The Civilization of Illiteracy Part 12

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 const.i.tuting 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 ent.i.ties it mediates between. States, as political ent.i.ties, are const.i.tuted on this a.s.sumption; so are legal systems, religion, and education. Each such mediating ent.i.ty introduces elements into the social structure that will finally be expressed in language and a.s.similated 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 const.i.tutes a body of practical knowledge that can be used again and again. The necessary integrative dimension of mediations makes the strategy of using mediating ent.i.ties, 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 circ.u.mstances is language's mediating function a.s.sumed 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 ent.i.ties, 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 a.n.a.logies to the male-female distinction, a s.e.xual 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 const.i.tuting 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 j.a.panese), the mediating function of images const.i.tuting the written is different. Combinations of ideograms const.i.tute new ideograms. Accordingly, self-const.i.tution 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 partic.i.p.ate 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 Hitt.i.te kingdom testifies to the landscape (there are many words for mountains), to trees (the Hitt.i.tes 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 a.s.sembly line, for instance. Obviously conceived on the linear, sequential model of time and language, the a.s.sembly 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-const.i.tution 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 circ.u.mstances under which the dominant mediating function of language can be a.s.sumed 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 a.s.sessment 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 const.i.tuted themselves in structurally very similar experiences, mediation took place through the insertion of rather h.o.m.ogeneous 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-const.i.tution 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+ft 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 fas.h.i.+on. We operate on configurations or on mixed data types (that const.i.tute 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 cla.s.sical 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 princ.i.p.al 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. Const.i.tuted in our language are experiences of survival and adaptation: the vocabulary of hunting, fis.h.i.+ng, 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 b.u.t.terfly causing a hurricane the most descriptive explanation of how small changes-caused by the flapping of the b.u.t.terfly'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 s.p.a.ce and time are housed in our language, we can account for only a three-dimensional s.p.a.ce and a h.o.m.ogeneous time that has only one direction-from past to future.

Nevertheless, we can conceive of multidimensional s.p.a.ces and of non-h.o.m.ogeneous 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 subst.i.tuted 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 a.n.a.lytic or even small-scale synthetic frameworks.

The discussion of mediation brought up other sign systems that a.s.sume 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 const.i.tute 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 s.p.a.ce and motion, make a virtual s.p.a.ce available. Within this s.p.a.ce, 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-const.i.tution 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 psychoa.n.a.lytic rhetoric. In other words, we notice that while language const.i.tuted a projection of the human being in the conventions of abstract systems of expression, representation, and communication, it also exercised an impoveris.h.i.+ng function in that it excluded the wealth of senses-possibly including common sense-and the signs addressing them. Language made of us one monolithic ent.i.ty. 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 ent.i.ties, 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 ent.i.ties 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-const.i.tution 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. Ma.s.sive 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-const.i.tution.

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 a.s.sociated 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-p.r.o.ng deals in derivatives, continuously subject the outcome of practical experiences of human self-const.i.tution 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 a.s.sociated 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 ent.i.ties 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 a.n.a.logies, 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 const.i.tute 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 const.i.tuted 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-const.i.tution 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 const.i.tute 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 ent.i.ties 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, quant.i.ty, 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.