The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 11

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. Authors.h.i.+p 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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, authors.h.i.+p, 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 const.i.tuting 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 ent.i.ties, 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 const.i.tuted.

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 const.i.tuting the language, not only using it. Biological sampling, along with the a.s.sociated 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 ma.s.s 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 authors.h.i.+p. 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 const.i.tution of ad hoc languages and their consumption in the act, becomes possible. The mixmaster is a machine for recycling arbitrarily defined const.i.tutive units such as notes, rhythms, or melodic patterns freed from their pragmatic ident.i.ty. 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, antic.i.p.ates 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 authors.h.i.+p; 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 ident.i.ties, but const.i.tutes new ones, which we integrate in new experiences of our own self-const.i.tution. From the perspective of logic, the procedure is of interest to the extent that it establishes domains of logical appropriateness. Logical ident.i.ty 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 a.s.signed 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 a.s.sumption. 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 ident.i.ty 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 ent.i.ty 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 a.s.sumes a higher place among the many factors partic.i.p.ating in the process of human self-const.i.tution. Indeed, in order for the human being to qualify as zoon politikon, as h.o.m.o Sapiens, or h.o.m.o Ludens (playful man) or h.o.m.o 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 ident.i.ty 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 partic.i.p.ation 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- const.i.tutive practical activity, whose output is the ever-changing ident.i.ty 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 ent.i.ty 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 a.s.sumption 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-const.i.tution 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 a.n.a.logies, 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-const.i.tution, 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 ent.i.ties.

What distinguishes these from tools is their caoability for self-replication. They are, as much as humans const.i.tuting their ident.i.ty 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-const.i.tution in mediating and mediated practical experiences is different from self-const.i.tution 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-const.i.tution. 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 mult.i.tude 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 a.s.sembled. Even more important, the quant.i.ty 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 a.s.sembled) are essential. All these const.i.tute 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 const.i.tute 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 quant.i.ties (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, sh.e.l.l, 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 s.p.a.ce-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 accomplis.h.i.+ng 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 const.i.tuted 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-const.i.tution (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 const.i.tuting 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, const.i.tute 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 a.s.sociation 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 ent.i.ties. 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 const.i.tuted 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, const.i.tuted intermediaries inserted in the world in which human beings a.s.serted 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-const.i.tution of the individual as member of the politeia, the community. By extension, politics means to effectively partic.i.p.ate in the life of the community.

The nature of this partic.i.p.ation changed enormously over time. It started as partic.i.p.ation in magic and ritual, and it evolved in partic.i.p.ation in symbolic forms, such as manc.i.p.atio, conventions embodied in normative acts. In the framework of partic.i.p.ation, 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, partic.i.p.ation 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 G.o.d (actually a plurality of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses) 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 s.p.a.ce-and to discover relations characteristic of adjacency, i.e., neighboring in time and s.p.a.ce. 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 a.s.similate adjacency in the experience of continuous human self-const.i.tution. 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 a.s.sumption that literacy can accomplish a unifying function.

Mediation and the a.s.sociated 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 s.p.a.ce 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 const.i.tuted 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 const.i.tution 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 owners.h.i.+p (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.