinberg, In the Field: the Language of the Vietnam War,
New York: Facts of File, 1991.

The strategic defense initiative (SDI) was focused upon
developing anti-missile and anti-satellite technologies and
programs. A multi-layered, multi-technology approach to ballistic
missile defense (BMD) meant to intercept offensive nuclear
weapons after they had been launched by aggressors. The system
consisted of the so-called target acquisition (search and
detection of an offensive object); tracking (determination of
the trajectory of the offensive object); discrimination
(distinguishing of missiles and warheads from decoys or chaff);
interception (accurate pointing and firing to ensure destruction
of the offensive object). The critical components are computer
programs and the lasers designed to focus a beam on the target's
surface, heating it to the point of structural failure.

The Pentagon. Critical Technologies Plan, March, 1990.

Restructuring the U.S. Military, a report by a joint task force
of the Committee for National Security and The Defense Budget
Project. Obviously, the post-Cold War momentum provided many
arguments for new plans for a scaled down, but highly
technological, defense. The new circumstances created by the end
of the Cold War require strategies for conversion of industries
that until recently depended entirely upon the needs and desires
of the military.



The Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in the
Age of the Web

Elaine Morgan. Falling Apart: The Rise and Decline of Urban
Civilisation. London: Souvenir Press, 1976.

David Clark. Urban Decline. London/New York: Routledge, 1989.

Katharine L. Bradbury. Urban Decline and the Future of American
Cities. Washington DC: Brookings Institution, 1982.

Hegel's theory of state derives from his philosophy of history.
Civil society affords individuals opportunities for freedom. But
since the state is the final guarantor, it accordingly has
priority over the individual; cf. Philosophy of Right, T.B.
Knox, Editor. London, 1973.

E.A. Wrigley and David Souden, Editors. Thomas Robert Malthus. An
Essay On the Principle of Population, 1798, in The Works of
Thomas Robert Malthus. London: W. Pickering, 1986.

"Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio.
Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio" (p. 9).

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). Philosopher of the French
Enlightenment. In Du Contract Social, he stated the law of
inverse proportion between population and political freedom (cf.
Book 3, chapter 1, Paris: Livre de Poche, 1978. Also in Social
Contract. Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau. Sir Ernest
Barker, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).

Bernard Rubin & Associates. Big Business and the Mass Media.
Lexington MA: Lexington Books, 1977.

Craig E. Aronoff, Editor. Business and the Media. Santa Monica
CA: Goodyear Publishing Corp., 1979.

David Finn. The Business-Media Relationship: Countering
Misconceptions and Distrust. New York: Amacom, 1981.

Observations made by media scholars give at least a quantitative
testimony to many facets of the business of media. Ed Shiller,
in Managing the Media (Toronto: Bedford House Publishing Corp.,
1989) states "The media are everywhere and they are interested
in everything" (p. 13).

A. Kent MacDougall (Ninety Seconds to Tell It All. Big Business
and the News Media, Homewood IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1981) observed
that "To communicate with the American public, companies must
first communicate with the media" (p. 43). Interestingly enough,
they reach huge audiences by using the rent free public
airwaves. Consequently, as the author shows, the news media shine
by any measure of profitability. According to Forbes magazine's
annual study of profits, broadcasting and publishing companies
led all industry groups in return on stockholder's equity and
capital in recent years. Specialized publications also keep
track of the profitability of the media.

Study of Media and Markets, a service of Simmons Market Research
Bureau, Inc., makes available standard marketing information.
Communications Industry Forecasts, brought out by Veronis, Suhler
& Asso. of New York, gives a detailed financial status of the
entire communication industry (radio, television, magazines,
entertainment media, recorded music, advertising, promotion).

J.H. Cassing and S.L. Husted, Editors. Capital, Technology, and
Labor in the New Global Economy. Washington DC: American
Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1988.

Raymond Vernon. Exploring the Global Economy: Emerging Issues in
Trade and Investment. Cambridge: Center for International
Affairs, Harvard University Press, 1985.

Stephen Gill. The Global Political Economy: Perspectives,
Problems, and Policies. New York: Harvester, 1988.

Gene Grossman. Innovation and Growth in the Global Economy.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Facts for Action (periodical). Boston: Oxfam America, from 1982.

John Clark. For Richer or Poorer: An Oxfam Report on Western
Connections with World Hunger. Oxford: Oxfam, 1986.

J.G. Donders, Editor. Bread Broken: An Action Report on the Food
Crisis in Africa. Eldoret, Kenya: Gaba Publications, AMECEA
Pastoral Institute, 1984.

In his study Eighteenth Brumaire, (1852), Karl Marx described
bureaucracy as a "semi-autonomous power standing partly above
class-divided society, exploiting all its members alike."

Harvey Wheeler. Democracy in a Revolutionary Era. Santa Barbara:
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1970.

Wheeler defineds bureaucracy as "a vast organism with an
assortment of specialized, departmentalized tentacles for coping
with the different kinds of reality it may encounter" (pp.
99-100).

Max Weber. Essay in Sociology. Edited and translated by H.H.
Gerth and C. Wright Mills. London: Oxford University Press,
1946.

In this classical theory of bureaucracy, the author saw its
roots in the cultural traditions of Western rationalism. As
such, it is characterized by impersonal relations, hierarchy, and
specialization.

R. Chackerian, G. Abcarian. Bureaucratic Power in Society.
Chicago: Nelson Hall, Inc., 1984.

B.C. Smith. Bureaucracy and Political Power. Brighton: Wheatsheaf
Books, Ltd., 1988.

The author argues that "Bureaucracy is a political phenomenon"
(p. ix), not a mere administrative occurrence.

Eva Etzioni-Halevy. Bureaucracy and Democracy. A Political
Dilemma. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

George C. Roche. America by the Throat: The Stranglehold of
Federal Bureaucracy. Old Greenwich CT: Devin Adair, 1983.

Eugene Lewis. American Politics in a Bureaucratic Age: Citizens,
Constituents, Clients, and Victims. Cambridge MA: Winthrop
Publishers, 1977.

Michael Hanben and Ronda Hanben. Netizens: On the History and
Impact of Usenet and the Internet. A Netbook.
http://www.columbia.edu/~rh120/ch106, June, 1996

Michael J. A. Howe, The Strange Feats of Idiots Savants, in
Fragments of Genius, London/New York: Routledge, 1989.

"'Idiots savants' is the term that has most frequently been used
to designate mentally handicapped individuals who are capable of
outstanding achievements at particular tasks" (p. 5). He also
mentions alternative labels: talented imbecile, parament,
talented ament, retarded savant, schizophrenic savant, autistic
savant. Among the examples he gives: A 14-year old Chinese who
could give the exact page for any Chinese character in a
400-page dictionary; a 23-year old woman hardly able to speak
(her mental age was assessed at 2 years, 9 months), with no
musical instruction, who could play on the piano a piece of
music that a person around her might hum or play; a subject who
knew all distances between towns in the USA and could list all
hotels and number of rooms available; a person who knew Abraham
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address but could not, after weeks of
classes on the subject, say who Lincoln was or what the speech
means.

In The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1920), Henry Adams
presented a logarithmic curve of the acceleration of history. In
1909, Adams noted that between 1800 and 1900, the speed of events
increased 1,000 times.

Gerard Piel. The Acceleration of History. New York: A.A. Knopf,
1972.

Nicolas Rashevsky. Looking at History through Mathematics.
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968.


End of
The Civilization of Illiteracy, by Mihai Nadin
(C) Mihai Nadin 1997





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