The Civilization of Illiteracy (2024)

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 TomorrowContrasting charactersChoose a letter and clickKeeping up with faster livingLoaded literacyMan proposes, man disposesBeyond the commitment to literacyA moving targetThe wise fox"Between us the rift"Malthus revisitedCaptives 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 LanguageSemeion revisitedThe first record is a whipScale and thresholdSigns 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 MechanismThe power of insertionMyth as mediating pre-textDifferentiation and coordinationIntegration and coordination revisitedLife 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, advertisem*nt, 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 VisualHow many words in a look?The mechanical eye and the electronic eyeWho is afraid of a locomotive?Being here and there at the same timeVisualization

Unbounded Sexuality
Seeking good sex
Beyond immediacy
The land of sexual ubiquity
The literate invention of the woman
Ahead to the past
Freud, modern hom*osexuality, 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 hom*osexual 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 FiveThe Interactive Future: Individual, Community, and Society in theAge of theWebTranscending literacyBeing in languageThe wall behind the WallThe message is the mediumFrom democracy to media-ocracySelf-organizationThe solution is the problem. Or is the problem the solution?From possibilities to choicesCoping with choiceTrade-offLearning 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 ofthe past in it. The heat and beat of network interactions andthe richness of multimedia and virtual reality reflect this timemore than do the pages you are about to read. I wish I could putin your hands the new book, suggested on the cover, as the firstpage following all those that make up the huge library of ourliterate accumulation of knowledge.

Let's us imagine that it exists. As I see it, the book would readyour mind.as you pause on a thought and start formulatingquestions. It should enable you to come closer to the personswhose thoughts are mentioned here, either through furtherinvestigation of their ideas or by entering into a dialogue withthem. We would be able to interact with many of the individualsmaking this fascinating present happen.

The emergence of a new civilization, freed from constraints borneby its members during a time to which we must bid farewell-thisis the subject of the book. Science and technology are themes ofthis intellectual expedition, but the subject is theever-changing human being. The civilization we are entering is nopromised land, make no mistake about that. But it is a realm ofchallenge. Tentative upon entering the territory of newpossibilities, we have no choice but to go ahead.

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

Others hesitate. They don't even notice the chains of a literateheritage, a heritage that buffers them, as it buffers us all atvarious times, from the often disquieting changes we experienceat all levels of our existence. In the palace of books andeternity, we were promised love and beauty, prosperity, and aboveall permanence.

Disinheriting ourselves from all that was, we are nostalgic forour lost sense of continuity and security. Still, we cannot helpfeeling that something very different from what we used toexpect is ahead of us. We are excited, though at timesapprehensive.

It might be that the cutting-edge language and look of Wired, themagazine of the Netizens, is more appropriate to the subjectthan is the elaborate prose of this book. But this is not yetanother product of the cottage industry of predictions, as weknow them from Naisbitt, Gilder, or the Tofflers.

To explain without explaining away the complexity of this time ofchange was more important to me than to ride the coattails oftoday's sound-byte stars. Solid arguments that suggestpossibilities fundamentally different from what they are willingto accept, or even entertain, make for a more deeply foundedoptimism.

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

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

nadin@utdallas.edu. Let's keep on touch!

Literacy in a Changing World

Thinking about alternatives

Preoccupation with language is, in fact, preoccupation withourselves as individuals and as a species. While many concerns,such as terrorism, AIDS, poverty, racism, and massive migrationof populations, haunt us as we hurry to achieve our portion ofwell-being, one at least seems easier to allay: illiteracy. Thisbook proclaims the end of literacy, as it also accounts for theincredible forces at work in our restlessly shifting world. Theend of literacy-a chasm between a not-so-distant yesterday andthe exciting, though confusing, tomorrow-is probably moredifficult to understand than to live with. Reluctance toacknowledge change only makes things worse. We notice thatliterate language use does not work as we assume or were told itshould, and wonder what can be done to make things fit ourexpectations. Parents hope that better schools with betterteachers will remedy the situation. Teachers expect more from thefamily and suggest that society should invest more in order tomaintain literacy skills. Professors groan under the prospect ofill-prepared students entering college. Publishers redefinetheir strategies as new forms of expression and communication viefor public attention and dollars. Lawyers, journalists, themilitary, and politicians worry about the role and functions oflanguage in society. Probably most concerned with their ownroles in the social structure and with the legitimacy of theirinstitutions, they would preserve those structures of humanactivity that justify literacy and thus their own positions ofpower and influence. The few who believe that literacy comprisesnot only skills, but also ideals and values, say that thedestiny of our civilization is at stake, and that the decline inliteracy has dreadful implications. Opportunity is not part ofthe discourse or argument.

The major accomplishment of analyzing illiteracy so far has beenthe listing of symptoms: the decrease in functional literacy; ageneral degradation of writing skills and reading comprehension;an alarming increase of packaged language (clichés used inspeeches, canned messages); and a general tendency to substitutevisual media (especially television and video) for writtenlanguage. Parallel to scholarship on the subject, a massive butunfocused public opinion campaign has resulted in all kinds ofliteracy enterprises. Frequently using stereotypes that inthemselves affect language quality, such enterprises plead forteaching adults who cannot read or write, for improving languagestudy in all grades, and for raising public awareness ofilliteracy and its various implications. Still, we do not reallyunderstand the necessary character of the decline of literacy.Historic and systematic aspects of functional illiteracy, as wellas language degradation, are minimally addressed. They arephenomena that affect not only the United States. Countries witha long cultural tradition, and which make the preservation andliterate use of language a public institution, experience them aswell.

My interest in the subject of illiteracy was triggered by twofactors: the personal experience of being uprooted from an EastEuropean culture that stubbornly defended and maintained rigidstructures of literacy; and involvement in what are commonlydescribed as new technologies. I ended up in the USA, a land ofunstructured and flawed literacy, but also one of amazingdynamics. Here I joined those who experienced the consequencesof the low quality of education, as well as the opening of newopportunities. The majority of these are disconnected from whatis going on in schools and universities. This is how and why Istarted thinking, like many others, about alternatives.

My Mayflower (if I may use the analogy to the Pilgrims) broughtme to individuals who do many things-shop, work, play or watchsports, travel, go to church, even love-with an acute sense ofimmediacy. Worshippers of the instant, my new compatriots servedas a contrast to those who, on the European continent I camefrom, 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 comingmoment. Not only television programs and advertisem*nts made meaware of this fact. Books are as permanent as their survival onbestseller lists. The market, with its increasingly breathtakingfluctuations, might today celebrate a company that tomorrowdisappears for good. Commencement ceremonies, family life,business commitments, religious practice, succeeding fashions,songs, presidents, denture creams, car models, movies, andpractically everything else embody the same obsession. Languageand literacy could not escape this obsession with change.Because of my work as a university professor, I was in thetrenches where battles of literacy are fought. That is where Icame to realize that a better curriculum, multicultural or not,or better paid teachers, or cheaper and better books could make adifference, but would not change the outcome.

The decline of literacy is an encompassing phenomenon impossibleto reduce to the state of education, to a nation's economicrank, to the status of social, ethnic, religious, or racialgroups, to a political system, or to cultural history. There waslife before literacy and there will be life after it. In fact,it has already begun. Let us not forget that literacy is arelatively late acquisition in human culture. The time precedingwriting is 99% of the entire story of the human being. Myposition in the discussion is one of questioning historiccontinuity as a premise for literacy. If we can understand whatthe end of literacy as we know it means in practical terms, wewill avoid further lamentation and initiate a course of actionfrom which all can benefit. Moreover, if we can get an idea ofwhat to expect beyond the safe haven now fading on the horizon,then we will be able to come up with improved, more effectivemodels of education. At the same time, we will comprehend whatindividuals need in order to successfully ascertain theirmanifold nature. Improved human interaction, for which newtechnologies are plentifully available, should be the concreteresult of this understanding of the end of the civilization ofliteracy.

The first irony of any publication on illiteracy is that it isinaccessible to those who are the very subject of the concern ofliteracy partisans. Indeed, the majority of the millions activeon the Internet read at most a 3-sentence short paragraph. Theattention span of students in high school and universities isnot much shorter than that of their instructors: one typed page.Legislators, no less than bureaucrats, thrive on executivesummaries. A 30-second TV spot is many times more influentialthan a 4-column in- depth article. But those who give life anddynamics to reality use means other than those whose continuedpredominance this book questions.

The second irony is that this book also presents arguments whichare, in their logical sequence, dependent on the conventions ofreading and writing. As a medium for constituting andinterpreting history, writing definitely influences how we thinkand what we think about. I wondered how my arguments would holdup in an interactive, non-linear medium of communication, inwhich we can question each other, and which also makesauthorship, if not irrelevant, the last thing someone would worryabout. Since I have used language to think through this book, Iknow that it would make less sense in a different medium.

This leads me to state from the outset-almost asself-encouragement-that literacy, whose end I discuss, will notdisappear. For some, Literacy Studies will become a newspecialty, as Sanskrit or Ancient Greek has become for a handfulof experts. For others, it will become a skill, as it is alreadyfor editors, proofreaders, and professional writers. For themajority, it will continue in literacies that facilitate the useand integration of new media and new forms of communication andinterpretation. The utopian in me says that we will find ways toreinvent literacy, if not save it. It has played a major role inleading to the new civilization we are entering. The realistacknowledges that new times and challenges require new means tocope with their complexity. Reluctance to acknowledge changedoes not prevent it from coming about. It only prevents us frommaking the best of it.

Probably my active practice of literacy has been matched by allthose means, computer-based or not, for coping with complexity,to whose design and realization I contributed. This book is notan exercise in prophesying a brave new world of people happy toknow less but all that they have to know when they need to.Neither is it about individuals who are superficial but whoadapt more easily to change, mediocre but extremely competitive.Its subject is language and everything pertaining to it: familyand sexuality, politics, the market, what and how we eat, how wedress, the wars we fight, love, sports, and more. It is a bookabout ourselves who give life to words whenever we speak, write,or read. We give life to images, sounds, textures, to multimediaand virtual reality involving ourselves in new interactions.Transcending boundaries of literacy in practical experiences forwhich literacy is no longer appropriate means, ultimately, togrow 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, emotionalresources, sensitivity, tendency to social interaction andpolitical organization. But what best defines our relation tolanguage is the pragmatics of our existence. Our continuousself-constitution through what we do, why we do, and how we doall we actually do-in short, human pragmatics-involves language,but is not reducible to it. The pragmatic perspective I assumeoriginated with Charles Sanders Peirce. When I began teaching inthe USA, my American colleagues and students did not know who hewas. The semiotic implications of this text relate to his work.Questioning how knowledge is shared, Peirce noticed that, withouttalking about the bearers of our knowledge-all the sign carrierswe constitute-we would not be able to figure out how results ofour inquiries are integrated in our deeds, actions, and theories.

Language and the formation and expression of ideas is unique tohumans in that they define a part of the cognitive dimension ofour pragmatic. We seem endowed with language, as we are withhearing, sight, touch, smell, and taste. But behind theappearance is a process through which human self-constitution ledto the possibility and necessity of language, as it led to thehumanization of our senses. Furthermore, it led to the means bywhich we constitute ourselves as literate as the pragmatics ofour existence requires under ever-changing circ*mstances. Theappearance is that literacy is a useful tool, when in fact itresults in the pragmatic context. We can use a hammer or acomputer, but we are our language. The experience of languageextends to the experience of the logic it embodies, as well asto that of the institutions that language and literacy madepossible. These, in turn, influence what we are and how we think,what we do and why we do. So does every tool, appliance, andmachine we use, and so do all the people with whom we interact.Our interactions with people, with nature, or with artifacts weourselves generated further affect the pragmaticself-constitution of our identity.

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

By civilization of illiteracy I mean one in which literatecharacteristics no longer constitute the underlying structure ofeffective practical experiences. Furthermore, I mean acivilization in which no one literacy dominates, as it did untilaround the turn of the century, and still does. This dominationtakes place through imposition of its rules, which preventpractical experiences of human self-constitution in domains whereliteracy has exhausted its potential or is impotent. Indescribing the post-literate, I know that any metaphor will doas long as it does not call undue attention to itself. Whatcounts is not the provocativeness but that we lift our gaze,determined to see, not just to look for the comfortingfamiliar.

This civilization of illiteracy is one of many literacies, eachwith its own characteristics and rules of functioning. Some ofsuch partial literacies are based on configurational modes ofexpression, as in the written languages of Japan, China, orKorea; on visual forms of communication; or on synestheticcommunication involving a combination of our senses. Some arenumerical and rely on a different notation system than that ofliteracy. The civilization of illiteracy comprises experiences ofthinking and working above and beyond language, asmathematicians from different countries communicating perfectlythrough mathematical formulae demonstrate. Or as we experiencein activities where the visual, digitally processed, supports ahuman pragmatics of increased efficiency. Even in its primitive,but extremely dynamic, deployment, the Internet embodies thedirections and possibilities of such a civilization. This bringsus back to literacy's reason for being: pragmatics expressed inmethods for increasing efficiency, of ensuring a desiredoutcome, be this in regard to a list of merchandise, a deed,instructions on how to make something or to carry out an act, adescription of a place, poetry and drama, philosophy, therecording and dissemination of history and abstract ideas,mythology, stories and novels, laws, and customs. Some of theseproducts of literacy are simply no longer necessary. That newmethods and technologies of a digital nature effectivelyconstitute an alternative to literacy cannot be overemphasized.

I started this book convinced that the price we pay for the humantendency to efficiency-that is, our striving for more and moreat an ever cheaper price-is literacy and the values connected toit as represented by tradition, books, art, family, philosophy,ethics, among many others. We are confronted with the increasedspeed and shorter durations of human interactions. A growingnumber and a variety of mediating elements in human praxischallenge our understanding of what we do. Fragmentation andinterconnectedness of the world, the new technology ofsynchronization, the dynamics of life forms or of artificialconstructs elude the domain of literacy as they constitute a newpragmatic framework. This becomes apparent when we compare thefundamental characteristics of language to the characteristics ofthe many new sign systems complementing or replacing it.Language is sequential, centralized, linear, and corresponds tothe stage of linear growth of humankind. Matched by the linearincrease of the means of subsistence and production required forthe survival and development of the species, this stage reachedits implicit potential. The new stage corresponds todistributed, non-sequential forms of human activity, nonlineardependencies. Reflecting the exponential growth of humankind(population, expectations, needs, and desires), this new stageis one of alternative resources, mainly cognitive in nature,compensating for what was perceived as limited natural means forsupporting humankind. It is a system of a different scale,suggestively represented by our concerns with globality andhigher levels of complexity. Therefore, humans can no longerdevelop within the limitations of an intrinsically centralized,linear, hierarchic, proportional model of contingencies thatconnect existence to production and consumption, and to thelife-support system. Alternatives that affect the nature oflife, work, and social interaction emerge through practicalexperiences of a fundamentally new condition.

Literacy and the means of human self-constitution based on itreached their full potential decades ago. The new means, whichare not as universal (i.e., as encompassing) as language, openpossibilities for exponential growth, resulting from theirconnectivity and improved involvement of cognitive resources. Aslong as the world was composed of small units (tribes,communities, cities, counties), language, despite differences instructure and use, occupied a central place. It had a unifyingcharacter and exercised a hom*ogenizing function within eachviable political unit. The world has entered the phase of globalinterdependencies. Many local languages and their literacies ofrelative, restricted significance emerge as instruments ofoptimization. What takes precedence today is interconnectivityat many levels, a function for which literacy is ill prepared.Citizens become Netizens, an identity that relates them to theentire world, not only to where they happen to live and work.

The encompassing system of culture broke into subsystems, notjust into the "two cultures" of science and literacy that C.P.Snow discussed in 1959, hoping idealistically that a thirdculture could unite and harmonize them. Market mechanisms,representative of the competitive nature of human beings, are inthe process of emancipating themselves from literacy. Whereliterate norms and regulations still in place prevent thisemancipation-as is the case with government activity andbureaucracies, the military, and legal institutions-the price isexpressed in lower efficiency and painful stagnation. SomeEuropean countries, more productive in impeding the work of theforces of renewal, pay dearly for their inability to understandthe need for structural changes. United or not in a Europe ofbroader market opportunities, member countries will have to freethemselves from the rigid constraints of a pragmatic frameworkthat no longer supports their viability. Conflicts are notsolved; solutions are a long time in coming.

One more remark before ending this introduction. It seems thatthose who run the scholarly publishing industry are unable toaccept that someone can have an idea that does not originatefrom a quotation. In keeping with literacy's reliance onauthority, I have acknowledged in the references the works thathave some bearing on the ideas presented in this book. Few, veryfew indeed, are mentioned in the body of the text. The line ofargument deserves priority over the stereotypes of referencing.This does not prevent me from acknowledging here, in addition toLeibniz and Peirce, the influence of thinkers and writers suchas Roberto Maturana, Terry Winograd, George Lakoff, Lotfi Zadeh,Hans Magnus Enzensberger, George Steiner, Marshall McLuhan,Ivan Illich, Yuri M. Lotman, and even Baudrillard, the essayistof the post-industrial. If I misunderstood any of them, it isnot because I do not respect their contributions. Seduced by myown interest and line of reasoning, I integrated what I thoughtcould become solid bricks into a building of arguments which wasto be mine. I am willing to take blame for its design andconstruction, remaining thankful to all those whosefingerprints are, probably, still evident on some of the bricks Iused.

In the 14 years that have gone by since I started thinking andwriting about the civilization of illiteracy, many of thedirections I brought into discussion are making it into thepublic domain. But I should be the last to be surprised orunhappy that reality changed before I was able to finish thisbook, and before publishers could make up their minds aboutprinting it. The Internet was not yet driving the stock market,neither had the writers of future shock had published theirbooks churning prophecies, nor had companies made fortunes inmultimedia when the ideas that go into this book were discussedwith students, presented in public lectures, outlined topolicy-makers (including administrators in higher education),and printed in scholarly journals. On starting this book, Iwanted it to be not only a presentation of events and trends, buta program for practical action. This is why, after examinationof what could be called the theoretical aspects, the focusshifts to the applied. The book ends with suggestions forpractical measures to be considered as alternatives to the beatenpath of the bandage method that only puts off radical treatment,even when its inevitability is acknowledged. Yes, I like to seemy ideas tested and applied, even taken over and developedfurther (credit given or not!). I would rather put up with anegative outcome in discussions following publication of thisbook, 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 ofthe last 300 years. What this means can be more easilyunderstood by giving some life to this dry evaluationoriginating from people in the business of quantifying dataprocessing.

Zizi, the hairdresser, and her companions exemplify today'sliterate population. Portrayed by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, sheis contrasted to Pascal, who at the age of sixteen had alreadypublished his work on conic sections, to Hugo Grotius, whograduated from college at fifteen, and to Melanchton, who at theage of twelve was a student at the once famous HeidelbergUniversity. Zizi knows how to get around. She is like a livingaddress on the Internet at its current stage of development: morelinks than content, perennially under construction. Shecontinuously starts on new avenues, never pursuing any to theend. Her well-being is supported by public money as she lives offall the social benefits society affords. Zizi's conversationsare about her taxes, and characters she reads about inmagazines, sees on television, or meets on vacation. Assuperficial as such conversations can be, they are full of catchphrases associated or not with the celebrations of the day. Herboyfriend, 34-year-old Bruno G., graduated with a degree inpolitical economy, drives a taxi cab, and still wonders what hewants to do in life. He knows the name of every soccer team thathas won the championship since 1936; he knows by heart the namesof the players, which coach was fired when, and every gamescore.

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

Enzensberger's examples are from Germany, but the phenomena hebrings to his readers' attention transcend national boundaries.He himself-writer, poet, publisher-is far from being an Internetbuff, although he might be as informed about it as hischaracters are. As opposed to many other writers on literacy andeducation, Enzensberger confirms that the efficiency reached inthe civilization of illiteracy (he does not call it that) makesit possible to extend adolescence well into what used to be themore productive time in the life of past generations. Everyonegoes to college-in some countries college education is a right.This means that over half of the young people enter some form ofhigher education. After graduating, they find out that theystill don't know what they want. Or, worse yet, that what theyknow, or are certified as knowing, is of no consequence to whatthey are expected to do. They will live, like Zizi, from socialbenefits and will get extremely angry at anyone questioningsociety's ability to provide them. For them, efficiency of humanpractical experiences translate into the right to not worrywhether they will ever contribute to this efficiency. While stillstudents, they demand, and probably rightly so, that everythingbe to the point. The problem is that neither they nor theirteachers can define what that means. What students get are morechoices among less significant subjects. That, at least, is howit looks. They probably never finish a book from cover to cover.Assignments are given to them in small portions, and usuallywith photocopied pages, which they are expected to read. Aquestion-and-answer sheet is conveniently attached, with the hopethat the students will read the pages to find the answers, andnot copy them from more dedicated classmates.

That Zizi probably has a vocabulary as rich as that of a16th-century scholar in the humanities can be assumed. That shelikely uses fewer than 1,000 of these words only says that thisis how much she needs in order to function efficiently.Melanchton used almost all the words he knew. His work requiredmastery of literacy so that he could express every new ideaprompted by the few new practical experiences of humanself-constitution he was involved in or aware of. He spoke andwrote in three languages, two of which are used today only inthe specialties they are part of. Two or three sentences from atourist guidebook or from a tape is all Zizi needs for her nextvacation in Greece or Italy. For her, travel is a practicalexperience as vital as any other. She knows the names of rockgroups, and lip-syncs the songs that express her concerns: sex,drugs, loneliness. Her memory of any stage performance or moviesurpasses that of Melanchton, who probably knew by heart theentire liturgy of the Catholic Church. Like everyone elseconstituting their identities in the civilization ofilliteracy, Zizi knows what it takes to minimize her tax burdenand how to use coupons. The rhythm of her existence is definedmore by commercial than natural cycles. And she keeps refreshingher base of practical information. Living in a time of change,this is her chance to beat the system and all the literate normsand constraints it imposes on her.

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

At this juncture, readers familiar with the World Wide Web,whether passionate about it or strongly against it, understandwhy I describe Zizi as a living Internet address. To derive somemeaning from this description, and especially to avoid theappearance of drawing a caricature of the Internet, we need tofocus on the pragmatic context in which Zizi constitutes herselfand in which the Internet is constituted as a global experience.The picture one gets from contrasting the famous Melanchton toZizi the hairdresser is not exactly fair, as it would be unfairto contrast the Library of Alexandria to the Internet. On theone hand, we have a tremendous collection representative ofhuman knowledge (and the illusion of knowledge). On the other wehave the embodiment of extremely effective methods for acquiring,testing, using, and discarding information required by humanpragmatics. The world in which Melanchton worked was limited toCentral Europe and Rome. News circulated mainly by word-of-mouth. Melanchton, like everyone who was raised with and workedamid books, was subjected to less information than we are today.He did not need an Intel inside computer or search engine tofind what he wanted. He would not understand how anyone couldreplace the need for and pleasure of browsing by a machine calledBrowser. His was a world of associations, not matches, no matterhow successful. Human minds, not machines, made up his cognitiveworld.

Literacy opened access to knowledge as long as this knowledge wascompatible with the pragmatic structures it embodied andsupported. The ozone hole of over- information broke theprotective bubble of literacy. In the new pragmatic context, thehuman being, thirsty for data, seems at the mercy of theinformational environment that shapes work, entertainment,life-in short, everything. Access to study was far from beingequal, or even close to some standard of fairness, inMelanchton's time of obsession with excellence. Informationitself was very expensive. In order to become ahairdresser-were it possible and necessary 500 years ago-Zizi, aswell as the millions who attend career training schools, wouldhave had to pay much more for her training than she did in ourage of unlimited equal access to mediocrity. Knowledge wasacquired through channels as diverse as family, schools,churches, and disseminated in very few books, or orally, orthrough imitation.

Individuals in Melanchton's time formed a set of expectations andpursued goals that changed minimally over their lifetime, sincethe pragmatic context remained the same. This ended with thedynamic practical experiences of self-constitution that led tothe pragmatic context of our day. Ended also are the variety offorms of human cooperation and solidarity-as imperfect as theywere-characteristic of a scale in which survival of theindividual was essential for the survival and well-being of thecommunity. They are replaced by a generalized sense ofcompetition. Not infrequently, this takes the form of adversity,socially acceptable when performed by literate lawyers, forinstance, yet undesirable when performed by illiterateterrorists.

More suggestive than precise, this description, in which Zizi andMelanchton play the leading characters, exemplifies the chasmbetween yesterday and today. A further examination of what isgoing on in our world allows the observation that literatelanguage no longer exclusively, or even dominantly, affects andregulates day-to-day activities. A great amount of language usedin the daily routine of people living in economically advancedcountries was simply wiped out or absorbed in machinetransactions. Digital networks, connecting production lines,distribution channels, and points of sale spectacularly augmentthe volume and variety of such transactions. Practicalexperiences of shopping, transportation, banking, and stockmarket transactions require literacy less and less. Automationrationalized away the literate component of many activities. Allover the world, regardless of the economic or technologicallevel reached, communication-specific endeavors, such asadvertisem*nt, political campaigns, various forms of ceremonial(religious, military, athletic), make crystal clear thatliterate language use is subordinated to the function or purposepursued.

The developments under scrutiny affect surviving pre-literatesocieties-the nomadic, animistic population of Sudan, the tribesof 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 awarethat commodities coming from such societies, including thecommodity of labor, no less than their needs and expectations,are traded on the global market. In the African Sahara, TV iswatched-sets connected to car batteries-as much as in the highmountains of Peru populated by illiterate Incas. As virtualpoints of sale, the lands with pre-literate societies are tradedin the futures markets as possible tourist resorts, or as asource of cheap labor. Experiences of practicalself-constitution as nomadic, animistic, and tribal are nolonger confined to the small scale of the respective community.In the effective world of a global pragmatics of highefficiency, their hunger and misery shows up in ledgers aspotential aid and cooperation programs. Don't read here onlygreed and cynicism, rather the expression of reciprocaldependencies. AIDS on the African sub- continent and the Ebolaepidemics only capture the image of shared dangers. Across theAtlantic Ocean, the plants of the disappearing Amazon rainforest, studied for their healing potential, capture an image ofopportunity. In such situations and locations, the pragmatics ofliteracy and illiteracy meet and interact.

Choose a letter and click

Images substitute text; sounds add rhythm or nuance; visualrepresentations other than written words become dominant;animation introduces dynamics where written words could onlysuggest it. In technologically advanced societies, interactivemultimedia (or hypermedia) combine visual, aural, dynamic, andstructural representations. Environments for personalexploration, organization, and manipulation of informationproliferate in CD-ROM formats, interactive games, and tutorialnetworks. High fidelity sound, rich video resources, computergraphics, and a variety of devices for individualized humaninteraction provide the technological basis for what emerges asa ubiquitous computing environment.

The entire process can be provisionally summarized as follows:Human cooperation and interaction corresponding to thecomplexity of the undertakings of our age is defined byexpectations of high efficiency. Relatively stable and wellstructured literate communication among the people involved isless efficient than rather fast and fragmentary contact throughmeans other than those facilitated by, or based on, literacy.Stereotyped, highly repetitive or well defined unique tasks, andthe literate language associated with them, have beentransferred to machines. Unique tasks require strategies ofspecialization. The smaller the task assigned to eachparticipant, the more effective the ways to carry it out at theexpense of variety of forms and extent of direct humaninteraction, as well as at the expense of literacy-basedinteractions. Accordingly, human self-constitution todayinvolves means of expression and communication no longer basedon or reducible to literacy. Characteristics immanent inliteracy 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 takeplace by general agreement or without conflict, as will bepointed out more than once.

While some fail to notice the decreased role of literacy and thedeterioration of language in our life today, others surrender toilliteracy without even being aware of their surrender. We livein a world in which many people-especially those with more thanundergraduate college education-complain about the low level ofliteracy while they simultaneously acquiesce to methods andnecessities that make literacy less and less significant.Furthermore, when invoking literacy, people maintain a nostalgiafor something that has already ceased to affect their lives.Their thinking, feeling, interpersonal relations, andexpectations regarding family, religion, ethics, morals, art,dining, cultural and leisure activities already reflect the newilliterate condition. It is not a matter of personal choice, buta necessary development. The low level of literacy of those whor*ceive an education from which society used to expect literateadults to graduate worries politicians, educators, and literacyprofessionals (writers, publishers, booksellers). They fear,probably for the wrong reasons, that people cannot live andprosper without knowing how to write or read at high levels ofcompetence. What actually worries them is not that people writeless well, or less correctly, or read less (some if at all), butthat some succeed despite the odds. Self-styled champions ofliteracy, instead of focusing on change, spend money, energy, andintelligence, not in exploring how to optimally benefit fromchange, but on how to stop an inexorable process.

The state of affairs characteristic of the civilization ofilliteracy did not come about overnight. Norbert Wiener'sprophetic warning that we will become slaves of intelligentcontraptions that take over intellectual faculties deserves morethan a parenthetic reminder. Some commentators point to thedisruption of the sixties, which put the educational system allover the world in turmoil. The events of the sixties, as much asthe new machines Wiener discussed, are yet another symptom of,but not a reason for, the decline of literacy. The majorhypothesis of this book is that illiteracy, in its relativeterms mentioned so far, results from the changed nature of humanpractical experiences; that is, from the pragmaticscorresponding to a new stage of human civilization. (I prefer touse pragmatics in the sense the Greeks used it: pragma, fordeeds, from prattein, to do.) Regardless of our vocations-workingin a large corporation or heading one's own business, farming,creating art, teaching language or mathematics, programming, oreven participating in a university's board of trustees- weaccept, even if with some reluctance, the rationalization oflanguage. Our lives take place increasingly in the impersonalworld 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 overridesconstraints and limitations resulting from the participation oflanguage in human pragmatics. Our world is becoming more andmore a world of efficiency and interconnected activities thattake place at a speed and at a variety of levels for whichliteracy is not appropriate.

Still, complex interdependencies are reflected in our relation tolanguage in general, and in our use of it, in particular. Itseems that language is a key-at least one among many-to themind, the reason for which artificial intelligence is interestedin language. It also seems to be a major social ingredient.Accordingly, no one should be surprised that once the status oflanguage changes, there are also changes far beyond what weexpect when we naively consider what a word is, or what is in aword or a rule of grammar, or what defines a text. A word onpaper, one like the many on this page, is quite different from aword in the hypertext of a multimedia application or that of theWeb. The letters serve a different function. Omit one from thispage and you have a misspelling. Click on one and nothinghappens. Click on a letter displayed on a Web page and you mightbe connected to other signs, images, sounds, and interactivemultimedia presentations. These changes, among others, are theimplicit themes of this book and define the context forunderstanding why illiteracy is not an accident, but a necessarydevelopment.

Keeping up with faster living

Ours is a world of efficiency. Although more obvious on thecomputer screen, and on the command buttons and touch-sensitivelevers of the machines we rely quite heavily upon, efficiencyexpectations met in business and financial life insinuatethemselves into the intimacy of our private lives as well. As aresult of efficiency expectations, we have changed almosteverything we inherited in our homes-kitchen, study, orbathroom-and redefined our respective social or family roles. Wedo almost everything others used to do for us. We cook (ifwarming up prefabricated dishes in a microwave oven stillqualifies as cooking), do the laundry (if selecting dirty sheetsor clothes by color and fabric and stuffing them into themachine qualifies as washing), type or desktop publish,transport (ourselves, our children). Machines replacedservants, and we became their servants in turn. We have to learntheir language of instructions and to cope with the consequencestheir use entails: increased energy demand, pollution, waste,and most important, dependence. Ours is a world of briefencounters in which "How are you?" is not a question reflectingconcern or expecting a real answer, but a formula. Once it meantwhat it expressed and prefaced dialogue. Now it is the end ofinteraction, or at best the introduction to a dialogue totallyindependent of the question. Where everyone living within themodel of literacy expected the hom*ogeneous background of sharedlanguage, we now find a very fragmented reality ofsub-languages, images, sounds, body gestures, and newconventions.

Despite the heavy investment society has made in literacy overhundreds of years, literacy is no longer adopted by all as adesired educational goal. Neither is it actively pursued forimmediate practical or long-term reasons. People seem toacknowledge that they need not even that amount of literacyimposed upon them by obligatory education. For quite afew-speech writers, editors, perhaps novelists andeducators-literacy is indeed a skill which they aptly use formaking a living. They know and apply rules of correct languageusage. Methods for augmenting the efficiency of the message theyput in the mouths of politicians, soap-opera actors, businessmen,activists and many others in need of somebody to write (andsometimes even to think) for them are part of their trade. Forothers, these rules are a means of exploring the wealth offiction, poetry, history, and philosophy. For a great majority,literacy is but another skill required in high school andcollege, but not necessarily an essential component of theircurrent and, more important, future lives and work. Thismajority, estimated at ca. 75% of the population, believes thatall one has to know is already stored for them and madeavailable as an expected social service-mathematics in the cashregister or pocket calculator, chemistry in the laundrydetergent, physics in the toaster, language in the greetingcards available for all imaginable occasions, eventuallyincorporated, as spellers or writing routines, into the wordprocessing programs they use or others use for them.

Four groups seem to have formed: those for whom literacy is askill; those using it as a means for studying values based onliteracy; those functioning in a world of pre- packaged literacyartifacts; and those active beyond the limitations of literacy,stretching cognitive boundaries, defining new means and methodsof communication and interaction, constituting themselves inpractical activities of higher and higher efficiency. These fourgroups are the result of changes in the condition of the humanbeing in what was broadly (in fact, too broadly) termedPost-Industrial Society. Whether specifically identified as suchor assuming labels of convenience, the conflict characteristic ofthis time of fundamental change has its locus in literacy; andmore specifically in the direction of change towards thecivilization of illiteracy.

At first glance, it is exceedingly difficult to say whetherlanguage, as an instrument of continuity and permanence, isfailing because the rhythm of existence has acceleratedincreasingly since the Industrial Revolution, or the rhythm ofexistence has accelerated because human interaction is no longerat the mercy of language. We do not know whether thisacceleration is due to, or nourished by, changes in language andthe way people use it, or if changes in language reflect thisacceleration. It is quite plausible that the use of images,moreover of interactive multimedia and network-based exchange ofcomplex data are more appropriate to a faster paced society thantexts requiring more time and concentration. But it is lessclear whether we use images and synesthetic means of expressionbecause we want to be faster, and thus more efficient, or we canbe faster and improve efficiency if we use such means.

Shorter terms of human interaction and, for example, the changein the status of the family have something in common. The newpolitical condition of the individual in modern society also hassomething in common with the characteristics of humaninteraction and the means of this interaction. But again, we donot really know whether the new socio-economic dynamics resultedfrom our intention to accelerate interactions, or theacceleration in human interaction is only the background (or amarginal effect) of a more encompassing change of our conditionunder circ*mstances making this change necessary. My hypothesisis that a dramatic change in the scale of humankind and in thenature of the relation between humans and their natural andcultural environments might explain the new socio-economicdynamics.

Loaded literacy

Languages, or any other form of expression and communication, aremeaningful only to the extent that they become part of ourexistence. When people do not know how to spell words that referto their existence, we suspect that something related to thelearning of spelling (usually the learner) does not function aswe assumed it should. (Obviously, literacy is more thanspelling.) School, family, new habits-such as extensivetelevision viewing, comics reading, obsessive playing of computergames, Internet surfing, to name some of the apparentculprits-come under scrutiny. Culture, prejudice, or fear of theunknown prevents us from asking whether spelling is still anecessity. Cowardly conformity stops us short from suspectingthat something might be wrong with language or with thoseliteracy expectations deeply anchored in all known politicalprograms thrown into our face when our vote is elicited. Whenspelling and phonetics are as inconsistent as they are inEnglish especially, this suspicion led to the examination andcreation of alternative alphabets and to alternative artificiallanguages, which we shall examine. But spelling fails even inlanguages with more consistent relations between pronunciationand writing.

Because we inherited, along with our reverence for language, apassive attitude regarding what is logically permissible underthe guise of literacy, we do not question implicit assumptionsand expectations of literacy. For instance, the belief thatcommand of language enhances cognitive skills, although we knowthat cognitive processes are not exactly reducible to language,is accepted without hesitation. It is ascertained that literatepeople from no matter what country can communicate better andlearn foreign languages more easily. This is not always thecase. In reality, languages are rather loaded systems ofconventions in which national biases and other inclinations areextensively embodied and maintained, and even propagated, throughspeech, writing, and reading. This expectation leads to wellintended, though disputable, statements such as: "You can neverunderstand one language until you understand at least two"(signed by Searle).

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

Man proposes, man disposes

Knowledge of the connection between languages-taking theappearance of entities with lives of their own-and peopleconstituting them-with the appearance of having unlimitedcontrol over their language-is essential for understanding theshift from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of multiplemeans of expression and communication. These means could becalled languages if an appropriate definition of such languages(and the literacies associated with them) could be provided. Inlight of what has been already mentioned, the broader context ofthe changes in the status of literacy is the pragmatic frameworkof our existence. It is not only that the use of language hasdiminished or its quality decreased. Rather, it is theacknowledgment of a very complex reality, of a biologically andculturally modified human being facing apparent choicesdifficult, if not impossible, to harmonize. Life is faster paced,not because biological rhythms abruptly changed, but because anew pragmatic framework, of higher efficiency, came about.

Human interaction extends in our days beyond the immediatecircle of acquaintances, or what used to be the family circle.This interaction is, however, more superficial and more mediatedby other people and by various devices. The universe ofexistence seems to open as wide as the space we canexplore-practically the whole planet, as well as the heavens. Atthe same time, the pressure of the narrower reality, ofexceedingly specialized work, through whose product individualand social identification, as well as valuation take place, isstronger than ever before. On a different level, the individualrealizes that the traditional mapping from one to few (family,friends, community) changes drastically. In a context ofglobality, the mapping extends to the infinity of thosepartaking in it.

Characteristic of the context of change in the status andfunction (communication, in particular) of literacy arefragmentation of everything we do or encounter and the need tocoordinate. We become aware of the increased number and varietyof stimuli and realize that previous explanations of their originand possible impact are not satisfactory. Decentralization ofmany, if not all, aspects of existence, paralleled by strongintegrative forces at work, is also characteristic of thedynamics of change. It is not communication alone, as somebelieve, that shapes society. More encompassing effectiveforces, relatively independent of words, images, sounds,textures, and odors continuously directed at society's members,from every direction and with every imaginable purpose, definesocial dynamics. They define goals and means of communication aswell.

The gap between the performance of communication technology andthe effectiveness of communication is symptomatic of thecontradictory condition of contemporary humans. It often seemsthat messages have lives of their own and that the morecommunication there is, the less it reaches its address. Lessthan two percent of all the information thrown into mass mediacommunication reaches its audience. At this level of efficiency,no car would ever move, no plane could take off, babies couldnot even roll over in their cribs! The dependency ofcommunication on literacy proved to be communication's strength.It delivered a potential audience. But it proved to be itsweakness, too. The assumption that among literate people,communication not only takes place, but, based on the impliedshared background, is always successful, was found to be wrongtime and again. Experiences such as wars, conflicts amongnations, communities, professional groups (academia, a highlyliterate social group, is infamous in this respect), familiesand generations continuously remind us that this assumption is afallacy. Still we misinterpret these experiences. Case in point:the anxiety of the business community over the lack ofcommunication skills in the young people it employs. That themost literate segment of business is rationalized away in themassive re-engineering of companies goes unnoticed.

We want to believe that business is concerned with fundamentalvalues when its representatives discuss the difficultiesmid-level executives have in articulating goals and plans forachieving them in speech or writing. The new structural formsemerging in today's economy show that business-people, as muchas politicians and many other people troubled by the currentstate of literacy today, speak out of both sides of theirmouths. They would like to have it both ways: more efficiency,which does not require or stimulate a need for literacy sinceliteracy is not adapted to the new socio-economic dynamics, andthe benefits of literacy, without having to pay for them. Thereality is that they are all concerned with economic cycles,productivity, efficiency, and profit in trying to figure outwhat a global economy requires from them. Re-engineering, whichcompanies also called restructuring or downsizing, translatesinto efficiency expectations within an extremely competitiveglobal economy. By all accounts, restructuring cut the literacyoverhead of business. It replaced literate practical experiencesof management and productive work with automated procedures fordata processing and with computer-aided manufacturing. Theprocess is far from over. It has just reached the usually placidworking world of Japan, and it might motivate Europe's effort toregain competitiveness, despite all the social contracts in placethat embody expectations of a past that will never return. Infact, all boils down to the recognition of a new status oflanguage: that of becoming, to a greater extent than in itsliterate embodiment, a business tool, a means of production, atechnology. The freeing of language from literacy, and thesubsequent loss in quality, is only part of a broader process.The people opposing it should be aware that the civilization ofilliteracy is also the expression of practical criticism inrespect to a past pragmatic framework far from being as perfectas literacy advocates lead us to believe.

The pragmatics of literacy established a frame of reference inrespect to ownership, trade, national identity, and politicalpower. Distribution of ownership might not be new, but itsmotivations are no longer rooted in inheritance, rather increativity and a selfish sense of business allegiance. One muchcirculated observation sums it up: If you think that thethousands of not yet fully vested Microsoft programmers willmiss their chance to join the club of millionaires to which theircolleagues belong, think again! It is not for the sake of theowner of a business, or of a legendary entrepreneur, andcertainly not for the sake of idealism. It is for their own sakethat more and more young and less young people use their chancein this hierarchy-free, or freer, environment in which theyconstitute their identity. What motivates them are arguments ofcompetitiveness, not national identity, political philosophy, orfamily pride. All these and many other structural aspectsresulting from the acquired freedom from structuralcharacteristics of a pragmatic context defined by literacy do notautomatically make society better or fairer. But a distributionof wealth and power, and a redefinition of the goals and methodsthrough which democracy is practiced is taking place.

We know, too, that the coercion of writing was applied to whattoday we call minorities. Since writing is less natural thanspeaking and bears values specific to a culture, it hasalienated individuality. Literacy implies the integration ofminorities by appropriating their activity and culture,sometimes replacing their own with the dominant literacy intotal disregard of their heritage. "If writing did not suffice toconsolidate knowledge," observed Claude Lévi-Strauss, "it wasperhaps indispensable in affirming domination. […] the fightagainst illiteracy is thus identical with the reinforcement ofthe control of the citizen by authority." I shall not go so faras to state that the current attempt to celebrate multiplicityand to recognize contradiction brought about by irreducibledifferences among races, cultures, and practical experiences isnot the result of literate necessities. But without a doubt,developments peculiar to the civilization of illiteracy, as thisbecomes the background for heterogeneous human experiences andconflicting value systems, brought multiplicity to the forefront.And, what is more important, illiteracy builds upon thepotential of this multiplicity.

Beyond the commitment to literacy

What seems to be the issue of putting the past in the rightperspective (with the appearance of historic revisionism) isactually the expression of pragmatic needs in regard to thepresent and the future. The subject, in view of its manyimplications, deserves a closer examination outside, but not indisregard of, the political controversy it has already stirredup. Writing is a form of commitment that extends from thePhoenician agreements and Egyptian records, religious and legaltexts on clay and in stone, to the medieval oath and later tocontracts. Written language encodes, at many levels (alphabet,sentence structure, semantics, etc.), the nature of the relationamong those addressed in writing. A tablet that the Egyptiansused for identifying locally traded commodities addressed veryfew readers. A reduced scale of existence, work, and trade wasreflected in very direct notation. For the given context, thetablets supported the expected efficiency. In the framework ofthe Roman Empire, labeling of construction materials-roof tiles,drainage pipes-distributed within and outside the Empire,involved more elaborate elements. These materials were stampedduring manufacture and helped builders select what matched theirneeds. More people were addressed. Their backgrounds were morediverse: they functioned in different languages and indifferent cultural contexts. Their practical experience asbuilders was more complex than that of Egyptian dealers in grainor other commodities who operated locally. Stamping constructionmaterials signaled a commitment to fulfill building needs andexpectations. Over time, such commitments became more elaborateand separated themselves from the product. With literacy, theybecame formalized contracts covering various pragmatic contexts.They bear all the characteristics of literacy. They also becomerepresentative of the conflict between means of a literatenature and means appropriate to the levels of efficiencyexpected in the civilization of illiteracy.

A short look at contracts as we experience them today revealsthat contracts are based on languages of their own, hard todecipher by even the average literate person. They quantifyeconomic expectations, legal provisions, and tax consequences.Written in English, they are expected to address the entireworld. In the European Community, each of the member countriesexpects a contract to be formulated in its own language.Consequently, delays and extra costs can make the transactionmeaningless. Actually, the contract, not only the packaging anddistribution labels, could be provided in the universal languageof machine-readable bar codes. Ours is a pragmatic framework ofilliteracy that results in the generation of languagescorresponding to functions but pertinent to the fast-changingcirc*mstances that make the activity possible in the firstplace. In a world of tremendous competition, fast exchange, andaccelerated growth of new expectations, the contract itself andthe mechanisms for executing it have to be efficient.

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

From whatever angle we look at language and literacy, we comeback to the people who commit themselves in the practicalexperience of their self-constitution. While the relation ofpeople to language is symptomatic of their general condition, tounderstand how and why this relation changes is to understand howand why human beings change. With the ideal of literacy, weinherited the illusion that to understand human beings is tounderstand human language. It is actually the other way around-ifwe understand language as a dynamic practical experience in itsown right. There is a deeper level that we have to explore-thatof the human activity through which we project our being intothe reality of existence, and make it sensible and understandableto others. It is only in the act of expressing ourselves throughwork, contemplation, enjoyment, and wonder that we become whatwe are for ourselves and for others. Under pragmaticcirc*mstances characteristic of the establishment of the speciesand its history up to our time, this required language and ledto the need for literacy. As a matter of fact, literacy can beseen as a form of commitment, one among the successivecommitments that individuals make and the human species enters.For over 2,500 years, these circ*mstances seemed to be eternaland dominated our existence. But as humankind outgrows thepragmatics based on the underlying structure of literacy, meansdifferent from language, that is, means different from thoseconstituting the framework of literacy and of literacy-basedcommitments become necessary.

A moving target

The context of the subject of change comprises also theterminology developed around it. The variation of the meaningsassigned to the words literacy and illiteracy is symptomatic ofthe various angles from which they are examined. Literacy, assomeone said (I found this credited to both John Ashcroft, oncegovernor of Missouri, and to Henry A. Miller) has been a movingtarget. It has reflected changes in criteria for evaluatingwriting and writing skills as the pragmatic framework of humanactivity changed through time. Writing is probably more than5,000 years old. And while the emergence of writing and readingare the premise for literacy, a notion of generalized literacycan be construed only in connection to the invention of movabletype (during the 11th century in China, and the early 16thcentury in Western Europe), and even more so with the advent ofthe 19th century high-speed rotary press.

Within the mentioned time-frame, many changes in theunderstanding of what literacy connotes have come about. Forthose who see the world through the Book (Torah, Bible, Koran,Upanishads, Wu Ching), literacy means to be able to read andunderstand the book, and thus the world. All practical rulespresented in the Book constitute a framework accessed eitherthrough literacy or oral tradition. In the Middle Ages, to beliterate meant to know Latin, which was perceived as the languageof divine revelation. Parallel to the religious, orreligion-oriented, perspective of literacy, many others wereacknowledged: social-how writing and reading constitute aframework for social interaction; economic-how writing andreading and other skills of comprehending maps, tables, andsymbols affect people's ability to participate in economic life;educational-how literacy is disseminated; legal-how laws andsocial rules are encoded in order to ensure uniform socialbehavior.

Scholars have looked at literacy from all these perspectives. Indoing so, they have foisted upon the understanding of literacyinterpretations so diverse and so contradictory that to followthem is to enter a maze from which there is no escape. One ofWill Rogers' lines was paraphrased as: "We are all illiterate,only about different things." The formula deserves closerexamination because it defines another characteristic of thecontext for understanding the relative illiteracy of our times.The degree of illiteracy is difficult to quantify, but theresult is easy to notice. Everything carried into theself-constitution of the individual as warrior, lover, athlete,family member, educator or educated in literacy-based pragmaticsis being replaced by illiterate means. Nobody expected that anindividual who reads Tolstoy or Shakespeare will be a bettercook, or devise better military plans, or even be a better lover.Nevertheless, the characteristics of literacy affectedpractically all pragmatic experiences, conferring upon them aunity and coherence we can only look back upon with nostalgia.Champions of sexual encounters, as much as innovators in newtechnologies and Olympic athletes are extremely efficient intheir respective domains. Peak performance increases as theaverage falls in the range of mediocrity and sub- mediocrity. Inthis book I will examine many aspects of literacy pertinent towhat is usually associated with it: the publications peoplewrite and read, communication at the individual and sociallevels, as well as many aspects of human activity that we do notnecessarily consider in relation to literacy-military, sports,sex and family, eating-but which nevertheless were influenced bythe pragmatic framework that made literacy possible andnecessary.

With the evident demise of philosophy as the science ofsciences, began fragmentation of knowledge. Doubt that a commoninstrument of access to and dissemination of knowledge exists isreplaced by certitude that it does not. A so-called thirdculture, in the opinion of the author who brought it to publicattention, "consists of rendering visible the deeper meanings ofour lives" in ways different from those of literaryintellectuals. This is not C.P. Snow's third culture ofscientists capable of communicating with non-scientificintellectuals, but the illiterate scientific discourse thatbrings fascinating notions into the mainstream, via powerfulmetaphors and images (albeit in a trivialized manner). This iswhy the relation between science and literacy, as well asbetween philosophy and literacy, will be examined with theintention to characterize the philosophy and science of thecivilization of illiteracy.

But are we really equipped with the means of exploration andevaluation of this wide-ranging change? Aren't we captive tolanguage and literacy, and thus to the philosophic andscientific explanations based on them? We know that the system inplace in our culture is the result of the logocratic viewadopted. The testing of skills rated by score is to a greatextent a measure of comprehension characteristic of thecivilization of literacy. The new pragmatic framework requiresskills related not only to language and literacy, but also toimages, sounds, textures, motion, and virtual space and time.Knowing this, we have to address the relation between arelatively static medium and dynamic media. We should look intohow literacy relates to the visual, in general, and, inparticular, to the controversial reality of television, ofinteractive multimedia, of artificial images, of networking andvirtual reality. These are all tasks of high order, requiring abroad perspective and an unbiased viewpoint.

Most important is the comprehension of the structuralimplications of literacy. An understanding of the framework thatled to literacy, and of the consequences that the new pragmaticframework of existence has on all aspects of our lives will helpus understand how literacy influenced them. I refer specificallyto religion, family, state, and education. In a world giving upthe notion of permanency, God disappears for quite a number ofpeople. Still, there are many more churches, denominations,sects, and other religious factions (atheist and neo-paganincluded) than at any other time. In the United States ofAmerica, people change life partners 2.8 times during theirlifespan (if they ever constitute a family), and calculate thefinancial aspects of getting married and having children withthe same precision that they use to calculate the expected returnon an investment. The state has evolved into a corporationregulating the business of the nation, and is now judged on itseconomic achievements. Presidents of states act assuper-peddlers of major industries on whose survival employmentdepends. These heads of state are not shy about giving up theideals anchored in literate discourse (e.g., human rights). Butthey will raise a big fuss when it comes to copyrightinfringement, especially of software. The irony is that copyrightis difficult to define in respect to digital originals. Throughthe literacy model, the state became a self- preservingbureaucratic machine rarely akin to the broad variety of optionsbrought about by the pragmatic framework of the civilization ofilliteracy.

Many more people than previous records mention become (or remain)illiterates after finishing the required years of schooling-aminimum of ten years-and even after graduating from college.Some people know how to read; even how to write, but opt forscanning TV channels, playing games, attending sports events, orsurfing the Internet. Aliteracy is also part of the broaderchange in the status of literacy. Decisions to forego readingand writing are decisions in favor of different means ofexpression and communication. The new generation is moreproficient in video games than in orthography. This generationwill be involved in high-efficiency practical experiencesstructurally similar to the interactive toy and far removed fromthe expectation of correct writing. The Internet shapes thechoices of the new generation in terms of what they want toknow, how, when, and for what purpose more than newspapers,books, and magazines, and even more than radio or televisiondoes. And even more than schools and colleges do. Through itsvast and expanding means and offerings, the Internet connectsthe individual to the globe, instead of only talking aboutglobality. Networking, at many levels and in many ways, isrelated to the characteristics of our pragmatic framework. Asrudimentary as it still is, networking excludes everything thatis not fast- paced and to the point.

Can all these examples, part of the context of the discussion ofliteracy in our changing world, be interpreted as being incausal relation to the decline of literacy? That is, the lesspeople are knowledgeable in reading and writing, or choose not toread or write, the less they believe in God or the more paganthey want to be? The more often they divorce, the less theymarry or have children? The more they want or accept abureaucratic machine to handle their problems, the more TVprograms they watch and the more electronic games they play, themore they surf the infinite world of networks? No, not alongthis line of one-dimensional, linear, simplistic form ofdeterminism. A multiplicity of factors, and a multiplicity oflayers need to be considered. They are, however, rooted in thepragmatic framework of our continuous self- constitution. It isexhibited through the dynamics of shorter and fasterinteractions. It is embodied in the ever wider choices ofascertaining our identity. It takes the appearance ofavailabilities, fragmentation and global integration, ofincreased mediation. The dynamics described corresponds to thehigher efficiency that a larger scale of human activity demands.To call attention to the multi-dimensionality of the process andto the many interdependencies, which we can finally uncover withthe help of new technologies, is a first step. To evince theirnon-linearity, reflecting the meshing between what can be seenas deterministic and what is probably non-deterministic isanother step in the argument of the book.

Without basing our discussion on human pragmatics, it would beimpossible to explain why, despite all the effort and moneysocieties invest in education, and all the time allocated foreducation-sometimes over a quarter of a lifetime-despite researchof cognitive processes pertinent to literacy, people wind up lessliterate, but, surprisingly, not at all less efficient. Somewould argue-the late Alan Bloom, a crusader for culture andliteracy, indeed a brilliant writer of the epilogue of humanculture and nostalgia for it, already did-that without literacy,we are less effective as human beings. The debate over sucharguments requires that we acknowledge changes in the status ofhuman beings and of human societies, and that we understand whatmakes such changes unavoidable.

The wise fox

The world as it stands today, especially the industrializedworld, is fundamentally different from the world of anyyesteryear, the last decade and century, not to mention the pastthat seems more the time of story than of history. Alan Bloom'sposition, embraced by many intellectuals, is rooted in thebelief that people cannot be effective unless they build on thefoundation of historically confirmed values, in particular thegreat books. But we are at a point of divergences with nonoticeably privileged direction, but with many, many options.This is not a time of crisis, although some want us to believethe contrary and are ready to offer their remedies: back tosomething (authority, books, some primitive stage of no-ego, orof the mushroom, i.e., psychedelic drugs, back to nature); orfast 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 creativityand diversity, operating on a scale of human interaction towhich we exponentially add new domains: outer space, whosedimensions can be measured only in light years, and whose periodof observation extends over lifetimes; the microcosmos, mirroringthe scale in the opposite direction of infinitesimaldifferentiations; the new continents of man-made materials, newforms of energy, genetically designed plants and animals, newgenetic codes, and virtual realities to experience new spaces,new times, and new forms of mediation. Networking, which at itscurrent stage barely suggests things to come, can only becompared to the time electricity became widely available.Cognitive energy exchanged through networks and focused oncooperative endeavors is part of what lies ahead as weexperience exponential growth on digital networks and fastlearning curves of efficient handling of their potential.

The past corresponds to a pragmatic framework well adapted to thesurvival and development of humankind in the limited world ofdirect encounters or limited mediations. In terms pertinent to acivilization built around the notion of literacy, the currentlower levels of literacy can be seen as symptomatic of a crisis,or even a breakdown. But what defines the new pragmatic contextis the shift from a literacy- centered model to one of multiple,interconnected, and interconditioned, distributed literacies. Itis well justified to repeat that some of the most enlightenedminds overlook the pragmatics of bygone practice. Challenged,confused, even scared by the change, they call for a journey tothe past: back to tradition, to discipline, to the ethics of ourforefathers, to old-time religion and the education that grew outof it, to permanence, and hopefully to stability. Even those whowholeheartedly espouse evolutionary and revolutionary modelsseem to have a problem when it comes to literacy. All set to doaway with authority, they have no qualms about celebrating theimperialism of the written word. Other minds confess todifficulties in coping with a present so promising and, at thesame time, so confusing in its structural contradictions. What weexperience, from the extreme of moral turpitude to a disquietingsense of mediocrity and meaninglessness, nourishes skeptical, ifnot fatalistic, visions. The warning is out (again): We will endup destroying humankind! Yet another part of the living presentaccepts the challenge without caring about the implications itentails. The people in this group give up their desire tounderstand what happens, as long as this makes life exciting andrewarding. Hollywood thrives on this. So do the industries ofdigital smoke- and-mirrors, always a step from fame, and not muchfarther from oblivion. Addresses on the Internet fade as quicklyas they are set up. The most promising links of yesterday showup on the monitor as a "Sorry" message, as meaningful as theirshort- lived presence was. Arguing with success is a sure recipefor failure. Success deserves to be celebrated in its authenticforms that change the nature of human existence in ouruniverse.

The future suggested in the labels technocracy, information age,and service society might capture some characteristics oftoday's world, but it is limited and limiting. This future failsto accommodate the development of human activity at the new scalein terms of population, resources, adaptation, and growth it hasreached. Within this model, its proponents preserve as theunderlying structure the current set of dependencies among themany parts involved in human activity, and a stubborndeterministic view of simplistic inclination. Unreflectedcelebration of technocracy as the sole agent of change must betreated with the same suspicion as its demonization. The currentparticipation of technology in human activity is indeedimpressive. So are the extent of information processing andinformation mining, and the new relation between productiveactivities and services. To make sense of disparate data and fromthem form new productive endeavors is a formidable task.Science, in turn, made available enormously challengingtheories and extremely refined models of the world.

But after all is done and said, these are only particular aspectsof a much more encompassing process. The result is a pragmaticframework of a new condition. Highly mediated work, distributedtasks, parallel modes, and generalized networking of ratherloosely coordinated individual experiences define this condition.Within this framework, the connection between input (forinstance, work) and output (what results) is of a differentorder of magnitude tfrom that between the force applied on alever and the outcome; or that between the energy necessary toaccomplish useful tasks through engines or electric, orpneumatic devices, no matter how efficient, and the result. Inaddition, even the distinction between input and output becomesfuzzy. The wearable computer provides interoperability andinterconnectedness-an increase in a person's heart rate can be aresult of an increase in physical exertion or cause forcommunicating with a doctor's office or for alerting the policestation (if an accident takes place). It might be that the nextinteraction will involve our genetic code.

The capacity for language and the ability to understand itsvarious implications are only relatively interdependent, andthus only relatively open to scrutiny and understanding. Thisstatement, as personal as it sounds, and as much as it expressesprobably less resignation than uncertainty, is crucial to theintegrity of this entire enterprise. Indeed, once within alanguage, one is bound to look at the world surrounding oneselffrom the perspective of that language as the medium for partialself-constitution and evaluation. Participating in its dynamicsaffects what I am able to see and describe. This affects alsowhat I am no longer able to perceive, what escapes myperception, or even worse, filters it to the point that I seeonly my own thoughts. This dual identity-observer and integralpart of the observed phenomena-raises ethical, axiological, andepistemological aspects almost impossible to reconcile. Sinceevery language is a projection of ourselves-as participants inthe human experience, yet as distinct instantiations of thatexperience-we do not see the world so much as ourselves inrelation to it, ourselves in establishing our culture, and againourselves in taming and appropriating the universe around us.The fox in Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince says it muchbetter: "One only understands the things one tames."

"Between us the rift"

Huge industrial complexes where an immense number of workersparticipate in the production of goods, and densely populatedurban centers gravitating around factories, make up the imagecharacteristic of industrial society. This image is strikinglydifferent from the new reality of interconnected, yetdecentralized, individual activities going well beyondtelecommuting. Various mediating elements contribute toincreasingly efficient practical experiences of humanself-constitution. The computer is one of the varied embodimentsof these mediating elements, but by no means the only one.Through its functions, such as calculation, word, image, andinformation processing, and control of manufacturing, itintroduces many layers between individuals and the object oftheir actions. The technology of interconnecting provides meansfor distributive task strategies. It also facilitates parallelmodes of productive work. This is a world of progressivedecentralization and interoperative possibilities. All kinds ofmachines can be an address in this interconnected world. Theiroperations can range from design tasks to computer-aidedmanufacturing. Distributed work and cognitive functionspertinent to it afford practical experiences qualitativelydifferent from the mechanical sequencing of tasks as we know itfrom industrial modes of production.

Obviously, large portions of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, aswell as part of the European and North American continents, donot necessarily fit this description in detail. Industrialactivities still constitute the dominant practical experience inthe world. Although nomadic and jungle tribes are part of thisintegrated world, the Industrial Revolution has not yet reachedthem all. In some cases, the stages leading to agriculture havenot yet been attained. In view of the global nature of human lifeand activity today, I submit that despite the deep disparity inthe economic and social evolution of various regions of theworld, it is plausible to assume that centralized modes ofproduction peculiar to industrial economies are not a necessarydevelopment. Efficiency expectations corresponding to the globalscale of human activity can be reached only by developmentstrategies different from those embodied in the pragmaticframework of industrial activity. It is therefore probable thatcountries, and even subcontinents, not affected by theIndustrial Revolution will not go through it. Planners with anecological bent even argue that developing countries should nottake the path that led industrial nations to augment theirpopulation's living standard to the detriment of the environmentor by depleting natural resources (A German Manifest, 1992).

Industrial production and the related social structures rely onliteracy. 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 tothe point. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution,children and women became part of the labor market. For the verylimited operation one had to perform, no literacy was necessary;and women and children were not literate. Still, the futuredevelopment of the industrial society could not take placewithout the dissemination of literacy skills. For instance,industry made possible the invention, in 1830, of the steel penindispensable to the compulsory elementary education that waslater instituted. The production of steel needles seemed toextend domesticity, but actually created the basis for the sweattrades following what Louis Mumford called carboniferouscapitalism. Gaslight and electricity expanded the time availablefor the dissemination of literacy skills. Housing improvementsmade possible the building of the individual library. GeorgeSteiner sees this as a turning point in the sense that a privatecontext of the experience of the book was created.

As far as national structures were concerned, phenomenacharacteristic of the Industrial Revolution cannot be understoodoutside the wider context of the formation and consolidation ofnations. Affirmation of national identity is a process intimatelyconnected to the values and functions of literacy. The productionprocess of the industrial age of mechanical machinery andelectric power required not brute force, but qualified force.Administrative and management functions required more literacythan work on the assembly line. But literacy projected itscharacteristics onto the entire activity, thus making a literateworkforce desirable. The market it generated projected thecondition of the industry in the structure of its transactions.The requirements for qualified work expanded to requirements forqualified market activities and resulted in the beginnings ofmarketing and advertising. That market was based on therecognition of national boundaries, i.e., boundaries ofefficiency, self-sufficiency, and future growth offering marketsof a size and complexity adequate to industrial output. Nationsreplaced the coarse fragmentation of the world. They were nolonger, as Jean-Marie Guéhenno notices, a disguise of tribalstructures, but a political space within which democracy couldbe established.

Progression from competing individual life and temporarycongregation in an environment of survival of the fittest totribal, communal, local, confederate, and national life isparalleled by progression in the forms and methods of humanintegration. The global scale of human activity characteristicof our age is not an extension of the linear, deterministicrelations between those constituting a valid human entity and thelife-support system, called environment, that structurally defineindustrial society. Discontinuity in numbers (of people,resources, expectations, etc.), in the nature of the relationsamong people, in the forms of mediations that define humanpractical experiences is symptomatic of the depth and breadth ofchange. The end of nations, of democracy even, might be far off,but this end is definitory of the chasm before us. The UnitedNations, which does not yet comprise the entire world, is acollection of over 197 nations, and increasing. Some are onlyisland communities, or newly proclaimed independent countriesbrought about by social and political movements. Of the over 240distinct territories, countries, and protectorates, very few (ifany) are truly autarchic entities. Despite never beforeexperienced integration, our world is less the house of nationsand discrete alliances among them, and more the civilization of aspecies in firm control (too firm, as some perceive) of otherspecies.

Within the world, we know that there are people still coming outof an age of natural economy based on hunting, foraging,fishing, and rudimentary agriculture. While barter and theminimal language of survival is the only market process in suchplaces, in reality, the world is already involved in globaltransactions. Markets are traded in their entirety, more oftenthan not without the knowledge of those comprising these markets.This only goes to show again the precarious nature of nationalstructures. National independence, passionately fought for, isless a charter for the future than the expression of the memoryof the past (authentic or fake). Selling or buying extends tothe entire economy, which while still at a stage difficult toentirely explain, is bound to change in a rhythm difficult tocope with by those supposed to control it, but inescapable inthe context of world-wide market. That literacy and nationalidentity 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. Subsistenceincreases only in an arithmetical ratio." The weakness of theprinciple is probably its failure to acknowledge that theequation of mankind has more than the two variables itconsiders: population and food supply. The experience ofextensive use of natural resources, in particular throughfarming, is only one among an increasing number of experiences.Human beings constitute their own reality not only as one ofbiological needs, but also of cultural expectations, growingdemands, and creativity. These eventually affect changes in whatwere believed to be primary needs and instincts. In many ways, agreat deal of previously acknowledged sources of protein areexhausted. But in an ever more impressive proportion, theacceptable realm of sources of nutrition-proteins included-hasbeen expanded so as to include the artificial. Hunting andgathering wild plants (not to mention scavenging, which seems topredate hunting) were appropriate when linear, sequentialstrategies of survival defined human behavior; so were herdingand agriculture, a continuation of foraging under circ*mstancesof changed subsistence strategies.

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

If the issue were only to feed mankind, the population census(over five billion people on record as of the moment these pagesare 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 populationsand exponentially (i.e., non-linearly) diversifyingexpectations. Such expectations relate to a human beingcelebrating higher average ages, and an extended period of activelife. We change anatomically, not necessarily for the better: wesee and hear less well and have lower physical abilities. Ourcognitive behavior and our patterns of social interaction change,too. These changes reflect, among other things, the transitionfrom direct interaction and co-presence to indirect, mediatedforms of the practical self-constitution of the human being.

The sequential nature of language, in particular its embodimentin literacy, no longer suits human praxis as its universalmeasure. The strategies of linearization introduced through theexperience of literacy were acceptable when the resultingefficiency accommodated lower and less differentiatedexpectations. They are now replaced by more efficient,intrinsically non-linear strategies made possible by literaciesstructurally different from those rooted in the practice ofso-called natural language. Accordingly, literacy loses itsprimacy. New literacies emerge. Instead of a stable center andlimited choice, a distributed and variable configuration ofcenters and wide choice connect and disconnect areas of commonor disjoint interest. There are still national ambitions, hugefactories to be built, cities to be erected and others to beexpanded, highways to be widened in order to accommodate moreintercity traffic, and airports to be constructed so that moreairplanes can be used for national and international travel.The inertia of past pragmatics has not yet been annihilated bythe dynamics of a fundamental change of direction. Still, anintegrated, yet decentralized, universe of work and living hasbeen taking shape and will continue to do so. Interconnectionmade possible by digital technology, first of all, opens a widerange of possibilities for reshaping social life, politicalinstitutions, and our ability to design and produce goods. Ourown ability to mediate, to integrate parts and servicesresulting from specialized activities is supported by machinesthat 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 toforget, to break the curse of literate memory, and to immerseourselves in the structurally amnesiac systems of signscorresponding to and addressing our senses. Nathaniel Hawthorne'sshort story "Earth's Holocaust" was prophetic in this sense. Inthis parable, the people of a new world (obviously the UnitedStates of America) bring all the books they inherited from theold world to a great bonfire. Theirs is not an exercise inmindless book-burning. They conscientiously discard all therules and ideas passed down through millennia that governed theworld and the life they left behind. Old ideas, as well as newones, would have to prove their validity in the new contextbefore they would be accepted. Indeed, the awareness broughtabout by theories of the physical world, of the mind, of our ownbiogenetic condition made possible practical experiences ofself-constitution that are not like anything experienced byhumans before our time. The realization of relativity, of thespeed of light, of micro- and macro-structures, of dynamicforces and non-linearity is already translated in new structuresof interactions. Our systems of interconnection- through electricenergy, telephone (wired and cellular), radio, television,communication, computer networks-function at speeds comparable tothat of light. They integrate dynamic mechanisms inspired bygenetics, physics, molecular biology, and our knowledge of themicro- and macro-structure.

Our life cycle seems to accept two different synchronizingmechanisms: one corresponding to our natural condition (days,nights, seasons), the other corresponding to the perceived scaleand to our striving towards efficiency. The two are less and lessdependent, and efficiency seems to dominate nature. Discovery ofthe world in its expanded comprehensive geographic dimensionsrequired ships and planes. It also required the biologicaleffort to adapt and the intellectual effort to understand variouskinds of differences. In outer space, this adaptation proves tobe even more difficult. In a world in a continuous flux of newerand newer distinctions, people constitute, instead of onepermanent and encompassing literacy, several literacies, none ofwhich bears the status of (quasi)eternal. Differentiation ofhuman experience is so far reaching that it is impossible toreduce the variety to one literate language.

In the process of building rational, interpretive methods andestablishing a body of knowledge that can be tested andpractically applied, people often discard what did not fit inthe theories they advanced, what did not obey the laws that thesetheories expressed. This was a necessary methodology thatresulted in the progress we enjoy today. But it was also adeceptive method because what could not be explained wasomitted. Where literacy was instilled, non-linguisticaspects-such as the irreducible world of magic, mystery, theesoteric (to name a few)-were done away with. Commenting uponThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Illich and Sanders pointedout that there is a whole world in Twain's novel that isinaccessible to the illiterate, but also a world of folklore andsuperstition that cannot be understood by those hostage to thebeautiful kingdom of literacy. Folklore in many countries, andsuperstition, and mystery in all the varieties corresponding tohuman practical self-constitution are definitely areas fromwhich we might gain better insight into life past, present, andfuture. 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 mostcomprehensive testimony to (and participant in) our experienceas human beings, we may want to see whether its crisis sayssomething about our own permanence and our own prejudicesconcerning the species. After all, why, and based on whatarguments, do we see ourselves as the only permanence in theuniverse and the highest possible achievement of evolution?Literacy freed us in many respects. But it also made us prisonersof a number of prejudices, not the least a projection ofself-awareness in direct contradiction to our own experience ofnever-ending change in the world.

The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy

In the opinion of foe and friend alike, America (the name underwhich the United States of America, appropriating theidentifier of the two continents comprising the New World)epitomizes many of the defining characteristics of today'sworld: market oriented, technologically driven, living onborrowed means (financial and natural resources), competitive tothe 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, andobsessed 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 iscaptive to militarism and prey to the seductive moral poison ofits self-proclaimed supremacy. At times it looks like the more itfails in some of its policies, the more it wants to heardeclarations of gratitude and hymns of glory, as in John Adams'lines: "The eastern nations sink, their glory ends/ And empiresrise where sun descends." To the peoples just awaking from thenightmare of communism, the American political slogans have afamiliar, though frightening, self-delusive ring.

On the other hand, Americans are credited with extraordinaryaccomplishments in technology, science, medicine, the arts,literature, sports, and entertainment. They are appreciated asfriendly, open, and tolerant. Their willingness to engage inaltruistic projects (programs for the poor and for children allover the world), indeed free from discrimination, makes for agood example to people of other nations. Patriotism does notprevent Americans from being critical of their own country. Tothe majority of the world, America represents a vivid model ofliberal democracy in action within a federation of states unitedby a political system based on expectations of balance amonglocal, state, and federal functions.

Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber once made headlines writing aboutthe American challenge (Le Défi Américain), more or less aboutthe danger of seeing the world Americanized. Downtown Frankfurt(on the river Main) is called Mainhattan because its skyscrapersrecall those of the island between the Hudson and East Rivers.The Disneyland near Paris, more of an import (the Frenchgovernment wanted it badly) than an export product, was called a"cultural Chernobyl." Tourists from all over the crumbled SovietEmpire are no longer taken to Lenin's Mausoleum but to Moscow'sMcDonald's. The Japanese, reluctant to import American-made carsand supercomputers, or to open their markets to agriculturalgoods (except marbled beef), will bend over backwards forbaseball. Add to all this the symbolism of blue jeans, Madonnaor Heavy Metal (as music or comic books), Coca-Cola, thetelevision series Dallas, the incessant chomping on chewing gumand bubble-gum popping, Texan boots, and the world-wide sneakercraze, and you have an image of the visible threat ofAmericanization. But appearance is deceitful.

Taken out of their context, these and many other Americanizedaspects of daily life are only exotic phenomena, easy tocounteract, and indeed subject to counteraction. Italiansprotested the culture of fast food near the Piazza d'Espagna inRome (where one fast food establishment rented space) by givingout free spaghetti carbonara and pizza. (They were unaware ofthe irony in this: the biggest exporter of pizza restaurants isno longer Italy, but the USA.) The rightist Russian movementprotested McDonald's by touting national dishes, the good oldhigh-calorie menu of times when physical effort was much greaterthan in our days (even in that part of the world). The Germanspush native Lederhosen and Dirndls over blue jeans. The Germanunions protest attempts to address structural problems in theireconomy through diminishing social benefits with a slogan thatechoes like a hollow threat: American conditions will be met bya French response, by which they mean that strikes will paralyzethe country. The Japanese resisted the Disney temptation bybuilding their own lands of technological marvels. When anathlete born in America, naturalized as Japanese, won thetraditional Sumo wrestling championship, the Japanese judgesdecided that this would be his last chance, since the sportrequires, they stated, a spirituality (translated by demeanor)that a foreign-born sportsman cannot have.

On closer examination, Americanization runs deeper than what anyassortment of objects, attitudes, values, and imitated behaviortell us. It addresses the very core of human activity in today'sglobal community. It is easy to understand why America appearsto embody efficiency reached at the expense of many abandonedvalues: respect for authority, for environment, for resources,even human resources, and ultimately human values. The focus ofthe practical experience through which American identity isconstituted is on limitless expectations regarding socialexistence, standard of living, political action, economicreward, even religious experience. Its encompassing obsession isfreedom, or at least the appearance of freedom. Whatever thepragmatics affords becomes the new expectation and is projectedas the next necessity. The right to affluence, as relative asaffluence is in American society, is taken for granted, nevershadowed by the thought that one's wealth and well-being mightcome at the expense of someone else's lack of opportunity.Competitive, actually adversarial, considerations prevail, suchas those manifest in the morally dubious practices accepted bythe legal and political systems. "To the victor go the spoils"is probably the most succinct description of what this means inreal life.

The American way of life has been a hope and promise for peopleall over the world. The mixed feelings they have towards Americadoes not necessarily reflect this. The entire world is probablydriven by the desire for efficiency that makes such a standardof living possible more than by the pressure to copy the Americanstyle (of products, living, politics, behavior, etc.). Thisdesire corresponds to a pragmatics shaped by the global scale ofhumankind, and by the contemporary dynamics of humanself-constitution. Each country faces the battle betweenefficiency and culture (some going back thousands of years), incontrast to the USA, whose culture is always in status nascendi.The American anxiety over the current state of literacy is ladenwith a nostalgia for a tradition never truly established and afear of a future never thought through. It is, consequently, ofmore than documentary interest to understand how Americaepitomizes a civilization that has made literacy obsolete.

For the love of trade

As a country formed by unending waves of immigration, America canbe seen, superficially though, as a civilization of manyparallel literacies. Ethnic neighborhoods are still a fact oflife. Here one finds stores where only the native language isspoken, with newspapers printed in Greek, Hungarian, German,Italian, Ukrainian, Farsi, Armenian, Hebrew, Romanian, Russian,Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean. Cable TV caters to thesegroups, and so do many importers of products reminiscent of somecountry where "food tastes real" and goods "last forever." All ofthese carried-over literacies are, in final analysis, means ofself-constitution, bridges between cultures that will be burnedby the third generation. In practicing the literacy of origins,human beings constitute themselves as split personalitiesbetween two pragmatic contexts. One embodies expectationscharacteristic of the context that relied upon literacy-hom*ogeneity, hierarchy, centralism, tradition. The other, of theadopted country, is focused upon needs that effect thetransition to the civilization of illiteracy- heterogeneity,horizontality, decentralism, tradition as choice, but not way oflife.

Aspects of immigration (and in general of human migration) needto be addressed, not from the perspective of parallelliteracies, but as variations within a unifying pragmaticframework. The de-culturization of people originating from manycountries and belonging to many nations is probably a uniquefeature of America. It impacted all aspects of life, andcontinues to be a source of vitality, as well as tension.Immigrants arrive as literates (some more so than others) only todiscover that their literacy is relatively useless. That thingswere not always like this is relatively well documented. NeilPostman reported that the 17th-century settlers were quiteliterate in terms characteristic of the time. Up to 95 percentof the men were able to read the Bible; among women thepercentage reported is 62. They also read other publications,some imported from England, and at the beginning of the secondhalf of the eighteenth century supported a printing industrysoon to become very powerful.

In importing their literacies, the English, as well as the Frenchand Dutch, imported all the characteristics that literacyimplies and which went into the foundation of the Americangovernment. Over time, in the successive waves of immigration,unskilled and skilled workers, intellectuals, and peasantsarrived. They all had to adapt to a different culture, dominatedby the British model but moving farther away from it as thecountry started to develop its own characteristics. Each nationalor ethnic group, shaped through practical experiences that didnot have a common denominator, had to adapt to others. Thecountry grew quite fast, as did its industry, transportationsystem, farming, banking, and the many services made possibleand necessary by the overall economic development. To someextent, 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 theliteracy of the former mother country. I say to some extentbecause, as the history of each of these accomplishments shows,the characteristics inherent in literacy were opposed, under thebanner of States' rights, democracy, individuality, or progress.

With all this in mind, it is no wonder that Americans do not liketo hear that they are a nation of illiterates, as people frommuch older cultures are sometimes inclined to call them (forright or wrong reasons). No wonder either that they are stillcommitted to literacy; moreover, that they believe that itrepresents a panacea to the problems raised by fasttechnological cycles of change, by new modes of humaninteraction, and by circ*mstances of practical experiences towhich they have to adapt. Educators and business-people are wellaware, and worried, that literacy in the classical sense isdeclining. The sense of history they inherited makes them demandthat effort and money be spent to turn the tide and bringAmerica back to past greatness, or at least to some stability.Probably the nature of this greatness is misunderstood ormisconstrued, since there is not much in the history of theaccomplishments of the United States that could rank the countryamong the cultural giants of past and present civilizations.

Throughout its history, America always represented, to somedegree, a break with the values of the old world. The Europeanswho came to the Dutch, French, and English colonies had at leastone thing in common: they wanted to escape from the pragmaticsof hierarchy, centralized political and religious domination, andfixed rules of social and cultural life representing a system oforder that kept them in their place. Freedom of religion-one ofthe most sought after-is freedom from a dominant, unifiedchurch and its vision of the unconditionally submissiveindividual. Cultivating one's own land, another hope thatanimated the settlers, is freedom from practical serfdomimposed by the landowning nobility on those lower on thehierarchy. John Smith's maxim that those who didn't work didn'teat was perhaps the first blow to the European values thatranked language and culture along with social status andprivilege.

Most likely, the immigrants, highborn and low, did not come withthe intention of overthrowing the sense and morals prevailing atthe time. The phase of imitation of the old, characteristic ofany development, extended from religious ceremonies to ways ofworking, enjoying, educating, dressing, and relating to outsiders(natives, slaves, religious sects). In this phase of imitation,a semi-aristocracy established itself in the South, emulatingthe English model. In protesting the taxes and punitive lawsimposed by King George III, the upper-class colonials weredemanding their rights as Englishmen, with all that thisqualifier entailed. Jefferson's model for the free United Stateswas that the agrarian state best embodied the classic ideals thatanimated him. Jefferson was himself the model of literacy-basedpractical experiences, a landed aristocrat who owned slaves, aman trained in the logic of Greece and Rome. His knowledge camefrom books. He was able to bring his various interests inarchitecture, politics, planning, and administration in focusthrough the pragmatic framework for which literacy was adequate.Although Jefferson, among others, rejected monarchy, which hisfellow citizens would have set up, he did not hesitate toexercise the almost kingly powers that the executive branch ofgovernment entailed. His activity shows how monarchic centralityand hierarchy were translated in the new political forms ofemerging democracies, within which elective office replacedinherited power. In the history of early America, we can see howliteracy carries over the non-egalitarian model as it advancedequality in people's natural rights and before the law, the powerof rules, and a sense of authority inspired by religion,practiced in political life, and connected to expectations oforder.

Just as new trees sprout from the trunk of an old tree, so newparadigms take root within an old one. People immigrated toAmerica to escape the old models. Challenged by the need toprovide a framework for their own self-identification, theyended up establishing an alternative context for the unfolding ofthe Industrial Revolution. In the process, they changed in moreways than they could foresee. Politically, they establishedconditions conducive to emancipation from the many constraintsof the system they left. Even their patterns of living, speaking,behaving, and thinking changed. In 1842, Charles Dickensobserved of Americans that "The love of trade is assigned as areason for that comfortless custom…of married persons livingin hotels, having no fireside of their own, and seldom meeting,from early morning until late at night, but at the hasty publicmeals. The love of trade is a reason why the literature ofAmerica is to remain forever unprotected: 'For we are a tradingpeople, and don't care for poetry: though we do, by the way,profess to be very proud of our poets.'" Dickens came from aculture that considered literacy one of the highest achievementsof England, so much so that, according to Jane Austen,Shakespeare could be particularly appreciated by the Englishalone (cf. Mansfield Park). She gave cultivation of the mind thehighest priority. Literature was expected to assist in definingvalues and pointing out the proper moral and intellectualdirection. France was in a very similar position in regard toits culture and literature; so were the German lands and Holland.Even Russia, otherwise opposed to acknowledging the newpragmatic context of industrial production, was affected by theEuropean Enlightenment.

De Toqueville, whose journey to America contributed to his fame,made his historic visit in the 1830's. By this time, America hadtime and opportunity to establish its peculiar character, so hewas able to observe characteristics that would eventually definea new paradigm. The associated emerging values, based on a liferelatively free of historic constraints, caught his attention:"The Americans can devote to general education only the earlyyears of life. […] At fifteen they enter upon their calling,and thus their education generally ends at the age when oursbegins. If it is continued beyond that point, it aims onlytowards a particular specialized and profitable purpose; onestudies science as one takes up a business; and one takes uponly those applications whose immediate practicality isrecognized. […] There is no class, then, in America, in whichthe taste for intellectual pleasures is transmitted withhereditary fortune and leisure and by which the labors of theintellect are held in honor. Accordingly, there is an equal wantof 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 governmentto examine prisons and penitentiaries in the New World, he woundup writing a study of how a highly literate European understoodAmerica's social and political institutions. Many of thecharacteristics of the civilization of illiteracy were emergingduring the years of his visit. He highlighted the shortness ofpolitical cycles, the orality of public administration, thetransience of commitments (the little there is of writing "issoon wafted away forever, like the leaves of the sibyl, by thesmallest breeze"). Severance from the past, in particular, madethis visitor predict that Americans would have to "recourse tothe history of other nations in order to learn anything of thepeople who now inhabit them." What we read in de Toqueville isthe expression of the surprise caused by discontinuity, bychange, and by a dynamics that in other parts of the world wasless obvious.

The New World certainly provided new themes, addressed andinterpreted differently by Americans and Europeans. The moreEuropean cities of the Northeast- Boston, New York,Philadelphia-maintained cultural ties to the Old World, asevidenced by universities, scholars, poets, essayists, andartists. Nevertheless, Washington Irving complained that onecould not make a living as a writer in the United States as onecould in Europe. Indeed, many writers earned a living asjournalists (which is a way of being a writer) or as civilservants. The real America-the one Dickens so lamented-wastaking form west of the Hudson River and beyond the AppalachianMountains. This was truly a world where the past did not count.

America finally did away with slavery (as a by-product of theCivil War). But at the same time, it started undoing some partof the underlying structure reflected in literacy. The depth andbreadth of the process escaped the full understanding of thoseliterate Founding Fathers who set the process in motion, and wasonly partially realized by others (de Toqueville included). Itclearly affected the nature of human practical experiences ofself-constitution as free citizens of a democracy whose chance tosucceed lay in the efficiency, not in the expressive power, ofideas. America's industrial revolution took place against abackground different from that of the rest of the world- a hugeisland indulging in relative autarchy for a short time. Forcescorresponding to the pragmatics of the post-industrial agedetermined a course of opening itself and opening as much of theworld as possible-regardless of how this was to be accomplished.The process still affects economic development, financialmarkets, 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 theAmerican character has been shaped by more than the love oftrade. They will point to the literary heritage of WashingtonIrving, Mark Twain, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph WaldoEmerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James. Indeed, 20th centuryAmerican writers have been appreciated and imitated abroad.Faulkner and Hemingway are the best known examples. Today,American writers of lesser stature and talent are translatedinto the various European languages, for the same reasons thatDisneyland was brought to France. Americans will point totheaters (which presented European plays) and opera houses,forgetting how late these acquisitions are, instituted wheneconomic progress was on a sound track. Indeed, the response tothese assertions is simple: the result of other influences isnot a change of course, but a much faster movement in thedirection America pursues.

A good example is given by education. The American colleges anduniversities founded in the 18th and early 19th centuriesattempted to follow the traditional model of learning for itsown sake; that is, moral and intellectual improvement throughstudy of the age-old classics. This lasted until variousinterest groups, in particular businessmen, questioned thevalidity of an educational program that had little or nopragmatic value. These schools were in the East-Harvard, Brown,Yale, Columbia, William and Mary- and the curricula reflectedthat of the Old World. In general, only the elite of Americaattended them. The newer universities, the so-called Land Grantcolleges, later called state universities (such as Ohio StateUniversity, Texas A & M), established west of the AlleghenyRiver during the last quarter of the 19th century, did indeedpursue more pragmatic programs-agriculture and mechanics-toserve the needs of the respective state, not the nation.

In view of this demand for what is useful, it is easy tounderstand why American universities have become high (andsometimes not so high) level vocational schools, substitutingfor what high school rarely provided. Pragmatic requirements andanti-elitist political considerations collided with the literatemodel and a strange hybrid resulted. A look at how the courseofferings changed over time brings clear evidence that logic,rhetoric, culture, appreciation of the word and of the rules ofgrammar and syntax-all the values associated with a dominantliteracy-are relegated to specializations in philosophy,literature, or written communication, and to a vast, thoughconfusing, repertory of elective classes, which reflect anobsession with free choice and a leveling notion of democracy.Literature, after being forced to give up its romantic claim topermanency, associates itself with transitory approaches thatmeet, with increasing opportunistic speed, whatever the currentagenda might be: feminism, multiculturalism, anti-war rhetoric,economic upheaval. Human truth, as literary illusion or hope, isreplaced by uncertainty. No wonder that in this context programsin linguistics and philology languish or disappear from thecurriculum. Economics lost its philosophic backbone and becamean 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 fallliterature, mathematics, philosophy, and almost everything elsedefinable within literacy as formative subject matter ordiscipline. Blame for this attitude, if any can be uttered,should not be put on the young people processed by theuniversity system. The students conform, as difficult as it mightbe for them to understand their conformity, to what is expectedof them: to get a driver's license and a college diploma, and topay taxes. The expectation of a diploma does not result fromrequirements of qualification but from the American obsessionwith equality. America, which revolted against hierarchy andinequality, has never tolerated even the appearance ofindividual superiority. This led to a democracy that opposedsuperiority, leveling what was not equal-rights or aptitudes,opportunities or abilities-at any price. College education asprivilege, which America inherited from the Europe it leftbehind, was considered an injustice. Over time, commercialdemocracy turned college into another shopping mall. Today,diplomas, from BA to Ph.D., are expected just for havingattended college, a mere prerequisite to a career, notnecessarily the result of rigorous mental application leading toquality results. Young adults go to college because they heardthat one can get a better (read higher paying) job with a collegeeducation.

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

A context was established for further emancipation. The depth andbreadth of the process escaped the full understanding of thosewho set the process in motion, and was at best partiallyrealized by very few others, de Tocqueville included. It clearlyaffected the nature of human practical experiences ofself-constitution as free citizens of a democracy whose chanceto succeed lay in the efficiency of ideas, not in theirexpressive power. Inventiveness was unleashed; labor-savingdevices, machinery that did the work of tens and hundreds of menprovided more and more immediate satisfaction than intellectualexercise did.

Americans do not, if they ever did, live in an age of the ideafor its own sake or for the sake of the spirit. Maintainingmental 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, butit* adherents only transplanted the seed from Europe. Those andothers-the schools of thought associated with Peirce, Dewey,James, and Royce-rarely took root, producing a flower moreappreciated if it actually was imported. This is not a countrythat appreciates the pure idea. America has always prided itselfin its products and practicality, not thinking and vision. "Aplaine souldier that can use a pick-axe and a spade is betterthan five knights," according to Captain John Smith. Hisevaluation summarizes the American preference for useful overornamental.

Paradoxically though, business leaders argued for education andproclaimed their support for schools and colleges. At a closerlook, their position appears somewhat duplicitous. Americanbusiness needed its Cooper, Edison, and Bell, around whoseinventions and discoveries industries were built. Once these werein place, it needed consumers with money to buy what industriesproduced. Business supported education as a right and took allthe tax deductions it could in order to have this right servethe interests of industry and business. Consequently, in Americansociety, ideas are validated only at the material level, inproviding utility, convenience, comfort, and entertainment, aslong as these maximize profit. "The sooner the better" is anexpectation of efficiency, one that does not take intoconsideration the secondary effects of production or actions, aslong as the first effect was profit. Not the educated citizen,but the person who succeeded in getting rich no matter how, wasconsidered the "smart" fellow, as Dickens learned during hisjourney through America. Prompted by such a deeply rootedattitude, Sidney Lanier, of Georgia, deplored the "endless tale/of gain by cunning and plus by sale." To value successregardless of the means applied is part of the Americanteleology (sometimes in complicity with American theology).

Bertrand Russell observed of Machiavelli that no one has beenmore maligned for simply stating the truth. The observationapplies to those who have taken upon themselves the task ofwriting about the brave citizens of the free land. Dickens waswarned against publishing his American Notes. European writersand artists, and visitors from Russia, China, and Japan haveirritated 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 authorsmade of the American character have been criticized by themajority of their compatriots whose sentimental vision ofAmerica cannot cope with legitimate observations. Mark Twain feltthat he'd rather be "damned to John Bunyan's heaven" than beobliged to read James's The Bostonians.

The rear-view mirror syndrome

So why do Americans look back to a time when people "knew how toread and write," a time when "each town had five newspapers?"Big businesses, consolidated well before the invention of newermeans of communication and mediation, have large investments inliteracy: newspapers, publishing houses, and especiallyuniversities. But the promise of a better material life throughliteracy today rings tragically hollow in the ears of graduateswho cannot find jobs in their fields of study. The advertisem*ntmost telling of this state of affairs is for a cooking school:"College gave me a degree in English. Peter Kump's CookingSchool gave me a career."

Granted that literacy has never made anyone rich in the monetarysense, we can ask what the pragmatic framework set up in thispart of the New World did accomplish that literacy could not. Inthe first place, escape from one dominant mode embodied inliterate practical experiences facilitated the assertion of othermodes of expression and communication. Peter Cooper, founder ofthe Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in NewYork City, made his fortune in railroads, glue, and gelatindesserts. He was truly illiterate: he could not read. Obviouslyhe was not unintelligent. Many pioneers had a better command oftheir tools than of their pen. They read nature with moreunderstanding than some university students read books. There areother cases of people who succeed, sometimes spectacularly,although they cannot read. The illiterate California businessmanwho taught high school social sciences and mathematics foreighteen years became known because television, for some reason,saw in him a good case for the literacy cause. People like himrely on a powerful memory or use an intelligence not based onliterate conventions. Howard Gardner's theory of multipleintelligences (formerly known as aptitudes) seems to be ignoredby educators who still insist that everyone learn to read andwrite-better said, conform to the conventions of literacy-asthough these were the only ways to comprehend others and tofunction in life. There are few commentaries that contradict thisattitude. William Burroughs thought that "Language is a virusfrom outer space." Probably it feels better to perceive languagelike this in view of the many abuses to which language issubjected, but also in view of the way people use it to deceive.A more direct criticism states: "The current high profile ofliteracy is symptomatic of a speedy, ruthless transition from anindustrial to an information-based economy. […] Literacy, tobe sure, is a powerful, unique technology. Yet literacy remainsa human invention contained by social contract, and themaintenance of that contract in education betrays our ideas ofhumanity as surely as our use of literacy enforces them" (cf.Elsbeth Stuckey)

American experience shows that the imposition of a sole model ofhigher education, based on literacy, has economic, social, andcultural consequences. It is very costly. It levels instead ofaddressing and encouraging diversity. It introduces expectationsof cultural hom*ogeneity in a context that thrives onheterogeneity. The literate model of education with which thecountry flirted, and which still seems so attractive, negatesone of America's sources of vitality-openness to alternatives,itself made possible by the stubborn refusal of centralism andhierarchy. Held in high esteem in the early part of Americanhistory, literacy came to students through schoolhouses in whichWebster's Speller and McGuffey's Reader disbursed more patriotism(essential to a nation in search of an identity) and moreawareness of what "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"should mean than quality writing or the possibility to selectgood books for reading. Literacy with a practical purpose, andthe variety of literacies corresponding to the variety of humanpractical experiences, is a discovery made in America.Understanding pragmatic requirements as opposed to pursuingliteracy for the sake of literacy, at the price of rejecting itsrewards, is where the road forks. But here America follows YogiBerra's advice: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."

In their search for new values, or when faced with competinganswers to tough questions, people tend to look back to a timewhen everything seemed all right. And they tend to pick andchoose the characteristics that led to this perceived state ofaffairs. Things were all right, some want to believe, when kids,plodding along country roads, winter or summer, went to schooland learned to read. Therefore, most people assume that theenvironment propitious to literacy will bring back the goldenage. No one wants to see that America was never reducible tothis romantic picture. In the South, education never seemed tobe a mission. Slaves and poor whites remained outside theidealized stream. Females were not encouraged to study. AProtestant viewpoint dominated subject matter (recall thePuritan alphabet primer).

Americans seem intent on ignoring accomplishments outside thedomain of literacy and the dynamics of the non-literate UnitedStates. In admiration of real cultures, Americans do not want tohear or see that many of them, of proud and ancient ancestry,started questioning their own values and the educationtransmitting them. The practical sense and pragmatismascertained in the formation of America were adopted as causesworth fighting for. In Europe, students protested an educationthat did not prepare them for work. Thanks to universaleducation-European governments by and large offer publiclysupported higher education, at no cost to the student, throughcollege and graduate school-more young people received aneducation (in the classical sense of the word) and their ranksflooded the market. They discovered that they were not preparedfor the practical experiences characteristic of the newpragmatics, especially the new forms of mediations thatcharacterize work and that are making headway around the world.In Europe, there is a clear distinction between universitystudies and vocational studies. This has prevented universitiesfrom becoming the high-class vocational schools that they are inAmerica, and has maintained the meaning of the diploma as aproof of intellectual endeavor. On the other hand, they remainivory towers, not preparing students for the practicalexperiences of the new pragmatics. Brotlose Kunst (breadlessart) is what the Germans now call such fields of study asliterature, philosophy, musicology, religion, and any otherpurely intellectual endeavor.

Looking at a totally different culture, Americans tend to respondto Japan's economic success and criticism of our system bysaying that our educational system must become more like that ofAmerica's leading competitor. They ignore the fact that Japan'shigh rate of productivity has less to do with the nation's highrate of literacy than does the indoctrination and characterformation that Japanese schooling entails. Fundamental attitudesof conformity, team mentality, and a very strong sense ofhierarchy, together with an almost sacred sense of tradition, areinstilled through literate means. One does not have to beliterate in any language in order to solder one circuit toanother on an assembly line or to snap together modularcomponents fabricated by advanced machines. What is necessary,indeed expected, is an ethic that calls for a sense of duty andpride in a job well done, a sense met by the social promise ofpermanency. All in all, the Japanese system allows for littlevariation from the consensus, and even less for the creation ofnew models. The only way Japan stepped out of the literate modein the manufacturing world is in quality control. Ironically,this idea was developed by the American Edward Denning, butrejected by his compatriots, who literally stagnated in ahierarchic model originating from circ*mstances of literacy.This hierarchical model, now in obvious decline, gave to Americanbusinessmen the sense of power they could not achieve througheducation or culture.

The Japanese, living in a system that preserved its identitywhile actively pursuing plans for economic expansion, formedstrategies of self-containment (severely tested in times ofeconomic downturn), as well as methods of relating to the rest ofthe world. This condition is manifest in their talent forspotting the most profitable from other countries, making ittheirs, and pursuing avenues of competition in which what isspecifically Japanese (skills, endurance, collusion) and theappropriated foreign component are successfully joined. Almostthe entire foundation of today's television, in its analogembodiment, is Japanese. But if for some reason the programmingcomponent would cease to exist, all the marvelous equipment thatmakes TV possible would abruptly become useless. In some ways,Japan has almost no interest in a change of paradigm intelevision, such as the revolutionary digital TV, because anenormous industry, present in almost every home where televisionis used, would have to reinvent itself. The expectation ofpermanency that permeates literate Japan thus extends fromliteracy to a medium of illiteracy. In the American context, ofalmost no stable commitments, digital television, along withmany other innovations in computation and other fields, is achallenge, not a threat to an entire infrastructure. Thisexample was not chosen randomly. It illustrates the dynamics ofthe change from a literacy-dominated civilization to one of manycompeting literacies. These emerge in the context of change fromself-sufficient, relatively small-scale, hom*ogeneouscommunities to the global world of today, so powerfullyinterconnected through television and through digital media ofall kinds. As illiterates, Americans lead other nations inbreakthroughs in medicine, genetics, networking, interactivemultimedia, virtual reality, and inventiveness in general.

Obviously, it is easier to design a course of education assumingsome permanency or maintaining it, regardless of pragmaticrequirements. Diane Ravitch stated that it is hard to definewhat education will be needed for the future when we don't knowwhat skills the jobs of the future will require. An optimaleducation, reflecting pragmatic needs of highly mediatedpractical experiences of distributed effort and networking, willhave to facilitate the acquisition of new cognitive skills.Decentralized, non-sequential, non-deterministic experiencesrequire cognitive skills different from those characteristic ofliteracy. Schools used to be able to prepare students to findtheir place in the workforce even before graduation. Moreschools than ever insist on churning out a strange version ofthe literate student who should go on to a college that is more(though still not enough) vocational school than university. Theuniversity, under the alibi of equal opportunity and more inconsideration of its own agenda, has done more damage toeducation and literacy by forcing itself upon Americans as theonly means to attain a better life. The result is crowdedclasses in which passive students are processed according to theindustrial model of the assembly line, while the creativeenergy of faculty and students is redirected to a variety ofventures promising what a university cannot deliver. The veryword university acknowledges one encompassing paradigm,prevalent in the Middle Ages, that the USA practically disposedof over a century ago. In an age of global reality and manyparadigms, the university is in reality less universal andincreasingly specialized.

In these times of change, America, founded on innovation andself-reliance, seems to forget its own philosophy ofdecentralization and non-hierarchy. By no surprise, the newercomputer technology-based companies took the lead indecentralizing and networking the workplace, in re-engineeringeach and every business. Most business-people, especially inestablished companies, are reluctant to address matrixmanagement methods or to use distributed forms of organizationand decentralized structures. Consequently, after waves ofcorporate restructuring and resizing, presidents and chairmen(not unlike university presidents and school principals) arekings, and the laborer, when not replaced by a machine, is oftena virtual serf. Surprisingly, the decentralized spirit ofhomesteading 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 pullingthe world from its literacy- based pragmatics to the future ofhigher efficiency required by the new scale of human activity,it has the initials USA written on it. And it is-make no mistakeabout it-digital.

When not faithful to its own experience of pluralism andself-motivation, the USA faces the inherent limitations ofliteracy-based practical experience in a number of domains, thepolitical included. America once had a number of politicalparties. Now it seems that it cannot effectively get beyond theliterate dualistic model of two antagonistic parties, emulatingthe Tories and the Whigs of the empire to which it oncebelonged. European countries and several African and Asian stateshave multi-party systems that reflect sensitivity to differencesand take advantage of the variety they allow for. Such systemsenfranchise more of a country's citizenry than does the two-party system in the USA. Every four years, Americans demandgreater 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 everysubject is now qualified as literacy-cultural literacy, computerliteracy, visual literacy, etc.-whether literacy is involved ornot. Literacy has become its own specialty. In addition, newliteracies, effectively disconnected from the ideals andexpectations of classical literacy, have emerged from practicalexperiences of human self-constitution in realms where writingand reading are no longer required. This would not be so bad ifit were not blinding people to the truth about a majorcharacteristic of humankind. Diversity of expression andmultiplicity of communication modes define new areas of humanaccomplishment and open avenues for further unfolding of people'screative and economic potential. The new condition of language,in particular the failure of literacy, is at the same time asymptom of a new stage in human progress. It in no way reflects afailure of national policy or will. As a matter of fact, the newstage we are entering is a reflection of the human spiritunfolding, refusing to be held captive to a dominant mode thathas outlived its usefulness. It may well be that the coming ofa*ge of America is part of this new stage. After all, manybelieve that the crisis of language is the crisis of the whiteman (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 constituteditself as an alternative to the world based on the underlyingstructures of literacy. The new pragmatic framework that the USAembodies does not automatically free it from the seductiveembrace of the civilization it negates, and the current angstover the state of literacy is a manifestation of this. As anembodiment of the civilization of illiteracy, Americademonstrates how several literacies can work together bycomplementing each other. Such a pragmatics succeeds or failson its own terms. Whenever the implicit founding principles ofadaptation, openness, exploration and validation of new models,and pragmatically based institutions are pursued, the result isthe expected efficiency. Sometimes, the price people seem to payfor it is very high-unemployment, dislocation, retrenchment, aloss of a sense of permanency that humans long for. The priceincludes the ability or willingness to consider all aspectsinvolved in a situation-political, environmental, social, legal,religious. These aspects transcend the tangible and necessitatetaking the broad view, which literate civilization allowed for,over the specialized, narrowly focused, short- sighted, parochialview. Other times, it looks as though there are no alternatives.But in the long run, no one would really want to go back to theway things were 200 years ago.

Book two

From Signs to Language

Languages are very different. So are literacies. The differencesgo well beyond how words sound, how alphabets differ, howletters are put together, or how sentences are structured in thevarious languages used around the world. In some languages, finedistinctions of color, shape, gender, numbers, and aspects ofnature are made while more general statements are difficult toarticulate. Anthropologists noted that in some of the Eskimolanguages many words could be identified for what we call (usingone word) snow and for activities involving it; in Arabic, manynames are given to camel; in Mexico, different names qualifyceramic pottery according to function, not form: jarro fordrinking, jarra for pouring, olla for cooking beans, cazuela forcooking stews. The Japanese and Chinese distinguish amongdifferent kinds of rice: still in the paddy, long- grained,shucked, kernels. George Lakoff mentions the Dyirbal language ofAustralia where the category balan includes fire, dangerousthings, women, birds, and animals such as platypus, bandicoot,and echidna.

In other languages, the effort to categorize reveals associationssurprising to individuals whose own life experiences are notreflected in the language they observe. The questioning attitudein 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 usedfor writing, is calculation based on the use of Arabic numerals.To be in command of a language such as Chinese (to be literatein Chinese) is different from being literate in English, andeven more different from being literate in various triballanguages. These examples suggest that the practical experiencethrough which language is constituted belongs to the broadpragmatic context.

There is no such thing as an abstract language. Among particularlanguages there are great differences in vocabulary, syntax, andgrammar, as well as in the idiosyncratic aspects implicit inthem, reflective of the experience of their constitution.Despite such differences-some very deep-language is the commondenominator of the species hom*o Sapiens, and an importantconstitutive element of the dynamics of the species. We are ourlanguage. Those who state that language follows life consideronly one side of the coin. Life is also formed in practicalexperiences of language constitution. The influence goes bothways, but human existence is in the end dependent upon thepragmatic framework within which individuals project their ownbiological structure in the practical act through which theyidentify themselves

Changes in the dynamics of language can be traced in what makeslanguage necessary (biologically, socially, culturally), whatcauses different kinds of language use, and what brought aboutchange. Necessity and agents of change are not the same,although sometimes it is quite difficult to distinguish betweenthem. Changed working habits and new life styles are, as much asthe appropriate language characterizing them, symptomaticallyconnected to the pragmatic framework of our continuousself-constitution. We still have ten fingers-a structural realityof the human body projected into the decimal system-but thedominant number system today is probably binary. Thisobservation regards the simplistic notion that words are coinedwhen new instances make them desirable, and disappear when nolonger required. In fact, many times words and other means ofexpression constitute new instances of life or work, and thus donot follow life, but define possible life paths.

There are several sources from which knowledge about languageconstitution and its subsequent evolution can be derived:historic evidence, anthropological research, cognitive modeling,cultural evaluation, linguistics, and archaeology. Here is aquote from one of the better (though not uncontroversial) bookson the subject: Language "enabled man to achieve a form ofsocial organization whose range and complexity was different inkind from that of animals: whereas the social organization ofanimals was mainly instinctive and genetically transmitted, thatof man was largely learned and transmitted verbally through thecultural heritage," (cf. Jack Goody and Ian Watt, TheConsequence of Literacy). The general idea pertaining to thesocial implications of language is restrictive but acceptable.What is not at all explained here is how language comes intoexistence, and why instinctive and genetically transmittedorganization (of animals) would not suffice, or even betantamount to the verbally transmitted organization of humanbeings. As a matter of fact, language, as perceived in the textcited and elsewhere in literature, becomes merely a storingdevice, 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 camebefore language can be identified. What remains after a certainlanguage disappears (and we know of some that have disappeared)are elements as important as the language itself for our betterunderstanding of what makes language necessary. The disappearanceof a language also helps us realize how the life of a languagetakes place through the life of those who made it initiallypossible, afterwards necessary, and finally replaced it withmeans more appropriate to their practical life and to theirever-changing condition. Research into pre-linguistic time (Irefer to anthropological, archaeological, and genetic research)has focused on items people used in primitive forms of work. Itconvincingly suggests that before a relatively stable andrepetitive structure was in place, people used sounds, gestures,and body expressions (face, hands, legs) pretty much the wayinfants do. The human lineage, in its constitutive phases, leftbehind 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 andadapting to changes affecting the availability of food andshelter.

Before words, tools probably embodied both potential action andcommunication. Many scholars believe that tools are not possiblewithout, or before, words. They claim that cognitive processesleading to the manufacture of tools, and to the tool-makinghuman being (hom*o Faber), are based on language. In the opinionof these scholars, tools extend the arm, and thus embody a levelof generality not accessible otherwise than through language. Itmight well be that nature-based "notation" (footprints, bitemarks, and the stone chips that some researchers believe were theactual tools) preceded language. Such notation was more inextension of the biological reality of the human being, andcorresponded to a cognitive state, as well as to a scale ofexistence, preparing for the emergence of language.

Research on emerging writing systems (the work of Scribner andCole, for instance, and moreover the work of Harald Haarmann,who considers the origins of writing in the notations found atVinca, in the Balkans, near present-day Belgrade) has allowed usto understand how patterns of sounds and gestures became graphicrepresentations; and how, once writing was established, new humanexperiences, at a larger scale of work, became possible.Finally, the lesson drawn from dying languages (Rosch's studiesof Dyirbal, reported by Lakoff) is a lesson in the foundation ofsuch languages and their demise. What we learn from these isless about grammar and phonetics and more about a type of humanexperience. We also acquire information regarding the supportingbiological structure of those involved in it, the role of thescale of humankind, and how this scale changes due to amultitude of conjectures.

The differentiation introduced above among pre-languagenotations, emerging languages, emerging systems of writing, anddying languages is simultaneously a differentiation of kinds andtypes of human expression, interaction, and interpretation ofeverything humans use to acknowledge their reality in the worldthey live in. Drawing attention to oneself or to others does notrequire language. Sounds suffice; gestures can add to theintended signal. In every sound and in every gesture, humansproject themselves in some way. Individuality is preservedthrough a sound's pitch, timbre, volume, and duration; a gesturecan be slow or rapid, timid or aggressive, or a mixture of thesecharacteristics. Once the same sound, or the same gesture, or thesame sequence of sounds and gestures is used to point to thesame thing, this stabilized expression becomes what can bedefined, in retrospect, as a sign.

Semeion revisited

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

Language-oral and written-is probably the most complex system ofsigns that researchers are aware of. Although the word languagecomprises experiences in other sign systems, it is by no meanstheir synthesis. Before the practical experience of language,humans constituted themselves in experiences of simpler means ofexpression and communication: sounds, rhythms, gestures,drawings, ritualized movement, and all kinds of marks. Theprocess can be seen as one of progressive projection of theindividual onto the environment of existence. The sign I of one'sown individuality-as distinct from other I's with whominteraction took place through competition, cooperation, orhostility-is most likely the first one can conjure. It must besimultaneous with the sign of the other, since I can be definedonly in relation to something different, i.e., to the other. Inthe world of the different, some entities were dangerous orthreatening, others accommodating, others cooperating. Thesequalifiers could not be simply translated into identifiers. Theywere actually projections of the subject as it perceived andunderstood, or misunderstood, the environment.

To support my thesis about the pragmatic nature of language andliteracy, a short account of the pre-verbal stage needs to beattempted here. Very many scholars have tried to discover theorigin of language. It is a subject as fascinating as the originsof the universe and the origin of life itself. My interest israther in the area of the nature of language, the origin beingan implicit theme, and the circ*mstances of its origination. Ihave already referred to what are loosely called tools and tobehavioral codes (sexual, or relating to shelter,food-gathering, etc.). There is historic evidence that can beconsidered for such an account, and there are quite a number offacts related to conditions of living (changes in climate,extinction of some animals and plants, etc.) that affect thisstage. The remaining information is comprised of inferences basedon how beings similar to what we believe human beings once wereconstituted their signs as an expression of their identity.These signs reflected the outside world, but moreover expressedawareness of the world made possible by the human's ownbiological condition.

The very first sentence of the once famous Port-Royal Grammarunequivocally considers speaking as an explanation of ourthoughts by signs invented for this particular purpose. The sametext makes thinking independent of words or any kind of signs. Itake the position that the transition from nature to culture,i.e., from reactions caused by natural stimuli to reflectionsand awareness, is marked by both continuity and discontinuity.The continuous aspect refers to the biological structureprojected into the universe of interactions with similar ordissimilar entities. The discontinuity results from biologicalchanges in brain size, vertical posture, functions of the hands.The pre- verbal (or pre-discursive) is immediate by its verynature. The discursive, which makes possible the manifestthought (one among many kinds) is mediated by the signs oflanguage. Closeness to the natural environment is definitive ofthis stage. Although I am rather suspicious of claims made bycontemporary advocates of the psychedelic, in particularMcKenna, I can see how everything affecting the biologicalpotential of the being (in this case psilocybin, influencingvision and group behavior) deserves at least consideration whenwe approach the subject of language.

Signs, through which pre-verbal human beings projected theirreality in the context of their existence, expressed throughtheir energy and plasticity what humans were. Signs capturedwhat was perceived as alike in others, objects or beings, andlikeness became the shared part of signs. This was a time ofdirect interaction and immediateness, a time of action andreaction. Everything delayed or unexpected constituted the realmof the unknown, of mystery. The scale of life was reduced. Allevents were of limited steps and limited duration. Interactingindividuals constituted themselves as signs of presence, thatis, of a shared space and time. Signs could thus refer to hereand now as immediate instantiations of duration, proximity,interval, etc., but long before the notions of space and timewere formed. Once distinctions were projected in the experienceof signs, the absent or the coming could be suggested, and thedynamics of repetitive events could be expressed. It was onlyafter this self- expression took place that a representationalfunction became possible: a high-pitched cry not just for pain,but also for danger that might cause pain; an arm raised not onlyas an indication of firm presence, but also of requestedattention; a color applied on the skin not only as an expressionof pleasure in using a fruit or a plant, but also ofanticipated similar pleasures-an instruction to be mimeticallyfollowed, to be imitated.

Being part of the expressed, the individuals projectingthemselves in the expression also projected a certain experiencerelated to the limited world they lived in. Signs standing forassociations of events (clouds with rain, noise of hooves withanimals, bubbles on a lake's surface with fish) were probably asmuch representations of those sequences as an expression ofconstituted experience shared with others living in the sameenvironment. Sharing experience beyond the here and now, in otherwords, transition from direct and unreflected to indirect andreflected interaction, is the next cognitive step. It took placeonce shared signs were associated with shared common experiencesand with rules of generating new signs that could report on new,similar, or dissimilar experiences. Each sign is a biologicalwitness to the process in which it was constituted and of thescale of the experience. A whisper addresses one other person,maybe two, very close to each other. A shout corresponds to adifferent scale. Accordingly, each sign is its shorthand historyand a bridge from the natural to the cultural.

Sequences, such as successions of sounds or verbal utterances, orconfigurations of signs, such as drawings, testify to a highercognitive level. Relations between sequences or configurationsof signs and the practical experience in which they areconstituted are less intuitive. To derive from the understandingof such sign relations some practical rules of significance tothose sharing a sign system was an experience in humaninteraction. Later in time, the immediate experiential componentis present only indirectly in language. The constitution of thelanguage is the result of the change of focus from signs torelations among them. Grammar, in its most primitive condition,was not about how signs are put together (syntax), nor of howsigns represent something (semantics), but of the circ*mstancesdetermining new signs to be constituted in a manner preservingtheir experiential quality-the pragmatics.

Consequently, language was constituted as an intermediary betweenstabilized experience (repetitive patterns of work andinteraction) and future (patterns broken). Signs still preservedthe concreteness of the event that triggered their constitution.In the use of language, the human being abandoned a great dealof individual projection. Language's degree of generality becamefar higher than that of its components (signs themselves), or ofany other signs. But even at the level of language, thecharacteristic function of this sign system was the constitutionof practical experiences, not the representation of means forsharing categories of experiences. In each sign, and more so ineach language, the biological and the artificial collide. Whenthe biological element dominates, sign experiences take place asreactions. When the cultural dominates, the sign or languageexperience becomes an interpretation, i.e., a continuation ofthe semiotic experience. Interpretation of any kind correspondsto the never-ending differentiation from the biological and isrepresentative of the constitution of culture. Under the nameculture as used above, we understand human nature and itsobjectification in products, organizations, ideas, attitudes,values, artifacts.

The practical experience of sign constitution-from the use ofbranches, rocks, and fur to the most primitive etchings (onstone, bone, and wood), from the use of sounds and gestures toarticulated language-contributed to successive changes inongoing activity (hunting, seeking shelter, collaborativeefforts), as well as to changes in humans themselves. In theuniverse of rich detail in which humans affirmed their identitythrough fighting for resources and creatively findingalternatives, information did not change, but the awareness ofthe practical implications of details increased. Eachobservation made in the appropriation of knowledge through itsuse in work triggered possible patterns of interaction.

Once signs were constituted, sharing in the experience becamepossible. Genetic transmission of information was relativelyslow. It dominated the initial phases during which the speciesintroduced its own patterns within the patterns of the naturalenvironment. Semiotic transmission of information, in particularthrough language, is much faster than genetic inheritance butcannot replace it. Human life is attested at roughly 2.5 millionyears ago, incipient language use roughly 200,000 years ago.Agriculture as a patterned experience emerged no more than 19,000years ago, and writing less than 5,000 years ago (although someresearchers estimate 10,000 years). The shorter and shortercycles characteristic of self-constitution correspond to theinvolvement of means other than genetic in the process of change.What today we call mental skills are the result of a rathercompressed process. Compare the time it took until motor skillsinvolved in hunting, gathering, and foraging were perfected tothe 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 variousmaterials- and so can language, as we all know. But language didnot start out as a written system. The African Ishango Bonepredates a writing system by some thousands of years; the quipusof the Inca culture are a sui generis record of people, animals,and goods previous to writing. China and Japan, as well asIndia, have similar pre-writing forms of keeping records.

The polygenetic emergence of writing is, in itself, significantin several ways. For one, it introduced another mediatingelement disassociated from a particular speaker. Second, itconstituted a level of generality higher than that of the verbalexpression that was independent of time and space, or of otherforms of record keeping. Third, everything projected into signs,and from signs into articulated language, participated in theformation of meaning as the result of the understanding oflanguage through its use. Only at that moment did language gaina semantic and syntactic dimension (as we call them in today'sterminology).

Formally, if the issue of literacy and the constitution oflanguages are connected, then this connection started withwritten languages. Nevertheless, events preceding writtenlanguage 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 yearsago), this could help us comprehend why writing and reading neednot dominate life and work today and in the future. Or at leastit could help clarify the relation among human beings, theirlanguage, and their existence. After all, this is what we wantto understand from the vantage point of today's world. We takethe word for granted, wondering whether there was a stage of thewordless human being (about which we can only infer indirectly).But once the word was established, with the advent of the meansfor recording it, it affected not only the future, but also theperception of the past.

Conquering the past, the word gives legitimacy to explanationsthat presume it. Thus it implies some carrying device, i.e., asystem of notation as a built-in memory and as a mechanism forassociations, permutations, and substitutions. But if such asystem is accepted, the origins of writing and reading arepushed back so far in time that the disjunction ofliterate-illiterate becomes a structural characteristic of thespecies at one of the periods of its self-definition. Obviouslyexpanded far in time and seen in such a broad perspective, thisnotation (comprising images, the Ishango Bone, quipus, the Vincafigurines, etc.) contradicts the logocratic model of language.Mono- and polysyllabic elements of speech, embodying audiblesequences of sounds (and appropriate breathing patterns thatinsert pauses and maintain a mechanism for synchronization),together with natural mnemonic devices (such as pebbles, knots onbranches, shapes of stones, etc.) are pre-word components ofpre-languages. They all correspond to the stage of directinteraction. They pertain to such a small scale of humanactivity that time and space can be sequenced in extension of thepatterns of nature (day-night, very close-less close, etc.).

This juncture in the self-definition of the species occurred whenthe transition, from selected natural marks to marking, andlater to stable patterns of sounds, eventually leading to words,took place. This was an impressive change that introduced alinear relation in a realm that was one of randomness or evenchaos. If catastrophes occurred (as many anthropologistsindicate), i.e., changes of scale outside the linear to whichhuman beings were not adapted, they resulted in the disappearanceof entire populations, or in massive displacements. Rooted inexperiences belonging to what we would call natural phenomena,this change resulted in rudimentary elements of a language. Newpatterns of interaction were also developed: naming (byassociation, as in clans bearing names of animals), ordering andcounting (at the beginning by pairing the counted objects, oneby one, with other objects), recording regularities (of weather,sky configurations, biological cycles) as these affected theoutcome of practical activities.

Scale and threshold

Already mentioned in previous pages, the concept of scale is animportant parameter in human development. At this point, it isuseful to elaborate on the notion since I consider scale to becritical in explaining major transitions in human pragmatics.The progression from pre-word to notation, and in our days fromliteracy to illiteracy is paralleled by the progression ofscale. Numbers as such-how many people in a given area, how manypeople interacting in a particular practical experience, thelongevity of people under given circ*mstances, the mortalityrate, family size-are almost meaningless. Only when relationsamong numbers and circ*mstances can be established is somemeaningful inference possible. Scale is the expression ofrelations.

A crude scale of life and death is remote from underlyingadaptive strategies as these are embodied in practicalexperiences of self-constitution. Knowledge regarding biologicalmechanisms, such as knowledge of health or disease, supportsefforts to derive models for various circ*mstances of life, ashumans project their biological reality into the reality ofinteractions with the outside world. We know, for instance, thatwhen the scale of human activity progressed to includedomesticated animals, some animal diseases affecting human lifeand work were transmitted to humans. Domestication of animals, avery early practical experience, brought humans closer to themfor longer times, thus facilitating what is called a change ofhost for agents of such diseases. The common cold seems to havebeen acquired from horses, influenza from pigs, smallpox fromcattle. We also know that over time, infectious diseases affectpopulations that are both relatively large and stationary. Theexamples usually given are yellow fever or malaria and measles(the latter probably also transported from swine, where thedisease is caused by the larva of the tapeworm from which theword measles is derived). Sometimes the inference is made frominformation on groups that until recently were, or still are,involved in practical experiences similar to those of remotestages in human history, as are the tribes of the Amazon rainforest. Isolated hunter- gatherers and populations that stillforage (the !Kung San, Hadza, Pygmies) replay adaptivestrategies that otherwise would be beyond our understanding.Statistical data derived from observations help improve modelsbased only on our knowledge about biological mechanisms.

The notion of scale involves these considerations insofar as ittells us that life expectancy in different pragmatic frameworksvaries drastically. The less than 30-year life expectancy(associated with high infant mortality, diseases, and dangers inthe natural environment) explains the relatively stationarypopulation of hunter-gatherers. Orders of magnitude of 20 yearshigher were achieved in what are called settled modes of lifeexisting before the rise of cities (occurring at different timesin Asia Minor, North Africa, the Far East, South America, andEurope). The praxis of agriculture resulted in diversifiedresources and is connected to the dynamics of a lower death rate,a higher birth rate, and changes in anatomy (e.g., increasedheight).

The hypotheses advanced by modern researchers of ancestrallanguage families concerning the relation between theirdiffusion over large territories and the expanding agriculturalpopulations is of special interest here. The so-called NeolithicRevolution brought about food production in some communities ofpeople as opposed to reliance on searching, finding, catching ortrapping (as with foragers and hunters). As conditions favoredan increase in population, the nature of the relations amongindividuals and groups of individuals changed due to force ofnumber. Groups broke away from the main tribe in order toacquire a living environment with less competition for resources.Alternatively, pragmatic requirements led to situations in whichthe number of people in a given area increased. With thisincrease, the nature of their relations became more complex.

What is of interest here is the direction of change and theinterplay of the many variables involved in it. Definitely, onewants to know how scale and changes in practical experiences arerelated. Does a discovery or invention predate a change inscale, or is the new scale a result of it or of several relatedphenomena? Polygenetic explanations point to the many variablesthat affect developments as complex as those leading todiscoveries of human practical experiences that result inincreased populations and diversified pragmatic interactions.The major families of languages are associated, asarchaeological and linguistic data prove, with places where thenew pragmatic context of agriculture was established. One welldocumented example is that of two areas in China: the YellowRiver Basin, where foxtail millet is documented, and the YangtziRiver Basin, where rice was domesticated. The Austronesianlanguages spread from these areas over thousands of milesbeyond. We have here an interesting correlation, even if onlysummarily 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 ofthe Papuan languages, covering large areas of territory as theysearched for suitable land and encountered the opposition offoragers.

Natural abilities (such as yelling, throwing, running, plucking,breaking, bending) dominated a humankind constituted in groupsand 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 ofscale in population and effort required efficiency levelsrelative to the community, impossible to achieve at the naturallevel. Such abilities developed very quickly. They led to thediversified means generated in practical experiences involvingelements of planning (as rudimentary as it was at itsbeginning), reductionist strategies of survival and well-being(break a bigger problem into smaller parts, what will become thedivide-and-conquer strategy), and coalition building. Theseinvolved acts of substitution, insertion, and omission, andcontinued with combinations of these at progressively higherlevels. At a certain scale of human activity, the experience ofwork and the cognitive experience of storing informationpertinent to work differentiated.

Do structural changes bring about a new scale, or does scaleeffect structural changes? The process is complex in the sensethat the underlying structure of human activity is adapted toexigencies of survival fine tuned to the many factors influencingboth individual and communal experiences. That scale andunderlying structure are not independent results from the factthat possibilities as well as needs are reflected in scale. Moreindividuals, with complementary skills, have a better chance tosucceed in practical endeavors of increased complexity. Theirneeds increase, too, since these individuals bring into theexperience not only their person, but also commitments outsidethe experience. The underlying structure embodies elementscharacteristic of the human endowment-itself bound to change asthe individual is challenged by new circ*mstances of life-andelements characteristic of the nature of human relations,affecting and being affected by scale. Dynamic tensions betweenscale and the elements defining the underlying structure lead tochanges in the pragmatic framework. Language development is justone example of such changes. Articulated speech emerged in thecontext of initial agricultural praxis as an extension ofcommunication means used in hunting and food gathering. Notationand more advanced tools emerged at a later juncture. Craftsresulted from practical experiences made possible by such toolsas work started to become specialized. Writing was made possibleby the cognitive experiences of notation and reading (no matterhow primitive the reading was). Writing emerged as practicalhuman constitution extended to trade, to beyond thehere-and-now and beyond co-presence. The underlying structure ofliteracy was well suited to the sequentiality characteristic ofpractical experiences, expression of dependencies, anddeterministic processes.

As already stated, successive forms of communication came aboutwhen the scale of interaction among humans expanded from one toseveral to many. Literacy corresponded to a qualitativelydifferent moment. If language can be associated with the humanscale characteristic of the transition from hunting and foragingfor food to producing it by means of agriculture, literacy canbe associated with the next level of humaninterconditioning-production of means of production. One can usehere the metaphor of critical mass or threshold, not tooverwrite scale, but to define a value, a level of complexity,or a new attractor (as this is called in chaos theory). Criticalmass defines a lower threshold-until this value, interaction wasstill optimally carried out by means such as referential signs,representations based on likeness, or by speech. At the lowerthreshold, individuals and the groups they belong to can stillidentify themselves coherently. But a certain instability isnoticeable: the same signs do not express similar or equivalentexperiences. In this respect, critical mass refers to number oramount (of people, resources they share, interactions they areinvolved in, etc.) and to quality (differences in the result ofthe effort of self-constitution). Former means are renderedinadequate by practical experiences of a different nature. Newstrategies for dealing with inadequacies result from theexperience itself, as the optimization of the sign systemsinvolved (signals, speech, notation, writing) result from thesame. Notation became necessary when the information to bestored (inventories, myths, genealogies) became more than whatoral transmission could efficiently handle. Critical massexplains why some cultures never developed literacy, as well aswhy a dominant literacy proves inadequate in our days.

Signs and tools

Practical experiences involving nature led to the realization ofdifferences: colors that change with seasons, flora and fauna intheir variety, variations in sky and weather. Human need isexternalized through hunting (maybe scavenging), fishing, findingshelter, and seeking one's own kind, either under sexual driveor for some collaborative effort. Thus, multiplicity of natureis met by multiplicity of elementary operations. What resultedwas a language of actions, with elements relevant to the task athand. There was no real dialogue. In nature, screeches andhoots, in finite sequences, signal danger. Otherwise, naturedoes not understand human signs, images, or sounds. Forattracting and catching prey, or for avoiding danger, sounds,colors, and shapes can be involved. What qualifies them as signsis the infinity of variations and combinations required by thepractical context. Against the background of differences, humanpractical experiences resulted also in the realization ofsimilarities in appearance and actions. Awareness ofsimilarities was embodied in means of interaction. They becamesigns once the experience stabilized in the constitution of agroup coherently integrating the sign in its activity.

Elementary forms of praxis maintained individuals near theobject upon which they acted, or upon which needs and plans fortheir fulfillment were projected. Extraction of what was commonto many tasks at hand translated into accumulation ofexperience. With experience, a certain distance between theindividual, or group, and the task was introduced. The languageof actions changed continuously. Evaluation started as acomparison. 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 wecall change of season, storm, drought, etc.), to observationsconcerning hunted animals, or digging for tubers, or toagriculture (as we define it in retrospect) resulted in theconstitution of a repertory of observed characteristics and,over time, in a method of observation. Once observed, phenomenawere tested for relevancy and thus became signs. They integratedthe observer, who memorized and associated them with successfulpatterns of action. In a way, this meant that reading- i.e.,observation of all kinds of patterns and associations to tasks athand-was in anticipation of notation and writing, and probablyone of the major reasons for their progressive appearance. Thisreading filtered the relevant, that characteristic-of ananimal, plant, weather pattern-which affected the attainment ofdesired goals. Consequently, the language of actions gained incoherence, progressively involving more signs. Rituals are aform of sharing and collective memory, a sui generis calendar,characteristic of an implicit sense of time. They are a trainingdevice in both understanding the signs pertaining to work andthe strategy of action to follow when circ*mstances changed. Inrituals, the unity between what is natural and what is human iscontinuously 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 ofcommunication. 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, notthe meaning they might conjure in a communicational context. Bytheir nature, tools require integration. In retrospect, toolsappear to us as instances of self-constitution at a scaledifferent from the natural scale of the physical world in whichindividuals created them. The difference is reflected in theirefficiency in the first place, but also in the implicitcorrelations they embody. Some are tools for individual use;others require cooperation with other persons.

Sign activity at such primitive stages of humankind marked thetranscendence from accidental to systematic. The use of toolsand the relative uniform structure of the tasks performedcontributed to a sense of method. Tools testify to the close andhom*ogenous character of the pragmatic framework of primitivehumans. The syncretic nature of the signs of practicalexperiences were reflected in the syncretism of tools andsigns. What we today call religion, art, science, philosophy, andethics were represented, in nuce, in the sign in anundifferentiated, syncretic manner. Observations of repetitivepatterns and awareness of possible deviations blended.Externalized in these complex signs, individuals strove towardsmaking them understandable, unequivocal, and easy to preserveover time.

Think about such categories as syncretism, understanding,repetitive patterns in practical terms. A sign can be a beat. Itshould be easily perceived even under adverse conditions (noisefrom thunder, the howl of animals). Humans should be able toassociate it with the same consequences (Run! should not beconfused with Halt!; Throw! should not be confused with Don'tthrow! or some other unrelated action). This univocalassociation must be maintained over time. As practicalexperiences diversified, so did the generation of signs. Rhythm,color, shape, body expression and movement, as experienced indaily life, were integrated in rituals. Things were shown as theyare- animal heads, antlers and claws, tree branches and trunks,huge rocks split apart. Their transformation was performedthrough the use of fire, water, and stones shaped to cut, or tohelp in shaping other stones.

It is quite difficult for us today to understand that for theprimitive mind, likeness produced and explained likeness, thatthere was no connotation, that everything had immediatepractical implications. What was shared, here and now, or betweenone short-lived generation and the next, was an experience soundifferentiated that sometimes even the distinction betweenaction and object of action (such as hunting and prey, plowingand soil, collecting and the collected fruit, etc.) was difficultto make.

The process of becoming a human being is one of constituting itsown nature. Externalizing characteristics (predominantlybiological, but progressively also spiritual) to be sharedwithin the emergent human culture is part of the process We havecome to understand that there is no such thing as the world onone side and a subject reflecting it on another. The appearance,which Descartes turned into the premise of the rationaldiscourse adopted by Western civilization, makes us fall captiveto representational explanations rather than to ontogeneticdescriptions. Human beings identify themselves, and thus thespecies they belong to, by accounting for similarities anddistinctions. These pertain to their existence, and sharing inthe awareness of these similarities and distinctions is part ofhuman interaction. As such, the world is constituted almost atthe same time as it is discovered. This contradictory dynamics ofidentity and distinction makes it possible to see how languageis something other than the "image of our thoughts," as Lamyonce put it, obviously in the tradition of Descartes. Languageis also something other than the act of using it. We make ourlanguage the way we continuously make ourselves. This making doesnot come about in a vacuum, but in the pragmatic framework ofour interdependencies. The transition from directness andimmediateness to indirectness and mediation, along with thenotions of space and time appropriated in the process, is in manyways reflected in the process of language constitution. Theemergence of signs, their functioning, the constitution oflanguage, and the emergence of writing seem to point to both theself- definition and preservation of human nature, as theseunfold 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, ColinRenfrew, Robert Blust, among them), is tantamount toacknowledging the pragmatic foundation of the practicalexperience of language of human beings. Language is not apassive witness to human dynamics. Diversity of practicalexperience is reflected in language and made possible through thepractical experience of language. The origins of language, asmuch as the origins of writing, lie in the realm of the natural.This is why considerations regarding the biological condition ofthe individual interacting with the outside world are extremelyimportant. Practical experiences of self-constitution inlanguage are constitutive of culture. The act of writing,together with that of tool-making, is constitutive of a speciesincreasingly defining its own nature. Considerations regardingculture are accordingly no less important than those concerningthe biological identity of the human being.

Let us point to some implications of the biological factor. Weknow that the number of sounds, for instance, that humans canproduce when they push air through their mouths is very high.However, out of this practically infinite number of sounds, onlyslightly more than forty are identifiable in the Indo-Europeanlanguages, as opposed to the number of sounds produced in theChinese and Japanese languages. While it is impossible to showhow the biological make-up of individuals and the structure oftheir experience are projected onto the system of language, itwould be unwise not to account for this projection as it occursat every moment of our existence. When humans speak, muscles,vocal chords, and other anatomical components are activated andused according to the characteristics of each. People's voicesdiffer in many ways and so subtly that to identify peoplethrough voice alone is difficult. When we speak, our hearing isalso involved. In writing, as well as in reading, thisparticipation extends to sight. Other dynamic features such aseye movement, breathing, heartbeat, and perspiration come intoplay as well. What we are, do, say, write, or read are related.The experience behind language use and the biologicalcharacteristics of people living in a language differ to such anextent that almost never will similar events, even the simplest,be similarly accounted for in language (or in any other signsystem, for that matter) by different persons.

The first history, or the personal inquiry into the probablecourse of past events, rests upon orality, integrates myths, andends up with the attempt to refer events to places, as well asto time. Logographers try to reconstruct genealogies of personsinvolved in real events (wars, founding of clans, tribes, ordynasties, for example) or in the dominant fiction of a period(e.g., the epics attributed to Homer, or the book of Genesis inthe Bible). In the transition from remembrance (mnemai) todocumented accounts (logoi), human beings acquired what we calltoday consciousness of time or of history. They became aware ofdifferences in relating to the same events.

The entire encoding of social experience, from very naive forms(concerning family, religion, illness) to very complex rules (ofceremony, power, military conduct) is the result of humanpractice diversified with the participation of language. Thetension between orality and writing is, respectively, anexpression of the tension between a more hom*ogeneous way of lifeand the ever diversifying new forms that broke throughboundaries accepted for a very long time. In the universe of themany Chinese languages, this is more evident than in Westernlanguages. Chinese ideographic writing, which unifies the manydialects used in spoken Chinese, preserves concreteness, and assuch preserves tradition as an established way of relating to theworld. Within the broader Chinese culture, every effort was madeto preserve characteristics of orality. The philosophy derivedfrom such a language defends, through the fundamental principleof Tao in Confucianism, an established and shared mechanism oftransmitting knowledge.

Unlike spoken language, writing is fairly recent. Some scholars(especially Haarmann) consider that writing did not appear until4,000 to 3,000 BCE; others extend the time span to 6,000 BCE andbeyond. To repeat: It is not my intention to reconstitute thehistory of writing or literacy. It makes little sense torekindle disputes over chronology, especially when new findings,or better interpretations of old findings, are not at hand orare not yet sufficiently convincing. The so-called boundariesbetween oral and post-oral cultures, as well as betweennon-literate, literate, and what are called post-literate, orilliterate, cultures are difficult to determine. It is highlyunlikely that we shall ever be able to discover whether images(cave drawings or petroglyphs) antecede or come after spokenlanguage. Probably languages involving notation, drawings,etchings, and rituals-with their vast repertory of articulatedgestures-were relatively simultaneous. Some historians ofwriting ascertain that without the word, there could be noimage. Others reject the logocratic model and suggest thatimages preceded the written and probably even the spoken. Manyspeculate on the emergence of rituals, placing them before orafter drawing, before or after writing. I suggest that primitivehuman expression is syncretic and polymorphous, a directconsequence of a pragmatic framework of self-constitution thatascertains multiplicity.

Individual and collective memory

Anthropologists have tried to categorize the experiencetransmitted in order to understand how orality and, later,writing (primitive notation, in fact) refer to the particularcategories. Researchers point to the materialsurroundings-resources, in the most general way-to successfulaction, and to words as pertaining to the more generalframework (time, space, goals, etc.). Speculation goes as far asto suggest that these human beings became increasingly dependenton artifactual means of notation. As a consequence, they reliedless on the functions of the brain's right hemisphere. In turn,this resulted in decreased acuteness of these functions. Someeven go so far as to read here an incipient Weltanschauung, aperspective and horizon of the world. They are probably wrongbecause they apply an explanatory model already influenced bylanguage (product of a civilization of literacy) on a veryunsettled human condition. In order to achieve some stabilityand permanence, as dictated by the instinctive survival of thespecies, this human condition was projected in various sequencesof signs still unsettled in a language. The very objects ofdirect experience were the signs. This experience eventuallysettled and became more uniform through the means andconstraints of orality.

Language is not a direct expression of experience, as the sameanthropologists think. In fact, language is also lesscomprehensive than the signs leading to it. Before anyconversation can take place, something else-experience withinthe species-is shared and constitutes the background for futuresharing. Face to face encounter, scavenging, hunting, fishing,finding natural forms of shelter, etc., became themselves signswhen they no longer were related only to survival, but embodiedpractical rules and the need to share. Sharing is the ultimatequalifier for a sign, especially for a language.

Tools, cave paintings, primitive forms of notation, and ritualsaddressed collective memory, no matter how limited thiscollective was. Words addressed individual memory and becamemeans of individual differentiation. Individual needs andmotivations need to be understood in their relation to those ofgroups. Signs and tools are elements that were integrated indifferentiation. To understand the interplay between them, wecould probably benefit from modern cognitive research ofdistributed and centralized authority. Tools are of adistributed nature. They are endlessly changed and tested inindividual or cooperative efforts. Signs, as they result fromhuman interaction, seem to emanate from anything but theindividual. As such, they are associated with incipientcentralized authority. These remarks define a conceptualviewpoint rather than describe a reality to which none of us hasor can have access. But in the absence of such a conceptualpremise, inferences, mine or anybody else's, are meaningless.

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

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

awareness of differences and similarities expressed in directways: comparison by juxtaposition, equalization by physicaladjustment; 3.

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

From the time same and different were perceived in their degreeof generality, directness and immediateness was progressivelylost. Layers of understanding, together with rules forgenerating coherent expressions, were accumulated, checkedagainst an infinity of concrete situations, related to signsstill used (objects, sounds, gestures, colors, etc.), and freedfrom the demand of unequivocal or univocal meaning. All thesemeans of expression were socialized in the process of production(the making of artifacts, hunting, fishing, plowing, etc.) andself-reproduction until they became language. Once they becamelanguage-talked about things and actions-this language removeditself from the objects and the making or doing. This removalmade it appear more and more as a given, an entity in itself, areality to fear or enjoy, to use or compare one's actions to theactions of others. The time it took for this process to unfoldwas very long-hundreds of thousands of years (if we can imaginethis in our age of the instant). The process is probablysimultaneous to the formation of larger brains and uprightposture. It included biological changes connected to the self-constitution of the species and its survival within a frameworkdifferent from the natural. It nevertheless acknowledged thenatural as the object of action and even change.

The functional need for distinctions explains morphologicalaspects; the pragmatic context suggests how the shift from thescale of one-to-one direct interaction to one-to-many by theintermediary of language takes place. Concreteness, i.e.,closeness to the object, is also symptomatic of the limitedshared universe. These languages are very localized because theyresult from localized experiences. They externalize a limitedawareness, and make possible a very restricted development ofboth the experience and the language associated with it. As weshall see later on, a structurally similar situation can beidentified in the world today, not on some island, as the readermight suspect, but on the islands of specialized work as weconstitute them in our economies. Obsessed with (or driven by)efficiency, and oriented towards maximizing it, we usestrategies of integration and coordination which were notpossible in the ages of language constitution.

But let us get back to the place of the spoken (before theemergence of notation and the written) and its cultural functionin the lives of human communities. The memory before the wordwas the memory of repeated actions, the memory of gestures,sounds, odors, and artifacts. Structuring was imposed fromoutside-natural cycle (of day and night, of seasons, of aging),and natural environment (riverside, mountainside, valley, woodedregion, grassy plains). The outside world gave the cues.Participants acted according to them and to the cues ofprevious experience as this was directly passed from one personto another. Long before astrology, it was geomancy (associationof topographical features to people or outcomes of activity) thatinhabited people's reading of the environment and resulted invarious glyphs (petroglyphs, geoglyphs). Initially rememberingreferred to a place, later on to a sequence of events. Only withlanguage did time come into the picture. Remembrance was dictatedminimally by instinct and was only slightly genetic in nature.With the word, whose appearance implied means for recognizingand eventually recording words, a fundamental shift occurred.The word entered human experience as a relational sign. Itassociated object and action. Together with tools, it constitutedculture as the unity between who we are (identity), what ourworld is (object of work, contemplation, and questioning), andwhat we do (to survive, reproduce, change). At this moment,culture and awareness of it affected practical experiences ofhuman self-constitution. Simultaneously, an important splitoccurred: genetic memory remained in charge of the human being'sbiological reality, while social memory took over culturalreality. Nevertheless, they were not independent of each other.

The nature of their interdependence is characteristic of each ofthe changes in the scale of humankind that interests us here.If we could describe what it takes for individuals tocongregate, what they need to know or understand in order tohunt, to forage, to begin herding and agriculture, we wouldstill not know how well they would have to perform. Inretrospect, it seems that there was a predetermined path from thestage of primitive development to what we are today. Assumingthe existence of such a path, we still do not know at whatmoment one type of activity no longer satisfied expectations ofsurvival and other paths needed to be pursued. Once we involvethe notion of scale in our cognitive modeling, we get someanswers important for understanding not only orality andwriting, but also the process leading to literacy and thepost-literate.

Cultural memory

Memory, in its incipient stages (comparable to childhood, at thebeginning of human culture), as well as in its new functionstoday, deserves our entire attention. For the time being, we canconfidently assume that before cultural memory was established,genetic memory, from genetic code to the inner clock andhomeostatic mechanisms, dominated the inheritance mechanismsrelated to survival, reproduction, and social interaction. Theemphasis brought by words is from inheritance to transmission ofexperience. Rituals changed; they integrated verbal language andgained a new status-syncretic projections of the community.Language opened the possibility to describe efficient courses ofaction. It also described generic programs for such diverseactivities as navigating, hunting, fire-making, producing tools,etc. Expressions in language were of a level of generality thatdirect action and the ritual could not reach.

In images preceding words, thought and action followed a circularsequence: one was embedded in the other. A circular relationcorresponded to the reduced scale of the incipient species: nogrowth, input and output in balance. Only when the circle wasopened was a sense of progression ascertained. The circularframework can be easily defined as corresponding to the identitybetween the result of the effort and the effort. Obviously,chasing and catching prey required a major physical effort. Thereward at this stage was nothing more nor less than satisfiedhunger. Let us divide the result by the effort. The outcome ofthis division is a very intuitive representation of efficiency orusefulness. The circular stage maintained the two variables closeto each other, and the ratio around the value of 1:1.

The framework of linear relations started with awareness of howefforts could be reduced and usefulness increased. The linearsequence of activities was deterministically connected-thestronger the person, the more powerful in throwing, thrustingand hauling; the longer the legs, the faster the run, etc.Language was a product of the change from the circularframework, embodied in foraging, but also a factor affecting thedynamics and the direction followed, i.e., agriculture. Inlanguage the circle was opened in the sense that sequences weremade possible and generality, once achieved, generated furtherlevels of generality. From direct interaction coordinated byinstinct, biological rhythm, etc., to interaction coordinated bymelodic sound, movement, fire signals, to communication based onwords, the human species ascertained its existence among otherspecies. It also ascertained a sense of purpose and progression.

The pragmatics of myths is one of progression. It extends wellinto our age, in forms that suit the scale ofhumankind-progression from tribal life to the polis, ancientcities-and its activities. In today's terminology, we can look atmyths as algorithms of practical life. In the ritual, givingbirth, selecting a mate, fruitful sexual relations-all relatedto reproduction and death-could be approached within the implicitcircularity of action-reaction. In myths, the word of thelanguage conveys a relatively depersonalized experienceavailable to each and all. Since it was objectified in language,it took on the semblance of rules. In language, things areremembered; but also forgotten, or made forgotten, for reasonshaving to do with new circ*mstances of work and social life.Change in experience was reflected in the change of everythingpertinent to the experience as it was preserved in language.Quite often, in the act of transmitting experience, details werechanged, myths were transmuted. They became new programs for newgoals and new circ*mstances of work.

Generally speaking, the emergence and cultural acquisition oflanguage and the change of status of the human being from hom*oFaber (tool-using human) to hom*o Sapiens (thinking human) wereparallel processes within the pragmatic framework of linearrelations between actions and results. The pre-language stage ofrelatively hom*ogeneous activities, of directness andimmediateness, of relative equality between the effort and theresult 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 oflanguage, within the experience of human self- constitution. Therelevance of experience to the task at hand was replaced by theanticipated relevancy of structuring future tasks in order tominimize 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 researchedwhile still in the oral phase (see Lévi- Strauss, among others)shows that they could not maintain the semantic integrity of thediscourse. Words uttered in a never-ending now-the implicitnotion of present-seem to automatically reinvent the pastaccording to the exigencies of the immediate. The past, duringthe oral phase of language, was a form of present, and so was thefuture, since there are no instruments to project the word alongthe axis of time.

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

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

Writing, which takes place in many respects at a higher cognitivelevel than the production and utterance of the word, or than inpictographic notation, is a multi- relational device. It makespossible relations between different words, between differentsentences, between images and language. From its incipient phase,it also related disjoint worlds, but at a level other than thatachieved in Sumerian cuneiform notation. Writing facilitates andfurther necessitates the next level of a language, which is thetext, an entity in which its parts lose their individual meaningwhile the whole constitutes the message or is conjured intomeaning. The experience already gained in visual records, suchas drawing, rock engravings, and wood carvings, was taken over inthe experience of the written word.

The pictorial was a highly complex notation with a vast number ofcomponents, some visible (the written), some invisible (thephonetics), and few rules of association. Within the pictorial,sequences are formed which narrate events or actions in theirnatural succession. What comes first in the sequence is alsoprior (in time) to everything else, or it has a more importantplace in a hierarchy. The male-female relation, or that betweenfree individuals and slaves, between native and foreign wasembedded here. Even the direction of writing (from left to right,right to left, top to bottom) encodes important informationabout the people constituting their identity in the practicalexperience of engraving letters on tablets or painting them onparchment. The very concrete nature of the pictograms preventsgeneralization. Expression was enormously rich, precisionpractically impossible to achieve.

The detailed history of writing makes up many chapters in thehistory of languages. It is also a useful introduction to thehistory of knowledge, aesthetics, and most likely cognitivescience. This history also details processes characteristic ofthe beginning of literacy. Probably more than 30,000 yearspassed between the time of cave paintings and rock engravingsand the first acknowledged attempt at writing. From theperspective of literacy, this time span comprised the liberationof the human being from the pictorially concrete and theestablishment of the realm of conventions, of purposefulencoding. Abstract thinking is not possible without the cognitivesupport of abstract representations and the sharing ofconventions (some implicit) they embody. The wedge-shapedletters of Sumerian cuneiform, the sacred engraved notations ofEgyptian hieroglyphics, the Chinese ideograms, the Hebrew, Greek,and Roman alphabets-all have in common the need to overcomeconcreteness. They offer a system of abstract notation forincreasingly more complex languages.

Until writing, language was still close to its users and boretheir mark. It was their voice, and their seeing, hearing, andtouching. With writing, language was objectified, freed from thesubject and the senses. The development towards written language,and from written language to initially limited and thengeneralized literacy, paralleled the evolution from satisfyingimmediate needs (the circular relation) to extending andincreasing demand (the linear function) of a mediated nature. Thedifference between needs related to survival and needs that areno longer a matter of survival but of social status (power, ego,fear, pleasure, incipient forms of conviction, etc.) isrepresented through language, itself seen as part of thecontinuous self-constitution of the human being in a particularpragmatic framework.

The alienation of immediacy

The term alienation requires a short explanation. Generally, itis used to describe the estrangement, through work, of humanbeings from the object of their effort. Awareness of havingone's life turned into products, which then appear to those whomade them as entities in themselves, open to anybody toappropriate 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.) revealedas foreign. Rooting the explanation of this very significantprocess of alienation (and of the concept representing it inlanguage) in the establishment and use of signs, makes possiblethe understanding of its pragmatic implications.

Awareness of signs is awareness of the difference between who weare and how we express our identity. In the case of signsrepresenting some object (the drawing of the object or of theperson, the name, social security number, passport, etc.), thedifference between what is represented and the representation isas much an issue of appropriateness (why we call a table tableor a certain woman Mary) as it is one of alienation. Theconscious use of signs most probably results from the observationpeople make that their thoughts, feelings, or questions arealmost always imperfectly expressed. Two things happen, probablyat the same time: 1.

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

The interpretation being no longer one of the direct object, orthe intended action, but of its representation, it leads to newexperiences, and thus associations-some confusing, and othersquite stimulating. The image was still close to the object; theconfusion regarded actions. Writing is remote from objects,though actions can be better described since differentiation oftime is much easier. We know by now that moving images, orsequences of photographs of the action, are even better for thispurpose.

With the written word, even in the most primitive use of it,events become the object of record. Relations, as well asreciprocal commitments among community members, can also be putin the records. Norms can be established and imposed. Afundamental change, resulting from the increased productivity ofthe newly settled communities, is accounted for in writing.People no longer deal with work in order to live (in order tosurvive, actually), but with life dedicated to work. Writing,more than previously used signs (sounds, images, movements,colors), estranges human beings from the environment and fromthemselves. 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 gothrough the same process, and so does everything else pertainingto life, activity, change, illness, love, and death.

It was stated many times that writing and the settlement of humanbeings are related. So are writing and the exchange of goods, aswell as what will become known as labor division. While the useof verbal language makes possible the differentiation of humanpraxis, the use of written language requires the divisionbetween physical and non-physical work. Writing requires skills,such as those needed for using a stylus to engrave in wax orclay, quill on parchment, later the art of calligraphy. Itimplies knowledge of language and of its rules of grammar andspelling. There is a great difference between writing skills andthe skills needed for processing animal skins, meat, variousagricultural products, and raw materials. The social status ofscribes proves only that this difference was duly acknowledged.It should be added here that the few who mastered writing werealso the few who mastered reading. Nevertheless, some historicreference points to the contrary: in the 13th century,non-reading subjects were used as scribes because the accuracyof their undisturbed copying was better than that of those whor*ad. This reference is echoed today in the use of non-Englishspeaking operators to key-in texts, i.e., to transfer accumulatedrecords into digital databases. And while the number of readersincreased continuously, the number of writers, lending theirhands as scribes to real writers, remained small for manycenturies.

Literacy started as an elitist overhead expenditure in primitiveeconomies, became an elitist occupation surrounded by prejudicesand superstition, expanded after technological progress (howeverrudimentary) facilitated its dissemination, and was finallyvalidated in the marketplace as a prerequisite for the higherefficiency of the industrial age. Primitive barter did not relyon and did not require the written word, although bartercontinued even after the place of written language becamesecure. In barter, people interact by exchanging whatever theyproduce in order to fulfill their immediate needs within adiversified production.

The alienation peculiar to barter and the alienationcharacteristic of a market relying on the mediating function ofwritten 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 sweatto produce them. Products to be sold become impersonal; theironly identity is the need they might satisfy or sometimesgenerate. Myth, as a set of practical programs for a limitednumber of local human experiences, no longer satisfiedexigencies of a community diversifying its experience andinteracting with communities living in different environments.This contrast of market forms characteristic of orality and ofincipient writing is related to the contrast between mythtransmitted orally and mythology, associated with theexperience of writing. Language in its written form appeared as asui generis social memory, as potential history.

The obsession with genealogies (in China, India, Egypt, among theHebrews, and in oral culture in general) was an obsession withhuman sequences stored in a memory with social dimensions. Itwas also an obsession with time, since each genealogical line issimultaneously a historic record-who did what, when and where;who followed; and how things changed. Most of these aspects areonly implicit in genealogy. In oral culture, genealogies wereturned into mnemonic devices, easily adjustable to newconditions of life, but still circular, and just as easilytransformable from a record of the past into a command for thefuture. In its incipient phases as notation and record,genealogy still relied on images to a great extent (the familytree), but also on the spoken, maintaining a variability similarto that of the oral. Nevertheless, the possibility for morestabilized expression, for storing, for uniformity, andconsistency was given in the very structure of writing. Thesewere progressively reached in the first attempts to articulateideas, concepts, and what would become the corpus of theoria-contemplation of things translated into language-on which thesciences and humanities of yesterday, and even some of today,are based. Theories are in some ways genealogies, with a rootand branches representing hypotheses and various inferences.Written language extended the permanence of records(genealogies, ownership, theories, etc.) and facilitated accessthrough relatively uniform codes.

In the city-states of ancient Greece, writing alerted peopleworking within the pragmatic constraints of orality to thedangers involved in a new mechanism of expression andcommunication. Writing seemed to introduce its own inaccuracies,either because of a deliberate attitude towards certainexperiences, or as a result of systematic avoidance ofinconsistency, which ended up affecting the records of facts. Aswe know, facts are not intrinsically consistent in theirsuccession. Therefore, we still use all kinds of strategies toalign 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 thesequence of conversations through which records weretransmitted. Within oral communication, there is a direct form ofcriticism, 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 informal languages.

Memory itself was also at issue. Reliance on the written mightaffect memory- which was the repository of a people's traditionand identity in the age of orality- because it provided analternative medium for storage. The written has a differentdegree of expression and leaves a different impression than theoral. Writing, confined to those who read, could also affectconstitution and sharing of knowledge. Writing was characterizedas superficial, not reaching the soul (again, lackingexpressiveness), interfering between the source of knowledge andthe receiver of any lesson about knowledge. Spoken words are thewords of the person speaking them. A written text seems to takeon a life of its own and appears as external, alien. The writtenis given and does not account for differences among humanbeings; the spoken can be adapted or changed, its coherencedependent upon the circ*mstances of the dialogue. There aresocieties today (the Netsidik, the Nuer, the Bassari, to name afew) that still prefer the oral to the written. Within theirpragmatic framework, the live expression of the human utteringthe words in the presence of others conveys more information thanthe same words can in writing.

The memory of a literate society becomes more and more arepository of the various mediations in social life and losesits relation to direct experience. Things said (what the Greekscalled legomena) are different from things done (dromena). Thewritten word connects to other words, not to things done. And sodoes the sentence, when it acquires its status as a relativelycomplete unit of language. But the real change is brought aboutby the written, whether on papyrus, clay, scroll or tablet, or instone or lead. Such a page connects to other written pages andto writing in general. Thus, things done disappear in the bodyof history, which becomes the collection of writings,eventually stored on bookshelves. The meaning of history isexpressed in the variability of the connections ascertained fromone text to another. When the here and now of dromena areexpurgated, we remain only with the consciousness of sequences.This is a gain, but also a loss: the holistic meaning ofexperience vanishes.

How much of this kind of criticism, opposing the oral to thewritten, is relevant to the phenomena of our time cannot beevaluated in a simple statement. Language has changed so muchthat in order to understand texts originating at the time of thiscriticism, we have to translate and annotate them. Some arealready reconstituted from writings of a later time (i.e., of adifferent pragmatic framework), or even from translations. Thereis no direct correspondence between the literacy of emergentwriting and that of automated writing and reading. In some caseswe have to define a contextual reference in the absence of whichlarge parts of these recuperated texts make little sense, ifany, to people constituted in literacy and in a pragmatic realityso different from that of thousands of years ago. Even writtenwords are dependent on the context in which they are used. Inother words, although it seems that written language is lessalive than conversation, and less bound to change, it actuallychanges. We write today, using technologies for word processing,in ways different from any other practical experience ofwriting.

The criticism voiced in Plato's time cannot be entirelydismissed. Writing became the medium through which some humanexperiences were reified. It allowed for extreme subjectivity:In the absence of dialogue and of the influence of criticismthrough dialogue, the past was continuously reinvented accordingto goals and values of the writer's present. Inorality-dominated social life, opinion (which Greeks called doxa)was the product of language activity, and it had to beimmediate. In writing, truth is sought and preserved. What madeSocrates sound so fierce (at least in Plato's dialogues) in hisattacks against writing was his intuition of progressive removalfrom the source of thinking, hence the danger of unfaithfulinterpretation. Socrates, as well as Plato, feared indirectnessand wrote conclusively about memory and wisdom.

Situated between Socrates and Aristotle, Plato could observe andexpress the consequences of writing: "I cannot help feeling,Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for thecreations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet ifyou ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." As oneof the first philosophers of writing, Plato could not yetobserve that writing is not simply the transcription of thoughts(of the words through which and in which humans think), thatideas are formed differently in writing than in speech, thatwriting represents a qualitatively new sign system in whichmeanings are formed and communicated through a mechanism oncemore mediated in respect to practical reality. The subject ofconfidence in language became the central theme of the Sophists'exercise, of Medieval philosophy, of Romanticism, and of theliterature of the absurd (symptomatically popular in the yearsfollowing World War 2).

Moving from the past to the present, we notice that memory is anissue of extreme importance today, too. Literacy challenges thereliability of memory across the board, even when memory is therepository of facts through which people establish themselves inthe world of work. Professionals ranging from doctors, lawyers,and military commanders to teachers, nurses, and officepersonnel rely more on memory than do factory workers on anassembly line. The paradox is that the more educated aprofessional is, the less he or she needs to rely on literacy inthe exercise of his or her profession, except in the initiallearning process, which is made through books. With the adventof video and cassette tapes or disks, with digital storage andnetworks, literacy loses its supremacy as transmitter ofknowledge.

What makes language necessary is also what explains its historyand its characteristics. Language came to life in a processthrough which humans projected themselves into the reality oftheir existence, identified themselves in respect to natural andsocial environments, and followed a path of linear growth.Orality testifies to limited, circular experiences butcorresponds to an unsettled human being in search of well beingand security. It relied on memory for the most part and wasassimilated in ritual. The written appeared in the context ofseveral fundamental changes: diversified human praxis,settlement, and a market that outgrew barter, each related andinfluencing the other. Its main result was the division betweenmental and physical labor. It made speaking, writing, andreading-characteristics of literacy, as we know it from theperspective of literate societies-logically possible. In fact, itrepresented only the possibility of literacy, not its beginning.Once we understand how language works and what were some of thefunctions of language that corresponded to the new stage madepossible by writing, we shall also understand how writingcontributed 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 cansee individual neurons triggering right on your monitor. Or youcan view how the surgeon tests the patient's pattern recognitionabilities, allowing the surgeon to draw a map of the brain'scognitive functioning, a map essential for the outcome of theoperation. Every now and then the dialogue between surgeon andassistants is complemented by the display of data coming fromdifferent monitoring devices. Can you understand the languagethey are using? Could a written report of the operationsubstitute for the real-time event? For a student inneurosurgery, or for a researcher, the issue of understanding isvery different from what it would be for a lay-person.

Tired of science? A concert is taking place at another Internetaddress. Musical groups from all over the world are sendingtheir live music to this address. As a multi- threadedperformance, this concert enables its listeners to select fromamong the many simultaneously performing groups. They sing aboutlove, hope, understanding…all the themes that each listener isfamiliar with. Still, understanding every word the musiciansuse, do you understand what is taking place?

Moving away from the Internet, one could visit a factory, a stockexchange, a store. One could find oneself in subway in any city,witness a first-grade class in session, or pursue business in agovernment office. All these scenarios embody the various formsof self-constitution through practical activity. It seems thateveryone involved is talking the same language, but whounderstands what? In seemingly simpler contexts, what doindividuals understand today when they understand a writteninstruction or conversations, casual or official? The context isour day, which is different from that of any previous time, and,in particular, different from that of a literacy- dominatedpragmatics. The answers to the questions posed above do not comeeasily. A foundation has to be provided for addressing suchquestions from a perspective broader than that afforded by theexamples given.

A feedback called confirmation

Understanding language is a process that extends far beyondknowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Where there is no sharingof experience beyond what a particular language sequenceexpresses, there is no understanding. This sounds like adifficult expectation. To be met, the non-expressed must bepresent in the listener, reader, or writer. Language mustrecreate the non-expressed, through the sequence heard, read, orwritten, and related to it, beyond the words recognized and thegrammar used. Behind each word that people comprehend, there iseither a common practical experience, or a shared pragmaticframework, or minimally some form of shared understanding, whichconstitute what is known as background knowledge. "The limits ofmy language mean the limits of my world," Wittgensteinpromulgated. I would rephrase, in an attempt to connectknowledge and experience, "The limits of my experience are thelimits of my world." Self-constitution in language is such anexperience.

The first level of the indirect relation established betweensomeone expressing something in language and someone else tryingto understand it is concentrated in a semantic assumption: "Iknow that you know." But is it a sufficient condition to continuea 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 accordinglydevise strategies for establishing a shared semantic background.These strategies range from making sure that students in a classunderstand the same things when they use the same words, topublishing comprehensive dictionaries of what they perceive asthe necessary shared knowledge in order to maintain culturalcoherence at the appropriate scale of the group or community inquestion. In the final analysis, these strategies correspond toa semantically based model of cultural education driven by theChomskyan distinction between competence and performance. Theyidentify the problem in the incongruence of our individualdictionaries (vocabulary), not in the diversity of humanpractical experiences. The assumption is that once peopleunderstand what is in language, they apply it (pragmatics as"uses and effects of signs within the behavior in which theyoccur," according to J. Lyons). We know by now that after acertain stage of unifying influences corresponding to industrialsociety, this congruence becomes impossible when the scale ofhuman experience changes. The examples given at the beginning ofthis chapter are evidence of this fact.

What I maintain throughout this book is that language isconstituted in human experiences, not merely applied to them.Performance predates competence. Recognition, of an utterance, awritten word, a sentence, is itself an experience through whichindividuals define each one of themselves. Within a limited scaleof existence and experience, the hom*ogeneity of the circ*mstanceguaranteed the coherence of language use. As the number ofpeople increases, and as they are involved in increasinglyvaried experiences, they no longer share a hom*ogeneous pragmaticframework. Consequently, they can no longer assume the coherenceof language. Progressively, ever diversifying practicalexperiences cause words, phrases, and sentences to mean more anddifferent things at the same time. Instantiation of meaning isalways in the experience through which individuals constitutetheir identity.

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

Indirectness implies awareness of a shared reference-thegesture, the sound, the word-that is simultaneously sharedexperience. At this level, there is no generality. Patterns ofactivity are patterns of self-constitution: in the act ofhunting, 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 tocoordination, planning, and reciprocal understanding. Withinthis pragmatic framework, a level of indirectness isconstituted: confirmation, or what cybernetics identifies asfeedback, in all biological processes. Along this line, theinitial (unuttered and obviously unwritten) "I know that youknow" becomes subsequently "I know that you know that I know."Coordination and hierarchy within the given task come into thepicture. Indeed, if we consider the experience as the origin ofmeaning in language, the sequence of assumptions is even larger:"I know that you know that I know that you know." Itcorresponds to a cognitive level totally different from that ofdirect practical experiences.

In a way, this threefold sequence shows how syntax is envelopedin semantics, and both in the pragmatics that determines them.Applied to the hunting scene, it says, "I know that you knowthat I am over here, opposite you, we are both closing in on ahunted animal, and I know that you are aware that you might throwyour spear in my direction; but the fact that we share in theknowledge of who is placed where will help us get the animal andnot kill each other by accident." At a very small scale of humanexperiences, the sequence was realized without language. Patternsof activity captured its essence. At a larger scale, wordsreplaced signs used for coordination. Writing established framesof 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 Internetbrowser, a graphic interface to an infinity of simultaneousexperiences of sharing information, frees participants fromsaying to each other, "Hello. I am here." It facilitates avirtual community of individuals who constitute the experienceof real-time neurosurgery, or the virtual concert mentioned atthe beginning of this section. In similar ways, new patterns ofwork in the civilization of illiteracy constitute ourwork-place, school, or government, based on the same pragmaticassumptions.

Between the primitive hunters and those who in our days identifytheir presence by all kinds of devices-a badge, a pager, amobile phone, an access card, a password-there is a differencein the means and forms used to acknowledge the shared awarenessthat affects the outcome of the experience. Even the simple actof greeting someone we think we know implies the whole sequenceof 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 withwhom we share practical experiences of self-constitution. 2.

All the others must realize this implicit expectation ofcommunication. 3.

Each new pragmatic context brings about new experiences and newforms of awareness. This understanding can go something alongthe 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 usedand how; or in today's context, what surgery is, what a brain is,what a virtual concert is, what a certain activity in aproduction cycle affects, what the function of a particulargovernment office is. Otherwise, the conversation would stop, oranother means of expression (such as recreating fire, ordemonstrating a tool) would have to be used, as happened in thepast and as frequently happens today: "I know that you know howto drive a car (or use a computer), but let me show you how."

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

Primitive orality and incipient writing

In addition to the general background of understanding, there aremany levels, represented by the clues present in speech orwriting, or in other forms of expression and communication. Forexample, a question is identified by some vocal expressionaccepted as interrogation. In writing, the question is denoted bya particular sign, depending on the particular language. Butother clues, no less important, are more deeply seated. Theyrefer 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. Muchextra-language background knowledge goes into human language anddirects understanding from experience to language use. Dialogueis more than two persons throwing sentences at each other. It isa pragmatic situation requiring as much language asunderstanding of the context of the conversation because eachpartner in the dialogue constitutes himself or herself for theother. Dialogue is the elementary cell of communicationexperience. Within dialogue, language is transcended by the manyother sign systems through which human self-constitution takesplace. Dialogues make it clear that understanding languagebecomes a supra- (or para-) linguistic endeavor. It requires thediscovery of the clues, in and outside language, and of theirrelationship. But more importantly, it requires thereconstruction of experience as it is embodied in backgroundknowledge.

By contrasting primitive orality to incipient writing, we canunderstand that the process of establishing conventions ismotivated by the need to overrule concreteness and to access anew cognitive realm that a different pragmatic contextnecessitates. By understanding how experience affects theirrelation, we can consider orality and writing in successivemoments of human pragmatics, i.e., within a concrete scale ofhumankind. Indeed, when writing emerged, elements of oralitycorresponding to a reduced scale of experience were reproducedin its structure because they were continued at the cognitivelevel. In our days, there is a far less pressing need to mimicorality in written signs. Some will argue that 4 Sale, 4-Runner,While-U-Wait, and Toys 'R' Us, among other such expressions, areexamples to the contrary. These attempts to compress languagerepresent ways of establishing visual icons, of achieving asynthetic level better adapted to fast exchange of information.We see many more examples in interactive multimedia, or in theheavy traffic of Internet-based communication. There is noliteracy involved here, and no literacy is expected in decodingthe message. There is a strong new orality, with characteristicsreminiscent of previous orality. But the dominant element is thevisual as it becomes a new icon. The international depiction ofa valentine-shaped heart to represent the word love is oneexample in this sense; the icons used in Europe on clothing carelabels are others.

Time reference in texts today is made difficult by the nature ofprocesses characteristic of our age: numerous simultaneoustransactions, distributed activity, interconnection, rapidchange of rules. These cannot be appropriately expressed in awritten text. In the global world, Now means quite a differentthing for individuals connected over many time zones. Sunriseexperienced on the Web page of the city of Santa Monica can beimmediately associated to poetic text through a link. But theimplicit experience of time (and space) carried by language andmade instrumental in literacy does not automatically refresh*tself.

It took thousands of years before humans became acquainted withthe conventions of writing. It is possible that some of theseconventions were assimilated in the hardware (brain) supportingcognitive activity and progressively projected in new forms ofself-constitution. The practice of writing and the awareness ofthe avenues it opened led to new conventions. Practicalendeavors, originating in the conventions of space and time,implicit in the written (and the subsequent reading), resulted inchanged conventions. For instance, the discovery that time andspace could be fragmented, a major realization probably notpossible in the culture of orality, resulted in new practicalexperiences and new theories of space and time.

Once writing became a practical experience and constituted alegitimate reality, at a level of generality characteristic ofits difference from gestures, sounds, uttered words orsentences, associations became possible at several levels of thetext. Some were so unexpected or unusual that understanding suchassociations turned into a real challenge for the reader. Thischallenge regarding understanding is obviously characteristic ofnew levels, such as the self-referential, omnipresent in thewired world of home pages. In some ways, language is becoming amedium for witnessing the relation between the conscious,unconscious, or subconscious, and language itself. The brainsurgery mentioned some pages ago suppressed the patient'sconscious recognition of objects or actions by inhibitingcertain neurons.

The unnatural, nonlinguistic use of language is studied bypsychologists, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligenceresearchers in order to understand the relation between languageand intelligence. This need to touch upon the biological aspectsof the practical experiences of speaking, writing, or readingresults from the premise pursued. Self-constitution of the humanbeing takes place while the biological endowment is projectedinto the experience. Important work on what are called split-brain patients-persons who, in order to suppress epilepticattack, have had the connection between the two brainhemispheres severed-shows that even the neat distinctionleft-right (the left part of the brain is in charge of language)is problematic. Researchers learned that in each practicalexperience, our biological endowment is at work and at the sametime subject to self-reflection. Projecting a word like laugh inthe 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 throughunrelated causes. If a text says "Scratch yourself," theyactually scratch themselves, stating that it is becausesomething itches. Virtual reality practical experiences take full advantage of these and other clinical observations. The absentin a virtual reality environment is very often as important asthe present. On the back channels of virtual realityinteractions, not only words but also data describing humanreactions (turning one's head, closing the eyes, gesturing withthe hand) can be transmitted. Once fed back, such data becomespart of the virtual world, adapted to the condition of theperson experiencing it. This is why interest in cognitivecharacteristics of oral communication-of the primitive stages orof the present-remains important.

Background information is more readily available in oralcommunication. In orality, things people refer to are closer tothe words they use. Human co-presence in conversation results inthe possibility to read and translate the word under the guise ofa willingness by others to show what a particular word standsfor. In orality, the experience pertinent to the word is sharedin its entirety. This is possible because the appropriate worldof experience (corresponding to the circular scale of humanpraxis) is so limited that the language is in a one-to-onerelation with what it describes. In some ways, the parent-childrelation is representative of this stage in the childhood ofhumankind.

In the new orality of the civilization of illiteracy the sameone-to-one relation is established through strategies ofsegmentation. The speaker and listener(s) share space andtime-and hence past, present, and, to a certain degree, future.And even if the subject is not related to that particular spaceand moment, it already sets a reference mechanism in place byvirtue of the fact that people in dialogue are people sharing asimilar experience of self-constitution. Far is far from wherethey speak; a long time ago is a long time ago from the momentof the verbal exchange. The acquisition of far, long (or short)time ago is in itself the result of practical circ*mstancesleading to a more evolved being. We now take these distinctionsfor granted, surprised when children ask for tighter qualifiers,or when computer programs fail because we input information withinsufficient levels of distinction.

The realization of the frame of time and space occurred quitelate in the development of the species, within the scale oflinear relationships, and only as a result of repeated practicalexperiences, of sequences constituting patterns. Once thereference mechanism for both time and space was acknowledged andintegrated in new experiences, it became so powerful that itallowed people to simplify their language and to assume muchmore than what was actually said. In today's world, space andtime are constituted in experiences affected by the experience ofrelativity. Accordingly, the orality of the civilization ofilliteracy is not a return to primitive orality, but to areferential structure that helps us better cope with dynamism.The space and time of virtual experiences are an example ofeffective freedom from language, but not from the experiencesthrough which we acquired our understanding of time and space.Computers able to perform in the space of human assumptions arenot yet on the horizon of current technological possibilities.

Assumptions

Assumptions are a component of the functioning of sign systems. Amark left can make sense if it is noticed. The assumption ofperception is the minimum at which expression is acknowledged.Assumptions of writing are different from those of orality. Theyentail the structural characteristics of the practicalexperiences in which the people writing constitute theiridentity. Literate assumptions, unlike any other assumptions inlanguage, are extensions of linear, sequential experience in allits constitutive parts. They are evinced in vocabulary, but evenmore strongly in grammar. In many ways, the final test of anysign system is that of its built-in assumptions. Illiteracy isan experience outside the realm defined by the means and methodsof literacy. The civilization of illiteracy challenges the needand justification of literate assumptions, especially in view ofthe way these affect human effectiveness.

The very fine qualifiers of time and space that we take forgranted today were acknowledged only slowly, and initially at arather coarse level of distinction. Despite the tremendousprogress made, even today our experience with time and spacerequires 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 anexperience much richer than language alone can convey. Suchpara-linguistic elements are no less meaningful in new practicalexperiences, such as interaction with and inside virtualenvironments.

Para-linguistic elements consciously used in primitivecommunities, or unconsciously present, still escape ourscrutiny. Their presence in communication among members ofcommunities sharing a certain genetic endowment takes differentforms. They are not reducible to language, although they areconnected to its experience. Examples of this are the strongsense of rhythm among Blacks in America and Africa, the sense ofholistic perception among Chinese and Japanese. We can onlyconjecture, 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 withnon-linguistic entities. Whether a mother-tongue or a pre-Babellanguage existed is a different issue. The hypothesis mimics thenotion of a common ancestor of the species and obviously looksfor the language of this possible ancestor. More important,however, is the observation that the practical experience oflanguage constitution does not eliminate everything that is notlinguistic in nature. Moreover, the para-linguistic, even whenlanguage becomes as dominant as it does under the reign ofliteracy, remains significant for the effectiveness of humanactivity. The civilization of illiteracy does not necessarilydig for para-linguistic remnants of previous practical endeavors.It rather constitutes a framework for their participation in amore effective pragmatics, in the process involvingtechnological means capable of processing all kinds of cues.

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

Within a given culture, each sign eventually becomes a verystrong background component because it embodies the sharedexperience through which it was constituted. In direct speech,we either know each other, or shall know each other to a certainextent, represented by the cumulative degrees of "I know that youknow that I know that you know," defining a vague notion ofknowledge within a multivalued logic. This makes speaking andlistening an experience in reciprocal understanding, if indeedthe conversation takes place in a non-linear, vague contextimpossible to emulate in writing. Dialogues in the wired world,as well as in transactional situations of extreme speed (stockmarket transactions, space research, military actions), belong tosuch experiences, impossible to pursue within the limitations ofliteracy.

Orality can be assertive (declarative), interrogative, andimperative (a great deal more so than writing). In the course oftime, and due to very extended experience with language and itsassumptions in oral form, humans acquired an intrinsicinteractive quality. This resulted from a change in theircondition: on the natural level there was the limitedinteractivity of action-reaction. In the human realm, the nucleusaction-reaction led to subsequent sequences through which areasof common interest were defined. The progressive cognitiverealization that speaking to someone involves theirunderstanding of what we say, as well as the acknowledgedresponsibility to explain, whenever this understanding isincomplete or partial, is also a source of our interactive bent.Questions take over part of the role played by the more directpara-linguistic signs and add to the interactive quality ofdialogue, so long as there is a common ground. This commonground is assumed by everyone who maintains the idea ofliteracy-how else to establish it?-as a necessity, butunderstood in many different ways: the common ground as embodiedin vocabulary and grammar, in logic, spelling, phonetics,cultural heritage. Granted that a common language is a necessarycondition for communication, such a common language is notsimultaneously a sufficient condition, or at least not one ofmost efficient, for communication. Interactivity, as it evolvedbeyond the literate model, is based on the probability, andindeed necessity, to transcend the common language expectationand replace it with variable common codes, such as those weestablish in the experience of multimedia or in networkedinteractions. Even the ability to interact with our ownrepresentation as an avatar in the Internet world becomesplausible beyond the constraining borders of literate identity.

Taking literacy for granted

In preceding paragraphs, we examined what is required, inaddition to a common language, for a conversation to make sense.Scale is another factor. The scale that defines a dialogue isvery different from the scale at which human self-constitution,language acquisition and use included, take place. Scale byitself is not enough to define either dialogue or the moreencompassing language-oriented, or language- based, practicalactivity through which people ascertain their biologicalendowment and their human characteristics. There is sufficientproof that at the early stage of humankind, individuals could beinvolved only in hom*ogeneous tasks. Within such a framework ofquasi-hom*ogeneous activity, dialogues were instances ofcooperation and confirmation, or of conflict. Diversificationmade them progressively gain a heuristic dimension-choosing theuseful from among many possibilities, sometimes against thelogical odds of maintaining consistency or achievingcompleteness. A generalized language-supported practicalactivity involved not only heuristics ("If it seems useful, doit"), but also logic ("If it is right/If it makes sense"),through the intermediary of which truth and falsehood takeoccupancy of language experiences. Thus an integrative influenceis exercised. This influence increases when orality isprogressively superseded by the limited literacy of writing andreading.

The quasi-generalized literacy of industrial society reflectedthe need for unified and centralized frameworks of practicalexperience, within a scale optimally served by the linearity oflanguage. In our days, people constitute themselves and theirlanguage through experiences more diverse than ever. Theseexperiences are shorter and relatively partial. They are only aninstant in the more encompassing process they make possible. Theresult is social fragmentation, even within the assumedboundaries of a common language, which nations are supposed tobe, and paradoxically survive their own predicted end. Inreality, this common language ceases to exist, or at least tofunction as it used to. What exists are provisional commitmentsmaking up a framework for activities impossible to carry out asa practical experience defined by literacy. Within each of thesefast-changing commitments, partial languages, of limited durationand scope, come into existence. Sub-literacies accompany theirlives. Experience as such opens avenues to more orality, underpost-literate conditions-in particular, conditions of increasedefficiency made possible by technology that negates thepragmatics of literacy. The most favorable case for thefunctioning of language-direct verbal communication-becomes atest case for what it really means to speak the same language,and not what we assume a common language accomplishes whenwritten or read by everyone.

Instances of direct verbal communication today (in the family andcommunity, when visiting foreign countries, at work, shopping,at church, at a football stadium, answering opinion polls ormarketing inquiries, in social life) are also instances of takingfor granted that others speak our own language. Many researchershave attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of communication inthese contexts. Their observations are nevertheless notindependent of the assumed premise of literacy as a necessity andas a shared pragmatic framework. Some recent research on thecognitive dimension of understanding language does not realizehow deep the understanding goes. One example given is the terseinstruction on a bottle of shampoo: "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." Itis not a matter of an individual's ability to read theinstructions in order to know how to proceed. One does not needto be literate, moreover, one does not even need to createlanguage in order to use shampoo, if one is familiar with thepurpose and use of shampoo (i.e., with the act). Indeed, formost individuals, the word shampoo on a bottle suffices for themto use it correctly with no written instructions at all. Icons orhieroglyphics can convey the instructions just as well, evenbetter, than literacy can. These, by the way, are coming moreinto use in our global economy. It is even doubtful that mostindividuals read the instructions because they are familiar notjust with the conventions that go into using shampoo, but,deeper still, the conventions behind the words of theinstructions. Should an adult, even a literate adult, who wastotally unfamiliar with the concept of washing his or her hairbe presented with a bottle of shampoo, the entire experience ofwashing the hair with shampoo would have to be demonstrated andinculcated until it became part of that adult'sself-constitutive repertory. Such analyses of language onlyscrape the surface of how humans constitute themselves inlanguage.

Literacy forces certain assumptions upon us: Literate parentseducate literate children. A sense of community requires thatit* members share in the functionality of literacy. Literatepeople communicate better beyond the borders of their respectivelanguages. Literacy maintains religious faith. People canparticipate in social life only if they are literate.Considering such assumptions, we should realize that the abstractconcept of literacy, resulting from the assumption that a commonlanguage automatically means a common experience, only maintainsfalse hope. Children of literate parents are not necessarilyliterate. Chances are that they are already integrated in theilliterate structures of work and life to the same degreechildren of illiterate parents are. This is not a matter ofindividual choice, or of parental authority. On the digitalhighway, on which a growing number of people define theircoordinates, with the prevalent sign @ taking over any otheridentification, communities emerge independent of location.Participation in such communities is different in nature fromliterate congregations maintained by a set of reciprocaldependencies that involved spelling as much as it involvedaccepting authority or working according to industrialproduction cycles.

In all of today's communication, not only is the literatecomponent no longer dominant, it is undergoing the steepestpercentile fall in comparison to any other form ofcommunication. In this framework, states and bureaucracies areputting up a good fight for their own survival. But the methodsand means of literacy on which their entireactivity-regulation, control, self-preservation-is based havemany times over proven inefficient. These statements do notremove the need to deal with how people understand writing, towhich literacy is more closely connected than it is to speech. Todiscover what makes the task of understanding language moredifficult as language frees itself from the constraints ofliteracy within the new pragmatic framework is yet another goalwe pursue.

To understand understanding

Incipient writing was pictorial. This was an advantage in that itregarded the world directly, immediately perceived and shared,and a disadvantage in that it did not support more than apotential generality of expression. It maintained notation veryclose to things, not to speech. Image-dominated language camealong with a simplified frame of space and time reference.Things were presented as close or far apart, as successiveevents or as distant, interrupted events. Anyone with a minimalvisual culture can read Chinese or Japanese ideograms, i.e., seemountain, sky, or bird in the writing. But this is not readingthe language; it is reading the natural world from which thenotation was extracted, reconstituting the reference based on theiconic convention.

Alphabetic writing annihilates this frame of experience based onresemblance. Unless time is specifically given, or coordinatesin space intentionally expressed, time and space tend to beassimilated in the text, and more deeply in the grammar. It is adifferent communication, mediated by abstract entities whoserelation to experience is, in turn, the result of numeroussubstitutions, the record of which is not at the disposal of thereader. Between tell in English and the root tal (or dal) inproto-language (with the literal meaning of tongue), there is awhole experiential sequence available only implicitly in thelanguage. In the nostratic phylum (root of many languages, theIndo- European among them), luba stands for thirst; the Englishlove and the German Liebe seem to derive from it, although whenwe think of love we do not associate it with the physicalexperience of thirst.

Clues in written language are clues to language first of all, andonly afterwards clues to human experience. Accordingly, readinga text requires an elaborate cognitive reconstruction of theexperience expressed, and probably a never-ending questioning ofthe appropriateness of its understanding. When a text is read,there is nobody to be questioned, nobody to actively understandthe understanding, to challenge it. The author exists in thetext, as a projection, to the extent that the author exists inthe manufactured objects we buy in order to use (glasses todrink water, chairs to sit on), or in whose production weparticipate in some way. After all, each text is a reality onpaper, or on other means of storage and display. Clues can bederived from names of writers and from historic knowledge. Whatcannot be derived is the reciprocal exchange which goes onduring conversation, the cooperative effort under circ*mstancesof co- presence.

Regardless of the degree of complexity, the interactive componentof orality cannot be maintained in writing. This points to anintrinsic limitation relevant to our attempt to find out whyliteracy does not satisfy expectations characteristic ofpractical experiences requiring interactivity. The metaphoricuse of interactivity, as it is practiced to express an animisticattitude according to which, for instance, the text is alive, andwe interact with it in reading, interpreting, and understandingit, addresses a different issue. Difficulties in languageunderstanding can be overcome, but not in the mechanical effortof improving language skills by learning 50 more words orstudying a chapter in grammar. Rather, one has to buildbackground knowledge through extending the experience(practical, emotional, theoretical, etc.) on which the knowledgeto be shared relies.

But once we proceed in this direction, we step out from theunifying framework of literacy, within which the diversity ofexperiences is reduced to the experience of writing, reading,and speaking. When this reduction is no longer possible-as weexperience more and more under the new conditions ofexistence-understanding language becomes more and moredifficult. At the same time, the result of understanding becomesless and less significant for our self-constitution in humanexperiences. If no other example comes to mind, the readershould reflect upon the many volumes that accompany the softwareyou'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 ofintegrating on-line the instructions one needs to work withsoftware is replacing literate documentation. These instructionscan be reduced to graphic representations or simple animations.The framework is specialization, for instance, in providinginstructions in a form adequate to the task. Within specializedexperience, even writing and reading are subject tospecialization. Literacy turns into yet another distinct form ofhuman praxis instead of remaining its common denominator.

Writing, in this context, makes it clear that language is notenough for understanding a text. Under our own scrutiny, writingbecomes a form of praxis in itself, contributing to the generalfragmentation of society, not to its unification. This happensinsofar as specialized writing becomes part of the general trendtowards specialization and generates specialized reading. Someexplanation is necessary.

Even when writers strive to adapt their language to a specificreadership, the result is only partially successful, preciselybecause the experiences constituted in writing are disjoint.Indeed, the practical experience to be shared, and the subsequentpractical experience of writing are different, pertinent todomains not reducible to each other. Sometimes the writer fallscaptive to the language (that very specialized subset oflanguage adapted to a specific field of knowledge) and mimicsnatural discourse by observing grammar and rhetoric devices.Other times, the writer translates, or explains, as in popularmagazines on physics, genetics, arts, psychology. Within thistype of interpretive discourse either details are left out, ormore details are added, with the intention of broadening thecommon base. Expressive devices, from simple comparisons (whichshould bridge different backgrounds) to metaphors, exposereaders to a new level of experiences. Even if readers know whatcomparisons are and how metaphors work, they still cannotcompensate for the unshared part of experience, with whose helpa text makes sense. A legal brief, a military text, an investmentanalysis, the evaluation of a computer program are examples inthis sense. The language they are written in looks like English.But they refer to experiences that a lawyer, or militaryofficer, or broker, or computer programmer is likely to befamiliar with.

Writers, speakers, readers, and listeners are aware of theadjustments required to comprehend these and many other types ofdocuments. While a direct conversation, for which time spentwith others is required, can be a frame for adjustment, a printedpage is definitely less so. The reader can, at best, transmit areaction in writing, or write to request supplementaryexplanation, that is, to maintain the spirit of conversation. Theexperience of writing and reading is becoming less a generalexperience or cultural identifier, and more a specializedactivity. Writing can be read by machines. In order to serve theblind, such machines read instructions, newspaper articles, andcaptions accompanying video images. The synthetic voice, as muchas a synthetic eye or nose, a syntactic touch-sensitive device,or taste translator, operates in a realm devoid of the life thatwent into the text (image, odor, texture, taste) and which wassupposed to be contributed by the reader (viewer, smeller,toucher, taster).

Literacy, projected as a universal and permanent medium forexpression, communication, and signification, nourished acertain 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 inpolitical life, understand science. This was indeed relativelytrue when poetry, politics, and science were, to a certaindegree, direct forms of human praxis with levels of efficiencyappropriate to the scale of human activity constituted inlinear, hom*ogeneous practical experiences. Now that the scalechanged, dynamics accelerated, mediation increased, andnon-linearity is accepted, we face a new situation.Paradoxically, the poet, the speech-writer, and thescience-writer not only fail to address everybody, but they, aspart and result of the mechanism of labor division, alsocontribute 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 causeof its unity. In reaction to claims that literacy carriedthrough time, a general deconstructionist attitude challenges thepermanency of philosophical tractate, of scientific systems, ofmathematics, political discourse and, probably more thananything else, of literature. The method applied is coherent:make evident the mechanisms used to create the illusion ofpermanence and truth. Texts thus appear as means to an end thatdoes not directly count. What results is an account of thetechnology of expression, embraced by all who grew skeptical ofthe universality of science, politics and literature. When eachsign (independent of the subject) becomes its own reference, andthe experience it embodies is, strictly speaking, that of itsmaking, the deconstructionist project reaches the climax. Nike'sadvertisem*nt is not about sneakers, even less about thecelebrities who wear them. It is a rather hermeticself-referential experience. Its understanding, however, is basedon the fast-changing experience of revealing one's illiterateidentity.

Words about images

The written, as we know, almost constantly appeared together withother referential systems, especially images. In this respect, aquestion regarding what we understand when we understandlanguage is whether images can be used as an aid tounderstanding texts. Doubtless, pictures (at least some of them)are, by their cognitive attributes, better bearers ofinterpretation 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, picturescan help the individual reconstitute, at least partially, theframe of time and space, or one of the two. However, thisrepresents only one side of the issue. The other side revealsthat images are not always the best conveyors of information,and that what we gain by using them comes at a cost inunderstanding, clarity, or context dependence.

First of all, what is gained through the abstraction of the wordsis almost entirely lost through the concreteness of the image.The very dense medium of writing stands in sharp contrast to thediluted medium of images. To download text on the network isquite different from displaying images. If this were the onlyreason, we would be alert to the differences between images andtexts. When the complexity of the image reaches high levels,decoding the image becomes as tedious as decoding texts, and theresult less precise. All this explains why people try to use acombination of images and words. It also helps in understandingstrategies for their combination. As a strategy of relatingtext and image, redundancy helps in focusing interpretation. Thestrategy of complementing helps in broadening theinterpretation. Other strategies, ranging from contrasting textsand images to paraphrasing texts through images, or substitutingtexts for images, or images for text, result in forceful ways ofinfluencing interpretation by introducing explanatory contexts.A very large portion of today's culture-from the comic strip topicture novels and advertisem*nts, to soap operas on theInternet-is embodied in works using such and similar strategies.

What interests us here is whether images can replace theexperience required to understand a text. If the answer isaffirmative, such images would be almost like the partner inconversation. As products of human experience, images, just likelanguage, embody that particular experience. This automaticallymakes the problem of understanding images more involved thanjust seeing them. But we knew this from written language. Seeingwords or sentences or texts on paper (in script or in print) isonly preliminary to understanding. The naturalness of images(especially those resembling the physical universe of ourexistence) makes access to them sometimes easier than access towritten language. But this access is never automatic, and shouldnever be taken for granted. In addition, while the written worddoes 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 eachother; neither is their pragmatic function the same.

Research reports are quasi-unanimous in emphasizing that theusefulness of pictures in increasing text comprehension seemsnot to depend on the mere presence of the image, but on thespecific characteristics of the reader. These make clear therole played by what was defined as background knowledge, withoutwhich texts, images, and other forms of expression stabilized aslanguages make little sense, if any, to their readers, viewers,or listeners. In order to arrive at such conclusions, researcherswent through real-time measurements of the so-called processingof texts, in comparison to picture-text processing. The paradigmemployed uses eye movement recordings and comprehension measuresto study picture-text interactions. Pictures helped what theresearchers defined as poor readers. For skilled readers,pictures were neutral when the information was important. Thepresence of pictures interfered with reading when theinformation in the text was less important. Researchers alsoestablished that the type of text-expository or narrative-is nota 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 linesthrough visual cues embodied in the architecture of the theater.After all was measured and analyzed, the only dependableconclusion was that the effects of images on comprehension ofwritten language are not easy to explain. Again, this should notcome as a surprise as long as we use literacy-based quantifiersto understand the limits of literacy. Whether images areaccidental or forced upon the reader, whether the text isquasi-linear or very sophisticated (i.e., results from practicalexperiences of high complexity), the relation does not seem tofollow any pattern. Such experiments, along with many othersbased on a literacy premise, proved unsuitable for discoveringthe sources and nature of reading difficulties.

Eye movement and comprehension measures used to studypicture-text interactions only confirmed that today there arefewer commonalties, even among young students (not to mentionamong adults already absorbed in life and work) than at the timeof the emergence of writing and reading. The diversification offorms of human experience, seen against the background of arelatively stable language adopted as a standard of culture,hints at the need to look at this relation as one of the possibleexplanations for the data, even for the questions that promptedthe experiments in the first place. These questions have bearingon the general issue of literacy. Why reading, comprehension,and recall of written language have become more uncertain inrecent years, despite efforts made by schools, parents,employers, and governments to improve instruction, remainsunanswered. Regardless of how much we are willing to help theunderstanding of a text through the use of images, the necessityof the text, as an expression of a literate practicalexperience, is not enhanced. Conclusions like these are not easyto draw because we are still conditioned by literacy. Experiencesoutside the frame of literacy come much more naturally togetherbecause their necessity is beyond the conditioning of ourrational discourse. This is how I can explain why on theInternet, the tenor of social and political dialogue isinfinitely more free of prejudice than the information providedthrough books, newspapers, or TV. These observations should notbe misconstrued as yet another form of technologicaldeterminism. The emphasis here, as elsewhere in the book, is onnew pragmatic circ*mstances themselves, not on the meansinvolved.

The research reported above, as any research we hear about in ourdays, was carried out on a sample. A sample, as representativeas it can be, is after all a scaled- down model of society. Theissue critical to literacy being the scale of human practicalexistence, scaled-down models are simply not suited for ourattempt to understand language changes when the complexity ofour pragmatic self-constitution increases. We need to considerlanguage, images, sounds, textures, odors, taste, motion, not tomention sub-verbal levels, where survival strategies are encoded,and beliefs and emotions are internalized, as they pertain tothe pragmatic context of our existence. Literacy is not adequatefor satisfactorily encoding the complexity and dynamics ofpractical experiences corresponding to the new scale thathumankind has reached. The corresponding expectations ofefficiency are also beyond the potential of literacy-basedproductivity. Ill-suited to address the mediated nature of humanexperience at this scale, literacy has to be integrated withother literacies. Its privileged status in our civilization canno longer be maintained.

Korzybski was probably right in stating that language is a "mapfor charting what is happening both inside and outside of ourskins." At the new stage that civilization has reached, it turnsout that none of the maps previously drawn is accurate. If wereally want details essential to the current and futuredevelopment of our species, we have to recognize the change inmetrics, i.e., in the scale of the charted entity, as well as indynamics. The world is changing because we change, and as aresult we introduce new dimensions in this world.

Even when we notice similarities to some past moment-let us takeorality as an example-they are only apparent and meaningless ifnot put in proper context. Technology made talking to each otherat long distances (tele-communication) quite easy, because wefound ways to overcome the constraints resulting from the limitedspeed of sound. The most people could do when living on two closehills was to visit, or to yell, or to signal with fire orlights. Now we can talk to somebody flying on an airplane, topeople driving or walking, or climbing Mount Everest. Cellulartelephony places us on the map of the world as precisely as theglobal positioning system (GPS) deployed on satellites. Thetelephone, 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 communicationrevived orality under circ*mstances of highly integrated,parallel, and distributed forms of human activity on a globalscale. On the digital networks that increasingly represent themedium of self-constitution, we are goal and destination at thesame time. In one click we are wherever we want to be, and to agreat extent what we want to be or are able to do. With anotherclick, we are only the instantiation of someone else's interest,acts, knowledge, or questioning. The use of images belongs tothe same broad framework. So does television, omnipresent and, attimes, seemingly omnipotent. We became connected to the world,but disconnected from ourselves. As bandwidth available forinteracting through a variety of backchannels expands fromcopper wire to new fiberglass data highways, a structure is putin place that effectively resets our coordinates in the world ofglobal activity. Defying the laws of physics, we can be in morethan one place at the same time. And we can be more than oneperson at the same time. Understanding language under suchcirc*mstances becomes a totally new experience ofself-constitution.

Still, understanding language is understanding those who expressthemselves through language, regardless of the medium or thecarrier. Literacy brought to culture the means for effectivelyunderstanding language in a civilization whose scale was welladapted to the linear nature of writing and reading, and to thelogic of truth embodied in language. However, literacy lacksheuristic dimensions, is slow, and of limited interactivity. Itrationalizes even the irrational, taking into bureaucraticcustody all there is to our life. Common experience, in alimited framework characteristic of the beginning of languagenotation, is bound to facilitate interpretation and supportconflicting choices. Divergent experiences, many driven by thesearch for the useful, the efficient, the mediating, experienceshaving less in common among themselves, make language lessadapted to our self-constitution, and thus less easy tounderstand. In such a context, literacy can be perceived only asa phenomenon that makes all things it encomapsses uniform;therefore literacy is resisted. Far from being only a matter ofskill, literacy is an issue of shared knowledge formed in workand social life. Changes in the pragmatic framework broughtabout the realization that literacy today might be better suitedto bridging various fragmented bodies of knowledge orexperiences, than to actually embodying them. Literacy mightstill affect the manner in which we use specialized languages astools adapted to the various ways we see the world, the manner inwhich we try to change it and report on what happens as aresult. But even under these charitable assumptions, it does notfollow that literacy will, or should, continue to remain thepanacea for all human expression, communication, andsignification.

The Functioning of Language

To function is a verb derived from experiences involvingmachines. We expect from machines uniform performance within adefined domain. In adopting the metaphor of functioning to referto language, we should be aware that it entails understandingsoriginating from human interaction involving sign systems, inparticular those eventually embodied in literacy. The argumentwe want to pursue is straightforward: identify languagefunctions as they are defined through various pragmaticcontexts; compare processes through which these functions areaccomplished; and describe pragmatic circ*mstances in which acertain functioning mechanism no longer supports practicalexperiences at the efficiency level required by the scale of thepragmatic framework.

Expression, communication, signification

Traditionally, language functions either are associated with theworkings of the brain or defined in the realm of humaninteraction. In the first case, comprehension, speechproduction, the ability to read, spell, write, and similar areinvestigated. Through non-invasive methods, neuropsychologistsattempt to establish how memory and language functions relate tothe brain. In the second case, the focus is on social andcommunicative functions, with an increasing interest inunderlying aspects (often computationally modeled). My approachis different in that it bases language functions in thepractical experience, i.e., pragmatics, of the species. Languagefunctions are, in the final analysis, sign processes.

Preceding language, signs functioned based on their ontogeneticcondition. As marks left behind-footprints, blood from an openwound, teethmarks-signs facilitated associations only to theextent that individuals directly experienced their coming intobeing. Cognitive awareness of such marks led to associations ofpatterns, such as action and reaction, cause and effect. Bitingthat leaves behind teethmarks is an example. Pointers toobjects-broken branches along a path, obsidian flakes wherestones 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 theunintentional phase of sign experience to an end. In imitativesigns, which are supposed to resemble whatever they stand for,the mark is not left, but produced with the express desire toshare.

The function best describing signs that are marks of theoriginator is expression. Communication is the function ofbringing individuals together through shared experiences.Signification corresponds to an experience that has signs as itsobject and relies on the symbolic level. It is the function ofendowing signs with the memory of their constitution inpractical experiences. Signification expresses theself-reflective dimension of signs. Expression andcommunication, moreover signification, vary dramatically fromone pragmatic framework to another.

Expressions, as simili of individual characteristics and personalexperience, can be seen as translations of these characteristicsand of the experience through which they come into being. A verylarge footprint is a mark associated with a large foot, human oranimal. It is important insofar as it defines, within a limitedscale of experience, a possible outcome essential to thesurvival of those involved. Expressions in speech are marked byco-presence. The functioning of language within orality restedupon a shared experience of time and space, expressed throughhere and now. In writing, expression hides itself in thephysical characteristics of the skill. This is how we come, forexample, to graphology-an exercise in associating patterns of themarks somebody wrote on paper to psychological characteristics.Literacy is not concerned with this kind of expression, althoughliteracy is conducive to it and eventually serves as a mediumfor graphology. Rather, literacy stipulates norms andexpectations of correct writing. People adopting them know wellthat within the pragmatics based on literacy, the efficiency ofpractical experiences of self-constitution is enhanced by uniformperformance. As we search in our days for the fingerprints ofterrorists, we experience the function of expression in almostthe reverse of previous pragmatic contexts. Theirmarks-identifiers of parts used to trigger explosions, or ofmanufacturers of explosives-are accidental. Terrorists wouldprefer to leave none.

The analysis can be repeated for communication andsignification. What they have in common is the progressivescale: expression for kin, expression for larger groups,collective expression, forceful expression as the scale ofactivity increases and individuals are gradually being negatedin their characteristics. Communication makes the process evenmore evident. To bring together members of a family is differentfrom achieving the togetherness of a tribe, community, city,province, nation, continent, or globe. But as availableresources do not necessarily keep up with increasedpopulations, and even less with the growth in need andexpectations, it is critical to integrate cognitive resources inexperiences of self-constitution. Communication, as a functionperformed through sign systems, reached through the means ofliteracy higher levels than during any previous pragmatic phase.Another increase in scale will bring even higher expectations ofefficiency and, implicitly, the need for means to meet suchexpectations. Only as practical experiences become more complexand integrate additional cognitive resources do changes-such asfrom 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 oflanguage no longer adequately supports human pragmatics in termsof achieving the efficiency that corresponds to the actual scaleof that pragmatics, new forms of expression, communication, andsignification become necessary.

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

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

They point to conditions under which new means and methodspertinent to effective functioning complement or override thoseof transcended pragmatic contexts.

As we have seen, prior to language experiences, peopleconstituted their identity in a phase of circular andself-referential reflection. This was followed by a pragmaticsleading to sequential, linear practice of language and languagenotation. With writing, and especially with literacy,sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism becamecharacteristics of the entire practical experience. Writing wasstamped by these characteristics at its inception, as were otherpractical activities. With its unfolding in literacy, itactively shaped further practical experiences. The potential ofexperiences sharing in these characteristics was reached inproductive 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 forvisualization, expanding into animation, modeling, andsimulation in our day, entails new changes. Their meaning,however, will forever escape us if we are not prepared to seewhat makes them necessary. Ultimately, this means to return tohuman beings and their dynamic unfolding within a broadergenetic script. To make sense of any explanatory modelsadvanced, here or elsewhere, we need to understand the relationbetween cultural structure-in which sign systems, literacy, andpost-literate means are identified-and social structure, whichcomprises the interaction of the individuals constitutingsociety. The premise of this enterprise is as follows: Since noteven the originators of the behaviorist model believed that weare the source of our behavior (Skinner went on record with thisin an interview shortly before his death), we can look at theindividuals constituting a human community as the locus of humaninteractions. Language is only one agent of integration amongmany. The shift from the natural to the cultural-with itsclimax in literacy-was actually from immediacy, circularity,discreteness, and the physical realm to indirectness,sequentiality, linearity, and metaphysics. What we experience inour time is a change of course, to the civilization ofilliteracy, characterized by msny mediating layers,configuration, non-linearity, distribution of tasks, andmeta-language. In the process, the functioning of language is asmuch subject to change as the human beings constituted insucceeding practical experiences of a fundamentally new nature.

The idea machine

Functioning of language cannot be expressed in rotations persecond (of a motor) or units of processed raw materials (of aprocessing machine). It cannot even be expressed in our newmeasurement of bits and bytes and all kinds of flops.Expressions, opportunities for exchange of information, andevaluations are the output of language (to keep to the machinemodel 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 ourbiological and cultural identities in the act of living as humanbeings. Attempts within primitive practical experiences tocapture language in some notation eventually freed language fromthe individual experience through sharing with the entire grouppracticing such notation. Even in the absence of the originatorof whatever the notation conveyed, as long as the experience wasshared, the notation remained viable. Constituted in humanpraxis, notation became a reality with an apparent life of itsown. It affected interactions as well as a course of action, tothe degree that notation could describe it. Notation predateswriting, addressing small-scale groups involved in relativelyhom*ogenous practical experiences. As the scale grew andendeavors required different forms of interaction, the writtenevolved from various co-existing notations based on constitutiveexperiences with their own characteristics. Together with theexperience of writing, an entire body of linear conventions wasestablished.

Circ*mstances that made possible the constitution of ideas andtheir understanding deserve attention because they relate to aform of activity that singles out the human being from theentire 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'sself-constitution. They also pertain to the states of mind ofthose expressing them. Ideas are symptomatic of humanself-constitution, and thus of the languages people havedeveloped in their praxis. What we want to find out is whetherthere is an intrinsic relation between literacy and theformation and understanding of ideas. We want to know if ideascan be constituted and/or understood in forms of expressionother than verbal language, such as in drawings, or in the morecurrent multimedia.

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

Pre-verbal and sub-verbal unarticulated languages (at the signallevel of smell, touch, taste, or language of kinesic or proxemictype) participate in defining sensations directly, as well asthrough rudimentary specification of context. The relationship ofarticulated language and unarticulated sub-verbal languages isdemonstrated at the level of predominantly natural activities aswell 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 experiencemediated through language replaced direct experience. Within thepragmatics of higher efficiency associated with literacy, thesense of smell, for example, ended up being done away with. Thedecrease of the weight of biological communication, in this caseof chemo-physical nature, is paralleled by the increase ofimportance 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 experiencesinvolving the olfactory and the gustatory, as well as othersenses, affect areas of human practical experiences beyondliteracy. Identification of kin, awareness of reproductioncycles, and alarm can all be simulated in language, which slowlyassumed or substituted some of the functions of naturallanguages.

Writing and the expression of ideas

When the sign of speech became a sign of language (alphabets,words, sentences), the process described above deepened. Theconcrete (written, stabilized) sign participated in capturinggenerality via the abstraction of lines, shapes, intersections,in wax, in clay, on parchment, or on another medium. Thesuccession of individual signs (letters, words) wasmetamorphosed into the sign of the general. For centuries,writing was only a container for speech, not operationallanguage. This observation does not contradict the stillcontroversial Saphir-Whorf hypothesis that language influencesthinking. Rather, the observation makes clearer the fact thatactive influence did not originate from language itself, but isa result of succeeding practical experiences. Had a recorder ofspoken language, let us imagine, been invented before writing, aneed or use for literacy would have taken very different forms.

Humans did not dispose of a system of signs as a person disposesof a machine or of elements to be assembled. They were their ownscripts, always re-constituting in notation an experience theyhad or might have had. In other words, the functioning oflanguages is essentially a record of the functioning of humanbeings. The Hebrew alphabet started as shorthand notationreduced to consonants by scribes who retained only the root ofthe word before recording its marks on parchment. Due to thesmall scale and shared pragmatics of readers, this shorthandsufficed. In Mayan hieroglyphics, and in Mesopotamianideographs, as well as in other known forms of notation, theintention was the same: to give clues so that another personcould give life to the language, could resuscitate it. Increasedscale and consequently less hom*ogenous practical experiencesforced the Hebrew scribes to add diacritical marks indicatingvowels. The written language of the Sumerians and Mesopotamiansalso changed as the pragmatic framework changed.

That writing is an experience of self-constitution, reflected inthe structure of ideas, might not sound convincing enough unlessthe biological component is at least brought up. Derrick deKerkhove noticed that all languages written from right to leftuse only consonants. The cognitive reading mechanism involved indeciphering them differs from that of languages using vowels,too, and written from left to right. Once the Greeks took overthe initially consonantal alphabet of the Phoenicians andHebrews, they added vowels and changed the direction ofwriting-at the beginning using the Bustrophedon (how the oxenplow), i.e., both directions. Afterwards, the directioncorresponding to a cognitive structure associated withsequentiality was adopted. Consequently, the functioning of theGreek language changed as well. Ideas resulting in the contextof pre-Socratic and Socratic dialogue have a more pronounceddeductive, speculative nuance than those expressed in theanalytic discourse of written Greek philosophy.

One can further this thought by noticing the so-called biasagainst the left-hand that is deeply rooted in many languagesand the beliefs they express. It seems that the right (hand anddirection) is favored in ways ranging from calling things right,or calling servants of justice Herr Richter (Master Right, theGerman form of address for a judge), or favoring things donewith the right hand, on the right side, etc. The very idea ofwhat is right, what is just, human rights, originates from thispreference. The left hand is associated, in a pragmatic andcognitive mode dominated by the right, with weakness,incompetence, even sin. (In the New Testament, sinners are toldto go to the left side of God after judgment.) While theimplicit symbolism is worth more than this passing remark, it isworthwhile noticing that in our days, the domination of the rightin writing and in literacy expectations is coming to an end. Theefficiency of a right-biased praxis is not high enough tosatisfy expectations peculiar to globality. The process is partof the broader experience through which literacy itself isreplaced by the many partial literacies defining thecivilization of illiteracy.

Since ideas come into being in the experience of language, theirdissemination and validation, critical to the efficiency ofhuman effort at any given scale, depends on the portability ofthe medium in which they are expressed. Through writing, theportability of language was no longer reducible to the mobilityof those speaking it. Ideas expressed in writing could be testedoutside the context in which they originated. This associatedthe function of dissemination through language to the function ofvalidation in the pragmatic context. A tablet, a papyrus scroll,a codex, a book, or a digital simile have in common theircondition as a record resulting from practical experiences; butit is not what they have in common that explains theirefficiency. Portability is telling of pragmatic requirements sodifferent that nothing before the digital record could be aspervasive and globally present. Except for a password, we neednothing with us in order to access knowledge distributed todaythrough networks. We are freeing ourselves from space and timecoordinates. Literacy cannot function within such broadparameters. The domain of alternatives constitutes thecivilization 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 ofwriting? Moreover, is it a prerequisite for understanding thepresent? These are questions that resonate loudly in today'spolitical discourse and in the beliefs of very many people. Letus start with the future, as the question raises the issue ofwhat it takes to deal with it.

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

Still, as we want to establish some understanding of theunfolding of the present into the future, we come to realizethat while possibilities expand, the future becomes less andless determined in its details. Try to tell this to the championsof technology who predicted the paperless office and who nowpredict the networked world. Alternatively, tell this to thosewho still constitute their identity in literacy-dependentpractical experiences: politicians, bureaucrats and educators.Neither of the two categories mentioned seems to understand therelation between language and the future expressed in it, or inany sign system, as plans, prophecies, or anticipations.

An idea is always representative of the practical experience andof the cognitive effort to transcend immediate affection.Monoarticulated speech (signaling), as well as ideographicwriting, result from experiences involving thepragmatic-affective level of existence. One cries or shouts, onecaptures resemblance in an image when choices are made andfeelings evoked. There are no ideas here, as there is very littlethat reaches beyond the immediate. Ideas extend from experiencesinvolving the pragmatic- rational level. Speech can serve as themedium 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, orsuccessful actions associated with satisfaction. When finally setin clay tablets or papyrus, the language regarding the futureacquired a different status-it no longer vanished, as the soundsor gestures used before. Writing accompanies action, and evenlasts past the experience. This permanency gave the written wordan aura that sounds, gestures, even artifacts, could notachieve. Even repetition, a major structural characteristic ofrituals, could not project the same expectation of permanency aswriting. Probably this is what prompted Gordon Childe to remarkthat "The immortalization of a word in writing must have seemeda supernatural process; it was surely magical that a man longvanished from the land of the living could still speak from aclay tablet or a papyrus roll."

Within the context of religion, the aura shifts from themytho-magical- transmitted clues for successful action-to themystical-the source of the successful clues is a higherauthority. Even social organization, which became necessary whenthe scale of humankind changed, was not very effective in theabsence of documents with a prescriptive function. Recognized inancient Chinese society, this practical need was expressed inits first documents, as it was in Hindu civilization, in theHebrew and the Greek, and by the civilizations to follow, manytaking an obvious cue from the Roman Empire.

Language use for prescriptive purposes does not necessitate oreven imply literacy. This holds true as much for the past as forthe present. There was a time, corresponding to increasedmobility of people, when only those foreign to a land weresupposed to learn how to write and read. The requirement waspragmatic: in order to get used to the customs by which thenative population lived, they had to gain access to theirexpression in language. Nevertheless, once promises are made-apromise relates structurally to the future-the record becomesmore and more written, although quite often sealed by the oral,as we know from oath formulae and from oath gestures thatsurvived even in our days. In all these, linear relations ofcause-and-effect were preserved and projected as the measure,i.e. rationality, for the future.

In contemporary society, the language characteristic of the pastis used as a decorum. Global scale and social complexity are nolonger efficiently served by linear relations. Subsequently,means for formulating ideas regarding the future make literacynot only one of the many languages of the time to come, butprobably an obstacle in the attempt to more efficientlyarticulate ideas for the future. Keep in mind that almost allpeople dedicated to the study of the future work on computationalmodels. The outcome of their effort is shorter and shorter ontext, which is replaced with dynamic models, always global innature. Linearity is effectively supplanted by non-lineardescriptions of the many interlocking factors at work. Moreover,self-configuration, parallelism, and distributive strategies arebrought 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 statebluntly: "The historian's house is on the island of writing….Where no words are left behind, the historian finds nofoundations for his reconstructions." Indeed, history resultsfrom concern with records that are universally accessible, hencewithin the universe of those sharing in literacy. We never knowwhether a grammar is a summary of the history of a language, orits program for the future. Grammars appear in various contextsbecause people recognize the need to verify the voices within alanguage. 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 andonly one voice, and probably link the records to recreate thecontinuum from which they emerge.

While the future and the self-constitution of the human being innew pragmatic contexts are directly related, the past isconnected to human practical experiences in indirect ways. Theunifying element of the various perspectives of the future is inthe new experience. In the absence of such a unifyingperspective, writing history becomes an end in itself,notwithstanding the power exercised by examples. From thebeginning of the Middle Ages, the written record and theanalytic power of language sufficed for constituting history andshaping historic experience. But once the methods of historicresearch diversified, probably as much as the pragmatics of humanexistence did, new perspectives were introduced. Some of thesehave practical implications: What were the plants used inprimitive societies? How was water supply handled? How were thedead disposed of? Other perspectives had ideological, political,or cultural ramifications. In each of these pragmaticallydetermined instances, history started escaping the prison ofliteracy.

Linguistic archaeology, anthropological and especiallypaleoanthropological history, computational history, are onlysome of the post-literate forms of practical experiencesconstituting a new domain of history. This domain ischaracterized by the use of non-traditional tools, such asgenetics, electronic microscopy, computational simulation,artificial life modeling, and inferences supported by artificialintelligence. Memetics, or the life of ideas and awareness ofthem, pertains no less to the past than to the present andfuture. It sprang from genetics and bears the mark of an implicitDarwinian mechanism. Its focus on ideas made it the catch phraseof a generation feeling dangerously severed from its relation tohistory, and no less endangered by a future falling too fastupon this generation. Technological extensions of memetics (theso-called memetic engineering) testify to expectations ofefficiency which history of the literate age never seemed tocare about or even to acknowledge.

Based on the awareness thus gained, we would have to agree thatthe relative dissolution of literacy and the associated idealsof universality, permanency, hierarchy, and determinism, as wellas the emergence of literacies, with the resulting attitudes ofparochialness, transitoriness, decentralization, andindeterminacy are paralleled by the dissolution of history andthe emergence of specialized histories. Hypertext replacessequential text, and thus a universe of connections isestablished. The new links among carefully defined fields in thehistoric record point to a reality that escapes the story (inhistory), but are relevant to the present. The specializedhistorian reports not so much about the past, but aboutparticular aspects of human self-constitution from the past thatare significant in the new frame of current experience. Itsometimes seems that we reinvent the past in patches, only toaccommodate the present pragmatics and to enforce awareness ofthe present. The immanent sequentiality and linearity of thepragmatic framework within which languages emerged and whichmade, at a later juncture, literacy and history necessary, isreplaced by non-sequentiality and non-linear relations betteradapted to the scale of humankind's existence today. They arealso better adapted to the complexity of the practical processof humankind's continuous self-constitution. In addition,primitive, deterministic inferences are debunked, and a betterimage of complexity, as it pertains to the living subject,becomes available.

As an entry in a database (huge by all means), the past sheds itsromantic aura, only to align itself with the present and thefuture. The illiterate attitude, reflected, for instance, in theignorance of the story of the past, results not from lack ofwriting and reading skills. It is not caused by bad historyteachers or books, as some claim. Decisive is the fact that ourpragmatic framework, i.e. our new practical experiences ofself-constitution, is disconnected from the experiences of thepast.

Knowing and understanding

Probably one of the most important aspects of current pragmaticsis the connection between knowing and understanding. We areinvolved in many activities without really understanding howthey take place. Our e-mail reaches us as it reaches those towhom 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 totheir destinations by bus, train, plane, or boat. Determiningthe paths of an e-mail message is trivial for a machine, butalmost impossible for a human being. As the complexity of anendeavor increases, chances that individuals constitutingthemselves in the activity know how everything works andunderstand the various mechanisms involved decrease. Still, theefficiency of the experience is not diminished. Moreover, itseems that knowledge and understanding do not necessarily affectefficiency.

This statement is valid for an increasing number of practicalexperiences in the pragmatics of the civilization ofilliteracy-not for all of them. We can conceive of complexdiagnostic machines; but there is something in the practicalexperience of medicine, for example, that makes one physicianbetter than another. We can automate a great deal of otheractivities-accounting, tax preparation, design, architecture-butthere is something implicit in the activity that will qualify acertain individual's performance as above and beyond our mostadvanced science and technology. There are managers who knowclose to nothing about what their company produces but whounderstand market mechanisms to such an extent that they end upwinners regardless of whether they head a bank, acracker-producing factory, or a giant computer company. Thesemanagers 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 knowledgeand understanding within succeeding pragmatic frameworks, andthe role language as a mediating element in each of theseframeworks.

The sign of language represents the contradictory unity of thephonetic and semantic units. Within a limited scale ofexperience, literacy meant to know what is behind the writtenword, to be able to resuscitate it, and to even give the word newlife. As the scale increases, literacy means to take for grantedwhat is behind the written word. This implies that dictionaries,including personal dictionaries, as they are formed inconstituting our language, are congruent. Learning language isnot reducible to the memorization of expressions. The only wayto learn is to live the language. With knowledge acquired andexpressed in language comes understanding.

Humans are not born free of experience. Important parts of it arepassed along in the biological endowment. Others are transmittedthrough ever new human interactions, including those ofreciprocal understanding. Neither are humans born free of theevolutionary cycle of the species. The relative decline of theolfactory in humans was mentioned some pages ago. With therelative loss of sensory experience, knowledge corresponding tothe respective sensorial perception diminishes. Linguisticperformance is the result of living and practicing language, ofexistence as language. Relating oneself to the world in languageexperience is a condition for knowing and understanding it. Thelanguage of the natural surrounding world is not verbal, but itis articulated at the level of the elementary sensations(Merleau-Ponty's participative perception) that the worldoccasions, when human beings are engaged in the practicalattempt to constitute themselves, or instance, by trying tochange or to master their world. They perceive this world, afterthe experience, as stabilized meanings: clouds offer the hope ofrain; thunder can produce fire; running deer are probably pursuedby predators; eggs in a nest testify to birds. The complexity ofthe effort to master the world surrounding us increases overtime. Tasks originating in the context leading to literacy areof a different degree of complexity than those faced inindustrial society and than those we assume today.

Between the senses and speech-hence between nonverbal and verballanguages-numerous influences play a role. Words obviously have acognitive condition different from perceptions and are processeddifferently. Speech adds intellectual information to thesensorial information, mainly in the form of associations,capable of reflecting the present and the absent. Interestinglyenough, we do not know everything that we understand; and we donot understand everything that we know. For instance, we mightknow that in non-Euclidean geometries, parallels meet. Or thatwater, a liquid, is made up of oxygen and hydrogen, two gases. Orthat the use of drugs can lead to addiction. Nevertheless, we donot necessarily understand how and why and when.

Within the civilization of literacy the expectation is that oncewe know how to write something, we automatically know andunderstand it. And if by some chance the knowledge isincomplete, inconsistent, or not maintained, if it loses itsintegrity through some corruption, it can be resuscitatedthrough reading or can be made consistent by comparing it toknowledge accumulated by others, and eventually redeemed. Aswriting has failed us repeatedly within practical experiencesthat transcend its characteristics and necessity, we havelearned that the relative stability of the written is a blessingin disguise. Compared to the variability of the speech, it ismore stable. But this stability turns out to be a shortcoming,exactly because knowledge and understanding are contextdependent. Within relatively stable contexts this shortcoming isnoticed only at rare intervals. But with the expectation ofhigher efficiency, cycles of human activity get shorter.Increased intensity, the variability of structures ofinteraction, the distributed nature of practical involvement,all require variable frames of reference for knowledge andunderstanding. As a result of these pragmatic characteristics, wewitnessed progressive use of language in equivocal and ambiguousways. Acceptable, and even adequate, in the practical experienceof poetry, drama and fiction, of disputable relevance inpolitical and diplomatic usage, ambiguity affects the literateformulation of ideas and plans pertinent to moral values,political programs, or scientific and technological purposes.

The same pragmatic characteristics mentioned above make necessarythe integration of means other than language and its literatefunctioning in the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge.This addresses concerns raised in the opening lines of thissection. Fast-changing knowledge can be acquired through meansadapted to its dynamics. As these means, such as interactivemultimedia, virtual reality programs, and genetic computation,change, the experience of accessing knowledge becomes, inaddition, one of understanding the transitory means involved instoring and presenting it. Many practical experiences are basedon knowledge that no other means, literacy- based means included,could effectively make available. From advanced brain surgery atneuronal levels to the deployment of vast networks, whichsupport not only e-mail but also many other meaningful humaninteractions-from space exploration to memeticengineering-focused understanding and a whole new gamut of highlyefficient practical experiences, involving knowledge neverbefore available, make up the pragmatic framework of thecivilization of illiteracy.

Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous

At least 700 artificial languages are on record. Behind each ofthese there is a practical experience in respect to whichnatural language functions in a less than desirable manner.There is a language on record that addressesleft-hand/right-hand biases. There is one, authored by S. H.Elgin, in which gender biases are reversed (Láadan). And thereis Inda, a language constructed like a work of art. There areexotic languages written for certain fictional worlds: J.R.R.Tolkien's Elvish, or the language of the Klingons of Star Trekfame, or Anthony Burgess's Nadsat, the language of the yobbs inA Clockwork Orange. And there are scientifically orientedattempts to structure a language: James Cooke Brown inventedLoglan to be a logic language. Sotos Ochado (almost 100 yearsbefore Brown) invented a language based on the classificationsof science. Some artificial languages of the past correspond toobvious pragmatic functions. Ars Magna, designed by Ramon Llul(celebrated in history books dedicated to precursors of thedigital age), was to be a language of missionaries. LinguaIgnota, attributed to the legendary Abbess Hildegard, is alanguage of practical monastic experiences extended well beyondthe performance of the liturgy.

When we acknowledge these languages we implicitly acknowledgeattempts to improve the performance of language functions. Insome cases, the effort is driven by the goal of transcendingbarriers among languages; in others, of getting a betterdescription of the world, with the implicit hope that this wouldfacilitate mastery of it. Awareness of the fact that language isnot a neutral means of expression, communication, andsignification, but comes loaded with all the characteristics ofour practical endeavors, prejudices included, motivated attemptsto generate languages reflecting an improved view of the world.Regardless of the intention, and especially of the success theyhad, such languages allow us a closer look at their cognitivecondition, and hence at their contribution to increases in theefficiency of human practical activities.

Increased expressive power, as in the artificial languagesinvented by Tolkien and Burgess, or in the language of theKlingons, is an objective relatively easy to comprehend.Propagated by means of literacy and within the literateexperience, such languages are accepted primarily as artisticconventions. Precision is the last quality they aim for;expressive richness is their goal. These are languages ofsublime ambiguity. Those seeking precision will find it inLoglan, or better yet in the languages of computer programming.Disseminated by means contradicting and transcending theassumptions of literacy, and within a pragmatics requiring meansof higher efficiency, programming languages, from Cobol andFortran to C, C++, Lisp, or Java, are accepted for theirfunctionality. They are not for poetry writing, as the family ofexpressive artificial languages are not for driving a computeror its peripherals. These are languages of never-failingunivocality. With such languages, we can control the function,and even the logic of the language. These languages areconceived in a modular fashion and can be designed to optimallyserve the task at hand. Among the functions pursued areprovability, optimization, and precision. Among the logics thatcan be used are classical propositonal logic, intuitionisticpropositional logic, modal logic, temporal logic, and others.

Reflecting human obsession with a universal language, someartificial constructs advance hypotheses regarding the nature ofuniversality. Dedicated, like many before him, to the idea of auniversal language, François Sondre (1827) invented a languagebased on the assumption that music comes the closest totranscending boundaries among various groups of people. Imaginea theory expressed as a melody, communication accomplished bymusic, or the music of the law and law enforcement. There is insuch a language enough room for expression and precision, butalmost no connection to the pragmatic dimension of humanself-constitution. If time is, as we know, encoded in music, theexperience of space is only indirectly present. Accordingly,its functioning might address the universality of harmony andrhythm, but not aspects of pragmatics which are of a differentnature.

A category of so-called controlled languages is alsoestablishing itself. A controlled language is a subset(constrained in its vocabulary, grammar, and style) of anatural language adapted to a certain activity. Artificiallanguages are products inspired and motivated by the functioningof our so-called natural language. Their authors wanted to fixsomething, or at least improve performance of the languagemachine in some respect. In order to understand the meaning oftheir effort, we should look into how language relates thepeople constituted in the language to the world in which theylive. Let's start with the evolution of the word and its relationto the expression of thoughts and ideas, that is, from theunivocal (one-to-one relation to what is expressed) to theambiguous (one-to-many relation).

Systems of univocal signs participate in the production of ideasonly to a small degree. As an outgrowth of signals, initialsigns are univocal. Feathers are definitely not from fish ormammals; blood stains are from wounds; four-legged animals leavedifferent marks than biped humans. Polysemy (more than onemeaning assignable to the sign) is a gradual acquisition andreflects the principle of retroaction of meaning on the carrier:words, drawings, sounds, etc. A drawing of an animal points towhat is depicted, or to things associated with the animal: thesoftness of fur, savage behavior, meat, etc.

Philosophy and literature (and the arts, in general) becamepossible only at a certain level of language development broughtabout by the practical experience of society confronted with newtasks related to its survival and further evolution. Thephilosopher, for example, resorts to common speech (verballanguage) but uses it in an uncommon way: metasemically,metaphorically, metaphysically. Ancient philosophy, importanthere for its testimony regarding language and literacy, is stillso metaphoric that it can be read as literature, and actuallywas enjoyed as such. Modern philosophy (post-Heidegger) showshow relations (which it points out and dwells upon) haveabsorbed the related. As a formalized argumentation, freed ofrestrictions characteristic of literacy, but also so much lessexpressive than the philosophy of the written word and theendless interpretations it makes possible, philosophy generatesits own motivations and justifications. Its practicalconsequences, within a pragmatics based on different forms ofsemiotic functioning than those of literacy, diminishconstantly.

The distance between the verbal and the significance of the ideais itself a parameter of the evolution from nature to culture.Words such as space, time, matter, motion, become possible onlyafter experience in writing. But once written, there is nothingleft of the direct, probably intuitive, human experience of spaceand time, of experience with matter in its various concreteforms, or of the experience of motion (of the human body orother bodies, some flying, some swimming, running, falling).Visual representations-other forms of writing-are closer to whatthey report about: the Cartesian coordinates for space, theclock for a cyclical perception of time, etc. They expressparticular instances of relations in space or time, orparticular aspects of matter or motion.

The word is arbitrary in relation to the idea it embodies. Theidea itself, getting its life in instances of activity, isknowledge practically revealed in the order of nature orthought. In expressing the idea, rational rigor andexpressiveness collide. Synthesizing ideas is an instance of theself-constitution of the human being. Ideas express the implicitwill of the human being to externalize them (what Marcuse called"the imperative quality" of thought). Once written, words notonly defy the ephemerality of the sounds of speech, but alsoenter the realm of potentially conflicting interpretations.These interpretations result from the conversion of the way weuse words in different pragmatic contexts.

To be literate means to be in control of language, but it alsomeans acceptance and awareness of being hostage to theexperiences of the past in which its rules were shaped. Whenspelling, for instance, is disassociated from the origin of theword, a totally arbitrary new realm of language is established,one in which transitory conventions replace permanency (or theillusion of permanency), and the appearance of super-temporalityof ideas is questioned. Each idea is the result of choices in acertain paradigm of existence. Its concrete determination, i.e.,realization as meaning, comes through its insertion in apragmatic context. When the context changes, the idea might beconfirmed, contradicted (it becomes equivocal), or open to manyinterpretations (it becomes ambiguous). To give an example, theidea of democracy went through all these stages from its earlyembodiment in Greek society to its liberal application, and evenself-negation, in the civilization of illiteracy. It means onething- the power of people-but in different contexts, dependingon how people was defined and how power was exercised. It meansso many things in its new contexts that some people reallywonder if it actually means anything at all anymore.

Literacy made communication of ideas possible within a scale ofhumankind well served by linear relations and in search ofproportional growth. But when ideas come to expression in afaster rhythm, and turn in shorter cycles from the univocal tothe ambiguous stage, the medium of literacy no longer doesjustice either to their practical function or to the dynamics ofan individual's continuous self-constitution. Moreover, it seemsthat ideas themselves, as forms of human projection, are lessnecessary under the new projection of pragmatic circ*mstances weexamine. What once seemed almost as the human's highestcontribution impacts today's society less and less. We live in aworld dominated by methods and products, within which previousideas have, so it seems, cultural significance, at most.Knowledge is reduced to information; understanding is onlyoperational. Artificial languages, which keep multiplying, aremore and more geared towards methods and products. In theinterconnected world of digitally disseminated information, wedo not need Esperanto, but rather languages that unify theincreasing variety of machines and programs we use in our newexperiences on the World Wide Web. Efficiency in this worldrefers to transactions which do not necessarily involve humanbeings. Independent agents, active in business transactions ofwhat 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, theNetconomy is more a promise than a reality. The functioning ofsuch agents allows us to see how the metaphor of languagefunctioning reverts to its literal meaning in the civilizationof 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 camea relatively long way before reaching this condition. Inprelinguistic forms, graphic representation had its object inreality-the re-presentation of the absent. What is present neednot be represented. The direction impressed on visualrepresentation is from past to present. What must be retained isthe originating tendency of distancing in respect to the presentand 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 aboutthe absent that is not seen (or heard, felt, smelled) for futurerelationships between human beings and their environment. Theimage belongs to nature. That which is communicated is the wayof seeing or perceiving it, not what is actually seen. Theexecution of the written sign is not its realization asinformation, as is the case with pictographic representations,some leading to the making of things (tools, artifacts). Whatmatters is not how something is written, but what it means. Arelatively small number of signs-the alphabet, punctuation anddiacritical marks-participate in the infinite competence ofwriting.

No matter how we conceive of human thought, its stabilizationcomes about with that of writing. The present captured inwriting loses its impact of immediate action. No written wordhas 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 languagewithin human praxis. It is not accidental (cf. Leroi-Gourhan)that spatial establishment (in village-type settlements) and theestablishment of language in writing (also spatial in nature)are synchronous. But here a third component, the language ofdrawings, no matter how primitive, helping in the making ofthings related to shelter and to work, needs to be acknowledged,too.

This is the broader context leading to the great moment of Greekphilosophy in the temporal context of alphabetization, and thecultural context of all kinds of forms of craftsmanship,architecture probably in the lead. Socrates, as the philosopherof thinking and discovering truth through dialogue, defendedoral culture. Or at least that is what Plato wanted us tobelieve when he mentioned Socrates' opposition to writing. Thegreat artisans of Socrates' time shared this attitude. Forbuilding temples, conceiving tools, creating all kinds of usefulobjects, writing is not a prerequisite. Heuristics andmaieutics, as methods of questioning human choices, those ofcraftsmen included, and generating new options, are essentiallyoral. They presuppose the philosopher's, or the architect's,physical presence. Not too much has changed since, if weconsider how the disciplines of design and engineering are taughtand exercised. But a lot is changing, as design and engineeringpractical activities rely more and more on digital processing.Computational practical experiences, as well as geneticengineering or memetics, are no longer in continuation of thosefounded on literacy.

Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia

The history of culture has recorded numerous attacks againstwriting, culminating, probably, in Marshall McLuhan's philosophy(1964): alphabetic cultures have uniformized, fragmented, andsequentialized 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, ofcourse, has for the West long meant uniform and continuous andsequential. In other words, we have confused reason withliteracy, and rationalism with a single technology." ThatMcLuhan failed to acknowledge the complementary language ofdesign and engineering, with its own rationality, is ashortcoming, but does not change the validity of the argument.The consequences of these attacks-as much as they can be judgedfrom the historical perspective we have since gained-havenevertheless not been the abatement of writing or of itsinfluence. In the same vein, the need to proceed to anoral-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 unitingoral (instructions to those transposing the plan into a product)and visual cultures. Many such plans, embodying ideas andconcepts probably as daring as those we read in manuscripts andlater in books, vanished. Some of the artifacts they created didwithstand the test of time. Even if the domination of thewritten word somehow resulted in a relatively low awareness ofthe role drawings played over time, experiences were shaped bythem and knowledge transmitted through them. Drawings areholistic units of a complexity difficult to compare to that of atext.

The meaning conferred by the intermediary of writing is broughtabout through a process of generalization, orre-individualization: What is it for the individual reading andunderstanding it? It inversely travels the route that led fromspeech to writing, from the concrete to the abstract, from theanalytic to the synthetic function of language. At any giventime, it looks as though we have, on the one hand, the finitereality of signs (alphabet, words, idiomatic expressions) and,on the other, the practically infinite reality embodied in thelanguage sequences or ideas expressed. In view of this, thequestion arises regarding the source of ideas and the relationbetween signs (words, in particular) and their assignedmeanings, or the content that can be communicated using thelanguage. Meaning is conjured in Western culture through additivemechanisms, similar to those of mixing pigments. In Easternculture, meaning is based on subtractive mechanisms, similar tothose of mixing light.

Alphabetic writing, although more simple and stabilized, isreally more difficult than ideographic writing. The experiencefrom which it results is one of abstraction. Henceforth, itsubjects the readers of the alphabetic text to the task offilling the enormous gap separating the graphic sign from itsreferent with their own experience. The assumption of theliterate practical experience is that literacy can substitute forthe reference through history or culture. Readers of ideographictexts have the advantage of the concreteness of therepresentation. Even if Chinese characters stand for specificChinese words, as John DeFrancis convincingly showed, theexperience of that writing system remains different from that ofWestern alphabets. Since every language integrates its ownhistory as the summary of the practical activity in which it wasconstituted, reading in a language of a foreign experience meansthat one must step- by-step invent this writing.

Research undertaken in the last 15 years shows that at a certainstage, aphasia brings on a regression from alphabet to imagereading as design, as pictographic, iconic reading. Letters losetheir linguistic identity. The aphasic reader sees only lines,intersections, and shapes. Ideas expressed in writing crumblelike buildings shaken by an earthquake. What is still perceivedis the similarity to concrete things. The decline from theabstract to the concrete can be seen as a socio-cultural accidenttaking place against the background of a natural (biological)accident.

In our days we encounter symptoms similar to those describedabove, 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. Fora while, graffiti was criminalized. Later on it was framed asart, and the market absorbed the new product among the manyothers it negotiates. What we probably refused to see is howdeep the literacy of graffiti goes, where its roots are, how widethe extensions, and how much aphasia in its writing and reading.After all, it was not only in the New York subway that trainswere literally turned into moving papers or moving books,issued as often as authority was circumvented. Much of the publichated graffiti because it obliterated legitimate communicationand a sense of neatness and order that literacy continuouslyreinforced. But many also enjoyed it. Rap music is the musicalequivalent of graffiti. Gang rituals and fights are acontinuation of these. Messages exchanged on the datahighways-from e-mail to Web communication-often display the samecharacteristics of aphasia. Concreteness is obsessively pursued.:) (the smiley) renders expressions of pleasure useless, while(: (the grince) warns of being flamed. On the digital networksof today's furious exchange of information, collective aphasiais symptomatic of many changes in the cognitive condition of thepeople involved in its practical experiences. Neitheropportunistic excitement nor dogmatic rejection of thisfar-reaching experience can replace the need to understand whatmakes it necessary and how to best benefit from it. More privatelanguages and more codes than ever circulate as kilo- andmegabytes among individuals escaping any form of regulation.

On the increasingly rewarding practical experiences ofnetworking, literacy is challenged by transitory, partialliteracies. Literacy is exposed in its infatuation andemptiness, although not discarded from among the means ofexpression and communication defining the human being. It isoften ridiculed for not being appropriate to the newcirc*mstances of the practical and spiritual experience of ahumankind that has outgrown all its clothes, toys, books,stories, tools, and even conflicts.

A legitimate follow-up question is whether the literateexperience of the word contributes to its progressive lack ofdetermination, or the change of context affects theinterpretation, i.e., the semantic shift from determinate tovague. Probably both factors play a role in the process. On theone hand, literacy progressively exhausts its potential. On theother, new contexts make it simultaneously less suited as thedominant medium for expression, communication, and significationof ideas. For instance, the establishment of a vague meaning ofdemocracy in political discourse leads to the need for strongcontexts, such as armed conflicts, for ascertaining it. In thelast 10 years we have experienced many such conflicts, but wewere not prepared to see them in conjunction with the forces atwork in facilitating higher levels of efficiency according tothe new scale that humankind has reached.

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

These and other examples require a few more words of explanationregarding changes in the functions of language. It is known thatthe 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 testifymore to those who drew them than to what the drawing is about.The decadent literacy of mystified messages does the same. Itspeaks about their writers more than about their subject, bethis history, sociology, or anthropology. And the increased oraland visual communication, supported by technology, defines thepost-literate condition of the human cognitive dimension. Thetransition from speech to writing corresponds to the shift fromthe pragmatic-affective level of human praxis to thepragmatic-rational level of linear relations among people andtheir environment. It takes place in the context of theevolution from the syncretic to the analytic. The transition fromliteracy to literacies corresponds to the pragmatics ofnon-linear relations, and results from the evolution fromanalytic to synthetic. These affirmations, at least as far as thecivilization of literacy is concerned, apply to the universe ofEuropean cultures and their later extensions. The cultures ofthe 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 formedin the sentence structure of speech, which is fundamentallydifferent in the two cultures mentioned. The imperative energy ofthe act of expressing confers on the Chinese language, forexample, a continuous state of birth (speech in the act). Thepreeminence of the act in Oriental culture is reflected by thecentral position the verb occupies. Concentration around theverb guides thought towards the relationship between conditionand conditioned.

The experience of logic characteristic of European cultures(under the distinctive mark of classical Greek philosophy) showsthat the main instrument of thinking is the noun. It is freerthan 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 searchfor unity between species and genus. European writing andOriental ideographic writing have each participated in thisprocess of defining logic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics.From a historic perspective, they are complementary. Recallingthe history of knowledge and history per se, we can say that theEuropean Occident achieved the meaning of knowledge and worldcontrol, while the Orient achieved self-knowledge andself-control. It would seem utopian (and with vast historical,social, ideological, and political implications) to imagine aworld harmoniously uniting these meanings. However, this wouldimply, as the reader can easily surmise, changes in the statusof literacy in both cultures. This is exactly the direction ofthe changes we witness, as languages function towardsconvergence in the two cultures mentioned.

Literacy is not only a medium of exchange between cultures; italso sets boundaries among them. This holds true for bothWestern and Far Eastern (and any other) civilization. Japan, forinstance, despite the spectacular effort of assimilation anddevelopment of new technologies, maintains inside its nationalboundaries a framework quite well suited to its traditionalliteracy. Outside, it assimilates other literacies. In differentways, this holds true for China. It is willing to build itsinternal network (Intranet) without connecting it to theall-encompassing net (Internet) through which we experience someaspects of globality.

The organization of hierarchy, which made the object of manystudies telling the West why Japan succeeds better in economicterms, is centered around the unity semmai-kohai, i.e.,senior-junior. Within the pragmatic framework of a literacydifferent from that of the Western world, a logic and ethicspertinent to the distinction mentioned evolved. The moral basisof the precedence of the senior over the junior is pragmatic innature. The Chinese formula (cho-jo-no-jo) results from apractical experience encoded not only in language but also inthe system of ranking. In fact, what is acknowledged is bothexperience and performance, expressed by the Japanese in thecategories of kyu, referring to proficiency, and dau, referringto 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 nationallanguage can serve for insulation, while adoptedlanguage-English, in particular-can serve as a bridge to therest of the world. Nevertheless, Japanese society, like allcontemporary societies, is more and more confronted with theworld in its globality, and with the need to constituteappropriate means for expression, communication and significationpertinent to the global world. While Japan is an example of manyliterate prejudices at work, rigidly hierarchic, discriminatingagainst women and foreigners, dogmatic, it also exemplifies theunderstanding of changing circ*mstances for human practicalexperiences of self-constitution as Japanese, and as members ofthe integrated world community as well. Consequently, newliteracies emerge within its hom*ogeneous cultural environment,as they emerge in countries such as China, Korea, and Indonesia,and in the Arab nations. As a result, we experience changes inthe nature of the relations between the cultures of the FarEast, Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and the West. Theprocess expands, probably more slowly than one might expect, tothe African and South American continents.

Global economy requires new types of relations among nations andcultures, and these relations need to correspond to the dynamicsof the new pragmatic framework that has emerged against thebackground of the new scale of human activity. The identity urgeexpressed in the multiculturalism trend of our days will find inthe past its most unreliable arguments. The point is proven bythe naive misrepresentation of past events, facts, and figuresthrough the activists of the movement. Multiculturalismcorresponds to the dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy:from the uniqueness and universality of one dominating mode toplurality, not limited to race, lifestyle, or cultures. Whoeversees multiculturalism as an issue of race, or feminism as one ofgender (against the background of history), will not be able todesign a course of action to best serve those whose differentcondition is now acknowledged. A different condition results indifferent abilities, and thus different ways of projecting one'sidentity in the practical experience of self-constitution. Thepast is irrelevant; emphasis is always on the future.

Language and Logic

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

Anyone even marginally educated in the history of logic willspontaneously associate the experience described here withLevy-Bruhl's controversial law of participation. According tothis law, "In the collective representations of primitivementality, objects, beings, phenomena can be, in a way we cannotunderstand, themselves and something different at the sametime." The relatively undifferentiated, syncretic humanexperience at the time of the inception of notation and writingtestifies to awareness of very unusual connections. Research ofartifacts originating with primitive tribes makes clear therelative dominance of visual thinking and functioning of humanbeings along the line of what we would today call multi-valuedlogics.

The world of non A, although placed by its author in somefictional future, seems to describe a logic prevalent in aremote time. Even today, as anthropologists report, there aretribes in the Amazon jungles and in remote Eskimo territorieswhose members claim to be not only the beings they are, but alsosomething else, such as a bird, plant, or even a past event.This is not a way of speaking, but a different way ofascertaining identity. Inferences in this pragmatic context gobeyond those possible in the logical world of truth andfalsehood that Aristotle described. Multi-valued logic isprobably a good name for describing the production of suchinferences, but not necessarily the explanation we seek for whyit is that self-constitution involves such mechanisms, and howthey work. Moreover, even if we could get both questionsanswered, we would still wonder-because our ownself-constitution involves a different logic-what the relationis between the language experience and the logical framework ofthose living in the non A world of ancient times. Practicalexperiences with images, dominant in such tribes, explains whythere is a logical continuum, instead of a clear-cut associationwith truth and falsehood, or with present and absent.Multi-valued logics of different types, corresponding todifferent pragmatic contexts, were actually tamed when languagewas experienced in its written form and thinking was stabilizedin written expressions. Awareness of connections distinctlyintegrated in human experience and quantified in a body ofintelligible knowledge progressively clears the logical horizon.As many-valued logics were subdued, entities were constitutedonly as what the experience made them to be, and no longersimultaneously many different things.

The change from orality to the practical experience of writtenlanguage affected many aspects of human interaction. Writingintroduced 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 ofquestioning, based on its implicit analyticity. Over timewritten language led to associations. Some were in relation toits visual aspect. Other associations were made to writingpatterns, a kind of repetition. Integrative by its nature,writing stimulates the quest for comparing experiences ofself-constitution by comparing what was recorded. Theexpectation of accurate recording is implicit in the experienceof writing. The rather skeletal incipient written language makesvisible connections which within orality faded away.

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

Time and space awareness are gained relatively slowly. Inparallel, connections to experiences in time and space areexpressed in an incipient awareness of how they affect theoutcome of any practical experience. No less than signs, logic isrooted also in the pragmatics of human self-constitution, andprobably comes into existence together with them. Co-presence,of what is different or what is alike, incompatibilities,exclusions, and similar time or space situations bcomedisassociated from actions, objects, and persons and form awell-defined layer of experience. Mechanisms of inference, fromobjects, actions, persons, situations, etc., evolve from simplerconfigurations or sequences of connections. Writing is moreeffective than rituals or oral expression in capturinginferences, although not necessarily in providing a mechanismfor sharing. What is gained in breadth is lost in depth.

As human practical experiences get more effective they alsobecome more complex. The cognitive effort substitutes more andmore for the physical. Stabilized in inferences based onincreasingly more encompassing cycles of activity-agriculture isdefinitely more extensive than hunting or foodgathering-experience is transmitted more and more in itsskeletal form, deprived of the richness of the individualcharacteristics of those identified through it. Less informationand more sequences of successful action-this is how from therichness of connections logic of actions takes shape. The accentis on time and space, or better yet on what we call, inretrospect, references. As writing supplants time-based means ofexpression and communication (rituals, first of all), temporallogic begins to lose in importance.

Once the pragmatic horizon of human life changes, literacy, inconjunction with the logic it houses, constitutes its invisiblegrid, its implicit metrics. The understanding of anything thatis not related to our literate self-constitution remains outsidethis understanding. Literate language is a reductionist machine,which we use to look at the world from the perspective of ourown experience. Aware of experiences different from ours, atleast of their possibility, we would like to understand them,knowing perfectly well that once captured in our experience oflanguage, their own condition is negated. Oral educationmaintained the parent-child continuum, and memory, i.e.,experience, was directly transmitted. Literacy introduced meansfor handling discontinuity and, above all, differences. Itstored, in some form of record, everything pertaining to theexperience. But as record, it constituted a new experience, withits own inherent values.

As a reductionist device, writing reduces language to a body ofaccepted ways of speaking, recording, and reading governed bytwo kinds of rules: pertinent to connections (logic), andpertinent to grammar. The process was obviously more elaborateand less focused. In retrospect, we can understand how writingaffected the experience of human self-constitution throughlanguage. It is therefore understandable why those who,following the young Wittgenstein, take the logic of language forgranted, seeing only the need to bring to light what isconcealed in the signs of language, are wrong. Language does nothave an intrinsic logic; each practical experience extractslogic from the experience and contaminates all means of humanexpression by the inference from what is possible to what isnecessary.

Logics behind the logic

The function of coordination resulting from the use of languageevolved over time. What did not change is the structure of thecoordinating mechanism. Logic as we know it, i.e., a disciplinelegitimized by literate use of language, is concerned withstructural aspects of various languages. The attempt to explainhow and why conditions leading to literacy were created, afterthe writing entered the realm of human experience, can onlybenefit from an understanding of the coordinating mechanism ofwriting and literacy, which includes logic but is not reducibleto it. This mechanism consisted of rules for correct languageuse (grammar), awareness of connections specific to thepragmatic framework (logic), means of persuasion (rhetoric),selection of choices (heuristics), and argumentation(dialectics). Together, they give us an image of how complex theprocess of self-constitution is. Separately, they give us insightinto the fragmented experiences of language use, rationality,conviction, selection, actions, and beliefs. There is a logicbehind the (relative) normal course of events, and also behindany crisis, if we want to extend the concept of logic so as toinclude the rational description or explanation of whatevermight have led to the crisis. And there are logics behind thelogic, 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, ofscience, of logic itself, the logic of literacy, are examples ofthe variety people consider and establish as their object ofinterest, subjecting such logic to the test of completeness(does it apply to everything?), consistency (is itcontradictory?), and sometimes transitivity.

Independent of the subject (religion, art, ethics, a precisescience, literacy, etc.), human beings establish the particularlogic as a network of reciprocal relations and functionaldependencies according to which truth (religious, artistic,ethical, etc.), relevant to the practical experience in morethan one way, can and should be pursued. This logic, anextension of the incipient awareness of connections, became aformal system, which some researchers in philosophy andpsychology still believe is somehow attached to the brain (or tothe mind), ensuring its correct functioning. Indeed, successfulaction was seen as a result of logic, hard-wired as part of thebiological endowment. Other researchers perceived logic as aproduct of our experience, in particular thinking, as thisapplies to our self-constitution in the natural world and theworld we ourselves created. As a corpus of rules and criteria,logic applies to language, but there is a logic of humanactions, a logic of art, a logic of morals, etc., described byrules for preserving consistency, maintaining integrity,facilitating causal inference and other relevant cognitiveoperations, such as articulating a hypothesis or drawingconclusions.

An old question sneaks in: Is there a universal logic, somethingthat in its purity transcends differences in language, inbiological characteristics, in differences, period? The answerdepends on whom one asks. From the perspective assumed so far,the answer is definitely no. Differences are emphasized, evencelebrated here, precisely because they extend to the differentlogics that pertain to various practical experiences. Formulatedas such, the answer is elusive because, after all, logic isexpressed through language, and once expressed, it constitutes abody of knowledge which in turn participates in practical humanexperiences. No stronger proof of this can be given than theBoolean logic embedded in computer hardware and programminglanguages. A more appropriate answer can be given once we noticethat major language systems embody different logical mechanismsthat pertain to language's coordinating function.

The main logical systems require our attention because they arerelated to what makes literacy necessary and, under newpragmatic conditions, less necessary, if not superfluous. Sincethe civilization of illiteracy is viewed also from theperspective of the changes resulting in a new scale of humanpraxis, it becomes necessary to see whether in the global worldforces of uniformity or forces of heterogeneity and diversity,embodied in various literacies and the logic attached to them, orassociated with their use, are at work. As almost all scholarsagree, Aristotle is the father of the logic that applies to theWestern language system. Writing helped to encode his logic ofproper inference from premises expressed in sentences. Literacygave this logic a house, and a sense of validity and permanencythat scholars accept almost as religion. For Eastern systems,contributions of equal value and relevance can be found in themajor writings of ancient China and Japan, as well as in Hindudocuments. Instead of a superficial overview of the subject, Iprefer to quote Fung-Yu-lan's precise observation regarding theparticular focus of Chinese philosophy (which is alsorepresentative of the Far East): "Philosophy must not be simplythe object of cognition, it must also be the object of anexperience." The resulting expression of this endeavor differsfrom the Indian, in search of a certain state of mind, notformulations of truth, and from Western philosophicalstatements. It takes the form of concise, often enigmatic, andusually paradoxical statements or aphorisms. A very goodpresentation of this experience is given in a famous text byChuang-tzu: "The words serve to fix the ideas, but once the ideais grasped, there is no need to think about words. I wish I couldfind somebody who has ceased to think of words and have him withme to talk to."

The logic of the Indo-European languages is based on therecognition of the object-action distinction, expressed inlanguage 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 thehuman as zoon politikon- community (polis), animal (zoon)-and hislogic is an attempt to discover what was the cognitive structurethat ensured proper inference from premises expressed insentences. Probably as much as some who today hope for a similarachievement through formal languages, he wanted logic to be asindependent as possible of the language used, as well asindependent of the particular language spoken by peoplebelonging to different communities.

Parallel to the language housing Aristotle's logic was adifferent system in which the verb (referring to action) wasassimilated in the object, as in the Chinese and Japaneselanguages. 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 iscovered), and if b is c (the cover are clouds), then a is c(cloudy sky). Non-predicative constructions do not come to aconclusion but continue from one condition to another, as inapproximately: Being covered, covers being clouds, cloudingbeing associated with rain, rain…and so on. That is, they areopen-ended connections in status nascendi. We notice thatAristotelian logic derives the truth of the inference from thetruth of the premise, based on a formal relation independent ofboth. In non- predicative logic, language only points to possiblechains of relations, implicitly acknowledging that others aresimultaneously possible without deriving knowledge, or withoutsubjecting conclusions to a formal test of their truth orfalsehood. To the abstract and formal representation ofknowledge inference, it opposes a model of concrete and naturalrepresentation in which distinctions regarding quality are moreimportant than quantity distinctions.

Based on observations already accumulated, first of all thatideographic writing keeps the means of expression very close tothe object represented in language, we can understand whylanguages expressed in ideographic writing are not adapted to thekind of thinking Aristotle and his followers developed and whichculminated in the Western notion of science, as well as in theWestern system of values. The successive rediscovery of FarEastern modes of representation and of the philosophy growing outof this very different way of thinking, as well as of theinterest in subtleties rather uncommon to our culture, resultedin the many attempts we witness to transcend the boundariesbetween these fundamentally different language structures. Thepurpose is to endow our language, and thus our thinking andemotional life, with dimensions structurally impossible withinthe Western framework of existence.

The logic of dependency-the Japanese amé-is one of embeddedrelations 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 misunderstandingsbetween the Western world and Japan. Of course, it can besimplified as to mean that if a company and an employee acceptit, and they do so since amé is structurally embedded in thelife of people, both parties will be faithful to each other nomatter what. Amé can also be simplified to mean a mutualrelationship within families (all prejudices included), or amongfriends. But as we get closer to the practical experience of amé(Takeo Doi's writing on the "anatomy of dependence" helps us agreat deal in this attempt), we realize that it constitutes aframework, marking not only distinct decisions (logicallyjustified), but an entire context of thinking, feeling, acting,evaluating. It is reflected in the attitude towards language andin the education system, inculcating dependency as a logic thattakes priority over the individual. Evidently, the only way tointegrate the logic of amé into our logic-if indeed we thinkthat this is right, moreover that it is possible-is throughpractical experience. Although amé seems to point to some limitsinherent in our language, it actually reveals limits in ourself-constitution, as part of establishing a network ofgeneralized mutual relationships as part of our experience.

It should be added that practically a mirrored phenomenon occursin the Far East, where what can be perceived as the limitationsof the language system and the logic it supports (or embodies),triggered an ever-growing interest in Western culture and manyattempts to copy or to quickly assimilate it in vocabulary andbehavior. From the Indian universe comes not only the mysticismof the Vedic texts, but also the stubborn preoccupation with thehuman condition (both the aspect of conditioning and of whatMircea Eliade called de-conditioning). This resulted in theattraction it exercises on many people looking for analternative to what they perceive as an over-conditionedexistence, usually translated as pressure of performance andcompetitive attitudes. Some opted out of literacy, and generallyout of their culture, in search of liberation (mukti), apractical experience of lower preoccupation with the useful andhigher spiritual goals, and of obstinate refusal of logic. (Somereally never fully appropriated or internalized the philosophy,but adopted a lifestyle emulating commercialized models, theexotic syntax of escapism.)

In short, and trying not to preclude future discussion of thesephenomena, the historic development of language and logic withinthe many cultures we know of-more than the Western and FarEastern mentioned-bears witness to the very complex relationbetween who and what people are: their language and the logicthat the language makes possible and later embodies. The hunterin the West, and the hunter in the Far East, in Africa, India,Papua, the fishermen, the forager, etc. relate in different waysto their environment and to their peers in the community. The waytheir relatively similar experiences are embodied in languageand other means of expression plays an important role in formsof sharing, religion, art, in the establishment of a valuesystem, and later on education and identity preservation. Thereare common points, however, and the most relevant refer torelations established in the work process, as these affectefficiency. These commonalties prove relevant to understandingthe role language, in conjunction with logic, exercises onvarious stages of social and economic development.

A plurality of intellectual structures

Since scale (of humankind, of groups performing coherentactivities, of activities themselves) plays such an importantrole in the dynamics of human self-constitution throughpractical activities involving language, it is only fair toquestion whether logic is affected by scale. Again, the answerwill depend upon who is asked. Logic as we study it has nothingto do with scale. An inference remains preserved no matter howmany people make it, or study it, for that matter. But thisreflects the universalistic viewpoint. Once we question theconstitution of logic itself, and trace it to practicalexperiences resulting in the awareness of connections, itbecomes less obvious that logic is independent of scale.Actually, some experiences are not even possible without havingreached a critical mass, and the relation between simple andcomplex is not one of progression. But it is certainly amulti-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 insidethe tribe, and between the tribe and the relatively limitedenvironment of existence. The logic (or pre-logic, to adapt thejargon of some anthropologists) specific to this scalecorresponds to the dominance of instincts and intuitions, and isexpressed within the visually dominant means of expression andcommunication characteristic of what is called the primitivementality. From all we know, memory plays a major role inshaping patterns of activity. The power of discrimination(through vision, hearing, smell, etc.) is extraordinary;adaptability is much higher than that of humans in modernsocieties. These tribe members live in a phase of disjointgroups, unaware even of biological commonalties among suchgroups, focused on themselves in pursuing survival strategiesnot much different from those of other living creatures whoshare the same environment. Once these groups start relating toeach other, the practical experiences of self-constitutiondiversify. Cooperation and exchange increase, and language, inmany varieties, becomes part of the self-constitution ofvarious human types.

Languages originate in areas associated with the early nuclei ofa*griculture. These are places where the population couldincrease, since in some ways the pragmatics was effective enoughto provide for a greater number of people. Probably primitiveagriculture is the first activity in which a scale threshold wasreached and a new quality, constituted in the practicalexperience of language, emerged. It is also an activity with aprecise logic embodied in the awareness of a multitude of levelswhere connections are critical for the outcome of the activity,i.e., for the well being of those practicing it. The sacrednessof place, to which the Latin root of the word culture (cultus)refers, is embodied in the practical activity with everythingpertinent to human experience. Logic captures the connectionbetween the place and the activity. In a variety ofembodiments-from ways to sequence an action to the use ofavailable resources, how to pursue a plan, craft tools,etc.-logic is integrated in culture and, in turn, participatesin shaping it. It is a two-way dependency which increases overtime and results in today's logical machines that define aculture radically different from the culture of the mechanicalcontraption. There are differences in the type of intelligence,which need to be acknowledged. And there are differencesresulting from the variety of natural contexts of practicallife, which we need to consider. Commonalties of the survivalexperience and further development should also be placed in theequation of human self-constitution.

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

One would almost expect the emergence of a universal logic and auniversal language (attempts were and are made to facilitatesuch a universalism). Leibniz had visions of an ideal language,a characteristica universalis and a calculus ratiocinator. Sodid many others, from the 17th century on, not realizing that inthe process of diversification of human experiences, their dreambecame progressively less attainable. In parallel, we gave upthe logical inheritance of the past: logic embedded in a varietyof autarchic primitive practical experiences that various groups(in Africa, Asia, Europe, etc.) had up to our time is rapidlybecoming a cultural reference. The scale that such experiencesembody and the logic appropriate to that scale are simplyabsorbed in the larger scale of the global economy. We aresimply no longer in the position to effectively unveil the logicof magical experiences, not even of those rational orrationalizable aspects that refer to the plants, animals, andvarious minerals used by the peoples preceding us for avoidingdisease or treating illness.

In our days, the cultures swinging from the sacred to theprofane, from the primitive to the over-developed, come closertogether. This happens not because everyone wants this tohappen, not even because all benefit (in fact, many give up anidentity-their own way of life-for a condition of non-identitythat characterizes a certain style of living). The process isdriven by the need to achieve levels of efficiency appropriateto the scale humankind reached. The various groups of people areintegrated as humans in the first place (not as tribes, nations,or religions), and consequently a pragmatic framework ofincreasing integration is progressively put in place.

The Euro-centrist (or Western) notion that all types ofintelligence develop towards the Western type (and thus theWestern practice of language culminating in literacy) has beendiscredited many times. The plurality of intellectual structureshas been acknowledged, unfortunately either demagogically or inlip-service to the past, but never as an opening to the future.Literacy eradicated, for valid practical reasons- those of theIndustrial Revolution-heterogeneity, and thus variety from amongthe experiences through which people constitute themselves inthe universe of their experience. When those reasons areexhausted, because new circ*mstances of existence and workrequire a new logic, literacy becomes a hindrance, withoutnecessarily affecting the role of the logic inhabiting it.

The scale of human life and activity, and the associatedprojection of expectations beyond human survival andpreservation, lead less to the need for universal literacy thanto the need for several literacies and for a rich variety oflogical horizons. Since the coordinating mechanism consists oflogic, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics, the new scaleprompts the emergence of new rhetorical devices, among otherthings. It suffices to think about persuasion at the level of theglobal village, or about persuasion at the level of theindividual, as the individual can be filtered in this globalvillage through mechanisms of networking and multimediainteractivity. Logical mechanisms of mass communication arereplaced by logical considerations of increased individualcommunication. Think about new heuristic procedures at work onthe World Wide Web, as well as in market research and inNetconomy transactions. Consider a new dialectic, definitelythat of the infertile opposition between what is proclaimed asvery good and excellent, as we try to convince ourselves thatmediocrity is eradicated by consensus. Fascinating work inmulti-valued logic, fuzzy logic, temporal logic, and many areasof logical focus pertinent to computation, artificialintelligence, memetics, and networking allow progress wellbeyond what the science fiction of the world of non A presentedus with.

The logics of actions

Between the relatively monolithic and uniform ideal of a literatesociety convinced of the virtues of logic, and the pluralisticand heterogeneous reality of partial literacies that transferlogic to machines, one can easily distinguish a change indirection. Persons with a rather adequate literate culture,educated in the spirit of rationality guarded by classic orformal logic, are at a loss when facing the sub-literacies ofspecialized practical endeavors, or the illogical inferences madewithin new fields of human self-constitution. Let us put theirattitude in some perspective. At various stages in humanevolution-for instance, transition from scavenging to hunting, orfrom hunting and foraging to herding and agriculture-peopleexperienced the effects of the erosion of some behavioral codesand projected their new condition in new practical patterns. Onetype of cohesion represented in the declining behavioral code wasreplaced by another; one logic, deferring the code, was followedby others. When interaction among groups of different types ofcohesion occurred, logic was severely challenged. Sometimes, asa result, one logic dominated; other times, compromise wasestablished. Primitive stages are remarkably adaptive to theenvironment.

Our stage, remote in many ways from the wellspring (Ursprung),consists of an appropriated environment within which the effortis to provide a pragmatic framework for high efficiency. Logic,rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics interact inside thisframework. In other words, human evolution goes from sensorialanchoring in the natural world to an artificial (human crafted)world superimposed on the concrete reality-and eventuallyextended into artificial life, one from among the most recentlyestablished fields of scientific inquiry. Within this world,humans no longer restrict the projection of their natural andintellectual condition through one (or very few) comprehensivesign systems. Quite to the contrary, the effort is towardssegmentation, with the aim of reaching not global cohesion, butlocal cohesiveness, corresponding to local optima. Thecomplexity and the nature of the changes within this systemresult in the need for a strategy of segmentation, and a logic,or several, supporting it. In the interaction between a languageand the humans constituted in it, as the embodiment of theirbiological characteristics and of their experience, logicalconflicts are not excluded. After all, the logic of actions,influenced by heuristics as well, and the logic inherent toliteracy are not identical.

Actions bring to mind agents of action and thus the logicintegrated in tools and artifacts. The assumption that the samelogic housed in language is involved in the expression leadingto the making of tools and other objects related to people'sactivity went unchallenged for a long time. Even today,designers and engineers are educated according to an ideal ofliteracy that is expected to reflect in their work therationality 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 howto perform some operations that are part of our continuousexperience of self- constitution in practical activity. Eachdrawing embodies the logic of the future artifact, no matter howuseful or even how ephemeral. There is a large record of literatework from which logical aspects of thinking can be derived.There is a rather small record of drawing, and not too manysurviving artifacts. They were conceived for precise practicalexperiences and usually did not outlast the experience, or theperson who embodied it. Roads, houses, tools, and other objectsindeed survived, but it is not until better tools for drawingitself and better paper became available that a library ofengineering was established.

As a hybrid between art and science, engineering accepts thelogic of scientific discovery only in order to balance itagainst the logic of aesthetic expectations. In the pragmaticframework of the civilization of illiteracy, engineeringdefinitely has a dominant position in respect to theself-constitution of the human being in language- based practicalexperiences. This is due to the impact it has on the efficiencyof human practical experiences and on their almost endlessdiversification.

There is a phase of conflict, a phase of accommodation, and aphase of complementarity when some means (such as language andthe means for visualization used by designers and engineers)replace others, if they do not render them useless. In our timeof experiences involving many more people than ever, ofdistributive transactions, of heterogeneity, and of interactionsthat go beyond the linearity of the sequence, the structuralcharacteristics of literacy interfere with the new dynamics ofhuman development as this is supported by very powerfultechnologies embodying a variety of logical possibilities. Atthis time, the implicit logic of literacy and the new logics (inthe plural) collide in the pragmatic framework.

Within the logic of the literate discourse, followed volensnolens in this book, it should be clear that the attempt tosalvage literacy is the attempt to maintain linear relations,determinism, hierarchy (of values), centralization-which fosteredliteracy-in a framework requiring non-linearity,decentralization, distributed modes of practical experiences,and unstable value (among others). The two frameworks arelogically incompatible. This does not mean that literacy has tobe discarded altogether, or that it will disappear, as cuneiformnotation and pictographic writing did, or that it will bereplaced by drawing or by computer-based language processing. Thelinear will definitely satisfy a vast number of practicalactivities; so will deterministic explanations and centralism(political, religious, technological, etc.), and even an elitistsense of value. But instead of being a universal standard, oreven a goal (to linearize everything that is not linear, toascertain sequences of cause and effect, to find a center andpractice centrality), it will become part of a complex system ofrelations, free of hierarchy-or at least with fast changinghierarchies-valueless, adaptive, extremely distributed.

Of no less significance is the type of logic (and for thatmatter, rhetoric, heuristics, and dialectics) housed inlanguage, i.e., projected from the universe of humanself-constitution in the system of inferences, knowledge, andawareness of the being characteristic of literate frameworks ofpractical experiences. Language successfully captured adualistic logic indebted to the values of truth and falsehood,and supported experiences embodied in the abstract character oflogical rationality. It was complemented by logical symbolismand logical calculus, very successful in formalizing dualism,and in eliminating logical models not fitting the dualisticstructure.

Literacy instilled bivalent logic as another of its invisiblelayers-something is written or not, the written is right orwrong-allowing only quite late, and actually in the realm oflogical formalism, the appearance of multi-valued schemes. Thenon-linearity, vagueness, and fuzziness characteristic of thepost-industrial pragmatic framework opened avenues of high humanefficiency, better adapted to the scale of humankind thatrequired efficiency and eventually made efficiency its majorgoal. 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 ofliteracy (such as history, philosophy, sociology) are not ableto integrate a logic different from the one seated in thepractical experience of reading and writing. This explains, forinstance, computationalism as a new horizon for science, withinwhich multi-valued logic can be simulated even if the computer'sunderlying structure is that of Boolean logic. The literateargument of science and multimedia's non-linear heuristic path toscience are fundamentally different. Each requires a differentlogic and results in a different interaction between those whoconstitute their identity in the practical experience ofscientific experiments and those who constitute their identity inco- participation.

It took longer in the world of predicative logic and in thescience based on analytic power to accept fuzzy logic and tointegrate it in new artifacts, than it took in the world ofnon-predicative logic and in the science based on the power ofsynthesis. Within the universe of non-predicative language,fuzzy logic made it into the design of control mechanisms forhigh-speed trains, as well as into new efficient toasters. It wasaccepted in Japan while it was still debated among experts in theWestern world, until 1993, when a washing machine integratingfuzzy logic was introduced in the market. This fact can go onrecord as more than a mere example in a discussion regarding theimplications of the global economy for the various languagesystems and the logical coordinating mechanisms specific toeach.

Progress in understanding and emulating human thinking shows aprogression from a literacy-based model to a model rooted in thenew pragmatic framework. Rule- based, pattern-matching systemsgeneralize predicate calculus; neural networking is devoted tomimicking the way minds work, in a synthetic neuron-plex array;fuzzy logic addresses the limitations of Boolean calculus andthe nondeterminism of neural networks, and concentrates onmodeling imprecision, ambiguity, and undecidability as these areembodied in new human practical experiences.

Sampling

Within the civilization of literacy, recollection and the logicattached to it are predominantly made through quoting. In theliterate framework, to know something means to be able to writeabout it, thus reconfirming the logic of writing. Lives aresubject to memories, and diaries are our interpreted life,written with some reader in mind: the beloved, one's children, aposterity willing to acknowledge or understand. The literatemeans of sharing in successive practical experiences contain theexpected logic and affect both the experience and itscommunication. Everything seems to originate in the samecontext: to know means to re-live the experience. The literategnoseology, with its implicit logic, is based on continuouslyremaking, reconstituting the experience as a languageexperience. This is why every form of writing based on thestructure embodied in literacy-literary or philosophic,religious, scientific, journalistic, or political-is actuallyrewriting.

The civilization of illiteracy is one of sampling, a conceptoriginating in genetics. To understand what this means, it isuseful to contrast quotation and sampling. Literateappropriation in the form of quotation takes place in thestructure of literacy. Sequences are designed to accept someoneelse's words. A quote introduces the hierarchy desired oracknowledged by invoking authority or questioning it. Authorshipis exercised by producing a context for interpretation andmaintaining literate rules for their expression. Interpretationsare determined by the implicit expectation of reproducing thedeterministic structure of literacy, i.e., its inner logic. Thequote embodies centralism by establishing centers of interestand understanding around the quoted.

Illiterate appropriation corresponds to a dissolution ofhierarchy, to an experience of dissolving it and doing awaywith sequence, authorship, and the rules of logical inference.It questions the notion of elementary meaningful units, extendingchoices beyond well formed sentences, beyond words, beyondmorphemes or phonemes (which always mean a lot to linguists, butalmost nothing to the people constituting themselves in literatelanguage experiences), and beyond formal logic. Thesetechniques of sampling lead to actual undoing. Rhythms of wordscan be appropriated, as writers did long before the technologyof musical sampling became available. So can the structure of asentence be appropriated, the feel of a text, or of many otherforms of expression that are not literacy-based (the visualarts, for instance). Anything pertaining to a writtensentence-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 asone desires, and appropriated as an echo of the experience itembodies. Genetic configurations, as they apply to plants andother living entities, can be sampled as well. Genetic splicingmaintains the relations to the broader genetic texture of plantsor animals. Spliced, a word, a sentence, or a text stillmaintains relations to the experience in which it wasconstituted.

These relations are enormously relativized, subjected to a logicof vagueness. When they relate to what we write, they areempowered by emotional components that the literate experienceexpelled from literate expression. There is room for variation,for spontaneity, for the accidental, where before the rigor andlogic of good writing stood guard against anything that mightdisturb. When they relate to a biological structure, theyconcern specific characteristics, such as composition orperisability. Within the culture of sampling, the expectation ofa shared body of literacy and its attached logic are quite outof touch with the dynamics of discarding the past as having noother significance than as an extended alphabet from which onecan choose, at random or with some system, letters fitting theact. The letters are part of a sui generis alphabet, changing aspractical experiences change, interacting with many logical rulesfor using them or for understanding how they work. In this newperspective, interpretation is always another instance ofconstituting the language, not only using it. Biologicalsampling, along with the associated splicing, also regards theliving as a text. Its purpose is to affect some components inorder 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 inDNA sequences and configurations, takes precedence over thelogic of language and literacy, even if the text metaphor, soprominent in genetics, plays such a major role. It is worthrecalling that the word text derives from the Latin word for toweave, which was later applied to coherent collections ofwritten sentences.

Sampling does not necessarily transform everything into the graymass of information. In their practical experiences, peoplesample emotions and feelings as they sample foods insupermarkets, sample entertainment programs (television samplingincluded), sample clothing, and even partners (for specialoccasions or as potential spouses, partners in business, orwhatever else). As opposed to quoting, sampling- periodic,random, or sequential-results in the severing from what literacycelebrated as tradition and continuity. And it challengesauthorship. With increased sampling as a practical experience ofdiversification, the human being acquires a very specificfreedom not possible within boundaries of the literateexperience. Tradition is complemented by forms of innovationimpossible within a pragmatic framework of progression anddualistic (true-false) experience. This becomes even more clearwhen we understand that sampling is followed by synthesis, whichmight be neither true nor false, but appropriate (to somedegree). In the case of music, a device called a sequencer isused for this purpose. The composite is synthetic. A newexperience, significant in itself at formal levels correspondingto the constitution of ad hoc languages and their consumption inthe act, becomes possible. The mixmaster is a machine forrecycling arbitrarily defined constitutive units such as notes,rhythms, or melodic patterns freed from their pragmaticidentity. What is significant is that the same applies to thebiological text, including the biology of the human being. Insome ways, genetic mutation acquires the status of a new meansfor synthesizing new plants and animals, and even new materials.

The artistic technique of collage is based on a logic of choicesbeyond those of realistic representations. Logical rules ofperspective are negated by rules of juxtaposition. Collage, as atechnique, anticipates the generalized stage of sampling andcompositing. It changes our notion of intellectual property,trademark, and copyright, all expressions of a logic firmlyattached to the literate experience. The famous case of Dr.Martin Luther King's plagiarism reflected aspects of primitiveculture carried over to the civilization of illiteracy: there isno authorship; once something becomes public, it is free to beshared. In the same vein, there is no Malcolm X left in thepoetry resulting from sampling his speeches, or anyone else's forthat matter.

Post-modern literature and painting result from samplingexercises governed by an ear or eye keen to our day's vernacularof machines and alienation. The same applies to plants, fruits,and microbes insofar as sampling does not preserve previousidentities, but constitutes new ones, which we integrate in newexperiences of our own self-constitution. From the perspectiveof logic, the procedure is of interest to the extent that itestablishes domains of logical appropriateness. Logical identityis redefined from a dynamic perspective. From a pragmaticviewpoint, certain experiences might be maximized by applying acertain logic to them. Moreover, within some experiences,complementary logics-each logic assigned to a precise aspect ofthe system-can be used together in strategies of layeredmanagement of the process, or in parallel processes, checkedagainst each other at defined instances. Strategies formaximizing market transactions, for instance, integrate variousdecision-making layers, each characterized by a differentlogical assumption. We experience a process of replacing therigid logical framework of literate condition with many logicalframeworks, adapted to diversity.

In conclusion, one more aspect should be approached. Is it enoughto say that language expresses the biological and the socialidentity of the human being? To deal with language, and morespecifically with the embodiment of language in literacy, meansto deal with everything that makes the human being thebio-socio-politico- cultural entity that defines our species. Thelogical 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 themany factors participating in the process of humanself-constitution. Indeed, in order for the human being toqualify as zoon politikon, as hom*o Sapiens, or hom*o Ludens(playful man) or hom*o Faber, he or she must first qualify forthe interactions which each designation describes: on thebiological level, with other human beings, within structures ofcommon interest, in the realm of a human being's own nature.This is why humans define themselves through practicalexperiences involving signs.

At the various levels at which such signs are generated,interpreted, comprehended, and used to conceive new signs, humanidentity is ascertained. This is what prompted Felix Hausdorf todefine the human being as zoon semeiotikon- semiotic animal,sign-using animal. Moreover, Charles Sanders Peirce consideredsemiotics as being the logic of vagueness. Signs-whetherpictures, sounds, odors, textures, words (or combinations),belonging to a language, diagram, mathematical or chemicalformalism, new language (as in art, political power, orprogramming), genetic code, etc.-relate to human beings, not intheir abstraction but in the concreteness of their participationin 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 ormathematics. If we define experience as self- constitutivepractical activity, whose output is the ever-changing identity ofthe individual or individuals carrying out the experience, logicderives from it, as do all knowledge and language. This placeslogic not outside thought, but in experience, and raises thequestion of logical replication. Dawkins defined the replicatoras a biological molecule that "has the extraordinary property ofbeing able to make copies of itself." Such an entity is supposedto have fecundity, fidelity, longevity. Language is a replicator;or better yet, it is a replicative medium. The question iswhether duplication can take place only by virtue of its ownstructural characteristics, or whether one has to consider logic,for instance, as the rule of replication. Moreover, maybe logicitself is replicative in nature.

This discussion belongs to the broader subject of memetics. Itsimplicit assumption is that memes, the spiritual equivalent ofgenes, are subject to mechanisms of evolution. As opposed tonatural evolution, memetic evolution is through more efficientorders of magnitude, and faster by far.

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

Be this as it may, expression, communication, and signification,the fundamental functions of any sign system, regardless of itslogic, are endowed with replicative qualities. Logic preventscorruption, or at least provides means for identifying it. Theeasiest way to understand this statement is to relate it to themany replications involved in the manipulation of data in acomputer. The Error message announcing corruption of datacorresponds to a replication process that went astray. Like allanalogies, this one is not infallible: a certain logic, againstwhose rules the replication is tested, might simply prove to beinadequate to processes of replication that are different innature. Indeed, if the logic implicit in the experience ofliteracy were to authenticate semiotic processes characteristicof the civilization of illiteracy, the Error message ofcorruption would overrun the monitor. All that occurs in theexperience of networking and all that defines virtuality pertainto a logical framework that is by no means a memetic replicationof the Aristotelian or some other logical system intrinsic to theexperience of literacy. Memes residing in the brain's neuronalstructure, 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 meaningsmediation has acquired over time, dispute resolution is thepractical activity that has appropriated the word. Nevertheless,in its etymology, mediation attests to experiences that pre-datelawyers as they pre- date the earliest attempt to introduce laws.

Mediation, along with heuristics, is definitory of the humanspecies. From all we know, nature is a realm of action andreaction. The realm of human activity implies a third element,an in-between, be this a tool, a word, a plan. This applies toprimitive experiences of self-constitution, as well as tocurrent embedded mediating activities: mediation of mediation adinfinitum. In each mediation there is the potential for furthermediation. That is, the inserted third can be divided in turn. Alever used to move a very heavy object can be supplemented byanother one, or two or more, all applied to the task at hand.Each tool can progressively evolve into a series of tools. Eachindividual called upon to mediate can call upon others toperform a chain of related or unrelated mediations.

The same holds true for signs and language. Mediation is thepractical experience of reducing to manageable size a task thatis beyond the abilities of an individual or individualsidentified through the task. Mediation is a mapping from ahigher scale of complexity to a scale that the persons involvedin a task can handle. This chapter will examine various phasesof mediated human experiences. We shall examine at whichpragmatic junctures language and, subsequently, literacy providemediating functions. More important, we will define theconditions that require mediations for which literacy is nolonger adequate.

Since tools, in their mediating function, will be frequentlybrought into the argument, a distinction needs to be made fromthe outset: Signs, language, artificial languages, and programs(for computers and other devices) are all mediating entities.What distinguishes these from tools is their caoability forself-replication. They are, as much as humans constituting theiridentity in semiotic processes, subject to evolutionary cyclesstructurally similar to those of nature. Their evolution is, aswe know, much faster than genetic evolution. The genetic make-upof the human species has changed relatively little, while themediating elements that substantially contributed to theincrease in human efficiency underwent many transformations. Someof these are no longer evolutionary, but revolutionary, and markdiscontinuities. Genetic continuity is a background forpragmatic discontinuity. The moments of discontinuity correspondto threshold values in the scale of human activity. They regardmediating devices and strategies as dynamic components of thepragmatic framework.

The power of insertion

Self-constitution in mediating and mediated practical experiencesis 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'sbiological and intellectual reality-that is projected in mediatedpractical experiences. The narrow, limited, and immediate scopeof direct human activity explains why no mediation, or onlyaccidental mediation (unintended mediation), characterizes thepragmatic framework. In the long run, mediation results in thesevered relation between individuals and their social andnatural environments. As we shall see, this fact hasimplications for literacy. A long chain of mediations separatesthe working individual from the object to be worked upon, bethis object raw material, processed goods, thoughts, or otherexperiences.

It is not easy to immediately realize the pervasiveness ofmediation and its effects on human activity andself-constitution. People introduce all the intermediaries theyneed in order to maintain efficiency. Because we notice only theimmediate layer with which we come into contact-the tool we useor the object we act upon-we have difficulty in recognizing thepervasiveness of mediation. The multitude of intermediariesinvolved in fabricating one finished product is far beyond ourdirect involvement.

Division, in the context of labor, means to break a task intosmaller parts that are easier to rationalize, understand, andexecute. Division engenders the specialization of each mediatingelement. To specialize means to be involved in practicalexperiences through which skills and knowledge pertinent toactivity segmented through labor division are acquired. Whetherdivision of physical work or of intellectual activity, at theend of the process there is a large number of components whichhave to be assembled. Even more important, the quantity ofpieces, the order in which various pieces come together, and theintermediary sequences of checks and balances (if something doesnot work, it is better to find out before the entire product isassembled) are essential. All these constitute the integrationaspect, which requires the element of coordination through toolsand methods.

The segmentation of work in order to reach higher efficiency isnot arbitrary. The goal is to arrive at coherent units ofsimpler work, which in some ways are like the letters of analphabet. In this model, production resembles writing differentwords by combining available letters. Segmentation of work takesplace concomitant with the effort to conceive of toolsappropriate to each segment in order to ensure the desiredefficiency. In effect, to specialize means to be aware of and tomaster tools that correspond to a step in the sequence leadingto the desired result-the final word, in keeping with ourexample. Conversely, what sometimes looks like excessivespecialization in our day-e.g., in medicine, physics,mathematics, electronics, computer science, transportation-isthe result of the propensity of each mediating element toengender a need for further mediations, which reflectexpectations for efficiency. Simultaneously with thedifferentiation of work, language changed, becoming itself moredifferentiated.

The efficiency reached in specialization is higher than that ofdirect action and of low levels of labor division. With each newspecialization of a mediating element, humans constitute a bodyof practical knowledge, in the form of experience, that can beused again and again. This body of knowledge reflects thecomplexity of the task and the scale in which it is exercised.For instance, stones (the Latin calcula) were used to representquantities (just as the early English used stone as a measure ofweight). Over the centuries, this practice led to the body ofknowledge known as calculus and to coherent applications invarious human endeavors. The physical presence of stones gaveway to easier methods of calculation: the abacus, as well as tomarks recorded on bone, shell, leather, and paper, to a numbersystem, and to symbols for numbers. The vector of change startsat the materiality and heads towards the abstract-that is, fromobjects to signs.

Computers were invented as a tool for calculation, as well as forother activities. They are the result of the labor ofphilosophers, logicians, mathematicians, and finallytechnologists, who changed calculation from a physical to acognitive practical experience. Boolean logic, binary numbers,and electronic gates are mediating elements that enhance theeffectiveness of calculation by high orders of magnitude. Asthings stand today, computer technology has led to myriadspecialties: design and production of chips; informationprocessing at various levels; manufacture of components andtheir integration as machines; networking; visualizationtechniques; the creation of machine languages for rendering theilliterate input, and on and on. This development exemplifiesthe active character of each mediation, especially the open-endedness of the mediation process.

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

Myth as mediating pre-text

Among the mediating elements mentioned so far, language performsits role in a particular way. Tools (such as pulleys, levers,gears, etc.) extend the arms or the legs, that is, the humanbody; language extends the coordinating capability of humans.Words, no matter how well articulated, will not turn the stone orlift the trunk of the fallen tree. They can be used to describethe problem, to enlist help, to discuss how the task can beaccomplished, to render intelligible the sequence ofaccomplishing it. Once writing was developed, coordination wasextended to apply from those physically present to people whocould read, or to whom a text could be read if one did not havereading skills.

Language is in extension and succession of the pragmatic phaseof immediate and direct appropriation of objects. As LeonardBloomfield-probably a bit hasty in his generalization-observed,"…the division of labor (…) is due to language." Althoughdifferent in nature from physical tools, language isinstrumental: It is applied on something and embodiescharacteristics of human beings constituted in a practicalexperience that made language possible and necessary.

The mediating nature of early words and early articulatedthoughts derived from their practical condition: medium forself-constitution (the voice externalizes the anatomy pertinentto producing and hearing sounds), and medium of exchange ofexperience (pertinent to nature or to others in the group). Earlywords are a record of the self-awareness of the human, denotingbody parts and elementary actions. They also reflect therelational nature of the practical experience of thoseconstituting viable groups. Researchers infer this from words,identified in proto-languages, that point to an other, or tocoalitions, or to danger. What distinguished words from animalsounds was their coherence in extending the practical experienceof appropriating a uniform survival strategy.

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

Indeed, myths are singular mediating entities. They conveyexperience and preserve it in oral societies. Magic is also amediating element, metaphysical in nature. Magic, in thepre-literacy context, inserts, between humans and everything theycannot understand, control, or tame, something (actions, words,objects) that stands for the practical implications of thisfailure. An amulet, for example, stands for the lack ofunderstanding of what it takes to be protected from evil forces.Spells and gestures intended to scare away demons belong to thesame phenomenon. Though not without purpose, magic is actionwith no immediate practical purpose, triggered by eventslanguage could not account for. Myth is a pre-text for actionwith a practical, experiential purpose. Each myth contains rulesfor successful activity.

The context in which language, as a complex sign system, wasstructured was also the context of social mediation: division ofsocial functions and integration in a cohesive social structure.In syncretic forms of social life, with low efficiency, andlimited self-consciousness, there is little need for orpossibility of mediation. Once human nature was constituted inthe reality of practical, mytho-magical relations, both labordivision and mediation became part of the new human experience.Tools for plowing, processing skins, and sharing experience (invisual or verbal form) kept the human subject close to theobject of work or human relation. It is probably more in respectto the unknown and unpredictable that mediation, via priests andshamans in various rituals, was used in forms of magicalpractice. Cave paintings, no less than cuneiform, and laterphonetic writing, constituted intermediaries inserted in theworld in which human beings asserted their presence orquestioned the presence of others.

The centralized state, which is a late form of socialorganization, the church, and schools are all expressions of thesame need to introduce in a world of differences elements withuniformizing and integrating power. What we today call politicssimply belongs to the self-constitution of the individual asmember of the politeia, the community. By extension, politicsmeans to effectively participate in the life of the community.The nature of this participation changed enormously over time. Itstarted as participation in magic and ritual, and it evolved inparticipation in symbolic forms, such as mancipatio, conventionsembodied in normative acts. In the framework of participation,we can mention goal determination and forms of organization andrepresentation, as well as the payment of taxes to support themediators of this activity. At the beginning, participation wasan 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 preservethe good and the right, in written language, law mediates andjustice, as much as God (actually a plurality of gods andgoddesses) or wisdom, are inserted in community affairs.

Differentiation and coordination

Mediation also implies breaking the immediate connection, toescape the domination of the present-shared time and space-andto discover relations characteristic of adjacency, i.e.,neighboring in time and space. Adjacency can be in respect tothe past, as expressed through the practice of keeping burialrecords. It can also be in respect to the future. The magicdimension of the ritual focused on desired things-weather, game,children-exemplifies this aspect. The notion of adjacency canpertain also to neighboring territories, inhabited by othersinvolved in similar or slightly different practical forms ofexperience. Regardless of the type of adjacency, what issignificant is the element that separates the immediate from themediated. The expanding horizon of life required means toassimilate adjacency in the experience of continuous humanself-constitution. Language was among such means and became evenmore effective when a medium for storing anddisseminating-writing-was established. In orality-dominatedsocial life, opinion was the product of language activity, andit had to be immediate. In writing, truth was sought andpreserved. Accordingly, logic centered around the true-falsedistinction.

Literate societies are societies which accept the value ofspeaking, writing, and reading, and which operate under theassumption that literacy can accomplish a unifying function.Mediation and the associated strategy of integration relied onlanguage for differentiation of tasks and for coordination ofresulting activities and products. Language projects both asense of belonging to and living in a context of life. Itembodies characteristics of the individuals sharing perceptionsof space and time integrated in their practical experiences andexpressed in vocabulary, grammar, and idioms, and in the logicthat language houses.

Language is simultaneously a medium of uniformity and a means ofdifferentiation. Within continuously constituted language,individual expression and various non-standard uses of language(literary and poetic, probably the most notorious of these) area fact of life. In the practical constitution of language forreligious or judicial purposes, or in order to give historicaccounts of scientific phenomena, expression is not uniform.Neither is interpretation. As we know from early attempts athistory, there is little difference between languages used todescribe relations of ownership (of animals, land, shelter) andtexts on astronomy or navigation, for instance. The lunarcalendar and the practical experience of navigation determinedthe coherence of writings on the subject. There is very littledifference in the work of people who accounted for numbers ofanimals and numbers of stars. Once differentiation of work tookplace, language allowed for expressions of differences. Behindthis change of language is the change of the people involved invarious aspects of social life, i.e., their projection into aworld appropriated through practical experiences based on thehuman ability to differentiate-between useful and harmful,pleasant and unpleasant, similar and dissimilar.

In order to distinguish the level at which a language ispracticed, people become aware of language's practicalconsequences, of its pragmatic context. Plato's dialogues can beread as poetry, as philosophy, or as testimony to the state oflanguage-based practical experiences in use at the time andplace in which he was active. What is not clear is how a personoperating in and constituting himself in the language identifiesthe level of an oral or written text, and how the personinterprets it according to the context in which it was written.The question is of more than marginal importance to ourunderstanding of how Plato related to language or how peopletoday relate to language: either by overstating its importanceor by ignoring it to the extent of consciously discardinglanguage, or certain aspects of it.

Here is where the issue of mediation becomes critical. Theinserted third- person, text, image, theory-should understandboth the language of the reader and the language of the text.More generally, the third should at any instance understand thelanguage of the entities it mediates between. States, aspolitical entities, are constituted on this assumption; so arelegal systems, religion, and education. Each such mediatingentity introduces elements into the social structure that willfinally be expressed in language and assimilated as acceptedvalue. They will become the norm. The process is sometimesextremely tight. Retroaction from mediating function tolanguage and back to action entails progressive fine-tuning,never-ending in fact, since human beings are in continuousbiological and social change.

Mediations lead to segmentation. The coordination of mediationsis necessary in order to recover the integrality (wholeness) ofthe human being in the output of the practical experience.Mediations, although coordinated by language or other mediatingmeans, and subject to integration in the outcome of activity,introduce elements of tension, which in turn require newmediation and thus progressive specialization. When the sequenceof mediations expands, the complexity of integration can easilyexceed the degree of complexity of the initial task. Theefficiency reached is higher than that of direct action or oflow levels of labor division. With each new mediation, the humanbeing constitutes a body of practical knowledge that can be usedagain and again. The necessary integrative dimension ofmediations makes the strategy of using mediating entities, alongwith the appropriate coordination mechanism, socially relevantand economically rewarding. One can speak of mediation betweenrational and emotional aspects of human life, between thoughtand language, language and images, thought and means ofexpression, communication and signification. Regardless of itsparticular aspect, mediation is an experience of cognitiveleverage.

Integration and coordination revisited

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

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

Under which circ*mstances is language's mediating functionassumed by other sign systems? Let us answer the questions inthe order they are posed.

Language is not the only mediating instrument people use. In theshort account given so far, other mediating entities, such asimages, movements, odors, gestures, objects (stones, twigs,bones, artifacts) were mentioned. Also mentioned was the factthat these are quite close to what they actually refer to (asindexical signs), or to what they depict based on a relation ofsimilarity (as iconic signs). However, even at this level ofreduced generality and limited coherence and consistency, humanbeings can express themselves beyond the immediate and direct.

The cave paintings of the Paleolithic age should be mentionedagain in this respect. The immediate is the cave itself. It isshelter, and its physical characteristics are perceived indirect relation to its function. The surprise comes in noticinghow these characteristics become part of the practicalexperience of sharing what is not present by involving amediating element. The drawings are completions, continuations,extensions of the ridges of the stone walls of the cave. This isnot a way of speaking. A better quality photograph, not tomention the actual drawings in the caves, reveals how the linesof the relief are extended into the drawing and made part ofthem. The first layer of exchange of information among people iscomparison, focused on similarities, then on differences. Weinfer from here that, before drawing-a practical experienceinvolving a major cognitive step-the human beings seeking shelterin the cave noticed how a certain natural configuration-cloud,plant, rock formation, the trail left by erosion-looked like thehead or tail of an animal, or like the human head, for example.

The completion of this look-alike form-when such a completion wasphysically possible-was an instance of practical self-definitionand of shared experience. When the act of completion wasphysically performed, probably by accident at the beginning, theimmediate natural (the cave) was appropriated for a new function,something other than merely shelter. The shape of the wings ofgalleries in the Altamira or Niaux caves suggests analogies tothe male-female distinction, a sexual identifier but also a firststep towards distinctions based on perceived differences. Theselection of a certain cave from among others was the result ofan effort, no matter how primitive, to express. Together, thisselected physical structure and the added elements became astatement regarding a very limited universe of existence and itsshared distinctions. Further on, the animals depicted, thesequence, the addition of mytho-magical signs (identification ofmore general notions such as hand, wound, or different animals)make the painted cave an expression of an inserted thought aboutthe world, that is, about the limited environment constitutingthe world. In the case of Egyptian pictographic writing, we knowthat images were used as mediating devices in such sophisticatedinstances as the burial of pharaohs and in their life afterdeath. In the universe of ideographic languages (such as Chineseand Japanese), the mediating function of images constituting thewritten is different. Combinations of ideograms constitute newideograms. Accordingly, self-constitution in language takes overexperiences of combining different things in order to obtainsomething different from each of the combined ingredients. Insome ways, the added efficiency facilitated by mediations wasaugmented by formal qualities that would eventually establish therealm of aesthetic practical experiences. This should come as nosurprise, since we know from many practical experiences or theremote past that formal qualities often translate into higherfunctionality.

Language use, which opened access to generality and abstraction,allowed humans to insert elements supporting an optimizedexchange of information in the structure of social relations,and to participate in the conventions of social life. There isnot only the trace of the immediate experience in a word, thereis also the shared convention of mediated interactions.Language, in its development over time, is thus a verydifficult-to-decode dynamic history of common praxis. Weunderstand this from the way the use of the ax, millstone, oranimal sacrifice expanded, along with the appropriate vocabularyand linguistic expression, from the universe of the Semites tothe Indo-Europeans. Reconstructed vocabulary from the region ofthe Hittite kingdom testifies to the landscape (there are manywords for mountains), to trees (the Hittites distinguishedvarious species), to animals (leopard, lion, monkey), and totools (wheel- based means of transportation).

Language is not only a reflection of the past, but also a programfor future work. The nuclei of agriculture where languageemerged (in China, Africa, southeastern Europe) were alsocenters of dissemination of practical experience. Writing, evenwhen it only records the past, does it for the future. Progressin writing resulted in better histories, but moreover in newavenues for future praxis. In the ideal of literacy, theindividual states a program of unifying scope in a social realityof diverse means and diverse goals. Literacy as such is aninsertion between a rather complex social structure, nature, andamong the members of society. Within a culture, it is a genericcode which facilitates dialogue among the members of the literatecommunity and among communities of different languages. Itsscope is multidimensional. Its condition is one of mediation.

A major mediating element in the rationale of industrialsociety, literacy fulfilled the function of a coordinatingmechanism for mediations made otherwise than through language,along the assembly line, for instance. Obviously conceived on thelinear, sequential model of time and language, the assembly lineoptimally embodied requirements characteristic of complexintegration. Once the reductionist practice of dividing workinto smaller, specialized activities became necessary, theresults of these activities had to be integrated in the finalproduct. At the level of technology of industrial society,literacy-based human practical experiences of self-constitutiondefined 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 notan exercise in prophecy. (I'll leave that to the priests offuturology.) This is why the question concerns circ*mstancesunder which the dominant mediating function of language can beassumed by other sign systems. The discussion involves a movingtarget because today the notion of literacy is a changingrepresentation of expectations and requirements. We know thatthere is a before to literacy; and this before pertains tomediations closer to the natural human condition. Of course, wecan, and should, ask whether there is an after, and what itscharacteristics might be. Complexities of human activity and theneed to ensure higher efficiency explain, at least partially,complexities of interhuman relations and the need to ensure someform of human integration.

What this first assessment somehow misses is the fact that, froma certain moment on, mediation becomes an activity in itself.Means become an end in themselves. When individuals constitutedthemselves in structurally very similar experiences, mediationtook place through the insertion of rather hom*ogeneous objects,such as arrows, bows, levers, and tools for cutting and piercing.Interaction was a matter of co-presence. Language resulted inthe context of diversification of practical human experiences.Self-constitution in language captured the permanence and theperspective of the whole into which variously mediated componentsusually come together. Later on, literacy freed humans from therequirement of co-presence. Language's mediating capabilitiesrelied on space and time conventions built into languageexperience over a very long time and interiorized by literatesocieties.

Characteristics of writing specific to different notationalsystems resulted from characteristics of practical experiences.Literacy only indirectly reflects the encoding of experience ina medium of expression and communication. Moreover, the shiftfrom a literacy-dominated civilization to one of partialliteracies involves the encoding of the experience in media thatare no longer appropriate for literate expression. We write totape or to digital storage. We publish on networks. We converttexts into machine- readable formats. We edit in non-linearfashion. We operate on configurations or on mixed data types(that constitute multimedia). Experiences encoded in such mediareflect their own characteristics in what is expressed and how itis expressed.

Although there are vast qualitative differences in linguisticperformance within a literate society, a common denominator-thelanguage reified in the technology of literacy-is established.The expectation is a minimum of competence, supposed to meetintegration requirements at the workplace, the understanding ofreligion, politics, literature, and the ability to communicateand comprehend communication. But as literacy became a sociallydesirable characteristic, language became a tool-at least insome professions and trades-and the command of language became amarketable skill. For example, during periods of greaterpolitical activity in classical Greece and Rome, the practicalexperience of rhetoric was a discipline in itself. Orators,skilled in persuasion, for which language is necessary, made acareer out of language use. The written texts of the Middle Ageswere also intended to foster the rhetorical skills of theclergy in presenting arguments. In our time, speechwriters andghostwriters have become the language professionals, and so havepriests, prophets, and evangelists (of all religions).

But what is only an example of how language can become an end initself has become a very significant development in humanpraxis. Not only in professions such as expository writing (forjournalists, essayists, politicians, and scientists), poetry,fiction, dramaturgy, communications, but also in the practice oflaw (normative, enforcement, judicial), politics, economics,sociology, and psychology has language become a principal tool.Nevertheless, the language used in such endeavors is not thestandard, national, or regional language, but a specializedsubset, marginally understood by the literate population atlarge. While the grammar governing such sub- languages is, withsome exceptions, the grammar of the language from which they arederived, the vocabulary is more appropriate to the subjectmatter. Moreover, while sharing language conventions and thegeneral frame of language, these sub-languages project anexperience so particular that it cannot be properly understoodand interpreted without some translation and commentary. Andeach commentary (on a law, a new scientific theory, a work ofart or poetry) is yet another insertion of a third, whichrefers to the initial object sometimes so indirectly that therelation might be difficult to track and the meaning is lost.

A similar process can be identified in our present relation tothe physical environment. Many things mediate between us and thenatural environment: our homes, clothes, the food processingindustry. Even natural artifacts, such as gardens, lakes, orwater channels, are a buffer against nature, an insertion betweenus and nature. Constituted in our language are experiences ofsurvival and adaptation: the vocabulary of hunting, fishing,agriculture, animal husbandry, coping with changes in weatherand climate, and coping with natural catastrophes such as floodsand earthquakes. The mediating function of language is differenthere than on the production line.

Mediated practice leads to distributed knowledge along successiveor parallel mediations that are not at all literacy-based orliteracy-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 tomaximize locally distributed efforts. For example: peopleinvolved in various activities must rely on persons specializedto infer from observation (of plants, trees, animals, waterlevels in rivers and lakes, wind direction, changes in theearth's surface, biological, chemical, atmospheric factors) andgenerate predictions regarding natural events (drought, plant oranimal disease, floods, weather patterns, earthquakes). What weacknowledge here is the new scale of the practical experience ofmeteorology, as well as methods of collecting and distributinginformation through vast networks of radio, television, andweather services. Both the means for acquiring the informationand for disseminating it are visual. Local networks subscribe tothe service and receive computer-generated maps on which clouds,rain, or snow are graphically depicted. The equations of weatherforecasting are obviously different from local observations ofwind direction, precipitation, dew point, etc. The chaoticcomponent captured and the necessity to visually displayinformation as it changes over time are not reducible toequations or direct observation. It is hard to imagine havingweather predicted through very mediated meteorological practice,and even harder to imagine forecasting earthquakes or volcanicactivity from remote stations, such as satellites. Still,weather patterns display dynamic characteristics that made themetaphor of the butterfly causing a hurricane the mostdescriptive explanation of how small changes-caused by theflapping of the butterfly's wings-can result in impressiveconsequences-the hurricane. The language of the forecast onlytranslates into common language the data (the majority in visualform) that represents our new understanding of naturalphenomena.

There is yet another aspect, which is related to the status ofknowledge and our ways of acquiring, transmitting, and testingit. Our knowledge of phenomena such as nuclear fusion,thermonuclear reaction, stellar explosions, genes and geneticcodes, and complex dynamic systems is no longer predominantlybased on inductions from observed facts to theories explainingsuch facts. It seems that we project theories, founded onabstract thinking, onto physical reality and turn these theoriesinto means of adapting the world to our goals or needs, whichare much more complex than survival. Memetics is but the morerecent example in this respect. It projects the abstract modelsof natural evolution into culture, focusing on replicativeprocesses 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 representedby new languages, such as mathematical and logical formalisms,chemical notation, computer graphics, or discourse in somepseudo- language. The formalism of memetics reminds many of us offormal languages, as well as of the shorthand used in genetics.The goal is to describe whatever we want to describe throughcomputational functions or through computable expressions.

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

Indeed, there are instances when the speed of a process and therequirement of sequencing make direct human control not onlyimpossible, but also undesirable. This mediation is thencontinued by sequences automatically generated by machines, i.e.,mediation generating new mediation. Although the structure ofall these new languages (which describe phenomena, supportprogramming, or control processes) is inspired by the structureof natural language, they project experiences which are notpossible in the universe of standard language. New forms ofinteraction, higher speeds, and higher precision becomeavailable when such powerful cognitive tools are designed ascustom-made instruments for advancing our understanding ofphenomena that evade analytic or even small-scale syntheticframeworks.

The discussion of mediation brought up other sign systems thatassume the mediating function characteristic of literacy. Notonly artificial languages-instruments of knowledge and action,new pragmatic dimensions, in fact-but also natural languages areincreasingly used in a mediating capacity. I would submit to thereader the observation that the visual, primarily, and othersensory information are recuperated and used in ways that changehuman experience. Where words no longer suffice, visualizedimages of the unseen constitute a mediating language, allowing usto understand phenomena otherwise inaccessible-the micro- orremote universe, for instance. Touch, smell, and sound can bearticulated and introduced as statements in a series of eventsfor which written and spoken language are no longer adequate.Virtual reality is synthesized as a valid simulation of realreality. Virtual realities can be experienced if we simply puton 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 ofspace and motion, make a virtual space available. Within thisspace, one's own image can become a partner of dialogue orconfrontation. Journeys outside one's body and inside one'simagination are experienced not only in advanced laboratories,but also in the new entertainment centers that appeal tochildren as well as adults. Such projections of oneself intosomething else represent one of the most intriguing forms ofinteraction in the networked world. The experience ofself-constitution as an avatar on the Internet is no longer oneof a unique self, but of multiples.

Language guards the entrance to the experience, but once thehuman subject is inside, it has only limited power orsignificance. Mediations other than through language dominatehere, invoking all our senses and deep levels of our existence,for which literacy produced only psychoanalytic rhetoric. Inother words, we notice that while language constituted aprojection of the human being in the conventions of abstractsystems of expression, representation, and communication, it alsoexercised an impoverishing function in that it excluded thewealth of senses-possibly including common sense-and the signsaddressing them. Language made of us one monolithic entity. Inthe meantime, we have come to realize that the transitionsbetween our many inner states can be a source of newexperiences.

The answer to the question regarding alternatives to literacy isthat part of the mediating function of language has extended tospecialized languages, and to sign systems other than verballanguage, when those systems are better adapted to thecomplexities of heretofore unencountered challenges. Virtualreality is not a linear reality but an integrating, interactingreality of non-linear relations between what we do and whatresults. Among these newly acquired, different mediatingentities, relations and interdependencies are continuouslyestablished and changed at an ever faster pace. It appears thatonce human activity moves from the predominantly object level tothe meta condition (one of self-awareness andself-interpretation), we have several languages and severalcontingent literacies instead of a dominant language anddominant literacy. When writing is replaced by multimedia alongthe communication channels of the networked world, we seem toenjoy rediscovering ourselves as much richer entities than weknew or were told about through literate mediation.

The entire transition is the result of pragmatic needs resultingfrom the fundamental change in continuous humanself-constitution and the scale in which it is exercised.Mediations break activities into segments that are more intensiveand shorter than the cycle from which they were extracted.Therefore, mediation results in the perception of the reality offaster rhythms and of time contraction. Massive distribution oftasks, finer levels of parallelism, and more sophisticatedintegrating and coordinating mechanisms, result in new pragmaticpossibilities, for which literacy is not suitable, and evencounter-productive. This entire transition comprises anothervector of change: from individual to communal survival, fromdirect work to highly mediated praxes, from local to global touniversal, from the visible to the invisible of macro andmicro-universe, from the real to the virtual. Mediation, in itsnewest digital forms of enmeshed nature and evolving culture,causes boundaries to disappear between the elements involved inpractical experiences of our self-constitution.

Literacy, Language and Market

Markets are mediating machines. In our time, the notion of amachine is very different from that of the industrial MachineAge associated with the pragmatics of the civilization ofliteracy. Today, the term machine is evocative of software ratherthan hardware. Machine comprises input and output, process,control mechanisms, and the expectation of predictablefunctioning. Here is where our difficulties start. At best,markets appear as erratic to us. Market prediction seems to be anoxymoron. Every time experts come up with a formula, the marketacts in a totally new manner.

An amazing number of transactions, ranging from bargaining at agarage sale to multi-prong deals in derivatives, continuouslysubject the outcome of practical experiences of humanself-constitution to the test of market efficiency. There isnothing that can escape this test: ideas, products, individuals,art, sports, entertainment. Like a tadpole, the market seems toconsume itself in transactions. At times, they appear soesoteric to us that we cannot even fathom what the input of thismachine is and what the output. But we all expect the charmingprince to emerge from the ugly frog!

What can be said, without giving away the end of the story tooearly, is that the functioning of this growing mechanism ofhuman self-evaluation could never take place at its currentdynamics and size in the pragmatic framework of literacy. Allover the world, market processes associated with previouspragmatic frameworks-barter is one of them-are relived inbazaars and shopping malls. But if anyone wants to seepractical experiences of the civilization of illiteracy unfoldingin their quasi-pure manner, one has only to look at the stockmarket and commodities exchanges and auctions conducted over theInternet. Moreover, one must try to envision those invisible,distributed, networked transactions in which it is impossible todefine who initiated a transaction, continued another one, orbrought 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 theirrole is diminished through the mediation of entities that cannotspeak or write, programmed trading on the various stockexchanges is a matter of course. Computational economists andmarket researchers, who design programs based on biologicalanalogies, genetics, and dynamic system models, can testify tothe truth of this statement.

Preliminaries

In viewing the market in its relation to the civilization ofliteracy, and that of illiteracy, we must first establish aconceptual frame of reference for discussing the specific roleof language as a mediating element characteristic of the market.In particular, we should examine the functions filled byliteracy in allowing people to diversify markets and make themmore effective. When the limits of literacy's mediatingcapabilities are reached, its efficiency becomes subject todoubt. This does not happen outside the market, as somescholars, educators, and politicians would have us believe, orwant to happen. It is within the market that this stage isacknowledged, rendering intellectual travail itself a productnegotiated in the market, as literacy itself already is.

To establish the desired conceptual frame of reference, I takethe perspective of market as a sign process through which peopleconstitute themselves. Consequently, transactions can be seen asextensions of human biology: products of our work embody thestructural characteristics of our natural endowment and addressneeds and expectations pertinent to these characteristics. Theseproducts are extensions of our personality and our culture, asconstituted in expectations and values characteristic of thehuman species becoming self-aware and defining goals for thefuture. With language, and more so with literacy, markets becomeinterpretive affairs, projective instantiations of what we are,in the process of becoming what we must be as the human scalereaches yet another threshold. Human self-constitution throughmarkets reflects attained levels of productive and creativepower, as well as goals pertinent initially to survival, laterto levels of well-being, and now to the complexity of the globalscale of current and future human activity.

From barter to the trading of commodities futures and stockoptions, from money to the cashless society, markets constituteframeworks for higher transaction efficiency, often equated withprofit. The broad arguments, such as the market as semiosis,often stumble upon specific aspects: Semiosis or not, practicalexperience or not, how come a rumor sends a company's stock intoturmoil while an audited report goes unnoticed? The hiddenstructure of the processes discussed throughout this book mighthave more to do with explanations and predictive models than themany clarifications empowered by academic aura.

Products 'R' Us

The reality of the human being as sign-using animal (zoonsemiotikon) corresponds to the fact that we project ourindividual reality into the reality of our existence throughsemiotic means. In the market, the three entities of signprocesses meet: that which represents (representamen), thatwhich is represented (object), and the process of interpretation(interpretant). These terms can be defined in the marketcontext. The representamen is the repertory of signs that areidentified in the market. These can be utility (usefulness of acertain product), rarity, quantity, type of material used toprocess the merchandise, imagination applied to the conceptionand creation of a product, and the technology used and theenergy consumed in the manufacturing process, for example.People can be attracted by the most unexpected characteristicsof merchandise, and can be enticed to develop addictions tocolor, form, brand name, odor. Sometimes the representamen isprice, 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 pricerepresents the product, although not always appropriately. Theobject is the product itself, be it a manufactured item, anidea, an action, a process, a business, or an index. Except forthe market based on exchange of object for object, every knownmarket object is represented by some of its characteristics.That these representations might be far removed from the objectonly goes to show how many mediating entities participate in themarket.

Nothing is a sign unless interpreted as a sign. Someone has to beable to conjure, or endow, meaning and constitute something (anidea, object, or action) as part of one's self-constitution.This is the interpretant-understood as process, becauseinterpretations can go on ad infinitum. For example: bread isfood; an academic title acknowledges that a course of study wassuccessfully completed; computers can be used as bettertypewriters or for data mining. As a sign, bread can stand foreverything that it embodies: our daily bread; a certain cultureof nourishment; the knowledge involved in cultivating andprocessing grain, in making dough, building the ovens, observingthe baking process. Symbolic interpretation, relating to myth orreligion, 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 doctorslive), function (how the title affects one's activity), andfuture expectations (a prospective Nobel Prize winner). Likewisewith computers: Intel inside, or Netscape browser, networked orstand-alone, a Big Blue product, or one put together in the backalleys of some far Eastern country.

According to the premise that nothing is a sign unlessconsidered as such, interpretation is equivalent to theconstitution of human beings as the sign, represented throughtheir product. A product is read as being useful; a product canbe liked or disliked; a product can generate needs andexpectations. Self-constituting individuals validate themselves(succeed or fail) through their activity as represented by theproduct of this activity, be it tangible or intangible, aconcrete object, a process (mediations are included here), anidea. These readings are also part of the process ofinterpretation. A conglomerate of the readings mentioned above isthe mug shot of the abstract consumer, behind whom are all theothers who constitute their individuality through thetransactions that make up the market. A used car or computersalesman, a small retailer, and a university professor identifythemselves in different ways in and through the market. Each isrepresented by some characteristic feature of his or her work.Each is interpreted in the market as reliable, competent, orcreative in view of the pragmatics of the transaction: Somepeople need a good used car, some a cheap, used computer, othersa leather wallet, others an education or counsel. The forms ofinterpretation in the market are diverse and range from simpleobservation of the market to direct involvement in marketmechanisms through products, exchange of goods, or legislation.

As a place where the three elements-what is marketed (object),language or signs of marketing (representamen), andinterpretation (leading to a transaction or not)-come together,the market can be direct or mediated, real or symbolic, closed oropen, free or regulated. A produce market, a supermarket, afactory outlet, and a shopping mall are examples of real marketspace. The market takes on mediated, conventional, and symbolicaspects in the case where, for example, the product is notdisplayed in its three-dimensional reality but substituted by animage, a description, or a promise. Mail-order houses, and thestock and futures markets belong here, even though they arederived from direct, real markets. Once upon a time, Wall Streetwas surrounded by various exchanges filled with the odors,tastes, and textures of the products brought in by ships. It isnow a battery of machines and traders who read signs on orderslips or computer screens but know nothing of the product that istraded.

In our day, the stock market has become a data processing center.Pressures caused by the demand for optimal market efficiencywere behind this transformation. Nevertheless, the time involvedin the new market semiosis is as real and necessary as the timeof transactions in the market based on barter or on directnegotiations; that is, only the amount of time needed to ensurethe cooperation of the three elements mentioned above, as humanbeings constitute themselves in the pragmatic context of themarket. The pragmatic context affects market cycles and the speedat which market transactions take place. This is why a deal in abazaar takes quite a bit of time, and digital transactionstriggered by programmed trading are complete before anyonerealizes their consequences. Market regulations always affect thedynamics of mediations.

The language of the market

Language signs and other signs are mediating devices between theobject represented in the market and the interpretant-the humanbeings constituting themselves in the process of interpretation,including satisfaction of their needs and desires. No matterwhat type of market we refer to, it is a place and time ofmediations. What defines each of the known markets (barter,farmers' markets and fairs, highly regulated markets, so-calledfree markets, underground markets) is the type of mediation morethan the merchandise or the production process. Of significanceis the dynamic structure involved. It is obvious that ifanything anticipated our current experience of the market, itwas the ritual.

Objects (things, money, ideas, process), the language used toexpress the object, and the interpretation, leading or not to atransaction, constitute the structural invariable in every typeof socio-economic environment. In the so-called free market(more an abstraction than a reality) and in rigidly plannedeconomies, the relation among the three elements is thevariable, not the elements themselves. Interpretation in a givencontext can be influenced in the way associations are madebetween the merchandise and its representations.

The history of language is rich in testimony to commerce, fromthe very simple to the very complex forms of the latter.Language captures ownership characteristics, variations inexchange rates, the ever-expanding horizon of life facilitatedthrough market transactions. It is within this framework thatwritten records appear, thus justifying the idea that, togetherwith practical experiences of human self-constitution, marketprocesses characteristic of a limited scale of exchange of valuesare parents to notation, to writing and to literacy.

Expectations of efficiency are instantiated, within a given scaleof human activity, in market quantities and qualities. Nobodyreally calculates whether rice production covers the needs ofhumankind at any given instance, or if enough entertainment isproduced for the billions living on Earth today. The immensecomplexity of the market machine is reflected in its dynamics,which at a certain level of its evolution could no longer behandled by, or made subject to the rules and expectations ofliteracy. Market processes follow a pattern of self-organizationunder the guise of many parameters, some of which we cancontrol, others that escape our direct influence upon them.Languages of extreme specialization are part of market dynamicsin the sense that they offer practical contexts for new types oftransactions. Netconomy started as a buzzword, joining net,network, and economy. In less than one year, the term was usedto describe a distributed commercial environment where extremelyefficient transactions make up an increasing part of the globaleconomy. But the consequences of the Netconomy are also local:distribution channels can be eliminated, with the effect ofaccelerating commercial cycles and lowering prices. Computers,cars, software, and legal services are more frequently acquiredthrough the virtual shops of the Netconomy.

To see how the practical experience of the market freed itselffrom language and literacy, let us now examine the marketprocess as semiosis in its various aspects. As already stated,in trading products, people trade themselves. Various qualitiesof the product (color, smell, texture, style, design, etc.), aswell as qualities of its presentation (advertising, packaging,vicinity to other products, etc.), and associated characteristics(prestige, ideology) are among the implicit components of thistrade. Sometimes the object per se-a new dress, a tool, wine, ahome-is less important than the image it projects. Secondaryfunctions, such as aesthetics, pleasure, conformity, override thefunction of fulfilling needs. In market semiosis, desire provesto be just as important, if not more so, than need. In a largepart of the world, self-constitution is no longer just aquestion of survival, but also one of pleasure. The higher thesemiotic level of the market in a context of decadent plenty-thenumber of sign systems involved, their extent and variety-themore obvious the deviations from the rule of merely satisfyingneeds.

Human activity that aims at maintaining life is very differentfrom the human activity that results in surplus andavailability for market transaction. In the first case, asubsistence level is preserved; in the second, new levels ofself-constitution are made possible. Surplus and exchange,initially made possible through the practical experience ofa*griculture, constituted a scale of human activity that requiredhuman constitution in signs, sign systems, and finally language.Surplus can be used in many ways, for which sign and laterlanguage differentiation became progressively necessary.Rituals, adornment, war, religion, means of accumulation, andmeans of persuasion are examples of differentiations. All theseuses pertained to settled patterns of human interaction and ledto products that were more than mere physical entities to beconsumed. To repeat, they were projections of individualself-constitution.

Behind each product is a cycle of conception, manufacture, andtrade, and an attached understanding of utility and permanence.With the advent of writing and reading, from its rudimentaryforms to the forms celebrated in literacy, and itsparticipation in the constitution of the market, the avenue wasopened towards using what was produced in surplus to cover theneed to maintain life, so that more surplus could be generated.The market of merchandise, services, slaves, and ideas wascompleted by the market of salaried workers, earning money fortheir life's salt, as Roman soldiers did. These belong to thecategory of human beings constituting themselves in thepragmatic framework of an activity in which production (work) andthe means of production separated. The language through whichworkers constituted themselves underwent a similardifferentiation. 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 ofhuman praxis that guarantees coherence and hom*ogeneity. Peoplewho have excess grain but need eggs, people who offer meatbecause they need fruit or tools, do not require instructionsfor using what they obtain in exchange for what they offer. Smallworlds, loosely connected, constitute the universe of theirexistence. The rather slow rhythm of production cycles equalsthat of natural cycles. A relatively uniform lifestyle resultsfrom complementary practical experiences only slightlydifferentiated in structure. Together, these characteristicsconstitute a framework of direct sharing of experience. Thismarket, as limited as it is, forms part of the social mechanismfor sharing experience.

Today's markets, defined by a complexity of mediations, are nolonger environments of common or shareable experience. Rather,they are frameworks of validation of one type of humanexperience against another. This statement requires someexplanation. Products embody not only material, design, andskills, but also a language of optimal functioning. Thus theyproject a variety of ways through which people constitutethemselves through the language of these products. Accordingly,the market becomes a place of transaction for the many languagesour products speak. The complexity of everything we produce inthe pragmatic framework of the civilization of illiteracy is theresult of expectations made possible by levels of humanefficiency 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 carrieswith itself not only its own language, but also its ownevaluation criteria. The product is one of many from which tochoose, each embodying its own justification. Its value isrelative, and sometimes no value at all dictates the urge tobuy, or the decision to look for something else. Rules ofgrammar, which gave us a sense of order and quality of literatelanguage use, do not apply to products. Previous expectations ofmorality were anchored in language and conveyed through means ofliteracy. The morality of partial literacies embodied incompeting products no longer appears to participants in themarket as emanating from high principles of religion or ethics,but rather as a convenient justification for politicalinfluence. Through regulation, politics inserts itself as aself-serving factor in market transactions.

Transaction and literacy

A visit to a small neighborhood store used to be primarily a wayof satisfying a particular need, but also an instance ofcommunication. Such small markets were spaces where members ofthe community exchanged news and gossip, usually with anaccuracy that would put today's journalism to shame. Thesupermarket is a place where the demands of space utilization,fast movement of products, and low overhead make conversationcounterproductive. Mail-order markets and electronic shoppingpractically do away with dialogue. They operate beyond the needfor literacy and human interaction. Transactions are brought toa minimum: selection, confirmation, and providing a credit cardnumber, or having it read automatically and validated via anetworked service.

Literacy-based transactions involved all the characteristics ofwritten language and all the implications of reading pertinentto the transaction. Literacy contributed to the diversificationof needs and to a better expression of desires, thus helpingmarkets to diversify and reach a level of efficiency notpossible otherwise. With required education and laws prohibitingchild labor, the productive part of people's lives was somehowreduced, but their ability to be more effective within modesadapted to literacy was enhanced. Thus market cycles wereoptimized by the effects of higher productivity and diversifieddemands. From earliest times (going back to the Phoeniciantraders), writing and the subsequent literacy contributed tostrategies of exchange, of taxation- which represents the mostdirect form of political intervention in the market-andregulations regarding many aspects of the constitution of humanbeings in and through the market. Written contracts expressedexpectations in anticipation of literacy- supported planning.

There are many levels between the extraction and processing ofraw material and the final sale and consumption of a product. Ateach level, a different language is constituted, very concretein some instances, very abstract in others. These languages aremeant to speed up processing and transaction cycles, reduce risk,maximize profits, and ensure the effectiveness of thetransaction on a global level. Literacy cannot uniformlyaccommodate these various expectations. The distributive natureof market transactions cannot be held captive to the centralismof literacy without affecting the efficiency of marketmediation. The ruin left after 70 years of central planning inthe Soviet Union and its satellite countries-highly literatesocieties-is proof of this point. The expected speed of marketprocesses and the parallelism of negotiations require languagesof optimal functionality and minimal ambiguity. Sometimestransactions have to rely on visual arguments, well beyond whatteleconferencing can offer. Products and procedures are modifiedduring negotiations, and on-the-fly, through interactive linksbetween all parties involved in the effort of designing,manufacturing, and marketing them. As fashion shows becomeprohibitively expensive, the fashion market is exploringinteractive presentations that put the talent of the designer andthe desire of the public one click away from each other.

The expectation of freedom results in the need to ignore nationalor political (and cultural and religious) allegiances, which,after all, means freedom from the literate mode of a nationallanguage, as well as from all the representations and definitionsof freedom housed in literate discourse. Indeed, since signsystems, and language in particular, are not neutral means ofexpression, one individual has to specialize in the signs ofother cultures. There are consulting firms that advise businesseson the cultural practices of various countries. They deal inwhat Robert Reich called symbol manipulation, semiotic activitypar excellence. These firms explain to clients doing business inJapan, for instance, that the Japanese have a penchant forexchanging gifts. Business cards, more symbolic than functional,are of great importance. These consultants will also advise oncustoms that fall outside values instilled through literacy,such as in which countries bribery is the most efficient way todo business.

Whose market? Whose freedom?

A market captive to moral or political concepts expressed inliterate discourse soon reaches the limits of its efficiency. Weface these limits in a different way when ideals are proclaimedor negotiations submitted to rules reflecting values attached toexpectations-of a certain standard of living, fringebenefits-frozen in contracts and laws. Many European countriesare undergoing the crisis of their literate heritage becauseoutdated working relations have been codified in labor laws.Contracts between unions claiming to represent various types ofworkers are not subject to criteria for efficiency at work inthe market.

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

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

Some people would prefer a confirmation of culture as the moreencompassing framework, containing markets but not reducible tothem. Culture itself is an object in the market, subjected totransactions involving literacy, but not exclusively. Here newlanguages 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 marketmechanism. There is a price attached here, too. New constraints,new types of intolerance, and new obstacles come about. Anexample is the preservation of wildlife at the expense of jobs.Efficiency and wide choice entail a replacement of what areknown as traditional values (perceived as eternal, but usuallynot older than 200-300 years) with what many would have a hardtime calling value: mediocrity, the transitory, the expedient,and the propensity for waste.

The market circumvents literacy when literacy affects itsefficiency and follows its own course by means appropriate tonew market conditions. In the quest for understanding howmarkets operate, the further cultivation of explanationsoriginating from previous pragmatic circ*mstances is pointless.The time-consuming detour might result in nostalgia, but not inbetter mastery of the complexities implicit in the practicalexperience of human self-constitution in the market.

New markets, new languages

With the descriptive model of markets as sign processes, allusionwas made to the open character of any transaction. With thediscussion regarding the many phases through which markets areconstituted, allusion was made to the distributed nature ofmarket processes. In order to further explain the changedcondition of human self- constitution in the market of aradically new scale and dynamics, we need to add some details toboth characteristics mentioned.

Like any other sign process, language processes are humanprocesses. The person speaking or writing a text continues toconstitute his identity in one or the other, whilesimultaneously anticipating the constitutive act of listening toor interpreting the potential or intended readership. Visual,auditory, tactile, olfactory, verbal, or written expression, aswell as combinations of these, which composes the language ofperformance, dance, architecture, etc., are in the samecondition. A viewer or viewers can associate an image with atext, music, odors, textures, or with combinations of these.Furthermore, the association can continue and can be conveyed toothers who will extend it ad infinitum, sometimes so far thatthe initial sign (which is the initial person interpreting thatsign in anticipation of the interpretation given by others),i.e., the image, text, or music that triggered the process, isforgotten.

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

This is not to say that the milk we buy from a farmer or in thesupermarket, the shoes, cars, homes, vacation packages, andshares in a company or options in a stock are all signs orlanguage. Rather, they can be interpreted as signs standing foran object (the state of manufacturing, quality of design,competence, or a combination of these) to be interpreted in viewof the framework for the pragmatics of human self- constitutionthat the pragmatics makes possible. There are many instances whena word simply dies on the lips of the speaker because nobodylistens or nobody cares to continue interpreting it. There areas many instances when a product dies because it is irrelevantto the pragmatic framework of our lives. There are otherinstances 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 whyInternet-oriented companies were so highly valued in theirinitial public offerings. Potential can be conveyed throughliterate descriptions, data regarding patents, market analysis,or an intuitive element that there is more to this new marketsign than only its name and initial offering price. At a smallscale of human experience, the neighbors wanted to own some ofthe action; at a larger scale, literacy conveyed the informationand acted as a co-guarantor. At today's scale, many similarbusinesses are already in place, others are emerging; supply anddemand meet in the marketplace where one's risk can be someoneelse's gain. Literacy is no longer capable of providing thebackground for the dynamics of change and renewal. If literacycould still control market transactions, Netscape-synonymous withthe Internet browser-would have never made it; nor the companiesthat develop software facilitating telephone calls via theInternet.

In the markets of relative hom*ogeneity, language proved to be anappropriate means of coordination. For as long as the variouscontexts making up today's global market were not as radicallydifferent as they are becoming, literacy represented a goodcompromise. But when market transactions themselves shift fromexchanging goods against goods, or the exchange of goods forsome universal substitute (gold, silver, precious stones withqualities of permanency), or even for a more conventional unit(money), for more abstract entities, such as the Ecu (the basketof currencies of the European Community), the Eurodollar, or thee-money transacted over networks, literacy is replaced by theliteracies of the segmented practical instances of eachtransaction. Shares of an Italian or Spanish company, futures onthe American commodities market, bonds for Third Worldinvestment funds-they all come with their own rules oftransaction, and with their own languages.

The specialization that increases market efficiency results in agrowing number of literacies. These literacies bring to themarket the productive potential of companies and theirmanagement value. They encode levels of expected productivity infarming (and a certain wager on weather conditions),entrepreneurial risks assumed within the context of progressiveglobalization of the economy. In turn, they can be encoded inprograms designed to negotiate with other programs. In addition,the mechanisms assuring the distributed nature of the market inthe global economy insert other literacies, in this case, theliteracy of machines endowed with search and heuristiccapabilities independent of literacy.

Market simulations trigger intelligent trade programs and avariety of intelligent agents, capable of modifying theirbehavior, and achieve higher and higher transaction performance.In short, we have many mediations against the background of apowerful integrative process: the pragmatic framework of ahighly segmented economy, working in shorter production cycles,for a global world. In this process, almost nothing remainssequential, 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 intoexistence on the ever fluid map of negotiations. Being aself-organizing nucleus, each deal has its own dynamics.Relations among configurational nuclei are also dynamic.Everything is distributed. The relations between the elementsinvolved are non-linear and change continuously. Solidarity isreplaced by competition, often fiercely adversarial. Thus themarket consumes itself, and the sequels of literacy, requiringprovisional and distributed literacies.

Each time individuals project their identity in a product, themulti-dimensional human experience embodied in the product ismade available for exchange with others. In the market, it isreduced to the dimension appropriate to the given context of thetransaction. Human behavior in the market is symptomatic of theself-awareness of the species, of its critical and self-criticalcapabilities, of its sense of the future. The progressiveincrease of the abstract nature of market transactions, theominous liberation from literacy, and adoption of technologiesof efficient exchange define a sense of future which can bequite scary for people raised in a different pragmatic context.

We are beyond the disjunctive models of socialist ideologies ofbourgeois property, class differences, reproduction of laborpower, and similar categories that emerged in the pragmaticframework that made literacy (and human constitution throughliteracy) possible and necessary. Property, as much as markets,is distributed (sometimes in ways that do not conform with oursense of fairness). People define their place in the continuumof a society that in many ways does away with the exceptionaland introduces a model based on averaging and resulting inmediocrity. The human being's self-constitutive power is notonly reproduced in new instances of practical activity, but alsoaugmented in the pragmatics of surplus creating higher surplus.Along with the sense of permanency, humans lose a sense of theexceptional as this applies to their products and the way theyconstitute themselves through their work.

Literacy and the transient

When a product is offered with a lifetime warranty and themanufacturer goes bankrupt within months from the date of thesales transaction, questions pertaining to ethics,misrepresentation, and advertisem*nt are usually asked. Suchincidents, to which no one is immune, cannot be discarded sincethe experience of market transactions is an experience in humanvalues, no matter how relative these are. Honesty, respect fortruth, respect for the given word, written or not, belong to thecivilization of literacy and are expressed in its books. Thecivilization of illiteracy renders these and all other bookssenseless. But it would be wrong to suggest that markets of thecivilization of illiteracy corrupt everything and that, insteadof confirming values, they actually empty values ofsignificance. Markets do something else: They integrateexpectations into their own mechanisms. In short, they have tolive up to expectations not because these were written down, butbecause markets would otherwise not succeed. How this takesplace is a longer story, starting with the example given: Whathappens to a lifetime warranty when the manufacturer goesbankrupt?

The pragmatic framework of human self-constitution in languagethrough the use of the powerful means of literacy is one ofstability and progressive growth. The means of productionfacilitated in this framework are endowed with qualities,physical, first of all, that guarantee permanency. Theindustrial model is an extension of the model of creation deeplyrooted in literacy-dominated human activity. Machines werepowerful and dominating. They, as well as the products theyturned out, lasted much longer than the generation of people whouse them.

After participating in the complex circ*mstances that made theIndustrial Revolution possible, literacy was stimulated andsupported by it. Incandescent lighting, more powerful than thegas or oil lamp, expanded the time available for reading, amongother activities. Books were printed faster and more cheaplybecause paper was produced faster and more cheaply, and theprinting press was driven by stronger engines. More time wasavailable for study because industrial society discovered that aqualified workforce was more productive once machines become morecomplicated. All this happened against the background of anobsession with permanency reflected also in the structure of themarkets. As opposed to agricultural products, subject to weatherand time, industrial products can be accepted on consignment.

Literacy was a mediating tool here since transactions becameless and less hom*ogeneous, and the institution of credit morepowerful due to the disparity between production and consumptioncycles. The scale of the industrial market corresponded to thescale of industrial economy. Industrial markets are optimallyserved by the sequential nature of literacy and the linearityinherent in its structure. Production cycles are long, and onecycle follows the other, like seasons, like letters in a word.Remember when new model automobiles came out in October, andonly in October? A large manufacturer embodied permanence and sodid its product. In this framework, a lifetime warranty reflectsa product's promised performance and the language describingthis performance.

This is no longer the case in the civilization of illiteracy.From the design of the product, to the materials used andprinciples applied, almost nothing is meant to last beyond acycle of optimal efficiency. It is not a moral decision, neitheris it a devious plan. Different expectations are embodied in ourproducts. Their life cycle reflects the dynamics of changecorresponding to the new scale of human self-constitution, andthe obsession with efficiency. Products become transient becausethe cycles of relative uniformity of our self-constitution areshorter.

We know that life expectancy has increased, and it may well bethat people past the peak of their productive capability willsoon represent the majority of the population. Nonetheless, theincreased level of productivity facilitated by mediatingstrategies is independent of this change. Longer life meanspresence in more cycles of change (which translates into otherchanges, such as in education and training, family life). Whatwas once a relatively hom*ogeneous life becomes a succession ofshorter periods, some only loosely connected. In comparison tocenturies of slow, incremental development, relatively abruptchange testifies to a new human condition.

Where once literacy was necessary to coordinate the variety ofcontributions from many people-who projected as much permanencyin their products, even if the individuals were more literate indrawing than in writing-new forms of coordination andintegration are now in place. The corresponding pragmatics ischaracterized by intension and distribution, and the productscapture the projected sense of change that dominates all humanexperiences. Thus conditions were created for markets of thetransient, in which lifetime functioning of ingenious artifactsis promised, because the lifetime meant is as short as the cycleof the entire line. The fact that the manufacturer goes bankruptis not even surprising since the structural characteristics ofthe obsession with efficiency results in manufacturing entitiesthat last as long (or as short) as the need for their product,or as long as the functional characteristics of the productsatisfy market expectations. This is how expectations areintegrated in market mechanisms. Since mediation is nowexercised through many literacies integrated in the product, itis clear why, together with the exhausted lifetime warranty, wethrow away not only manufactured items, but also the literacy(and literacies) embodied in them. Each transaction in thetransient corresponds to a pragmatics that transforms theFaustian promise into an advertising slogan.

Market, advertisem*nt, literacy

First, the indictment: "If I were asked to name the deadliestsubversive force within capitalism-the single greatest source ofits waning morality-I should without hesitation nameadvertising." These words belong to a commentator of theill-reputed supply side economics, Robert L. Heilbroner, butcould have been signed by many sharing in this definition. Nowcomes the apologia: "The historians and archaeologists will oneday discover that ads of our times are the richest and mostfaithful daily reflections that any society ever made of itsentire range of activities." McLuhan's words, as familiar asthey are, bear the imprint of his original thinking. The issue isnot to take sides. Whether admired or despised, ignored orenjoyed, advertisem*nt occupies an inordinately important placein our life today. For anyone who went through the history ofadvertisem*nt, it becomes obvious that the scale of thisactivity, which is indeed part of the market, has changedradically.

It used to be true that only 50 to 60 percent of the investmentin advertisem*nt 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 advertisem*nt. Suchlevels of efficiency-and waste, one should add, in fullawareness that the notion is relative-are possible only in thecivilization of illiteracy. The figures (subject to controversyand multiple interpretation) point to efficiency as much as tothe various aspects of the market. Our concern withadvertisem*nt is not only with how literate (or illiterate)advertisem*nt is, but also with how appropriate literacy meanscan be to address psychological, ethical, and rational (orirrational) aspects of market transactions.

A look at advertisem*nts through the centuries is significant tothe role of literacy in society and in the world ofmerchandising. Word-of-mouth advertising and hanging signsoutside a business reflect the literacy levels of an age ofsmall-scale market transactions. The advertisem*nts of the endof the 19th and beginning of the 20th century exemplify thelevels of literacy and the efficiency expected from it formerchandising in the context and scale of that time. The adscontain more text than image and address reason more than thesenses. In the age of the magazine and newspaper, advertisersrelied on the power of verbal persuasion. Honesty or value wasnot the issue here, only its appearance. The word committed topaper, black on white, had to be simple and true.

In Europe, advertisem*nt took a different style at this time, butstill reflected value. Manufacturers engaged many well knownartists of the time to design their ads. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec,El Lissitzky, and Herbert Bayer are among the best known. To thehighly literate but more artistically inclined Europeans of thetime, such ads for upscale products and events were moreappealing. Probably taking their cue from Europe, Americandesigners experimented with image advertising after World War II,and graphic design took off in the USA. With the advent of morepowerful visualization media, and based on data from psychologyto support its effectiveness, the image began to dominateadvertising. As ambiguously as an image can be interpreted, itsefficiency in advertising was confirmed in rising sales figures.

In the rare cases when literacy is used today, it is usually forits visual impact. In an attempt to relate to the qualities ofthe black-on-white advertisem*nt of earlier times, Mobilstarted a series of ads in the mid-1980's. To those notsemiotically aware, the ad was simply text appealing to thereader's reason. Literacy rediviva! To people attuned tosemiotics, the ad was a powerful visual device. The simpletombstone style evoked relations between literacy and valuessuch as simplicity, honesty, the permanence of the idea, thedominance of reason. The visual convention was actually strongerthan the literacy element, used as an alibi in these ads.Indeed, the people who hand out the Clio awards for advertisingwere so taken in as to award Mobil a first prize for these ads.

Markets are far from being simple causal phenomena. A market'seasy switch from a well structured, rational interpretation andethical conduit, to irrationality and misrepresentation isrevealed in the new forms markets take, as well as in their newtechniques for transactions and the associated advertisem*nt. Theterm irrationality describes a contradiction of common senserules (or economic theories setting them forth) of exchange ofgoods. During the 1980's, this occurred in the oil market, theart market, the market for adoptable children, and in new stockmarket offerings.

The literate discourse of theories or of an advertisem*nt canonly 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 torender understandable economic and financial phenomena difficultto predict. Language-like explanations and advice are part ofadvertising, part of market language, forming its own literacyand keeping many captive to it. But even the most literateparticipant cannot stop the process since the literacy involvedin what some perceive as an aberration is different from theliteracy embodied in the product traded or in its advertisem*nt.Irrational elements are present in the market, as in life, atall times, but not to the extent to which the language of themarket reflects hysteria (as on Black Monday in 1987 on the NewYork Stock Exchange) or simply ceases its pragmatic function.

We all deplore the continuous shrinking of the intimate sphereof our lives, but admit, in the act of constituting ourselves inthe space and time of market transactions, the integrating powerthat the market exercises, ignoring how close the relationbetween the two aspects is. Literacy was once a protectivemedium and entailed rules of discretion and decency. Illiteracymakes us fear; it allows us to become more efficient, but at thesame time we become subject to intrusion by all the means thatcapture our identity. People making purchases on-line will nothesitate to write down their personal data and credit cardnumbers, trusting in a sense of privacy that is part of the codeof literate behavior. Of all people, the computer-literateshould realize the power of the Net for searching, retrieving,and sorting such information for all types of uses imaginable.

In the civilization of illiteracy, advertisem*nt is no longer anintegrative device that addresses a non-differentiated marketbut a device that addresses powerful distinctions that cancapture smaller groups, even the individual. "Tell me what youwant to buy or sell and I'll tell you who you are," is a conciseway of declaring how market semiosis X-rays its participants.The enormous marketing efforts associated with a new brand ofcereal, software, a political campaign, a role in a movie, or asports event result in advertisem*nt's becoming a language initself, with its own vocabulary and grammar. These are subjectto rapid change because the pragmatics of the activities theyrepresent change so fast. "Tell me what you buy and I'll tell youwho you are"-mug shots of all of us are taken continuously, byextremely inventive digital devices, while the market fine-tunesus. Buying products ended long ago. Products now buy us.

Advertising in the civilization of illiteracy is no longercommunication or illustration. It is an information processingactivity, bizarre at times, extremely innovative in the abilityto cross reference information and fine-tune the message to theindividual. Automatic analysis of data is complemented byrefinement methods that adjust the weight of words in order tofit the addressee. In the reality of the market and itsattendant advertising, languages pertaining to art, education,ideology, sexuality, are integrated at a high level ofsophistication in the infinite series of mediations thatconstitute the pragmatic framework of human existence. Nothing ismore valuable than the knowledge of who we are. One can riskstating that brokers of information about each of us willprobably fare best in this market of many competing partialliteracies.

When markets rely more and more on mediations, and market cyclesbecome faster and faster, when the global nature of transactionsrequires mechanisms of differentiation and integration farbeyond the scope of language, literacy ceases to play adominating role. The literate message assumed that the humanbeing is the optimal source of information and the idealreceiver. The illiterate message can send itself automatically,as image or as speech, as video or as Internet spamming, whateverbest hits its human target, to people's addresses. Whether welike it or not, face-to-face negotiations have already becomefax-to-fax and are bound to be converted intoprogram-to-program dealings. The implications are so far-reachingthat emotional reactions, such as enthusiasm or disgust, are notreally the best answer to this prospect.

Market pragmatics in our civilization is defined by the need tocontinuously expand surplus to meet a dominant desire andexpectation driven exchange of goods and services. These desiresand expectations correspond to the global scale of humaninteraction for which a dominant literacy is poorly suited.Hundreds of literacies, representing hundreds of forms of humanself-constitution around the world, are integrated in thesupersign known as the market.

The market-in its narrow sense as transaction, and as a signprocess joining structure and dynamics-focuses all that pertainsto the relation between the individual and the socialenvironment: language, customs, mores, knowledge, technology,images, sounds, odors, etc. Through the market, economies areascertained or subjected to painful restructuring. Recent yearsbrought with them turmoil and economic opportunity as anexpression of new pragmatic characteristics. Competition,specialization, cooperation, were all intensified. An excitingbut just as often disconcerting growth path of economic activitygenerated markets of high performance. Just-in-time,point-of-sale, and electronic interchanges came into beingbecause the human pragmatic made them necessary.

This is why it is difficult to accept views, regardless of theirpublic acclaim, that explain the dynamics of economic lifethrough technological change. The increased speeds of economiccycles are not parallel but related to the new practicalexperiences of human self-constitution. Cognitive resourcesbecame the main commodity for economic experiences. And themarket fully confirms this through mechanisms for acceleratedtransactions and through sign processes of a complexity thattechnology has really never reached. New algorithms inspired bydynamic systems, intelligent agent models, and better ways tohandle the issues of opportunity and prediction are theexpression of cognitive resources brought to fruition in acontext requiring freedom from hierarchy, centralism,sequentiality, and determinism. As exciting as the model of theeconomy as ecosystem is (I refer to Rothschild's bionomics), itremains an essentially deterministic view.

No semiosis triggers forces of economic change. But signprocesses, in the form of elaborate transactions, reflect thechange in the pragmatic condition of the human being. All thosenew companies, from fast food chains to microchip makers androbot providers that convert human knowledge into the new goodsand services, are the expression of the necessity of thispragmatic change. Diversity and abundance might be related tocompetition and cooperation, but what drives economic life,market included, is the objective need to achieve levels ofefficiency corresponding to the global scale human activity hasreached. Central planning, like any other centralized structure,including that of businesses, does not come to an end because oftechnological progress, but in view of the fact that it preventsefficient practical experiences.

Markets of the civilization of illiteracy, like the economy forwhich they stand, are more and more mediated. They go throughfaster cycles, their swings wilder, their interdependency deeperthan ever. The literate experience of the market assumed thatthe individual was the optimal source of information and theideal receiver. Decision- making was an exclusively humanexperience. The illiterate message of complex data processingand evaluation can send itself automatically and reach whateverhas to be reached in a given context: producers of rawmaterials, energy providers, manufacturers, a point-of-saleunit. As shoppers start scanning their purchases by themselves,information regarding their buying patterns makes it quickly intoprograms in charge of delivery, production, and marketing.Face-to-face negotiations, many times replaced by fax-to-fax ore-mail-to-e-mail transactions, are converted into moreprogram-to-program dealings. Instead of mass markets, weexperience point-cast markets. Their pragmatics is defined bythe need to continuously meet desire and expectation instead ofneed. Their dynamics, expressed in nuclei of self-organization,is in the last instance not at all different from that of thehuman beings self-constituted in their reality.

Language and Work

Work is a means of self-preservation beyond the primitiveexperience of survival. Actually, one can apply the word workonly from the moment awareness of human self- constitution inpractical experiences emerged from these experiences. Awarenessof work and the beginnings of language are probably very closeto one another.

By work we understand patterns of human activity, not theparticulars of one or another form of work. This defines afunctional perspective first of all, and allows us to deal withreplication of these patterns. Interaction, mutation, growth,spreading, and ending are part of the pattern. For anyone evenmarginally informed, it is quite clear that work patterns ofa*griculture are quite different from those of the pre-industrial,industrial, or post-industrial age. Our aim is to examine workpatterns of the civilization of literacy in contrast to those ofthe civilization of illiteracy.

That agriculture was determined, in its specific aspects, bydifferent topography and climatic biological context is quiteclear. Nevertheless, the people constituting their identity inexperiences of cultivating the land accomplished it in coherentways, regardless of their geographic location. Their languageexperience testifies to an identifiable set of concerns,questions, and knowledge which is, despite the fragmentedpicture of the world, more hom*ogenous than we could expect. If,by contrast, one considers a chip foundry of today's hightechnology, it becomes clear how chip producers in SiliconValley and those in Chinese provinces, in Russia, or in adeveloping country of Eastern Europe, Asia, or Africa share thesame language and the same concerns.

The example of agriculture presents a bottom-up structure ofpre-literate nature, based mainly on reaction. Reaction slowlybut surely led to more deliberate choices. Experience convergedin repetitive patterns. The more efficient experiences wereconfirmed, the others discarded. A body of knowledge wasaccumulated and transmitted to everyone partaking in survivalactivities. In the case of the chip foundry, the structure istop-down: Goals and reasons are built in, and so is the criticalknowledge of a post-literate nature required for achieving highefficiency. Skills are continuously perfected throughreinforcement schemes. Activity is programmed. An explicitnotion of the factory's goals-high quality, high efficiency, highadaptability to new requirements-is built into the entirefactory system.

In both models, corresponding to real-life situations, languageis constituted as part of the experience. Indeed, coordinationof effort, communication, record keeping, and transmission ofknowledge 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 quitedifferent from the language pertinent to the modern productionof chips. One is more natural than the other, i.e., itsconnection to the human being's natural stage is stronger thanthat of the activity in the foundry. In the chip age of thecivilization of illiteracy, languages of extreme precision becomethe means for an efficient practical experience. Their functionsare different from those of natural language, which by all meansstill constitutes a medium for human interaction.

All these remarks are meant to provide a relatively comfortableentry to the aspects of the changing relation between languageand work. The terminology is based on today's fashionable lingoof genetics, and of memetics, its counterpart. Still, I wouldsuggest more than caution, because memetics focuses on thequantitative analysis of cultural dynamics, while semiotics,which represents the underlying conception, is concernedprimarily with qualitative aspects.

As we have already seen, evolutionary biology became a source ofmetaphors for the new sciences of economics, as well as for theacquisition and dissemination of knowledge, or the replicationof ideas. Many people are at work in the new scientific space ofmemetic considerations. The majority are focused on effectiveprocedures, probably computational in nature, for generatingmechanisms that will result in improved human interactions. Asexciting as all this is, qualitative considerations might proveno less beneficial, if indeed we could translate them ineffective practical experiences. If the purposeful character ofall living organisms can be seen as an inevitable consequence ofevolution, the dynamics of human activity, reflected insuccessive pragmatic frameworks, goes beyond the mechanism ofnatural selection. This is exactly where the sign perspective ofhuman interaction, including that in work, differentiates itselffrom the quantitative viewpoint. As long as selection itself is apractical experience-choose from among possibilities-it becomesdifficult to use selection in order to explain how it takesplace.

In the tradition of analogies to machines-of yesterday or oftoday-we could look at work as a machine capable ofself-reproduction (von Neumann's concept). In the new traditionof memetics, work would be described as a replicative complexunit, probably a meta-meme. But both analogies are focusedultimately on information exchange, which is only a limited partof what sign processes (or semioses, as they are called) are.This is not to say that work is reducible to sign processes or tolanguage. What is of interest is the connection between work andsigns, or language. Moreover, how pragmatic frameworks andcharacteristics of language experiences are interconditioned isa subject that involves a memetic perspective, but is notreducible to it.

Inside and outside the world

Comparisons of the efficiency of direct human practicalexperiences to that of mediated forms-with the aid of tools,signs, or languages-suggest one preliminary observation: Theefficiency of the action mediated through sign systems is higherthan that of direct action. The source of this increase inefficiency is the cognitive effort to adapt the proper means(how work is done) to the end (what is accomplished) pursued. Inretrospect, we understand that this task is of a tall order-itinvolves observation, comparison, and the ability to conceive ofalternatives. As we learn from attempts involving the best ofscience and the best of technology, the emulation of suchcognitive processes, especially as they evolve over time, is notyet within our reach.

Language, together with all other sign systems, is an integralpart of the process of constitution and affirmation of humannature. The role it plays in the process is dynamic. Itcorresponds to the different pragmatic contexts in which humanbeings project their structural reality into the reality oftheir universe of life. The biophysical system within which thisprojection took and takes place underwent and still undergoesmajor changes. They are reflected in the biophysical reality ofthe human being itself. To be part of a changing world and toobserve this change places the human being simultaneously insideand outside the world: inside as part of it, as a geneticsequence; outside as its conscience, expressed in all the formsthrough which awareness, including that of work, isexternalized.

Whether a very restricted (limited by the pragmatic horizon ofprimitive human beings), or a potentially universal system ofexpression, representation, and communication, language cannotbe conceived independent of human nature. Neither can it beconceived independent of other means of expression,representation, and communication. The necessity of language isreflected in the degree to which evolutionary determination andself-determination of the individual or of society, correlate.Language is constituted in human practical experiences. At thesame time, it is constitutive, together with many other elementsof human praxis: biological endowment, heuristics and logic,dialectic, training. This applies to the most primitive elementsof language we can conceive of, as well as to today's productivelanguages. Embodied in literacy, language accounts for theever-deepening specialization and fragmentation of human praxis.The replacement of the literate use of language by theilliteracy of the many languages dismissing it in work, markettransactions, and even social life is the process to which weare at the same time witnesses and agents of change.

Sign systems of all kinds, but primarily language, housed andstored many of the projects that changed the condition ofpraxis. The major changes are: from direct to mediated, fromsequential to parallel, from centralized to decentralized, fromclustered (in productive units such as factories) todistributed, from dualistic (right or wrong) to multi-valued(along the continuum of acceptable engineering solutions), fromdeterministic to non-deterministic and chaotic, from closed (oncea product is produced, the problem-solving cycle is completed)to open (human practical experiences are viewed as problemgenerating), from linear to non-linear. Each of these changes, inturn, made the structural limits of language more and moreevident. Practical experiences in the design of languages, inparticular the new languages of visualization, are pushing theselimits in order to accommodate new expectations, such asincreased expressiveness, higher processing speed,inter-operability-an image can trigger further operations.

Globality of human practical experience succeeds against thebackground of the emergence of many languages that are veryspecific, though global in scope in that they can be applied allover the world. The chip factory already mentioned-or, for thatmatter, an integrated pizza or hamburger production facility-canbe delivered turn-key in any corner of the world. The languagesof mathematics, of engineering, or of genetics mightindependently be characterized by the same sequentiality,dualism, centralism, determinism that made natural languageitself incapable of handling complexities resulting from the newscale of human activity. Once integrated in practicalexperiences of a different nature, such as those of automation,they all allow for a new dynamics. Obviously, they are lessexpressive than language-we have yet to read a DNA sequencepoem, or listen to the music of a mathematical formula-butinfinitely more precise.

We are what we do

In the contemporary world, communication is progressively reifiedand takes place more and more through the intermediary of theproduct. Its source is human work. Characteristics of thelanguages involved in the work are also projected into them. Anew underlying structure replaces that which made literacypossible and necessary. In the physical or spiritual reality ofthe product, specialized languages are re-translated into theuniversal language of satisfying needs, or creating new needs,which are afterwards processed through the mediating mechanismsof the market. Reification (from the Latin res: transformationof everything-life, language, feeling, work-into things) is theresult of the alienating logic of the market and its semiosis.

Markets abstract individual contributions to a product. In thefirst place, language itself is reified and consumed. Marketsreify this contribution, turning life, energy, doubts, time, orwhatever else-in particular language-into the commodity embodiedin the product. The very high degree of integration leads toconditions in which high efficiency-the most possible at thelowest price-becomes a criterion for survival. The consequenceis that human individuality is absorbed in the product. Peopleliterally put their lives, and everything pertaining tothem-natural history, education, family, feelings, culture,desires-in the outcome of their practical experiences. Thisabsorption of the human being into the product takes place atdifferent levels. In the second place, the individualconstituted in work is also reified and consumed: the productcontains a portion of the limited duration of the lives of thosewho processed it.

Each form of mediated work depends upon its mediating entities.As one form of work is replaced by another, more efficient, thelanguage that mediated is replaced by other means. Languages ofcoordination corresponding to hunting, or those of incipientagriculture, made way for subsequent practical experience ofself-constitution in language. This applies to any and all formsof work, whether resulting in agricultural, industrial,artistic, or ideological products. The metaphors of genetics andevolutionary models can be applied. We can describe theevolution of work in memetic terminology, but we would still notcapture the active role of sign processes. Moreover, humanreproduction, between its sexual and its cultural forms, wouldbecome meaningless if separated from the pragmatic frameworkthrough which human self-constitution takes place.

To illustrate how language is consumed, let us shortly examinewhat happens in the work we call education. In our day, the needfor continual training increases dramatically. The paradigm of aonce-for-life education is over, as much as literacy is over.Shorter production cycles require changes of tools and thepertinent training. A career for life, possible while the linearprogress of technology required only maintenance of skills andslight changes of knowledge, is an ideal of the past. Efficiencyrequirements translate into training strategies that are lesscostly and less permanent than those afforded through literacy.These strategies produce educated operators as training itselfbecomes a product, offered by training companies whose list ofclients includes fast food chains, nuclear energy producers,frozen storage facilities, the U.S. Congress, and computeroperations. The market is the place where products aretransacted and where the language of advertising, design, andpublic relations is consumed. Training, too, focused more andmore on non-literate means of communication, is consumed.

Literacy and the machine

Man built machines which imitated the human arm and itsfunctions, and thus changed the nature of work. The skillsneeded to master such machines were quite different from theskills of craftsmen, no longer transmitted from generation togeneration, and less permanent. The Industrial Revolution madepossible levels of efficiency high enough to allow for themaintenance of both machines and workers. It also made possiblethe improvement of machines and required better qualifiedoperators, who were educated to extract the maximum from themeans of production entrusted to them.

At present, due to the integrative mechanisms that humans havedeveloped in the processes of labor division, natural languagehas lost, and keeps losing, importance in the population'spractical experience. The lower quality of writing, reading, andverbal expression, as they apply to self-constitution throughwork and social life, is symptomatic of a new underlyingstructure for the pragmatic framework. Literacy-based means ofexpression and communication are substituted, not justcomplemented, by other forms of expression and communication. Orthey are reduced to a stereotyped repertory that is easy tomechanize, to automate, and finally, to do away with. Overseeingan automated assembly line, serving a sophisticated machine,participating in a very segmented activity without having a realoverview of it, and many similar functions ultimately means tobe part of a situation in which the subject's competence isprogressively reduced to fit the task. Before being rationalizedaway, it is stereotyped. The language involved, in addition tothat of engineering, is continuously compressed, trimmedaccording to the reduced amount of communication possible ornecessary, and according to situations that change continuouslyand very fast.

Today, a manual for the maintenance and repair of a highlysophisticated machine or weapon contains fewer words thanimages. The words still used can be recorded and associated withthe image. Or the whole manual can become a videotape, laserdisk, or CD-ROM, even network-distributed applications, to becalled upon when necessary. The machine can contain itscomputerized manual, displaying pages (on the screen)appropriate to the maintenance task performed, generatingsynthesized speech for short utterances, and for canneddialogues. Here are some oddly related facts: The Treasurydesigns dollar bills that will tell the user their denomination;cars are already equipped with machines to tell us that we forgotto lock the door or fasten our seat belt; greeting cards containvoice messages (and in the future they will probably containanimated images). We can see in such gadgets a victory of themost superficial tastes people might have. But once thegratuitous moment is over, and first reactions fade away, weface a pragmatic situation which, whether synthesized messagesare used or not, reflects an underlying structure better adaptedto the complexities of the new scale of humankind.

The holographic dollar bill that declines its name might evenbecome useless when transactions become entirely electronic. Thevoice of our cars might end up in a museum once the generalizednetwork for guiding our automobiles is in place, and all we haveto do is to punch in a destination and some route expectations("I want to take the scenic route"). Moreover, the supertech caritself might join its precursors in the museum once work becomesso distributed that the energy orgy, so evident on the rush-hourclogged highways, is replaced by more rational strategies of workand life. Telecommuting is a timid beginning and a pale image ofwhat such strategies might be. The speaking greeting card mightbe replaced by a program that remembers whose birthday it isand, 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 theindividualized electronic newspaper when the coffee is ready. Amodest company manufacturing screensavers, using today's stillprimitive applications in the networked world, could already dothis.

Anticipation aside, we notice that work involves means ofproduction that are more and more sophisticated. Nevertheless,the market of human work is at a relatively low level ofliteracy because human being do not need to be literate for mosttypes of work. One reason for this is that the new machinesincorporate the knowledge needed to fulfill their tasks. Themachines have become more efficient than humans. The universitysystem that is supposed to turn out literate graduates for theworld of work obeys the same expectations of high efficiency asany other human practical experience. Universities become moreand more training facilities for specific vocations, instead ofcarrying on their original goal of giving individuals a universaleducation in the domain of ideas.

The statement concerning the literacy level does not reflect thelonging of humanists but the actual situation in the manpowermarket. What we encounter is the structurally determined factthat natural language is no longer, at least in its literateform, the main means of recording collective experience, nor theuniversal means of education. For instance, in all itsaspects-work, market, education, social life-the practicalexperience of human self-constitution relies less on literacy andmore on images. Since the role of images is frequently mentioned(formulated differently, perhaps), the reader might suspect thisis only a way of speaking. The actual situation is quitedifferent. Pictographic messages are used whenever a certain normor rule has to be observed. This is not a question oftranscending various national languages (as in airports orOlympic stadiums, or with traffic signals, or in transactionspertinent to international trade), but a way of living andfunctioning. The visual dominates communication today.

Words and sentences, affected by long-time use in varioussocial, geographical, and historical contexts, became tooambiguous and require too much educational overhead forsuccessful communication. Communication based on literacyrequires an investment higher than the one needed for producing,perceiving, and observing images. Through images a positivistattitude is embodied, and a sense of relativity is introduced.Avoiding sequential reading, time and money consuminginstruction, and the rigidity of the rules of literacy, the useof images reflects the drive for efficiency as this results fromthe new scale of human survival and future well-being. The changefrom literacy-oriented to visually-oriented culture is not theresult of media development, as romantic media ecologists wouldlike us to believe. Actually, the opposite is true. It is theresult of fundamental ways of working and exchanging goods,within the new pragmatic framework that determined the need forthese media in the first place, and afterwards made possibletheir production, dissemination, and their continuousdiversification.

The change under discussion here is very complex. Direct demandsof mediated praxis and the new, highly mediative means of masscommunication (television, computers, telecommunication,networks), acting as instruments of integrating the individualin the mechanism of a global economy, are brought to expressionin this mutation. Transition from language to languages, andfrom direct to indirect, multimediated communication is notreducible to abandoning logocentrism (a structuralcharacteristic of cultures based on literacy) and the logicattached to it. We participate in the process of establishingmany centers of importance that replace the word, and competewith language as we know it. These can be found in subculture,but also within the entrenched culture. One example is theproliferation of electronic cafés, where clients sipping theircoffee on the West Coast can carry on a dialogue with a friend inBarcelona; or contact a Japanese journalist flying in one of theSoviet space missions; or receive images from an art exhibitopening in Bogota; or play chess with one of the miracle sistersfrom Budapest. These experiences take place in what is knowngenerically as cyberspace.

The disposable human being

While it is true that just as many different curves can be drawnthrough a finite number of points, consistent observations canbe subsumed under various explanations. Observations regardingthe role and status of literacy might result in explanationsthat put radically different glosses on their results, but theycannot escape confirming the sense of change defined here. Thischange ultimately concerns the identity humans acquire inilliterate experiences of self-constitution.

Progressively abandoning reading and writing and replacing themwith other forms of communication and reception, humansparticipate in another structural change: from centralization todecentralization; from a centripetal model of existence andactivity, with the traditional system of values as an attractionpoint (religious, aesthetic, moral, political values, amongothers) to a centrifugal model; and from a monolithic to apluralistic model. Paradoxically, the loss of the center alsomeans that human beings lose their central role and referentialvalue. This results in a dramatic situation: When humancreativity compensates for the limited nature of resources(minerals, energy, food supply, water, etc.), either by producingsubstitutes or by stimulating efficient forms of their use, thehuman itself becomes a disposable commodity, more so the morelimited its practical self-constitution is.

Within the pragmatics characteristic of the underlying literacy,machines were changed less often; but even when changed, thehuman operator did not have to be replaced. A basic set ofskills sufficed for lifelong activity. Engineering was concernedwith artifacts as long lasting as life. The pragmatic frameworkof illiteracy, as one of rapid change and progressively shortercycles, made the human more easily replaceable. At the new scaleof human activity, the very large and growing commodity of humanbeings decreases in value: in its market value, and in itsspiritual and real value. The sanctity of life gives way to theintricate technology of life maintenance, to the mechanics ofexistence and the body-building shops. In the stock market ofspare parts, a kidney or a heart, mechanical or natural, islisted almost the same way as pork bellies and cement, vanGogh's paintings, CD players, and nuclear headscrews. They arequoted and transacted as commodities. And they support highlyspecialized work, compensated at the level of professionalfootball or basketball.

Projected into and among products of short-lived destiny, thehuman beings working to make them project a morality of thedisposable that affects their own condition and, finally, thedissolution of their values. As a result of high levels of workefficiency, there are enough resources to feed and househumankind, but not enough to support practical experiences thatredeem the integrity of the individual and the dignity of humanexistence. Within a literate discourse, with an embedded ideologyof permanency, the morality of the disposable makes for goodheadlines; but since it does not affect the structuralconditions conducive to this morality, it soon gets lost in themany other literate commentaries, including those decrying thedecline 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 RobertReich, Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professorLester Thurow, and many educators and policy-makers, become lessand less meaningful in the fast-changing world of work, it iseasy to understand why little weight can be attached to one oranother individual. Under the guise of basic skills, young andless than young workers receive an education in reading andwriting that has nothing to do with the emergent practicalexperiences of ever shorter cycles. Companies in search of cheaplabor have discovered the USA, or at least some parts of it, andachieve here efficiencies that at home, under labor lawsoriginating from a literate pragmatics, are not attainable.Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Porsche, and many Japanese companies traintheir labor force in South Carolina, Mississippi, Arkansas, andother states. The usefulness of the people these companies trainis almost equal to that of the machine, unless the workers arereplaced by automation.

The technological cycle and the human cycle are so closelyinterwoven that one can predicate the hybrid nature oftechnology today: machines with a live component. As a matter offact, it is interesting to notice how progressively machines nolonger serve us, but how we serve them. Entirely equipped toproduce high quality desktop publishing, to process data forfinancial transactions, to visualize scientific phenomena, suchmachines require that we feed the data and run the program sothat a meaningful output results. In the case in which themachine might not know the difference between good and badtypography, for example, the human operator supplies the requiredknowledge, 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, continuityof means and methods and of semiotic processes can be easilyestablished. What should most draw our attention arediscontinuities. We are going through such a discontinuity, andthe opposition between the civilization of literacy and thecivilization of illiteracy is suggestive of this. Evidently,within the new practical experiences through which our ownidentity is constituted, this is reflected in fast dynamics ofeconomic change. Some industries disappear overnight. Manyinnovative ideas become work almost as quickly, but this work hasa different condition. Discontinuity goes beyond analogy andstatistical inferences. It marks the qualitative change which wesee 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, occuras scale changes. Threshold values mark the emergence of newsign processes. As we have seen, practical experiences throughwhich humans continuously ascertain their reality are affected bythe scale at which they take place. Immediate tasks, such asthose characteristic of direct forms of work, do not require adivision into smaller tasks, a decomposition into smalleractions. The more complex the task, the more obvious the need todivide it. But it is not until the scale characteristic of ourage is reached that decomposition becomes as critical as it nowis. 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 rangeof the human's ability to handle it. Labor division is a powerfulmechanism for a divide and conquer strategy applied to tasks ofgrowing complexity. The generation of choices, and the abilityto compensate for the limited nature of resources as theseaffect the equation of population growth, integrate this rule ofdecomposition.

Literacy, itself a practical experience of not negligiblecomplexity, helps as long as the depth of the division intosmaller parts, and the breadth of the integrative travail do notgo beyond litercy's own complexity. When this happens, it isobvious that even if means belonging to literacy were effectivein managing very deep hierarchies in order to allow forre-integration of the parts in the desired whole, the managementof such means would itself go beyond the complexity we are ableto cope with. Indeed, although very powerful in many respects,when faced with many pragmatic levels independent of language,literacy (through which language attains its optimaloperational power) appears flat. Actually, not only literacyappears 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 anddemand of an order of magnitude exponentially higher than anyexperience an individual can have, can no longer be grasped bysingle minds. Since the condition of the mind depends oninteraction with other minds within practical experiences ofself-constitution, it results that means of interactiondifferent from those appropriate to sequentiality, linearity, anddualism are necessary. This new stage is not a continuation of aprevious stage. It is even less a result of an incrementalprogression. The wheel, once upon a time a rounded stone, alongwith a host of wheel-based means of practical experiences,opened a perspective of progression. So did the lever, andprobably alphabetic writing, and the number system. This is whythe old and new could be linked through comparisons, metaphors,and analogies in a given scale of humankind. But this is alsowhy, when the scale changes, we have to deal with discontinuityand avoid misleading translations in the language of the past.

A car was still, in some ways, the result of incrementalprogression from the horse-drawn carriage. An airplane, andlater a rocket, are less along a line of gradual change, butstill conceptually close to our own practical experience withflying 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 ofany previous pragmatic experience. The effort here is to tamethe process, to keep it within a scale that allows for our useof a new resource of energy. The relation between the sizesactively involved-nuclear level of matter compared to theenormous machinery and construction-is not only beyond the powerof distinction of individual minds, but also of any operators,unless assisted by devices themselves of a high degree ofcomplexity. The Chernobyl meltdown suggests only the magnitudesinvolved, and how peripheral to them are the literacy-basedexperiences of energy management.

The enormous satellite and radio-telephonic network, whichphysically embodies the once fashionable concept of ether, isanother example of the scale of work under the circ*mstances ofthe new scale of human activity; and so are the telephonenetworks-copper, coaxial, or fiberglass. The conceptualhierarchies handled by such networks of increasingly generalizedcommunication of voice, data, and images make any comparison toEdison's telephone, to letters, or to videotapes useless. Theamount of information, the speed of transmission, and thesynchronicity mechanisms required and achieved in thenetwork-all participate in establishing a framework for remoteinteraction that practically resets the time for all involved anddoes away with physical distances. Literacy, by its intrinsiccharacteristics, could not achieve such levels.

Finally, the computer, associated or not with networks, makesthis limit to our ability to grasp complexities even morepressing. We have no problems with the fact that a passengerairplane is 200 times faster than a pedestrian, and carries, atit* current capacity, 300-450 passengers plus cargo. Thecomputer chip itself is a conceptual accomplishment beyondanything we can conceive of. The depth encountered in thefunctioning of the digital computer-from the whole it representsto its smallest components endowed with functions integrated inits operation-is of a scale to which we have no intuitive ordirect access. Computers are not a better abacus. Some computerusers have even noticed that they are not even a better cashregister. They define an age of semiotic focus, in that symbolmanipulation follows language processing. (The word symbolpoints to work become semiotic praxis, but this is not what I amafter here.)

In addition to the complexity it embodies, the computer makesanother distinction necessary. It replaces the world of thecontinuum by a world of discrete states. Probably thisdistinction would be seen only as qualitative, if the shift fromthe universe of continuous functions and monotonicbehavior-whatever applies to extreme cases applies to everythingin between-were not concretized in a different condition ofhuman 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). Evenstriving-from a general attitude to particular forms (do better,achieve higher levels)-is inherent in the underlying structure ofthe analog. The digital is not linear in nature. Within thedigital, one small deviation (one digit in the phrase) changesthe result of processing so drastically that retracing the errorand fixing it becomes itself a new experience, and many times anew source of knowledge.

In a written sentence, a misspelling or a typographical error isalmost automatically corrected. Through literacy, we dispose ofa model that tells us what is right. In the digital, thelanguage of the program and the data on which programs operateare difficult to distinguish (if at all). Such machines canmanipulate more symbols, and of a broader variety, than thehuman mind can. Free of the burden of previous practicalexperiences, such machines can refer to potential experiences ina frame of reference where literacy is entirely blind. Thebehavior of an object in a multi- dimensional space (four, five,six, or more dimensions), actions along a timeline that can beregressive, or in several distinct and unrelated time frames,modeling choices beyond the capability of the human mind-allthese, and many more, with practical significance for thesurvival and development of humankind are acceptable problemsfor a digital computer.

It is true, as many would hasten to object, that the computerdoes not formulate the problem. But this is not the point.Neither does literacy formulate problems. It only embodiesformulations and answers pertinent to work within a scale ofmanageable divisions. The less expressive language of zeros andones (yes-no, open-closed, white- black) is more precise, anddefinitely more appropriate, for levels of complexity as high asthose resulting from this new stage in the evolution. Thegenerality of the computer (a general-purpose machine), theabstraction of the program of symbol manipulation, and the veryconcrete nature of the data upon which it is applied represent apowerful combination of reified knowledge, effective proceduresfor solving problems, and high resolution capabilities. Thosewho see the computer as only the principal technologicalmetaphor of our time (according to J. D. Bolter) miss thesignificance of the new metrics of human activity and its degreeof necessity as it results from awareness of the limits of ourminds (after the limits of the body were experienced inindustrial society).

Edsger Dijkstra, affirming the need for an orthogonal method ofcoping with radical novelty, concludes that this "amounts tocreating and learning a new foreign language that cannot betranslated into one's mother tongue." The direction he takes isright; the conclusion is still not as radical as the new scale ofhuman activity and the limits of our self-constitution require.Coming to grips with the radical change that he and many, manyothers ascertain, amounts to understanding the end of literacyand the illiteracy of the numerous languages required by ourpractical experience of self- constitution. This conspectus ofthe transformation we experience may foster its own forms offresh confusion. For instance, in what was called a civilizedsociety, language acted as the currency of culturaltransactions. If higher level needs and expectations continue todrive the market and technology, will they eventually becomesubservient to the illiterate means they have generated? Or, iflanguage in one of its illiterate embodiments cannot keep pacewith the exponential growth of information, will it undergo arestructuring in order to become a parallel process? Or will wegenerate more inclusive symbols, or some form of preprocessing,before information is delivered to human beings? All thesequestions relate to work, as the experience from which humanidentities result together with the products bearing their mark.

The active condition of any sign system is quite similar to thecondition of tools. The hand that throws a stone is a handinfluenced by the stone. Levers, hammers, pliers, no less thantelescopes, pens, vending machines, and computers supportpractical experiences, but also affect the individualsconstituting themselves through their use. A gesture, a writtenmark, a whisper, body movements, words written or read, expressus or communicate for us, at the same time affecting thoseconstituted in them. How language affects work means, therefore,how language affects the human being within a pragmaticframework. To deal with some aspects of this extremely difficultproblem we can start with the original syncretic condition of thehuman being.

Innate heuristics

Conceptual tools that can be used to refer to the human being inits syncretic condition exist only to the degree to which weidentify them in language. In every system we know of, varietyand precision are complementary. Indeed, whether human beingshunt or present personal experiences to others, they attempt tooptimize their efforts. Too many details affect efficiency;insufficient detail affects the outcome. There seems to be astructural relation of the nature of one to many, between ourwhat and our how. This relation is scrutinized in the pragmaticcontext where efficiency considerations finally make us choosefrom among many possibilities. The optimum chosen indicateswhat, from the possibilities humans are aware of, is mostsuitable for reaching the goal pursued. Moreover, such anoptimum is characteristic of the pragmatics of the particularcontext. For example, hunting could be performed alone or ingroups, by throwing stones or hurling spears, by shootingarrows, or by setting traps.

The syncretic primitive being was (and still is, in existingprimitive cultures) involved in a practical experience in itswholeness: through that being's biological endowment, relationto the environment, acquired skills and understanding, emotions(such as fear, joy, sorrow). The specialized individualconstitutes himself in experiences progressively more and morepartial. Nevertheless, the two have a natural condition incommon. What distinguishes them is a strategy for survival andpreservation that progressively departs from immediate needs anddirect action to humanized needs and mediated action. This meansa departure from a very limited set of options ("When hungry,search for food," for example), to multiplying the options, andthus establishing for the human being an innate heuristiccondition. This means that hom*o Sapiens looks for options.Humans are creative and efficient.

My line of reasoning argues that, while verbal language may beinnate (as Chomsky's theory advances), the heuristic dimensioncharacteristic of human self- constitution certainly is. Inhunting, for instance, the choice of means (defining the how)reflects the goal (to get meat) and also the awareness of what ispossible, as well as the effort to expand the realm of thepossible. The major effort is not to keep things the way theyare, but to multiply the realm of possibilities to ensure morethan mere survival. This is known as progress.

The same heuristic strategy can be applied to the development ofliteracy. Before the Western alphabet was established, a numberof less optimal writing systems (cuneiform, hieroglyphics, etc.)were employed. The very concrete nature of such languages isreflected in the limited expressive power they had. CurrentChinese and Japanese writing are examples of this phenomenontoday. In comparison to the 24-28 letters of Western alphabets,command of a minimum of 3,000 ideographic signs represents theentry level in Chinese and Japanese; command of 50,000ideographic signs would correspond to the Western ideal ofliteracy. Behind the letters and characters of the variouslanguage alphabets, there is a history of optimization in whichwork influenced expression, expression constituted new frames forwork, and together, generative and explanatory models of theworld were established. The what and the how of language wereinitially on an order of complexity similar to thatcharacteristic of actions. Over time, actions became simplerwhile languages acquired the complexity of the heuristicexperience.

The what and the how of mediation tools of a higher order ofabstraction than language, achieved even higher complexities.Such complexities were reflected in the difference in the orderof magnitude between human work and outcome, especially thechoices generated. Parallel to the loss of the syncretic natureof the human being at the level of the individual, we notice thecomposite syncretism of the community. Individual, relativelystable, wholeness was replaced by a faster and faster changingcommunity- related wholeness. Language experiences were part ofthis shift. Self-constituted in the practical use of language,the human being realized its social dimension, itself an exampleof the acquired multiplication of choice.

Indeed, within the very small scale of incipient humanitycorresponding to the stage of self-ascertainment (when signswere used and elements of language appeared), population andfood supply were locked in the natural equation best reflectedin the structural circularity of existence and survival. It is atthis juncture that the heuristic condition applies: the moreanimals prey on a certain group, this group will either findsurvival strategies (adaptive or other kinds), or indeed cease tobe available as food for others. But once the human being wasascertained, evidence shows that instead of focusing on one orfew ways to get at its food sources, it actually diversified thepractical experience of self-constitution and survival,proceeding from one, or few, to many resources. hom*o Habilis waspast the scavenging stage and well into foraging, hunting, andfishing during the pre-agricultural pragmatic frame. What forother species became only a limited food supply, and resulted inmechanisms of drastic growth control (through famine,cannibalism, and means of destroying life), in the human speciesresulted in a broadening of resources. In this process, the humanbeing became a working being, and work an identifier of thespecies.

Language acquisition and the transition from the naturalexperience of self- constitution in survival to the practicalexperience of work are co-genetic. With each new scale thatbecame possible, sequences of work marked a further departurefrom the universe of action-reaction. The observation to bemade, without repeating information given in other chapters, isthat from signs to incipient language, and from incipientlanguage to stabilized means of expression, the scale ofhumankind changed and an underlying structure of practicalexperiences based on sequentiality, linearity, determinism (ofone kind or another), and centralism established a new pragmaticframework. Individual syncretism was replaced by the syncretismof communities in which individuals are identified through theirwork.

Writing was a relatively late acquisition and occurred as part ofthe broader process of labor division. This process was itselfcorrelated to the diversification of resources and types ofpractical experiences preserving syncretism at the communitylevel. Not everyone wrote, not everybody read. The pragmaticframework suggested necessitated elements of order, ways ofassigning and keeping track of assignments, a certaincentralism, and, last but not least, organizational forms, whichreligion and governing bodies took care of. Under thesecirc*mstances, work was everything that allowed for theconstitution, survival, change, and advancement of the humanspecies. It was expressed in language to the degree suchexpression was necessary. In other words, language is anotherasset or means of diversifying choices and resources.

Over time, limited mediation through language and literacy becamenecessary in order to optimize the effort of matching needs withavailabilities. This mediation was itself a form of work:questions asked, questions answered, commitments made,equivalencies determined. All these defined an activity relatedto using available resources, or finding new ones. Whenproductivity increased, and language could not keep up with thecomplexities of higher production, variety, and the need forplanning, a new semiosis, characteristic of this differentpragmatic level, became necessary. Money, for example,introduced the next level of mediation, more abstract, thattranslated immediate, vital needs into a comparative scale ofmeans to fulfill them. The context of exchange generated money,which eventually became itself a resource, a high levelcommodity. It also entailed a language of its own, as does eachmediation. With the advent of means of exchange as universal aslanguage, the what and how of human activity grew even moredistant. Direct trade became indirect. People making up themarket no longer randomly matched needs and availability. Theirmarket praxis resulted in an organizing device, and usedlanguage to further diversify the resources people needed fortheir lives. This language was still rudimentary, direct, oral,captive to immediacy, and often consumed together with theresource or choice exhausted (when no alternative wasgenerated). This happens even in our day.

In its later constitution in practical activity, language wasused for records and transactions, for plans and newexperiences. The logic of this language was an extension andinstantiation of the logic of human activity. It complemented theheuristic, innate propensity for seeking new choices. Influencedby human interaction in the market, and subjected to theexpectation of progressively higher efficiency, human activitybecame increasingly mediated. A proliferation of tools allowedfor increased productivity in those remote times of theinception of language. Eventually tools, and other artifacts,became themselves an object of the market, in addition tosupporting self-constitutive practical experiences of the humansinteracting with them. As a mediating element between theprocessor and what is processed, the tool was a means of workand a goal: better tools require instructed users. If they usetools properly, they increase the efficiency of activity andmake the results more marketable. Tools supported the effort ofdiversification of practical experiences, as well as the effortof expanding the subsistence base. The means for creating toolsand other artifacts fostered other languages, such as thelanguage 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 someextent, the used, the tool of the tool. The same is true oflanguage, writing, and literacy. They were developed by humansseeking to optimize their activity. But humans have adaptedthemselves to the constraints of their own inventions.

At the inception of writing, the tension between an imposedwritten precision (as relative as this might appear from ourperspective today)-keeping language close to the object,allowing into the language only objects that pictograms couldrepresent- and a rather diverse, however very unfocused, orallanguage resulted in conflicts between the proponents of writingand the guardians of orality (as documented in ancient Greekphilosophy). The written needed to be freed from the object asmuch as the human being from a particular source of protein, ora particular food source. It had to support a more generalexpression (referring to what would become families, types,classes of objects, etc.), and thus to support practical effortsto diversify the ways of survival and continuous growth innumber. The oral had to be tamed and united with the written.Taming could, and did, take place only through and in work, andin socially related interaction. The practical effort to embodyknowledge resulting from many practical experiences of survivalinto all kinds of artifacts (for measuring, orientation,navigation, etc.) testifies to this. Phonetic writing, thedevelopment of the effort to optimize writing, better imitatedoral language. Personal characteristics, making the oralexpressive, and social characteristics, endowing the written withthe hints that bring it close to speech, are supported in thephonetic system. The theocratic system of pictographs and whatothers call the democratic language of phonetic writing deservetheir names only if we understand that languages are bothconstitutive and representative of human experience.Undifferentiated labor is theocratic. Its rules are imposed bythe object of the practical experience. Divided labor, whileaffecting the integrity of those becoming only an instance ofthe work process, is participatory, in the sense that itsresults are related to the performance of each participant in theprocess. Practical experience of language and experience ofdivided labor are intrinsically related and correspond to thepragmatic framework of this particular human scale. Labordivision and the association of very abstract phonetic entitiesto very concrete language instantiations of human experience areinterdependent.

The realm of alternatives

In defining the context of change leading from anall-encompassing literacy to the civilization of illiteracy, Ireferred to the Malthusian principle (Population, whenunchecked, increases geometrically, while food sources increasearithmetically). What Malthus failed to acknowledge is theheuristic nature of the human species, i.e., the progressiverealization of the creative potential of the only known speciesthat, in addition to maintaining its natural condition,generates its own a-natural condition. In the process of theirself-constitution, humans generate also the means for theirsurvival and future growth beyond the circularity of meresurvival strategies. The 19th century economist Henri Georgegave the following example of this characteristic: "Both thejayhawk and the man eat chicken, but the more jayhawks, the fewerchickens, while the more men, the more chickens." (Just thinkabout the Purdue chicken industry!) The formula is flawed.Humans also intervene in the jayhawk-chicken relation; the numberof animals and birds in a certain area is affected by moreelements than what eats what; and the population increase ismeaningless unless associated with patterns of human practicalexperiences. Species frequently become extinct due to human, notanimal, intervention. Despite all this, Henri George'scharacterization captured an important aspect of the humanspecies, as it defined itself in the human scale that madeliteracy possible and necessary.

George's time corresponded to some interesting though misleadingmessages that followed the pattern of Malthus' law. People wererunning out of timber, coal, and oil for lamps, just as weexpect to run out of many other resources (minerals, energy andfood sources, water, etc.). Originators of messages regarding theexhaustion of such resources, regardless of the time they utterthem, ignore the fact that during previous shortages, humansfocused on alternatives, and made them part of new practicalexperiences. This was the case leading to the use of coal, whenthe timber supply decreased in Britain in the 16th century, andthis will be the case with the shortages mentioned above: forlighting, kerosene was extracted from the first oil wells(1859); more coal reserves were discovered; better machines werebuilt that used less energy and made coal extraction moreefficient; industry adapted other minerals; and the strictdependence on natural cycles and farming was progressivelymodified through food processing and storage techniques.

The pragmatic framework of current human praxis is based on thestructural characteristics of this higher scale of humankind. Itaffects the nature of human work and the nature of social,political, and national organization within emerging nationalstates. A retrospective of the dynamics of growth and resourceavailability shows that with language, writing and reading, andfinally with literacy, and even more through engineering outsidelanguage experience, a coherent framework of pragmatic humanaction was put in place, and used to compensate for theprogressive imbalance between population growth and resources.

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

Phoenician traders supplied materials to the Minoans. The Minoanburial culture involved the burial of precious objects thatembodied the experience of crafts. These objects were made outof silver, gold, tin, and lead. In time, increased quantities ofsuch metals were permanently removed from the market.Phoenicians, who supplied these materials, had to search fartherand farther for them, using better tools to find and preprocessthe minerals. The involvement of writing and drawing in theprocess of compensation between perceived needs and availableresources, and the fact that searches for new resources led tothe dissemination of writing and craftsmanship should beunderstood within the dynamics of local economies.

Up to which point such a compensatory action, implying literacyand engineering skills, is effective, and when it reached itsclimax, possibly during the Industrial Revolution, is a questionthat can be put only in retrospect. Is there a moment when thebalance was tilted towards the means of expression of and thecommunication specific to engineering? If yes, we do not knowthis moment; we cannot identify it on historic charts. But oncethe potential of literacy to support human practical experiencesof self- constitution in a new pragmatic framework was exhausted,new means became necessary. To understand the dynamics of thechanges that made the new pragmatic framework of thecivilization of illiteracy necessary is the object of the entirebook. While engineering contributed to them, they are not theresult of this important practical experience, but rather acause of how it was and is affected by them. The stream ofdiversified experiences that eventually gushed forth through newlanguages, the language of design and engineering included,resulted in the awareness of mediation, which itself became agoal.

Mediation of mediation

With the risk of breaking the continuity of the argument, I wouldlike to continue by suggesting the implications of this argumentfor the reality to which this book refers: the present. First, ageneral thesis derived from the analysis so far: The market ofdirect 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 specificlanguages. From a certain moment in human evolution, tools, as anextension of the human body and mind, are used, some directly,some indirectly. Today we notice how, through the intermediaryof commands transmitted electronically, pneumatically,hydraulically, thermally, or in some other way, the mediation ofmediation is introduced. Pressing a button, flipping a switch,punching a keyboard, triggering a relay-seen as steps preparingfor entirely programmed activities-means to extend the sequenceof mediations. Between the hand or another body part and theprocessed material, processing tools and sequences of signscontrolling this process are introduced. Accordingly, language,as related to work, religion, education, poetry, exchange in themarket, etc., is restructured. New levels of language and new,limited, functionally designed languages are generated and usedfor mediating. The language of drawings (more generally thelanguage of design) is one of them. Relations among thesedifferent levels and among the newly designed languages areestablished.

But how is this related to the innate heuristic condition of thehuman being and to the working hypothesis advanced regarding thechange in the scale of humanity? Or is it only another way ofsaying that technology, resulting from engineeringinterpretations of science, defines the path to higher levels ofefficiency, and to the relative illiteracy of our time? Theincrease in population and the dynamics of diversification (morechoices, more resources) at this new scale assume a differentdimension. It is irrelevant that resources of one type oranother are exhausted in one economy. As a matter of fact,Japan, Germany, England, and even the USA (rich in the majorityof 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 thequantities and different types of food consumed per capita haveincreased substantially. Faced with the challenge posed by thenational, linear, sequential, dual, deterministic nature of thepragmatic framework that generated the need for literacy, humansdiscover means to transcend these limitations-globality,non-linearity, configuration, multi-valued logic,non-determination-and embody them in artifacts appropriate tothis condition.

The new scale necessitated creative work for multiplyingavailable resources, for looking at needs and availabilitiesfrom a new perspective. Those who see globality in the Japanesesushi restaurant in Provence or in the Midwest, in the McDonaldsin Moscow or Beijing, in multinational corporations, in foreigninvestments mushrooming all over, miss the real significance ofthe term. Globality applies to the understanding that we sharein resources and creative means of multiplying them independentof boundaries (of language, culture, nations, alliances, etc.),as well as in high efficiency processing equipment. Thisunderstanding is not only sublime, it has its ugly side. Theworld would even go to war (and has, again and again) to secureaccess to critical resources or to keep markets open. But it isnot the ugly side that defines the effective pragmatics. Nordoes it define the circ*mstances of our continuousself-definition in this world of a new dynamics of survivalneeds and expectations above and beyond such needs.

Where literacy no longer adequately supports creative work basedon higher levels of efficiency, it is replaced by languagesdesigned and adapted to mediation, or to work destined tocompensate for an exhausted resource, or by machinesincorporating our literacy and the literacies of higherefficiency. Hunting and fishing remain as mere sport, andforaging declined to the level at which people in a countrylike the USA no longer know that in the woods there aremushrooms, berries, and nuts that can be used as food. Evenagriculture, probably the longest standing form of practicalexperience, escapes sequentiality and linearity, and addsindustrial dimensions that make agriculture a year-round, highlyspecialized, efficient activity. We share resources and evenmore in the globality of the life support system (the ecology);in the globality of communication, transportation, andtechnology; and, last but not least, in the globality of themarket. The conclusion is that, once again, it is not anyrecent discovery or trend that is the engine of change, fromlocal to national to global, but the new circ*mstances of humanexperience, whose long-lasting effect is the alteredindividual.

Freed from the human operator and replaced by technology thatensures levels of efficiency and security for which the livingbeing is not well adapted to provide, many types of work aresimultaneously freed from the constraints of language, ofliteracy in particular. There is no need to teach machinesspelling, or grammar, or rules of constructing sentences. Thereis even less of a need to maintain between the human being andthe machine a mediating literacy that is awkward, inefficient,stamped by ambiguity, and burdened by various uses (religious,political, ideological, etc.). The new languages, whetherinterfaces between machines or between humans and machines, areof limited scope and duration. In the dynamics of work, these newlanguages are appropriately adapted to each other. Our entireactivity becomes faster, more precise, more segmented, moredistributed, more complex. This activity is subordinated to amulti-valued logic of efficiency, not to dualistic inferences ortruth or falsehood.

Some might read into the argument made so far a vote against themany kinds of activists of this day and age: the ecologists whowarn of damage inflicted on the environment; Malthusianstireless in warning of upcoming famine; the zero-population-growth movement, etc. Some might read here a vote fortechnocracy, for the advocates of limitless growth, theoptimists of despair, or the miracle planners (free marketers,messianic ideologists, etc.). None is the case. Rather, I submitfor examination a model for understanding and action that takesinto account the complexity of the problem instead of explainingcomplexities away and working, as literacy taught us to, onsimplified models. Mapping out the terrain of the descriptivelevel of the relation between language and work under currentpragmatic circ*mstances will assist in the attempt to plot, insome meaningful detail, the position so far described.

Literacy and Education

Education and literacy are intimately related. One seemsimpossible without the other. Nevertheless, there was educationbefore the written word. And there is education that does notrely on literacy, or at least not exclusively. With this in mind,let us focus, in these preliminary words, on what broughtliteracy into education, and on the consequences of theirreciprocal relation.

The state of education, like the state of many other institutionsembodying characteristics of literacy-based practicalexperiences, is far from what is expected. Literacy carried theideal of permanency into the practical experience of education.In a physical world perceived as limited in scale andfragmented, captive to sequentiality, characterized by periodicchanges and intercommunal commitments aimed at maintainingpermanency, literacy embodied both a goal and the means forachieving it. It defined a representative, limited set ofchoices. Within this structure, education is the practicalexperience of stabilizing optimal modes of interaction centeredaround values expressed in language. Education based onliteracy is adapted to the dynamics of change within the reducedscale of humankind that eventually led to the formation ofnations-entities of relative self-sufficiency. Within nationalboundaries, population growth, resources, and choices could bekept in balance.

Purposely simplified, this view allows us to understand thateducation evolved from its early stages-direct transmission ofexperience from one person to another, from one generation toanother-to religion-based educational structures. Filtered by aset of religious premises, education later opened a window beyondthe immediate and the proximity of life, and evolved, notpainlessly, into schools and universities concerned withknowledge and scholarship. This, too, was a long process, withmany intermediate steps, which eventually resulted in thegeneralized system of education we now have in place, and whichreflects the separation of church and state. Liberal educationand all the values attached to it are the foundational matrix ofthe current system of general education.

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

"Know the best"

Resulting from our self-constitution in a world obsessed withefficiency and satisfaction, the insatiable effort to exhaustthe new-only to replace it with the newer- puts education in aperspective different from that opened by literacy. Educationdriven by literacy seems to be condemned to a sui generiscatch-up condition, or "damned if you do, damned if you don't."In the last 30 years, education has prepared students for afuture different from the one education used to shape in areactive mode. Under the enormous pressure of expectations(social, political, economic, moral) it simply cannot fulfill,unless it changes as the structure of the pragmatic frameworkchanged, the institution of education has lost its credibility.Classes, laboratories, manuals, any of the educational methodsadvanced, not to mention the living inventory of teachers,account for contents and ways of thinking only marginally (if atall) linked to the change from a dominant literacy to numerousliteracies. IBM, fighting to redefine itself, stated bluntly inone of its educational campaigns, "Since 1900, every institutionhas kept up with change, except one: Education."

More money than ever, more ideals and sweat have been invested inthe process of educating the young, but little has changedeither the general perception of education or the perception ofthose educated. The most recent laboratory of the high school oruniversity is already outdated when the last piece of equipmentis ordered. The competence of even the best teachers becomesquestionable just as their students start their first journey inpractical life. The harder our schools and colleges try to keeppace with change, the more obvious it becomes that this is awrong direction to pursue, or that something in the nature ofour educational system makes the goal unreachable-or both ofthese alternatives. Some people believe that the failure is dueto the bureaucracy of education. Much can be said in support ofthis opinion. The National Institute for Literacy is an exampleof how a problem can become a public institution. Other peoplebelieve that the failure is due to the inability of educators todevelop a good theory of education, based on how people learn andwhat the best way to teach is. Misunderstanding the implicationsof education and setting false priorities are also frequentlyinvoked. Misunderstanding too often resulted in expensivegovernment projects of no practical consequence.

Other explanations are also given for the failure ofeducation-liberalism, excessive democracy in education,rejection of tradition, teaching and learning geared to tests,the breakdown of the family. (Listing them here should not bemisconstrued as an endorsem*nt.) It seems that every critic oftoday's education has his or her own explanation of what eachthinks is wrong. Some of these explanations go well back,almost to the time when writing was established: educationaffects originality, dampens spontaneity, and infringes uponcreativity. Education negates naturalness during the mostcritical 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 methodsto put them in a light that makes them attractive, educationwould not lose out to entertainment. Some groups advocate thedigest approach for texts, sometimes presented in the form ofcomic strips or Internet-like messages of seven sentences perparagraph, each sentence containing no more than seven words.These explanations assume the permanence of literacy. Theyconcentrate on strategies, from infantile to outlandish, tomaintain literacy's role, never questioning it, never evenquestioning whether the conditions that made it necessary mighthave changed to the degree that a new structure is already inplace. Educators like to think that their program is definedthrough Matthew Arnold's prescription, "Know the best that isknown and thought in the world," an axiom of tradition-drivenself- understanding. This attitude is irrelevant in a context inwhich 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 ofa love for reading are the proper goal of education."Ideal vs. real

Schools at all levels of education purport to give students atraditional education and promise to deliver the solid educationof yesteryear. Contrast this claim to reality: Under thepressure of the market in which they operate, schools maintainthat they prepare students for the new pragmatic context. Someschools integrate practical disciplines and include trainingcomponents. Courses in computer use come immediately to mind.Some schools go so far as to sign contracts guaranteeing theappropriateness of the education they provide. In the traditionof the service industry, they promise to take back pupils unableto meet the standardized criteria. Every spring, a reality checkis made. In 1996, a poll of 500 graduating seniors revealed thatonly 7% succeeded in answering at least 15 of 20 questionsasked. Five of these were on math, the rest on history andliterature-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 hiseducational ideas implemented; Diane Ravitch, former AssistantSecretary of Education; and Stephen Balch, president of theNational Association of Scholars, constitute themselves in thepragmatic 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 ademocracy needs. As reputable as they undoubtedly are, thesescholars, and many of those in charge of education, do not seemto realize what changes have been taking place in the realworld. They live in the richest and probably most dynamic countryin the world, with one of the lowest unemployment rates, and thehighest rate of new business creation, but fail to associateeducation with this dynamism. If education is failing, thensomething positive must be replacing it.

In modern jargon, one can say that until education isre-engineered (or should I say rethought?), it has no chance ofcatching up with reality. In its current condition ofcompromise, education will only continue to muddle along,upsetting both its constituencies: those captive to an educationbased on the literacy model, and those who recognize newstructural requirements.

The reality is that the universality implicit in the literacymodel of education, reflected in the corpus of democraticprinciples guaranteeing equality and access, is probably nolonger defensible in its original form. Education should ratherelaborate on notions that better reflect differences amongpeople, their background, ethnicity, and their individualcapabilities. Instead of trying to standardize, education shouldstimulate differences in order to derive the most benefit fromthem. Education should stimulate complementary avenues toexcellence, instead of equal access to mediocrity. Some peoplemay be uneducatable. They might have characteristics impossibleto reduce to the common denominator that literacy-basededucation implies. These students might require alternativeeducation paths in order to optimally become what their abilitiesallow them to be, and what practical experience will validate asrelevant and desired, no matter how different.

Equal representation, as applied to members of minority studentsor faculty, ethnic groups, sexes or sexual preferences, and thehandicapped, introduces a false sense of democracy in education.It takes away the very edge of their specific chances from thepeople it pretends to help and encourage. Instead ofacknowledging distinctions, expectations of equal representationsuggest that the more melting in the pot, the better forsociety, regardless of whether the result is uniform mediocrityor distributed excellence. Actually the opposite is true: equalopportunity should be used in order to preserve distinctivequalities and bring them to fruition.

As a unified requirement, literacy imparts a sense of conformityand standardization appropriate to the pragmatic framework thatmade standardized education necessary. Numerous alternativemeans of expression and communication, for which education hasonly a deaf ear, facilitate the multiplication of choices. In aworld confronted with needs well beyond those of survival, thisis a source of higher efficiency. The necessary effort toindividualize education cannot, however, take place unless theinalienable right to study and work for one's own path toself-improvement is not respected to the same extent as libertyand equality are.

The globality of human praxis is not a scenario invented by someentrepreneur. It is the reflection of the scale at whichpopulation growth, shared resources, and choices heading to newlevels of efficiency become critical. In our world many peoplenever become literate; many more still live at the borderlinebetween human and animal life, threatened by starvation andepidemics. These facts do not contradict the dynamics that madealternatives to literacy necessary. It is appropriate,therefore, to question the type of knowledge that educationimparts, and how it impacts upon those who are educated.

Relevance

Schools and universities are criticized for not giving studentsrelevant 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, arerelevant. Relevant also are elements of logical thinking, enoughscience in order to understand the wealth of technologies weuse, foreign languages, and other subject matter that will helpstudents face the world of practical experience. Although thesubjects listed are qualified as significant, they are never usedin polls of graduating students.

Critics of the traditional curriculum dispute the relevance of atradition that seems to exclude more than it includes. They alsochallenge implicit hierarchical judgments of the people whoimpose courses of study. Multiculturalism, criticism oftradition, and freedom from the pressure of competition areamong the recommendations they make. Acknowledging the newcontext of social life and praxis, these critics fail, however,to put it in the broader context of successive structuralconditions, and thus lack criteria of significance outside theirown field of expertise.

With the notion of relevance, a perspective of the past and adirection for the future are suggested. That literacy-basededucation, at its inception, was xenophobic or racist, andobviously political, nobody has to tell us. Individuals fromoutside the polis, speaking a different mother tongue, wereeducated for a political reason: to make them useful to thecommunity as soon as possible. Conditions for education changeddramatically over time, but the political dimension remains asstrong as ever. This is why it can only help to dispense withcertain literate attitudes expressing national, ethnic, racial,or similar ambitions. It is irrelevant whether Pythagoras wasGreek and whether his geometry was original with him. It isirrelevant whether one or another person from one or anotherpart of the world can be credited with a literary contribution,a work of art, or a religious or philosophic thought. What countsis how such accomplishments became relevant to the people of theworld as they involved themselves in increasingly complexpractical experiences. Moreover, our own sense of value does notrest on a sports-driven model-the first, the most, the best-buton the challenge posed by how each of us will constitute his ownidentity in unprecedented circ*mstances of work, leisure, andfeeling. Relevance applies to the perspective of the future andto the recognition that experiences of the past are less and lesspertinent in the new context.

What should be taught? Language? Math? Chemistry? Philosophy? Thelist can go on. It is indeed very hard to do justice by simplynodding yes to language, yes to math, yes to chemistry, but notyes wholesale, without putting the question in the pragmaticcontext. This means that education should not be approached withthe aura of religion, or dogmatism, assumed up to now: Theteacher knew what eternal truth was; students heard the lecturesand finally received communion.

All basic disciplines have changed through time. The rhythm oftheir change keeps increasing. The current understanding oflanguage, math, chemistry, and philosophy does not necessarilybuild on a progression. Science, for example, is notaccumulation. 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 dynamicexistence are. To memorize all that education-no matter howgood or bad-unloads on students is sheer impossibility. But toknow where to find what a given practical instance requires, andhow one can use it, is quite a different matter.

Should square dancing, Heavy Metal music, bridge, Chinese cuisinebe taught? The list, to be found in the curriculum of manyschools and colleges, goes on and on. The test of the relevanceof such disciplines (or subjects) in a curriculum should bebased on the same pragmatic criteria that our lives andlivelihoods depend on. New subjects of study appear on courselists due to structural changes that make literacy useless inthe new pragmatic context. They cannot, however, substitute foran education that builds the power of thinking and feeling forpractical experiences of increased complexity and dynamism.

Education needs to be shaped to the dynamics of self-constitutionin practical experiences characteristic of this new age ofhumankind. This does not mean that education should becomeanother TV program, or an endless Internet voyage, without aimand without method. We must comprehend that if we demand literacyand efficiency at the same time, ignoring that they are in manyways incompatible, we can only contribute to greater confusion.Higher education was opened to people who merely need trainingto obtain a skill. These students receive precious-lookingdiplomas that exactly resemble the ones given to students whohave 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 neverunderstood by the graduates, and many times not even by theprofessors who hand them out. In the spirit of nostalgia,useless rituals are maintained, which are totally disconnectedfrom today's pragmatic framework.

The progressively increased mediation that affects efficiencylevels also contributes to the multiplication of the number oflanguages involved in describing, designing, coordinating, andsynchronizing human work. We are facing new requirements-thoseof parallelism, non-linearity, multi-valued logic, vagueness, andselection among options. Programming, never subject to wrong orright, but to optimal choice, and always subject to furtherimprovement, is becoming a requirement for many practicalexperiences, from the arts to advanced science. Requirements ofglobality, distribution, economies of scale, of elementspertinent to engineering, communication, marketing, management,and of service-providing experiences need to be met withinspecific educational programs. The fulfillment of theserequirements can never be relegated to literacy.

We have seen that the broader necessity of language, from whichthe necessity of literacy is derived, is not defensible outsidethe process of human self-constitution. Language plays animportant role, together with other sign systems, subordinated tolanguage or not. In retrospect, we gain an understanding of theentire process: natural instincts are transmitted geneticallyand only slightly improve, if degeneration does not occur, inthe interaction among individuals sharing a habitat. Theconscious use of signs takes newborns from the domain of natureand eventually places them in the realm of culture. In thisrealm, life ceases to be a matter of biology only, and takes onnon-natural, social and cultural dimensions. To live as an animalis to live for oneself and for very few others (mainlyoffspring). To live as a human being is to live through theexistence of others, and in relation to others. Establishedbefore us and bound to continue after us, culture absorbsnewcomers who not only begin their existence through theirparents, but who also get to know culture and to adapt to it, orrevolt against it.

Education starts with the experience of the absent, thenon-immediate, the successive. In other words, it impliesexperiences resulting from comparisons, imitation of actions,and formation of individual patterns corresponding to humanbiological characteristics. Only much later comes the use oflanguage, of adjectives, adverbs, and the generation ofconventions and metaphors, some part of the body of literacy,others part of other languages, such as the visual. With theconstitution of the family, education begins, and so doesanother phase in labor division. The initial phase probablymarked the transition from a very small scale of nomadic triballife to the scale within which language settled in notation andeventually in writing. The generality of sequences, words,phonetics, nouns, and actions was reached in the practicalexperience of writing. The language of drawings, resulting fromdifferent experiences and supporting the making of objects,complemented the development of writing. When the scale ofhumankind corresponding to incipient literacy was reached,literacy became the instrument for imparting experiencescoherent with the experience of language and its use. Thisaccount is inserted here as a summary for those who, althoughclaiming historic awareness, show no real instinct for history.This summary says that education is the result of many changesin the condition of humankind and makes clear that thesealterations continue. They also entail a responsibility toimprove the experience of education and re-establish itsconnection to the broader framework of human activity, insteadof limiting education to the requirements of cultural continuity.

It has been said, again and again, that what we are we had tolearn to become. Actually, we are who and what we are throughwhat we do in the context of our individual and socialexistence. To speak, write, and read means to understand whatwe say, what we write, and what we read. It is not only themechanical reproduction of words or sound patterns, whichmachines can also be programmed to perform. The expectation ofspeaking, reading, and writing is manifested in all humaninteractions. To learn how to speak, write, and read means bothto gain skills and to become aware of the pragmatic context ofinterhuman relations that involve speaking, writing, andreading. It also means awareness of the possibility to changethis context.

To educate today means to integrate others, and in the processoneself, in an activity-oriented process directed towardssharing the knowledge necessary to gain further knowledge. Itscontent cannot be knowledge in general, since the varieties ofpractical experiences cannot be emulated in school and college.Within the pragmatic framework that made literacy possible, itsufficed to know how an engine functioned in order to work withdifferent machines driven by engines. Literacy reflectedhom*ogeneity and served those constituted as literate incontrolling the parameters within which deviations wereallowed. The post-industrial experience, based on an underlyingdigital structure, is so heterogeneous that it is impossible tocope with the many different instances of practicalrequirements. The skills to orient us towards where to find whatwe 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 humanpraxis focused on cognition. Education should, accordingly,prepare people to handle information, or to direct it toinformation processing devices. It has to help students developa propensity for understanding and explaining the variety inwhich cognition, the raw material of digital engines, resultsfrom our experiences.

The unity between the various paths we conceive in projecting ourown biological reality into the reality of the world housing usand the result of our activity is characteristic of our mentaland emotional condition. It defines our thinking and feeling. Atsome moment in time, after the division between physical andintellectual work took place, this thinking became relativelyfree of the result. The abstraction of thinking, once attained,corresponds to our ability to be in the process, to be aware ofit, to judge it. This is the level of theories. The dynamics ofthe present affects the status of theories, both the way weshape them and how we communicate them. At least in regard to thecommunication of theory, but also to some of its generation, itis worthwhile to examine, in the context of our concern witheducation in this age, the evolution of the university.

Temples of knowledge

Education became the institution, the machine of literacy, oncethe social role of a generalized instrument of communication andcoordination was established. This happened simultaneously withthe reification of many other forms of human praxis: religion,the judiciary, the military. The first Western universitiesembodied the elitist ideal of literacy in every possible way:exclusivity, philosophy of education, architecture, goals,curriculum, body of professors, body of students, relation to theoutside world, religious status. These universities did not carefor the crafts, and did not acknowledge apprenticeship. Theuniversity, more than schools (in their various forms), extendedits influence beyond its walls to assume a leading role in thespiritual lives of the population, while still maintaining anaura about itself. This was not just because of the religiousfoundation of universities. The university housed importantintellectual documents containing theories of science andhumanities, and encompassing educational concepts. Thesedocuments emphasized the role of a universal education (not onlyas a reflex of the Church's catholic drive) in which fundamentalcomponents constructed a temple of knowledge from which theorieswere dispensed throughout the Western world. Through its conceptand affirmed values, the university was intended as a model forsociety and as an important participant in its dynamics.Tradition, languages (opening direct access to the world ofclassic philosophy and literature), and the arts were understoodin their unity. Engineering and anything practical played nopart in this.

Compared to the current situation, those first universities wereahead of their time almost to the effect of losing contact withreality. They existed in a world of advanced ideas, of idealizedsocial and moral values, of scientific innovation celebrated intheir metaphysical abstraction. There is no need to transcribethe history of education here. We are mainly interested in thedynamics of education up to the turn of the century, and wouldlike to situate it in the discussion caused by the apparent, oractual, failure of education to accomplish its goals today. Whenuniversities were founded, access to education was very limited.This makes comparison to the current situation in universitiesalmost irrelevant. It explains, however, why some people questionthe presence of students who would not have been accepted in acollege a century ago, even 50 years ago. Yes, the university isthe bearer of prejudices as well as values.

The relevance of historic background is provided by theunderstanding of the formative power of language, of itscapacity for storing ideas and ideals associated withpermanency, and for disseminating the doctrine of permanency andauthority, making it part of the social texture. Religioninsinuated itself into the sciences and humanities, and assumedthe powerful role of assigning meaning to various discoveries andtheories. Education in such universities was for eternity,according to a model that placed humanity in the center of theuniverse and declared it exemplary because it originated fromthe Supreme power. The university established continuity throughits entire program, and did so on the foundation of literacy. Asan organization, it adopted a structure more favorable tointegration and less to differentiation. It constituted acounter-power, a critical instrument, and a framework forintellectual practice. Although many associate the formula"Knowledge is power" with the ideology of the political left, itactually originated in the medieval university, and withinconservative power relations for which literacy constituted theunderlying structure.

Looking at the development of the medieval university, one cansay that it was the embodiment of the reification of language,of the Greek logos and of the Roman ratio. The entire history ofreifying the past was summarized in the university and projectedas a model for the future. Alternative ways of thinking andcommunicating were excluded, or made to fit the language moldand submit, without exception, to the dominating rationality.Based on these premises, the university evolved into aninstitution of methodical doubt. It became an intellectualmachine for generating and experimenting with successivealternative explanations of the universe, as a whole, and of itsparts, considered similar in some way to the whole theyconstituted.

The circ*mstances leading to the separation of intellectual andeducational tasks were generated by an interplay of factors. Theprinting press is one of them. The metaphors of the universityalso played an important role. But the defining element waspractical expectations. As people eventually learned, they couldnot build machines only by knowing Latin or Greek, or byreciting litanies, but by knowing mathematics and mechanics.Some of this knowledge came from Greek and Latin texts preservedby Moslem scholars from the desolation following the fall of theRoman empire. People also had to know how to express theirgoals, and communicate a plan to those who would transform itinto roads, bridges, buildings, and much more. Humans could notrely on Aristotle's explanation of the world in order to find newforms of energy. More physics, chemistry, biology, and geologybecame necessary. Access to such domains was still primarilythrough literacy, although each of these areas of intereststarted developing its own language. Machines were conceived andbuilt as metaphors of the human being. They embodied ananimistic view, while actually answering needs and expectationscorresponding to a scale of human existence beyond that ofanimistic practical experiences.

Industrial experience, a school of a new pragmatic framework,would impart awareness of creativity and productivity, as wellas a new sense of confidence. Work became less and lesshom*ogeneous, as did social life. Once the potential of literacyreached its limits of explaining everything and constituting theonly medium for new theories, universities started laggingbehind the development of human practice. What separates GalileoGalilei's physics from the Newtonian is less drastic than whatseparates both from Einstein's relativity theory, and all threeof these from the rapidly unfolding physics of the cosmos. Inthe 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 forwhich past instruments of knowledge are not adequate. The sameapplies to theories in biology, chemistry, and more and more tosociology, economics, and the decision sciences. It is worthnoting that scale, and complexity therein, thus constitutes arather encompassing criterion, one that finally affects thetheory and practice of education.

Coherence and connection

Education has stubbornly defended its turf. While it fell wellbehind the expectations of those in need of support for findingtheir place in the current pragmatic context, a new paradigm ofscientific and humanistic investigation was acknowledged-computation. Together with experimental and theoretical science,computation stimulated levels at which the twin concerns forintellectual coherence and for the ability to establishconnections outside the field of study could be satisfied.Computation made it into the educational system without becomingone of education's underlying structures. The late-in-comingTechnology Literacy Challenge that will provide two billiondollars by the year 2001 acknowledges this situation, though itfails to address it properly. In other countries, the situationis not much better. Bureaucracies based on rules of functioningpertinent to past pragmatics are not capable of evenunderstanding the magnitude of change, in which their reason forbeing disappears.

In some colleges and private high schools, students can alreadyaccess the computer network from terminals in their dormitories.Still, in the majority, computing time is limited, and assignedfor specific class work, mainly word processing. Too manyeducational outlets have only administrative computers forkeeping track of budget execution and enrollment. In mostEuropean countries the situation is even worse. And as far asthe poor countries of the world are concerned, one can only hopethat the disparity will not deepen. If this were the case withelectricity, we would hear an uproar. Computing should become aspervasive as electricity.

This view is not necessarily unanimously accepted. Argumentsabout whether education needs to be computerized or whethercomputers should be integrated across the board go on and onamong educators and administrators with a say in the matter. Itshould be noticed that failure to provide the appropriate contextfor teaching, learning, and research affects the condition ofuniversities all over the world. These universities cease tocontribute new knowledge. They become instead the darkroom forpictures taken elsewhere, by people other than their professors,researchers, and graduate students. Such institutions fathom arelatively good understanding of the past, but a disputablenotion of the present and the future, mainly because they arehostages to literacy-based structures of thought and activity,even when they use computers.

To function within a language means to share in the experienceswhich are built into it. Natural language has a built-inexperience of space and time; programming languages containexperiences of logical inference or of object-orientedfunctioning of the world. These experiences represent itspre-understanding frame of reference. Knowledge built into ourso-called natural languages was for a long time common to allhuman beings. It resulted in communities sharing, throughlanguage, the practical experiences through which the communitymembers constituted themselves in space and time. The continuityof language and its permanence reflected continuity ofexperience and permanence of understanding. Within such apragmatic framework, education and the sharing of experiencewere minimally differentiated from each other. Progressively,language experience was added to practical experience and used todifferentiate such an experience in new forms of praxis:theoretic work, engineering, art, social activism, politicalprograms. Diversity, incipient segmentation, higher speeds, andincremental mediations affected the condition ofself-constitutive human experiences. Consequently, literacyprogressively ceased to represent the optimal medium forsharing, although it maintains many other functions. Indeed,plans for a new building, for a bridge, for engines, for manyartifacts cannot be expressed in literate discourse, no matterhow high the level, or how well literate competency is served byeducation or impacts upon it.

Accelerated dynamics and a generalized practice of mediations, bymeans not based on literacy, become part of human praxis in thecivilization of illiteracy and define a new underlyingstructure. Language preserves a limited function. It isparalleled by many other sign systems, some extremely welladapted to rationalization and automation, and becomes itselfsubject to integration in machines adept at sign processing (inparticular information processing). The process can beexemplified by a limited analogy: In order to explore in depththe experience embodied in Homer's texts, one needs a knowledgeof ancient Greek. In order to study the legal texts of the RomanEmpire, one needs Latin, and probably more. But in order tounderstand algebra-the word comes from the Arabic al-jabr/jebr,meaning union of broken parts-one really does not need to befluent in Arabic.

Literacy embodies a far less significant part of the currenthuman practical experience of self-constitution than it did inthe past. Still, literacy-based education asserts its owncondition on everything: learning what is already known is aprerequisite to discovering the unknown. In examining the amountand kind of knowledge one needs to understand past experienceand to make possible further forms of human praxis, we can besurprised. The first surprise is that we undergo a major shift,from forms of work and thinking fundamentally based on pastexperience to realms of human constitution that do not repeatthe past. Rather, such new experiences negate it altogether,making it relatively irrelevant. Freed from the past, peoplenotice that sometimes the known, expressed in texts, obliteratesa better understanding of the present by introducing apre-understanding of the future that prevents new and effectivehuman practical experiences. The second surprise comes from therealization that means other than those based on literacy bettersupport 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, thenatural sciences are perhaps our greatest single intellectualachievement as human beings, and any education that neglectsthis fact is to that extent defective." What is not clearlystated is the fact that sciences emerged as such achievementsonce the ancillary relation to language and literacy wasovercome. Mathematization of science and engineering, the focuson computational knowledge, the need to address design aspects ofhuman activity (within sociology, business, law, medicine,etc.), all belong to alternative modes of explanation that makeliterate speculation less and less effective. They also openednew horizons for hypotheses in astronomy, genetics, anthropology.Cognitive skills are required in the new pragmatic contexttogether with meta-cognitive skills: how to control one's ownlearning, for example, in a world of change, variety,distributed effort, mediated work, interconnection, andheterogeneity.

We do not yet know how to express and quantify the need foreducation, how to select the means and criteria for evaluatingperformance. If the objective is only to generate attitudes ofrespect for tradition and to impart good manners and some formof judgment, then the result is the emulation of what we thinkthe past celebrated in a person. In the USA, the bill foreducation, paid by parents, students, and private and publicsources, is well over 370 billion dollars a year. In thenational budget alone, 18 different categories ofgrants-programs for building basic and advanced skills in50,000 schools, programs for Safe and Drug-free schools, programsfor acquiring advanced technology, scholarships, and support forloans-quantify the Federal part of the sum. State and localagencies have their own budgets allowing for $5,000 to $12,000per student. If a class of 25 students is supported by $250,000of funding, something in the equation of financing educationdoes not add up. The return on investment is miserable by allaccounts. Knowing that close to one million students drop outeach year-and the number is growing-at various stages of theireducation, and that to reclaim them would cost additional money,we add another detail to the picture of a failure that is nolonger admissible. In other countries, the cost per person isdifferent. In a number of countries (France, Germany, Italy, somecountries in Eastern Europe), students attend school yearsbeyond what is considered normal in the USA. Germany discusses,forever it seems, the need to cut schooling. Are 12 or 13 yearsof schooling sufficient? How long should the state support astudent in the university? With the reunification of thecountry, new needs had to be addressed: qualified teachers,adequate facilities, financing. Japan, while maintaining a12-grade system, requires more days of schooling (230 per yearcompared to 212 in Germany and 180 in the USA). France, whichregulates even pre-school, maintains 15 years of education.Still, 40% of French students commit errors in using theirlanguage. When, almost 360 years ago, Richelieu introduced(unthinkable for the American mentality) the Académie Françaiseas the guardian of the language, little did he know that a timewould come when language, French or any other, would no longerdominate people's life and work, and would not, despite moneyinvested and time spent to teach, make all who study literate.

The new pragmatic context requires an education that results inabilities to distinguish patterns in a world of extremedynamism, to question, to cope with complexity as it affectsone's practical existence, and with a continuum of values.Students know from their own experience that there is nointrinsic determination to the eternity and universality oflanguage-and this is probably the first shock one faces whennoticing how large illiterate populations function and prosper inmodern society. The economy absorbed the majority of the dropoutpopulation. The almost 50% of the American population consideredfunctionally illiterate partakes, in its majority, in the highstandard of living of the country. In other countries, while thenumbers are different, the general tenor is the same. Wellversed in the literacy of consumption, these people performexactly 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 topreserve the physical and intellectual capability of the humanoperator. It invested in education because the return was highenough to justify it. A qualified worker, a qualified physician,chemist, lawyer, and businessman represented a necessity for theharmonious functioning of industrial society. One needed to knowhow to operate one machine. Chances were that the machine wouldoutlast the operator. One needed to study a relatively stablebody of knowledge (laws, medical prescriptions, chemicalformulas). Chances were that one and the same book would servefather, son, even grandson. And what could not be disseminatedthrough literacy was taught by example, through theapprenticeship system, from which engineering profited a lot.What education generated were literate people, and members of asociety prepared for relations without which machines madelittle or no sense at all. The more complex such relations, thelonger the time needed for education, and the higher thequalifications required from those working as educators.

Education ensured the transmission of knowledge, filling emptycontainers sent by parents, from settled families, as incomingstudents to schools and colleges. Industrial societysimultaneously generated the products and the increased need forthem. Some would argue that all this is not so simple.Industrialists did not need educated workers. That is why theytransferred a lot of work to children and women. Reformists(probably influenced by religious humanism) insisted on takingchildren out of the factories. Children were taught to read inorder to uplift their souls (as the claim went). Finally, lawswere enacted that forbade child labor. As this happened, industrygot what it needed: a relatively educated class of workers andhigher levels of productivity from employment that used theeducation provided. Under the right pragmatic conditions, aneducated worker proved to be a good investment.

Alan Bloom detailed many of the motives that animated industrialphilanthropists in supporting education. I beg to differ andreturn to the argument that industrial society, in order to usethe potential of machine production, had to generate the need forwhat it produced. Indeed, the first products are the workersthemselves, projecting into machine-based praxis their physicalattributes, but foremostly skills such as comprehension,interaction, coordination. All these attributes belong to thestructural condition of literacy.

Industrial products resulting from qualitatively new forms ofhuman self- constitution were of accidental or no interest toilliterates. What would an illiterate do with products, such asnew typewriters, books, more sophisticated household appliances?How would an illiterate interact with them in order to get themost out of each artifact? And how could coordination withothers using such new products take place? We know that thingswere not exactly divided along such clear-cut borders.Illiterate parents had literate children who provided thenecessary knowledge. The trickle-down effect was probably partof the broader strategy. But all in all, the philanthropists'support of education was an investment in the optimal functioningof a society whose scale necessitated levels high enough forefficient work. Education was connected to philanthropy, and itstill is, as a form of wealth distribution. But it is not lovefor the neighbor that makes philanthropists' support of educationnecessary, rather the sheer advantage resulting from moneygiven, estate or machines donated, chairs endowed. Cynical ornot, this view results from the perception one experiences whennoticing how generosity, well supported by public money, ends upas 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 witheternity, others as a therapeutic ego massage-is but one of theoverhead 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 fellowcan outpace/the wisdom of a heap of learned men?" How a manciple(probably equivalent to a Residence Life Administrator andCafeteria Head combined) would perform today is worth anothertale. Education, as a product of the civilization of literacy,has problems understanding that literacy corresponds to adevelopment in which written language was the medium for thespoken. Nevertheless, it did learn that today we can store thespoken in non-written form, sometimes more efficiently, andwithout the heavy investment required to maintain literacy. Asan industry, with the special status of a not-for-profitorganization, education in the USA competes in the market forits share, and for high returns. Endowments qualify manyuniversities as large businesses that are buffered from thereality of economics.

With or without the aid of philanthropy, learning has to freeitself from its subordination to literacy and restrictiveliterate structures, as it previously freed itself from itssubordination to the church, in whose bosom it was nurtured.Obviously, if this new awareness manifests itself only inmailing out videotapes instead of printed college catalogues,then we may ask whether it is educators, or only marketers, whounderstand the current dynamics. The same should be asked whensome professors put their courses on tape, in the belief thatcanned knowledge is easier for the student to absorb. On-lineclasses break with the mold, but they are not yet the answer, atleast as long as they do not belong to a broader visionreflected in different priorities and appropriate content.

There is nothing intrinsically bad about involving media ineducation, but the problem is not the medium for storage anddelivery. Media labs that are covered by dust because theyconvey the same useless information as the classes they weresupposed to enhance only prove that a fundamental change isnecessary. Fundamental, for instance, is the skewed notion thatknowledge is transferred from professors-who know more-tostudents-who know less. Actually, we face a reality never beforeexperienced: students know more than their teachers, in somedisciplines. In addition, knowledge still appropriate to asubject a short time ago-call it history, politics, oreconomics, and think about classes in Soviet and East Europeanstudies- has been rendered useless. Physics, mathematics, andchemistry underwent spectacular renewal. This created situationsin which what the textbooks taught was immediately contradictedby reality.

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

The equation of a compromise

As the scale of humankind changed, and the efficiency of humanpractical experience corresponding to the scale ascertaineditself as the new rationality, the practical experience ofself-constitution had to adjust to new circ*mstances of existenceand activity. There is no magic borderline. But there is adefinite discontinuity between what constituted the relativelystable underlying structure of literacy and what constitutes thefast-changing underlying structure of the pragmatic framework.Because in our own self-constitution literacy is only one amongmany media for achieving the efficiency that the new scalerequires, we come to realize, even if public discourse does notexactly reflect it, that we cannot afford literacy the way wehave until now. And even if we could, we should not. Peoplerecognize, even if only reluctantly, that the literacy machine,for some reason still called education, endows the new generationwith a skill of limited significance. The resulting perspectiveis continuously contradicted by the ever new and ever renewinghuman experiences through which we become who we are. Educationbased on the paradigm of literacy is, as we have seen, a luxurywhich a society, rich or poor, cannot afford. Conditions ofhuman life and praxis require, instead of a skill andperspective for the whole of life, a series. Skill andperspective need to be understood together. Their applicationwill probably be limited in time, and not necessarily directlyconnected to those succeeding them.

Nobody seriously disputes the relevance of studying language, butvery few see language and language-based disciplines as theprerequisite for the less than life-long series of differentjobs students of today will have. Although colleges maintain acore curriculum that preserves the role of language and thehumanities, the shift towards the languages of mathematics-adiscipline that has diversified spectacularly-and of visualrepresentation is so obvious that one can only wonder why thevoices of mathematicians are not heard over those of the ModernLanguage Association. Mathematics prepares for fields fromtechnical to managerial, from scientific to philosophic, andfrom design to legal. The realization that calculus is first ofall a language, and that the goal of education is fluency init, corresponds to an awareness that musicians had for thelongest time with respect to musical scores, but the championsof literacy always refused to accept. The same holds true for thedisciplines of visualization: drawing, computer graphics,design. In today's education, the visual needs to be studied atleast as much as language-dependent subjects.

Against the background of deeper changes, education is focusingon its on redefinition. The major change is from a containermodel of education-the child being the empty container who needsto be filled with language, history, math, and not much more-toa heuristic education. Our pragmatics is one of process, as thepragmatics of education finally should be. Education needs to beconducive to interaction and to the formation of criteria forchoices from among many options. But change does not comeeasily. Still using the impertinence of literacy, some educatorscall the container model "teaching students to think." They donot realize that students think whether we teach them to or not!Students of all ages are aware of change, and familiar with modesof interaction, among themselves and with technology, closer totheir condition than to that of their teachers. The majority ofthe new businesses on the Internet are instigated by studentsand supported by their inventiveness and dedication. They havebecame agents of change in spite of all the shortcomings ofeducation. 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 consideringthe real child. In a world of choice and free movement, childrenare more likely to come from families that will consist of asingle parent. Many children will come from environments wherediscrimination, poverty, prejudice, and violence have anoverpowering influence. Such an environment is significant for asociety dedicated to democratic ideals. We have to face the factthat childrearing and education are being transferred from familyto institutions meant to produce the educated person. With thebest of motives, society has created factories for processingchildren. These socio-educational entities are accepted quiteobligingly by the majority of the people freed from aresponsibility affecting their own lives. "Everything will befine, as long as the education of the new generation basicallyrepeats the education of the parents," sums up the expectationsregarding these institutions.

Although we know that, generally speaking, cycles (of production,design, and evaluation) are getting shorter, we maintainchildren in education well past the time they even fit inclassroom chairs. One needs to see those adults forced to bestudents, full of energy, frustrated that their patience, nottheir creative potential, is put to the test. Dropping out ofhigh school or college is not indicative of a student'simmaturity. Society's tendency to decide what is best for thenext generation has determined that only one type of educationwill ensure productive adults. Society refuses to considerhumans in the variety of their potential. From the Projection ofEducation Statistics to the Year 2006, we learn that the totalprivate and public elementary and secondary school enrollment inthe 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 highschool, and by the year 2006 the number will not exceed 3million. Students themselves seem to be more aware of theexcessively long cycle of education than do the experts whodefine its methods, contents, and goals. This creates a basisfor conflict that no one should underestimate.

Growing up in an environment of change and challenge is probablyrewarding in the long run. But things are not very simple. Thepressure to perform, peer pressure, and one's youthful instinctsto explore and ascertain can transform a student's life in aninstant. The distance between paradise (support and choicewithout worry) and hell (the specter of disease, addiction,abandonment, disappointment, lack of direction) is also shorterthan prior generations experienced it. Hundreds of TV channels,the Internet, thousands of music titles (on CD, video, and radiostations), the lure of sports, drugs, sex, and the hundreds offashion labels-choosing can be overwhelming. Literacy used toorganize everything neatly. If you were in love, Romeo and Julietwas proper reading material. If you wished to explore Greece,you started with Homer's epics and worked your way up to themost recent novel by a contemporary Greek writer.

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

Still, some young people go to school or college full ofenthusiasm, hoping to get an education that will guaranteeself-fulfillment. All that is studied, over a long period oftime and at great financial sacrifice, comes not even close towhat they will face. They might learn how to spell and how toadd. But they soon discover that in real life skills other thanspelling and arithmetic are expected. What bigger disappointmentis there than discovering that years of pursing a promise bringno result? If, after all this, we still want both literacy andcompetence for experiences which literacy does not support, andoften inhibits, we would have to invest beyond what society iswilling and able to spend. And even if society were to do so, asit seems that it feels it must, the investment would be inimposing useless skills and a primitive perspective on the newgeneration, until the time comes when it can escape society'spressure. Education in our day remains a compromise between theinterests of the institution of education (with tens of thousandsof teachers who would become unemployed) and a new pragmaticframework that few in academia understand.

One of the elements of this equation is the practical need toextend education to all, and if possible on a continuous basis.But unless this education reflects the variety of literaciesthat the pragmatic framework requires, admitting everyone toeverything results in the lowest general level of education. Thevariety of practical experiences of self-constitution requiresthat we find ways to coordinate access to education by properlyand responsibly identifying types of creativity, and investingresponsibility in their development. Continuous education needsto be integrated in the work structure. It has to become part ofthe reciprocal commitments through which the new pragmaticframework is acknowledged.

To all those dedicated to the human aspects of politics,business, law, and medicine, who deplore that the technicians ofpolicy-making can no longer find their way to our souls, allthis will sound terrifying. Nevertheless, as much as we wouldlike to be considered as individuals, each with our owndignity, personality, opinions, emotions, and pains, weourselves undermine our expectations in our striving for moreand more, at a price lower than what it costs society todistinguish us. Scale dictates anonymity, and probablymediocrity. Ignorance of literacy's role in centuries ofproductive human life dictates that it is time to unload theliteracy-reflected experiences for which there is no referencein the new pragmatic context.

Who are we kidding?

Scared that in giving up literacy training we commit treason toour own condition, we maintain literacy and try to adapt it tonew circ*mstances 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 ofthe current status of human experience of multiple partialliteracies. The result is the transformation of education into apackaging industry of human beings: you choose the line alongwhich you want to be processed; we make sure that you get theliteracy alibi, and that we train you to be able to cope withso-called entry-level jobs. Obviously, this evolves in a moresubtle way. The kind of college or university one attends, orthe tuition one pays, determines the amount of subtlety.Students accept the function of education insofar as it mediatesbetween their goals and the rather scary reality of themarketplace. This mediation differs according to the level ofeducation, and is influenced by political and social decisionmaking.

As an industry for processing the new generation, education actsaccording to parameters resulting from its opportunistic searchfor a place between academia and reality. Education acknowledgesthe narrow domains of expertise which labor division broughtabout, and reproduces the structure of current human experiencein its own structure. Through vast financial support, fromstates, private sources, and tradition- based organizations,education is artificially removed from the reality of expectedefficiency. It is rarely a universe of commitments. Accordingly,the gap between the literate language of the university and thelanguages of current human practice widens. The tenure systemonly adds another structural burden. When the highest goal of aprofessor is to be freed of teaching, something is awfully wrongwith our legitimate decision to guarantee educators the freedomnecessary for exercising their profession.

Behind the testing model that drives much of current education isthe expectation of effective ranking of students. This modeltakes a literate approach insofar as it establishes a dichotomy(aptitude vs. achievement) that makes students react toquestions, but does not really engage them or encourage creativecontributions. The result is illustrative of the relationbetween what we do and how we evaluate what we do. Anexpectation was set, and the process of education was skewed togenerate good test results. This effectively eliminates teachingand learning for the sake of a subject. Students are afraid theywill not measure up and demand to be taught by the book.Teachers who know better than the book are intimidated, bystudents and administration, from trying better approaches. Goodstudents are frustrated in their attempts to define their ownpassion and to pursue it to their definition of success.Entrepreneurs at the age of 14, they do not need the feedback ofstupid tests, carried out more for the sake of bureaucracy thanfor their well-being. Standardized tests dominated bymultiple-choice answers facilitate low cost evaluations, but alsoaffect patterns of teaching and learning. Exactly what the newpragmatics embodies-the ability to adapt and to be proactive-iscounteracted through the experience of testing, and the teachinggeared to multiple-choice instruments.

The uncoupling of education from the experiential frame of thehuman being is reflected in education's language andorganization, and in the limiting assumptions about its functionand methods. Education has become a self-serving organizationwith a bureaucratic "network of directives," as Winograd andFlores call them, and motivational elements not very differentfrom the state, the military, and the legal system. Like theorganizations mentioned, it also develops networks of interactionwith sources of funding and sources of power, some driven by thesame self-preserving energies as education itself. Instead ofreflecting shorter cycles of activity in its own structure, ittends to maintain control over the destiny of students for longerperiods of time. Even in fields of early acknowledgedcreativity-e.g., computer programming, networking, genetics, andnanotechnology-education continues to apply a policy that takesaway the edge of youth, inventiveness, and risk.

The lowest quality of education is at the undergraduate level inuniversities, where either graduate assistants or even machinessubstitute for professors too busy funding their research, oractually no longer attuned to teaching. This situation existsexactly because we are not yet able to develop strategies ofeducation adapted to new circ*mstances of human work and to theefficiency requirements which we ourselves made necessary. The"network of recurrent conversations," to use Winograd'sterminology again, or the "language game" that Wittgensteinattributed to each profession, hides behind the front ofliteracy and thus burdens education. Once accreditationintroduces the language game of politics, education distancesitself even more from its fundamental mission. Accreditationagencies translate concerns about the quality of education intorequirements, such as the evaluation of colleges anduniversities based on scores on exit tests taken by students.These are supposed to reflect academic achievement. In othercases, such scores are used for assessing financial support. Theparadox is that what negatively affects the quality of educationbecomes the measure of reward. Test results are often used inpoliticians' arguments about improved education, as well as amarketing tool. In fact, to prepare students for performancemakes performance a goal in itself. Thus it should come as nosurprise that the most popular book on college campuses-today'seducation factories-is a guide to cheating.

Many times comparisons are made between students in the USA andin Japan or in Western European countries. In many ways thesecomparisons are against the pervasive dynamics of integrationthat we experience. Still, there are things to consider-forinstance, that Japanese students spend almost the same amount oftime watching TV as American students do, and that they are notinvolved in household tasks. Noticeable differences are inreading. The Japanese spend double the number of hours thatAmerican students do in reading. Japanese students spend moretime on schoolwork (the same 2-to-1 ratio), but much less onentertainment. Should Japan be considered a model? If we seethat Japanese students rank among the best in science subjects,the answer seems to be positive. But if we project the sameagainst the entire development of students, their exceptionalcreative achievements, the answer becomes a little more guarded.With all its limitations, the USA is still more attuned topragmatic requirements. This is probably due more to thecountry's inherent dynamics than to its educationalinstitutions. Largely unregulated, capable of adaptive moves,subject to innovation, the USA is potentially a better networkfor educational possibilities.

What caused the criticism in these pages of evaluation is theindecisiveness that the USA shows-the program for school reformfor the year 2000 is an example of this attitude-and thedifficulty it has in realizing the price of the compromise itkeeps supporting. Once Japanese businesses started buyingAmerican campuses, the price of the compromise became clear.Universities in the USA were saved from bankruptcy. Japaneseschools, whose structured programs and lack of understanding ofthe new pragmatics made for headlines, were able to evade theirown rigid system of education, reputed for being late inacknowledging the dynamics of change. Abruptly, theAmericanization of world education-study driven bymultiple-choice tests with a dualistic structure-wasshort-changed by a Japanization movement. But in the closerlook suggested above, it is evident that the Japanese areextricating themselves from drastic literacy requirements thatend up hampering necessary accommodations in the traditionalJapanese system of values. Although caution is called for,especially in approaching a subject foreign to our directexperience and understanding, the trend expressed is telling inits many consequences.

What about alternatives?

A legitimate question to be expected from any sensible readerrefers to alternatives. Let us first notice that, due to the newpragmatic framework, we are more and more in the situation todisseminate every and any type of information to any imaginabledestination. The interconnectivity of business and of marketscreates the global economy. In contrast, our school and collegesystems, as separate from real life, and conceived physicallyoutside our universe of existence, are probably as anachronisticas the castles and palaces we associate with the power andfunction of nobility; or as anachronistic as the high stacks ofsteel mills we associate with industry, and the cities weassociate with social life. Some alumni might be nostalgic forthe Gothic structures of their university days. The physicalreference to a time "when education meant something" is clear-asis the memory of the campus, yet another good reason to look atthe homecoming party in anticipation of the football game, or incelebration of a good time (win or lose).

To make explicit the shift from a symbolism of education,coordinated with the function of intellectual accomplishment, toa stage when debunking this symbolism, still alive in andoutside Ivy League universities, is an urgent political andpractical goal is only the beginning. There is no justificationfor maintaining outmoded structures and attitudes, and investingin walls and campuses and feudal university domains. As one ofthe successful entrepreneurs of this time put it, "anything thathas to do with brick and mortar and its DISPLAY is-to use somepoetic license-dead." The focus has to be on the dynamics ofindividual self-constitution, and on the pragmatic horizons ofeveryone's future.

Fixing and maintaining schools in the USA, as well as in almostany country in the world, would cost more than building themfrom scratch. The advantage of giving up structuresinappropriate 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 ofcommunication and interactive learning. There is no need toidealize the Internet and the World Wide Web at their currentstage. But if the future will continue to be defined more bycommerce expectations than by educational needs, no one shouldbe surprised that their educational potential will come tofruition late.

Humans do not develop at the same pace, and in the samedirection. Each of us is so different that the main function ofeducation should be not to minimize differences through literacyand literacy-based strategies that support a false sense ofdemocracy, but to identify and maximize differences. This willprovide the foundation for an education that allows each studentto develop according to possibilities evinced through therelations, language-based or not, that people enter into. Thecontent of education, understood as process, should be theexperience, and the associated means of creating andunderstanding it. Instead of a dominant language, with built-inexperiences more and more alien to the vast majority ofstudents, the ability to cope with many sign systems, with manylanguages, to articulate them, adapt them to the circ*mstance,and share them as much as the circ*mstance requires, shouldbecome the goal. Some would counter, "This was attempted withcourses labeled modern math and resulted in no one'sunderstanding it, or even simple math." There is some truth inthis. The mathematically gifted had no problem in learning thenew math. Students who were under the influence of literatereasoning had problems. What we need to do is to keep the mindopen, allow for as much accumulation as necessary, and fordiscarding, if new experiences demand an open mind and freedomfrom previous assumptions. Some students will settle (in math orin other subjects) for predominantly visual signs, others forsounds, some for words, for rhythm, for any of the forms throughwhich human intelligence comes to expression. Interactivemultimedia are only some of the many media available. Otherpossibilities are yet to emerge. The Internet is in the samesituation. A framework for individual selection, for tapping intolearning resources and using them to the degree desired andacknowledged as necessary by praxis, would be the way to go. Notonly literacy, in the accepted sense, but mathematical literacy,biological, chemical, or engineering literacy, and visualthinking and expression should be given equal consideration.Cross-pollination among disciplines traditionally kept inisolation will definitely enhance creativity by doing away withthe obsessive channeling practiced nowadays.

Education needs to shift from the atomistic view that isolatessubjects from the whole of reality to a holistic perspective.This will acknowledge types of mediation as effective means ofincreasing the efficiency of work, the requirements ofintegration, and the distributed nature of practical experiencesin the world today. Collaborative effort needs to be brought tothe forefront of the educational experience. We can definecommunities of interest, focused on some body of experience(which can be incorporated in an artifact, a book, a work ofart, or someone's expertise). Education should provide means forsharing experiences. A variety of different interests can bebrought into focus through sharing and collaborative learning.There are many dimensions to such an approach: the knowledgesought, 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 atthe same time maintaining motivations for individual achievementand individual reward. This becomes critical at a time when itbecomes more and more evident that resources are finite, whileexpectations still grow exponentially. The change from astandardized model, focused on the quick fix that leads toresults (no matter how high a cost), to the collaborative modelof individuality and distinction re-establishes an ethicalframework, which is urgently needed. Competition is notexcluded, but instead of conflict-which in the given systemresults in students who cut pages from books so that theircolleagues will fail-we ought to create an environment ofreciprocally advantageous cooperation. How far are we from suchan objective?

In the words of Jacques Barzun, a devoted educator committed toliteracy, education failed to "develop native intelligence." Inan interesting negative of what people think educationaccomplishes, he points to the appearance of success: "Weprofessed to make ideal citizens, super-tolerant neighbors,agents of world peace, and happy family folk, at once sexuallyadept and flawless drivers of cars." All this is nothing to beashamed of, but as educational goals, they are quite off thetarget. Citizenship in the society of the new pragmatic contextis different from citizenship in previous societies. Tolerancerequires a new way to manifest it, such as the integration ofwhat is different and complementary. Peace, yes, even peace,means a different state of affairs at a time when many localconflicts affect the world. As far as family, sex, and theculture of the car are concerned, nothing can point more to thefailure of education. Indeed, education failed to understandall the factors involved in contemporary family life. It failedto understand sexual relations. Faced with the painful reality ofthe degradation of sexual relations, education resorted to thedesperate measure of dispensing condoms, an extension of whatwas gloriously celebrated as sex education. The flawless driversnever heard the criticism voiced by citizens concerned withenergy waste. We made students rely on cheap gasoline andaffordable cars to bring them to school and college, instead ofunderstanding that education needs to be decentralized,distributed, and-why not-adapted to the communication andinteraction possibilities of our times. The Green Teens who areactive against energy waste might be well ahead of theireducational system, but still forced to go through it. Moreover,education should be seen in the broader context of the otherchanges coming with the end of the civilization of literacy: thestatus 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 veryimportant. Ideally, education addresses all the facets of thehuman being. New conditions of generalized interconnection almostturn the paradigm of continuing education into continuouseducation that corresponds to changes in human experienceunfolding under even more complex circ*mstances. It might wellhappen that for some experiences, we shall have to recuperatevalues characteristic of literacy. But better to rediscover themthan to maintain literacy as an ideal when the perspectives fornew forms of ascertaining ourselves as human beings requiremore, much more, than literacy.

Book Four

Language and the Visual

Photography, film, and television have changed the world morethan Gutenberg's printing press. Much of the blame for thedecline in literacy is attributed to them, especially to moviesand television. More recently, computer games and the Internethave been added to the list of culprits. Studies have beenconducted all over the world with the aim of discovering howfilm 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 (stillin its infancy), have also been analyzed on a comparative basis.Inferences have been drawn concerning the influence of varioustypes of images on what is printed and why, as well as on howwriting (fiction, science, trade books, manuals, poetry, drama,even correspondence) has changed.

In some countries, almost every home has a television set; inothers even more than one. In 1995, the number of computers soldsurpassed that of television sets. In many countries, mostchildren watch television and films before they learn to read. Ina few countries, children play computer games before everopening a book. After they start to read, the amount of timespent in front of a TV set is far greater than the timededicated to books. Adults, already the fourth and fifthgenerations of television viewers, are even more inclined toimages. Some images are of their choice-TV programs at home,movies in the theater, videotapes they buy, rent, or borrow fromthe library, CD-ROMs. Other images are imposed on the adultgenerations by demands connected to their professions, theirhealth, their hobbies, and by advertisem*nt. Afterimage-recording and playing equipment became widely available,the focus on TV and video expanded. In addition to the abilityto bring home films of one's choice, to buy and rent videotapes,laser discs, and CD-ROMs on a variety of subjects, we are alsoable to produce a video archive for family, school, community,or professional purposes. We can even avail ourselves of cableTV to generate programs of local interest. The generalizedsystem of networking (cable, satellites, airwaves), through whichimages can be pumped from practically any location into schools,homes, offices, and libraries, affects even further the relationof children and adults among themselves and the relation of bothgroups to language and to literacy in contemporary life. Anyonewith access to the printing presses of the digital world canprint a CD-ROM. Access to the Internet is no more expensive thana magazine subscription. But the Internet is much more excitingbecause we are not only at the receiving end.

The subject, as almost all have perceived and analyzed it, is notthe impact of visual technology and computers on readingpatterns, or the influence of new media on how people write. Atthe core of the development described so far is the fundamentalshift from one dominant sign system, called language, and itsreified form, called literacy, to several sign systems, amongwhich the visual plays a dominant role. We would certainly failto understand what is happening, what the long-lastingconsequences of the changes we face are, and what the best courseof action is, if we were to look only at the influence oftechnology. Understanding the degree of necessity of thetechnology in the first place is where the focus should be. Theobsession with symptoms, characteristic of industrialpragmatics, is not limited to mechanics' shops and doctors'offices.

New practical experiences within the scale of humankind thatresult in the need for alternatives to language confirm that thefocus cannot be on television and computer screens, nor onadvertisem*nt, electronic photography, and laser discs. The issueis not CD-ROM, digital video, Internet and the World Wide Web,but the need to cope with complexity. And the goal is to achievehigher levels of efficiency corresponding to the needs andexpectations of the global scale that humankind has reached.

So far, very few of those who study the matter have resisted thetemptation to fasten blame on television watching or on theintimidating intrusion of electronic and digital contraptionsfor the decline of literacy. It is easier to count the hourschildren spend watching TV-an average of 16,000 hours incomparison to 13,000 hours for study before graduation from highschool-than to see why such patterns occur. And it is as easy toconclude that by the time these children can be served alcohol ina restaurant or buy it in stores, they will have seen well overa million commercials. Yet no one ever acknowledges newstructures of work and communication, even less theunprecedented wealth of forms of human interaction, regardless ofhow shallow they are. That particular ways of working and livinghave for all practical purposes disappeared, is easilyunderstood. Understanding why requires the will to take a freshlook at necessary developments.

Some of today's visual sign systems originate in the civilizationof literacy: advertisem*nt, theatrical and para-theatricalperformance, and television drama. They carry with themefficiency expectations typical of the Machine Age. Other visualsign systems transcend the limits of literacy: concrete poetry,happening, animation, performance games that lead to interactivevideo, hypermedia or interactive multimedia, virtual reality,and global networks. Within such experiences, a differentdynamics and a focus on distinctions, instead of onhom*ogeneity, are embedded. Most of these experiences originatein the practical requirement to extend the human being'sexperiential horizon, and the need to keep pace with the dynamicsof 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 soundmore convincing, he later reformulated it as "One picture isworth a thousand words," and called it a proverb from China. Fewslogans were repeated and paraphrased more than this one.Barnard wanted to draw people's attention to the power ofimages. It took some years until the new underlying structure ofour continuous practical self-constitution confirmed anobservation made slightly ahead of its time. It should be addedthat, through the millennia, craftsmen and the forerunners ofengineering used images to design artifacts and tools, and toplan and build cities, monuments, and bridges. They realizedthrough 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 thevisual makes images inappropriate for describing other images.However, it does not prevent human beings from associatingimages with the most abstract concepts they develop in thecourse of their practical or theoretical experience. Words startby being relatively close to what they denote, and end up so farremoved from the objects or actions they name that, unless theyare generated together with an object or action (like the wordcalculator, from calculae, stones for counting), they seemarbitrary. Reminiscences of the motivation of words (especiallyonomatopoeic qualities, i.e., phonetic resemblance to what theword refers to, such as crack or whoosh) do not really affect theabstract rules of generating statements, or even ourunderstanding of such language signs.

Images are more constrained, more directly determined by thepragmatic experience in whose framework they are generated. Redas a word (with its equivalencies in other languages: rot inGerman, rouge in French, rojo in Spanish, 赤 (aka) in Japanese,adom in Hebrew, andкрасный in Russian) is arbitrary in comparison to the color itdesignates. Even the designation is quite approximate. In givenexperiential situations, many nuances can be distinguished,although there are no names for them. The red in an image is aphysical quality that can be measured and standardized, hencemade easier to process in photography, printing, and synthesis ofpigments. In the same experiential framework, it can beassociated with many objects or processes: flowers, blood, astoplight, sunset, a flag. It can be compared to them, it cantrigger new associations, or become a convention. Once languagetranslates a visual sign, it also loads it with conventionscharacteristic of language-red as in revolution, cardinal red,redneck, etc.-moving it from the realm of its physicaldetermination (wavelength, or frequency of oscillation) to thereality of cultural conventions. These are preserved andintegrated in the symbolism of a community.

Purely pictorial signs, as in Chinese and Japanese writing,relate to the structure of language, and are culturallysignificant. No matter to which extent such pictorial signs arerefined-and indeed, characters in Chinese and Kanji areextremely sophisticated- they maintain a relation to what theyrefer to. They extend the experience of writing, especially incalligraphic exercise, in the experience conveyed. We can imposeon images-and I do not refer only to Chinese ideograms-the logicembodied in language. But once we do, we alter the condition ofthe image and transform it into an illustration.

Language, in its embodiment in literacy, is an analytic tool andsupports analytic practice quite well. Images have a dominantlysynthetic character and make for good composite tools.Synthesizing activities, especially designing, an object, amessage, or a course of action, imply the participation ofimages, in particular powerful diagramming and drawing. Languagedescribes; images constitute. Language requires a context forunderstanding, in which classes of distribution are defined.Images suggest such a context. Given the individual character ofany image, the equivalent of a distributional class for alanguage simply does not exist.

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

For as long as visual experience was confined to one's limiteduniverse of existence, as in the case of the migrating tribes,the visual could not serve as a medium for anything beyond thischanging universe of existence. Language resulted from the needto surpass the limitations of space and time, to generatechoices. The only viable alternative adopted was the abstractimage of the phonetic convention, which was easier to carry fromone world to another, as, for instance, the Phoenicians did. Eachalphabet is a condensed visual testimony to experiences in themeanwhile uncoupled from language and its concrete practicalmotivations.

Writing visualizes language; reading brings the written languageback to its oral life, but in a tamed version. Whether theSumerian, Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Latin, or Slavicalphabet, the letters are not neutral signs for abstractphonetic language. They summarize visual experiences and encoderules of recognition; they are related to anthropologicexperience and to cognitive processes of abstracting. Themysticism of numbers and their meta-physical meanings, of lettersand combinations of letters and numbers, of shapes, symmetry,etc. are all present. With alphabets and numbers the abstractnature of visual representation took over the phonetic quality oflanguage. The concreteness of pictorial representation, alongwith the encoded elements (what is the experience behind aletter? a number? a certain way of writing?), simply vanishedfor the average literate (or illiterate) person. This is part ofthe broader process of acculturation-that is, breaking throughexperiences of language. Experts in alphabets show us the levelsat which the image of each letter constituted expressive levelssignificant in themselves. Nevertheless, their alphabeticl*teracy is as relevant to writing as much as a good descriptionof the various kinds of wheels is relevant to the making and theuse of automobiles.

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

the global scale of our activity and existence; 2.

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

the dynamics of ever faster, increasingly mediated, humaninteraction; 4.

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

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

the non-linear, non-sequential, open nature of human experiencesbrought 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 thesearguments should be construed as a blank and non-criticalendorsem*nt of images. We know that we cannot pursue theoreticwork exclusively with images, or that the meta-level (languageabout language) cannot be reached with images. Images arefactual, situational, and unstable. They also convey a falsesense of democracy. Moreover, they materialize the shift from apositivist conception of facts, dominating a literacy-baseddeterminism, to a relativist conception of chaotic functioning,embodied, for instance, by the market or by the new means andmethods of human interaction. However, until we learn all thereis to know about the potential of images in areas other thanart, architecture, and design, chances are that we shall notunderstand their participation in thinking and in othertraditionally non-image-based forms of human praxis.

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

Within a given culture, images relate to each other. In themultitude of cultures within which people identify themselves,images translate from one experience to another. Against thebackground of globality, the experience of images is one ofsimultaneous distinctions and integration. Distinctions carry theidentifiers of the encultured human beings constituted in newpractical experiences. Integration is probably best exemplifiedby the metaphor of the global village of teleconnections andtele-viewing, of Internet and World Wide Web interactions.

The characteristics of images given here so far need to berelated to the perspective of changes brought about by imagingtechnologies. Otherwise, we could hardly come to understand howimages constitute languages that make literacy useless, orbetter yet, that result in the need for complementary partialliteracies.

The mechanical eye and the electronic eye

The photo camera and the associated technology of photoprocessing are products of the civilization of literacy inanticipation of the civilization of illiteracy. The metaphor ofthe eye, manifest in the optics of the lens and the mechanics ofthe camera, could not entirely support new human perceptions ofreality without the participation of literacy. Camera useimplied the shared background of literacy and literacy-basedspace representations. The entire discussion of the possibilitiesand limitations of photography-a discussion begun shortly afterthe first photographic images were produced, and still going onin our day-is an exercise in analytical practice.

Some looked at photography as writing with light; others asmechanical drawing. They doubted whether there was room forcreativity in its use, but never questioned its documentaryquality: shorthand for descriptions difficult, but stillpossible, in writing. The wider the framework of practicalexperiences involving the camera, the more interesting thetestimony of photography proved. This applies to photography injournalism and science, as well as in personal and family life.With photography, images started to substitute for words, andliteracy progressively gave way to imagery in a variety of newhuman experiences related to space, movement, and aspects of lifeotherwise not visible.

Testimony of the invisible, made available to many peoplethrough the photographic camera, was much stronger, richer, andmore authentic than the words one could write about the same.Early photographs of the Paris sewer system-the latter a subjectof many stories, but literally out of sight-exemplify thisfunction. Before the camera, only drawing could capture thevisible without changing it into words or obscure diagrams.Drawing was an interpreted representation, not only in the senseof selection-what to draw-but also in defining a perspective andendowing the image with some emotional quality. The camera had along way to go before the same interpretive quality wasachieved, and even then, in view of the mediating technology, itwas quite difficult to define what was added to what wasphotographed, and why.

Today's cameras-from the disposables to the fullyautomated-encapsulate everything we have to know to operatethem. There is no need to be aware of the eye metaphor-which isundergoing change with the advent of electronic photography-andeven less of what diaphragm, exposure time, and distance are. Theexperience leading to photography and the practical experienceof automated photography are uncoupled. To take a picture is nolonger a matter of expertise, but a reflex gesture accompanyingtravel, family or community events, and discrete moments ofrelative significance. Thus photographic images took overlinguistic descriptions and became our diaries. As confusing asthis might sound, a camera turns into an extension of our eyes(actually, only one), easier to use than language, and probablymore accurate. In some way, a camera is a compressed languageall set for the generation of visual sentences. If scientificuse of photography were not available, a great deal of effortwould be necessary to verbally describe what images from outerspace, from the powerful electronic microscope, or from underthe earth and under water, reveal to us. In Leonardo da Vinci'stime, the only alternative was drawing, and a very richimagination!

The camera has a built-in space concept, probably more explicitthan language has. This concept is asserted and embodied in thegeometry of the lens and is reflected in some of thecharacteristics of photographic images. They are, mainly, two-dimensional reductions of our three-dimensional universe ofexperience, also influenced by light, film emulsion, type ofprocessing, technology and materials used for printing, butprimarily by physical properties of the lens used. Once ourspatial concept improved and progress in lens processing wasmade, 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 thathelped to capture dynamic events.

Another important change was brought about by Polaroid's conceptof almost instant delivery of prints. It is with thisconcept-compressing two stages of photographic representationinto one and, in initial developments, giving up the possibilityof making copies-that we reached a new phase in the relationbetween literacy and photography. As we know, the traditionalcamera came with the implicit machine-focused conversation: Whatcan I do with it? The Polaroid concept changed this to adifferent query: What can it do for me? This change of emphasiscorresponds to a different experience with the medium and isaccompanied by the liberation of photography from some of theconstraints of the system of literacy. "What can I do?"concerns photographic knowledge and the selection made byphotographers, persons who constitute their identity in a newpractical experience. "What can it do?" refers to knowledgeembodied in the hardware. The advertisem*nt succinctly describesthe change: "Hold the picture in your hand while you still holdthe memory in your heart." As opposed to a written record, aninstant image is meant for a short time, almost as a fastsubstitute for writing.

A more significant change occurs when photography goeselectronic, and in particular, digital. Both elements alreadydiscussed-the significance of the smallest changes in the inputon the result, and the quality aspect of digital vs. analog-arereflected in digital photography. I insist on this because of thenew condition of the image it entails and our relation to therealm of the visual. Language found its medium in writing, andprinting made writing the object of literacy. Images could not beused with the same ease as writing, and could not be transmittedthe way the voice is. When we found ways to have voice travel atspeeds faster than that of sound, by electromagnetic waves usedin telephone or radio transmission, we consolidated the functionof language, but at the same time freed language of some of thelimitations of literacy. Digital photography accomplishes thesame for images.

A written report from any place in the world might take longerto produce, though not to transmit, than the image representingthe event reported. Connected to a network, an electronic camerasends images from the event to the page prepared for printing.The understanding of the image, whose printing involved a digitalcomponent (the raster) long before the computer was invented,requires a much lower social investment than literacy. Thecomplexity is transferred from capturing the image totransmitting and viewing it. Films are used to generate anelectronic simile of our photographic shots. At the friendlyautomated image shop, we get colorful prints and the shinyCD-ROM from which each image can be recalled on a video screen orfurther processed on our computers.

From the image as testimony, as literacy destined it to be, tothe image as pretext for new experiences-medium of visualrelativity and questionable morality- everything, and more, ispossible. Images can mediate in fast developing situations-transactions, exchange of information, conflicts-better thanwords can. They are free of the extra burden words bear andallow for global and detailed local interpretation. Electronicprocessing of digital photography supports comparison, as well asmanipulation, of images in view of unprecedented humanexperiences requiring such functions. The metaphor of theone-eye, which the photographic camera embodies, led to a flatworld. Cyclopes see everything flat. Unfortunately, but by noaccident, this metaphor was taken over in computer graphics.Images on the computer screen are held together by theconventions of monocular vision. Digital photography can benetworked and endowed with dynamic qualities. But what makesdigital photography more and more a breakthrough, in respect toits incipient literate phase, is that we can build 3D cameras,that is, technical beasts with two eyes (and if need be, withmore). This leads to practical experiences in a pragmaticframework no longer limited to sequences or to reductioniststrategies of representation.

Who is afraid of a locomotive?

The image of a locomotive moving in the direction of thespectators made them scream and run away when moving pictureswere first shown to the public. Movement enhanced the realism ofthe image, captured on film to the extent of blurring theborderline between reality and the newly established conventionof cinematographic expression. In the movies of the silent era,the literacy-based realism of the image- actually anillustration of the script-successfully compensated for theimpossibility of providing the sound of dialogue. The experienceof literacy and that of writing movement onto film were tightlycoupled. Short scenes, designed with close attention to visualdetails, could be understood without the presence of the word,because of the shared background of language. The convention ofcinematography is based on sharing the extended white page onwhich the projection of moving images takes place. Humor was thepreferred structure, since the mechanical reproduction ofmovement had, due to rudimentary technology and lack of sound, acomic quality in itself. Later, music was inserted, thendialogue. Everyone was looking forward to the day when image andsound would be synchronized, when color movies would becomepossible.

It adds to the arguments thus far advanced that cinematographichuman experience, an experience dominantly visual, revealed therole of language as a synchronizing device, while the mechanicsof cameras and projectors took care of the optical illusion.Cinematography also suggested that this role could be exercisedby other means of expression and communication as well. Languageis related to body movement, and often participates in therhythmic patterns of this movement. Before language, otherrhythmic devices better adapted to the unsettledself-constitutive practical experience of the hom*o Hominis wereused to synchronize the effort of several beings involved in theendeavor of survival. Although there is no relation between theexperience of cinematography and that of primitive beings on themove after migrating herds of animals, it is worth pointing outthe underlying structure of synchronicity. The means involved inachieving this synchronicity are characteristic of the variousstages in human evolution. At a very small scale of existence,such as autarchic existence, the means were very simple, andvery few. At the scale that makes the writing of movementpossible, these means had become complex, but were dominated byliteracy. With cinematography, a new strategy of synchronizationwas arrived at. In many ways, the story of how films became whatthey are today is also the story of a conflict between literacyand image-based strategies of synchronization.

The intermediary phases are well known: the film accompanied bymusic ("Don't kill the pianist"), recorded sound, soundintegrated in the movie, stereophonic sound. Their significanceis also known: emulate the rhythm of filmed movement, provide adramatic background, integrate the realism of dialogue and otherreal sounds in the realism of action, expand the means ofexpression in order to synthesize new realities. Some of theconventions of the emerging film are cultural accomplishments,probably comparable to the convention of ideographic writing.They belong, nevertheless, to a pragmatic context based on thecharacteristics of literacy. They ensue also from an activitythat will result in higher and higher levels of humanproductivity and efficiency. Each film is a mold for the manycopies to be shown to millions of spectators. The personal touchof handwriting is obfuscated by the neutral camera-a mechanicaldevice, after all. That the same story can be told in manydifferent ways does not change the fact that, once told, itaddresses enormous numbers of potential viewers, no longerrequired to master literacy in order to understand the film'scontent. The experience of filmmaking is industrially defined.It also bears witness to the many components of humaninteraction, opening a window on experiences irreducible towords; and it points to the possibility of going beyond literacy,and even beyond the first layers of the visible-that is, toappropriate the imaginary in the self-constitution of the humanbeing.

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

The generations since the beginning of cinematography learned thenew filmic convention while still involved in practicalexperiences characteristic of literacy. Conventions of film, asa medium with its own characteristics, started to be experiencedrelatively recently, in the broader context of a human praxis inthe 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 theirmost intricate experiences, and afterwards submit the record tofast, slow, entire, or partial evaluation. The experience offilming is an experience with space and time in theirinterrelationship. But as opposed to the space and timeprojected in language, and uniformly shared by a literatecommunity, space and time on film can be varied, and madeextremely personal. Within the convention of film, we canuncouple ourselves from the physical limitations of our universeof existence, from social or cultural commitments, and generatea new frame for action. The love affair between Hollywood andemerging technologies for creating the impossible in the virtualspace of digital synthesis testifies to this. But we cannot,after all, transcend the limitations of the underlying structureon which cinematography is based. Generated near the height ofthe civilization of literacy, cinematography represents theborderline between practical experiences corresponding to thescale for which literacy was optimal, and the new scale for whichboth literacy and film are only partially adequate. It is evendoubtful that the film medium will survive as an alternative tothe new media because it is, for all practical purposes,inefficient.

Cinematography influenced our experience with language, whilesimultaneously pointing to the limits of this experience. A filmis not a visually illustrated text, or a transcription of aplay. Rather, it is a mapping from a universe of sentences andmeanings assigned to a text, to a more complex universe, one ofconsecutive images forming (or not) a new coherent entity. Inthe process, language performs sometimes as language (dialogueamong characters), other times as a pre-text for the visualcinematographic text.

Before film, we moved only in the universe of our natural,physical existence, on the theatrical stage, or in the universeof our imagination, in our dreams. The synchronizing function oflanguage made this movement (such as working, going from oneplace to another, from one person to another) socially relevant.Our movement in language descriptions (do this, go there, meetso-and-so) is an abstraction. Our movement recorded on film isthe re-concretized abstraction. This explains the role of filmedimages for teaching people how to carry out certain operations,for educating, or for indoctrinating them, or for acquaintingthem with things and actions never experienced directly. It alsoexplains why, once efficiency criteria become important, film nolonger addresses the individual, or small groups; rather, itaddresses audiences at the only scale at which it can still beeconomically justified. The industry called Hollywood (and itsvarious copies around the world) is based on an equation ofefficiency that keys in the globality of the world, ofilliteracy, and of the distribution network already in place. Onan investment in a film of over $100 million, five continentsof viewers are needed, and this is still no guarantee of breakingeven. It is not at all clear whether Dreamworks, the offspringof the affair between Hollywood and the computer industry, willeventually create its own distribution channels on the globaldigital network.

The temptation to ask whether the language of moving images madeliteracy superfluous, or whether illiteracy created the need forfilm, and the risk of falling prey to a simplifyingcause-and-effect explanation should not prevent us fromacknowledging that there are many relations among the factorsinvolved. Nevertheless, the key element is the underlyingstructure. Books embody the characteristics of language andtrigger experiences within the confines of thesecharacteristics. When faced with practical requirements andchallenges resulting from a new scale of existence, the humanbeing constitutes alternatives better adapted to a dynamics ofchange for which books and the experience they entail are onlypartially appropriate.

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

Films are mediating expressions better adapted than language to amore segmented reality of social existence. They are alsoadapted to the dynamics of change and to the global nature ofhuman existence. They prepared us for electronic media, but notbefore generating those strange books (or are they?) thattranscribe films for a market so obsessed with success that itwill buy the rudimentary transcription together with theparaphernalia derived from the stage design and from thecostumes used by the characters. We can find substitutes forcoal or oil or tin, but seemingly not for success and stars. Asa result, everything they touch or are associated with enters thecircuit of our own practical existence. An American journalistended his commentary occasioned by Greta Garbo's death: "Todaythey no longer make legends, but celebrities."

Being here and there at the same time

Four generations old (or maybe five), but already the medium ofchoice-this statement does not define television, but probablycaptures its social significance. It can be said from the outsetthat while cinematography is at the borderline between thecivilization of literacy and that of illiteracy, televisiondefinitely embodies the conflict between the two. In fact,television irreversibly tipped the balance in favor of thevisual. The invention of television took place in the context ofthe change in scale of humankind. Primarily, televisionoccasions the transition from the universe of mechanics andchemistry, implicit in film making and viewing, to that ofelectricity, in particular electronics, and, more recently,digital technology.

Television, as a product of this change in the structure andnature of human theoretic and practical experience, results fromthe perceived pragmatic need to capture and transmit dynamicimages. Electricity was already the medium for capturing andtransmitting sound at the speed of electrons along telephonenetworks. And since images and actions are influenced by thelight we view them in, it followed that light is what weactually wanted to record and transmit. This is television.Cumbersome and still owing a lot to mechanics, televisionstarted as a news medium, allowing for almost instantaneousconnection between the source of information and the audience. Itwas initially mostly illustrative. Today, it is constitutive, inthe sense that it not only records news, it makes news. Itconstitutes a generalized mass-medium supporting entertainmentand ritual (political, religious, military).

Literacy corresponds to the experiences of human self-definitionin the world of classical physics and chemistry. It is based onthe same underlying structure, and projects characteristics ofthis experience. Electricity and electronics correspond to veryfast processes (practically instantaneous), high leverage ofhuman action, diversity, more varied mediating elements, andfeedback. The film camera has the main characteristics ofliteracy. It can be compared to the printing press. But thecomparison is only partially adequate since it writes movementsto film, and lets us read them together on the shared white pagecalled the screen. Between recording the movement and viewingit, time is used for processing and duplication.

Television is structurally different, capturing movement andeverything else belonging to what we call reality, in order tomake it immediately available to the viewer. Electronicmediation is much more elaborate, has many more layers thancinematography, and as a result is much more efficient. Filmmapped from the selected world of movement, in a studio, on thestreet, or in a laboratory, to a limited viewership: public in amovie theater. It requested that people share the screen onwhich its images were projected. Television maps from manycameras to the entire world, and all can simultaneously partakein its images. Television is distributed and introducessimultaneity in that several events from several locations can bebroadcast on the TV screen. By comparison, cinematography iscentralized. Filming is limited to the location where it isbeing carried on. Cinematography is intrinsically sequential inthat it follows the narrative structure and constitutes a closedentity. Once edited for showing, the film cannot be interruptedto insert anything new.

There are still many who see the two as closely related, andothers who see the use of television only as a carrier (of film,for instance). They ignore the defining fact that film andtelevision, despite some commonalties, belong to practicalexperiences impossible to reconcile. In fact, while film passedthe climax of its attraction, television became the mostpervasive medium. Due to the use of television in education,corporate communication, sports, artistic and otherperformances, such as space exploration and war, televisionimpacts upon social interaction without being an interactivemedium. A televised event can address audiences close to theworld's entire population. When recording images for televisionbecame possible, television supported continued humanexperiences of decentralization, which previous communicationtechnologies could not provide. The video camera and the videocassette recorder, especially in its digital version, make eachof us own not only the receivers of the language of images andsounds, but also emitters, the sources, the private Hollywoodstudios. That is, they make us live the language of TV, andsubstitute it for literacy. Interactive TV will undoubtedlycontribute even more in this direction.

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

Among the many networks through which the foundation of ourexistence is continuously altered, cable TV plays a distinctrole. Many consider it more important than libraries, probablyfor the wrong reasons. Whether living in thickly populated urbanclusters or in remote locations, people are physically connectedthrough multi- channeled communication networks, and even throughinteractive media. Cable TV is often seen only as another entryto our home for downloading classical programs as well asp*rnography and superstition. The full utilization of theelectronic avenue as a multi-lane, bi-directional highwaythrough which we can be receivers of what we want to accept, andsenders of visual messages to whomever is interested and willingto interact with these messages, is still more a goal than areality. With computer- supported visual communicationintegrating digital television, we will dispose of the entireinfrastructure for a visually dominated civilization. In the ageof Internet, wired or wireless networks become part of theartificial nervous system of advanced societies. Whether in itsmodem-based variant, or through other advanced schemes fortransporting digital information and supporting interaction, thecable system already contributes to the transformation of thenature of many human practical experiences. These can beexperiences of entertainment, but also of learning, teaching,even work.

There is a negative side to all this development, and a need toface consequences that over time can accumulate beyond what wealready know and understand. Children growing up with TV missthe experience of movement. Jaron Lanier discussed the "famouschildhood zombiehood," an expression of staring into nothing, alimited ability to see beyond a television image, the desire forinstant gratification, and a lack of basic common senseappreciation for doing work in order to achieve satisfaction.Games developed around video technology train children to behavelike laboratory rats that learn a maze by rote. They grow upaccepting the politics of telegenic competition, a poorsubstitute for competence and commitment. Their vote is focusedon brands, regardless of whether they regard political choices orcereals. Addressed en masse, such viewers gel in the mass imageof polls that rapidly succeed one another. That technology makespossible alternatives to literacy embodied in the visual isunquestionable. To what extent these alternatives carry with themprevious determinations and constraints, or they correspond to anew stage in human civilization, is the crux of the matter. Thedegree of necessity and thus the efficiency of any new form ofvisual expression, communication, or interaction can beascertained only in how individuals constitute themselvesthrough practical activities coherently integrating the visual.There is no higher form of empowerment than in the fulfillment ofour individual possibilities. Telegenic or not, a president or aTV star has little, if any, impact on our fulfillment in theinterconnected world of our time.

Television implies a great deal of language, but such languagefrees the audience from the requirement of literacy. You do notneed to know how to write or read to watch TV; you need to be incommand of a limited part of spoken language in order tounderstand a TV show, even to actively participate in it-fromgoing on a game show to using cable networks, videotex, orinteractive programs, exploring the Internet, or setting up apresence on the network.

Growing up with TV results in stereotypes of language andattitudes representing a background of shared expressions,gestures, and values. To see in these only the negative, the lowend, is easier than to acknowledge that previous backgrounds,constituted on the underlying structure of literacy, have becomeuntenable under the new pragmatic circ*mstances. Due to itscharacteristics, television belongs to the framework of rapidchange typical of the dynamics of needs and expectations withinthe new scale of humankind. There are many varied implicationsto this: it makes each of us more passive, more and more subjectto manipulations (economic, political, religious), robbing (orfreeing) us from the satisfaction of a more personal relation (toothers, art, literature, etc.). Nobody should underestimate anyof these and many other factors discussed by media ecologistsand sociologists. But to stubbornly, and quite myopically,consider TV only from the perspective and expectations ofliteracy is presumptuous. We have to understand the structuralchanges that made TV and video possible. Moreover, we have toconsider the changes they, in turn, brought about. Otherwise wewill miss the opportunities opened by the practical experience ofunderstanding the new choices presented to us, and even the newpossibilities opened. There is so much more after TV, even on500 channels and after video-on-demand!

Language is not an absolute democratic medium; literacy, withintrinsic elitist characteristics, even less. Although it wasused to ascertain principles of democracy, literacy ended up,again and again, betraying them. Because they are closer tothings and actions, and because they require a relativelysmaller background of shared knowledge, images are moreaccessible, although less challenging. But where words and textcan obscure the meaning of a message, images can be immediatelyrelated to what they refer to. There are more built-in checks inthe visual than in the verbal, although the deceptive power ofan image can be exploited probably much more than the power ofthe word. Such, and many other considerations are useful, sincethe transfer of social and political functions from literacy(books and newspapers, political manifestos, ceremonies andrituals based on writing and reading) to the visual, especiallytelevision, requires that we understand the consequences of thistransfer. But it is not television that keeps voters away fromexercising the right to elect their representatives in thecivilization of illiteracy, and not the visual that makes uselect actors, lawyers, peanut farmers, or successful oilmen tothe 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, toname 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 somecharacteristics of the entire development under discussion-forinstance, how the function of integration is carried out.Integration through the intermediary of literacy required sharedknowledge, and in particular, knowledge of writing and reading.Integration through the intermediary of modern image-producingtechnology, especially television and computer-aided visualcommunication, means access to and sharing of information.Television has made countries which are so different in theiridentity, history, and culture (as we know the countries of theworld to be) seem sometimes so similar that one has to ask howthis uniformity came about. Some will point to the influence ofthe market process- advertisem*nts look much the same all overthe world. Others may note the influence of technology-anelectronic eye open on the world that renders uniform everythingwithin its range. The new dynamics of human interaction, requiredby our striving for higher efficiency appropriate to the scaleof humankind, probably explains the process better. Thesimilarity is determined by the mechanism we use to achieve thishigher efficiency, i.e., progressively deeper labor division,increased mediation, and the need for alternative mechanisms forhuman integration, that is reflected in TV images. Thissimilarity makes up the substratum of TV images, as well as thesubstratum of fashion trends, new rituals, and new values, astransitory as all these prove to be.

Literacy and television are not reciprocally exclusive. If thiswere not the case, the solution to the lower levels of literacywould be at hand. Nevertheless, all those who hoped to increasethe quality of literacy by using television had to accept thatthis 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 connectedthrough a TV chain of cameras and receivers. Literacy is amedium of tedious elaboration and inertia. TV is spontaneous andinstantaneous. Moreover, it also supports forms of scientificactivity for which language is not at all suited. We cannot sendlanguage to look at what our eyes do not see directly, or seeonly through some instruments. We cannot anticipate, inlanguage, processes which, once made possible on a televisionscreen, make future human experience conceivable. I know that inthese last lines I started crossing the border betweentelevision and digital image processing, but this is no accident.Indeed, human experience with television, in its various formsand applications, although not at all closed, made necessary thenext step towards a language of images which can take advantageof computer technology and of networking.

With the advent of HDTV, television achieves a quality that makesit appropriate for integration in many practical experiences.Design (of clothes, furniture, new products) can result from acollaborative effort of people working at different sites, andin the manufacture of their design during a live session.Modifications are almost instantaneously integrated in thesample. The product can be actually tested, and decisionsleading to production made. Communication at such levels ofeffectiveness is actually integrated in the creative andproductive effort. The language is that of the product, a visualreality in progress. The results are design and production cyclesmuch shorter than literacy-based communication can support.

HDTV is television brought to a level of efficiency that onlydigital formats make possible. The reception of digitaltelevision opens the possibility to proceed from each and everyimage considered appropriate to storing, manipulating, andintegrating it in a new context. Digital television reinstatesactivity, and is subject to creative programming andinteractivity. The individual can make up a new universe throughthe effort of understanding and creative planning. It is quitepossible that alternative forms of communication, much richerthan those in use today, will emerge from practical experiencesof human self-constitution in this new realm. That in ten yearsall our TV sets, if the TV set remains a distinct receiver, willbe digital says much less than the endless creative ideasemerging around the reality of digital television.

Visualization

Whenever people using language try to convince their partner indialogue, or even themselves, that they understood adescription, a concept, a proof, and answer by using thecolloquial "I see," they actually express the practicalexperience of seeing through language. They are overcoming thelimitations of the abstract system of phonetic language andreturning to the concreteness of seeing the image. Way ofspeaking equals way of doing-this sums up one of the manypremises of this book. We extract information about things andactions from their images. When no image is possible-what does athought look like, or what is the image of right, of wrong, ofideal?-language supports us in our theoretic experiences, or inthe attempt to make the abstract concrete. Language is rathereffective in helping us identify kinds of thoughts, inimplementing social rules that encode prescriptions fordistinguishing between right and wrong, for embodying the justin the institution of justice, and ideals in values. But theexperience of language can also be an experience of images.

Once we reach the moment when we can embody the abstract in aconcrete theory, in action, in new objects, in institutions, andin 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, anduse it further for many practical or intellectual purposes, weexpand the literate experience in new experiences. So it seemsthat we tend to visualize everything. I would go so far as tosay that we not only visualize everything, but also listen tosounds of everything, experience their smell, touch, and taste,and recreate the abstract in the concreteness of ourperceptions. The domination of language and the ideal ofliteracy, which instills this domination as a rule, was andstill is seen as the domination of rationality, as though to beliterate equals being rational, volens nolens. In fact, therationality associated with language, and expressed with itshelp, is only a small part of the potential human rationality.The measure (ratio) we project in our objectification can aswell be a measure related to our perceptive system. It is quiteplausible to suspect that some of the negative effects of ourliterate rationality could have been avoided had we been able tosimultaneously project our other dimensions in whatever we did.

The shift from a literacy-dominated civilization to the relativedomination of the visual takes place under the influence of newtools, further mediations, and integration mechanisms requiredby self-constitutive practical experiences at the new humanscale. The tools we need should allow us to continue exploringhorizons at which literacy ceases to be effective, or evensignificant. The mediations required correspond to complexitiesfor which new languages are structurally more adequate. Thenecessary integration is only partially achievable throughliterate means since many people active in the humanities andthe sciences gave up the obsession of final explanations andaccepted the model of infinite processes.

Images, among other sign systems, are structurally better suitedfor a pragmatic framework marked by continuous multiplication ofchoices, high efficiency, and distributed human experience. Butin order to use images, the human being had to put in place aconceptual context that could support extended visual praxis.When the digital computer was invented, none of those who madeit a reality knew that it would contribute to more than themechanization of number crunching. The visionary dimension ofthe digital computer is not in the technology, but in the conceptof a universal language, a characteristica universalis, orlingua Adamica, as Leibniz conceived it.

This is not the place to rewrite the history of the computer orthe history of the languages that computers process. But thesubject of visualization-presented here from the perspective ofthe shift from literacy to the visual-requires at least someexplanation of the relation between the visual and the human useof computers. The binary number system, which Leibniz calledArithmetica Binaria (according to a manuscript fragment datedMarch 15, 1679), was not meant to be the definitive alphabet,with only two letters, but the basis for a universal language, inwhich the limitations of natural language are overcome. Leibniztried hard to make this language utilizable in all domains ofhuman activity, in encoding laws, scientific results, music. Ithink that the most intriguing aspect, which has been ignored forcenturies, was his attempt to visualize events of abstractnature with the help of the two symbols of his alphabet. In aletter to Herzog Rudolph August von Braunschweig (January 2,1697), Leibniz described his project for a medal depicting theCreation (Imago Creationis). In this letter, he actuallyintroduced digital calculus. Around 1714, he wrote two letters toNicolas de Remond concerning Chinese philosophy. It is useful tomention these here because of the binary number representationof some of the most intriguing concepts of the Ih-King. Throughthese letters, we are in the realm of the visual, and in front ofpages in which, probably for the first time, translations fromideographic to the sequential, and finally to the digital, wereperformed. It took almost 300 years before hackers, trying tosee if they could use the digital for music notation, discoveredthat 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, butintellectual 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 forgenerating images related to information and its use. A text on acomputer screen is, in fact, an image, a visualization of thelanguage generated not by a human hand in control of a quill, apiece of lead or graphite, a pencil or a pen. The computer doesnot know language. It translates our alphabet into its ownalphabet, and then, after processing, it translates it back intoours. Displayed in those stored images which, if in lead, wouldconstitute the contents of the lower and upper cases of thedrawers in each typography shop, this literacy is subject toautomation.

When we write, we visualize, making our language visible onpaper. When we draw, we make our plans for new artifactsvisible. The mediation introduced by the computer use does notaffect the condition of language as long as the computer is onlythe pen, keyboard, or typewriter. But once we encode languagerules (such as spelling, case agreement, and so on), once westore our vocabulary and our grammar, and mimic human use oflanguage, what is written is only partially the result of theliteracy of the writer. The visualization of text is thestarting point towards automatic creation of other texts. Italso leads to establishing relations between language andnon-language sign systems. Today, we dispose of means forelectronically associating images and texts, forcross-referencing images and texts, and for rapidly diagrammingtexts. We can, and indeed do, print electronic journals, whichare refereed on the network. Nothing prevents such journals frominserting images, animation and sounds, or for facilitatingon-line reactions to the hypotheses and scientific datapresented. That such publications need a shorter time to reachtheir public goes without saying. The Internet thus became thenew medium of publication, and the computer its printing press-aprinting press of a totally new condition. Individualsconstituting their identity on the Internet have access toresources which until recently were available only to those whoowned presses, or gained access to them by virtue of theirprivileged position in society.

The visual component of computer processing, i.e., the graphics,relies on the same language of zeros and ones through which theentire computer processing takes place. As a result of thiscommon alphabet and grammar (Boolean logic and its newextensions), we can consider language (image translations, ornumber-image relations such as diagrams, charts, and the like),and also more abstract relations. Creating the means to overcomethe limitations of literacy has dominated scientific work. Thenew means for information processing allow us to replace theroutine of phenomenological observation with processing ofdiverse languages designed especially to help us create newtheories of very complex and dynamic phenomena.

The shift to the visual follows the need to change the accentfrom quantitative evaluations and language inferences based onthem, to qualitative evaluations, and images expressing suchevaluations at some significant moments of the process in whichwe are involved. Let us mention some of these processes. Inmedicine, or in the research for syntheses of new substances,and in space research, words have proven to be not onlymisleading, but also inefficient in many respects. Newvisualization techniques, such as those based on molecularresonance, freed the praxis of medicine from the limitations ofword descriptions. Patients explain what they feel; physicianstry to match such descriptions to typologies of disease based ondata resulting from the most recent data. When this process isnetworked, the most qualified physician can be consulted. Whenexperimental data and theoretic models are joined, the result isvisualized and the information exchanged via high-speed broadbanddigital networks.

Based on similar visualization techniques, we acquire betteraccess to sources of data regarding the past, as well as toinformation vital for carrying through projects oriented towardsthe future. Computed tomography, for instance, visualized theinternal structure of Egyptian mummies. Three-dimensional imagesof the whole body were created without violating the casings andwrappings that cover the remnants. The internal body structurewas visualized by using a simulation system similar to thoseutilized in non-intrusive surgery.

The design and production of new materials, space research, andnano- engineering have already benefited from replacing theanalytical perspective ingrained in literacy-based methods withvisual means for synthesis. It is possible to visualizemolecular structures and simulate interactions of molecules inorder to see how medicine affects the cells treated, thedynamics of mixing, chemical and biochemical reactions. It isalso possible to simulate forces involved in the so-calleddocking of molecules in virtual space. No literacy-baseddescription can substitute for flight simulators, or forvisualization of data from radio astronomy, for large areas ofgenetics and physics.

Not the last among examples to be given is the stillcontroversial field of artificial intelligence, seduced withemulating behaviors usually associated with human intelligencein action. But it should not surprise anybody that while thedynamics of the civilization of illiteracy requires freedom fromliteracy, people will continue to preserve values and conceptsthey are used to, or which are appropriate to specific knowledgeareas. Paradoxically, artificial intelligence is, in part, doingexactly this.

When people grow up with images the same way prior generationswere subjected to literacy, the relation to images changes. Thetechnology for visualization, although sometimes still based onlanguage models, makes interactivity possible in ways languagecould not. But it is not only the technology of visualizationapplied within science and engineering that marks the newdevelopment. Visualization, in its various forms and functions,supports the almost instantaneous interaction between us and ourvarious machines, and among people sharing the same naturalenvironment, or separated in space and time. It constitutes analternative medium for thinking and creativity, as it did allalong the history of crafts, design, and engineering. It is alsoa medium for understanding our environment, and the multitude ofchanges caused by practical experience involving the lifesupport system. Through visualization, people can experiencedimensions of space beyond their direct perception, they canconsider the behavior of objects in such spaces, and can alsoexpand the realm of artistic creativity.

The print media, as an overlapping practical experience unitingliteracy and the power of sight, are more visual today than atany previous time. We are no longer subjected-sometimes withgood reason, other times for dubious motives-to thesequentiality of literacy-dominated modes of communication. Anentire shared visual language is projected upon us in the formof comic strips, advertisem*nts, weather maps, economic reports,and other pictorial representations. Some of theserepresentations are still printed on paper. Others are displayedthrough the more dynamic forms at public information kiosks, orthrough interactive means of information dissemination, such ascomputer-supported networks and non-linear search environments,which Ted Nelson anticipated back in 1965. The World Wide Webembodies many of his ideas, as well as ideas of a number of othervisionaries.

Parallel to these developments, we are becoming more and moreaware of the possibilities of using images in human activitieswhere they played a reduced role within literacy-civic action,political debate, legal argumentation. Lawyers already integratevisual testimony in their cases. Juries can see for themselvesthe crime being committed, as well as the results ofsophisticated forensic tests. Human destinies are defended witharguments that are no longer at the mercy of someone's memory oranother's talent for rhetoric or drama. The citizen is frequentlyaddressed by increasingly visual messages that explain how taxdollars are spent and why he or she should vote for one oranother candidate. In becoming the Netizen, he or she willparticipate in social interactions fundamentally new in nature.On the Net, politicians claiming credit for some accomplishmentcan be immediately challenged by the real image. Politicalpromises can be modeled and displayed while the campaign speechis given. A decision to go to war can be subjected to an instantreferendum while the simulation of the war itself, or ofalternatives, is played on our monitors. But again, to idealizethese possibilities would be foolish. The potential for abusiveuse of images is as great as that for their meaningfulapplication.

Many factors are at work slowing down the process of educatingvisually literate individuals. We continue to rediscover thewheel of reading and writing without advancing comprehensiveprograms for visual education. Illustrative visual alternatives,advanced more as an alibi for the maintenance ofliteracy-dominated communication, are by the nature of theirfunction inappropriate in the context of higher efficiencyrequirements. Utilized as alternatives, these materials can be,and often are, irrelevant, ugly, insignificant, and expensive.More often than not, they are used not to enhancecommunication, but to direct it, to manipulate the addressee. Itwill take more than the recognition of the role of the visual tounderstand that visual literacy, or probably several suchliteracies, comprising the variety of visual languages we need,less confining, less permanent, and less patterned, arenecessary in order to improve practical experiences ofself-constitution through images. We are yet to address theethical aspects of such experiences, especially in view of thefact that the visual entails constraints different from thoseencoded in the letter of our laws and moral principles.

In discussing the transition to the visual, I hope to have madeclear that the process is not one of substituting one form ofliteracy for another. The process has a totally differentdynamics. It implies transition from a dominating form ofliteracy to a multitude of highly adaptive sign systems. Theseall require new competencies that reflect this adaptability. Italso requires that we all understand integrative processes inorder to make the best of individual efforts in a framework ofextremely divided and specialized experiences ofself-constitution. If seeing is believing, then believingeverything we see in our day is a challenge for which we are, forall practical purposes, ill prepared.

Unbounded Sexuality

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

The Netizens were up in arms: The Communications Decency Actmust be repealed. Blue ribbons appeared on many Websites as anexpression of solidarity. This Act was prompted by the Americangovernment's attempt to prevent children from accessing the manyp*rnographic outlets of the Internet. This first major publicconfrontation between a past controlled by literate mechanismsand a future of illiterate unrestricted freedom seemed to beless about sex and more about democracy. But that the two arerelated, 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 ofthe civilization of literacy) addressed alienation: "We thusarrive at the result that man feels that he acts freely only inhis animal functions-eating, drinking, procreation, or at mostusing shelter, jewelry, etc.-while in his human functions, hefeels only animal. What is animal becomes human and what ishuman becomes animal." How an analysis of industrial capitalism,with its underlying pragmatic structure reflected in literacy,can anticipate phenomena pertinent to the post-industrial, andreflected in illiteracy, is not easy to explain.

Although he referred to economic self-constitution, hisdescription is significant in more than one way. Sexuality is ofconcern in the civilization of illiteracy insofar as the humanbeing in its multi-dimensionality is of concern. This might soundtoo broad to afford any meaningful inference from the conditionof literacy to the condition of human sexuality, but it is anexistential premise. Through sexuality humans project theirnatural condition and the many influences, language included,leading to its humanization. An understanding of the multiplefactors at work in conditioning human experiences as intimate assexual relations, depends upon the understanding of the pragmaticframework in which they unfold. Child p*rnography on the Internetis by no means the offspring of our love affair with technology.Neither is p*rnography being invoked for the first time as ajustification for censorship. Nevertheless, the commotionregarding the Communications Decency Act constitutes a newexperience that is intimately related to the condition of humanexistence in today's world.

"SWF seeks unemployed SWM grad student for hideaway weekends,intimate dinners, and cuddling. Must know how to read, and beable to converse without extensive use of 'you know' or'wicked.'" This announcement (dated October 6, 1983) is oneamong many that use qualifying initials, but with one twist:"Must know how to read."-moreover, to be articulate. What overten years ago was formulated innocently (hideaway, intimatedinner, 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 tolove and be loved; that is, what does reading have to do withsex?

Long before hom*o Sapiens ascertained itself, reproduction, andall it comprises in its natural and form, ensured survival.Do literacy, language, or sign systems affect this basicequation of life? Mating seasons and habits shed some light onthe natural aspect. Colors, odors, mating calls, specificmovements (dances, fights, body language) send sexual signals.Molecular biology places the distinction between hominids andchimpanzees at four million years ago. After all this time offreeing themselves from nature, even to the extent ofself-constitution in the practical experience of artificialinsemination, human beings still integrate color, odor, matingcalls, and particular movements into the erotic. But they alsointegrate the experience of their self-constitution in language.Since the time hominids distinguished themselves, the sexualityof the species started differentiating itself from that ofanimals. For example, humans are permanently attractive, evenafter insemination, while animals attract each other only atmoments favorable for reproduction. Along the timeline from theprimitive being to our civilization, sex changed from being anexperience in reproduction to being predominantly a form ofpleasure in itself.

Instead of the immediacy of the sexual urge, projected throughpatterns subject to natural cycles, humans experience ever moremediated forms of sexual attraction and gratification, which arenot necessarily associated with reproduction. An initial changeoccurred when humanized sexual drive turned into love, andbecame associated with its many emotions. The practicalexperience of language played an important part in extendingsexual encounters from the exclusive realm of nature to therealm of culture. Here they acquired a life of their own throughpractical experiences characteristic of the syncretic phase ofhuman practical experiences, mostly rituals. During the processof differentiating these experiences-constitution of myths, moraland ethical self-awareness, theater, dance, poetry-sexualencounters were subjected to various interpretations.

Beyond immediacy

The birth of languages and the establishment of sex codes, asprimitive as they were, are related to the moment ofa*griculture, a juncture at which a certain autonomy of thespecies was reached. Rooted in the biological distinctionbetween male and female, labor division increased the efficiencyof human effort. Divisions were also established, some under themodel of male domination, others under the model of femaledomination, pertinent to survival activities, and later on toincipient social life. Eventually, labor division consecratedthe profession of prostitution, and thus the practice ofsatisfying natural urges in a context in which nature wasculturized. The prototypical male-dominated structure of thesexual relation between man and woman marked the history of thisrelation more than female domination did. It introducedpatterns of interaction and hierarchies today interpretedwholesale as harmful to the entire development of women.

What is probably less obvious is the relation among the manyaspects of the pragmatic context in which such hierarchies wereacknowledged. Moreover, we do not know enough about how thesehierarchies were transformed into the underlying consciousnessof the populations whose identities resulted from experiencescorresponding to the pragmatic context. The implicit thesis ofthis book is that everything that made language and writingpossible, and progressively necessary, led to a coherentframework of human practical experiences that are characterizedby sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism, andwhich literacy appropriated and transmits. Consequently, whenthe structural framework no longer effectively supports humanself-constitution, the framework is modified. Other aspects ofhuman existence, among them sexuality, reflect themodification.

Reading and writing have much to do with our emotional life. Theyremove it from the immediacy of drive, hope, pain, anddisappointment and give it its own space: human striving,desire, pleasure. They are associated with an infinity ofqualifiers, names, and phrases. With language, feelings aregiven a means for externalizing, and they are stabilized.Expectations diversify from there. Structural characteristics ofthe context that makes language necessary simultaneously markthe very object of the self- constitutive experience of lovingand being loved. There are many literary and visual testimoniesto how the erotic was constituted as a realm of its own: FromGilgamesh, the Song of Solomon, Kama Sutra, Ovid's Art of Love,through Canterbury Tales and the Decameron, to the eroticl*terature of 18th and 19th century Europe, down to the manycurrent romance novels and handbooks on lovemaking. No matterwhich of them is examined, one inference becomes clear: thepragmatic context of the continuous human self-constitutioneffects changes in the way people are attracted to each other.Love and integration of sexual experiences, in the manifold ofacts through which hominids move from the self-perpetuationdrive to new levels of expectation and new intensities of theirrelations, is also pragmatically conditioned.

Writing, as a practical experience of human self-constitution, isconducive to relations between male and female that aredifferent from random or selective mating. It is bound tocontinue along a time sequence severed from the natural cycle ofmating, reshaped into the marriage contract and the familyalliance. Literacy, as a particular practical experience oflanguage, regulates the sexual, as it regulates, in a variety offorms, all other aspects of human interaction. In the literateerotic experience, expectations pertinent to the pragmatics of asociety in search of alternative means of survival evolve intonorms. The inherited experience of female-male relations,affected through the experience of rituals, myths, and religion,is condensed in literacy. Encoding hierarchy, some languagesplace women in a secondary position. There is almost no languagein which this does not happen. "Many men and women" is in Arabic("rijaalan kafiiran wa-nisaa'aa") literally "men many women." InJapan, women speak a Japanese reserved to their sex alone. Inthe English wedding ceremony, the woman had to repeat that shewould "love, honor, and obey" the husband. To this day, OrthodoxJewish men give thanks to God that He did "not make me a woman."

With the demise of literacy, the sexual experience gets divorcedfrom procreation. Statistics of survival in the past world oflimited available resources, of natural catastrophes, ofdisease, etc., cease to play any role in the illiterate sexencounters. Sexuality becomes a diversified human experience,subject to divisions, mediations, and definitely to theinfluence of the general dynamics of the world today. As marketsbecome part of the global economy, so does sexuality, in thesense that it allows for experiences which, in limitedcommunities and within prescribed forms of ceremony (religious,especially), were simply not possible. From the earliesttestimony regarding sexual awareness up to the present,everything one can imagine in respect to sex has been tried. Sooften placed under the veil of secrecy and mystery, sex is noless frequently and vividly, to say the least, depicted. Yet arhetorical question deserves to be raised: Does anyone knoweverything about sex?

The land of sexual ubiquity

Borges, in his own way, would have probably mapped the sexualrealm: Freud aside, to know everything about sex would requirethat one be everyone who ever lived, lives, and eventually willlive. Such a Borgesian map is indeed detailed but leads nofurther than ourselves. Connect all sex-related matter that is onthe Internet today- from on-line striptease and copulation tolegitimate sex education and the passionate defense of love-andyou will still not have more than a partial image of sexuality.When one considers all the books, videotapes, songs, radio andtelevision talk-shows, private discussions and public sermons,the subject of sex would still not be exhausted. If sex were anindividual matter-which it is, to a large extent-how could wemeaningfully approach the subject without the risk of making it apersonal confession, or worse, a pretentious discourse aboutsomething any author would unavoidably know only through themany and powerful filters of his or her culture? But maybe sex isless private than we, based on prejudice, ignorance, ordiscretion, assume.

Ritualized sex was a public event, sometimes culminating inorgies. It took a lot of taming, or acculturation, for sex tobecome an intimate affair. Myths acknowledged sexual habits andpropagated rules coherent within the pragmatic framework of theirexpression. Like myths, many religions described acceptable andunacceptable behavior, inspired by the need to maintain theintegrity of the community and to serve its goals of survivalthrough lineage and proprietary rights, especially when alesbegan to dominate in society. Art, science, and businessappropriated sex as a subject of inquiry, or as a lucrativeactivity. Sex is a driving force for individuals and communities,an inescapable component of any experience, no matter how remotefrom sex.

Sexual ubiquity and the parallel world of self-awareness,embodied in forms of expression, communication, andsignification different from the actual sexual act, areconnected in very subtle ways. Once sexual experiences areappropriated by culture, they become themselves a sign system, asymbolic domain, a language. Each sexual encounter, or eachunfulfilled intention, is but a phrase in this language writtenin the alphabet of gestures, odors, colors, smells, bodymovement, and rhythm.

We are the sexual sign: first, in its indexical condition-adefinite mark left, a genetic fingerprint testifying to ourdeepest secrets encoded in our genetic endowment; second, iniconicity, that is, in all the imitations of others as theyconstitute their identity in the experience of sexuality. Asmany scholars have hastened to point out, we are also the signin its symbolism. Indeed, phallic and vulvar symbols populateevery sphere of human expression (and obsession). Nevertheless,our own self-constitution in the sexual act confirms a doubleidentity of the human species: nature, involved in the strugglefor survival, where the sheer power of numbers and strategies forcoping with everything destructive make for continuous selection(Darwin's law of natural selection); and culture, in whichhumans pursue a path of progressive self-definition, many timesin conflict with the natural condition, or what Freud and hisfollowers defined as the psychological dimension. The two arerelated, and under specific circ*mstances one dominates theother. In my opinion, Peirce's encompassing notion that the signis the person who interprets it integrates the two levels.

In the pragmatic framework, experiences of self-constitutionresult from the projection of natural characteristics in theactivity performed, as well as from the awareness of the goalspursued, means incorporated, and meanings shared. Does thepragmatic perspective negate explanations originating from other,relatively limited, perspectives? Probably not. An example isfurnished by the theories explaining sexuality from theviewpoint of the conflict between sex (libido) andself-preservation (ego) instincts, later substituted by theconflict between life instincts (Eros) and the death instinct(Thanatos, self-destruction). Such theories introduce a languagelayer into a subject which, although acknowledged, was simplynot discussed, except in religious terms (mainly asprohibitions), or in poetry. As with any other dualisticrepresentation, such theories also end in speculation, opposingthe experience to the scheme adopted. The scheme functions inextreme cases, which psychoanalysis dealt with, but explainssexual normalcy-if such a thing can be defined, or even exists-toa lesser extent, and inconsistently. The labels remainunchanged-Eros, Logos, Thanatos-while the world undergoesdrastic alterations. Some of these alterations affect the verynature of the sexual experience as human beings unfold under newpragmatic circ*mstances, some of extreme alienation.

The literate invention of the woman

The case I am trying to make is for the acknowledgment of theconflict between a new state of affairs in the world and ourperspectives, limited or not by the literate model of sexuality.The current situation recalls the world before literacy, beforethe expectation of hom*ogeneity, and before the attempt to deriveorder and complexity through linear progression. The atom ofthat sexual world was the genderless human being, a genericexistence not yet defined by sexual differentiation. Themale-female distinction came as a surprise-the realization ofseeing the same and its negative, as in the case of a stone andthe hole that remains after it is unearthed. Some read thegenderless world as androcentric, because the generic human beingit affirmed had a rather masculine bent. The significance ofwhatever such a genderless model embodied needs to beestablished in the pragmatic realm: how does difference resultfrom same, if this same is an archetypal body withcharacteristics celebrated copiously over time? Painting,medical illustration, and diagrams, from the Middle Ages to the17th century, focus on this genderless person, who seems todayalmost like a caricature.

The pragmatics of the time period just mentioned were conduciveto a different image of genders. The sense of excitementassociated with human advances in knowing nature certainlyspilled over into every other form of human experience, sexincluded. A new scale of mankind required that the efficiency ofhuman activity increase. This was a time of many innovations andgroundbreaking scientific theories. It was also a time ofdiversified, though still limited, sexual experiences, madepossible by a framework of creativity different from theframework of the Middle Ages. Discoveries in many domains shookthe framework of thinking according to Platonic archetypes,appropriated by the Catholic Church and used as explanatorymodels for all things living or dead. Pragmatics required thatthe one-sex model be transcended because limits of efficiency(in thinking, medical practice, biological awareness, labordivision) were reached within the model. The world of practicalexperiences of this time unfolded in the Industrial Revolution.With literacy established, some sexual attitudes, consonantwith the pragmatic circ*mstance, were enforced. Others weredeemed unacceptable, and qualified as such in the literatelanguage of church, state, and education. From the ubiquity ofnatural sexuality to what would become sexual self-awareness andsexual culture, no matter how limited, the journey continued inleaps and bounds.

To acknowledge the woman as a biological entity, withcharacteristics impossible to reduce to male characteristics,was not due to political pressure-as Thomas Lacquer, aremarkable writer on the subject, seemed to believe-but topragmatic needs. It simply made sense to know how the bodyfunctions, to acknowledge morphology, to improve the quality oflife, however vaguely acknowledged as such, by addressing therichness of the human being. Interestingly enough, the order innature and matter found by science contradicted the newexperience of variety, sexuality included, made possible by thescientific revolution. A gulf opened between reality andappearance, motivating a healthy empirical program, well extendedin the realm of sexual encounters.

Back in the medium aevum, Maximus of Torino thought that "thesource of all evil is the woman," probably embodied in theprototypical Eve. The social importance of women in the contextof the empirical program, leading to the need for generalizedliteracy and better knowledge of the human body, discredited thisprejudice of the Middle Ages, and of any age since. Sexualitymade the transition to the two-sex world with a vengeance.Reproduction still dominated, since incipient industry neededmore qualified workers in its own reproduction cycles, andproductivity triggered the need to maintain consumption. But theunnatural dimension widened as well. The context was populationgrowth, limited means of birth control, and levels of productionand consumption characteristic of the pragmatics of highefficiency.

Those who think that the relation between industry, sexuality,and reproduction is far-fetched should recall the birth policiesof countries obsessed with industrial growth. In what wascommunist Romania, workers were needed to do what there were nomachines to do: to produce for the benefit of the owners of themeans of production. To a similar end, the Soviets handed outmedals to mothers of many children. The government structure,bearing the characteristics of literacy, clashed with the harshpragmatic framework existing in the former communist countries.The result of the clash was that women avoided birth at allcost.

Ahead to the past

Longer life and the ability to enjoy the fruits of industryaltered attitudes towards sex, especially reproduction.Sexuality and marriage were postponed to the third decade oflife as people acquired more training in their quest for a betterlife. Children were no longer a matter of continuity andsurvival. After decades of denying the strength of nature'sdrive towards self-perpetuation of a species, today we againrecognize that sexual life starts very early. But thisrealization should not have come as a surprise. Juliet's motherwas worried that Juliet was not married at the age of 13.Beyond the realization of early sexuality, we notice thatadolescents have multiple sex partners, that the averageAmerican is bound to have 37 sex partners in his or herlifetime, that prohibitions against sodomy are ignored, and thathalf the population is involved in group sex. Statistics tell usthat 25% of the adult population uses p*rnography for arousaland another 30% uses contraptions bought in sex shops; 33- 1/3%of married couples have extra-marital affairs; the averagemarriage lasts 5 years; the open practice of hom*osexualityincreases 15% annually. Incest, bestial*ty, and sexual practicesusually defined as perverse are reaching unheard of proportions.It's not that changes in sexual experience take place, but thatpractices known from the earliest of times assert themselves,usually by appealing to the literate notion of freedom. As withmany aspects of the change human society undergoes, we do notknow what the impact of these sex practices will be. Probablythat is the most one can say in a context that celebratespermissiveness as one of the highest accomplishments of modernsociety. Such changes challenge our values and attitudes, andmake many wonder about the miserable state of morality. Wealready know about the cause and physical effects of AIDS. We donot even know how to wonder what other diseases might come uponhumanity if the human relation with animals moves in thedirection of bestial*ty. "Is this the price we pay fordemocracy?" is asked by people accused of having a conservativeleaning. Enthusiasts celebrate an age of unprecedentedtolerance, indulgence, and freedom from responsibility. But nomatter to which end of the spectrum one leans, it should beclear that these considerations are part of the pragmatics ofsexuality in the civilization of illiteracy. Shorter cycles arecharacteristic not only of production, but also of sexualencounters. Higher speed (however one wants to perceive it),non-linearity, freedom of choice from many options, and thetranscendence of determinism and clear-cut dualistic distinctionsapply to sexuality as they apply to everything else we do.

Although it is a unique experience, impossible to transmit orcompare, and very difficult to separate from the individual,sex is widely discussed. Media, politicians, and socialscientists have transformed it into a public issue; hypocritesturn it into an object of derision; professionals in sexualdisorders make a good living from them. Sex is the subject ofeconomic prognosis, legal dispute, moral evaluation, astrology,art, sports, and so on. One should see what is made public onthe World Wide Web. Highly successful networked pages ofp*rnographic magazines are visited daily by millions of people,as are pages of scientific and medical advice. Questionsreferring to sexuality in its many forms of expression increaseday by day. Questions about sex have also extended to areaswhere the sexual seems (or seemed) excluded-science,technology, politics, the military. For example, thecontraceptive pill, which has changed the world more than itsinventors ever dreamed of, and more than society could havepredicted, has also changed part of the condition of the sexual.The abortion pill (with a name-RU486-that reminds us of computerchips) only accentuates the change, as do many scientific andtechnological discoveries conceived with the purpose of sexuallystimulating the individual or augmenting sexual pleasure.

Emancipation-social, political, economic, as well asemancipation of women, children, minorities, nations-has alsohad an impact on sexual relations. As such, emancipation resultsfrom different pragmatic needs and possibilities, and reflectsthe weaker grip of literate norms and expectations. Emancipationhas reduced some of sexuality's inherent, and necessary,tension. It freed the sexual experience from most of theconstraints it was subjected to in a civilization striving fororder and control. Still, individual erotic experiences haveoften culminated not in the expected revelations, stimulated bythe use of drugs or not, but in deception, even desperation. Thisis explained by the fact that, more than any activity thatbecomes a goal in itself, sexuality without the background ofemotional contentment constitutes individuals as insular,alienated from each other, feeling used but not fulfilled. Linesof a similar sway were written by opponents of sexualemancipation, and as a suggestion of a price humans pay forexcess. These lines were articulated also by firm believers intolerance, free spirits who hardly entertain the thought ofpunishment (divine or otherwise).

Concerns over human sexuality result from the role of scale andthe erotic dimension. Within a smaller scale, one does not feellost or ignored. Small-scale experiences are constraining, butthey also return a sense of care and belonging. The broader thescale, the less restrictive the influence of others, but also themore diminished the recognition of individuality. In the modernmegalopolis, the only limits to one's sexual wishes are thelimits of the individual. Nonetheless, at such a scale,individuality is continuously negated, absorbed in the anonymityof mediocre encounters and commercialism. The realization thatscale relates not only to how and how much we produce, and tochanges in human interaction, but also to deeper levels of ourexistence is occasioned by the sexual experience ofself-constitution in a framework of permissiveness thatnullifies value. The human scale and the altered underlyingstructure of our practical experiences affect drives, inparticular the sexual drive, as well as reproduction, in a worldsubjected to a population explosion of exponential proportions.

The entire evolution under consideration, with all its positiveand negative consequences, has a degree of necessity which wewill not understand better by simply hiding behind moral slogansor acknowledging extreme sexual patterns. No person and nogovernment could have prevented erotic emancipation, which ispart of a much broader change affecting the human condition inits entirety. The civilization of illiteracy is representativeof this change insofar as it defines a content for humanexperiences of self-constitution, including those related tosexuality, which mark a discontinuity in sexual patterns. Sexdreams turn into sex scripts on virtual reality programs withinwhich one can make love to a virtual animal, plant, to oneself,projected into the virtual space and time of less than cleardistinctions between what we were told is right and wrong.Telephone sex probably provides just as much arousal, but againstfees that the majority of callers can hardly afford. Less thansurprising, lesbians and gays make their presence known on theInternet more than in literate publications. Discussions evolve,uncensored, on matters that can be very intimate, described intitillating terms, sometimes disquietingly vulgar, obscene, orbase, by literate standards. But there are also exchanges onhealth, AIDS prevention, and reciprocal support. Gay and lesbiansexuality is freely expressed, liberated from the code languageused in the personal columns of literary publications.

Freud, modern hom*osexuality, AIDS

The godfather of modern hom*osexuality is Freud (independent ofhis own sexual orientation), insofar as sexual expressionremains a symbolic act. hom*osexuality, evading natural selectionand eliciting acceptance as an expression of a deeply rootedhuman complex, is part of the ubiquitous sexual experience of thespecies. The fact that hom*osexuality, documented in some of theearliest writings as a taboo, along with incest and bestial*ty,predated Freud does not contradict this assertion. hom*osexualEros has a different finality than heterosexual Eros. The extentof hom*osexuality under the structural circ*mstances of thecivilization of illiteracy is not only the result of increasedtolerance and permissiveness. Neither is it merely the result offreedom resulting from an expanded notion of liberal democracy.It is biologically relevant, and as a biological expression, itis projected into practical experiences constitutive ofindividuals, men or women, acknowledged as different becausetheir practical experience of self-constitution identifies themas different. Their experience, though necessarily integrated intoday's global world, has many consequences for them and forothers.

While research has yet to confirm the hypothesis of structuralpeculiarities in the brain and genes of hom*osexuals, thespecifics of the self-constitution process through practicalexperiences in a world subject to natural selection cannot beoverlooked. Genetics tells us that the borderline betweengenders is less clear-cut than we assumed. Be this as it may,hom*osexuality takes place under a different set of biologicaland social expectations than do heterosexuality and other formsof sexuality. It is an act in itself, with its own goal, with noimplicit commitment to offspring, and thus different in itsintrinsic set of responsibilities and their connection to thesocial contract. But for this matter, so is heterosexualityunder the protection of the pill, the condom, or any other birthcontrol device or method, abortion included.

A different sense of future, moreover an expectation of instantgratification, is established in the sexual experience ofhom*osexuality. Exactly this characteristic acknowledges theunderlying structure of the pragmatics of high efficiency thatmakes hom*osexual experiences possible, and even economicallyacceptable. Acknowledged also is the scale of humankind.Survival is much less affected by fruitless sexuality thanwithin a limited scale of existence and activity. The freedomgained through birth control methods and the freedom to practicenon-reproductive sexual relations, such as hom*osexual love, arein some ways similar. It is impossible not to notice that thedevelopment under discussion displays a shift from a domain ofvulnerability in regard to the species-any imbalance inprocreation, under conditions of severe selection, affects thechances of survival-to the domain of the individual.

The extreme case of AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome),which is transmitted sexually (among other ways), reintroducedmoral concerns at a time when morality was almost dropped fromerotic language and expelled from the human erotic experience.The frenzy of sexual freedom and the confusion resulting from thespread of AIDS present contradictory images of a much broaderdevelopment that affects human erotic behavior, and probablymuch more than that. Nobody, no doomsayer on record, whethercoming from a literate perspective or already integrated in thepragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy, predicted the newvulnerability which AIDS makes so painfully evident, inside andoutside the hom*osexual segment of the population. The integratedglobal nature of human life brought Africa, with its largeAIDS-infected population, close to countries that reached adifferent (not to use the word higher) level of civilization.AIDS impacted on the sense of invulnerability, assumed byindividuals in industrialized countries as almost a right. Thisinvulnerability is now drastically tested, despite the enormouseffort to address AIDS. The disease suddenly put globality in anew light. Statistics connect the sense of danger experienced inHollywood by HIV-infected movie stars, fashion designers, anddancers to the desperation of the disenfranchised in the firstworld-drug addicts, the urban poor, and prostitutes-and to thedisenfranchised and working poor of the Third World.

Far from being a new phenomenon, the hom*osexual and lesbianpreference, or lifestyle as it is euphemistically called,reaches a status of controversial acceptance in the civilizationof illiteracy. The paradox is that while the choice ofhom*osexuality over heterosexuality is facilitated by thepragmatic context of the civilization of illiteracy, theactivism of hom*osexuality solicits recognition within thestructures characteristic of literacy. It is very ironic thatgay activism, stimulated by the many consequences of the AIDSepidemic, attempts to reverse time, fighting for equal access toexactly those means in which the values and prejudices thatcondemn hom*osexuality are embedded. It looks like hom*osexualswant to rewrite the book or books in which they are damned,instead of freeing themselves from them. hom*osexuals want theirvoice to be heard in church and politics. They want their causepresent in ethical writings, and their rights encoded in newlaws and rules. They want to enlighten others by making theirexperience known as art, literature, and social discourse. Thegenetic condition of the hom*osexual choice needs to beconsidered together with the variety of contexts pertaining tothe diversity of the civilization of illiteracy that make itsunfolding possible.

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

Orality and sexuality were characterized by immediateness, and areduced sense of space and time. Sex equaled instinct. Withwriting, and thus the possibility of what later would becomeliteracy, a new set of underlying elements was acknowledged.Sexuality was subjected to the experience of accepted rules-thedo's and don'ts appropriate to expectations of efficiency, andtheir resulting values, corresponding to the scale of humankindand the natural condition. Reproduction still dominatedsexuality, while rules of optimal human interaction, encoded inreligion or social expectations, started to permeate eroticbehavior. To a great extent, language in its literate formexpresses the awareness of the various erotic dimensions as theywere socially acknowledged at any given time. Literacy enrolledsexuality in the quest for higher productivity and sustainedconsumption characteristic of the pragmatics associated with theIndustrial Revolution. Once conditions making literacy necessaryare overruled by new conditions, sexuality undergoescorresponding changes. Basically, sexuality seems to return toimmediateness, as it integrates many mediating elements.Sexuality unfolds in an unrestricted set of varieties, escapingsome of its natural determination. In keeping with the shorterand shorter cycles of human activity, sexuality turns into anexperience of transitory encounters. Since it is a form of humanexpression, it ascertains its condition as yet another signsystem, or language, among the many participating in thepractical experiences of our new pragmatic context. It nowbridges dramatically between life and death, in a world where thecurrency of both life and death is, for all practical purposes,devaluated.

Sex and creativity

Experts from fields as different as brain research, cognitivescience, and physiology agree that a distinct similarity betweenthe practical experience of self- constitution in sexual acts andin creative efforts of art, scientific discovery, and politicalperformance can be established. It seems that they all involve aprogression, reach a peak, experienced as enormous pleasure andrelief, and are followed by a certain feeling of emptiness. Likeany creative experience, the erotic experience is one ofexpression. To express means to constitute oneself authentically,and to project hope that the experience can impact others. Fromthis 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 theerotic includes the participation of the language of sexualrelationships, without being limited to it.

Having reached this understanding, we can apply it to theobservation that hom*o Eroticus is a subject who continuouslynegates 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- timeinteractive erotic multimedia captures even more attention. Inparallel, humans try to be authentic, unique, and free in theirintimate sphere. They scan through image- dominated books, somemore than vulgar, subscribe to magazines, face their ownsexuality on videotapes, register for sex initiation seminars, ortake advantage of group sex encounters. Millions land onp*rnographic Websites or create their own sex messages in theinterconnected world. They do all this in an attempt to freethemselves from natural necessity and from the conformist frameof literate Eros, including the many complexes explainingpainful real or imaginary failures.

Living in an environment in which science and technologyeffectively support human experiences of overcoming theconstraints of space, time, and material existence, humans freedsexuality from the influence of natural cycles. These, as weknow, can even be altered as pragmatic conditions might requirefor sportswomen and ballerinas. New totems and taboos populatethis environment in which Eros, as a reminder of distant phasesof anthropological evolution, continues to be present. Like anyother creative act, the sexual act involves imagination, and theurge to explore the unknown. It is irrepeatable, yet anotherinstance of discovering one's identity in the uniqueness of theexperience.

Although continuously programmed through endlessly refined means,humans maintain a nostalgia for the authentic, but accept, moreoften unconsciously than not, a mediocre syntax of the sexualimpressed upon them from the world of celebrity and success.This syntax is a product of erotic experts, writers, andimagemakers. It is a contentless semantics-the meaning oferotic encounters fades in the meaning of the circ*mstance-andan absurd pragmatics-sexuality as yet another form ofcompetition, deliriously celebrated by mass media.

While artificial insemination was a scientific breakthrough, itis also symptomatic of the process analyzed here, in particularof the changes in the underlying structure leading to thecivilization of illiteracy. Artificial insemination is part ofthis background; so is the entire genetic research that resultedin our ability to design not only new plants and animals withexpected characteristics, but also human beings. Specializationreached a point where the market can satisfy a new type ofconsumption, in this case represented by artificialinsemination, under acceptable economic conditions. Whether apill, or aesthetic insemination, will ever make those who desireto be artists become creative is still to be seen. (The sameholds true for science, politics, and any other creativecareer.) But we have already seen the dissemination of tools(mainly computer- based) that give many the illusion of becomingabruptly talented, as some women discover that they are abruptlyfecund because they found the right pill, or the rightgynecologist, to make the impossible happen.

As part of contemporary society's generalized illiteracy, eroticilliteracy is eloquently illustrated by the pervasiveness of sexin art. The transition from p*rnography to artistic p*rnographycorresponds to the search of those human obsessions thatlegitimize art's appropriation of territories considered taboo.As some see it, once freed from the constraints implicit in thepragmatic framework relying on literacy, art and sexualityintensified their reciprocal influence. Aesthetic concernschanged from elaboration and method to improvisation and process.The expectation of education or therapeutics gave way totriggering excitement, more obliquely sexual excitement.Striptease has moved from the back alleys of bigoted enjoymentinto movie theaters, museums, prime time television, theInternet. And so has the language of arousal, the voice ofpleasure, the groan of post-coital exhaustion, or disappointmentfrom telep*rn services to the pay-per-session Websites, wherecredit card numbers are submitted without fear of their beingused beyond payment for the service. In certain countries stillunder a literate regimen, the problem of p*rnography has beensolved by administrative prohibitions; in others, a solutionarises from blind market logic.

The market acknowledges the various aspects of sexuality in thecivilization of illiteracy through products and services gearedtowards all those involved. Many market semioses work in thisdirection-from the p*rnographic sites on the Internet to the redlight districts where risk can be generously rewarded. Sometimesthe market's attention leads to unexpected changes in what ismarketed, and how previous acceptable codes of sexual behaviorare revised and new codes publicly sanctioned. The many forms ofadvertisem*nt catering to hom*osexuals, sexploitation, genderedsexuality, group experiences, while never using one qualifier oranother, are quite explicit in identifying their public and thepatterns of behavior characteristic for this public. Means usedfor this purpose correspond to those of the civilization ofilliteracy. There is, probably, no other medium of more precisenarrow casting of sexual wares, from legitimate to scandalouslybase, than that of the networked world.

In the framework of literacy, the erotic (as all other creativecontributions) was idealized in many respects. Languageprojected the erotic experience as one that transcendedsexuality, leading to stable and selective male-femalerelationships within the boundaries of the familycharacteristic of industrial society. In time, various valuerepresentations, symptomatic of a peculiar understanding of thedifferences between man and woman, and stored in the language ofcustoms and rituals, took over the substance of the erotic andmade form predominant. Literacy and the ceremonies celebratingthe erotic-especially marriage and wedding anniversaries-areconnected far beyond what most would accept on first reflection.The fact that the civilization of illiteracy took over theseceremonies, and created a service sector able to provide asubstitute for an instance that used to signify commitment onlyproves how ubiquitous the expectation of high efficiency is. Thevows that made marriage a social event, sanctioning the implicitsexual component of the contract, and sometimes celebratingmore prejudice than tolerance, are expectations expressed inliterate language and submitted for public validation. Whethernewlyweds knew what they signed-or did not know how to sign-doesnot change the fact that the institution was acknowledged inthe integrating reality of language.

Equal access to erotic mediocrity

Once the hom*ogeneous image of society breaks, and sexuality morethan previously turns into another market commodity(prostitution, in its hetero- and hom*osexual forms), once moralsand direct commitments are substituted by rules of efficiencyand population control, the language of the erotic is emptied. Itis useless to accuse people of lower moral standards withoutunderstanding that, under new conditions of human experience,these standards simply embody ways of achieving the efficiencythat this civilization of illiteracy strives for. To own yourpartner, as the marriage certificate is interpreted by some, andto buy pleasure or perversion as one buys food or clothing, aretwo different contexts for the self-constitution of theindividual. It is much cheaper-and I cringe to state this sobluntly-to buy sexual pleasure, regardless how limited andvulgar it can be, than to commit oneself to a life of reciprocalresponsibility, and unavoidable moments of inequity. The economicequation is so obvious that facing it, one ends up discouraged.But this equation is part of the broader equation of highexpectations defining the illiterate practical experience ofself- constitution in a world of a very large scale. In thisequation, access to p*rnographic sites on the Internet canindeed appear to some as an issue of freedom of speech orfreedom of choice.

Even those living outside the platinum and diamond belt of wealthand prosperity partake in the illiterate expression of sexualityas this created global markets of prostitution, p*rnography, andvulgarity, 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, tostimulate it. Crime and sex drive the market (the art marketincluded) more than anything else. All age groups are addressedon their own biological and cultural terms; all backgrounds,including ethnic and religious, are involved in the fabric ofsex messages. One million children are forced yearly into thesex market, the majority of them from poor countries. People whodo not know how to read or write, and who probably never will,live under the seduction of the Calvin Klein label and willimitate the lascivious moves of the models through which theylearn about them. Enormous numbers of people who might not haveappropriate shelter, or enough food, buy Madonna videos andindulge in the fantasy that sexual freedom embodies in theirparticular illiterate expression.

Today, humans no longer share a literate notion of the sexual,but display a multitude of attitudes and involve themselves in avariety of experiences, which include the expectation of acommon denominator, such as the family used to be. Humans tamedtheir own nature and discovered, at the peak of what seemed tobecome a collective sense of invulnerability, that there arestill points of individual vulnerability. Some are revivinghopes of chastity and clean marriages, of generalizedheterosexuality-in short, of a return to the safe shores of anidealized erotic experience of the past. Sexuality, however,always had its bright and dark sides. Suffice it to recall theexplicit images in the ruins of Pompeii, or those in Indian andJapanese art. Sometimes, not even our most aggressive sexmagazines, p*rno shops, Hollywood crap, and Internet sitesequal their boldness. But people have managed to hide the darkside, or at least what could be construed as such, and topropagate, through literacy, the sublime erotic poem, the cleanerotic novel, the romance, the love songs and dances, andeverything else testifying to the sublime in love. What is new inthe context of the civilization of illiteracy is that one sideno longer excludes the other. To be is to be different, even ifthe biological equation of only two sexes seems so limiting.

Becoming more indirect and transitory, human relations affectsexuality and the ability to cope with what is defined asdeviant erotic behavior in respect to tradition. AIDS will notturn back events that made the current pragmatic contextnecessary. Rather, it will add to the demystifying of love andsex, and thus effectively bridge between genetic research andthe self-perpetuation drive of the species, rationalized informulas meeting higher levels of efficiency, resources, andhuman reproduction. Such formulas, more sophisticated than theprogressions Malthus used, are already tested by variousorganizations concerned with strategies for avoiding humanself-destruction by overpopulation. A condom is cheaper thangiving birth; all the pills women swallow over a lifetime arefar less costly than taking care of one child. It should notsurprise that Japan, committed to all the values of literacy andthe sexuality attached to them, is reluctant to adopt the pill.The country has a very low birth rate, so low that its leadersare justified in fearing that soon Japan will not have enoughpeople to fuel the economy through production and consumption.Still, Japan sees a relation between the pill and the state ofmorality as part of the cultural hom*ogeneous fabric on which itrelies. Nobody really doubts that the globality of humanexperience, to which Japan contributed through its productivegenius probably more than any country, will catch up with it.Sexually, the literate Japanese are no less daring than theilliterate Americans.

To continuously tend towards having more at the cheapest price-inmany ways an expression of rape of other people's work andresources-means to exhaust not only the object, but also thesubject. Rape, one of the most heinous crimes people commit,generalized in political and economic rape, projects sexualityand its powerful action even outside the biological realm ofhuman life. To want all (especially all at once) means to wantnothing in particular. At the end of the total sexual experiencelies nothing but disappointment for some; for others, the nextexperience. Profoundly subjective, deeply individual, unique andirrepeatable, human sexuality has meaning only to the extentthat it remains an integrating factor, relating individualdestiny to that of the species. The similarity between thecreative and sexual acts might explain why changes similar tothose occurring in erotic experience can be identified in theartistic, scientific, or political practice of the civilizationof illiteracy. Unless we understand the many implications ofsuch changes, we would only leap into a vortex of wildconjecture. Family is the part of the experience of humanself-constitution in which such implications are most likely tohave a profound effect.

Family: Discovering the Primitive Future

A paradox has developed: hom*osexuals want to establish familiesand to have them acknowledged by society. Adults who havechildren choose to avoid the family contract. Well over 30% ofthe children born in the USA are born out of wedlock. In thepragmatic equation of human self-constitution, these facts beardeeper signification.

Commenting before a television camera after a celebrity divorcetrial, an onlooker remarked that there is more communication inpreparing a pre-nuptial agreement than during a marriage. Asexaggerated and imprecise (communication between whom-the coupleor their representatives?) as this remark probably is, itnevertheless captures some traits of family life in our age.Indeed, families are constituted on the basis of economicagreements, mediated by lawyers and financial consultants. Therisk of family breakdown is carefully integrated in thecalculations establishing the viability of the marriage.Children are part of the calculation-minus the long-lastingemotional effects-as are the odds for illness, disability, andliabilities, such as living parents and siblings who might needassistance, or obligations due to previous marriages. The curvesregistering amount of time the recently married spend togetherreveals that once the agreement is signed, dialogue shrinks toless than eight hours a week, which is well below the time spentwatching television-almost seven hours a day-or devoted tophysical 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 affectsother aspects of family life besides dialogue. When childrenarrive, the time parents spend with them decreases progressivelyfrom the days following birth through the critical years of highschool. It is reported that on the average, youngsters in the USAget their parents' attention for less than four hours a week. Insome European countries, this time can reach eight to ten hours.On the Asian sub-continent, many children lose contact withtheir parents before the age of six. Statistics show that over aquarter of the American student population planning to enroll incollege never discuss their high school programs, or necessarypreparation courses, with their fathers. Close to half thisamount never discuss their plans with their mothers (single ornot). The same holds true for students in Italy, France, andBelgium.

Divorce percentages, abortion rates, number of partners overone's lifetime, and hours spent with the family in meaningfulexchange of ideas or in common tasks express a condition of thefamily that reflects the dynamics of today's human practicalexperiences. Over 16 million children under the age of eighteenyears live with one parent (mainly the mother). Economics(income level, joblessness, opportunity) plays a critical rolein the life of the young and of their progenitors.

All the changes leading to the civilization of illiteracy affectthe experience of family life, and result in radical changes ofthe family model itself. Faster rhythms of experiences leadingto casual relationships and to forming a family are on record.Shorter cycles during which the experience is exhausted result inincreasingly unstable relations and families. Permanence is nolonger the expectation in marriage. Throughout society,clear-cut distinctions between morally right and wrong are beingreplaced by situation ethics. Increased mediation, throughcounselors, lawyers, doctors, and financial planners, explainsthe new efficiency of the family as short-lived interaction andcooperation. The factors mentioned characterize the new pragmaticframework of human existence in which a new kind ofinterpersonal commitment is made and a new type of family isestablished, not unlike the short-lived corporations that areexhausted as soon as their product's potential has been reached.

In this pragmatic framework, family-like interactions harkingback to the civilization of literacy, with its hierarchy andcentral authority and the promise of stability and security, areconsidered the only alternative to the new situation of thefamily. The people who consciously seek this alternativediscover that the family is bound by relatively looseconnections and that reciprocally advantageous distributed tasksreplace family unity. Mediated and segmented experiences andvague commitments, which evolve into a frame of vague morality,dominate family life today. Marriages of expediency, undertakento solve some difficulty-such as resident status in somecountries, health insurance, care for one's old age, betterchances at a career- illustrate the tendency.

Once the conditions for the perpetuation and dissemination ofvalues associated with literacy are no longer granted, at thecurrent globally integrated scale of humankind, family lifechanges fundamentally. Even the notion of family is questioned.Family unity, reflected in the coherent pragmatic frameworkafforded by literacy, is replaced by individual autonomy andcompetition. An array of options greater than the one feasibleat the scale characteristic of agricultural or industrialeconomy, presents itself to adults and children in theirpractical experiences of self-constitution. Nobody escapes thetemptation of trying and testing in the multiple of choices thatare characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy.

There are many facets to what is called family. The conceptdisplays ample variety in its perceived or construed meaning.Sexual instincts manifested as attraction, associated with theawareness of the consequence of reproduction, might lead the listin defining what it took to establish a family. At the same levelof importance is the need to establish a viable unity ofeconomic, cultural, and psychological significance, a framework,sanctioned by religious and political entities, for carrying outobligations significant to the community. These, and a number ofadditional elements, such as morality based on the pragmatics ofhealth, inter-generational exchange of information and aid,social functions ensuring survival and continuity throughcooperation and understanding with other families, are tightlyconnected. The nature of this interconnectedness is probably amuch better identifier of what, under given socio- historicalcirc*mstances, is considered and experienced as family.

Togetherness

Dictionaries point to the broader meaning of an extended notionof family-all living in a household-with the root of the wordextending to all the servants, as well as to blood relations anddescendants of the same progenitor. What is probably missingfrom such a definition is the understanding ofinterconnectedness, more specifically, awareness of the roleplayed by agents of connection, among which language, ingeneral, and literacy, in particular, become relevant.

Much has been written concerning the change from animal-likesexual drive to the formation of family; much, too, about themany specific forms of practical experiences through whichfamilies were established and maintained. The history of thehuman family captures the nature of the relations between man andwoman, parents and offspring, near and distant kin, and betweengenerations. Natural aspects of production and reproduction, andcultural, social, political, and ethnic elements are alsoexpressed through the family. Its reality extends even to thearea of interdependencies between the language of individualsconstituting families as viable survival units, and the languageof the community within which family is acknowledged. Whetherfemale- or male-dominated, as the pragmatic context afforded,the family ascertains a sense of permanency against thebackground of need and flux. It is another constitutive practicalexperience involving the projection of individual biologicalcharacteristics in the context of life and work, an experiencethat progressively extended beyond biology into its own domainof expectations and values, and finally into its owneffectiveness.

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 (theeconomy of family), emotions, sexual attraction (which includespsychological aspects), and ways of interacting with the extendedfamily and with other families (social aspects). But beyondthis, little else can be stated without causing controversy.Within each family, there is a maternal and a paternal line. Insome family types, mother and father together feed the children,introduce them to survival tactics, and train their familyinstincts. In other cases, only one parent assumes thesefunctions. The implicit linearity of family relations unfoldsthrough new family associations.

Anthropological research reports in detail how families areestablished. The pragmatic aspect is decisive. In Melanesia, thegoal is to acquire brothers-in-law who will join the woman'sfamily in hunting, farming, and other activities. Margaret Meaddescribed the rule of not marrying those one fights. Expressed inlanguage, this rule has a normative quality. Nevertheless, insome tribes in Kenya, enemies marry to ensure that they becomefriends. The language expressing this strategy is moresuggestive than imperative. Research also documents variationsfrom the nuclear model. The Nayar, a population in India,consecrates a family in which children belong to the maternalline; fathers visit. The woman can have as many lovers as shedesires. The semiosis of naming children reflects thiscondition. Rules established over time in some countries areindicative of peculiar pragmatic requirements: polygamy insocieties where marriage is the only form of protection andfulfillment for women; polyandry in societies with a high man towoman ratio; uxorilocation (the new couple resides in thewife's home territory), and virilocation (the new couple residesin the husband's home territory).

The scale at which family self-constitution takes place affectsits effectiveness. When this scale reaches a certain thresholdor critical size, structural changes take place. The family, inits various embodiments, and within each specific pragmaticframework, reflected these major changes in the human scale ofmankind at many levels. From the first images documentingfamilies over 25,000 years ago, in the Paleolithic Age, to thepaintings at Sefar (Tassili des Ajjer, 4th century BCE), and tomany other subsequent forms of testimony, we have indicators ofchange in family size, the nature of family hierarchy,inheritance mechanisms, restrictions and prohibitions (incestforemost), and above all, change in the family condition when thepragmatic context changes. The testimony extends to cemeteries:It matters who is buried with whom or close to whom; to theevolution of words: What Beneviste called glottochronology; tocontracts. Marriage contracts, such as the cuneiform tablet ofKish, dated 1820 BCE, or contracts documenting the sale of land,in which the family tree of the sellers is reproduced astestimony that the entire family accepts the transaction, shedlight on the evolution of family. When Aristotle stated "Eachcity is made up of families," he acknowledged that a stage ofstabilized family relations had been reached, well adapted tothe stabilizing pragmatic framework facilitated by the newpractical experience of writing.

By Aristotle's time, togetherness was designated through a name.The expectation at this scale of human relations was: without aname there is no social existence. Characteristics of signprocesses pertinent to self-constitution as members of variousfamily types become characteristic of the family. That is, thestructure of family-based semiotic processes and the structureof the family are similar. Rudimentary signs, incipientlanguage, oral communication, notation, and writing are stagesin the semiosis of means of expression and communication. Thesign processes of family develop in tandem.

The quest for permanency

At the time literacy became possible and necessary, it embodiedan idiom of effective relations, both synchronically-at a giveninstance of those relations-and diachronically-over time, suchas from one generation to another, each attached to the same useof language in writing, reading, and speaking. It is preciselythe need to achieve efficiency, in every human endeavor, thatassigns to the family the function of co-guarantor of tradition.Even before the possibility of literacy, language carried thedo's and don'ts transmitting rules, based on the practicalexperience, that ensured survival through cooperation and newways to satisfy direct needs and respond to expectations-rulesthat affected the efficiency of each practical experience.

The family appropriated these requirements, shaping them into acoherent framework for efficient togetherness. Directness,sequentiality, linearity, centralism, cooperation, anddeterminism marked the family experience as it marked otherexperiences of human self-constitution. Family members relieddirectly on each other. As one male assumed the role ofprovider, and the female, or females, of caretaker, a certainstructure of dependence was put in place, resulting in hierarchyand sub- hierarchies. Family activity involved repetitive andsequential phases related to survival: reproductive cycles ofanimals; the progression of seasons and its relation toagriculture (rainy and dry, cold and hot, long days and shortdays). The pragmatics of survival seemed determined; there waslittle choice in method and timing. The family took shape in aworld of cause-and-effect, which also determined religiouspractices.

The source of each rule for successful family life was directpractical experience; the test of validity was theeffectiveness appropriate to the specific scale of humanity.The do's changed over time, as experience confirmed theirefficiency. They became a body of accepted knowledge from whichmoral ideals are extracted, laws derived, and political actioninspired within the context of literacy. In the industrialequation, output (products, end results, increase or profit)should equal or exceed input (raw materials, energy, humaneffort). The don'ts, adopted by religion, law, and rudimentarymedical praxis, were engraved in language even more deeply. Theywere encoded together with punishments that reflected theurgency behind preserving the integrity of the family- basedpragmatic framework, in the experience of the agricultural and,later on, the industrial model. The association between act andresult was continuously scrutinized in a world of action andreaction. In a world of experience mediated through literacy,rules were followed for their own sake; or rather, for the sakeof the permanence that literacy embodied.

That at some time sexual relations outside marriage could be thecause of so many prohibitions and dire punishment, mainly forwomen, does not bear as much significance on the state of moralsas upon the pragmatic implications of the act of infidelity andwantonness. These implications refer to lineage, continuity, andinheritance, psychological effects on other family members,health, and status of offspring born out of wedlock. Rulesregarding family integrity were encoded in the language ofcustom, ritual, and myth. Later on they were encoded in thelanguage of religion, philosophy, ethics, law, science,ideology, and political discourse. Eventually, they wererecorded in the rules of the market. Filtered over time through avariety of experiences resulting in success or failure, they areacknowledged in culture, and adopted in the language ofeducation, and probably most directly in the language of markettransactions. To give birth meant to continue the sequence andenhance the chances of survival; to rear children to adulthoodmeant to afford new levels of efficiency. More people could bemore effective in ensuring survival in a pragmatic framework ofdirect action and immediacy. Beyond a certain scale, it becameeffectively impossible to coordinate the complex of familiesthat went into the entire family. City life, even in earlycities, was not propitious to extended families. During thisperiod, the strategy of labor division took overundifferentiated, direct execution of tasks.

Over time, as the scale of human experience changed, communityexpectations were reflected in what used to be the domain of theindividual or that of families. The term over time needs someclarification. The first phases to which we refer are of veryslow change. From the initial indications of family-likerelations up to the establishment of language families, the timespan is greater than 15,000 years. From nuclei practicingagriculture to the first notation and writing, the time is in therange of 4,000 to 5,000 years. From then on, the cycles becamemore compressed: less than 2,000 years to the time religionswere established, another 1,000 years to settlement in cities.Each moment marks either progressive changes in the pragmaticframework or radical change, when the scale of human life andwork required different means to meet efficiency expectations.Language acquisition, settlement of populations, development ofwriting, the emergence of philosophy, science and technology, theIndustrial Revolution, and the civilization of illiteracy arethe six changes in the scale of humankind, each with itscorresponding pragmatic framework. Many agents of influencecontribute to the change from one pragmatic framework to another:climactic conditions, natural selection, the environment,religions, communal rules, distribution of resources, and theexperience of the market. Regardless of the difference inlanguages, language use is probably the common experiencethrough which natural changes are acknowledged and socialdifferentiation effected.

Exactly what made literacy necessary-the need to achieve levelsof efficiency corresponding to the human scale that led toindustrial society-made the corresponding type of familynecessary. Families reproduced the needed working force andtransmitted the literacy required to attain the efficiency ofqualified work. Such work was accomplished in a settingfundamentally different from that of immediate, direct,practical experiences with nature (farming, animal husbandry), orsmall-scale craftsmanship. Literacy was fostered by the familyas a means of coordination and as a universal language of humantransactions. This is how family fulfills the function of co-guarantor of education. Conversely, among the forms through whichthe future contract of literacy was acknowledged, family is one.The pragmatic need for permanency reflected in the expectationof the stable family has many consequences inside and outsidefamily life. These can be witnessed in the spirit and letter ofcontractual obligations people enter under the coordinatingpower of the literate commitment. Education, law, politics,religion, and art are impregnated with this spirit. As theultimate family-the hom*ogeneous family of families-the nationasserts its permanency as a reflection of the permanency of itsconstituent atoms. When deterioration occurs in the conditionsthat make literacy possible and necessary, many of thepermanencies associated with literacy, including theinterpersonal relations adapted to it, or the hom*ogeneity ofnations, fail. As we entertain the prospect that nations, asdefinable political entities, might disappear, we automaticallywonder whether the family, as a definable social entity, willsurvive-and if yes, in what form.

What breaks down when family fails?

The downfall of nations and empires has been attributed to thebreakdown of the family. The weakening of family has been citedas a cause of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.Anti-abortionists and other traditionalists in the United Statesblame the breakdown in traditional family values for many of thesocial ills of our day. Now that the royal children in GreatBritain are divorced, people wonder how long the monarchy willlast.

One of the symptoms of the civilization of illiteracy is theperceived breakdown of family. Simultaneously, otherinstitutions, such as schools, the church, the military,embodying permanency and stability, are undergoing drasticreassessment. In a broad sense, a transition from one way oflife to another has been taking place. But things are a littlemore confusing since what used to be is not always actuallyreplaced by something else, but rescaled, turned into apossibility among many, in a dynamics of ever-expandingdiversity and wider choices. Many have argued that the breakdownof the traditional family was inevitable. They bring upcultural, ideological, and socio- economic arguments-from theliberation of women and children to the exhausted model of thepatriarchal structure. All these arguments are probably partiallyright. After previous economies of scarcity and limited means ofproduction, human experience at the global scale has broughtabout a wealth of choices and means of affluence that questionthe very premise of the family contract.

In a context of rapid change from the practical experience ofauthority to the pragmatics of endless choice, subsumed underthe heading of freedom, the permanency of the family structurecomes under the methodical doubt of our new patterns of praxis.The tension between choice and authority was experienced infamily life in the specific context of human relations based onhierarchy and centralism. New questions have a bearing onsexuality, parent-child relations, interactions among families,and the whole social fabric. Likewise, the transition of what wasprojected as self-control-with elements of self-denial, for thesake of family, a form of internalized authority-to thediscovery of new frontiers, and the alternative pursuit of self-indulgence, follows the same path. These new frontiers andalternatives make values appear relative and undermine thespirit of sharing implicit in the traditional experience offamily. Sharing is replaced by strategies of coordination andwealth preservation, all involving many mediating elements, suchas political power, the legal system, taxation, charity.

It is argued, probably with good reason, that the high rate ofdivorce-the socially sanctioned breakdown of a family, butprobably only relatively indicative of the breakdown-is notmeaningful unless put in a broader context: how many people stillmarry, how many remarry, how much longer people live. The highrate of divorce at the end of World War II is symptomatic ofevents above and beyond the structural characteristics of familyconstitution, re-constitution, or breakdown. The rate of divorcein the years following the war, especially in the last 10-15years, is nevertheless connected to the underlying structure ofa pragmatic framework within which permanency, whether that oflanguage, 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 quitefast-ends in divorce. This is, nevertheless, only one aspect ofbroader modifications making such a rate more of a qualifierthan an accident in human pairing.

The dynamics of reproduction-births per marriage, average numberof children per family, children living with one parent, infantmortality-is significant from the perspective of one of the mostimportant functions of family. In the pragmatic context oftoday's integrated world, the need to have many children in orderto maintain continuity and viability is different, even inBangladesh, Afghanistan, or Africa, than at any previous time.The species has practically freed itself from the direct pressureof natural selection. What is at work, even in areas of extremepoverty, is a perverted mechanism of interdependencies echoingwhat herders in East Africa expressed as: "He who has childrendoes not sleep in the bush." The family has ceased to be the solesource of welfare. Its functions are taken over by thecommunity, the state, even international organizations. The factthat in some parts of the world this structural change is notacknowledged, and very high birth rates are on record, shows thatthe result of ignoring the pragmatic exigencies of this new ageadds to the burden, not to the solution.

Another phenomenon difficult to assess is the single woman whodecides to give birth. If individual or social materialresources are available, moral and educational needs orexpectations still remain to be addressed. Individualism fosteredto the extreme partially explains the trend, but cannotsatisfactorily indicate the many aspects of this new phenomenoncharacteristic of the civilization of illiteracy. If one readsthe statistics, single parenthood appears like a sure winner inthe lottery of poverty and frustration. The problems of childrenwho will be growing up with a mother single by choice will bethe source of much sociological and psychoanalytical research inthe future. But existence is more than numbers in ledgers, orpsychological predicaments. Self-fulfillment, the instinct tonurture and to ensure continuity are all at work in such cases.

The hom*osexual family

No group has done more in the way of forcing us to rethink thedefinition and role of family as hom*osexuals have. Within thecivilization of illiteracy, hom*osexuals assert their identity inthe public eye. Gay and lesbian groups fight for theratification of the hom*osexual family, which could not even beconceived of within the pragmatics associated with literacy.Their fight corresponds to a practical experience that is notmotivated by the self-perpetuation drive of the species, but byother forces. These are economic, social, and political-theright to enjoy the same benefits as members of heterosexualfamilies. Interestingly enough, social principles adopted in theage when pragmatics required that society support childbirth,family nurturing, and education are extended today, undertotally different circ*mstances, in ignorance of the necessitiesthat were reflected in these principles. A tax deduction was anexpression of social co- participation, since society needed morepeople, better educated youth, a stable framework of familylife. The economy and the military could not succeed without thefresh flesh of new generations.

Gays and lesbians challenge the traditional notion of family in acontext that no longer requires hierarchy and that redefinesroles that have become stereotypes and undemocratic. Theypropose a model on a continuum in which each partner can beprovider and assume household duties to any degree. There are noclear-cut roles, no clear-cut hierarchy, and no long-termcommitments. Children are not the consequence of sexualrelations but of desire and choice. This choice has two aspectsof special significance for the pragmatics of our age. Oneconcerns the human desire to form an alliance in the form offamily, which seems almost instinctual. It may be difficult torecognize a natural inclination in a context (hom*osexuality) thatnegates propagation of the species. It is this threat tosurvival that caused so many taboos to be placed onhom*osexuality in the first place. These taboos took on otherdimensions when encoded in a literacy that ignored thepragmatics.

The second aspect has to do with the extent to which hom*osexuals'desire for a family constitutes its own validity in thepragmatic framework of our time. To what extent does the desireto have a family reveal characteristics of humanself-constitution in the current context? In a world in whichthere is a high rate of births out of wedlock, a world in whichthe traditional family is no guarantee of relationships free ofabuse and exploitation, a world with great numbers of childrenin orphanages or in foster care, any desire to place children ina loving family context is worthy of attention.

What constitutes a family in an age whose pragmatics is notdefined by the values perpetuated in and through literacy? Thenew definition might go along these lines: main provider (thefather role); second provider (the mother role), who is alsomanager of the household. The two roles are not polarized; eachprovider participates in household work and in salaried workoutside the home, as circ*mstances require. A child is adependent under the age of 18 years (or 22 years if in college),for whom the providers are legally responsible. A grandparent isqualified through age and willingness to assume the role.Aunt/uncle is someone with fraternal ties to the providers. Thedefinitions can go on. In considering these literate definitions,we can see that they apply to the situation of the currenttraditional family as well, in which father and mother bothwork, in which a child may live with and be cared for by aparent's second or third spouse, in which distance from or lackof blood relations calls for ad hoc relatives. The most vitalimplications concern our culture as it has been passed down overthe centuries through literate expression, laden with valuesthat literacy perpetuates and endows with an aura, in defianceof the new pragmatics and the new scale in which humans operate.

The hom*osexual family and its occasional focus on adoptingchildren reflects the fact that we live in a world of manyoptions, and consequently of very relative values. Their desirefor a family, under circ*mstances that are far from beingconducive to family life, is as valid as that of an unmarriedwoman who wants to give birth and rear a child (the one-parenthousehold). It is as valid as the desire of infertile couples whouse every means the market offers to have a child, throughcostly medical intervention or by hiring surrogates. In thecivilization of illiteracy, each person forms his or her owndefinition of family, just as people form their own definitionsof everything else. The only test of validity is, ultimately,effectiveness. In the long run, the biological future of thespecies will also be affected, one way or another, as part of theeffectiveness equation.

To want a child

The new pragmatics ultimately affects the motives behind forminga family in the civilization of illiteracy. Marriage, if at allconsidered, has become a short-term contract. Its brevitycontradicts marriage's reason for being: continuity and securitythrough offspring and adaptation to life cycles. The attitudeswith which partners enter the family contract result in adynamic of personal relations outside of that sanctioned bysociety. Vows are exchanged more as a matter of performance thanof bonding. Natural instincts are systematically overriddenthrough mediating mechanisms for providing nourishment,acquiring health care, and settling conflicts. Child rearing isthe result of pragmatic considerations: What does a couple, orsingle parent, give up in having a child? Can a mother continueworking outside the home?

In order to correctly qualify answers to these questions, wewould need to acknowledge that many characteristics of theindividuals constituting a family, or seeking alternatives toit, are reflected in the family experience, or in experiencesthat are parallel to it. Economic status, race, religion,culture, and acculturation play an important role. Literacyassumed hom*ogeneity and projected expectations of uniformity.The new pragmatic framework evidences the potential ofheterogeneous experiences. Data indicating that the averagenumbers of divorces, single-parent households, number ofpartners, etc. vary drastically among groups of differentbiological, cultural, and economic backgrounds shows hownecessary it is to realistically account for differences amonghuman beings.

Let us take a look at some statistical data. But before doingthat, let us also commit ourselves to an unbiasedinterpretation, free of any racial prejudice. Almost 60% ofBlack children in the USA are living in a one-parent household.Of these children, 94% live with their mothers. It wasdocumented that 70% of the juveniles in long-term correctionalfacilities grew up without a father. To make any inference fromsuch data without proper consideration of the many factors atwork would only perpetuate literacy-based prejudices, and wouldnot lead to a better understanding of the new circ*mstances ofhuman self-constitution. Our need to understand the dynamics offamily and what can be done to effect a course of events that isbeneficial to all involved cannot be served unless we understandthe many characteristics of the practical experience ofself-constitution of the Black family, or of any non-standardWestern family.

Under the expectations of literacy, a prototypical family lifewas to be expected from all. As the expectation of hom*ogeneityis overridden by all the forces at work in the civilization ofilliteracy, we should not be surprised by, and even less inclinedto fasten blame on people who constitute themselves in wayscloser to their authenticity. Multiplication of choice is-let mestate again-part of the civilization of illiteracy. Modern,enlightened laws introduced in some African countries prohibitpolygamous families. With this prohibition in place, a newphenomenon has occurred: Husbands end up having extra-maritalaffairs and support neither their lovers nor their children,which they did under polygamy. Paradoxically, activists in theWomen's Liberation movement are seriously considering the returnto polygamy, as an alternative to the increasing number ofdeadbeat dads and the misery of abandoned wives and children.There is no necessary relation between the two examples, ratherthe 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 orpolygamous) as unfailingly unified and showing exemplary concernfor offspring. Children, as much as wives and husbands, wereabused and neglected. Concern over education was at timesquestionable. The projected ideal of authority and infallibilityresulted in the perpetuation of patterns of experiences fromwhich we are still fighting to free ourselves. Notwithstandingthese and other failures, we still have to acknowledge that ashift, from individual and family responsibility to a diffusesense of social responsibility, characterizes the processaffecting the status of children. The family in the civilizationof illiteracy embodies expectations pertinent to progressivelymediated practical experiences: from childbirth-an almostindustrial experience-to education; from entering the familyagreement, mediated by so many experts-lawyers, priests, taxconsultants, psychologists-to maintaining a sense of commonaltyamong family members; from embodying direct interaction and asense of immediacy to becoming instances of segmentation,change, and interaction, and instances of competition andoutright conflict. The institution of the family must alsocounteract sequentiality and linearity with a sense ofrelativity that allows for more choices, which the new humanscale makes possible. This new pragmatic framework also allowsfor higher expectations.

Like any other institution, the institution of marriage (and thebureaucracy it has generated) has its own inertia and drive tosurvive, even when the conditions of its necessity, at least inthe forms ascertained in the past, are no longer in place. Inshort, the breakdown of the family, even if equated with thefailure of the individuals constituting it-children included-isrelated to the new structural foundation of a pragmaticframework for which it is not suited as a universal model, or towhich it is only partially acceptable. This does not exclude thecontinuation of family. Rather, it means that alternative formsof cooperation and interaction substituting the family willcontinue to emerge. Just as literacy maintains a presence amongmany other literacies, the family is present among many forms ofreciprocal interdependence, some expanding beyond the man-womannucleus. To understand the dynamics of this change, a closerlook at how the new pragmatic framework of the civilization ofilliteracy affects experiences pertinent to family is necessaryhere.

The history of the family, independent of its various embodiments(matriarchal, patriarchal, polygamous, monogamous, restricted orextended, heterosexual or hom*osexual), is in many respects thehistory of the appropriation of the individual by society. Theoffspring of primitive humans belonged to nobody. If theysurvived to puberty, they continued life on their own, or asmembers of the group in which they were born, as nameless astheir parents. Children and parents were amoral and competed forthe same resources. The offspring of the humans constitutingtheir own identity, and their own universe parallel to that ofnature, belonged more and more to what emerged as the family,and by extension to the community (tribe, village, parish). Thechild was marked, named, nurtured, and educated, as limited asthis education might have been. It was given language and,through the experience of work, a sense of belonging. In allknown practical experiences-work, language, religion, market,politics-the succession of generations was specificallyacknowledged. Rules, some pertaining to the preservation ofbiological integrity, others to property and social life, wereestablished in order to accommodate relations betweengenerations.

Over centuries, family ownership of children decreased while thatof society increased. This is reflected in the various wayschurch, school, social institutions, and especially the marketclaim each new generation. In this process, mediation becomespart of family life: the priest, the teacher, the counselor, thelanguage of advertisem*nt, direct marketing, and much, much moreis insinuated between children and their parents. The processintensifies as expectancies of better life for less effort becomepredominant. Responsibilities, procreation included, aredistributed from the parents to the practical experiences ofgenetics. Test tube production of babies is an alternative tonatural procreation. More to come. As a matter of fact, bothprocreation and adoption are dominated by strong selectivemethods and design procedures. Genetic traits are identified andmatched in the genetic banks of adoptable children. Surrogatemothers are selected and contracted based on expectations ofbehavior and heredity. Sperm banks offer selections from high IQor high physical performance bulls. Other mediators specifyideal cows, surrogate mothers whose offspring are treated likeany other commodity-"satisfaction guaranteed." If the product issomehow unsatisfactory, the dissatisfied parents get rid of it.

Obviously, the language and literacy expected for the success ofthe biochemical reaction in the test tube is different from thatinvolved in the constitution of the family. It is also differentfrom the literacy involved in the change from instinctual sexualencounters to love, procreation, and child rearing. In each ofthe procedures mentioned, new languages-of genetics, forexample-introduce levels of mediation that finally affect theefficiency of procreation. As nightmarish as some of theseavenues might seem, they are in line with the entire developmenttowards the new pragmatics: segmentation-the task is dividedinto sub-tasks-networking-to identify the desired components andstrategies for synthesis-and task distribution. Children are notyet made on the Internet, but if the distinction between matterand information suggested by some geneticists is carriedthrough, it would not be impossible to conceive of procreationon networks.

A new individuality

The process of mediation expands well further. Family lifebecomes the subject of practical experiences involving familyplanning, health, psychology, socialized expectations ofeducation, the right to die. The private family owned theiroffspring and educated it to the level of its own education, orto the level it deemed advantageous, consistent with theprogress of literacy. To the extent that this family wasinvolved in other experiences, such as religion, sport, art, orthe military, children grew up partaking in them. Once oneaspect of the relation between environment, home, family, andwork changes-for example, living in the city reshapes the natureof the dependence on the environment, the house is one ofseveral possible, family members work at different jobs-thefamily is made more and more part of a bigger family: society. Inturn, this belonging dissolves into solitary individualism.Nothing any longer buffers the child from the competitivepressure that keeps the economic engine running. Industrialsociety required centers of population while it still relied onrelatively nuclear families that embodied its own hierarchy. Thehuman scale reflected in industrial society required thesocialization of family in order to generate an adequateworkforce, as well as the corresponding consumption. Withnetworking, children as much as adults are on their own, in aworld of interactions that breaks loose from any conceivableconstraints. There is no need to fantasize here, rather toacknowledge a new structural situation of consequences beyondour wildest imagination.

Literacy unified through its prescriptions and expectations. Itfacilitated the balance between the preserved naturalness andthe socialized aspect of family. It projected a sense ofpermanency and shielded the family from the universe of machinesthreatening to take over limited functions of the body: themechanical arm, the treadmill. As a human medium for practicalexperiences involving writing and reading, literacy seemed torepresent a means of resistance against the inanimate. It helpedpreserve human integrity and coherence in a world progressivelylosing its humanity due to all the factors that the need forincreased efficiency put in place (machines, foremost). Iteventually became obvious that procreation had to be kept withinlimits, that there is a social cost to each child and to eachmother giving birth. Moreover, family structural relationsneeded to be reconsidered for the expected levels of efficiencyto be maintained and increased, as expectations took overdesires. The new pragmatic framework is established as thisborderline between the possible and the necessary. Thecivilization of illiteracy is its expression.

At the family level, the civilization of illiteracy correspondsto increased segmentation, affecting the very core of familylife, and mediation. The family can no longer be viewed as awhole by the many mediating entities constituting the market.The market is with us from birth to death. It deals in everyaspect of life, and extends the pressure of competition in eachmoment of our existence. The market segments medical care. It ismost 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 membersconstitute their identity in different religious experiences,and some of them in none, as it is not uncommon that theireducational needs run the gamut from a modicum of instruction tonever-ending study. They live together, or find togetherness onthe network matrix-one running a business on some remotecontinent, the other pursuing solitary goals, and some adaptingto foreign cultures (less than to foreign languages).

The market has broken society into segments and the family intoparts on which it concentrates its message of consumption. Thereis 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 totoys and recreation. And so are their respective natural oradoptive parents, grandparents, and relatives. We can all decrythis as manipulation, but in fact it corresponds to the objectiveneed to increase commercial efficiency through narrow marketing.Accordingly, a new moral condition emerges, focused on theindividual, not on the family. Part of the broader pragmaticframework, this process stimulates the relative illiteracy of thepartners constituting the family. This illiteracy is reflectedin varied patterns of sexual behavior, in new birth controlstrategies, in a different reciprocal relation between men andwomen, or between individuals of the same sex, and in as-yetundefinable codes of family behavior. The condition of the childin the civilization of illiteracy corresponds to the samedynamics. Children are less and less cared for at home, oftenentrusted to specialized caretakers, and finally started ontheir 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 miseryof people obliged to remain together by forces they considerlegitimate (religion foremost). In the dynamics of thecivilization of illiteracy, forces kept under the control ofrules and norms established in the practical experience ofliteracy are unleashed. It would be difficult to speak aboutprogress where one sees the demise of family, the erosion ofprivate life, the increased number of one- parent households, ofearly and very early maternity, of incest, rape and increasedchild abuse, of obsession with contraceptives or ignorance oftheir use, and the threat of sexually transmitted diseases anddrugs. Still, before hurrying value judgments, one would bebetter advised to consider the entire picture and to assess whatmakes all these occurrences possible, indeed, what makes themnecessary.

It might well be true that what we perceive as the sources ofmorality and happiness-the family, children, love, religion,work, and the satisfaction associated with all of these-areexhausted. It might well be that fresh sources must be sought, orinvented, or at least not eliminated because they do not fit themold of previous choices. Even the thought that morality andhappiness are altogether unnecessary deserves to be considered.They are loaded with the expectation of permanency anduniversality rendered impossible in the new pragmatic frameworkof permissiveness, local values, instant gratification, change,and interconnectedness.

The nuclear family of the civilization of literacy has beenabsorbed in the illiterate dynamics of societal functioning. Itis coming out of the experience restructured. On the other hand,socially acceptable patterns of development are encouragedthrough the public education system, where the chief objectiveis the socialization of children, not the dissemination ofknowledge. Ethnic characteristics are progressively, althoughtimidly, acknowledged. The seemingly losing battle against drugsleads many parents and social researchers to wonder whetherlegalization would be more efficient than spending immenseamounts of money and energy to fight the underground market. Inthis world of mediation, science and technology make geneticengineering possible in the form of influencing the profile ofthe offspring, ways to avoid what does not fit the fashionable,ways to induce early in development (almost at the embryonicstage) preferences and cognitive characteristics.

Together with everything pertaining to the human beingself-constituted in the framework of the civilization ofilliteracy, the family goes public in the stock market of themany enterprises involved in the self-perpetuation and the wellbeing of the species. Its value is no longer a matter of thoseconstituting it, of its goals and means, but of the return onthe investment society makes in it. As a competitive unit withinthe pragmatic framework associated with literacy, the familyfreed itself from the constraints implicit in literacy thataffect its efficiency. It became a contract, one among thegrowing number, in whose expression literacy gives way to thealternative litigation language of the law, in respect to which,with the exception of lawyers, everyone else is illiterate.Favorable taxation supports children-euphemistically calleddeductions when they are really additions-but not beyond what issocially expected of them, at least in the USA: to become agentsof consumption and increased efficiency as soon as possible. Inthis sense, the tensions between generations are simplyrefocused-society is willing to make available social help inthe form of transitory family substitutes. The problem is notaddressed, only its symptoms. The languages of counseling andpsychiatry at work here are another instance of specializedliteracy. They substitute for family communication whileprojecting limited and limiting psychological explanations uponall those involved.

In an age that expects efficiency to lead to satisfaction, if nothappiness, the family relies on specialists when problems arise:psychiatrists, counselors, specialized schools. Sometimes thespecialists are imposed when society perceives a need tointervene, especially in cases of suspected child abuse. It isreflective of the pragmatics of our time that the elderlyreceive attention in the market of mediations andspecializations on a less obvious level. They are considered onlyto the extent that they are viable consumers. Once upon a time,and still in isolated cases, such as the Amish and Mennonites inthe USA, age was to be honored for its own sake, a value keptalive through literacy. While many elderly enjoy the benefits ofbetter healthcare and economic sufficiency, they effectivelydivorce themselves from the family in enjoying what the marketoffers them. Their participation in the family is a matter ofchoice more than necessity. The success of the Internet amongthe elderly, in need of communication and support groups, is avery telling phenomenon. Networks of reciprocal support, asnuclei of self-organization, emerge independent of any form ofsocial intervention. Their viability is based on this dynamics.

The struggle between the value of life in the civilization ofliteracy and that of illiteracy can be seen in hospitals andnursing homes where the aged are treated on machine-basedanalogies, abandoned or entrusted to specialists in the care ofthe dying. While aging and death cannot be eliminated, themarket provides ways to avoid them as long as we can afford to.

It used to be that the new generation continued the familywork-farming, carpentry, pottery, law, business, banking,publishing. This happened in a context of continuity andrelative permanence: the work or business remained relativelyunchanged. Literacy was appropriate for the transfer of know-how,as it was for the maintenance of family-based values andsuccessive assumption of responsibilities regarding the family,moreover the community. These pragmatic elements no longerexist the way they did.

Today, even within the same generation, the nature of businessevolves, and so does the nature of the values around whichfamily is established. In addition, ownership changes as well;businesses are more and more integrated in the market; theybecome public entities; their shares are traded with no regardto the object those shares represent. The consequence is what weperceive as lack of family continuity and bonding. The newnature of the family contract is such that its basis of affectionis eroded. Sequentiality of work is replaced by cycles ofparallel activity during which generations compete asadversaries. This is why the family contract is shifted more andmore to the market, depersonalized, indexed like one among manycommodities. This contract is no longer literacy-bound, butrooted in circ*mstances of distributed activities of intensecompetition and networking. Once demythified, family relationsare reassessed; continuity is severed. The market acknowledgesthe segmentation of family-no longer an economic entity in itsown right-and in turn accentuates it. The baby business, theinfant market, teenagers, and so on to the senior market are well focused on their respective segments as these embody not justage groups, but foremostly expectations and desires that can bemet at the level of each individual.

How advanced the past; how primitive the future

No matter how intense the desire to maintain a neutral discourseand to report facts without attaching teleological conclusionsto them, it turns out that the language of family, probably morethan the language of science, machines, or even art, religion,sports, and nourishment, involves our very existence. Whereshould somebody place himself in order to maintain some degreeof objectivity? Probably at the level of the structuralanalysis. Here, everything affecting the status of family and thecondition of morality appears as a network of changinginterrelations among people involved in the practicalexperiences of defining what a human being is. It seems, attimes, that we relive experiences of the primitive past: thechild knew only his or her mother; women started giving birth atan early age (almost right after menarche); children were ontheir own as soon as they could minimally take care ofthemselves. But we also build an ideal image of the family basedon recollections of the less distant past: permanent marriages("until death"), respect for parents, mother cooking meals forwhich the whole family sits down, father bringing wood for thefamily hearth, children learning by participating, assumingresponsibilities as their maturity permitted. This idealizedimage is also the bearer of prejudices: women's subservientrole, the authoritarian model passed from one generation toanother, frustration, unfulfilled talents.

So the paradox we experience is that of a primitive future: moreanimality (or, if you want a milder term, naturalness) incomparison to a civilized (or at least idealized) past. There isno cause for worry, especially in view of the realization thatdespite our success in labeling the world (for scientific andnon-scientific purposes), the majority of human behavior isdetermined (as already pointed out) independent of labels. Takinginto account that the notion of permanency is related torelatively stable frames of reference makes it easier to explainwhy the high mobility of our age results in changes, bothphysical and psychological, that undermine previousexpectations. Losing the discipline of the natural cycle thataffected human work for centuries, human beings freed themselvesfrom a condition of subservience, while at the same timegenerating new constraints reflected in the nature of theirreciprocal relations. What does it mean to become used tosomething-environment, family, acquaintances-when thissomething is changing fast, and with it, we ourselves?

The Industrial Revolution brought about the experience oflabor-saving machinery, but also of many new dependencies. InHenri Steele Commanger's words, "Every time-saving machinerequired another to fill the time that had been saved." Onemight not agree with this description. But it would be hard tocontradict its spirit by taking only a cursory look at all thecontraptions of illiteracy filling the inventory of the modernhousehold: radio, photo camera, TV set, video recorder, videocassette player, WalkmanT, CD player, electronic and digitalgames, laser disc player, CD-ROM, telephone, computer, modem.The one-directional communication supported by some of thesemachines affected patterns of interaction and resulted inaudiences, but not necessarily in families, at least not in thesense acknowledged in practical experiences of family life. Withthe two-directional communication, supported by digital networks,human interaction takes on a new dimension. Choices increase. Sodo risks.

Once the substance of one's experience is substituted bymediations, even the rationale for communication changes, nevermind the form. Families separated by virtue of assignments(war, business) at remote locations, or in pursuit of variousinterests (sport, entertainment, tourism), exchange videotapesinstead of writing to each other, or focus on telephoneconversations meant to signal a point of reference, but not ashared universe of existence and concerns. They discover e-mailand rationalize messages to a minimum. Or they become a Webpage, available to whoever will surf by. All thesechanges-probably more can be acknowledged-took place concomitantwith changes in our expectations and accepted values. With theincreased gamut of choice, attachment to value decreases. Whenall emotions come from soap operas, and all identity from thelatest fashion trend, it becomes difficult to defend notions suchas sensitivity and personality. When love is as short as therandom encounter, and faith as convincing as reading a person'spalm or tarot cards, it is impossible to ascertain a notion ofreciprocal responsibility or the moral expectation offaithfulness. On the other hand, when the need to achieve levelsof efficiency dictated by a scale of humankind never experiencedbefore and by expectations and desires in continuous expansion isas critical as we make it, something is given up-or, to put itthe other way around, somebody has to pay for it. With the senseof globality-of resources, actions, plans- comes the pressure ofintegration of everybody into the global market, and theexpectations of consumption attached to it. Many-to-manycommunication is not just a matter of bandwidth on digitalnetworks, but of self-definition, also.

The family used to reflect the perceived infinity of the universeof existence., despite the family's finite and determinedinternal structure. With the awareness of limited resources, inparticular those of the natural support system, comes therealization that alternative practical experiences of life andcooperation become necessary in order to generate new pragmaticframeworks for increased efficiency and enhanced dynamism. Theindefinite expansion of what people want and the progressiveincorporation of higher numbers of human beings into the marketthrough which affluence, as much as misery, can be achieved,results in the devaluation of life, love, of values such asself-sacrifice, faithfulness, fairness. The moral literatephilosophers of the 19th century-Ralph Waldo Emerson, ThomasCarlyle, William James-thought that the answer lay in ourrecognition that the world is not only for enjoyment. One canimagine a TV debate (interrupted by commercials, of course)between them and the romantic proponents of the ideology ofprogress-John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, David Hume. It's safeto wager that the audience would zap over their literate debate,while they would enjoy the illiterate 30-second spots. None ofthe philosophers would establish a Web site, as none would beterribly excited about the discussion forums on the Internet-nota place for intellectual debate. Who would read their elegantprose? To say more at this point would almost preempt theargument: The family in the civilization of illiteracyascertains new forms of human interaction. It departs from theexpectation of conformity for a model that acknowledges many waysto live together and, even more important, how we transcend ourown nature in this process. We might, after all, be much morethan we know, or trust that we could become.

A God for Each of Us

On the Memetic Algorithms Web page on the Internet, H. KeithHenson illustrates the lifelike quality of memes by recountingan episode from his time as a student (University of Arizona,1960). Having to fill out a form on which religious affiliationwas to be disclosed, he chose the denomination Druid, afterhaving initially tried MYOB (the acronym for Mind Your OwnBusiness). As he stated, "It was far too good a prank to keep itto myself." Replication mechanisms, in addition to a healthydose of social criticism, soon had the university record almost20% of the student body as Reform Druids, Orthodox Druids,Southern Druids, Members of the Church of the nth Druid, ZenDruids, Latter-Day Druids, and probably a number of othervariations. Once the question regarding religious affiliationwas removed from the entry form, the chain of replication andvariation was interrupted.

There are many aspects of the relation between religion andlanguage embedded in the anecdote. In some of the themes to bediscussed in the coming pages, the humorous aspects willresonate probably less than questions on how religiousexperiences extend from early forms of human awareness to thecurrent day.

Using, or even inventing, advanced technology, asking the mostprobing questions, experiencing injustice and pain, beingsubjected 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 affiliationfrom 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 notautomatically lead to practical experiences of humanself-constitution as religious. Neither do adverse conditionsgenerate atheists, or at least not the same kinds. There is nosimple 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 pressureof the church did not generate more believers. Scientific andtechnological progress of the magnitude we experience did noterase the verb to believe from among the many that denote whatpeople do, or no longer do, in our day. To believe, and thisapplies 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 distinctionsthat are pragmatically significant and synchronized with thedynamics of life and work.

The world of nature is not one of belief but of situations. Wehumans perceive the world, i.e., project ourselves as entities,forming images of the surroundings in our mind, through manyfilters. One of them is our continuously constituted beliefs, inparticular, our religious faith. Webster's dictionary (probablyas good a source as any reference book) defines religion as"belief in a divine superhuman power or powers to be obeyed andworshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe."Religion today is far less a coherent and consistent practicalexperience than it was in previous pragmatic frameworks.

The manifold relation between literacy and religion can bemeaningfully understood by explaining the pragmatic context ofthe constitution of religion. Its further development intodifferent theologies, and its embodiment in various churches andother institutions connected to religion, also help in thisunderstanding. The centralized and hierarchic structure ofreligion, the basic notions around which theology evolves, andthe dynamics of change in religion and theology that reflectadaptive strategies or goals of changing the world to make itfit a theology, have a strong bearing on the values that formedand transformed literacy. Truly, language and religion,especially language after the experience of writing, developedpractically in tandem. The transition from ritual to myth toincipient religion is simultaneously a transition from primitiveexpression, still tightly connected to body movement, image, andsound, to a more self- organized system of expression becomingcommunication. During the process, presented here in compressedform, writing appears as a result of interactions between theexperiences of language and religion.

That writing is a premise for pragmatic requirements that willeventually lead to literacy has already been generouslyexplained. It has also been pointed out that with writingemerges the perspective of literacy into whose reality many morepractical experiences will eventually crystallize. Literacy andreligion are intertwined in ways different from thosecharacteristic of other human practical experiences. In thehistoric overview to be provided, these peculiarities will bepointed out. Expression, as a practical experience of humanself-constitution, interrupts the slow cycle of geneticreplication, and inaugurates the much shorter cycles of memetictransmission-along the horizontal axis of those living together,and along the vertical axis in the quickly succeeding sequenceof generations. The role of scale of human experience, therelation between religious, ethical, aesthetic, political, andother aspects, the relation between individual and community,and between right and wrong will also be addressed in theircontext. In addition, logical, historic, and systemic argumentswill be employed to clarify what religions have in common.

In anticipation of a short history, it should be clarified thatliving in a religion of one God (such as Judaism, Christianity,Islam), or of many (as the Hindu world entertains), or of amixture of pantheism and mysticism (as in the Chinese or Japaneseworlds), even living in animism, does not imply identificationwith its history, nor even with its national or ethnic confinesor premises. Islamic enthusiasm and Christian retreat in our dayis not a matter of the validity of one religion over the other,but rather a matter of their pragmatic significance. United inaccepting Allah as their God, or a broadly defined way of livingaccording to the Koran, Moslims are far less united than theless religious, and less hom*ogeneous, Christians. But in givingup the clear-cut distinctions between right and wrong, andespecially involving relativity in the search for optionsleading to higher efficiency, we constitute ourselves in aframework of vagueness and relativity-different from thetranscendental value of Hinduism, or from the clear-cut valuesof contemporary Islam-which can no longer rely on the certaintyembodied in literacy-based praxis, and which leads us to subjecthuman existence to doubt.

In realizing the broad consequences of a pragmatics based on thedesire to achieve levels of efficiency appropriate to a givenscale of human experience, we can understand why some conflictsinvolving forces identifying themselves with religions from thepast against forces of the present appear as religious conflicts.The most vivid examples can be found in Bosnia-Herzegovina andin the southern republics of the defunct Soviet Union. Through areligious past to which they have lost any meaningfulconnection, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Muslim Bosnianstry to reconnect to the world of experiences to which theytraditionally belong. In the Central Asian conflicts,allegiances are confused-Sunni from Tadjikistan align themselveswith the Shiites of Iran, while the Uzbeks pursue the hope of anew 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 theshiny palace of cheap, replaceable values of plannedobsolescence, eventually of the human being itself. In hope ofredemption, many give their lives, probably not understandingthat they close the cycle of potential practical experiencesjust as drug addicts, suicidals, and murderers do, obviously indifferent contexts and with different motivations. This mightsound too strong, but it is no more extreme than the extremes ofexistence and faith, or lack thereof.

Friends and foes of religion will agree that, for better orworse, it has played an important role in the history ofhumankind. The complement to this agreement is less clear: Wecannot define what replaced, or could replace, religion. The newworld order brought about by the downfall of communism in theSoviet Union and East Europe raises even more questionsregarding religion: Are the extremist-not to say fanatical- formsof religion that replace official atheism religion or disguisedforms of ethnic or cultural identification? To which extent dothey reflect pragmatic reintegration in the global economy orsafe isolationism? Practical experiences of religious nature wereall affected by a change in their details: different ways ofpreserving religious doctrine, a different attitude towardsauthority, a change from self-denial to indulgence, but not inthe fundamental acceptance of Divinity.

Characteristics of religions are still in flux. For instance,religious events embedded in various cultures take on a merelyceremonial role in today's world, aligning themselves with thenewest in music, imagery, interactive multimedia, and networks.Believers as well as casual spectators have access to religiousceremonies through Websites. Probably even more telling is theappropriation of social, political, and moral causes, asreligion ascertains itself in our time as open, tolerant, andprogressive, 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 thedynamic reality in which religion operates, and not by thememetic replication of its name. This is, of course, the reasonfor not limiting our discussion to variation and replication, nomatter how exciting this might appear.

But who made God?

The variety of religions corresponds to the variety of pragmaticcirc*mstances of human identification. Regardless of suchdifferences, each time children, or adults, are taught that Godmade the world, the oceans, the sun, stars, and moon, and allliving creatures, they ask: But who made God? Trying to answersuch a question might sound offensive to some, impossible toothers, or a waste of time. Still, it is a good entry point tothe broader issue of religion's roots in the pragmaticframework. The commonalties among the majority of religions, towhich comparative studies (especially those of Mircea Eliade)point, are significant at the structural level. We have, on theone hand, all the limitations of the individual human-one amongmany, mortal, subject to illness and defeat, object of passionand seduction, deceitful, limited in understanding of thevarious forces affecting one's projection as part of nature, andas part of the human species. On the other hand, there is theuniqueness of the immortal, untouchable, impervious, omniscient,entity (or entities) able to understand and unleash forces farmore powerful than those of nature or of men, an entity (orentities) upon which depends the destiny of all that exists.Through belief, all the limitations of the human being areerased. It is quite instructive, as well as impressive, how everylimitation of the human being, objective and subjective, iscounteracted and given a life of its own in the language housingthe progression from man to gods or to God, on one side, and tothe practice of religion, on the other.

The various gods constituted in the world's religious texts alsorecount what people do in their respective environment, naturalor tamed to some degree. They tell about what can go wrong intheir life and work, and what community rules are mostappropriate to the pragmatic context. The value of rain in theMiddle East, the fine- tuning of work to seasonal changes in theFar East, the significance of hope and submission in the Indiansubcontinent, the increased role of animal domestication, theextension of farmland, the role of navigation in other parts ofthe world are precisely encoded in the various religions and intheir books. These books are bodies of explanations,expectations, and norms pertinent to practical experiences,written in very expressive language, ambiguous enough toaccommodate a variety of similar situations, but precise intheir identification of who is part of the shared religiousexperience, and who is outside, as foreign and undesirable, orforeign and subject to enticement.

The plurality of religious experiences

What makes religion necessary is a subject on which it would befoolish to expect any degree of consensus. What makes itpossible, at least in the forms experienced and documented fromancient times to the modern, is language, and soon afterlanguage, writing-although Japanese Shintoism, like Judaism,began before writing-and reading, or more to the point, theBook. For the Judeo-Christian religions, as well as for Islam,the Book is the sufficient condition for their development andpersistence. When the Book grew into books, it actually becamethe center of religious praxis. This is reflected in the natureof religious rituals, an extension of mytho-magical experiencesprevious to writing. They were all meant to disseminate the Book,and make its rules and prescriptions part of the life of themembers of the respective community.

The timeline of the practical experience of religious humanself-constitution suggests significant commonalties among thevarious religions. The way the notion of God was constituted isonly one of these commonalties. What separates religion frompre-religious expression (such as animism) is the medium in whicheach is articulated. The subject is relatively constant.Acknowledgment of forces beyond individual understanding anddesire to overcome confusion or fear in facing difficult andinexplicable aspects of life and death go hand in hand. Aperceived need to pursue avenues of survival which promise to besuccessful because of the implied expectation that forcesresiding in the unknown would be, if not directly supportive, atleast not actively opposed, is also discernible.

But when rationalizing the coming of age of religion, oneautomatically faces the broader issue of the source of religion.Is it given to humans by some perceived superior force? Does itresult from our involvement with the environment of ourexistence and from the limits of our experience? When praxisbegan to differentiate, mytho-magical experiences provedunadaptable to the resulting pragmatic framework.

Farming and animal husbandry replaced scavenging, hunting, andforaging. Communities started to compete for resources (manpowerincluded). Efficiency of human work increased, resulting in moreforms of exchange and leading to accumulation of property.Relations among people within communities became complex to theextent that arguments, attributed to forces outside directpractical experiences, were necessary to instill and maintainorder. The process was multi- faceted, and still involved myths,the magical, and rituals. All three-still retraceable in someparts of the world-were carried over to religion, progressivelyforming a coherent system of explanations and prescriptionsmeant to optimize human activity. The sequence is known:Practical experiences conveyed by example from one individual toanother, or orally from one to several.

Where the unknown forces were ritually conjured in new forms ofhuman practical self-constitution, these practical experienceswere progressively unified and encoded in forms apt to furthersupport the new scale achieved in the insular communities aroundthe world. Abraham, accepted almost equally by Jews, Christians,and Moslems, lived at around 2,000 BCE and proclaimed theexistence of one supreme God; Moses in the 13th century BCE; thesix sacred texts of the Hindus were compiled between the 17thand 5th centuries BCE; Taoism-the Chinese religion and philosophyof the path-came to expression around 604 BCE, and Confucius'steachings on virtue, human perfectibility, obedience toProvidence, and the role of the sage ruler shortly afterwards;Buddhism followed within decades, affirming the Four Nobletruths, which teach how to exist in a world of suffering andfind the path to inner peace leading to Nirvana. This listing ismeant to highlight the context in which the practical experienceof religious self-constitution was expressed in response tocirc*mstances of life and work that necessitated a coherentframework for human interaction.

The Torah, containing the five books of Moses dedicated to thebasic laws of Judaism, was written around 1,000 BCE. It wasfollowed by the other books (Prophets and Writings) and form theOld Testament. The Greeks, referring to all seven books (theSeptuagint), called the entire work ta biblia (books). Thiscollection of books is dedicated to the theme of creation,failure, judgment, exodus, exile, and restoration, andintroduced prescriptions for conduct, diet, justice, andreligious rites. The themes were presented against the broadbackground in which laws pertinent to work, property, morals,learning, relations between the sexes, individuals, tribes, andother practical knowledge (e.g., symptoms of diseases, avoidanceof contamination) were introduced in normative form, though inpoetic language.

The pragmatic framework explains the physics of theprescriptions: What to do or not do in order to become useful inthe given context, or at least not to be harmful. It alsoexplains the metaphysics: why prescriptions should be followed,short of stating that failure to do so affects the functioningof the entire community. What was kept in writing from thebroader oral elaborations that constituted the covenant(testament) for practical experience was the result of pragmaticconsiderations. Writing was done in consonantal Hebrew, awriting system then still at its beginning, on parchment scrolls,and thus subject to the limitations of the medium: How much textcould be written on such scrolls in a size that facilitatedreading and portability.

Between these books and what much later (translationsnotwithstanding) came from the printing presses followingGutenberg's invention, there is a difference not only in size,but also in sequence and in substance. Over time, texts weresubject to repeated transcriptions, translations, annotation,revision, and commentary. The book that appeared to be givenonce and for all kept changing, and became subject tointerpretations and scrutiny ever so often. Still, there is afundamental element of the continuity of its expressed doctrine:life and work, in order to be successful, must follow theprescribed patterns. Hence the implicit expectation: read thebook, immerse yourself in its spirit, renew the experiencethrough religious services meant to extol the word.

But since alternate explanatory systems were progressivelydeveloped-science not the last-parallel to relative fixedpragmatic frames sanctioned in early religion, a certainseparation of religion from practical experience took place.Religion consecutively constituted its own domain of humanpraxis, with its own division of labor, and its own frame ofreference. Christianity, Islam, the Protestant Reformation, andvarious sectarian movements in China, Japan, the Indiansubcontinent (neo- Confucianism, Zen, the Sikh religiousmovement) are such developments.

We have heard about such expatiations and hear as well aboutconflicts triggered around them, but fail to put these conflictsin the perspective that explains them. Within a given context, anew growth triggers reactions. Members of the Baha'i religion (afaith that began in the 19th century) are subjected to therepression of Muslims because its program is one of unity ofreligions, not subordination of some to others. The expectationof universal education, or active promotion of equality betweensexes, corresponds to a pragmatics different from that from whichIslam emerged, and for that matter, many other religions. TheReligious Society of Friends, i.e., the Quaker movement, was areaction to the corruption of the church as an institution. Itspells 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 alsosubjected to repression, as each schism was, by the powers thatwere in place.

These and many other developments mark the long, as yetunfinished, process of transition from religion to theology andchurch, and even to business, as well as the process ofpermutation of religion into culture, in particular from religionto secular culture and market. The Book became not only manydifferent books, but also varied experiences embodied inorganized religion. Alternative perspectives were submitted asdifferent ways to practice religion within a pragmatic contextacknowledged by religion.

And the word became religion

In the circular structure of survival in nature, there was noroom for metaphysical self-constitution, i.e., no practical needto wonder about what was beyond the immediate and proximate,never mind life and death. When the practical experience ofself-constitution made rudiments of language (the language ofgestures, objects, sounds) possible, a sense of time-assequences of durations-developed, and thus a new dimension, inaddition to the immediate, opened. This opening grew as awarenessof oneself in relation to others increased in a context ofdiversified practical experiences. Acknowledging others, notjust as prey, or as object of sexual drive, but as associates(in hunting, foraging, mating, securing shelter), and even thevery act of association, resulted in awareness of the power ofcoordination. Thus the awareness, as diffuse as it still was, oftime got reinforced. Be-Hu Tung ventured a description of theprocess: "In the beginning there was no moral or social order.People knew only their mothers, not their fathers. Hungry, theysearched for their food. Once full, they threw the rest away.They ate their food with skin and hair on it, drank blood andcovered themselves in fur and reeds." He described a world inits animal phase, still dependent on the cycles of nature,perceiving and celebrating repetition.

Myth and ritual responded to natural rhythms and incorporatedthese in the life cycle. Once human self-constitution extendedbeyond nature, creating its own realm, observance of naturalrhythms took new forms. This new forms were more able to supportlevels of efficiency appropriate to the new condition achieved inthe experience of farming. It was no longer the case thatsurvival equaled finding and appropriating means of subsistencein nature. Rather, natural cycles were introduced as a matrix ofwork, modulating the entire existence. Once the experience ofreligion was identified as such, religious praxis adopted thesame matrix. In almost all known religions, natural cycles, asthey pertain to reproduction, work, celebrations, education, aredetailed. Cooperation and coordination progressively increased.A mechanism of synchronization beyond the one that onlyaccommodated natural cycles became necessary. In retrospect, weunderstand how rules of interaction established in thenature-dominated pragmatic framework turned into thecommandments of what would be asserted through written religion.

We also understand how animistic pre-religious practice-embodiedin the use of masks and charms, in worship of the untouchednatural object (tree, rock, spring, animal), and the employmentof objects meant to keep harm away (tooth, bone, plant) took newforms in what can be defined as the semiotic strategy ofattaching the religious word (more broadly, the Book) to thelife of each member of the religious community. The need toestablish the community, and to identify it through action, wasso pressing that ceremonies were put in place to bring peopletogether for at least a few times during the year. In Egyptianhieroglyphics, one can distinguish an affection for coordinationof effort, expressed in the depiction of rowers on boats,builders of pyramids, warriors. The written word of the Hebrewswas inspired by the experience of hieroglyphics, taking thenotion of coordination to a more abstract level. This levelprovided a framework for synchronizing activity that broughtritual closer to religion. This added a new dimension toceremonies based on natural cycles, gradually severing the linkto the practical experience of interaction with nature.

Notation evolving into the written word was still the domain ofthe very few. Accordingly, religious reminders were stronglyvisual, as well as aural, a state of affairs that continued inthe religions that sprouted from Judaism and establishedthemselves after the fall of the Roman Empire. The populationsadhering to these religions were largely illiterate, but derivedimportant characteristics from religions based on the writtenword-the Word that was equated with God. Nailed to the doorwaysor inscribed over portals, converted into many types of charms,the words of a religious creed became elements of thesynchronizing mechanism that religion embodied in the pragmaticframework of its constitution. Prayer punctuated the dailyroutine, as it continues to do in our day. The seasons and thecycles of nature, embodied in the mytho-magical, werereinterpreted in religious celebrations, which referenced thenatural cycle, and appropriated pre-religious rituals. Cycles ofactivity aimed at maintaining and increasing the outcome of workfor survival were thus confirmed. A community's well-being wasexpressed by its ability to satisfy the needs of its members andachieve a pattern of growth. Still heavily dependent uponnatural elements (rain, floods, wind, insects, etc.), as well assubjected to attacks from neighbors, communities developedstrategies for better use of resources (human included),storage, and defense mechanisms. These strategies were carefullyencoded in the respective religious covenants.

The religions that have survived and developed seem to gravitatearound a core of very practical writings and associated visualreminders of the power they invoke in connection to thepragmatic identity of the community. The book was the standard;those who constituted the organization of religion-thepriesthood-could usually read the book. Scribes, even some ofthe priests, could write and add to the book. The majoritylistened and memorized, resorting to better memory than weexercise today, memory that their practical experiencerequired. They subscribed to religious patterns, or carried outrituals on a personal or communal level.

It is helpful to keep in mind that religious involvement wasfacilitated by the fact that religion is not only pragmaticallyfounded, but also pragmatically ascertained and tested. Rulesfor farming, hunting, preparing food; rules for hygiene andfamily relations; rules for conducting war and dealing withprisoners and slaves were expressed against the background of anaccepted supreme reference, before evolving into future ethicalrules and legal systems. Those rules which were not confirmed,progressively lost authority, were "erased" from the people'smemory, and ceased to affect the rhythm of their lives. Thewritten word survived the oral, as well as the living whouttered it or wrote it down. This word, abstracted from voice,gesture, and movement, and abstracted from the individual, wasprogressively assigned a more privileged place in the hierarchy.The writings seemed to have a life of their own, independent ofthe scribes, who were believed to be only copiers of everlastingmessages entrusted to them.

Written words express the longing for a unified framework ofexistence, thought and action. Within such a framework,observance of a limited number of rules and procedures couldguarantee a level of efficiency appropriate to the scale at whichhuman activity took place. This is a world of human practicalexperiences transcending natural danger and fear. It is auniverse of existence in which a species is committed to itsfurther self-definition in defiance of nature while stilldependent upon it. Religion as a human experience appears inthis world as a powerful tool for the optimization of the effortinvolved, because it effectively constitutes a synchronizingmechanism. In the practical experience of religious writing andthe associated experience of reading or listening to a text, theword becomes an instrument of abstraction. Accordingly, it isassigned a privileged position in the hierarchy of the many signsystems in use. Memetic replication appropriately describes theevolution of religious ideas, but not necessarily how theseideas are shaped by the pragmatic framework.

Tablets, scrolls, and books are blueprints for effectiveself-constitution within a community of people sharing anunderstanding of rules for efficient experiences. The outcome isguaranteed by the implicit contract of those self-constituted asbelievers in the supernatural from which the rules supposedlyemanate. In search of authority, this world settled for unifyingmotivations. The rules of animal, and sometimes even human,sacrifice, and those of religious offerings were based on thepragmatics of maintaining optimal productivity (of herds, trees,soil), of entering agreements, maintaining property,redistributing wealth, and endowing offspring. The immediatemeaning of some of the commitments made became obscured overtime as scale changed and the association to nature weakened.The rules were subsequently associated with metaphysicalrequirements, or simply appropriated by culture in the form oftradition. To ensure that each individual partook in thewell-being of the community, punishments were established forthose violating a religious rule. Immediate punishment and,later, eternal punishment, although not in all religions, wenthand in hand as deterrents.

The involvement of language, in particular of writing andreading, is significant. As already stated, the individual whocould decipher the signs of religious texts was set apart. Thusreading took on a mystical dimension. The division between thevery few who wrote and read and the vast majority involved inthe religious experience diminished over a very long time. Morethan other practical experiences, religion introduced theunifying power of the written word in a world of diversity andarbitrariness. Under the influence of Greek philosophy, the Wordwas endowed with godlike qualities, implicitly becoming a god.Seen from a given religious perspective, the rest of the worldfails because it does not accept the word, i.e., the religion.The irreligious part of the world could be improved by imposingthe implicit pragmatics that the religion carried; it couldsubmit to the new order and cease to be a threat. At this time,religion entered the realm of the abstract, divorced from theexperience with nature characteristic of religions originatingin the oral phase of human self-constitution. It is at this timethat religion became dogma.

All over the globe, in the worlds of Hinduism, Taoism,Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, and later Islam, theconflict between communities embracing a certain creed andothers, in pre-religious phases or dedicated to a differentreligion, is one of opposing pragmatics in the context ofincreased differentiation. In other words, a different religiousbelief is a threat to the successful practical self-constitutionof one group. To get rid of the threat is a pragmaticrequirement, for which many wars were fought. Some are stillgoing on. With each religion that failed, a pragmatic requirementfailed, and was replaced by others more appropriate to thecontext of human self- constitution. That these conflictsappeared under the aegis of conflicting deities, represented byleaders regarded as representatives of divinity, only goes toshow how close the relation is between the underlying structureof human activity and its various embodiments.

In a world of unavoidable and even necessary diversity, religionmaintained islands of unity. When interaction increased amongthe various groups, for reasons essentially connected to levelsof efficiency required for current and future practicalexperiences, patterns of common activity resulted in patterns ofbehavior, increased commonalty of language, accepted (orrejected) values, and territorial and social organization. Thecommonalty of language, as well as the commonalty of what wouldbecome, during the Middle Ages, national identity (language andreligion being two of the identifiers), increased steadily.

From among the major changes that religion underwent, the mostsignificant are probably its reification in the institution ofthe church and the constitution of vast bodies of discourseregarding its intrinsic logic, known as theology. Once assertedas an institution, religion became the locus of specific humaninteraction that resulted in patterns based on the language(Latin, for some in the Western Christian world, and Arabic inthe Islamic East) in which religion was expressed. Religiouspractical experience progressively distanced itself from thecomplexities of work and socio- political organization, andconstituted a form of praxis independent of others, althoughnever entirely disconnected from them. The organization ofreligion concerns the pattern of religious services at certainlocations: 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 inconflict, with other interests at work.

A multitude of structural environments, adapted to the practicalaspects of religious experience appear, while religionprogressively extricated itself, or was eliminated, from thepragmatics of survival and existence. The institution it becamededicated itself to pursuing its own repetitive assignments. Atthe same time, it established and promoted its implicit set ofmotivations and criteria for evaluation. In many instances, thechurch constituted viable social entities in which work, andagriculture in particular, was performed according toprescriptions combining it with the practice of faith. Rules offeudal warfare were established, the day of rest was observed,education of clergy and nobility were provided. From the MiddleAges to the never abandoned missionary activity in Africa, Asia,and North and South America, the church impacted community lifethrough actions that sometimes flew in the face of common sense.The effort was to impose new pragmatics, and new social andpolitical realities, or at least to resist those in place.

Whether in agreement or in opposition, the pattern of religiousexperience was one of repeated self-constitution of its ownentity 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, andmaintained, though sometimes artificially, entities, such asmonasteries, where scale was controllable. Autarchy proveddecreasingly possible as the church tried to extend itsinvolvement. The growing pragmatic context had to beacknowledged: increased exchange of goods, reciprocaldependencies in regard to resources, the continuous expansion ofthe world-a consequence of the major discoveries resulting fromlong-distance travel. In recent years the challenge has comefrom communication-in particular the new visual media-requiringstrategies of national, cultural, social, and even politicalintegration.

From the scrolls of the Torah and from the sacred texts of theRig Veda and Taoism, to the books of Christianity, to the Koran,to the illuminated manuscripts copied in monasteries, and to theBible 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 thebroader history of the beginning of literacy. This history is awitness to the process, one of many variations, but also one ofdedication to the permanency of faith and the word through whichit is reified.

Replications of all kinds mark the memetic sequence, and soreligion appears in retrospect as propagation of a special kindof information, generated in the human mind as it startedlabeling what we know, as well as what is beyond our directunderstanding. What did not change, although it was renderedrelative, is the acknowledgment and acceptance of a supremeauthority, known as God, or described through other names suchas Allah and Myo-Ho-Ren-Ge, and the nature of the practicalexperience of self- constitution as believer. If Abraham, Moses,Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius, and the Japanese and Indianreligious leaders were alive today, they would probably realizethat if religion had any chance, it could no longer be founded onthe written text of the Book or books, but in the practicalexperiences of the civilization of illiteracy. By no accident,the first category on one of the Web sites dedicated to religionis entitled Finding God in Cyberspace.

The educated faithful-a contradiction in terms?

The pragmatic requirement of optimally transmitting experienceessential to a group's permanency was recognized as one of themain functions of language. It should come as no surprise thateducation was carried out, if not exclusively then at least to ahigh degree, in religion. Neither should it surprise thatreligion appropriated literacy as one of its programs once thescale of human activity that made literacy necessary wasreached. In the context of nation-states that adopted religion asone of their identifiers, the entire history of the relationbetween society and religion can be seen in a different light.As we know from history, the quest for power frequently broughtstate and religion into conflict, although one needed and reliedon the other. In the unifying pragmatic framework of industrialsociety, their alliance was sealed in literacy programs. Thesewere simultaneously programs for higher efficiency and for themaintenance of values rooted in religious belief, as long asthese did not adversely affect the outcome of work or of markettransactions.

Parallel to the initially dominant religious view of life,change, origins, and future, alternative views were expressed asthe result of self-observation and observation of the outsideworld. Philosophy, influenced by religion and by religiousexplanations of the world, of men, of society and its change, isone example. Sciences would diverge from philosophy, multiplyingalternate models and explanatory contexts. These were usuallycarefully construed so as not to collide with the religiousviewpoint, unless they bluntly rejected it, regardless of theconsequences of such an attitude. There were also heresies basedon an individual's notions, or holdovers from past religions.During the Renaissance, for instance, such holdovers derivedfrom studies of the Bible, which led to the Reformation. Ideasnot rejected as heresy were usually within the scope of thechurch. These ideas were expressed by men and women who foundedorders. They were put into practice by religious activists ormade into new theologies.

There is no religion that does not go through its internalrevisions and through the pain of dividing schisms. On today'slist of religious denominations, one can find everything, frompaganism to cyberfaith. The rational explanation for thismultiplication into infinity is not different from theexplanation of any human experience. Multiplication of choices,as innate human characteristic, applies to religious experiencesas it does to any other form of pragmatic humanself-constitution. The practical experience of science,diverging more and more from philosophy and from religious dogma,also followed many paths of diversification. So did theunfolding of art, ethics, technology, and politics. Theunifying framework offered by the written word, as interpreted bythe monolithic church, was progressively subjected todistinctions that the experience of literacy made possible. Whenpeople were finally able to read the Bible for themselves-a bookthat the Catholic church did not allow them to read even afterthe Reformation-protest started, but it started after theRenaissance, when political entities were strong enough to defythe papacy with some degree of success.

The illiterate warriors of centuries ago and the sometimesilliterate, at least unlettered, worshipper and militaryinsurgent of today belong to very different pragmaticframeworks. The former did not have to be able to read or writein order to fight for a cause superficially (if at all) relatedto the Book. One had only to show allegiance to the institutionguarding souls from hell. In the scale characteristic of theseevents, individual performance was of extreme importance to thecommunity, as we know from the stories of King Frederick, Joanof Arc, Jan Hus-or, to change the reference, from the story ofGuru Nanak (the first guru of the Sikhs, a religion prompted bythe Muslims' persecution of Hindus at about the time Columbuswas on his last expedition to the New World), Martin Luther,George Fox (founder of the Quaker movement), and many others. Theeducated faithful of the past probably obtained access to theestablished values of culture and to the main paradigms ofscience as these confirmed the doctrine defended by the church.An educated faithful in contemporary society is torn betweenaccepting a body of knowledge ascertaining permanency, whileexperiencing change at a pace for which no religion can prepareits followers. Indeed, from the unity of education and faith-onemeant to reinforce the other-the direction of change is towardstheir contradiction and disparity. The secular web is not onlythat of the Internet infidels, but also of a broad segment ofthe population that has no need for either.

Challenging permanency and universality

For many, the survival of religion is itself a miracle. For manymore, it is indicative of human aspects not sufficientlyaccounted for in science, art, or social and political life. Itsrole in a new pragmatic framework of fast change, mediatedactivity, alienation, decentralization, and specialization, isobviously different from that it played in the time of religiousconstitution and in a reduced scale of humankind. Religion didnot start out to deceive, but to explain. Its practices, whileseeming violent, empty, extreme, demagogic, cunning, or evenridiculous at times, fulfill a purpose deemed pragmatic at theinception. The old and familiar are reassuring, if only by resortto endurance. The promise of redemption and paradise gain inattraction the more people face change and uncertainty. Whilethe original purpose of religion was modified over time, thepractice 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 succeedingpragmatic circ*mstances, under new patterns ofself-constitution, the result is complacency and deception, ifthere is no alternative. Religion and literacy ultimately findthemselves in the same predicament.

Religious diversification reflects each new scale at which humanpractical experience takes place. Changes in the pragmaticframework in which people constitute themselves as religiousresult in tension between the variability of the elementsinvolved in work or new aspects of social life and the claims ofthe eternal. This tension triggers numerous rethinkings andconsequent rewritings of the books, as well as the generation ofnumerous new books of new forms of faith. Christianity and Islamare 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 andprotestations (movements claiming to reconstitute the originalstatus, whatever that means), are to a great extent rewritingsbased on acknowledging new contexts-that is, new pragmaticrequirements. Once upon a time, the Book was supposed to addresseveryone in the small community in which it came to expression.Over time, many books addressed their ownconstituencies-adherents to certain teachers, to particularsaints, or to some subset of the religious doctrine-within alarger community. The success of these sub-groups grew inproportion to the diversification of human praxis and to thefunction of education exercised on a broader and broader scale.

From the religion of small-scale human activity to the churchesof universal ambitions, many modifications in the letter and thespirit of the respective books occurred. They ultimately reflectalterations of values that religious institutions had to adaptto and justify. The tribes that accepted the Book as a unifyingframework- embodiment of tradition which became law-as well asthe followers of the prescriptions in the Hindu scriptures ofVeda and Upanishad, the followers of the Enlightened One(Buddha), the practitioners of Taoism and Confucianism, alsoacknowledged a sense of community. It is the same sense ofcommunity held, at a different scale and with different goals,by the nation-state.

The spread of religions, parallel to military conquest, resultedin the spread of the respective religious books, and of theletters that the books were written in. This is not necessarilythe same as the spread of literacy. Religion established its ownstate, the Holy Roman Empire (which is now down to the size ofVatican City) that transcended national boundaries andlanguages, and was considered universal. In the language ofIslam, umma is the world community of Moslems, while wattan isthe Motherland. The Moslem armies, defeated at Poitiers by theCatholic 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 Europedid not spread literacy as much as they attempted to defend orestablish the dominance of a way of living meant to ensure anorder that promised eternal life.

In the scale of today's human practical experience, efficiency ingeneral is almost independent of individual performance. It isindependent of the degree of faith, ethical behavior, familystatus, and other characteristics of what religion calls good,and which ethics appropriates as a desired set of socialexpectations. Within a small scale of existence and work, thingsbelong together: the practical and the spiritual, politics andmorals, the good and the useful. Religion is their syncreticexpression. The need for specialization and mediation changedthe nature of pragmatic relations. Various realms of humanpractical experience are severed from each other. As this takesplace, the religiously grounded system of values based on unityand integration-after all, this is what monotheism, in itsvarious embodiments, represents-is submitted to the test of newcirc*mstances of human self-constitution.

Among the many explanations of the events of the late sixties, atleast the phenomenon of the attraction exercised by the variouschurches of meditation and their gurus is reflective of thecrisis of monotheism, and of the culture that grew around it. Anincreasing number of esoteric, exotic, scientific, orpseudoscientific sects today bear witness to the same. Thedifference is that these sects are no longer isolated, thatalmost the entire religious dimension of people is connected tosome sect, be it even one that used to be a dominant church.

Religion-based values or attitudes are carried over into the newsegmented 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 experiencesfrom which family, friendship, art, and philosophy derived overtime. Once written in the Book as a different form of love, onceascertained as a practical experience, it bridges between itsnatural biological basis and its cultural reality as acharacteristic of a framework of human interaction in whichindividuals project their biological and cultural identity.Written about in religious books, love starts a journey fromnaturalness to artifact. Expressed as intelligence, temperament,appearance, or physical ability (our natural endowment), love issubjected, in conjunction with the experience of writing theBook, to a set of expectations expressed as though theyoriginated from outside the experience.

In this process, there is no passive participant. The writtenword is permeated by the structural characteristics of the actof preferring somebody to somebody else, one course of actionfrom among many, and, more generally, something over somethingelse, according to religious values. The implicit expectation ofpermanency (of faith, love, or ownership) results from thepragmatic reasons acknowledged by the Book(s). A consensusessential for the survival and well being of the community isreached by acknowledging forces from outside, and acceptingtheir permanent and quasi-universal nature. In a universe ofimmediacy and proximity, change other than that experienced innatural cycles is not anticipated.

Divinity makes sense only if constituted in practical experiencesfrom which a notion of eternity and universality result. Thewritten words exalting unity, uniqueness, eternity, and thepromise of a better future are the result of the practicalexperience, since in the realm of nature only the immediate andthe proximate are acknowledged. Forever marked by thisexperience of time and space beyond the immediate, the writtenlanguage of religion, together with the written language ofobservations connected to the awareness of natural cycles (themoon, the seasons, plagues), remains a repository of the notionof permanency, universality, and uniqueness, and an instrumentfor hierarchical differentiation.

Whenever constituted in activities related to or independent ofreligion, language, as a product of and medium for humanidentification, projects these structural characteristics uponwhatever the object of practical experience is. Once written, theword seems to carry into eternity its own condition. With theadvent of literacy, as this is made possible and necessary by adifferent scale of human praxis, literacy itself would appear asendowed with the quality of eternity and universality, triggeringits own sense of exaltation and mission, lasting well into ourday. For millions of citizens from countries south of Russia,who once gave up their roots to show allegiance to the SovietEmpire, to return to Arabic writing after being forced to adoptthe Cyrillic means rediscovering and reconnecting to theireternity. That some of them, caught in the geo- politicalconfrontation of their neighbors, adopt the Roman alphabet oftheir 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 politicsare established and subjected to the practical test ofefficiency. Each projects a notion of permanency anduniversality, which is influenced by the practical experience ofreligion, sometimes in contradiction to the archetypalexperience resulting in the notion (or notions) of God (or gods).Now that the pragmatic framework of the very ample scale ofhuman practice makes permanency and universality untenable, thetendency to escape from the confines of religion becomesevident. There is a strong sense of relativism in science, anappropriate self- doubt in humanistic discourse, and anappropriate understanding of the multiplicity and open-endednessin almost every aspect of our social and political life.

This was not achieved through and in literacy, but in disregardof it, through the many partial literacies reflecting ourpractical self-constitution. The reality of the global nature ofhuman experience, of interconnectedness, of its distributednature, and of the many integrative forces at work, renders thecentralism implied in the Book(s) obsolete for many people. Atthe same time, let it also be noted that this reality makes theBook even more necessary than ever for many, and at differentlevels of their practical life. The many religious literacies ofthese days-promoting permanent modes of life, exotic and lessexotic codes of behavior, ways of eating and dressing, hopes fora happy future or some form of afterlife-maintain dualisticschemes of good and bad, right and wrong, sacred and secular ina world of extremely subtle and painfully vague distinctions.The question whether love and reason can undergird communityawareness, social action, political activism, and education if,as seems to be the case, their connection to faith continues todecline, belongs to the same dualistic perspective. Thisperspective is common to both partisans and enemies of religion.It used to be the backbone of the ideology of religioussuppression-either under communism, or wherever a dominantreligion takes upon itself the eradication of any other religion.And it is becoming the argument of the many emancipatorymovements promoting the religions of atheism and agnosticism asa substitute for religion. The subject is ultimately one offaith, concerning very intimate aspects of individualself-assessment, but not necessarily the institution of creed.Still captive to dualism, brought about and nourished byexperiences constitutive of literacy, we have problems copingwith a world where the enemy is us and where religion isdifferent from what it was at the time of its inception, or thetime we were first were exposed to it.

In view of these developments, we wonder how the rules and valuesestablished in the original religious framework are to survive.If the literacy through which these rules come to us is seenonly as a vessel, a means of expressing values and criteria forevaluation, then any other means could perform the same function.The Crystal Cathedral of television fame, no less than the Websites of many churches, proves the point.

Since we are our language, and we constitute ourselves asspiritual and physical entities in the experience of language,writing cannot be seen as a passive medium, nor reading as amechanical rendition. Accordingly, the medium through whichreligion is expressed affects the religion, changes itscondition. Applied to contemporary religious experience, thisargument is confirmed again and again. From the entire practicalexperience of religion, what survives is the liturgy, transformedinto a performance of limited cathartic impact.

Merchandising completes this new condition of faith. Formillennia, a community considered its priests vital to itssurvival. In the civilization of illiteracy, the situation isreversed. Ministers, and to some extent priests, depend on acommunity for their survival. Ministers are in the business ofselling themselves as much as they are in the business ofselling their church or even God. Some evangelists remainindependent in the sense that they package their own programsfor presentation to large crowds in tents, in auditoriums, or ontelevision. These religious enterprises create a vast businessempire around a persona. As long as the enterprise can deliverwhat the preacher promises-through his performance act and themerchandise he sells to the faithful-then thetele-congregants-no less fascinated by celebrity than the rest ofsociety-will buy him.

A newer phenomenon is less personality dependent and moremessage- oriented, but the goal is the same: ministers need tomake a living. Relying on information polled from hundreds ofmiddle-class non-churchgoers, some enterprising ministers cameup with a product bound to please: nothing boring or aggressive;cost- efficiency; comfortable seating; no organ. According to astudy by the Harvard Business School, the resulting church wasthe embodiment of the phrase "knowing your customers and meetingtheir needs." Church attendance grew by relying on customerrecommendation. Soon, the ministers franchised their operation inlocalities with a target market: 25-to-40-year-old seekers ("agrowing market"), with middle to upper middle class salaries.

Other seekers look in different directions. Almost anyone with amessage can establish a religion, and sometimes entire sects arebased on just a few words from the Bible (the Seventh-DayAdventists, for example, or the snake handlers of theAppalachians, or the Pentecostals). Participatory forms ofworship are another trend. They may derive inspiration from thebook, but they aim to involve avenues of perception not bound toliteracy: 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, theyare religions of the civilization of illiteracy. They do notrepeat the original pragmatic framework but respond to today'sframework of self-constitution and the individual needs ordesires of the people who constitute themselves as religiousthrough these new manifestations.

While observations made in language can be subjected toconfirmation, religious assumptions are expressed through theinner reality of language, and are only subject to languagecorrectness. It is impressive how language houses concepts forwhich there is no referent in practical experience, but whichare constituted exactly because some aspects of practicalexperience cannot be otherwise explained. In the history of howideas, generalities, and abstractions are formed, the experienceof religion is of particular interest. Values and beliefs thatcannot be submitted to the physical senses, but can becomprehended through language-written, read, sung, danced, andcelebrated-are transmitted through religion.

Many assume that the new status of religion in our day is due notonly to market pressure and obsession with consumption, but alsoto the advancement of science. Supposed to debunk therationality of faith and offer its own rationality as the basisof new ways of understanding the origin of life, the role ofhuman beings, the source of good and evil, and the nature oftranscendence, science introduces a positivist conception offacts, irreconcilable with that of the relativity of religiousimages. Research in artificial intelligence discovered that "97%of human activity (is) concept- free, driven by controlmechanisms we share not only with our simian forebears, but withinsects." If this is indeed true, the role of rationality,religious or scientific, in our practical experiences ofself-constitution has to be revisited. The various manifestationsof religion subtly address this need because they recognizedimensions of human experience that cannot be reduced toscientific explanations and logic, or cannot be explainedwithout explaining them away in the process. One interestingtendency in the civilization of illiteracy is less to assimilatethe new science and technology-as was the case only 20-30 yearsago-and more to subject it to what religion considers right.

Fundamentalism of any kind corresponds to the dynamics of thisilliterate society, in the sense that it promotes a very limitedand limiting subset of the language of religion, in a worldsegmented into more religious denominations than ever before. Ifover 350,000 registered churches serve the religious needs of thepopulation in the USA, and almost as many meeting places areavailable to small groups of believers, nobody will seriouslyargue that people are less religious, rather that they arereligious in a different way, often integrating the latest inscience and technology. Among the most active Internet forums,religion maintains a presence supported by the best thattechnology can offer. With each new scientific theory unveilingthe deeper structure of matter, more subtle forms ofinterconnectedness among phenomena, new sources of creativity,and new limits of the universe, the need for religion changes. Tocope with complexity means either to have a good command ofit-which seems less and less possible-or to accept a benevolentunderwriting. The challenge of complexity generates its own needfor creed. Social, economic, and political realities are notalways encouraging. Integration based on pragmatic motivesincreases, as does individual anxiety. No matter how much welearn about death, we are still not free of its frighteningrandomness. Realistically speaking, the belief in an afterlifeand the dedication to cryonics are less far apart than they seemat first glance.

Religiosity in the civilization of illiteracy

Some will argue, probably with good reason, that religion in thecivilization of illiteracy is but another form of consumerism,or at least of manipulation. No matter what the religiousoccasion, and if it is still indeed of religious motivation, themarket celebrates its highest results in anticipation ofholidays (the former holy days). The 40,000 car dealerships,many designed as car cathedrals, and almost 35,000 shoppingmalls get more visitors during the holiday season than dochurches. In addition, even ceremonies whose significance isfundamentally different today than during previous periods,generate more business than religious awareness. The language ofceremonies is entrusted to consultants in marriage, confirmation,baptism, bar mitzvah, and death. Texts related to circ*mstancesof practical experiences different from those of our day arewritten and read, or, to be more precise, performed withouteither understanding what kind of pragmatics made them necessaryor realizing the discrepancy between past and presentpragmatics. This is why they ring so hollow in our day.

When permanence is exalted, faithfulness promised, acceptance ofbiblical or other precepts (of the Koran, of Far Easternpantheistic religions) ascertained, literacy and religion areonly mimicked. Talaba, the 100 rubles (or whatever the currencyof choice) per month paid by Shiite missionaries from Iran,brings many Tadjiks, Uzbeks, and Turkmenians to the newreligious schools of Islam. Chances are that a higher bidderfrom another religion would spoil the game. Under the newpragmatic circ*mstances of human self-constitution, change,variety, self-determination, individualism, negation ofauthority, divine or secular, and skepticism are decisive forreaching the levels of efficiency demanded by a dynamic scale ofexistence.

Today's world is not one of generalized atheism. It is, rather,one of many partial religious literacies, sharing in some basicsymbolism, although not necessarily in a unifying framework forits consistent interpretation. Many do not believe, for reasonsof science or convenience, in the religious explanation of theorigin of the universe and life. Or they do not care for themessage of love and goodness embedded in almost every currentmanifestation of faith. They see in every religious book thehandwriting of some groups who, in order to impose their values,invented the image of a supreme force in order to achieve, ifnot authority, at least credibility.

We live in an environment of compromise and tolerance, infinitedistinctions, fast sequences of failure and success, challengedauthority and generalized democracy. In today's huge andineffective social mechanism, in the integrated and networkedworld, individual failure does not affect the performance of thesystem. Illiteracy, while dangerous under circ*mstancescharacteristic for the pragmatic of the recent past, onlymarginally affects the levels of efficiency reached.Religiosity, of consequence in the same pragmatic framework,plays no role whatsoever in the illiterate practicalexperiences of human self-constitution. Calling such assessmentsheresies, as some might be inclined to do, does not reallyanswer the question of whether religious law can still serve,alone or together with other laws, as the binding tie ofcommunity-as it does not address the broader issues of whetherliteracy can serve as the binding tie of community. Because oftheir pragmatic nature, characteristics of religion andstructural characteristics of language are fundamentallysimilar. If we want to understand the condition of religiontoday, we have to specifically address the pragmaticcirc*mstances of self-constitution within the civilization ofilliteracy.

In the events of tele-evangelism there is no place for literacy.But the video church, and computer-aided religion, the bible onCD-ROM, or CD-I, the vacation village for believers, andreligious tourism are mainly forms of entertainment. Theirvalidity is divorced from the concept of the exalted individual,critical in the context of a small- scale community.Consequently, the religious dimension of transcendence isannihilated. Ours is the time of the eternal instant, not of somevague eternity promised as reward after the present. Partiallybanalized through abuse of the word, concepts such as dignity,decency, and human values have become the clichés of the videochurch, with as many gospels as there are preachers. Religiositytoday differs from the religiosity of previous pragmaticframeworks insofar as it corresponds to the accentuatedinsularity of the individual.

As long as the viewer is only a digit away on his or her remotecontrol from a p*rnography channel, from the latest quote on thestock market, of from a commercial message-for denture adhesive,gastric relief, and home pregnancy tests-it is difficult, if notimpossible, to distinguish between sanctity and triviality,righteousness and venality. The global community of tele-viewingis splitting into smaller and smaller groups. And TV, as apulpit of missionary activity, reveals itself as onlysyntactically different from the missionary work ofadvertisem*nt. Mass religion proves to be as impersonal as themarket. In effect, it severs the relations between religion andthe mysterious, still unexplained aspects of human existence. Avirtual reality package can be as good as the performance ofhaving the blind see, and the cripple leave the wheelchair toenter the 100-meter dash. The virtual cathedral, the stadium, andthe mass audience addressed in front of the camera arethemselves of a scale inadequate to both the teachingdisseminated and the nature of religious experience, no matterhow far the effort to change the vocabulary goes.

The language of the books is rooted in experiences to which thetele-viewer no longer has a direct relation. They cannot besubstituted in a medium adapted to change and variety. Thecategories that religious discourse centers on-faith, goodness,transcendence, authority, sin, punishment-were established in apragmatic framework totally different from that of the present.Today, existence offers variety, immediate satisfaction, andprotection from the whims of nature. The sense of danger haschanged. The equity accumulated by the church in these categoriesmay be enough to entitle claims of ownership, given people'sinertia, but not to maintain them as effective means ofaffecting current practical experiences. It might well be truethat 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 worldof quickly changing scenarios for fulfillment outside faith.Networking and distributed work are better synchronized with thepragmatics of high efficiency of our day. Software forinteractive multimedia keeps track of a person's religiouspatterns, and provides prayer and interpretation integrated inthe 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 ofentertainment (renouncing its asceticism). With each stepoutside the boundaries of religion, the transcendental dimensionis sacrificed. This dimension is embedded in the medium ofliteracy through which religious practical experience became afixture in society. When the word does not satisfy, believersresort to other means of expression, some older than religion. Itis not unusual to have a religious celebration during the day insome Catholic churches in Brazil, and at night, on the samealtar, a chicken sacrificed to Yemenyá. The literatecelebration, of European import, and the illiterate sacrifice towhich a different group of believers connects, are impossible toreconcile. In this framework, freedom of choice, as vulgar ortrivial as those choices might be, takes precedence overauthority. In Brazil, "Graças a Deus!" is paired with thepractice of African cults (Candomblé, Umbanda, Macumba), just as"Allah-hu-akbar" is with shamanistic or Buddhist celebrations inAzerbaidjan and Kazakstan. These are particular expressions ofreligion in the civilization of illiteracy, as much as TVevangelism 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 changewould only further undermine religious practice. This is why thenew religions focus on the immediate and produce the reward asfast as it is expected. The continuous proliferation of newreligious denominations, soon to be as many as there are peoplewho constitute the networks of human interaction in today'spragmatic context, reflects also the ability of the church toadapt. But this was not religion's reason for being in thefirst place, and will not represent more than what actuallyhappens when we all wear the same shoes, or shirts, or hats butread a different label on each, when we all eat the same foodthat is only packaged differently, when we all vote for the samepolitics (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 religiousliteracies emerge, developing their own languages, their ownorganizations, their own justification. The heterogeneity of theworld, its intrinsic relativity, and its dynamics of change markreligious practical experiences in ways not dissimilar to thoseof scientific, artistic, political, educational, moral, and manyother experiences. Consumption of the language of religion inceremonies and holidays that promote the expectation of moreand cheaper, on which the quest for unlimited satisfaction ofneeds and desires is based, does not qualify anyone as religiousor literate. Neither does secularism for that matter, no lessilliterate, and no less subjected to the same expectation of highefficiency which undermines the core of any religion.

Secular religion

In our day of increased secularism, the extent to which religionpermeates people's lives, whether faithful, indifferent(neutral), or actively antireligious, is probably difficult toassess. The separation of church and state is powerfully anchoredin constitutions and declarations of independence, while newpresidents, kings, emperors, state officials, and members of thejudiciary still swear on the books of their religious faith,invoke their respective gods as the ultimate judge (or help), andopenly, or covertly, participate in the rituals inherited fromtheological practical experiences. The dominant symbolism of ourday has a religious aura. It seems that both the faithful andthe secularists of all nuances entered a mutual agreement insanctioning what came to be known as civil religion. Peoplepledge allegiance to the flag, get emotionally carried away whenthe national anthem is played, and partake in the celebration ofholidays, never questioning their justification. These elementsof civil religion come to us in perverted forms, divorced fromthe pragmatic context within which they were constituted. Toswear on the Bible was specifically prohibited ("You are not toswear at all, not by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor byearth, for it is his footstool…" Matthew 5:33-36). Swearing-inceremonies take place in the open in order to make themmanifest to the gods. In some countries a window is still openedwhen an oath of office is recited. Holidays, meant as occasionsof religious recollection, or to instill a sense of solidarity,remain only what each person makes of them. Even more, incountries making a point of avoiding the domination of onereligion over another, the holidays of the dominant religionbecome the holidays of the entire nation, enjoyed foremostly asmarket celebrations.

To notice the contradictory nature of the presence of religion incontexts of secular practical experiences, some directlycontrary to religious beliefs, means to notice how some of themotivations of religion expatiate in a context contradicting thelegitimacy of the theological experience in our day and age. Thisbecame clear even within the particular circ*mstances ofrevolutions whose stated goal was to eradicate religion throughstate oppression or by education. The French Revolutiondiscovered, soon after the king and other members of the powerelite were decapitated, that the authority of its ideals,embodied in the call for liberty, equality, fraternity, was notenough, despite being housed in the same body of literacy asreligion was, to substitute for the higher authority ofDivinity.

The Soviet Revolution hoped that theater or cinematography wouldsubstitute for religion, or at least for church. Some of itsideologues experimented with a secular god- building strategy,inventing a sui generis higher force to which people couldrelate, and on which hope could be placed. They tried, very muchin the spirit of the utopian Marx, to deify the collective forceof the working class in order to inspire a religious sense ofcommunity. Enormous energy was invested in designing new rituals.Many of the atheist artists of the Russian avant-garde servedthe cause they thought opened the gates of artistic freedom anduniversal love. Their own escape from the realm of literacy intothe realm of imagery-intended to replace the confining texts ofreligion and ideology-should have warned them about theimpossibility of the task at hand. Disappointed by their ownnaiveté, but incapable of acknowledging failure, some of themwound 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 ofstructural characteristics pertinent to religion and to themedium of its expression, i.e., literacy in a fundamentallydifferent context. The encompassing principles of tolerance,equality, and freedom contradict the spirit on which religionand literacy were based. They weaken our convictions of what isright and efficient in view of the desired end, and ofendurance as a group. The decline of morals in a context in whichmoral behavior does not affect efficiency is not due to thedecline in religiosity, but to the general perception,justified or not, that morality and religion do not count; orthat they play no role in making people happy. The sanctity oflife gone, there is little sanctity left in forms ofcelebrating it: birthdays, communions, marriage, funerals.Between birth and death, the audience at our rites of passagediminishes painfully. We know that death is very personal, butcommunities, for pragmatic reasons, used to confront death andits consequences, many related to inheritance, not relegate itto specialists in the various aspects of dying. Death is reducedto a biological event leading only to biochemicaldecomposition: No fun, no direct practical significance forothers, except in the inheritance process, a market event forfuneral parlors and pushy clergy.

Appropriation of life events in the civilization of illiteracyequals the structuring of small languages of post-literatecelebrations, taken over by baptism, communion, and marriageconsultants, all alienated from the religious meaning they had,moreover from the initial pragmatic motivation. Literacy stoodas the rulebook for all these direct, integrated,sequentialized, deterministic occurrences. The illiteratecelebrates the randomness and the relative and makes everythinga festival of randomness-crime, deadly disease, a riot, abargain, a love affair.

Religion and church tried to instill permanency. Baptism was theinitiation rite that opened the cycle. Confirmation entailedacceptance in the community. Marriage, once and forever,introduced a sense of unity and continuity. The last rites freedone from life for an afterlife in which the deceased stillwatched over the living faithful. Today, each of these momentsis associated with a civil ritual: birth is recorded in the townor city hall. The child must have a social security number by theage of two. At age five, children must enter school. Children nolonger join the community as responsible members at the age of12 or 14 years, but they are given rights that they sometimescannot handle. Marriage and the establishment of family come muchlater than in earlier pragmatic contexts. Extracted from thereligious context, family life is a strange mixture ofbiological convenience and contractual obligations. Death, alwaysthe focus of religion, is defined in terms of its effects onefficiency. The fine distinction between clinical death andtotal death only shows how priests, the final witnesses to theend of a life, are replaced by the technologists who keep theheart beating under the alibi of "sanctity of life." Life endsas it begins, as an entry in the record books, for tax purposes.

Japanese parents-to-be might still consult an ekisha (a sort offortune teller) in order to choose the proper name for a newborninfant, already thinking about the marriage (names should fit inorder to ensure harmony); others will have difficulty inunderstanding the similarity between choosing a name and theobservance of agricultural cycles, as both were religiouslyencoded in minute rules centuries ago. These people will evencringe at the discourse in a monastery where the priest mightindulge in the discussion of the unity between inner order (ofthe individual) and outer order. The fact that mandala, tradedall over the world, once represented that order escapes theirpersonal experience.

Religions distinguished between nature and cosmos. Whetherexplicitly stated or not, nature was seen as earthbound, thesource of our existence, the provider. Cosmos, beyond our reach,should not be interfered with. The experience ofextraterrestrial research expanded the notion of nature. Intoday's integrated world, resources and environmental concernsalso contribute to the expanded notion of nature pertinent toour activity and life. Our worries about pollution of earth,oceans, and skies are not religious in nature. Neither is thedistinction between what is feasible and what is desirable. TheTen Commandments tell us what we should not do, while the devilcalled desire whispers into our ears that nothing is forbiddenunless we really do not care for it. The relation between thewholeness of the being and its parts is subject to maintenance,just as the automobile is. Once gods were described as jealousand intolerant. Now they are presented as accommodating a worldof diversified experiences and heterogeneous forms of worship,including Satanism. Our pragmatic context is one of generalizedpluralism, embodied in the many choices we pursue in thepractical experience of self-constitution. When the pragmatics ofself-constitution can be based on rationality, the churches ofthe civilization of illiteracy are houses of secular religion.

A Mouthful of Microwave Diet

Have you ever ordered a pizza over the Internet? It is anexperience in illiterate cooking. The image on the screen allowsclients to prepare the most individualized pizza one can thinkof: they decide what the shape, size, and thickness of the crustwill be; which spices and how much; what kind of cheese; andwhich toppings. They can arrange these the way they want, layerthem, and control how much tomato sauce, if any, should be used.Done? Ask your children, or your guests, whether they want tocorrect your design. The on-line chef is open to suggestions. Allset? The pizza will be delivered in 20 minutes-or it's free. Theentire transaction is illiterate: selection is made by clickingan image. With each choice, prices are automatically calculatedand listed. Addition is as error-free as it can get. Taxes arecalculated and automatically transferred to the IRS. A voiceannounces over the Internet, "Food is ready! Thank you for yourorder. And please visit us again."

No, this is not fantasy. Pizza shops and hamburger joints figurevisibly on the Internet (still in its infancy). Their structureand functioning, as well as the expectations connected to them,are what defines them as belonging to the civilization ofilliteracy. But the picture of what people eat and how theirfood is prepared is more complicated than what this exampleconveys. This chapter will describe how we arrived at this point,and what the consequences of the fundamental shift from thecivilization of literacy in our relation to food are.

Food and expectations

How does one connect food to literacy? In the first place, how weeat is as important as what we eat and how we prepare it. Thereis a culture of dining, and an entire way of viewing food-fromobtaining raw ingredients to preparation and to eating-thatreflects values instilled in the civilization of literacy. Foodand eating in the civilization of illiteracy are epitomized notonly by the pizza outlet on the Internet, by McDonalds, BurgerKing, and the frozen dinner waiting to be thrown into themicrowave oven, but also by the vast industry of efficientproduction of primary and secondary foodstuffs, the anonymous,segmented processing of nutrition. It is not an individual'sliteracy that characterizes the meal, but the pragmatic frameworkin which people emerge and how they project theircharacteristics, including dietary and taste expectations, inthe process.

The hunger-driven primitive human and the spoiled patron of agood Italian restaurant have in common only the biologicalsubstratum of their need, expressed in the very dissimilar actsof hunting and, respectively, selecting items from a menu.Primitive beings are identified by projecting, in the universe oftheir existence, natural qualities pertinent to the experienceof feeding themselves: sight, hearing, smell, speed, force.Restaurant patrons project natural abilities filtered through aculture of eating: taste, dietary awareness, ability to selectand combine. These two extremes document a commonalty of humanself-constitution. Nevertheless, what is of interest in theattempt to understand food and eating in the civilization ofilliteracy are actually differences. The nuclei of ancientincipient agriculture, which were also the places of origin formany language families, are distinct pragmatic frameworksrelevant also to the experience of cooking. Within agriculture,absolute dependencies on nature are changed to relativedependencies, since more food is produced than is needed forsurvival. The food of this period is cause for some of therituals associated with the elements involved in producing it.The layers between animal hunger and the new hunger, filter newexperiences of satisfaction or illness, of pleasure or pain, ofself-control or abuse. Symbolism (concerning fertility,agriculture, power) confirms patterns of successful or failedpractical experiences against the background of increasedawareness of the biological characteristics of the species.Notation and writing contribute to the change of balance betweenthe natural and the cultural. But the difference between theprimitive eater and the person who awaits his dinner at a tablederives from the distinctive conditions of their existence.

In the pragmatic framework that constitutes the foundation forliteracy, expectations regarding food were already in place:slow rhythm, awareness of the environment, environment andnatural cycles, labor division according to sex and age (thefemale was usually the homemaker and cook). Food preparation wascharacterized by its intrinsic sequentiality, by lineardependencies among its variables. Cooking was inspired andsupported by the sequence of seasons, local stock, and relativeimmediacy of needs, affected by weather conditions, intensity ofeffort, and celebration pertinent to seasons or special events.In short, the relation to food was governed by the sameprinciples that notation and writing were.

In the civilization of illiteracy, personal attitudes towardspreparing food and eating, whether at home or in a restaurant,are affected by a different pragmatic framework. Probably moreis known about food in the civilization of illiteracy than at anyother time in the history of agriculture and cuisine. But thisknowledge does not come from the direct experience of the food,i.e., how it is grown and processed. Human beings in thecivilization of illiteracy know better why they eat than whatthey eat. It is not what is in the food that concerns manypeople, but what the food is supposed to do for them: maintainand 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 ofcompeting symbolisms. Fashion extends to food, too!

People feed themselves today according to expectations differentfrom those of primitive human beings-hunters, farmers,craftsmen, and workers involved in pre- industrial experience.Needs are different, and food resources are different. Manylayers of humanity stand between an individual projecting animalhunger in a world of competing animals and an individualexpressing desire for French cuisine, in its authenticvariations, 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 thelist of choices. Many filters, in the form of various taboos andrestrictions, as well as personal tastes, are at work. Meaningis incidentally elicited as one chooses the recipe of acelebrity cook, or decides on a certain restaurant.

The hungry primitive human, the human beings working the land inthe agricultural phase, the farmers, craftsmen, soldiers, andscholars of the pre-industrial age expected only that food wouldstill their hunger. More is expected from the eating experiencetoday, and some of these expectations have nothing to do withhunger. People take it for granted that they can buy any type offood from anywhere in the world, at any time of the year.Globality is thus acknowledged, just as the sequence of seasonsis ignored. In between these two extremes is the literate eatingexperience, with its own expectations.

The experience of eating reflected a way of life, a way ofself-constitution as civilized, progressive, literate. Here arethe words of Charles Dickens, recorded during his visit to theUnited States in 1842. He gave a vivid summary of American eatinghabits west of the big eastern cities (Boston, New York) as heobserved them on steamboats and in inns where stagecoachesstopped for the night in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Missouri. Inever in my life did see such listless, heavy dulness [sic] asbrooded over these meals: the very recollection of it weighs medown, and makes me, for the moment, wretched. Reading andwriting on my knee, in our little cabin, I really dreaded thecoming of the hour that summoned us to table; and was as glad toescape from it again as if it had been a penance or apunishment. Healthy cheerfulness and good spirits forming partof the banquet, I could soak my crusts in the fountain with LeSage's strolling players, and revel in their glad enjoyment: butsitting down with so many fellow-animals to ward off thirst andhunger as a business; to empty each creature his Yahoo's troughas quickly as he can, and then to slink sullenly away; to havethese social sacraments stripped of everything but the meregreedy satisfaction of the natural cravings; goes so against thegrain with me, that I seriously believe the recollection ofthese funeral feasts will be a waking nightmare to me all mylife. Dickens was the epitome of the literate experience, and hewas addressing a literate audience that had literateexpectations in the experience of dining: what time meals wereheld, who sat where and next to whom, the order in which certainfoods were served, how long a meal should last, what topicscould be discussed. Literate characteristics persist in theliterate frameworks of political and formal dinners: hierarchy(who sits where), the order in which food is presented, the typesof dishes and eating utensils.

Fishing in a videolake

Many questions come to mind with respect to how, and what, andwhen, people eat and drink. Human beings still project theirreality in the environment through biologicalcharacteristics-the ability to see, smell, taste, move, jump,etc.-but some in unnatural ways. Not only do we help vision withglasses and hearing with aid devices, but even taste and smellare helped through the appropriate chemistry, in order to buffersome odor and enhance others. From odorless garlic to tofusmelling of pork chops, everything is within the possibility ofbiochemistry. At the extreme, nutrition is altogether removedfrom the context of nature. This is the case not just with peoplewho are fed artificially, through tubes, pills, or specialconcoctions.

What does this have to do with literacy? How is it influenced, ifat all, by the increased illiteracy of the new condition ofhuman activity? The answers are far from being trivial. Aneditorialist from Germany, a country of solid, if not necessarilyrefined, eating instincts, went to great lengths to explain thealienation of nourishment in our age. The final scene hedescribed is comic and sad at the same time. Some artificiallyobtained nutritive substance, molded in the shape of fish, isfried and served to a video- literate who eats the food whilewatching a videotape about fishing. The ersatz experience oftele-viewing is probably disconnected from the experience ofriver, trees, sunshine, and fish biting the hook, not to mentionthe taste of fresh fish. Dwindling stocks of fish is one reasonwhy we can no longer afford the nourishment that results fromdirect involvement with nature. Not everyone can or wants to be ahunter, a fisherman, or a farmer. The romanticism of literacy,and of the utopian ideologies it helps express, would lead someto believe that this is possible, even desirable. But maybe not,since the new scale of humankind does not go unnoticed, even bythose still clinging to the continuity and permanency embodiedin literacy.

Values, rules, and expectations such as health considerations,efficiency, and taste are embodied in programs and proceduresfor which machines are built, new substances designed, and wastereprocessed. It might make some people shiver, but about 50% ofa person's average caloric intake is the result of artificialsynthesis and genetic engineering. Louis de Funés (in a 1976French film directed by Claude Zidi) almost wound up as part ofthe food processed at Tricatel, a new factory that producestasteless 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 realthing is and what is the fake. Competing with this burlesque, anational program, Awakening of Taste, under the aegis of theMinister of Culture, was set up to encourage French students inprimary schools to rediscover the true national cuisine. Thatsuch a program parallels the effort of the Académie Française tomaintain the purity and integrity of the language is aconvenient argument concerning the interdependence of the idealof literacy and that of haute cuisine.

The movie satirizes the human being's relation to food andtechnology. Eating something reminiscent of a fish, whetherfarmed or synthetically produced, while having video nostalgiafor fishing is not an exception. In the mental gardens we planteach spring, when magazines and television shows present imagesof the beautiful tomatoes we might enjoy in a few months, thereis a virtual space for every practical experience we gave up inorder to satisfy our desire for more at the lowest price. Thetomato in the civilization of illiteracy, hydroponic or gardengrown, ripens faster, is perfect in form, and tastes almost likewe think it should.

Irony and science fiction aside, we are indeed engineeringproteins, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, and minerals. They aredesigned to optimally maintain the human being and enhance hisor her performance. This can be seen as a new phase in theprocess of transferring knowledge pertinent to nourishment fromthe encompassing and dominating medium of literacy to the manypartial literacies- chemical, biological, genetic-of thecivilization of illiteracy. Having in mind the image of where wecurrently stand and the direction in which we are heading, we cantrace human self-constitution with the practical experience offood.

Language and nourishment

The relation between what people eat, how they prepare theirfood, how they serve and how they eat it, is accounted for inlanguage, especially in its literate use, in many ways.Experiences of our continuous constitution through work, personallife, habits, defense, and aggression are expressed throughlanguage and other manifestations of our nature and culture. Thesame holds true for such peculiarities as the way people eat,entertain, dress, make love, and play. Language, as one amongmany expressive means, is a medium for representation, but alsofor diversifying experiences. It supports the research of newrealms of existence, and participates in the maintenance of theintegrity 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 inculture. Reformulated as "Why can't Asians tolerate alcohol?"the question shifted the focus from what we do or do not do- thefilters of exclusion or preference-to biology. Environmental,cultural, social, psychological, and cognitive characteristicscan be acknowledged once the biological substratum is brought tolight. Many people of Asian origin display an intolerance toalcohol that is due to a metabolism peculiar to their race. Theintolerance to alcohol is associated with the lack of acatalytic enzyme, which under normal circ*mstances does notaffect the functioning of the body. Only when alcohol is consumeddo unpleasant symptoms appear: the face becomes flushed, skintemperature rises, the pulse quickens. Europeans, blackAfricans, and North American Indians are not affected in thesame way. But they are subject to other genetically determinedfood sensitivities. For example, lactose intolerance is highestin Blacks.

The example given above tells us that the projection ofbiological characteristics into the universe of people'sexistence results in the image of differences among variousgroups of people and among individuals. People noticed thesepeculiarities before science existed in order to explain them.Relating the effect to a cause-a certain food or drink-peopleincorporate this relation into their body of experiences.Established connections become rules that are intended to ensureoptimal individual and group functioning. Rules pertaining tofood and ways of eating were eventually encoded and transmittedthrough literate means.

In short, patterns of work and life are affected. They point tovarious levels at which human practical experiences and theexperience of nourishment are interconditioned. A first levelregards nourishment and our biological endowment. A second levelis nourishment and the environment-what we can afford from theworld surrounding us. A third level is nourishment andself-consciousness-what best suits our life and work. Over timethe interdependency changes. And at moments when the scale ofmankind reaches a threshold, it is drastically redefined-as inour times, for instance.

On a larger scale, food- and drinking-related instances promptvast servicing activities and the establishment of networks ofdistributed tasks. Today, diet engineers, caterers, geneticists,nutritionists, are set up to provide whatever fits the occasion,the guest list, dietary prescriptions, and astrological ormedical recommendations. A formal dinner can become a wellmediated activity, with many prefabricated components, includingtable manners-if the commissioning party so desires. Associatedor not to the menu, a preparatory seminar in what to wear, howto use utensils (if more than plastic spoons and knives areused), what kind of conversation with the entrée, and which jokesbefore, or after, or instead of the wine, educates for the event.In fact, the buffet, a configuration from which each canassemble his or her menu, not unlike the on-line order form forthe Internet pizza, is more and more preferred. It is lessconfining than the literacy-based sequence of the three-coursemeals-structured as introduction, thesis, and conclusion, knownunder the labels appetizer, main entrée, dessert.

Sequence and configuration revisited

With writing and reading, the experience of feeding oneself andone's family expanded to partaking in the experience of foodpreservation and sharing. French Assyriologist Jean Bottero readrecipes, in cuneiform writing on clay tablets from around 1700BCE, 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 ushere. But the description of the ingredients, some no longerknown or in use, of the sequence, and the context (celebration)deserve attention: "Head, legs and tail should be singed. Takethe meat. Bring water to boil. Add fat. Onions, samidu, leeks,garlic, some blood, some fresh cheese, the whole beatentogether. Add an equal amount of plain suhutium." This is a stewof kid, a meal for an exceptional occasion.

The pragmatic framework that made this cooking possible also madewriting possible and necessary. Over time, this connectionbecame even closer. Between the experiences of language and thatof eating and drinking, a continuum of interactions can benoticed. Language distinctions pertinent to the practicalexperience of cultivating plants, taking care of animals,processing milk, and seasoning food expanded from satisfyingneeds to creating desires associated with taste. New knowledge isstimulated by experiences different from nourishment, such asnew forms of work (cooking included), use of new resources, newtools, and new skills. And so is the expression of logic in theact of preparing, serving, and eating the food. On reading a bookof recipes from the Tiberian era of the Roman Empire-De ReCulinaria (The Art of Cooking, attributed to Gaelius Apicius)and De Re Rustica (by Cato)-one can discern how things havechanged over 1600 years. Apicius expressed many distinctions infoods and in ways of cooking and eating. He also expressed acertain concern for health. "Digging one's grave with one'steeth," as the expression came to life in connection withgluttony (crisp tongues of larks, dormice marinated in honey,tasty thighs of ostrich are listed), was replaced by elaboraterecipes to relieve an upset stomach or to facilitate digestion.The books do not say what everyone ate, and there are reasons tobelieve that there was quite a difference between the menu ofslaves and that of their owners. Advances in identifying plantsand in processing food go in tandem with advances in medicine.Writings from other parts of the world, especially China, testifyto similar developments.

It was already remarked, by no other than Roland Barthes, thatthe two basic language systems-one based on ideographic writing,the second on the phonetic convention-put their characteristicstamp on the menus of the Far Eastern and Western civilizations.A Japanese menu is an expression of a configuration. One canstart with any of the dishes offered simultaneously. Combinationsare allowed. Eating is part of the Japanese culture, a practicalexperience of self-constitution with strong visual components,refined combinations of odors, and participation of almost allsenses. It also reflects the awareness of the world in which theJapanese constitute themselves. Japanese food is focused on whatlife on an island affords, plus/minus influences from othercultures, resulting from the mobility of peoples. The moreconcrete writing system of the Far East and the moredown-to-earth nourishment, i.e., the closeness to what eachsource of nutrition is (raw fish, seaweed, rice, minimalprocessing, strict dietary patterns based on combinations ofnutritional ideograms), are an expression of the unity of thepragmatic framework within which they result.

A Western menu is a sequence, a one-directional linear eventwith a precise culmination. Eating proceeds from theintroduction to the conclusion, "from soup to nuts." A meal hasa progression and projects expectations associated with thisprogression. Within the language of our food, there are wellformed sentences and ill- formed sentences, as well as a generaltendency experience gastronomic pleasure. A literate society isa society aware of the rules for generating and enjoying mealsaccording to such rules. The rules are based on experiencestransmitted from one generation to the next, not necessarily inwritten form, but reflecting the intrinsic sequentiality oflanguage and its abstract writing system. Goethe fired his cook(Lina Louise Axthelm) because she could not realize thedistinction between healthy meals and the more sophisticated artof preparing them according to rules of literacy and aestheticdistinction.

On cooks, pots, and spoons

Cooking food-a practical experience that followed catchingprey-represents an important moment in human self-definition. Asa form of praxis, it parallels the experience ofself-constitution through language. It extends, as language does,far beyond satisfying immediate needs, allowing for theestablishment of expectations above and beyond survival. Cookingimplies generality, but also integrates elements ofindividuality. Some foods taste better, are more easily digested,support specific practical experiences. For example, some foodsenhance prowess. When eaten before a hunt, they can trigger lustfor 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 thesensorial experience, intellectual elements were involved in theprocess. They are observations, of similarities anddissimilarities of certain procedures, of substances used, ofthe influence of weather, season, tools, etc.; simpleinferences, discoveries-the effect of fire, salt, spices. Theexperience of preparing food, together with many other practicalexperiences on which it depends or which are connected to it,opens avenues of abstraction. Cooking improves the quality ofindividual life, and thus empowers members of a community tobetter adapt to pragmatic expectations.

The constitution of the notion of food quality, as an abstractionof taste, and crafting of tools appropriate to the activity, isof special interest. An example: Pottery, in the natural contextwhere it was possible, became the medium for preserving andcooking. In other contexts, carved stone, carved wood, wovenbranches, or metal was used, for storing or for cooking,according to the material. Progressively, tools for preparingand tools for eating were crafted, and new eating habits wereacknowledged. When the multiple interdependencyfood-container-cooking-preservation was internalized in theactivity of preparing food, a framework for new experiences wasestablished. Some of these experiences, such as how to handlefire, transcend nourishment. The significance of this processcan be succinctly expressed: cooked food, which we need toassociate to the tools used, is food taken out of the context ofnature and introduced in the context of culture. The experienceof cooking involves other experiences and then expands intoother domains unrelated to nourishment. This experience requiresinstruments for cooking, but even more an understanding of theprocess involved, of the effects of combinations and additions,and a strategy for delivery to those for whom cooking wasundertaken.

Satisfying hunger in the fight for survival is an individualexperience. Preparation of food requires time. In the experienceof achieving time awareness, cooking played a role not to beignored. If time can be used for different purposes by differentpeople, associated in view of shared goals, then some can tendto the need of prepared food for others, while in turn partakingin their effort of hunting, fishing, agriculture, andcraftsmanship. 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 needfor specialized activity. But once pragmatic circ*mstances oflife required it, some people assumed the function and thus,once a critical mass of efficiency was reached, what we todaycall the cook was identified. From the not-too- many writtenrecipes that come down to us through the centuries, as well asfrom religious writings containing precise, pragmaticallymotivated restrictions, we learn enough about the stabilizingrole of writing upon food preparation. We also gainunderstanding 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 thisprocess, they come to share values beyond the immediacy ofplants, fruits, and a piece of meat. Mediations pertinent to theart of cooking and eating are also part of the language processand become language. Culinary restrictions, such as those setdown in some religions, are but an example of this process. Theyencode practical rules related to survival and well- being, butalso to some conventions beyond the physical reality of the food.Language makes such rules the rules of the community; writingpreserves them as requirements and thus exercises an importantnormative role.

Each pragmatic context determined what was acceptable as food andthe conditions of food preparation, henceforth the condition ofcooks 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 alltheir clients tried to impress through the food served and thewines, or other drinks, accompanying them. In such circ*mstances,the symbolic function of food indeed takes over the primaryfunction of satisfying hunger. Thus the cook, like the singerand the dancer and the poet, contributes his part to whatbecomes the art of living. It is probably worth pointing out thatmemory devices similar to those used by poets and musicians areused by cooks, and that improvisation in preparing a meal playsan important part.

Writing entered the kitchen; and some of the last to resistliteracy, when it became a pragmatic requirement, were those whocooked for others. Orality is more stubborn, for many reasons,when it involves the secrecy of food preparation. There aregood reasons for this, some obvious even in our day of crackingthe most guarded secrets. Indeed, labor division does not stopat the gates of factories. The segmentation of life and labor,increased mediation, and expectations of high efficiency makemass production possible. Almost everything people need to feedthemselves, in order to maintain their physical and mentalproductive powers with a minimum of investment, is provided infavor of productive cycles. In the pragmatic framework of theindustrial age, this meant the reproduction of the productiveforces of the worker in a context of permanency. The investmentin education and training was to be recuperated over a lifetimeof work. Nourishment contributed to the same pattern: the familyadapted to the rhythms of the practical experience of industryrelated jobs.

At work, at home, in school, at church, and last but not least innourishment, acceptance of authority together with thediscipline of self-denial were at work. That literacy, throughits own structural characteristics (hierarchy, authority,standardization) accentuated all these peculiarities should atthis time be evident. On special occasions, accounted for in theoverall efficiency of effort, nourishment became celebration. Itwas integrated in the calendar of events through which authoritywas acknowledged: Sabbath, religious holidays, and politicalcelebrations 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 orshe was a product of the literate environment of practicalexperiences of pre-industrial and industrial societies. Thetools and the culture of spices, ingredients, matching food anddishes, of expressing social status in the dinnerware set out,and the meal, i.e., the structure of the entire statement whicha meal constitutes were all subjected to literacy. Labordivision made the cook necessary, while simultaneouslygenerating an industrial culture of food. In the equation of thelabor market in industrial society, with literacy as itsunderlying structure, eating equals maintenance of productiveand reproductive power. It also means the reproduction of needsat an increasing scale, as well as their change from needs todesires triggering the expansion of industrial production.

In the expectations associated with food there is more than onlythe voice of hunger. Our system of values, as it was articulatedin the literate use of language, is expressed in our hunger, andin our particular ways to satisfy it. Based on this observation,we acknowledge that all the forces at work in structuringdemocratic social relations also affect the socialization of ournourishment. Uniform quality, and access to this commondenominator quality, are introduced in the market, and with themthe possibility of stating and maintaining health standards.Within the boundaries of the civilization of literacy and itsassociated hygiene and health standards, there is little leftthat can be identified with the country home that cannot beindustrialized and made uniformly available. Beyond theseboundaries starts a new reality of expectations, of transcendedneeds, and of technological means to satisfy them withinstandards 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 differentproportions, of new ingredients, of new combinations thatresults in the food we care for so much. The awareness of theentire process during which humans distanced themselves fromnature 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 combinevarious sources of nutrition (animal and plant), noticed whatwas good for the body and the mind. What is generally notaccounted for is the fact that the break from the direct sourceof food to the experience of preparing is simultaneous with theemergence and establishment of language. Consequent changes arethe use of methods for preserving, the continuous expansion ofthe food repertory (sources of nourishment), the development ofbetter artifacts for increasing the efficiency of production andpreparation of foods, and industrial processing. These changesparallel differentiations in the status of language-basedpractical experiences: the appearance of writing, the emergenceof education, progress in crafts, the pragmatic of industrialsociety.

With the experience of literacy, human awareness of foodexperienced as a necessity, and as an expression of humanpersonality and identity, increases. Claude Lévi-Strauss, amongothers, forcefully dealt with this subject. The basic idea-ofhuman dimensions expressed in nourishment-becomes moresignificant today. None of the many writers infatuated with thesubject have noticed that once the limits of literacy, aslimits of the pragmatics that made it necessary, are reached, wetranscend the age of McDonalds, of synthetic nutritionalsubstances, and of an infinity of prefabricated foods. This isalso the age of endless variations and combinations. The humanpersonality and identity are more difficult to characterize. Itis expressed in our nourishment, as well as in how wedress-choosing from an infinity of available cloths-our sexualbehavior- free to experiment in ever-expanding possibilities:patterns of family life, education, art, and communication. Theinfinity of choices available in the civilization of illiteracyeradicates any center, and to some extent undermines commonalty,even at the level of the species.

In this civilization, the investment in self is lesscommunity-related and more an act of individual choice. Thesechoices are embodied in precise, customized diets based onindividual requirements as defined by dietitians. Computerprograms control personalized recipes and the production of anymeal or menu. The balance of time and energy has changedtotally. Experiences of work, free time, and fitness mix. Theclear borderline between them is progressively blurred. It isnot clear whether one burns more calories today in jogging thanin working, but it is clear that discipline, in particular thatof self-denial, is replaced by unpredictable self-indulgence.Consequently, to maintain the body's integrity, individual dietand exercise programs are generated, given a new focus throughthe transition from the economy of scarcity to that ofconsumption. Illiterate subjects accept that the market decidefor 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 ofself-determination. Independence and responsibility are notinstant-mix experiences. Whether embodied in fast food chains, inmicrowave nourishment, in the television cooking shows, there isan illusion of self-determination, continuously reinforced inthe seductive reality of a segmented world of competing partialliteracies.

The appearance is that one can choose from many literacies,instead of being forced into one. The fact is that we are chosenin virtue of having our identity constituted and confirmedwithin the pragmatic context. Awareness of and interaction withnature, already affected in the previous age of industrialprocessing of basic foods, are further eroded. The immediateenvironment and the sources of nutrition it provides areassimilated in the picture of seasonless and context-freeshelves at the supermarket. Space (where does the food comefrom?) and time (to which season does it correspond?)distinctions, accounted for so precisely in literacy, dissolve ina generic continuum. One does not need to be rich to have accessto what used to be the food of those who could afford it. Onedoes not need to be from a certain part of the world to enjoywhat used to be the exotic quality of food. Time and space shrinkfor the traveler or TV viewer, as they shrink for thesupermarket patron. They shrink even more for the increasingnumber of people shopping through the World Wide Web, accordingto formulas custom designed for them. With brand recognition,brands become more important than the food. The rhythms ofnature and the rhythm of work and life are pulled further apartby the mediating mechanisms of marketing. The natural identity offood vanishes in the subsequent practical experience ofartificial reality. There is little that distinguishes between amenu designed for the team of the space shuttle, for themilitary personnel in combat far from home, and the energycalculations for a machine. A little artificial taste of turkeyfor 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 andtexture even when they know that what they eat or drink is theresult of a formula, not of natural processes. This is why thealmost fat-free hamburger, devised in laboratories for people inneed of nourishment adapted to new conditions of life and work,will succeed or fail not on the basis of calories, but on thesimulation of the taste of the real thing. This is how the newco*ke failed. Non-alcoholic beer and wine, fat- and sugar-free icecream, low cholesterol egg, vegetable ham, and all substitutesfor milk, butter, and cream, to list a few, are in the samesituation. In the fast lane of the civilization of illiteracy, weexpect fast food: hamburgers, fish, chicken, pizza, and Chinese,Indian, Mexican, Thai, and other foods. The barriers of time andspace are overcome through pre-processing, microwave ovens, andgenetic engineering. But we do not necessarily accept theindustrial model of mass production, reminiscent of literacycharacteristics quite different from those of home cooking.

We cannot afford those long cooking cycles, consuming energy andespecially time, that resulted in what some remember as thekitchen harmony of smell and taste, as well as in waste anddubious nutritional value, one should add. A McDonaldshamburger is close to the science fiction image of a worldconsuming only the energy source necessary for functioning. Butthe outlet reminds one of machines. It is still a mannedoperation, with live operators, geared to offer a uniformindustrial quality. However, the literate structure gives way tomore effective functioning. At intervals defined by a programcontinuously tracking consumption, the restaurant is stocked withthe pre-processed items on the menu. None of the cooks needs toknow how to write or read; food preparation is on-line, in realtime. And if the requirements of the pragmatics of thecivilization of illiteracy overcome the current industrialmodel, the new McDonalds will be able to meet individualexpectations no less restricted than those of the Internetpizza providers. If this does not happen, McDonalds and its manyimitators in the world will disappear, just as many of the massproduction food manufacturers have already disappeared.

The mediating nature of the processes involved in nourishment isrevealing. Between the natural and artificial sources ofprotein, fats, sugar, and other groups recommended for abalanced meal and the person eating them with the expectation oflooking, feeling, and performing better, of living longer andhealthier, there are many layers of processing, controlling, andmeasuring. Many formulas for preparation follow each other, orare applied in parallel cycles. After we made machines thatresemble humans, we started treating ourselves as machines. Thedigital engine stands for the brain, pump for the heart,circuits for the nervous system. They are all subjected tomaintenance cycles, clean sources of energy, self-cleaningmechanisms, diagnostic routines. The end product of foodproduction-a customized pizza, taco, egg roll, hamburger,gefilte fish-resembles the "real thing," which is produced at thelowest possible cost in a market in which literate food is amatter of the past, a subject of reminiscence.

The new dynamics of change and the expectation of adaptabilityand permanence associated with the nourishment of thecivilization of literacy collide at all levels involved in ourneed to eat and drink. What results from this conflict are thebeautiful down-sized kitchens dominated by the microwave oven,the new cookware adapted to the fast food and efficientnourishment, the cooking instructions downloaded from thedigital network into the kitchen. The interconnectedness of theworld takes rather subtle aspects when it comes to food.Microwave ovens can perfectly be seen as peripheral devicesconnected to the smart kitchens of the post-industrial age, allset to feed us once we push the dials that will translate adesire, along with our health profile, into a code number.Three-quarters of all American households (Barbie's included) usea microwave oven. And many of them are bound to become an addresson the Internet, as other appliances already are.

The conflict between literate and illiterate nourishment is alsodocumented by the manner in which people write, draw, film,televise, and express themselves about cooking and relatedmatters. This addresses the communication aspects of thepractical experience of what and how we eat. The people who couldgo to their back yard for fresh onions or cabbage, get meat fromanimals they hunted or tended, or milk their own cow or goat,belong to a pragmatic framework different from that of peoplewho buy produce, meat, cheese, and canned and frozen food in asmall store or a supermarket. To communicate experiences thatvanished because of their low efficiency is an exercise inhistory or fiction. To communicate current experiences innourishment means to acknowledge mediation, distribution oftasks, networking, and open-endedness as they apply tocommunication and the way we feed ourselves or are fed byothers. It also means to acknowledge a different quality.

Once upon a time, writing on food and dining was part ofliterature. Food authorities have been celebrated as writers.But with the advent of nourishment strategies, literate writinggave way to a prose of recipes almost as idiosyncratic asrecipes for the mass production of soap, or cookbooks forprogramming. Some gourmets complained. Food experts suggestedthat precision was as good for cooking as temperature gauges.The understanding of how close the act of cooking is to writingabout it, or, in our days to the tele-reality of the kitchen, orto the new interactive gadgets loaded with recipes for thevirtual reality cooking game, is often missing. When conditionsfor exercising fantasy in the kitchen are no longer available,fantasy deserts the food pages and moves into the scripts of thenational gourmet video programs and computer games-or on Websites. Moreover, when predetermined formulas for bouillons,salad dressings, cakes, and puddings replace the art of selectingand preparing, the writing disappears behind the informationadded according to regulation, as vitamins are added to milk andcereals. A super-cook defines what is appropriate, and theefficient formula turns our kitchens into private processingplants ensuring the most efficient result. What is gained is thepossibility to assemble meals in combinations of nutritionalmodules and to integrate elements from all over the worldwithout the risk of more than a new experience for our tastebuds. From the industrial age, we inherited processingtechniques guaranteeing uniformity of flavor and standards ofhygiene. The price we pay for this is the pleasure, theadventure, the unique experience. Food writing is based on theassumptions of uniformity. In contrast, cooking shows startedexploring the worlds of technological progress, in which youdon't cook because you are hungry or need to feed your family.You do it for competitive reasons, in order to achieverecognition for mastering new utensils and learning the names ofnew ingredients. In the post-industrial, the challenge is tobreak into the territory of innovation and ascertain practicalexperiences of cooking, presentation, and eating, freed fromliterate constraints.

Coping with the right to affluence

Pragmatic frameworks are not chosen, like food from a menu ortoppings from a list. Practical experiences of humanself-constitution within a pragmatic framework are the concreteembodiments of belonging to such a pragmatics. A new pragmaticframework negates the previous one, but does not eliminate it.Although these points were made in earlier chapters, there is aspecific reason for dealing with them again here. As opposed toother experiences, nourishment is bound to involve more elementsof continuity than science or the military. As we have alreadyseen, literacy-based forms of preparing and eating food existparallel to illiterate nourishment. This is the reason why somepeculiar forms of social redistribution of food need to bediscussed.

From self-nourishment to being fed

Humanized eating and drinking come with moral values attached tothem, foremost the rule of sharing. Pragmatic rules regardingcleanliness, waste, and variation in diet are also part of theexperience of nourishment. These associated elements- values,expectations, rules-are rarely perceived as constituting anextension of the practical experience through which humanitydistinguishes itself from sheer naturalness. Literacyappropriates the rules and expectations that acknowledge andsupport ideals and values. Once expressed in the literate text,however, they appear to be extraneous to the process. Changes inthe condition of religion, civic education, family, and thelegal code, as well as progress in biology, chemistry, andgenetics, create the impression and expectation that we canattach to food whatever best suits the situation morally orpractically. The self-control and self-denial of previouspragmatic contexts are abandoned for instant gratification.

In the competitive context of the new pragmatics that rendersliteracy useless, the sense of a right to affluence developed.Parallel to this, institutions, founded on literacy-basedexperiences, were set up to control equity and distribution.Against the background of high efficiency that the newpragmatics made possible, competition is replaced by controlleddistribution, and the experience of self-nourishment is replacedby that of being fed. Absorbed by tax-supported social programs,the poor, as well as others who chose giving up responsibilityfor themselves, are freed from projecting their biological andcultural identity in the practical experience of taking care oftheir own needs. Thus part of the morality of eating anddrinking is socialized, in the same manner that literacy issocialized. At the same time, people's illiteracy expands in thesphere of nourishment. Today, there are more people than ever whocould not take care of themselves even if all the food in theworld and all the appliances we know of were brought into theirhomes. Dependencies resulting from the new status of highefficiency and distribution of tasks free the human being inrelative 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 resultonly in cutting benefits and tightening requirements. Suchreforms are driven by short-sightedness and politicalopportunism. A different perspective is necessary, one thataddresses motivation and the means for pursuing individualself-constitution as something other than the beneficiary of aninefficient system. The pragmatics that overrides the need forliteracy is based on individual empowerment. As necessary assoup kitchens are under conditions of centralism and hierarchy,the dissemination of knowledge and skills that individuals needin order to be able to provide for themselves is much moreimportant.

Run and feed the hungry

"Sponsorship for a charitable track event. Funds for Third Worldcountries threatened by starvation sought. Register supportthrough your donations." And on a nice sunny weekend, manykind-hearted individuals will run miles around a city or swimlaps in a pool in order to raise funds for organizations such asCARE, Oxfam, Action Hunger, or Feed the World. Hunger in thisworld of plenty, even in the USA and other prosperous countries,derives from the same dynamics that results in the civilizationof illiteracy. The scale of humankind requires levels ofefficiency for which practical experiences of survival based onlimited resources are ill suited. Entire populations aresubjected to hunger and disease due to social and economicinequities, to weather conditions or topological changes, or topolitical upheaval in the area where they live. Short ofaddressing inequities, aid usually alleviates extreme situations.But it establishes dependencies instead of encouraging the bestresponse 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, wecould end up ignoring starving and diseased populations, or wecould try to understand our part in the equation. Living in anintegrated world and partaking in the pragmatics of a globaleconomy, people become prisoners of the here and now, discardingthe very disconcerting reality of millions living in misery. Butit is exactly the pragmatic framework leading to thecivilization of illiteracy that also leads to the enormousdisparities in today's world. Many forces are at work, and thedanger of falling prey to the slogans of failed ideology, whiletrying to understand misery and hunger in today's world, cannotbe overestimated. Starvation in Africa, South America, in someEast European countries, and in parts of Asia needs to bequestioned in light of the abundance of food in Japan, WestEurope, and North America. Both extremes correspond to changes inhuman self-constitution under expectations of efficiency criticalto the current scale of humankind.

If human activity had not changed and broadened its base ofresources, 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 ofthe land due usually to bad farming practices, can be overcome bynew farming methods, progress in agricultural technology,biogenetics, and chemistry. Spectacular changes have come aboutin what is considered the most traditional practice throughwhich humans constitute their identity. The change affected waysof working, family relations, use of local resources, social andpolitical life, and even population growth. It resulted in a newset of dependencies among communities that had afforded autarchicmodes of existence for thousands of years. The environment, too,has been affected probably as much by scientific andtechnological progress as by the new farming methods that takefull advantage of new fertilizers, insecticides, and geneticengineering of new plants and animals.

Motivated by literacy-based ideals, some countries took it uponthemselves to see that people in less developed lands beredeemed through benefits they did not expect and for which theywere not prepared. At the global levels of humankind, when thenecessity of literacy declines, dependencies characteristic ofliteracy-based interactions collide with forces of integrationand competition. What results is a painful compromise. Hunger isacknowledged and tended to by enormous bureaucracies: churches,charities, international aid organizations, and institutions moreconcerned with themselves than with the task at hand. Theymaintain dependencies that originated within the pragmatics ofthe civilization of literacy. The activities they carry out areinherently inefficient. Where the new dynamics is one ofdifferentiation and segmentation, the main characteristics ofthese experiences are those of literacy: establishment of auniversal model, the attempt to reach hom*ogeneity, tirelesseffort to disseminate modes of existence and work of asequential, analytic, rationalistic, and deterministic nature.Consequently, where nourishment from the excess attainedelsewhere is dispensed, a way of life alien to those in need isprojected upon them.

Aid, even to the extent that it is necessary, re-shapes biology,the environment, the connection among people, and eachindividual. Diseases never before experienced, behavioral andmental changes, and new reliances are generated, even in the nameof the best intentions. In some areas affected by starvation,tribal conflicts, religious intolerance, and moral turpitude addto natural conditions not propitious to life. These man-madeconditions cannot and should not veil the fact that humancreativity and inventiveness are prevented from unfolding,replaced by ready-made solutions, instead of being stimulated.Empowerment means to facilitate developments that maintaindistinctions and result from differences, instead of uniformity.

Would all the populations facing hunger and disease actually jumpfrom the illiteracy of the past-a result of no school system orlimited access to education, as well as of a pragmatics that didnot lead to literacy-to the pragmatically determined illiteracyof the future? The pragmatic framework of our new age correspondsto the need to acknowledge differences and derive fromheterogeneity new sources of creativity. Each ton of wheat orcorn airlifted to save mothers and children is part of themissionary praxis commenced long ago when religious organizationswanted to save the soul of the so-called savage. The answer tohunger and disease cannot be only charity, but the effort toexpand networks of reciprocally significant work. The onlymeaningful pragmatics derives from practical experiences thatacknowledge differences instead of trying to erase them. Accessto resources for more effective activities is fundamentallydifferent from access to surplus or to bureaucratic mechanismsfor redistribution.

Where literacy never became a reality, no organization shouldtake it upon itself to impose it as the key to survival and wellbeing. Our literacy-based medicine, nourishment, social life,and especially values are not the panacea for the world, nomatter how proud we are of some, and how blind to theirlimitations. Human beings have sufficient means today to affordtending to differences instead of doing away with them. In thisprocess, we might learn about that part of nourishment that wasrationalized away in the process of reaching higher levels ofefficiency. And we might find new resources in otherenvironments and in the peculiar self-constitution of peoples weconsider deprived-resources that we could integrate into ourpragmatics.

No truffles (yet) in the coop

Our civilization of illiterate nourishment is based on networksand distributed assignments. The change from self-reliance toaffluence corresponds, first and foremost, to the change of thepragmatic context within which the human condition is defined.We project a physical reality-our body-that has changed over timedue to modifications in our environment, and the transition frompractical experiences of survival to the experience ofabundance. The room for invention and spontaneity expands themore we discover and apply rules that guarantee efficiency orlimit those preventing it. There might be several dozens ofsauces one can select from, and no fewer cereals for breakfast,many types of bread, meat, fish, and very many preprocessedmenus. It would probably be an exaggeration to say that all tastealike. But it would not necessarily be false to ascertain thatbehind diversity there are a limited number of changingformulas, some better adapted to succeed in the marketplace thanothers, and some better packaged than others.

Yes, people are nostalgic. More precisely, people are subjectedto the nostalgia- triggering stimuli of mass media: theattraction of the homemade, homestyle, Mom's secret recipe.This is not because the majority of us know what these icons ofthe past are, but rather because we associate them with what isno longer possible: reassurance, calm, tradition, protection,permanence, care. We also hear the voices of those who demystifythe literate cooking of yesteryear: women spent their lifetimeslaving in their kitchens. They did so, the argument goes, tosatisfy males, only too happy to be taken care of. Both voices,those idealizing and those demystifying the past, should beheard: We enslaved part of nature and took it upon ourselves toannihilate animals or, worse, change their genetic structure. Inorder to satisfy our appetites, we sacrificed the environment.And, giving in to gluttony, we effectively changed our geneticconstitution. The truth, if there is any above and beyond thecultural and economic conditions of cooking, is that transitionsfrom one scale of humankind to another subjected practicalexperiences of self-constitution to fundamental modifications.Trying to understand some of the patterns of life and work, aswell as patterns of access to food or of preparing it, requiresthat we understand when and why such changes take place.

Language stored not only recipes, but also expectations thatbecame part of our nourishment. The culture of food preparationand serving, the art of discovering new recipes and enjoyingwhat we eat and drink, is more than language can convey.Truffles, the food of kings and nobles, and more recently ofthose who can afford them, bear a whole history, obviouslyexpressed in language. Whether seen as the spit of witches, amore or less magic aphrodisiac, or a miraculous life-prolongingfood, truffles gain in status because our experience, reflectedin the language pertinent to cooking, led us to regard them froma perspective different from those who first discovered, byaccident, their nutritive value. It is in the tradition oforality that fathers whispered to their sons the secret ofplaces where truffles could be found. Practical experiencesinvolving writing, and later literacy, raised the degree ofexpectancy associated with their consumption. They affected theshift regarding the eating of truffles from the sphere of thenatural (the pigs that used to find them, and liked themprobably as much as the gourmets, had to be replaced byspecially trained dogs) to the realm of the cultural, where theinterests of human beings prevail over anything else. Throughlanguage processes paralleled by the semiosis of highgastronomy, truffles enter the market as sign-of adiscriminating palate, of snobbery, or of actually knowing whytruffles are good.

Language and food interact. This interaction involves other signsystems, 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 anart. In the age of illiteracy, the languages of genetics,biology, and medicine make us aware of what it takes to avoidmalnutrition, what it takes to maintain health and prolong one'slife. Literacy was reinforced in the convention of how peopleeat, what, when, and how satisfaction or disappointment wasexpressed. In our new nutritional behavior and in our newvalues, literacy plays a marginal role (including interaction atthe dining table). The artificial truffle is free of the mystiqueof origin, of the method for finding truffles, of secretformulas (except the trade secret). It is one item among many,cheap, illusory, and broadly available, as democratic asartificial caviar or, as Rousseau would have put it, governmentby representation.

Identical in so many ways, the cafeterias that extend anindustrial model in a post-industrial context feed millions ofpeople based on a formula of standardization. Hierarchies arewiped away. This is no place for truffles. One gets his tray andfollows those who arrived before. There is no predeterminedsequence. All that remains is the act of selection and theexecution of the transaction-an exercise in assemblage not farremoved from composing your own pizza on a computer monitor. Whenthe language of available nourishment is standardized to theextent that it is in these feeding environments-elegant coopsstocked with shining metal coffee, tea, and soda dispensers,refrigerated containers of sandwiches, cake, fruit-the languageof expectations will not be much richer. The increasedefficiency made possible this way accounts for the wideacceptance of this mediocre, illiterate mode of nourishingourselves.

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 thislanguage is tightly connected to the language of ouridentification. We are what, how, why, when, and where we eat.This identification changed when agriculture started andfamilies of languages ascertained themselves. It changed againwhen the pragmatic framework required writing, and so on untilthe identity of the literate person and the post-literate emergedfrom practical experiences characteristic of a new scale ofhuman experiences. Today we are, for quite a broad range of oursocial life, an identification number of a sort, an address, andother information in a database (income, investment, wealth, debthistory) that translates into what marketing models define asour individual expectations. Information brokers trade uswhenever someone is interested in what we can do for him or her.Powerful networks of information processing can be used toprecisely map each person to the shelf surface available instores, to the menus of restaurants we visit on variousoccasions, and to the Internet sites of our journeys incyberspace. Our indexical signs serve as indicators for variousforms of filtering calories (how many do we really need?), fats(saturated or not), proteins, sugars, even the aesthetics of foodpresentation, in order to exactly match individual needs anddesires. Scary or not, one can even imagine how we will getprecisely what best suits our biological system, influenced bythe intensity of the tennis game (virtual) we just finished, theTV program we watched for the last 30 seconds, or the work weare involved in. To make this happen is a task not so muchdifferent from receiving our customized newspaper or only theinformation we want through Pointscape, saving our monitors fromexcessive 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 ofsurvival and reproduction. They are made part of a moreencompassing practical experience. Each time we take a bite froma hot dog or sandwich, each time we enjoy ice cream, drink wineor beer or soda, take vitamins or add fiber to our diet, weparticipate in two processes: the first, of revisingexpectations, turning what used to be a necessity into luxury;the second, of continuous expansion of the global market presentthrough what we eat and drink. Many transactions are embodied inour daily breakfast, business lunch, or TV dinner. With each biteand gulp (as with each other product consumed), we areincorporated into the dynamics of expanding the market. Theso-called Florida orange juice contains frozen concentrate fromBrazil. The fine Italian veal microwave dinner contains meatfrom Romania. The wildflower honey "Made in Germany" is fromHungarian or Polish beehives. Bread, butter, cheese, cold cuts,jams, and pasta could be marked with the flag of the UnitedNations if all the people involved in producing them were to beacknowledged. Meat, poultry, fruits, and vegetables, not unlikeeverything else traded in the global market, make for anintegrated world in which the most efficient survives in thecompetition for pleasing if not our taste, at least ourpropensity to buy.

The efficiency reached in the pragmatic framework of illiteracyallows people to maintain, within the plurality of languages, aplurality of dietary experiences, some probably as exotic as theliteracy of ancient Greek, Sanskrit, Aramaic, or cuneiformwriting. Even the recipes of the Roman Empire can be enjoyed inexclusive settings (as in Saint-Bernard-de-Comminges in thePyrénées) or as haute, ready-made cuisine (the Comptesse duBarry food company offers wild boar in spicy sauce, stuffed duckin ginger, and sea trout with wild leeks). The Japanese havetheir sushi prepared from resuscitated fish flown, in a state ofanabiosis (organic rhythm slowed through refrigeration), fromwherever the beloved delicacies are still available.

The multiplicity of food-related experiences in our time isrepresentative of segmentation and heterogeneity in thecivilization of illiteracy. It is also an expression of thesubtle interdependencies of the many aspects of humanself-constitution. The democracy of nourishment and themediocrity of food are not necessarily a curse. Neither are theextravagant performances of artist-cooks that fetch a priceequivalent to the average annual salary of a generic citizen ofthis integrated world. Difference makes a difference. Feminism,multiculturalism, political activism (from right to left)-all usearguments related to how and what we eat, as part of the broaderhow and why we live, to advance their causes. If nothing else,the civilization of illiteracy makes possible choices, includingthose pertinent to nourishment, for which we are ill prepared.The real challenge is still ahead of us. And no one knows how ittastes.

The Professional Winner

The connections between sports and literacy are far fromobvious. Watching sports events, as a spectator in the stadium,or in front of the television, does not require the literacy weassociate with libraries, reading and writing, and schooleducation. One does not need to read in order to see who isfastest, strongest, or jumps the farthest or highest, or throwsor catches the best. And one does not really need to be literatein order to become a champion or to make it into a first-leagueteam. Running, jumping, pushing, throwing, catching, and kickingare part of our physical repertory, related to our day-to-dayexistence, easy to associate with ways through which survivaltook place when scavenging, hunting, fishing, and foraging werethe fundamental ways for primitive beings to feed themselves andto avoid being killed. Even the association of sports and withmytho-magical ceremonies implying physical performance is easyto explain without reference to language, oral or written.Exceptional physical characteristics were, and still are in someparts of the world, celebrated as expressions of forces beyondimmediate control and understanding. Gods were worshippedthrough exceptional physical feats performed by peopleworshipping them. In archaic cultures, athletes could even besacrificed on the altar of gratitude, where the best weredestined to please the gods.

The initial phases of what was eventually called sport correspondto establishing those sign systems (gestures, sounds, shapes)which, in anticipation of language, made language possible andnecessary. This was a phase of syncretism, during which thephysical projection of the human being dominated the intellect.Running after an animal or from one, and running for play aredifferent forms of human experience corresponding to differentpragmatic contexts. They have different motivations anddifferent outcomes. Probably 20,000 years separate these twoexperiences in time. In order to reach the level of generalityand abstraction that a competition embodies, the human being hadto undergo experiences of self-constitution within which thedomination of physical over intellectual characteristics changeddrastically. The qualifier sport-a word which seems to haveascended within the English language of the 19thcentury-probably came about in the framework of the divisionbetween secular and non-secular forms of human praxis. Bothmaintenance and improvement of the human biological endowmentand mytho-magical practice were based on awareness of the rolethe body plays and the recognition of the practical need todisseminate this awareness. Efficiency was the governing aspect,not recognized as such, not conceptualized, but acknowledged inthe cult of the body and the attempt to make it part of theshared culture. The contest (for which the Greeks used the wordsathlos) and the prize (athlon, which eventually led to the wordathlete) embody generalizations of those practical situationsthrough which survival and well-being came about.

As a complex experience, sports involves rational and irrationalcomponents. This is why approaching the relation betweenliteracy and sports, one has to account for both dimensions.Sports is approached here from the perspective of the changesthrough which it became what it is today: a well defined form ofrelaxation, but probably more a competitive type of workacknowledged in the market like any other product of humanpractice.

The immediate connection between physical fitness and the outcomeof practical experiences dominated by physical aspects wasestablished within very limited, but strongly patterned,activity. It soon became the measure of survival success, andthus the rationality shared by the community experiencing thesurvival of the fittest is reflected in competition. Athletescompeted in order to please gods; to conjure fertility, rain, orthe extension of life; or to expel demons. The process isdocumented in a variety of petroglyphs (cave paintings,engravings on stone) and in carvings or etchings on animal hornand metal, as well as in the first written testimony, in whichthe role of the stronger, the faster, the more agile wasevinced. Documents from all known cultures, regardless of theirgeographic coordinates, have in common the emphasis on thephysical as it acquired a symbolic status.

To understand how some biological characteristics improvedchances of survival means to understand the rationality of thebody. Its embodiment in the culture of physical awarenessfacilitated practical experiences of human self-constitution thatwould result in sports professions. The irrational element has todo with the fact that although all males and all females arestructurally the same, some individuals seem better endowedphysically. As with many other aspects of the practicalexperience through which each person acknowledges his or heridentity, what could not be clarified was placed in a domain ofexplanations where the rationality is lost. This is whyexpectations of rain, of longer life, of chasing away evil forcesare associated with sports. The cult of the body, in particularof body parts, resulted from experiences leading to awareness ofoneself. When the body, or parts of it, became a goal in itself,the rationality of physical fitness for survival is contradictedby the irrationality of fitness for reasons other thanindividual and communal well-being. Rituals, myths, religion, andpolitics appropriated the irrational component of physicalactivities. In ancient communities, in the context of a limitedunderstanding of physical phenomena, attempts were made to inferfrom the immediate well-being of the body of competing athletesto the future well-being of the entire community.

When it comes to physical fitness in the context of survival ofthe fittest, can we suppose that a lone human being stands out,something like the lonely animals on their own until the timefor pairing comes, competing with others, killing and beingkilled? Probably not. Scale defines the species as one thatascertains its self-constitution in cooperative efforts, nomatter how primitive. Up to a certain scale, the only competitionwas for survival. It translated into food and offspring. Onlyafter the agricultural phase, which corresponds to a level ofefficiency of more food than immediately necessary, the elementof competition shifts from survival to ascertainment.Competition and expectations of performance correspond to theperiod of incipient writing, and were progressively acknowledgedas part of the dynamics of communal life. Every other change inthe role of humankind brought with it expectations of physicalfitness corresponding to expected levels of efficiency.

Sports and self-constitution

Gymnastics is an expression of the cult of the body parallel tothat of art. In order to realize its dimensions, it needs to beseen from this broader perspective, not as a random set ofexercises. It has a physical and a metaphysical dimension, thelatter related to the obsession with ideal proportions thateventually were expressed in philosophic terms. There are plentyof explanations to be considered for both the origin of thepractical experience of sports and the forms this experience tookover centuries. Alluding to some explanations, though not inorder to endorse them, will help to show how diversity of sportsexperiences resulted in diversity of interpretations.

The basic assumption of this entire book, human self-constitutionin practical experiences, translates into the statement thatsports is not a reflective but a constitutive experience.Indeed, through running, jumping, wrestling, or otherwiseparticipating in some game, human beings project themselvesaccording to physical characteristics and mental coordinationthat facilitate physical performance in the reality of theirexistence. This projection is a direct way of identifying oneselfand thus of becoming part of an interacting group of people. Themajority of researchers studying the origins of sports identifythese in the experience of survival, thus placing them in theDarwinian evolutionist frame. When survival skills, maintenance,and reproduction skills become distinct and relativelyautonomous, they follow recurrent patterns on whose basis socialpractice takes place and new ideas are formulated.

From the perspective of today's jogger, running might seem anindividual experience, and to a great extent it is. Butfundamentally, running as a practical experience takes placeamong people sharing the notion of physical exercise andattaching to it social, cultural, economic, and medical meaning.We create ourselves not only when we write poetry, tend land, ormanufacture machines, but also when we are involved in athleticexperiences. There is in sports, as there is in any other form ofpractical experience, a natural, a cultural (what we learn fromothers and create with others), and a social (what is known ascommunication) dimension. The sports experience appears to us asthe result of the coordination of all these elements. Forsomeone attending a sports event, this coordination can become anobject of description: this much is due to training, this muchto natural attributes, and this much to social implications(pride, patriotism). This is why sports events sometimes appearto the spectator as having a predetermined meaning, not oneresulting from the dynamics of the interaction characteristic ofthis human experience. In the mytho-magical stage of humandynamics, in which the ability of the body was celebrated, themeaning seemed to drive the entire event more than it occurstoday in a game of hockey or football. Due to the syncreticnature of such events, rituals addressed existence in itsperceived totality. The specialized nature of games such ashockey or football leads these to address only one aspect ofexistence-the experience of the particular sport. A game candegenerate from being a competition structured by rules to aconfrontation of nerves, violence, or national pride, or intosheer exhibitionism, disconnected from the drive for victory.

Although the physical basis for the practical experience ofsports is the same- human beings as they evolved in time-indifferent cultures, different recurrent patterns and differentmeanings attached to them can be noticed. This statement does notalign itself with explanations of sports given in Freudiantradition, Marxist theory, or in Huizinga's model of the humanbeing as playful man (hom*o Ludens). It takes into considerationthe contextual nature of any form of human practice and looks atsports, as it does at any human experience, from the perspectiveof a constitutional, not representational, act; in short, fromthe pragmatic perspective. When Japanese players kick a ball inthe game called kemari, the recurrent pattern of interaction isnot the familiar football or soccer game, although each playerconstitutes his identity in the performance. When the Zen archertenses his bow, the pattern, associated with the search forunity with the universe, is quite different from the pattern ofarchery in Africa or of the archery competition at the Olympicgames of the past. The ball games of the Mayans relied on amythology which was itself a projection of the human being inquest of explaining and finding an answer to what distinguishesthe sun from the moon and how their influence affects patternsof human practice. It is probably easier to look at therecurrent patterns of interaction of more recent sportsexperiences not rooted in the symbolism of the ancient, such asbaseball, aquatic dancing, or ice skating, to understand whataspect of the human being is projected and what kind ofexperience results for the participants (athletes, sports fans,public, media). The surprising reality is the diversity. Peoplenever exhaust their imagination in devising new and newer formsof competition involving their physical aptitude. No lesssurprising is the pursuit of a standard experience, modeled inrules for the competition. Some are intrinsic to the effort (therules of the game), others to the appearance (expected clothing,for instance). Parallel to the standard experience, there isalso a deviant practice of sports (nonstandard), in forms ofindividual rules, ad hoc conventions, private competition. Thesocial level of sports and the private level are looselyconnected. 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 languageprofessional is pretty much in a similar situation. Literacyserves as the medium for encoding the rules.

Language and physical performance

But the subject here is not the similarity between sports andlanguage, but rather their interrelation. The obvious entry pointis to notice that we use language to describe the practicalexperience of sport and to assign meaning to it. As obvious asthis is, it is also misleading in the sense that it suggeststhat sports would not be possible without language-an ideaimplicit in the ideal of literacy. In ages when written languageemerged, sporting events become part of social life. Visualrepresentation (such as petroglyphs and the laterhieroglyphics), while not exactly a statement about theawareness of exercise, contain enough elements to confirm thatnot only immediate, purposeful physical activity (running aftera wild animal, for instance) and the exercise and maintenance ofthe physical were, at least indirectly, acknowledged. Testimonyto the effect that at a certain moment in time the communitystarted providing for the physically talented-in the tombs ofthe Egyptian Pharaoh Beni Hasan the whole gamut of wrestling isdocumented in detail-helps us understand that labor division andincreased efficiency are in a relation that goes far beyond causeand effect. The specialization, which probably started at thattime, resulted not just from the availability of resources, butalso from the willingness to allocate them in ways that make thesports experience possible because a certain necessity wasacknowledged.

The pattern of kicking a ball in kemari and the pattern oflanguage use in the same culture are not directly connected.Nevertheless, the game has a configurational nature: the aim isto maintain the ball in the air for as long as possible. Soccer,even football, are sequential: the aim is to score higher thanthe opposing team. In the first case, the field is marked byfour different trees: willow, cherry, pine, and maple. In thesecond, it is marked by artificial boundaries outside of whichthe game rules become meaningless. The languages of the culturesin which such games appeared are characterized by differentstructures that correspond to very different practicalexperiences. The logic embodied in each language system affects,in turn, the logic of the sports experience. Kemari is not onlynon-predicative and configurational, but also infused by theprinciple of amé, in which things are seen as deeplyinterdependent. Soccer and football are analytical, games ofplanning, texts whose final point is the goal or the touchdown.No surprise then, that mentality, as a form of expressing theinfluence 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 marketmentality plays a different role than in the past, it stillaffects sports in its non-standard form. These and otherdifferences are relevant to understanding how differentpractical experiences constitute different instances of humanobjectification, sports being one of these. Even when the sportsinstance is disconnected from the experience that made itnecessary, it is still affected by all the structural elementsthat define the pragmatic context. Indeed, while there is apermanency to sports-involvement of the human body-there is alsoa large degree of variation corresponding to successivepragmatic circ*mstances.

Sport is also a means of expression. During the action, itexternalizes physical capabilities, but also intellectualqualities: self-control, coordination, planning. Initially,physical performance complemented rudimentary language.Afterwards the two took different paths, without actually everseparating entirely (as the Greek Olympics fully document). Whenlanguage reached some of its relative limits, expression throughsports substituted for it: not even the highest literateexpression could capture the drama of competition, the tragedyof failure, or the sublimity of victory. But more interesting iswhat language extracted from the experience of sports. Languagecaptured characteristics of the sports experience and generalizedthem. Through language, they were submitted, in a new form, toexperiences very different from sports: sports for warfare,athletics for instilling a sense of order, competitions as circusfor the masses. But primarily, people derived from sports thenotion of competitiveness, accepted as a nationalcharacteristic, as well as a characteristic of education, of art,of the market.

Rationalized in language, the notion of competition introducesthe experience of comparing, later of measuring, and thus opensthe door to the bureaucracy of sports and the institutionalizedaspects we today take for granted. Greeks cared for the winner.Time-keeping devices were applied to sports later, moreprecisely at the time when keeping records became relevantwithin the broader pragmatics of documentary ownership andinheritance. While playing does not require language, writinghelped in establishing uniform rules that eventually definedgames. The institution of playing, represented by organizedcompetitions, is the result of the institution of literacy, andreflects pragmatic expectations pertinent to literacy.

In every sports experience, there is a romantic notion of natureand freedom, reminiscent of the experience of hunting, fishing,and foraging. But at the same time, sports experiences testifyto changes in the condition of human beings as they relate tothe natural environment, their natural condition, socialenvironment, and the artificial world resulting from humanpractice. Target shooting, or, more recently, Nintendo-typeaiming with laser beams, is at the other end of the gamut. Thecirc*mstances of human experience that made literacy necessaryaffected the status of the sports experience as well. Thecontest became a product with a particular status; the prizereflects the sign process through which competition isevaluated.

Allen Guttman distinguished several characteristics of modernsports: secularism, equality of opportunity, specialization ofroles, rationalization, bureaucratic organization,quantification, and quest for records. What he failed toacknowledge is that such characteristics are not relevant unlessconsidered in connection to the recurrent patterns of sportsseen against the background of the general pragmatic framework.Once we make such connections, we notice that efficiency is moreimportant than the so-called equality of opportunity,quantification, and bureaucratic organization. The quest forefficiency appropriate to the new scale of humankind is exactlywhat today affects literacy's degree of necessity.

The quest for efficiency in sports becomes evident when wecompare the changes from the very sophisticated, indeed obscure,rules governing sports performances in ritualistic cultures(Indian, Chinese, Mayan, Apache) with the tendency to simplifythese rules and make the sports experience as transparent aspossible. When certain African tribes adopted the modern game ofsoccer, they placed it in the context of their rituals. Theentire set of premises on which the game is based, and whichpertain to a culture so different from that of the Africantribes, was actually dismissed, and premises of a differentnature were attached as a frame for the adopted game.Consequently, the Inyanga (witch-doctor) became responsible forthe outcome; the team and supporters had to spend the nightbefore the game together around a campfire; goats weresacrificed. In such instances, the ceremony, not the game, is therecurrent pattern; winning or losing is of secondary importance.Once such tribes entered literate civilization, the utilitarianaspect became dominant. If we take European soccer and extend itto the American game of football, we can understand how newpatterns are established according to conditions of humanpractice of a different structural nature. This discussioncannot be limited to the symbolism of the two games, or of anyother sport. The attached meaning corresponds to the interpretedpractical experience and does not properly substitute for therecurrent patterns which actually constitute the experience as aprojection of the humans involved.

What is of interest here is that literacy was a powerfulinstrument for structuring practical experiences, such as sports(among others), in the framework of a dynamics of interactionspecific to industrial society. As the cradle of the industrialage, England is also the place where many sports and experiencesassociated with physical exercise started. But once the dynamicschanged, some of the developments that the Industrial Revolutionmade necessary became obsolete. An example is national isolation.Literacy is an instrument of national distinction. By theirnature, sports experiences are, or should be, above and beyondartificial national boundaries. Still, as past experiences show(the 1936 Olympics in Berlin was only the climax) and currentexperiences confirm (national obsession with medals in morerecent Olympics), sports in the civilization of literacy, likemany other practical experiences, is tainted by nationalism.Competition often degenerates into an adversarial relation andconflict. In the physical exercises of ancient Greece, China, orIndia, performance was not measured. The patterns were those ofphysical harmony, not of comparison; of aesthetics, not offunctionality. In England, sports became an institution, andperformance entered into the record books. Indeed, in England,the history of competitions was written to justify why sportswere for the upper, educated classes, and should be kept foramateurs willing to enjoy victory as a reward.

Some games were invented in the environment of the civilizationof literacy and meant to accomplish functions similar to thosefulfilled by literacy. They changed as the conditions of thepractice of literacy changed, and became more and more anexpression of the new civilization of more languages of a limiteddomain. In the information age, where much of language issubstituted by other means of expression, sports are anexperience that results primarily in generating data. For someoneattracted by the beauty of a tennis game, the speed of a serve isof secondary relevance. But after a while, one realizes thattennis has changed from its literate condition to a condition inwhich victory means obliteration of the game. A very strong andfast 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 expertsfind more enjoyment than from the actual event. The dynamics ofchanges in the nature and purpose of sports is related to whatmakes the sports experience today another instance in theprocess of diversification of languages and the demotion of thenecessity of literacy.

The illiterate champion

The dynamics of the change from the sports experience embodyingthe ideal of a harmoniously developed human being to that ofhigh performance is basically the same as the dynamics of changebehind any other form of human projection. Structurally, itconsists of the transition from direct forms of interaction withthe outside world to more and more mediated interrelations.Chasing an animal that will eventually be caught and eaten is aperformance directly related to survival. In addition to thephysical aspect, there are other elements that intervene in therelation hunter-hunted: how to mask the presence of one's odorfrom the prey; how to attract game (through noise or lure); howto minimize energy expended to succeed (where to hit the prey,and when). Ritual, magic, and superstition were added, but didnot always enhance the outcome.

Running for the maintenance and improvement of physical qualitiesis immediate, but still less direct in relation to the outcomethan in hunting. The activity displays an understanding ofconnections: What do muscle tone, heartbeat, resilience, andvolition have to do with our life and work, with our health? Italso testifies to our efforts to preserve a certain sense oftime and space (lost in the artificial environments of our homesor workplaces) and projects sheer physical existence. Running forpleasure, as we suppose animals do when young and enjoyingsecurity (think about puppies!) is different from running with apurpose such as hunting an animal, catching someone (friend orfoe), running after a ball, or against a record. Running forsurvival is not a specialized experience; running in a war gameimplies some specialization; becoming the world champion infield and track is a specialized effort for whose outcome manypeople work. In the first case, the reason is immediate; in thesecond, less direct; in the third, mediated in several ways: thenotion of running to compete, the distance accepted by allinvolved (athletes, spectators, organizations), the valueattached, the meaning assigned, the means used in training anddiet, the running costume. Before specialization, which isexclusive commitment to a particular practical experience,socially acknowledged selection took place. Not everybody had thephysical and mental qualities appropriate to high sportsperformance. In the background, the market continuouslyevaluates what becomes, to variable degrees, a marketableproduct: the champion. In the process, the human being undergoesalienation, sometimes evinced through pain, other timesignored-books never read don't hurt. People tend to remember thefestive moments in a champion's life, forgetting what leads tovictory: hard work, difficult choices, numerous sacrifices, andthe hardship inflicted on the bodies and minds engaged in theeffort of extracting the maximum from the athlete.

How literate should an athlete be? The question is not differentfrom how literate a worker, farmer, engineer, ballerina, orscientist should be. Sports and literacy used to be tightlyassociated 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 ina healthy body-was understood along the line of the practicalexperience involving literacy as a rule for achieving highefficiency in sports. Some forms of sport are a projection fromlanguage and literacy to the physical experience. Tennis is oneexample, and possibly the best known. Such forms of sport weredesigned by literates and disseminated through the channels ofliteracy. Collegiate sports is their collective name. But oncethe necessity of literacy itself became less stringent, suchsports started emancipating themselves from the confinements oflanguage and developed their own languages. When winning becamethe aim, efficiency in specific sports terms became paramount andstarted being measured and recorded.

Literates are not necessarily the most efficient in sports wherephysical 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 statementmight seem tainted by stereotype or prejudice to which one fallsprey when generalizing from a distorted past practicalexperience (affected by all kinds of rules, including those ofsex and race discrimination). What is discussed here is not thestereotypical illiterate athlete, or the no less stereotypicalaristocrat handling Latin and his horse with the same elegance,but the environment of sports in general. People involved in thepractical experience of sports are sometimes seen asexceptionally endowed physically, and less so intellectually.This does not have to be so; there is really nothing inherent insports that would result in the intellect-physique dichotomy, oneto the detriment of the other. Examples of athletes who alsoachieved a high level of intellectual development can be given:Dr. Roger Bannister, the runner who broke the four-minute milebarrier; William Bradley, the former basketball player who becamea United States senator; Michael Reed, once defense lineman whois now a concert pianist; Jerry Lucas, now a writer; MichaelLenice, a wide receiver who became a Rhodes Scholar. They are,nevertheless, the exception, not because one kind of experienceis counterproductive to the other, but because the expectationsof efficiency make it very difficult for one and the same personto perform at comparable levels as athletes and asintellectuals. Specialization in sports, no less than in anyhuman 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, alimited notion of sports literacy, i.e., control of the languageof sports, allows for improved performance. It is relevant toanalyze how today's sports experience requires the specializedlanguage and the understanding of what makes higher performance,and thus higher efficiency, possible. Once sport is understoodas a practical experience of human self- constitution, we canexamine the type of knowledge and skill needed to reach thehighest efficiency. Knowledge of the human body, nutrition,physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology is important.Information focused on reaching high performance has beenaccumulated for each form of physical exercise. As a result ofthe experience itself, as well as through import of pertinentknowledge from other domains of human activity, expertisebecomes more and more focused. In some ways, the commonalty ofthe experience diminished while the specific aspect increased.

For instance, on the basketball court, as we see it in variousneighborhoods, playing is the major goal. Rules are looselyrespected; players exert themselves for the pleasure of theeffort. One meets others, establishes friendships, finds a usefulway of getting physical exercise. On the professional basketballteam, various experts coordinated by a coach make possible anexperience of efficiency predictable to a great extent,programmable within limits, original to some measure. The effortto coordinate is facilitated through natural language; but theexpectation of efficiency in achieving a goal-winning thegame-extends beyond the experience constituted in andcommunicated through language. Games are minutely diagrammed; theadversary's plays are analyzed from videotapes; new tactics areconceived, and new strategies followed. In the end, the languageof the game itself becomes the medium for the new gameobjectives. In the last 30 seconds of a very tight game, eachstep is calculated, each pass evaluated, each fault (and thecorresponding time) pre-programmed.

Technology mediates and supports sports performance in ways fewwould imagine when watching a volleyball team in action or arunner reaching the finish line. There are ways, not at allrequiring the tools of literacy. To capture recurrent patternscharacteristic of high efficiency performance and to emulate orimprove them, adapt them to the type of sportsperson preparedfor a certain contest, becomes part of the broader experience.Indeed, boundaries are often broken, rules are bent, andvictories are achieved through means which do not exactlypreserve the noble ideal of equal opportunity or of fairness.

Sports experiences were always at the borderline. A broken rulebecame the new rule. Extraneous elements (mystical,superstitious, medical, technological, psychological) werebrought into the effort to maximize sports performance. Theentire story of drugs and steroids used to enhance athleticprowess has to be seen from the same perspective of efficiencyagainst the background of generalized illiteracy. The languagesof stimuli, strategies, and technology are related, even if someappear less immoral or less dangerous. As drugs become moresophisticated, it is very difficult to assess which new recordis the result of pure sports and which of biochemistry. And it isindeed sad to see sportsmen and sportswomen policed in theirprivate functions in order to determine how much effort, howmuch talent, or how much steroid is embodied in a performance.

Stories of deception practiced within the former totalitarianstates of Europe might scare through gruesome detail. Peoplerisked their lives for the illusion of victory and theprivileges associated with it. But after the ideological level isremoved, we face the illiterate attitude of means and methodsintended to extract the maximum from the human being, even atthe price of destroying the person. Whether a state encouragesand supports these means, or a free market makes them available,is a question of responsibility in the final analysis. Factsremain facts, and as facts they testify to the commercialdemocracy in which one has access to means that bring victory andreward, just as they bring the desired cars, clothes, houses,alcohol, food, or art collections. Among the records broken atthe Olympic games in Atlanta is the number of samples collectedfor doping control (amounting to almost 20 percent of the numberof athletes).

American football is possibly the first post-modern game in thatit appropriates from the old for use in a new age. ComparingAmerican football with sports of different pragmaticframeworks-to tennis, volleyball, or rugby-one can notice thespecialization, mediation, new dynamics, and language of thegame. There are twenty- two positions and special formations forplace kicks, kick-offs, and receiving. There are also supportpersonnel for different functions: owners, managers, coaches,trainers, scouts, doctors, recruiters, and agents. The game isburdened with literacy-based assumptions: it is as totalitarianas any language, although its elementary repertory is quitereduced-running, blocking, tackling, catching, throwing, kicking.Rules implicit in the civilization of literacy-all know thelanguage and use it according to its rule, sequentiality,centralism-are observed. The word signal, snap numbers, colorcode, and play name are part of the semiosis. It is a minimalrule experience, which seems a comedy to someone who neverwatched it before. The players are dressed in ridiculous gear.They seem actors in a cheap show, and act according to plansshared through private code.

As opposed to many games that we can only sketchily retrace tosomeplace back in history, we know how all this came about inAmerican football. The goal was no longer the game, as it was inits early history as a college sports, but winning. A moreefficient game required more efficient football machines,specialized in a limited repertory, present only for theduration of their task. The game acquired a configurationalaspect, takes place at many levels, requires distribution oftasks, and relies upon networks of communication for maintainingsome sense of integration. Its violence, different from thestaged buffoonery of wrestling, is in sync with the spirit ofbelligerence implicit in today's competitive environment: "Weteach our boys to spear and gore…. We want them to plant thathelmet right under a guy's chin." (Woody Hayes, legendary coachat Ohio State University, better known for its football team thanits academic standards). There is physical involvement, injury,steroids, drugs, illicit money-and there are statistics. Thespirit of the game is disseminated to other sports and otheraspects of life (business, politics). In the case of baseball,the statistics are most important. They attach to each gestureon the field a meaning which otherwise would escape the mind ofthe viewer. In games of a more continuous flow (soccer, tennis,handball), the attraction is in the particular phase, not in thenumber of yards gained or the average (hits, home runs,strike-outs).

The general dynamics of existence and human interaction in thecivilization of illiteracy also marked the dynamics of thepractical experience of sports. Higher speed, shorterencounters, short action spans-these make the sports event moremarketable in the environment of the new civilization. The moreprecise the experience, the less expressive. Almost no onewatched the compulsory ice skating exercises at worldchampionships, and so they were canceled, but millions enjoy thedramatics of dancing on ice that is becoming more and more ashow 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 afast, dangerous downhill race. These characteristics aredefinitive of the civilization of illiteracy. People do not wantto learn how to perform at the same level; knowledge isirrelevant. Performance is what attracts, and it is the onlything which gains prizes that the winner of the ancientOlympics, who was also spoiled, never dreamed of. "Winner takeall" is the final rule, and the result is that winning, morethan competing, has become the goal.

The efficiency requirement leads not only to the relativeilliteracy of those involved in sports, but also to a practiceof discriminatory physical selection. In the USA, for instance,black African-Americans dominate football and basketball, whichhave become national obsessions. If equal opportunity wereapplied to professional sports as it is to other activities, thecompetitions would not be so attractive. The irony of thissituation is that, in fact, black African-Americans are stillentertainment providers in the USA. Regardless of how profitableprofessional sports are, the obsession with efficiencyeffectively consecrates an important segment of the population toentertaining the rest. Blacks are also playing in the mostadvanced major basketball leagues in the world. In what used tobe the Soviet Union, chances were that the winter sports teamswould be recruited from the Siberian population, where skiing isa way of life. All over Europe, soccer teams recruit from Spain,Italy, Africa, and South America. It is easier to attain maximumefficiency through those endowed with qualities required by thenew goals of the games instead of creating a broad base ofeducated athletes.

The public, hom*ogenized through the mediating action oftelevision, is subjected to the language of the sportsexperience and is presented with performance and interpretationat the same time. Thus, even the mechanism of assigning meaningis rationalized, taken over by the market mechanism, freed fromthe constraints of literacy and reason, and rendered to humansubjects without requiring that they think about it.

Blaming changes in sports, or for that matter in literacy, thecondition 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 ofsports. Yes, the greatly celebrated champions are illiterate. Nomatter how good in their political game of finding excuses andalibis, colleges care for the high performances of physicallygifted students, recruited only insofar as they add to themarketability of the institution, not to the academic entryrequirements. Literacy is not a prerequisite for sportsperformance. It might actually interfere with it. In the worldof competitions, sportsmen and sportswomen are either jettingaround the globe or traveling from one exhibition game toanother, barely able to breathe, never mind to take care of theirliteracy or their private lives. Their language is one ofpitiful limitation, always inferior to the energy spent in theeffort or externalized in frustration when the rules don't workin their favor. They don't read, they don't write. Even theirchecks are signed by others. The description might be somewhatextreme and sound harsh, and the attitude might seemimpertinent, but after all, it is not because sportsmen andsportswomen know Shakespeare's sonnets by heart that peoplewatch baseball, nor because they write novels (or even shortstories) that the public applauds the ice skating dancers, andeven less that they keep diaries, with minimal spelling errorsand full sentences, that spectators die to be on the stand ofthe stadium where the drama of football starts in the fall andends shortly before another sports takes over the media.

Sports are marketable work, of high intensities and no literatestatus. The efficiency of each sport is measured in theattraction it exercises over many people, and thus in theability 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 tothe ideal of the complete human being, sport is as specialized asany other form of human praxis. Sports constituted their owndomains of competence and performance, and generate expectationsof partial sport literacies. That in the process, because theyaddress physical attributes and intellectual functions, sportsbecame a molding machine for the athletes, another nature,should not go without saying or understanding what it takes tosucceed. All over the world, where efficiency reached levelscorresponding to the new scale of humankind, football,basketball, soccer, and tennis players, swimmers, runners, andgymnasts are created almost from scratch. Experts selectchildren, analyze their genetic history and current condition,devise training procedures, and control diet, psychology, andemotional life until the desired performer is ready to compete.

Gentlemen, place your bets!

The investment in sports, as in the stock market, is supposed toreturn profit. Successful sportspeople need not testify to howhigh their own return is. That this return also meanscompromised physical or mental integrity is part of the cynicalequation that the public enthusiastically validates. Whenplayers are traded and contracts are signed, the money theyearn, disproportionate as it seems at times, corresponds, almostto the last digit, to the number of people who will watch them,some for the sake and pleasure of the performance, others makingmoney from a team's victory or an athlete's record. In somestates and countries, whether betting is legal or prohibited, itis by far the strongest sector of the economy. It takes veryinteresting forms, however. One is the direct bet: this horse,this player, this team.

Betting, with its partial literacy involving its own mediatingelements that render reading and writing useless, is not a newinstitution. People were challenged by the odds down throughhistory. But once the structural change that entailed means ofnetworking, task distribution, and almost instant access to anyevent in the world was in place, the experience of bettingtotally took over that of competing. All our unfulfilled desiresand 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 mundanestake-the actual wager. Expectation of high figures is anextension of literate expectations. It embodies the naiveassumption that cultivated minds and challenged bodies unite ina balanced personality of high integrity. The reason this modelfailed over and over need not be restated here. But the pointneeds to be made that the ideal stake and the trivial stake arenot independent. This introduces to competition an element ofobscurity 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. Onthe never- ending table of Olympic records, the most spectacularperformances are dollar signs preceding figures into thebillions. Within the general shift from manufacturing to serviceeconomy characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy, sportbecomes a form of entertainment. New media, replacing theprinted word as the dominant means of communication, makespossible international viewing of competitions as they happen.In the past, we were satisfied with the image of the winner. Nowwe can own the tape of the game and can retrieve each moment ofany event. More broadband, and soon we will download the runningathlete 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, orSydney), even able to pay for forty-five minutes or a whole weekof shaping up with the very best trainers. Facts in the world ofsports, as much as in the rest of our activities, are lessimportant than the image. The authority and self-discipline, onwhich physical education was built, are replaced by the freedomand opportunity to choose from among many sports events, and byan attitude of permissiveness and self-indulgence which manytimes results in considering the whole world as a sports show.Sports are used to further many causes and support manyinterest groups. On the stage of the events they sponsor, theworld's largest companies compete with feminism, equalopportunity, AIDS, and various disabilities for the attentionand dollars of the audience. Sponsorship is a highly selectiveexperience. Nevertheless, it frequently contradicts the slogansit sets before the public. These are important because theindirect bet on sports takes into consideration the huge marketof entertainment, and defines within this market the segments itwill address.

Product endorsem*nts, advertising, and public relations are themedia through which marketing places its bets. No less than500,000 brands were traded in Atlanta. Only to keep track ofthem was a major task, described officially as "protecting theintegrity of the Olympic Games and the rights of officialsponsors," but also "detecting attempts at parasiticmarketing." Every square inch on the body of a tennis player or atrack and field athlete can be rented. And is. The better themanager (not necessarily a player's game), the higher theendorsem*nt contract. The minute detail picked up by the cameraallows us to see the name of the maker on the watch, themanufacturer's logo on the socks, a sponsor company's name onthe shirts and headgear, the brand of glucose or mineral water,the maker of ice or snow for winter games. It seems that thecompetition on the court and the competition among those who buythe space available on cyclists' ware, football players'uniforms, skiers, swimmers, runners, and chess players arefeeding off one another. When the Canon company chose as itsprime-time advertising actor a tennis player who did not make itbeyond the preliminary games, the bet continued on the waves, onthe screens, on the videotapes, and on any other imaginabledisplay.

Marshall McLuhan plays year after year in the Superbowl. Theworld indeed becomes a village. Moreover, the world has almostdecided that the outcome is less important than the newcommercials, the new thirty-second drama, followed by thenumbers telling us all how much more a second of prime timecosts, and what benefits it might bring. But the message isactually lost. Here McLuhan was still somehow captive toliteracy, believing there was a message, as we are used to whenwriting or reading a text. The message is the sneaker, orwhatever will take over, for its own short turn in the glory ofconsumption, the world. The day the object is acknowledged,between New York and Zambia, Paris and the tribes in theBrazilian rain forests, Frankfurt and the starving populationsof Africa or Asia, there will be a trade in the original and itsmany substitutes, reaching sheer madness. Sports entrusted withthe marketing image are equalled in their persuasive power onlyby the entertainment stars, of similar illiterate condition,singing for the world's hungriest only in order to add one moremarketing craze to their torment.

In these and in other characteristics mentioned, the unnaturalaspect of sports takes over their original, natural component.It seems almost as though the sports experience is falling intoitself, is imploding, leaving room for the many machines andgadgets we use at home in order to salvage our degeneratingbodies. Now we still bicycle, ski, climb stairs, and row in theprivacy of our rooms, with our eyes glued to the images of thevery few who still do the real thing, but for reasons less andless connected with excellence. Soon we will swim in the poolsand ski on the slopes of virtual reality. Some are alreadytiming their performance. Little do they know that they arepioneering 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, Underthe tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, willnot 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 cyclesinvolved in the review process prior to academic publication donot come into the picture. On Web sites dedicated to research,the review process consists of acknowledging, challenging, andfurthering breakthrough hypotheses. It is carried out by realpeers, not by the geriatric or opportunistic hierarchies thathave 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 ofthe shared knowledge, already available in formats that can beinputted for further work or can be technologically tested.

Of course, there are many issues connected to the new dynamics ofscience, not the least of which is intellectual property andintegrity. A totally new experience in research and knowledgedissemination is taking place. The majority of the researchersinvolved know that previous models, originating in the pragmaticsof the civilization of literacy, will not provide answers. Asbeautiful as the science embodied in the technology ofindustrial society is, it will not, not even accidentally,contribute to the scientific progress in nanotechnology, inbioinformatics, in fluid dynamics, and in other frontier domainsresearched today. Gene expression and protein syntheses are manyworking centuries-the total of the years contributed byresearchers to the advancement of their respective fields-aheadof everything that science has produced in the past. Add tothese accomplishments in the ever-expanding list of modernsciences, and you get the feeling that humankind is literallyreinventing itself in the civilization of illiteracy.

The list to follow is telling of the shift from the coarse levelof scientific effort corresponding to the industrial operationsof milling and grinding, to a level of atomic and sub-atomicre-ordering. The same components, differently ordered, can appearto us as graphite or diamonds, sand or silicon for chips. Thelist represents a reality of enormous consequence, confirmed inthe daily commotion of a never-ending series of discoveries.Life on Mars, molecular self-assembly, protein folding, atomicresolution imaging, nano-structural materials with unprecedentedproperties, quantum devices, advances in neuro-medicine-the listis a shameless exercise in creating headlines, soon to bereplaced by newer and more creative endeavors. This is why, inaddressing issues of science and philosophy, I do not intend tooffer a catalogue of current research, but to put the subject ina dynamic perspective. By all means, I want to avoid the dangerof presenting science especially as the agent of change, asthough its own motivations and means could give humankind itsdirection and purpose.

Rationality, reason, and the scale of things

The dynamics of change in scientific and philosophic thinking isnot independent of the underlying structure of the pragmaticsthat leads to the civilization of illiteracy. Both involverationality, which connects human practical experiences toconsistent 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 toefficiency insofar as it is applied in the selection of meansappropriate to accomplishing goals; or it serves as aninstrument for evaluation of the premises leading to a selectedcourse of action. In short, rationality is goal oriented. Reason,in turn, is value oriented; it guides practical experiences ofhuman 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 emotioncan be diagrammed in the matrix of living and working that theyconstituted under the guise of literacy.

The process through which human rationality and reason becomecharacteristics of human self-constitution is long and tortuous.People defining themselves in different pragmatic contexts enterinto a network of interdependency. At a very small scale ofhuman existence and activity, rationality and reason wereindistinguishable. They began to differentiate early on, alreadyduring hunting and gathering. But during the long experience ofsettlement and taking care of plants and animals, they grew awareof the distinction between what they were doing and how. With theculture of artifacts, to which tools belong, reason andrationality took separate paths. With the advent of science, inits 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. Thereis a rationality-goal oriented: how to get more goods, how toavoid losses-with the appearance of reason-actions to pleaseforces supposed to control nature or matter. Parallel toscience, magic manifested itself through alchemy, astrology, andnumerology, all focused on the attempt to harmonize human beings,constituted in practical experiences focused on goodness, withthe world housing them. In some cultures, rationality resultedin the propensity to face, change, and eventually dominatenature-that is, to submit the environment to a desired order.Reason aimed at finding practical grounds for harmony withnature.

After the phase of orality, writing served both of them equally.It made language a mold for new experiences, a container forstoring knowledge, and an effective means for the practicalexperience of evaluation and self-evaluation. The overwhelmingmajority of human accomplishments leading to the possibility andnecessity of literacy were connected to the experience of humanself-constitution in writing. The science and philosophy uponwhich the scientific revolution and the revival of humanities (inparticular philosophy) of the 16th and 17th centuries took placeare deeply rooted in the pragmatics that made writing necessary.This revolution is usually summarized through three mainaccomplishments. First: a new picture of the universe,scientifically expressed in heliocentric astronomy andphilosophically a turning point in understanding the role of thehuman being in this world. Second: the mathematical descriptionof motion. Third: the new conceptual framework of mechanics. Asimpressive as they are, their meaning is revealed in the factthat the Industrial Revolution was actually triggered by thescientific and humanistic renewal embodied in theseaccomplishments. The change from an agrarian economy,appropriate to a relatively reduced scale of population andwork, to industrial production changed efficiency by orders ofmagnitude corresponding to those of the critical mass reachedby humankind. All the characteristics of this newpragmatics-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, scienceprogressively assumed the leading role over philosophy. In fact,science changed from an elitist practical experience stronglycontrolled by the guardians of literacy (i.e., religion) to anexperience integrated in society. Philosophy followed an inversepath, from a generalized attitude of wonder to becoming theprivilege of the few who could afford to contemplate the world.Generalized in technology, the rationality of science reached itspeak in the civilization of literacy through standardization andmass production of processed food, means of transportation(cars, airplanes), home building, and the use of electricity asthe efficient alternative energy source. But the real challengewas yet to come.

Einstein took a daring guess. "The tragedy of modern men…isthat they created conditions of existence for which, from theperspective of their phylogenetic development, they are notadjusted." The lost balance between rationality and reason isreflected in the image of all the consequences of the IndustrialRevolution that led to the runaway capitalism of the 19th and20th centuries. Exhaustion of raw materials, air and waterpollution, erosion of productive land, and mental and physicalstrain on humans are the concrete results of this imbalance.

But if these consequences were all people and society had to copewith, the dominance of literacy in science would still bedefensible. The challenge comes from the new scale of humankindfor which the Industrial Revolution model and literacy are nolonger adequate. Efficiency expectations, of an order ofmagnitude incompatible with the underlying structure of thepragmatic framework based on literacy, result in the need for anew dynamics, for mediation, acknowledgment and use ofnon-linearity, vagueness, and non-determinism. Science, as wellas the implicit philosophic component of this new science,already approached areas of knowledge beyond the borderlineguarded by literacy. On the initial success of micro-physics, thefirst non- literacy-based technological challenge for more energywas met in the form of relatively rudimentary weapons. In themeanwhile, it became clear that a new physics and a newchemistry, and a new biology, along with many disciplinesnon-existent within literacy, of a systemic focus with qualityand process is what we need. Some of the scientific themesmentioned already illustrate how science is evolving. They alsoillustrate how a new epistemological condition is established,one that is based on projecting explanatory models upon theworld and testing them for appropriateness and coherence. In thelead are practical experiences of science driven by cognitiveresources no longer constrained by observation. What is free ofepistemological doubt is that almost all the science that hasemerged has reclaimed interest in the living. These newsciences, which are philosophies at the same time, arecomputationally disclosed biophysics, biochemistry, molecularbiology, genetics, medicine, and knowledge of the micro- andnano-universe.

Literacy, because of its inherent structural characteristics, isno longer the appropriate mold for such new experiences, theproper container for knowledge, or even an effective means ofevaluation. Among many possible literacies, it maintains adomain of appropriateness, and within this domain it allows forlocal performance synchronized with the general expectation ofefficiency. The shift from literacy to literacies-in fact, theshift to the pragmatic framework of the civilization ofilliteracy- takes place against the background of conflictbetween means of restricted efficiency and new means for copingwith larger populations, and with the newly acquired right towell-being, or even affluence. Almost all new sciences evolve innew technologies. We are already familiar with some, since wewere told that from science programs (space exploration, geneticresearch, biophysics), products as trivial as calculators,thermal fabric, and new construction materials were madeavailable at prices affordable in the global economy. We aregetting used to others as they become available: intelligentmaterials able to alter their structure, and self-assemblingmaterials.

Thinking about thinking

One dominant inherited assumption is that thinking takes placeonly in language; that is, that language is the medium ofthinking. This is a very difficult subject to deal with because,despite claims to the contrary, some people (Einstein is mostquoted witness) maintain that they think in images, others insounds, others in some combination of shapes, colors, textures,even odor and taste. Until now, no one could conclusively provewhether this is a way of speaking or a fact. But the same can besaid of language. That we can express thoughts, sometimesfrustratingly incomplete, in language does not necessarily meanthat we think in language, or only in language. That language isa medium for explanation and interpretation, well adapted tosupport incomplete inductions or deductions, and sometimeshypothetical thinking (so-called abductions), is not necessarilythe proof that it is the only one. Scientists think in thelanguage of mathematical or logical formalism, or in some of thenew programming languages, even if they do not carry on dialogueor try to write poetry or love letters in such languages.

Literacy, as a socially encompassing ideal, states that peopleshould be literate because people think in language.Accordingly, proper use of language, as set forth in the rulesof literacy, is a premise for successful thinking. Besidesintroducing circularity-the premise turns out to be theconclusion-this is a strong assumption, with too manyimplications for science and for philosophy to be leftunchallenged. The assumption was never entirely proven; and itis probably impossible to prove, given the strong connectionbetween all signs participating in thinking processes. Imagescall up words, but so do odors, flavors, textures, and sounds.Words recall or trigger images, music, etc. The integratednature of thinking is probably affected by mechanisms ofvoluntary decision-making or by genetic mechanisms structured toaccept a certain sign system (language, mathematical formalism,diagrams) as dominant, without precluding modes of thoughtdifferent from those resulting from the premise of literacy.

If defining thinking as language processing resulted in humanexperiences possible only under this assumption, there are alsoother ways to define thinking which, in turn, may become, ifthey haven't yet, necessary and beneficial. In this respect, onequestion can be raised: Are thinking machines, i.e., programsable to autonomously perform operations we associate with humanthinking, excluded from the discussion because they do notqualify as literate? Many scientific endeavors of our time wouldnot have started if potential success were to be put to aliteracy test. The area of new materials, able to fixthemselves, and of machines resulting from self-assembly belongamong our examples. Fortunately, science based on alternativepractical human experiences, fairly independent of language andliteracy, discovered that there are alternative ways to definethinking, and rationality, for that matter. Considering thinkingtogether with other human traits, such as emotion, sense ofhumor, aesthetics, the ability to project ideas through variousmedia, senses or languages will probably lead to even moredaring scientific research.

Before considering alternative ways to define thinking and therelation between rationality and human reason, let us look atthe characteristics of thinking in current praxis, science andphilosophy included. The amount of language we need to functionin the workplace and in social life has diminished in comparisonto previous circ*mstances of human experience. If thinking tookplace only in language, that would mean that thinking itself hasdiminished. Very few people would be inclined to accept thisconclusion. The small subset of language used in social life andin professional interaction is representative of the segmentednature of this life and of the interactions it supports. Thissmall subset of language, the command of which does not requireliteracy skills, is composed of social stereotypes, but is notsufficient to constitute a medium for thinking. Parallel to thediminished subset of natural language, the languages of scienceand technology expanded as expectations of scientific andtechnological efficiency increased. Expressions in the smallsubset of natural language that people use in order to functionare generated regardless of the requirement of variety andchange in our reciprocal relations. As canned expressions oflimited function, they are taken over from previouscirc*mstances, and used independently of what once determinedtheir need. Chances are that an illiterate neighbor will never benoticed since everything pertaining to the social status of sucha neighbor is literacy independent: driving, washing clothes,cooking, banking, telephoning, watching television, connectingto the Internet. The trained illiterate can perform these tasksand those pertinent to work perfectly without ever displaying aliteracy handicap. No doubt that the new machines, newmaterials, new foods, and new medicines that are more at thefrontiers of science than in the mainstream of living and workingwill further affect the need and possibility of a civilizationdominated by more than one of its means of expression andcommunication.

People can function as illiterates in societies of extremespecialization without being noticed as illiterates and withoutaffecting the efficiency of the system to which they belongbecause their own involvement in the functioning of the world inwhich they live is changing. Illiterate rationality is no lessgoal oriented than any other rationality. It is just expressedthrough other means. And it is no less concerned with predictingthe behavior of systems driven by languages of extremefunctionality, working regardless of the literacy of theoperators. Scientific literacy is either stored in skills,through training, or in the systems operated by people who knowless 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 tosustain dialogue might be telling something about thinking,too-for instance, that forms of thinking based on sign systemsother than language are more effective, or more appropriate towhat people do in our days; or even that appropriateness in oneparticular sign system does not translate into appropriatenessand effectiveness in another practical experience. No wonderthat science, in addition to reasons implicit in the nature ofscientific inquiry, shies away from language, from itsimprecision, ambiguity, and tendency to coalesce in stereotypes,or become stereotypes under circ*mstances of patterned use.Philosophy, by and large, follows the same tendency, althoughits alternatives are not comparable to those of science. Theexperience of science, and to a more limited degree that ofphilosophy, is simultaneously an experience in generatinglanguage capable of handling continuity, vagueness, and fuzzyrelations. Spatial reasoning and replication of phenomena,usually associated with the living as aspects of common-senseknowledge, are also constitutive of the new science.

Extremely specialized human practical experiences are no longerpredominantly experiences based on knowledge, but onconstituting the person as information integrator. Thecontinuous diminution of the need to think corresponds to theextreme segmentation of work and to the successful technologicalintegration of various partial contributions resulting from thishighly efficient segmented and mediated work. In one'sindividual life, in activities pertinent to self-maintenance(nourishment, rest, hygiene, enjoyment), the process is thesame. Thinking is focused on selection: cooking one from manypre-processed meals at home, dressing in one from among manyready- made clothing items, living in pre-fabricated homes,washing objects in programmed machines. But the objects embodysomeone else's thinking. The reified thinking projected intogene manipulation, materials, and machines leads to a reductionof live thinking. People integrate themselves in the informationnetwork, and for a greater part of their existence they act asinformation processors: heat something until it pops; snap orzip to close; press a button that will adjust water temperatureand 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; thusit is rationalized away from the process of individualself-constitution. As tremendous as the consequences can be,they will be infinitely more dangerous if we do not startthinking 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 integratethemselves into the program embodying high efficiencyrationality and reason. Today, knowledge of what goes into food,how preparation affects its qualities, what makes for a goodshirt or sweater, what makes for a good house, what it means towash, and how a material is affected by certain chemicals andwater temperatures are rendered irrelevant. What matters is theresult, not the process. What counts is efficiency, notindividual know-how. Thinking is detached from thinking in thesense that all thinking, and thus rationality, is embodiedoutside the self-constituted human being. The appearance is thatthis outside thinking and this outside rationality have a life oftheir own. Memetic mechanisms are a testimony to the process.

In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience not only thebenefits of high efficiency, but also the self-perpetuatingdrive of new pragmatic means. At times it appears that humans donot compete for achieving higher levels of creativity andproductivity. Affluence appears as a given that takes over theneed to match efficiency expectations characteristic of theglobal scale of humankind. To keep pace with technologicalprogress and with scientific renewal becomes a rationale initself, somehow disconnected from human reason. The confusingrationality of ever- increasing choices is matched by thefrustrating realization that value options literally disappear,leaving no room for sensible reasoning. As a result, social andpolitical aspects of human existence are short circuited, inparticular those affecting the status of science and thecondition of philosophy. Frequently, research is questioned as towhether its goals make sense at all. Only 15 years ago, half ofthe population in the USA suspected that science and thetechnology it fosters were the cause rather than the cure ofmany problems faced in the country, social problems included. Thebalance changed, but not the attitude of those captive toliteracy's goals and values, who oppose science and thehumanities instead of seeing them in their necessary, althoughcontradictory, unity.

Quo vadis science?

Discovery and explanation

From among the many levels at which the issue of language inrelation to science is relevant, two are critical: discovery andexplanation. In all fairness, it should be said that literacynever claimed to be a way towards scientific discovery, or thatlanguage is the instrument making discovery possible. The mainclaim is that access to science, and thus the possibility tocontinue scientific work, is primarily through language. Thisassertion was correct in the past as long as scientific practicetook place in a hom*ogeneous cognitive context of sharedrepresentations of time and space. Once this context changed,the built-in language metrics of experience, what is called theratio, the shared measure, started to get in the way of newdiscoveries and efficient explanations of previous discoveries.Among the many new codes scientists use today, symbolicreasoning (used in mathematics, logic, genetics, informationscience, etc.) is the most pervasive. All in all, a transitionhas been made from a centralized scientific practice to newexperiences, which are quite often independent of each other andbetter adapted to the scale of the particular phenomenon ofinterest. This independence, as well as sensitivity to scale,results from different objects of specialized disciplines, fromdifferent perspectives, and from different sign systemsstructured as research tools or as medium for constitutingefficient explanatory theories.

Plato would have barred entrance to the Academy to those who didnot master mathematics: "Let no one enter who is not amathematician." In today's world, the guardians of science wouldrequire logic, and others the mastery of artificial languages,such as programming languages, themselves subject to improvedfocus (as in object programming) and increased computationalefficiency. In the time of Socrates, "the orator," language wasascertained to be constitutive of cities, laws, and the arts. Inthe time of the Roman poet Lucretius, physics was written inverse (7,000 lines of heroic hexameter were used to presentEpicurus' atomic theory). Galileo preferred the dialogue,written in colloquial Italian, to share discoveries in physicsand astronomy with his contemporaries. With Newton, equationsstarted to replace words, and they became, almost to our time,the vocabulary of physics. Very similar developments took placein the evolution of science in China, India, the Middle East. Theemergence of new visual or multimedia languages (of diagrams,systems of notation, visual representations, mixed data types)corresponds to the different nature of visual and multimediaexperience. They are steps in the direction of deeper labordivision, increased mediation, and new forms of humaninteraction-in particular, of a practice that is moreintensional than extensional.

Time and space: freed hostages

The Encyclopedic tradition centered around the scientific humanbeing (l'homme scientifique) who it defined through language.This tradition continued a line of progressive changes inhumankind's scientific experience. We can learn about thesechanges by examining the language through which they areexpressed. The syncretic stage of human activity was dominatedby observations and short cycles of action- reaction. Incipient,rudimentary science was not independent of the human being'spractical projection. Images and, later, names of plants,animals, mountains, and lakes pertained to the beginning. Onlywhen the scope of observation broadened and, instead of theimmediate 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 todevelop in this symbiosis. Eventually, it joined religion inopposing the magic. Observation and fear of the observed wereone. Names of stars testify to changes in the language in whichwhat we call astronomical science is embodied. Obviously therewas little awareness of the mechanics of the cosmos during thetime names changed. Mytho-magical terminology, followed byzodiac signs of magic origin (in both cases with reference tothe practical activity of people during changing seasons), and bythe Christian names (after the establishment of Christianity),is a line continued today in detailed catalogs encodingpositions, dynamics, and interrelations in numeric form.

In the experience of observing the sky and in deriving the notionof duration (how long it took for celestial objects to changeposition), humans projected their biological and cognitivecharacteristics: seeing, association, comparison. Names weregiven and observations were made, of position mainly, but alsoof light intensity. With the emergent notion of time,generalized from the notion of duration, stars were nolongerrelated to divinities. Still, astronomical observation was usedto structure monastic life. Stars served as a nighttime clock.At a time of reduced scientific inquiry (Europe from the 5thcentury to the 10th), the observation of the skies, reflected inmaps of various constellations, prepared for future progress inastronomy. Physical properties, such as intensity of light,color, and brilliancy, later suggested better names because theexperience in which stars were recognized (navigation, in thefirst place) required identification for successful performance.Magic and science explained success in very different ways. Thiswas the time when planets were identified through propertiesevident to all who needed the sky. The magic layer was projectedas a result of associations people made between qualitiescharacteristic of persons and the behavior of certain stars,i.e., the perceived influence they had on events pertinent tohuman existence. During the entire process, language served asan instrument of integration and observation, as well as a meansfor logical practice, such as deductions. Molding the experienceof time perception, storing the acquired knowledge, and furthershaping practical experiences of time, language acquired a verypowerful position in the human being's self-constitution intime. This position would be strengthened by literacy, bound togeneralize distinctions in language and introduce them aseffective means of structuring new expectations. Only whentime-dependent practical requirements, such as those ofrelativity, impossible to satisfy within literacy, becamecritical was time freed from the captivity of verbal language.

A giant cognitive step bridged the immediacy of thesurroundings-where magic forces were rumored to exist, waitingfor humans to free them-and the notion of space. Geometry-whichliterally means to measure land-is relevant as a practicalexperience of human self-constitution that unites the concretetask at hand (surveying, building, decorating, observing thesky) and the generalization of distance. Measuring land ends upnot only in description of the land, but also in itsreconstitution in the abstract category of space. Language waspart of the process, and for as long as practical experiences inthe immediate surrounding were direct, geometric conventionsremained very close to their practical implications. Oncedistinctions beyond direct relations in space were made possibleby the experience of navigation, by settled forms of social life(leading to future cities), and by strategies for successfulsecuring and defense of land, the language of geometry changed.Internally motivated developments, as well as those rooted informs of human praxis other than geometry, resulted in theconstitution of many geometric languages.

The languages of the foundations of geometry and of algebraic,differential, or topological geometry are as different as thepractical experiences from which they are derived. In manycases, literate language suffices for formulating geometricproblems, but breaks down in supporting the practice ofattempting solutions. Obviously enough, the intuitive visualaspect of geometry is quite often better adapted to subjects suchas symmetry, higher order spaces, and convexity than isliteracy. Rigid spaces and elastic spaces behave differentlyfrom spaces describable in language. Geometry frequently usesnotations whose referent is rather abstract. The freeing of timeand space from the captivity of language made an impact on thecondition of rationality, where scientific praxis is rooted, andof reason, where philosophy originates.

Coherence and diversity

Science integrates the results of diversified experiences andexpresses the perceived human need to maintain a coherentperspective of the whole. As a reaction to the establishment ofa permanent and universal language embodied in the practice ofliteracy, partial languages of scientific focus emerged. Thosewho knew from their own self-constitution in scientific practicethat global coherence, as preserved in language, and specializedknowledge conflict, gave up the effort to harmonize the generalframework (of language) and the specialized perspective (ofscience). The understanding that the language of science is notsimply a descriptive device, but a constitutive element ofscientific practical experience, did not come easy, especiallysince language kept human awareness of space and time captive toits mechanism of representation. Seemingly, it was lessdifficult to notice how measuring some phenomena (especially inphysics) changed the system observed than to understand how ascientific hypothesis expressed in language created a frameworkof subjective science. The subjectivity of the languagedescription corresponds to a particular practical experienceinvolving identification through language.

Particular developments in science are not identical in allscientific branches. Astronomy and geometry evolved differentlyfrom each other and from other sciences. As a result of theinherent dynamics of conflict between means and goals ofsciences, a phase of liberation from language started. Oncelanguage itself reached its limits in literacy, in respect tothe efficiency of the new human experiences that the currentscale of humankind brought about, new languages were needed.Breaking the language barrier, with implicit emancipation fromliteracy, is a practical experience in itself. In thisexperience, two aspects of language come under scrutiny: theepistemological and the communicational. In the epistemologicalstatus, we evaluate how language is a medium for embodyingscience and shaping the perspective of scientific inquiry. Thecommunicational status refers to language as a medium for sharingknowledge. The levels of problem formulation, of solutions, ofinterpretation, of experiment and validation, and ofcommunication are quite different. They will continue todifferentiate even more in order to be efficient. Therationality intrinsic to this new science is no longer reducibleto finding the logos in things and phenomena, or to instill alogos into techné. This is why the legacy of Francis Bacon-theprophetic theoretician of experimental science-as well as ofDescartes-whose rules for understanding dominated the literatephase of humankind's scientific practical experience-literallycease 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 tothe phenomena observed and accounted for. For these and otherreasons, researchers working within the informational paradigmneeded to synthesize specialized languages designed in such waysto avoid ambiguity and make higher efficiency of automatedprocessing possible. Many formal languages have become the newscientific laboratories of our time, preparing quite well forthe new stage of computational disciplines. In parallel, newforms of scientific experimentation, which correspond to thecomplexity of the phenomena under observation and to theirdynamics, were developed. These forms are known under the namesimulation (sometimes modeling) and consist of observing notthe behavior of the researched aspect of the world, but one orseveral of its descriptions.

To observe the explosion of a remote star, a time-span of datacollection that extends well over the age of humankind isrequired. Instead of waiting (forever, so to speak), scientistsmodel astrophysical phenomena and visualize them with the aid ofsophisticated computable mathematical descriptions. These arebetter suited to the scale of the phenomena than all theequipment ever used for this purpose. Radio astronomy is nolonger about the stars seen through human eyes. It is not aboutthe visible, and it is not burdened by all the history of starnames. Radio-astronomy is about star systems, cosmic physics,dynamics, even about the notion, so often discarded, of thebeginning 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 inhabitingit. Such geometries submit theoretical constructs supporting apractice of thinking, explaining, even acting, that is notpossible without the generalization of space dimensions. Whetherin the fiction of Flatland (Edwin Abbott's book about howdifferent life is in lower-dimension space compared to life inwhat we take to be 3-dimensional reality), or in the computergraphics animated representation of the hypercube, or in thetheories of higher dimension spaces (relating to Einstein'srelativity theory), scientific languages, irreducible to thegeneral language and non- translatable into it, are at work.

There are quite a number of similar subjects which make evidentthe border at which science can no longer rely on language. Anon-language-based rationality- spatial reasoning, forinstance-becomes necessary in this realm of inquiry. Assciences enter the age of computation, necessities becomepossibilities. There are subjects of research in which thebrevity of a process makes impossible its direct observation andappropriate description in language. Indeed, the universe ofextremely short interactions, of fast exchanges of energy, ofhigh frequency patterns (which give the appearance of acontinuum), among others, can be approached only withinstruments of observation whose own inertia is lower than thatof the phenomena scrutinized and with a conceptual framework forwhich language (of high inertia) is ill equipped.

Language preserves in its structure the experience that made itnecessary; literacy does the same. This is why theirsequentiality conflicts with subjects of configurationalcondition. This is also why linearity, inherent in the pragmaticsthat formed literacy, conflicts with the inherent non-linearityof the world. Many other conflicts are at work at the same time:centrality of work opposed to distribution of tasks; hierarchyand distributed networking; clear-cut distinctions and vagueness;deterministic experiences of limited scope opposed toself-configurational, chaotic processes of infinite adaptationto new circ*mstances; dualism as opposed to pluralism (inscientifically significant forms). At stake is the efficiency ofthe effort, as it approaches issues of recuperation mechanismsin nature and society, strategies of co- evolution (replacingstrategies of dominance) with nature, holistic models madepossible by both increased mediation and powerful integrativemechanisms. Idealizing all these possibilities would be ascounterproductive as demonizing literacy-based practicalexperiences. Nevertheless, we need a better understanding of whatno longer responds to requirements of human self-constitutionunder the new scale of humankind, as we need an image of thealternative practical experiences through which a newrationality is formed.

In the rapidly expanding context of parallel scientific endeavorsand distributed tasks supported by speedy and reliable networks,scientific research is liberated from the industrial model.Instead of centralized institutions sharing in the use ofexpensive instruments, there is an increasing number ofexperiments taking place all over the world. Tele-presence isless expressive a name for what researchers actually performthousands of miles away from each other, using expensive machinesand various measuring and testing devices. The laboratories thatonce served as the place for scientific self-constitution arereplaced by collaboratories, a combination of real instruments,which can be used more efficiently, and virtual places ofresearch that allow for more creativity. Real-time interactionis fundamental to the context of focusing on nano-scale.Multidisciplinarity is no longer an illusion, but a practicalrequirement for the integration that scientific effort requires.

Explaining ourselves away

Systematic domains of human practical experiences are changingfast. The science of the ever shorter and more intense phenomenain which the human being of this age is constituted consists ofa body of expressive means in which language either plays asecondary function or is substituted with forms of expressionother than language. Procedures to capture the coherence of thephenomena researched now need to be adapted to this reality. Thecoherence embodied in language reflects past experiences, butdoes not properly explain experiences characterized by new kindsof coherence. In recent years, a question has come up time andagain: Is there some common element in language, in the possiblemessages exchanged in our universe by civilizations differentfrom ours, in the messages exchanged at the genetic level of ourexistence or in the biochemical trails which we associate withthe behavior of ant colonies or beehives? It would be prematureto attempt an answer. As already mentioned, David Hirschascertains that 97% of human activity is concept free. Controlmechanisms in charge of this form of activity are common not onlyto humans, but also to lower level biological entities (insects,for instance). Exploration of cosmic civilizations, genetics,biochemistry, not to mention memetics, is not necessarily helpedby this answer. Having to explain abstract mathematical conceptsor the behavior of complex systems (such as the human nervoussystem), some displaying learning capabilities orself-organization tendencies, raises the stakes quite high: Do weexplain ourselves away in the effort to emulate the human being?Replication of ideas (scientific, philosophic, or of any othertype) based on the genetic model inspired by evolutionarytheory, contributes new angles to the subject. But even if wemanage to establish methods for successful replication, have wecaptured the characteristics of human self-identification?

In the same vein, another question needs to be addressed: themystique of science comes from the realization that the law ofgravity applies everywhere, that electricity does not depend onthe geographic coordinates of the place where people live, thatcomputation is a universal calculus. Still, science is not valueneutral; one model dominates others; one rationality wins overothers. The truth of a scientific theory and its empiricaladequacy are only loosely related. To accept one science overanother is to the scientist an issue of rationality, while forthose integrating it in their practical experiences, it becomesan issue of adequacy. This aspect constitutes more than acultural or memetic issue. At stake is the fact that the naturalcondition 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 itsentire history. Still, these changes are not of the depth andbreadth of scientific and technological praxis. Computerscience, as Dijkstra pointed out, deserves a better name, more inline with the fundamental change this practical experiencebrings about. ("Would anyone call surgery knife science"? heasked.) We don't have better names for many other fields of newhuman experience: artificial life, artificial intelligence,genetics, qualitative reasoning, and memetics. But we do havepowerful new notation systems, new ways of reasoning (combiningqualitative and quantitative aspects), and fresh methods ofexpression (interactive). Consequently, a new human conditionresulting from the practice of science will probably emerge.This condition will reflect the changed premises of scientificexperiment.

Experimentation joined logical analysis over 350 years ago.Simulation, the experiment of the civilization of illiteracy, isbecoming the dominant scientific form of expression of thesystematic search for the multitude of elements involved in newscientific theories and in their applications. A variety ofsimulators embody knowledge and doubt. This can be seen in abroader context. Through simulation, variability is accountedfor, relations are scrutinized, functional dependencies aretested over a wide array of data critical to the performance ofnew systems, or over a wide array of the people involved withthem. After heroically, and necessarily, separating fromphilosophy and establishing its own methods, science isrediscovering the need for the dimension covered by humanreasoning. This is, after all, what the subject matter ofartificial 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 ofthe universe, and the language of the mind (lingua mentis),evidently assumed to be different from language as we use it inthe framework of community, cultural, and national existence.

To reflect upon the beginning of the universe or upon the mindmeans to constitute oneself, together with the appropriatelanguage, in a pragmatic context different from communityinteraction, cultural values, or national characteristics. Thefocus is changed from obsession with quantity to preoccupationwith quality. Qualities are pursued in the attempt to build ascience of artificial reality. As a scientific artifact, thisreality is endowed with characteristics of life, such as changeand evolution over time, selection of the fittest, the bestadapted to that world, and acquisition of knowledge, commonsense, and eventually language. Focused on the model of life as aproperty of organization, artificial reality is intent ongenerating 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 fordiversity, which eventually foster adaptability. Allocation ofresources within a system and strategies of co-evolution are seenas resources of incremental performance. Research starts from apremise 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 artpursues: illusion of space, time, movement, projection of humanemotions. Interacting with such a system means that the personbecomes involved in the inside of images, sounds, and movements.All these are simulated, using animation as the new language ofthe science that the moving image embodies. In some ways,virtual reality becomes a general purpose simulator of acaptivating variable reality, made possible by mediatingelements such as computer graphics images, animation, digitalsound, tracking devices, and quite a number of other elements.Inside this reality, virtual objects, tools, and actions openthe possibility of practical experiences of self-constitution ina meta- knowledge world.

Quality in virtual reality is also pursued as scientists try togive a coherent image of the very first minutes of the universe.Physics, genetics, biophysics, biochemistry, geology, and allelse integrated in this multi-mediated effort are turned fromscience into natural history or philosophic ontology. To explainwhy physicists needed an indestructible proton for explainingmatter is not an issue of numbers, precision, or equations, butof common sense: If protons could decay, mountains, oceans,stars, and planets would crumble and turn back into neutrons andelectrons, and a reversal of the Big Bang might occur. Is thispredictive rationality? Is validation of this type ofexperimentation a subject of language? As a possible explanation,which facilitates a new array of experiments in computersimulation, particle accelerators, and radio- astronomicobservations, virtual reality facilitates new forms of humanpraxis and is embodied in new theories of physics.

Obviously, the efficiency factor, one of the major elements inthe transition from one dominant literacy to partial literacies,plays an important role in this endeavor. This generalizednotion of efficiency has several components in the case ofscience. One is the efficiency of our attempts to make scienceproductive. Compared to the efficiency of the lever and thepulley, the efficiency of the electric engine reaches a differentscale of magnitude. The same applies to our new tools, but inmore dramatic ways. So far, we have managed to make science themost expensive human endeavor. Its current development appearsto be motivated by a self-perpetuating drive: knowledge for thesake of knowledge. Science generated technology, whichdramatically affects the outcome of human effort.

The second component factor in the transition to the pragmaticsof the civilization of illiteracy is the efficiency of ourpreparation for commanding these new tools, new forms of energy,and new forms of human interaction. Learning how to operatesimple mechanical devices is different from learning how toprogram new tools capable of commanding sophisticated technologyand of controlling tremendous amounts of energy. Althoughmediation has increased in human praxis, people do not yet knowhow to handle mediation, even less how to adapt education, theirown and their children's, to shorter cycles of scientific andtechnological renewal.

Last among the factors at work in the change we are going throughis the efficiency of invention, discovery, and explanation.Largely supported by society (states invest in science in orderto pursue their goals, as do businesses and various interestgroups), science is under the pressure of performance.

Markets confirm scientific results from the perspective of thereturn on investment they promise to deliver. Parallel to themost advanced and promising scientific endeavors, venturecapital underwrites the industries of the near future.Insulation of any kind, even secrecy, no matter how stubbornlypursued and justified, is no longer possible within the economicdynamics of the present. No matter how hard companies try toimpose secrecy, they fail when faced with the interactivity andintegration of effort characteristic of the new dynamics. Theexpectation of change, of shorter cycles of investigation, andof shorter times for integration of results in the productiveability of technology is unavoidable. Still, in the USA and inEurope, there are conflicts between the new dynamics ofscientific and technological progress and the bureaucracy ofscience. Driven by motivations characteristic of literateinfatuation with national pride and security, this bureaucracyextends well beyond science and is hard at work to protect whatis already passé. For science to advance, networks of activity,distributed tasks, and shared resources, all implyingtransparency and access, are essential.

The conflict between scientific goals and morality takes on itsown characteristics in the civilization of illiteracy. Indeed,scientific results might be right, but not necessarily alwaysgood for humankind. They might support higher efficiency, butsometimes to the detriment of people obsessed with maintaininghigh standards of living. There are many activities-too many tolist-in which humans can be entirely replaced by machines.Extreme effort, exposure to chemicals, radiation, and otherunfriendly elements could be avoided. However, doing away withthe living person whose identity is constituted in workexperiences makes the activity itself questionable. It is nolonger the case that we only talk about genetic control ofpopulations, or about mind control, about creating machinesendowed with extreme capabilities, including control of thepeople who made them. These are distinct possibilities, to whichwe are closer than many believe. Neither science nor technology,even less philosophy, can afford to ignore the conflictimmanent in the situation, or the danger posed by giving in tosolutions resulting from a limited perspective, or from ourdedication to make real everything that is possible. After all,we can already destroy the planet, but we do not, or at least notso radically as it could be destroyed. Short of being paralyzedby all these dangers, science has to question its own condition.In view of this, it is far from accidental that sciences in thecivilization of illiteracy rediscover philosophy, or theyre-philosophize themselves.

Quo vadis philosophy?

The language of wisdom

Reflecting upon human beings and their relation to the outsideworld (nature, culture, society) constitutes a determined formof philosophical experience. It involves awareness of oneselfand others, and the ability to identify similarities anddifferences, to explain the changing dynamics of existence, andto project the acquired understanding into the practice offormulating new questions. Practical implications ofphilosophic systems are manifold. Such systems affect scientific,moral, political, cultural, and other human practicalexperiences of self-constitution. They accumulate wisdom morethan knowledge. To this effect, we can say that the classic modelof philosophy remains a science of sciences, or at least thealma mater of sciences. Philosophic systems are concerned withhuman values, not with skills or abilities involved in reachinggoals defined by our rationality. Nevertheless, this status hasbeen continuously challenged from inside and outside philosophy.The decline of respect for philosophy probably results from theperceived omniscient attitude philosophers have displayed andfrom their unwillingness to focus on aspects of human reason.

Philosophy has never been a domain for everyone. In our day, ithas become a discourse expressed, if not in painfully contortedlanguage, in a multitude of specialized languages addressed to arelatively small circle of interested parties, themselvesphilosophers for the most part. The change in the pragmaticcondition of philosophy is reflected in its current linguisticequivocations. "My philosophy" is an expression used by anyoneto express anything from a tactic in football to investments,drug use, diet, politics, religions, and much more.

Misunderstood cultural exigencies, originating in thecivilization of literacy, and political opportunism maintainphilosophy as a required subject in universities, no matter whatis taught under its name, who teaches it, or how. Under communismin East Europe and the Soviet Union, where free choice was outof question, philosophy was obligatory because it was identifiedwith 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 thedeteriorating literacy manifested in our days. But what affectsthis change is the new pragmatic framework, not the decline inwriting and reading proficiency.

The specialization of philosophic language, as well as theintegration of logico- mathematical formalism in philosophicaldiscourse, have not contributed to recuperating the prestige ofphilosophy, or of the philosopher, for that matter. Neither didit contribute to resolving topics specific to the discipline, inparticular, to human experience and conscience. In fact,philosophy has disappeared in a number of philosophies practicedtoday: analytic, continental, feminist, Afro-American, amongothers. Each has constituted its own language and evenperspective, pursuing goals frequently rooted in the philosophyof the civilization of literacy, or in its politics.

The relevance (or irrelevance) of philosophy cannot beascertained outside the practice of questioning and answering, apractice that made philosophy necessary in the first place.Indeed, as a practice of positioning the human being in theuniverse of human experience, philosophy is as relevant as thepractical results of this positioning. There are scientifictheories, such as the theory of relativity in physics or genetheory in biology, that are as philosophically relevant as theyare scientifically significant. And there are, as well,philosophic theories of extreme scientific significance. Manycomponents of Leibniz's system, of Descartes' rationalism, andPeirce's pragmaticism can be mentioned. Each originates within adistinct pragmatic framework of practical experiences throughwhich reason comes to expression and questions specific forms ofrationality.

Philosophy, as we know it from the texts in which it wasarticulated, is a product molded through the experience thatinitially made writing possible (though not universallyaccepted) and, later, literacy necessary. Its fundamentaldistinctions- subject/object, rational/irrational, matter/spirit,form/content, analytic/synthetic, concrete/abstract,essence/phenomenon-correspond largely to human practicalexperiences in the framework of language. The traditionalgnoseological approach reflects the same structure, as doesformal logic, based on Aristotle's syllogistic theory. Thefundamental linguistic distinction of subject/predicate marks-atleast for Western civilization-the entire approach. Expectationsof efficiency pertinent to the human scale leading to theIndustrial Revolution affected the condition of philosophy. Atthis juncture, philosophers realized the practical aspect of thediscipline. Marx thought that it would empower people and helpthem change the world: "Until now philosophers interpreted theworld; it's time to change it." And change it did, but in waysdifferent from what he and his followers anticipated. The hardgrip of reified language turned the workers' paradise into amental torture chamber.

Once the underlying structure (reflected in the requirements ofliteracy) changed, philosophy changed as well, also freeingitself from the categories of language that molded itsspeculative discourse. Nevertheless, its institutions (education,professional associations and conferences) continue to pursuegoals and functions peculiar to literate expectations. Thisprompted a strong movement of philosophic dissidence (Feyerabendand Lakatos are the main representatives), attuned to thepractical need of a philosophic praxis aware of the relativenature of its assertions.

Multi-valued logic, the logic of relations, fuzzy set theory, andcomputation in its algorithmic and non-algorithmic forms (basedon neural networks) allow philosophers to free themselves fromthe various dualisms embedded in the language of philosophy.Significantly better answers to ontological, gnoseological,epistemological, and even historic questions have to reflectsuch and other cognitively relevant perspectives of knowledge.Philosophy undergoes a process of mathematization in order togain access to science and improve its own efficiency. It hasbecome logic oriented, more computational. It has adoptedgenetic schemes for explaining variation and selection,extending to the current memetic conversations and methods. It isnot unusual for philosophers to abandon the pattern of rehashingolder theories and views, and to attempt to understand pragmaticexigencies and their reason. The scientification of philosophycould not have happened under the scrutiny of language and thedomination of literacy. Neither could we expect, within theliterate framework, anything comparable to Plato's Dialogues, tothe great philosophical systems of Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, andMarx, to the literary seduction of Heidegger, Sartre, or MartinBuber.

In scientific disguise

Developing, parallel to common language (which philosophersfrequently call natural language), different types of signsystems, humans utilize the latter's mediating force in order toincrease the efficiency of their action. "Give me a fixed pointand I'll move the world" is the equivalent philosophicalstatement characteristic of the civilization of the lever andpulley. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty says in a scornfultone, "it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more norless." "The question is," says Alice, "whether you can makewords mean so many different things." Reading the dialogue fromLewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, with the magnificentworks of great philosophers (from Plato to Leibniz, Kant, andHegel, Peirce and many more) in mind, one understands Alice'strouble. With the exception of Wittgenstein, nobody really seemsto have been bothered by the ability people have to make wordsmean many things.

Today, we could be directed to a philosophical paraphrase inwhich, instead of a fixed point, the need for a sign system (alanguage) is spelled out. Adapted to the scope of the conceivedpractical experience, such a sign system, when put intopractice, will change the world, will "move" it. Diagrammaticthinking, the powerful cognitive model Peirce advanced,exemplifies the idea. Cybernetics, biogenetics, computers, andresearch in artificial intelligence and artificial life, as wellas political, social, aesthetic, or religious concepts areexamples of domains where such sign systems have been devised.They have facilitated forms of human self-constitution thatcontribute to the contradictory image of today's world. Suchlanguages reflect the fundamental process of progressivemediation, participate in the diversification of the languagesused, and affect the status and value system of the ideal ofliteracy. 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. Inaddition, objectivity and the ever seductive truth, for whichphilosophy was never known, are also apparently within reach.

There is to philosophic discourse an internal reason for itscontinuous unfolding: People constituting themselves asphilosophers change as the world they live in changes. Humanreasoning is part of the world; the ability and, moreover, thedesire to think of new questions, attempt answers, and doubt ourown ability to reach the right answer are part of what definesthe human being. The consequences of mediation in philosophyshould not be ignored. Mediation implies, on one hand, a highdegree of integration of human praxis (to the extent of makingindividual contribution anonymous), and on the other, a no lesshigh degree of the subject's independence in respect to theobject of work or reasoning, or the object represented by theother participants in human praxis. While it seems appropriatefor science to know more and more about a narrower range ofsubjects, it contradicts the image of philosophy as it is formedin language and embodied in the ideal of literacy. Due to thismetaphorically defined deepening of knowledge, each philosopheris more independent of the other, but more intensely integratedthan ever before due to the necessary interconnection of thisknowledge. The meaning of this paradoxical situation is not easyto clarify. The overall process has followed two qualitativelycontrary directions: 1) concentration on a precisely delineatedaspect of knowledge or action in order to understand and controlit; 2) abandoning interest in the whole as a consequence of theassumption that the parts will finally be reunited in the socialintegrating 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 acomprehensive philosophy of existence.

The scientific disguise of philosophy contributes to its renewedstruggle for legitimacy. It adopts concepts and methodspertinent to rationality. In order to deal with reason, or to doaway altogether with questions of reasoning, it unfolds inscience and technology. Durkheim tried to apply Darwin's naturalselection model to explain labor division. At present,philosophers have become memeticians, and examine computationalsimulations of Darwinian principles in order to see how ideassurvive and advance. Spencer believed that the increase of theproductive power of work increases happiness. Present-dayphilosophers are eager to diagram the relation between worksatisfaction and personality. Some even try to revive Compte'spositivist philosophy, to improve upon past Utopian schemes, orto invent a calculus of intellectual well-being. Short of aphilosophic inquiry, everything becomes a subject waiting for aphilosopher who does not want to stay within the boundaries ofthe history of philosophy.

Once new movements, some better justified than others, and allreflecting the shift from the authority-based civilization ofliteracy to the endless freedom of choice of the illiteratecontext, needed a powerful instrument to further their programs,they chose, or were chosen by, philosophy. Secularism andpluralism meet within philosophic concerns with the gaymovement, feminism, multi-culturalism, integration of newtechnology, implications of aging, the new holisms, popularphilosophy, sexual emancipation, virtuality, and more along thisline. In a way, this reflects the new awareness of efficiencythat permeates philosophic activity, but also its struggle tomaintain its relations to literacy. Legitimate doubt is generatedby the choice of subjects that seem to attract philosophers, andby the apparent lack of philosophic matter. When the language isnot obscure, the philosopher seems to discuss matters, not reallyquestion reasons, and even less advance ideas or explanatorymodels. Wholesale generalizations do not help, but one canreally not escape the feeling that the process through whichphilosophy liberates itself from literacy has been lessproductive than the similar process of science's emancipationfrom language.

A journey through the many philosophically oriented Web sitesreveals very quickly that even when philosophy opts out of theprint medium, it carries over many of the limitations ofliteracy. The ability to open philosophic discourse, to adoptnon- linearity, and to encourage dialogue free of the pressure oftradition is often signaled, but rarely accomplished. The mediumis resisted, not enjoyed as an alternative to classicphilosophical discourse. Such observations have prompted theopinion that scientists are becoming the most appropriatephilosophers of their own contributions.

Who needs philosophy? And what for?

At this point, one question naturally arises: Is philosophyrelevant after all? Moreover, is it even possible without theparticipation of natural language, or at least without thisintermediary between philosophers and their public? In blunterterms, can we live without it? In the context in whichefficiency expectations translate into a practical experience ofan unprecedented degree of specialization, will philosophy turninto another mediating activity among people? Or will it be, asit was considered in the culture of a Romantic ideal, humanity'sself-consciousness, as expressed in Hegel's philosophy? Ifindeed philosophy is absorbed into science, what can its purposebe?

As with literacy, the inclination is to suggest that, regardlessof the new condition of language, philosophy remains possibleand is indeed relevant. As far as its functions areconcerned-mediating activity, humanity's self-consciousness,corpus of interpretive discourse about humanity and nature-theyremain to be defined in the pragmatic context. It is needless toreiterate that within each scale of humankind, philosophypursued different interests as these proved pertinent toefficiency expectations. Philosophers never contributed bread tothe 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 Greekscalled eunomia)-made them simultaneously philosophers andinterpreters of science. "How can we know?" and "How can weexplain?" are subsequent questions, pursued more stringently bypeople in search of scientific rationality than by philosophersper se.

No historic account, no matter how detailed, can do justice tothe definition of philosophy. Its subject changes as humanbeings change in the process of their practicalself-constitution. From philosophy, science and all thehumanities (ethics, aesthetics, politics, sociology, law)evolved. Even our concern with language is of a philosophicnature. It seems that philosophy is, in the final analysis, theonly authentic domain of abstraction. Its interest is not theindividual, the concrete, the immediate, not even the idea, butthe abstraction of these. Where other domains, such asmathematics, logic, linguistics, and physics are intent onunderstanding the abstract notions around which their domainsare built, on giving them life in the context of practicalexperiences, philosophy seems driven by the quest for reachingthe next level of abstraction, the abstraction of abstractions,and so on. Science uses abstraction as an instrument forreaching concreteness; philosophy follows the inverse path. Thereis always to the philosophic attempt a call for the next step,into the infinite. Each accomplishment is provisional. Toexperiment philosophically means not so much to searchsystematically for causes as to never end the inquiry. There areno right or wrong philosophic theories. Philosophy is cumulativeand self-devouring.

That people will never stop wondering what is what, the moretheir own activity will multiply the domain of existingentities, goes almost without saying. That they will ask againand again how they can know, how they can be sure that what theyknow is true, or at least relevant, is also evident. The speciesis characterized by its ability to think, produce and mastertools, acknowledge value, and constitute itself as a communityof shared concern and resources, through its playfulness andother characteristics (alluded to in terms such as hom*oeconomicus, Zoon semiotikon, Zoon politikon, hom*o ludens).Probably more than all these partial qualifiers, the species isthe only one known to question everything. As language experiencemarked the genetic condition of the human being, questioningmarked it too, probably through language mechanisms in the firstplace. When the child articulates the first question, the entiregenetic endowment is at work.

We are who and what we are in our inquisitive interaction withothers. Our minds exist only through this interaction. Thisstatement says in effect that to philosophize became part of theprocess of human self-constitution and identification. The onlyreferent of philosophy is the human being constituted inpractical experiences. Together with other surviving literacies,philosophic literacy will be one of many. The philosophy of thecivilization of illiteracy will reflect the circ*mstances of workand life characteristic of the pragmatic framework. It will alsobe subjected to the severe test of market exigencies as thesereflect efficiency expectations characteristic of the new scaleof humankind. Science can justify itself by the return ininvestment in new explanatory models. It also leads to newtechnologies and to higher levels of efficiency in humanpractical experiences. Philosophy certainly has a differentjustification. Philosophic necessity is evasive. Short of livingoff the past, as literacy, religion, and art do, it needs torefocus on reason as the compass of human activity. Focusing onalternative practical experiences, philosophy can practicallyhelp people to free themselves from the obsession withprogress-seen as a sequence of ever-escalating records (ofproduction, distribution, expectation)-and moreover, from thefear of all its consequences. It can also focus people'sattention on alternatives to everything that affects theintegrity of the species and its sense of quality, including therelation to their environment. When past, present, and futurecollapse into the illiterate frenzy of the instant, philosophyowes to those who question its articulations an honest approachto the question, "Is there a future?" But as this future takesshape in the presence of humans partaking in the open world ofnetworked interactions, banalities will not do.

Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes

Confusing as it is, a snapshot of everything that today goesunder the names art and literature conveys at least a sense ofvariety. Forget the never-ending discussions of what qualifiesas art and what does not. And forget the irreconcilable disputesover taste. What counts are practical experiences ofself-identification as artist or writer, as well as involvementwith artifacts eventually acknowledged within the experience asart or as literature, i.e., experiences through which the artpublic and readership are constituted.

What comes to mind when we think about the art and literature ofthe civilization of illiteracy are not illiteratewriters-although they exist-and not illiterate painters,composers, pianists, dancers, sculptors, or computer artists ofall kinds. Rather, disparate examples of works, each remarkablein its own way (or altogether unremarkable), but above allmarked by characteristics that distinctly disconnect them fromthe literate experience of art and literature capture ourmemory. Cautionary note ended. Here are the examples: survivingAuschwitz translated into a comic book parable populated by cats(depicting the Nazis) and mice (depicting their victims); aGrammy Award returned by a famous singing group because someoneelse was doing the singing for them; the tear-jerkers fromDisney Studios (a company whose audience is the world), classicstories or history turned into feminist or politically correctmusicals; paintings by a controversial artist (self-made or madeby the market?), fetching prices as high as overvalued shares ofa new Internet company, after he died of AIDS at an early age;the never-ending parade of computer animation miracles; the Websites of uninterrupted aesthetic frenzy that would havedelighted Andy Warhol, one of the authentic founders of art inthe civilization of illiteracy, if anyone could pinpoint thebeginning of this civilization.

These are examples. Period. Originality, aesthetic integrity,hom*ogeneity, and artfulness are the exception. The processthrough which these examples were produced begs qualifiersdifferent from art produced under the aegis of literateexpectations. Today, art is produced much faster, embodied-ordisembodied-in and disseminated through more media, andexhausted in a shorter time-sometimes even before it comes intobeing! Cycles of artistic style are abridged to the extreme ofbeing impossible to define. Artistic standards are leveled asthe democracy of unlimited access to art and literature expandstheir public, without effecting a deep rapport, a long-lastingrelation, or a heightened aesthetic expectation. Never before hasmore kitsch been produced and more money spent to satisfy theobsession 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 andfashion retail stores. And never before were more technologicaland scientific means involved in the practical experience ofart, always on the cutting edge, not only because art istraditionally associated with innovation. These new experiencesmake possible the transition from an individual, private, almostmystical, experience to a very public activity. Open a virtualstudio on the Web, and chances are that many people willexercise their calling (or curiosity) on the digital canvas. Notinfrequently, this activity is carried on at the scale of theintegrated world: major concerts viewed on several continents,attempts to integrate art from all nations into a super-work, themelange of literatures fused into new writing workshops,distributed, interactive installations united in the experienceof digital networks. Good taste and bad co-exist; p*rnographyresides as bits and bytes in formats not different from those ofthe most suave examples from art history. The Internet is theone and only uncensored place left on the earth. All thesephenomena deserve to be understood as testimony to the change ofthe condition of human experience, and in the context of changefrom a literacy-dominated art to an art of many partialliteracies, of mediations, and of relatively vague notions ofvalue and significance.

Making and perceiving

Nature and culture meet in artistic practical experiences ofhuman self- constitution, as they meet in any other humanexperience. What makes their meeting extraordinary is the factthat what we see, or hear, or listen to is the expression oftheir intersecting. Through art, humans project sensorial, aswell as cognitive, characteristics. The experience ofstructuring a category of artifacts, defined through theiraesthetic condition, and the complementary experience ofself-definition through aesthetically relevant actionsconstitute the realm of the artistic. In their interaction withobjects and actions resulting from such experiences, individualsconjure meaning as they define themselves in respect to theexperiences in a given context. Like any other practicalexperience, the production of art belongs to the pragmaticframework. We are what we do: hunting, running, singing,drawing, telling stories, creating rhymes, performing a play. Intheir respective doings, artists identify themselves throughparticular aptitudes and skills: rhythm, movement, voice, senseof color, harmony, synchronism, contrast. The emergence oflanguage and the consecutive experience of recording led to theassociation 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 humanspecies. Since the practical experience of art is so close toour biogenetic structural reality, while at the same timeconstitutive of a non-existential domain, the making of art andthe cultural appropriation of art are perceived as similarexperiences. Nevertheless, language exercised coordination forthe simple reason that successive motivations of the artexperience-such as the mytho-magical, practical, ritual, sexual,gnoseologic, political, or economic-and the underlying structureof art belong to different domains. The underlying structure ofart defines its aesthetics. The underlying structure of magic,ritual, or the sexual defines their respective condition, as itexpresses human understanding of the unknown, or the manyaspects of sexuality.

The interaction between artist and society, once markets emergedand art was acknowledged as a product with its own identity,resulted in specific forms of recurrence: recognition of theuniqueness of the work, of the artist, and of interpretivepatterns. Once the framework for recognizing artworks asmerchandise was established, transactions in artworks becametransactions in the artist-society relation, with a lot ofgive-and-take that was difficult, if not impossible, to encode.The nature of the relations can be partially understood byexamining behaviors of artists, who are almost always seen aseccentric, a little off the middle of the road, and behaviors ofthe public. There is much instinctive interaction, and even morelearned behavior, mediated through an experience constituted inand communicated through language.

Looking at a painting-once painting is acknowledged asartifact-is more than acknowledging its physical reality: theoptical, and sometimes the textual, appearance, or the contextof contemplation. The action of painting, sculpting, dancing,performing, or writing poetry or a novel is simultaneously anaction of constituting oneself as artist or writer andprojecting this self, as it results from the practical experiencecharacteristic of such an endeavor, into the social space ofinteractions. This is why art is in the first place expression,and only secondly communication. This is also why looking at awork is to constitute the individual experience of context, inthe first place, and only secondly to conjure and assignmeaning. In both the action of painting and looking at apainting, biologically inherited characteristics, together withlearned elements (skills), participate in the process ofconstituting the being (the painter and the onlooker, forinstance) as both individual and member of the community.

The natural and the acquired, or learned, interact. And in thecourse of time, the natural is educated, made aware ofcharacteristics connected to culture rather than nature. Twosimultaneous processes take place: 1) the recurrent interactionof those making art and those acknowledging it in theirpractical life; 2) establishment of patterns of interpretationas patterns of interaction mediated by the artwork. Languageexperiences take place in both processes. Consequently, artisticknowledge is accumulated, and art-related communication becomesa well defined practical experience, leading toself-identification such as art historian, art theoretician, artcritic, and the like. The nature and characteristics of thepractical experience of art-related language ought to beexamined so that we can reach an understanding of thecirc*mstances under which they might change.

Art and language

Language is a multi-dimensional practical experience. In theinteraction between individuals who produce something (in thiscase, works of art) and those who consume them,self-constitution through language makes coordination possible.Production and consumption are other instances of humanself-constitution. Frequently, integration takes place in theprocess 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 structurallydifferent experiences. These two practical experiences can berelated in many ways: display the drawing and the object drawnside-by-side; explain the drawing to the onlookers; attach adescription. Here is where difficulties start to accumulate. Theartifact and the experience leading to it appear as differententities. Descriptions (what is on paper or on canvas) lead toidentification, but not to interaction, the only reason behindthe artistic experience. Language substitutes its own conditionfor the entire physical-biogenetic level of interaction. Itoverplays the cultural, which is consequently made to representthe entire experience.

People speak about works of art, write about art, and readwritings about art as though art had no phylogenetic dimension,only a phylocultural reality. Language's coordinative functionis relied upon because of the dissimilarity between the practicalexperiences of making art and of appropriating it in the culturalenvironment. Through cultural experiences, the coordinatingfunction of language extends to facilitating new forms ofpractical experiences associated with making art: instruction,use of technology, and cooperation peculiar to artmaking. Italso facilitates experiences of appropriation in the art market,the constitution of institutions dedicated to supportingeducation in art, the politics of art, and forms of publicevaluation. Art implicitly expresses awareness, on the part ofartists and public, of how persons interacting through artisticexpression are changed through the interactions.

Language, especially in forms associated with literacy, makesthis awareness of reciprocal influence explicit. In thecivilization of illiteracy, all non-literate means ofinformation, communication, and marketing (e.g., songs, film,video, interactive multimedia) take it upon themselves toreposition art as yet another practical experience of thepragmatics of high efficiency peculiar to a humankind thatreached yet another critical mass. It was not unusual for anartist in the literacy-dominated past to go through very longcycles in preparing for the work, and for the work itself tounfold after years of effort. It is quite the contrary in thecase of the instantaneous gratification of a video work, of aninstallation, or of gestural art. Within the pragmatics of anunderlying structure reflected in literacy, art was as confinedas the experience of language, which represented itsunderpinning. The pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracymakes the experience of art part of the global experience.

Many people wonder whether the basic, though changing, relationbetween art and language, in particular art and literacy, isunavoidable-furthermore, whether coordination can be assumed bya sign system other than literate language. In prelude toanswering this question, I would like to point out that theinfluence 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 connectedto, or resulting from, high levels of literacy, i.e., offavoring an art emancipated from the domination of language,means to account for the change of art and its perceivedmeaning. The entire artistic effort to transcend the figurativeand the narrative, to explore the abstract and the gestural, toexplore its own reality, and to establish new languagestestifies to this striving towards emancipation. Ascertainingthat the art- language relation is not inescapable does notpurport the invention of a new relation as an alternative towhat culture acknowledges as the relatively necessary dependenceof the two. As with the case of other forms of practicalexperiences discussed against the background of literacy,examination of directions of change and the attempt to conjuretheir meaning is required.

Human beings are agents of change and, at the same time, outsideobservers of the process of change. An observer can distinguishbetween the recurrent influence of the human biogeneticstructure and the interactions based on this structure. Anobserver can also account for the role of the phylocultural, inparticular the interactions this triggers. Restricted to theliterate means of communication that I chose for presenting myarguments, I want to show that art and its interpretation are nolonger the exclusive domain of literate language. Alternativedomains of creation and interpretation are continuouslystructured 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 questfor innovation, integrates aspects of the conflict betweenliteracy-dominated pragmatics and pragmatics dominated byilliteracy. Were I an artist, and were we all visually attuned,this topic could have been explained through one or severalartworks, or through the process leading to an artwork. The roleof processing current practical experiences of art needs to beproperly highlighted. Exacerbated in the self-consciousness ofart in the age of illiteracy, artistic processes take precedenceover artifacts; the making of art becomes more important than theresult. Artists would say that we exist not only in theenvironment of our language projections, but probably just asmuch (if not more) in the environment of our art projections.

Impatience and autarchy

The prophets of the end of the arts (Hegel was their mostconvincing, but most misunderstood, representative) were soconfused by changes in the arts that, instead of approaching thedynamics of the process, they concentrated on the logicalpossibility that artistic practice is self-devouring andself-destructive. The initial end-of-the-arts prophecies weredelivered during a time of relatively mild change in the statusof the aesthetic appropriation of reality. Recent propheciesoccurred in a very different context. It was only after WorldWar I that aesthetic experiences really difficult to connect andintegrate in an accepted explanation changed our notion andexpectations of art. With the experience of disposable language,which the Dadaist movement submitted to a community alreadyskeptical of language, came the experience of disposable art.

While literacy supplied a framework for (almost) consistentrepresentations of values and norms, human practice at theborder between literacy and a-literacy introduced and fosteredinconsistency, believed to be the last resort of individualfreedom. Eclecticism and consumption joined in this experience,since mixing without system or justification of any kind is likestating that everything is worth whatever people make of it, andtherefore they want to have it. Re-evaluation of available art,good or bad, aesthetically relevant or kitsch, significant orinsignificant, is part of this change. Once re-evaluationstarted, the processes of artmaking and aesthetic appropriationgrew relatively disconnected. Where language, through literacy asa generalized medium of interaction, maintained culturaldistinctions, such as the ones embodied in our notions ofperspective, resemblance, and narration, the new art experienceintroduced distinctions at the natural level, such as instinct,energy, choice, and change. For as long as literacy maintainedcontrol and integration, viewers, irritated by conventionsforeign to them, physically attacked works (such asImpressionist paintings) resulting from artistic practicesdifferent from those congruent to the practice of language andto the associated expectations of seeing.

Art under the scrutiny of literacy is always model driven. Oncethe necessity of literacy as the only integrating mechanism waschallenged by the need to maintain levels of efficiency forwhich language is not well equipped, new forms of artisticappropriation of reality and a new notion of reality itselfbecame possible. Model was replaced by iconoclasm. WalterBenjamin captured some of these changes in the formula of "artin the age of its mechanical reproduction." The end of the aura,as Benjamin has it, is actually the aura's shift from theartifact to the process and the artist. It corresponds not tothe end of art's uniqueness, but to the artist's determination toget rid of all restrictions (of subject matter, material,technique) and to ascertain artistic freedom as the goal ofartistic experience. But there are yet more possibilities for theemancipation of artists and their work.

As we enter the age of electronic reproduction, massivecommunication that supports interactive multimedia, andinformation integration through networks (adapted for pipeliningdata and all kinds of images), we encounter such possibilities.We are also subjected to new experiences-for instance,simultaneous transmission of art and interpretation, moreoverthe possibility to contribute our own interpretation, to becomeco-makers of whatever is presented to us through the verymalleable digital media. Technology and change of aestheticgoals affect the scale of artistic experience, as well as therelation between artists and the world. Projects such as Walterde Maria's Lightening Field and Christo's Umbrella project(extended over California and Japan) are examples of both thechange of scale and of new interpretation processes. They arealso vivid proof that globality permeates art at each level. Sodoes the sense of rapid change, the acknowledgment and fear ofperishability, and the open-endedness of the practicalexperience of making art. I doubt that anyone could have capturedthis sense as well as the Web site on which millions of viewerscould experience the wrapping and unwrapping of the Reichstag inBerlin. Christo and Jeanne-Claude might remain the authors ofrecord, but the event grew beyond the notion of authorship.

The artistic experience of the civilization of illiteracy is alsocharacterized by impatience and autarchy. Things happen fast andrelatively independent from one another. Artistic experimentalways embodied characteristics of the practical experience ofhuman self-constitution. From petroglyphic expression to the artof our age, this happens again and again, obviously incontext-dependent forms. The Dutch and Flemish Baroque artistscelebrated results of industriousness through mythologicalthemes. Before that, religion dominated up to and through theRenaissance. In the context of African, Asian, and SouthAmerican art, the forms were different, but the pragmatic stampis faultlessly evident. No wonder that in the settled age ofliteracy, art had a structure similar to that of the practicalexperience of literate language, regardless of the richness ofits forms. It even called for experimental settings reminiscentof industry, or of the university context, as we know from arthistory. And it was sanctioned on the same pragmatic criteria asany other literate experiment: success (it was useful), orfailure (it was discarded). Accordingly, it implied sequentialdevelopment and a rather settled succession of operations. Asartistic experimentation took place in line with all otherexperiments 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 shopsproduced thousands of ready-made artistic objects with a cleargoal in mind: value through usefulness, function over form,functionality as aesthetics at work. Artistic practice andappropriation were coordinated through the still literatelanguage of the market.

Art in the civilization of illiteracy is less a matter ofinvention and discovery, as it was in the civilization ofliteracy, and more one of selection, framing, and endlessvariation. Since the end of the last century, artists startedbreaking away from some of the characteristics implicit in theliterate experience, such as hierarchy, centralism, andnationalism. This is not a time for rules and laws, unless theyare taken from the books of the past, relativized and integratedin the tools needed in artistic practice, made into underlyingprinciples. Appropriation is not of the object, but of themethod, process, and context. The tools of this civilization areendowed with the literacy required for certain partialexperiences. Artists, instead of acquiring skills, are trained tomaster such tools. In his series of ready-mades, Marcel Duchampanticipated much more than a style. He anticipated a new kind ofartistic practice and a different interrelation among theindividuals involved in producing-literally selecting from theinfinite repertory of ready- mades and framing-and theindividuals who appropriate the artifact for whatever reason(aesthetic satisfaction, status, investment, irrational drive tocollect).

Today, artists are more dependent on others involved in thepragmatic framework of the time. This dependency is the resultof the more integrated nature of human effort. Everything thatis eventually built into the work, regardless of whether thiswork is an object, an action, or a process, results from otherhuman practical experiences. The time of the artist's inventinghis 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 industrialproduction. In the context of mediation and task distribution,new levels of dependencies are established and reflected in thework. Video art, photography, film, computer-based installations,and much of the computer music, interactive multimedia, andvirtual art experiences are examples of such dependencies.Simultaneously they are examples of the new forms of conflictand tension that mark the artistic experience. Artistic freedomand self- determination are only apparent. The limits of the manyelements involved in an artistic experience affect choice andartistic integrity. Free choice, a romantic notion, is adelusion under these new circ*mstances. There is no censorship onthe Internet, but that does not make the medium totally free.

The forms of integration in the guise of new science andtechnology are probably less troublesome than integrationthrough language. They are, however, much more constricting andrestrictive because they derive from elements over which theartist has little, if any, control. The growth of non-verbalmodes of human expression, communication, and interactionintroduces elements of mediation. These can be seen asintermediaries, such as images to be integrated, sounds,political actions (a sit-in is the best known example) that areinvolved in the practical experience of art in all its phases.Formulation of aesthetic goals, in the form of videoimprovisations, diagrams, multimedia installations,computer-generated simulations, interpretation of an artwork(animation of a painting or sculpture, for example), andprocesses of meaning realization and valuation (represented bymarket transactions, insurance estimates, political relevance,ideological tendency, cultural significance) use mediatingelements. None of Christo's elaborate and very comprehensiveprojects could have been carried through without such means.Keijo Yamamoto's widely celebrated virtual performance could notcome into being without an understanding of all that it takes toestablish a Worldwide Network Art.

Art, as a human experience, emphasizes its own transitory natureand becomes less permanent than in previous stages of artisticpractice, but far more pervasive. Still, to qualify this processas mere democratization of the arts would be misleading. Thatsupermarkets are full of meat, oranges, cheese, and all kinds ofgraphic signs should not be interpreted as the democratizationof meat, oranges, cheese, or graphic signs. The majority ofartists still strive for recognition. To the extent that theirown recognition as different means that there are people who donot qualify for the same recognition and reward, there is noequality in the realm of art. On the other hand, the pressures ofleveling and the iconoclastic component of artistic experiencereduce the passion that drove artists in the past, or at leastchanges the focus of this passion. Although the artistic processhas changed in line with other changes in the systematic domainof human experience in general, it still resists doing away withthe terms for artistic recognition. The uncertainty (includingthat of recognition, but not limited to it) projected in thework qualifies it as an expression of individualism. Theheuristic attempt to establish new patterns of human interactionthrough art reflects the uncertainty. To own art that is storedin units of information and in invisible processing instructionsmeans something totally different from being in possession ofunique artifacts embodied in matter, regardless of how much theyare affected by the passing of time.

The recurrent phylogenetic and phylocultural structure, on whichthe artist-public interaction was built in the pragmaticframework fostering literacy, is questioned from within artisticpractice. Art is only indirectly affected by the new scale ofhumankind, as it tries to acknowledge this scale. But theefficiency that this scale requires is reflected in the meansavailable to support experiences of human self-constitution asartist. Related to scale are the notions of survival and wellbeing. People do not need art to survive, and the majority ofpeople on Earth are living proof of this assertion. But in abroader sense, life that does not have an artistic dimension isnot human. That is what we have learned or what we want tobelieve.

To express oneself in forms involving an artistic element is partof self- constitution as a human being, distinct from the rest ofthe natural realm. Moreover, to have access to the richness ofother expressive forms-rhythms, colors, shapes, movements,metaphors, sounds, textures-is to reascertain a sense ofbelonging. In this vein, the right to affluence implicit in thecivilization of illiteracy extends well into the domain of theaesthetic. New artistic structures and means are continuouslysubmitted and consumed. Some end up in oblivion; others suggestdynamic patterns. Freed from the constraints of a dominantliteracy, artistic practice is becoming more and more like anyother form of human experience, emancipated from the obsession ofuniversality and eternity (embodied in museums and artcollections), from centralism (expressed in such elements as thevanishing point, the tonal center of music, the architecturalkeystone). True, a great deal of narcissism has come to theforefront. And there is a tendency to break rules for the sakeof breaking them, and to make the act of breaking the rule theobject of artistic interest. In transcending old mediaboundaries, production and appropriation come closer together.The person making the artwork already integrates theappropriation in the making. Thus a complicity beyond and abovelanguage is established in defiance of time, space, and theuniversal. 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 levelsupported by literacy is breaking the bonds of a generic,pervasive literacy. Several specialized languages mediate atvarious levels. The language of art history addressesprofessionals at one level, and laymen at another, through anarray of journals and magazines. Art theory speaks to expertsand, in a different tone, to neophytes who themselves will judgeor produce artworks. The language of materials and techniquesdelves into particulars beyond oil, canvas, melody, beat, andrhythm that a generally literate onlooker or listener would notreadily comprehend.

The art of the civilization of illiteracy partly reprocessesprevious artistic experience. By no accident, the entire modernmovement looked back at ancient art forms and exotic art andappropriated their themes and structural components. In thisexperience, cultural conventions expressed through literacy (suchas the recurrent linear perspective, illusory space, or colorsymbolism) are of secondary import. The goal is to account forthe tension between motives (the magical, the sacred, or themythic), the realistic image, and abstract extensions. Theexperience, which language inadequately reported, but could notsubstitute, is the subject of artistic investigation. Africanand Chinese masks, Russian icons, Mayan artifacts, Arabicdecorative motifs, and Japanese syllabaries are invoked with theintention of arousing awareness of their specific pragmaticcontext, which in turn will influence new artistic practicalexperiences. This is art after art. Evidently, Russianavant-garde, French cubism, American conceptualism, and all theother isms cannot be seen as ordinary extensions to experiencesalien to tradition, or as attempts to loosen the ties between artand literacy in conscious preparation for relative emancipationfrom language. This phase has its own, new, recurringinteractions. The post-modern is probably the closest we havecome 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 resultsto the public at large (literate or not). To look at post-modernart and architecture as only illustrative of cultural quotes, andpossible self-irony, would mean to miss the nature of theexperience projected in making the new artifacts. It is anundoing of the past in order to achieve a new freedom (fromnorm, ideal, value, morality, even aesthetics). The concept ofart, resulting from the theoretic practice focused onaccumulated artistic experience in its broadest sense, issubjected to change. Artifacts resulting from the practicalexperience of artists constitute a domain congruent to theaesthetic dimension of human interaction in the socialenvironment. This art is illiterate in the sense that it refusesprevious norms and values, comments upon them from within, andprojects a very individual language, with many ad hoc rules, anda vocabulary in continuous change. Think about how, in thepost-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 ownaesthetic condition. In a broader sense, it is as though artcontinuously generates its definition and redefinition, andallows those involved in artistic practice to constitutethemselves as entities of change more than as manufacturers ofaesthetically 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 incrediblediversification of skills and techniques, to the creation andadoption of new tools (digital devices included), and awarenessof the market. Those who know the language of an artifact, or ofa series of relatively similar artifacts, are not necessarilythose who will appropriate and interpret the artifact. In thisage, aesthetic expression becomes an issue of informationprocessing resulting from the systematic deconstruction of theaesthetic practice of the age dominated by literacy. Images andsounds are derived from various experiences (photographic,mechanical, electronic). Spontaneity is complemented byelaboration. Previous stylistic characteristics- spontaneity isonly the most evident-are reified and framed in new settingstogether with the interpretation. They are also reified inartistic expression as the gesture of making the work and theact 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 brokenconventions and rules, or of disparate and sometimesantagonistic characteristics. Suffice it to point out how theprivate (the personal side of art, layout strategies, art ofproportions, drawing, symbolism, harmony, and musical orarchitectural composition) becomes public. Real Life, an MTVseries, is the personal drama of five young people trying to makeit in New York City. The script was their day-to-day existence,the attempt to harmonize their conflicting lifestyles in theelegant loft that MTV provided. When the director fell in lovewith one of the characters, he was brought in front of thecamera's merciless eye. Likewise, the artist-painter, composer,sculptor, dancer, or film director-submits the secrets of hisexperience to the viewer, the listener, and the spectator. Theartifact comes to the market delivered with its self-criticism,even with a time bomb set for the hour after which the work hasbecome valueless. The making of art made public is at the sametime its unmaking.

Appropriation, one of the preferred methods of the artexperience, is based on a notion of aesthetic or culturalcomplicity. The illiterate public accepts a game of allusions.The alluded must be present in the work, because in the absenceof a unifying literacy, there is no shared background one cancount on. Insinuations, innuendo, and provocation are practicedparallel to the quote around which the work establishes its ownidentity.

Art is infinitely fragmented today. No direction dominates, or atleast no longer than the 15 minutes of fame that Warholprophesied. There is a real sense of artistic glut and a feelingof ethical confusion: Is anything authentic? The public is luredinto the work, sometimes in ridiculous forms (a painting withlive characters touching the viewers, pinching them, reachingfor pocketbooks, or spitting chewing gum); other times in naiveways (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 openchallenge to change. To copyright openness and sign it is asabsurd, or sublime, as delivering beautiful empty bars of musicto serve as a score for symphonic interpretation or a multimediaevent.

The copy is better than the original

Within artistic practice, as much as within any other practicalform of human projection, we notice the transition from acentralized system of reference and values to a system ofparallel values. In the continuum generically qualified in themarket as art- and what cannot be declared art today?-there is anoticeable need for intrinsic relations of patterns: whatbelongs together, and how commonalties are brought about. Andthere is a need for disparity and distinction: How do wedistinguish among the plenty accumulated in a never-endingseries 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. Anevident tension results, not different from the one we perceivein the market of stocks and options. The dilemma is obvious:where to invest, if at all, unless someone has insiderinformation (What is hot?). This is not an expression of anideal, as the values of literacy marked art to be, but ofalternatives delivered together with the uncertainty thatcharacterizes the new artistic experience as one of obsessionwith recognition in an environment of competition that oftenbecomes adversarial. (The umbrellas that the Parisians used toattack Impressionist canvases at the turn of the century arechildren's toys in comparison to the means of aestheticannihilation used in our time.)

Becoming a practical experience focused on its own condition andhistory, this kind of art affects the appropriation of itsproducts in the sense of increasing artificiality-the sharedphylocultural component-and decreasing naturalness. Accordingly,interpretive practice is focused on establishing distinctions(often hair- splitting), more and more within the artisticdomain, in disregard of message, form, ethical considerations,and even skill. This is the type of art whose photographicreproduction is always better than the original. This is themusic that always sounds crisper on a compact disk. This is theart whose simuli of the show, performance, dance, or concert ontelevision are even better than the production. Meaning comesabout in an individual experience of relating distinctions, notcommon experiences.

The specialization of art, no less than the specialization ofsciences and humanities, results in the formation of numerousnetworks of recurrent or non-recurrent interaction. Examples ofthis are layering, tracing from photo-projection, expanding thestrategies of collage (to include heterogeneous sources), mixingthe elaborate and the spontaneous (in dance, performance, video,even architecture). The pencil and brush are replaced by thescanner and by memes of operations favoring minute detail overmeaningful wholes. Music is generated by means of sampling andsynthesizing. We deal with a phenomenon of massivedecentralization-each is potentially an artist-and generalizedintegration through networks of interaction, within whichmuseums, galleries, and auction houses represent major nodes. Itis not unusual to see the walls of a museum become the supportfor a work whose life ends with the end of the show, if notearlier. Many musical compositions never make it to paper,forever sentenced to tape or compact disk. Composers who do notknow how to read or write music rely on the musical knowledgeintegrated in their digital instruments.

With the advent of technological means for the production anddissemination of images, sounds, and performances begins an ageof a sui generis artistic environment of life that is easy toadapt to individual preference, easy to change as the preferencechanges. The new artistic practice results in the demythificationof artists and their art. Art itself is demythified at the sametime. As a consequence of electronic reproducibility andinfinite manipulation, art forms a new library of images withmemory devices loaded with scanned art, but with no books. Soundsamples are the library of the composer active in thecivilization of illiteracy. Using networking as a matter ofpracticability, people could display, in places of living orwork, images from any collection, or listen to music from anyongoing concert around the globe. They could also change theselection without touching the display. They could redo eachartwork as they please, painting over its digital double in theact of appropriating it, probably beyond what any artist of thepast would ever accept, or any artist of the present would carefor. Music could be subjected to similar appropriations. As amatter of fact, televised images are already manipulated andr-written. DVD-three letters standing for Digital Video Data-yet to make it into the everyday jargon reflecting ourinvolvement with new media, will probably replace the majorityof televised images. With the advent of digital video deliveredvia the familiar compact disk format, a tool as powerful as anyTV production facility will support artistic innovation that westill associate with high budgets and glamorous Hollywoodevents.

Art, as much as any other form of human interaction in thecivilization of illiteracy, involves shorter cycles of exchangeand contact at each of its levels: meaning constitution,symbolism, education, merchandise. The eternity andtranscendence of art, notions and expectations associated withthe literate experience, become nostalgic references of a pastpragmatics. Viewers consume art almost at the rhythm at whichthey consume everything else. Art consumes itself, exhausting amodel even before it can be publicly acknowledged as one. In itsnew manifestations, not all necessarily in digital format, butmany in the transitory existence of networks, it either comes inan abundance, which contradicts the literacy-based ideal ofuniqueness, or in short-lived singular modes, which contradictsthe ideal of permanency. Strategies of over-writing,over-dancing, over-sounding, and over-impression are applied withfrenzy. Grid structures made visible become containers for veryfluid forms of expression, bringing to mind the fluidity ofChinese calligraphy. Afro-American street dancers, WestEuropean ballet groups, and theaters in which the human body isintegrated into the more comprehensive body of the show,practice these strategies for different purposes and withdifferent aesthetic goals. There is also a lot of parody, andfervor, in expanding one medium into another: music becomespainting or sculpture; dance becomes image; sculpture lends itsvolume to theatrical projects or to 3D renditions, virtual orreal events that integrate the natural and the artificial.

In this vast effort of exploration, authenticity is rarelysecured. Photography, especially in its digital forms, would beimpossible without the industry it created; nor would painting,sculpture, music, or computer-based interactive art (cyberart,another name for virtual reality) without the industries theystimulated. The legitimate market of fakes and the illegitimatemarket of originals meet in the illiterate obsession withcelebrity, probably the most fleeting of all experiences. Theextension of art as practice to art as object, resulting fromthe aesthetic experience in the space of reproductions betterthan originals, is challenged by the intensions of the act(process). Intensity is accepted more and more as the essence ofthe artistic practical experience, impossible to emulate in areproduction, and actually excluded in the perfection of aconcert transposed onto a compact disk, for example, or ofimages on CD-ROM and DVD disks.

When each of us can turn into a gazelle, a lobster, a stone, atree, a pianist, a dancer, an oboe, or even an abstract thoughtby donning gloves and goggles, we are projected in a space ofpersonal fantasy. Creativity in virtual reality, includingcreativity of interaction on the Internet, invites play. It canbe in someone's private theater, sex parlor, or drug experience.As an interactive medium, virtual reality can be turned into aninstrument for knowing others as they unfold their creativity inthe virtual space shared. As opposed to art in its conventionalform, virtual reality supports real-time interactions. Theartist and the work can each have its own life. Or the artist candecide to become the work and experience the perception ofothers. No Rembrandt or Cézanne, not even the illiterategraffiti artists in the New York subway system could experiencesuch things.

Surprisingly, this experience is not limited only to non-languagebased experiences, but also to the art of writing and reading.Embodied in avatars, many would-be writers contribute theirimages or lines to ongoing fictional situations on chat sites onthe World Wide Web. While art is freeing itself from literacy,literature does not seem to have the same possibility. Or isthis another prejudice we carry with us from the pragmaticframework 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 ina very strange domain of our existence. Why strange? Thelanguages of poetry and of our routine conversations differdrastically. How they are different is not easy to explain. Manya writer and interpreter of poetry, plays, and stories (short orlong) used their wisdom to explain that Gertrude Stein's "A roseis a rose is a rose," (or for that matter, Shakespeare's "A roseby any other name…") is not exactly the same as "A nose is anose is a nose…" (or "A nose by any other name…"). Althoughthe similarities between the two are so evident that, without acertain shared experience of poetry, some of us would qualifyboth as identically silly or identically strange, there is aliterary quality that distinguishes them.

The art of written words, usually called literature, involvesusing language for practical purposes other than projecting ourcommon experiences and sharing them on a social level. Nabokovonce told his students that literature was not born on the daysomeone cried "Wolf! Wolf!" out of the Neander Valley as a wolfran after him (or her). Literature was born when no wolf chasedthat person. "Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf inthe tall story, there is a shimmering go-between. Thatgo-between, that prism [Nabokov qualified Proust as a prism] isthe art of literature." This is not the place to discuss thedefinition 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 literatureoutside written language. (The term oral literature is regardedas 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 insufficientbecause to understand language is not equal to using languagecreatively). Partisans of literacy will say that there is noliterature without literacy. However, language use in literatureis not the same as language use in daily life, in theself-constitutive experience of living and surviving.

When human experience is projected in language and languagebecomes a medium for new experiences, there is no distinction inthe experience. The syncretic character of language as it isformed in a particular pragmatic framework corresponds to thesyncretic character of human activity in its very early stages.Distinctions in language are introduced once this experience ofself-constitution is segmented and various forms of labordivision are brought about by expectations of efficiency. Thescale of humankind, whatever it might be at a given moment, isreflected in distinctions in the pragmatic framework, which, inturn, determines distinctions in human expression andcommunication through language. Survival becomes a form of humanpractice, losing its primeval condition when it implies theexperience of cooperation, and the realization, though limited,of what transcends immediacy. Killing an animal to satisfyhunger does not require awareness of needs and the means tofulfill them, as much as it requires natural qualities such asinstinct, speed, and strength. Noticing that the flesh of ananimal hit by lightening does not rot like the flesh ofslaughtered animals requires a different awareness. The firstreports about the immediate sequence of cause and effect; thesecond, about the ability to infer from one practical domain toanother. So does the perceived need to share and expandexperience.

In the oral phase, and in oral cultures still extant, theimmediate and the remote (fear, for example, and the magicaladdressed with the hope of help) are addressed in the samelanguage. The poetry of myths, or what is made of them asexamples of poetry, is actually the poetry of the pragmaticspertinent to efficiency expectations of a small scale ofhumanity conveyed in myth. Rules for successful action wereconveyed orally from one generation to another. Only much laterin time, and due to demand for higher efficiency and theexpanding scale, do different forms of practical experienceseparate, but not yet radically. Wolf is wolf, whether it isrunning after someone, or it is only a product of someone'simagination, or it is displayed in a cage in the zoo, or it isin the process of becoming extinct. Behind each of thesesituations lies an experience of conflict, on whose basissymbolism (rooted in zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, geometric,astrologic, or religious forms) is established. The use oflanguage symbols is structurally identical to the use ofastronomic, mathematical, or mytho-magical symbols in that ituses the conventional nature of the representation in signprocesses (generation of new symbols, associations amongsymbols, symbolic inferences, etc.).

Crying wolf started early

Literature results from the perceived need to transcend theimmediate and to make possible an experience in a time andspace 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 amotivation different from how names were given to real cities,to rivers, to mountains, even to human beings. Names are usuallyidentifiers resulting from the pragmatic context. They becomepart of our environment, constituting the markers for thecontext, the stones and barbwire fence of the borders of theexperiences from which they result. In each name of a person,place, or animal in what is called real life, as well as infiction (poetry, plays, novels), the practical experience ofhuman self-constitution creeps in.

When readers of a novel, audiences at a play, or listeners at apoetry 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 inconstituting that novel, performance, or poem. Whether theyreally know about something, or whether they care to know it, isa different question. Usually, they do not know or care to knowbecause, being born in a language, moreover being subjected toliteracy, they believe that things are real because they are inlanguage. They take the world for granted because words describeit. With such a frame of mind, things become even more real whenthey are written about. Some people are educated to accept somethings as more real than others: historical accounts, geographicaccounts, biographies, diaries, books, images on a screen. Moreoften than not, people walk through Verona in order to see whereShakespeare's famous pair of enamored adolescent lovers sworeundying love to each other. They wind up in front of someridiculous plaque identifying the place. And because the incidenthas gone down in writing, they accept the place as real. Apicture taken there seems to extend the reality of Romeo andJuliet into their lives. The same can be said of Bran Castle andthe fictional Dracula; likewise for the so-called holy places inJerusalem, reputed cafés in Paris, or sites associated with thename of Al Capone. Real life eventually makes the distinctionbetween fiction, the fiction of fiction, the tourism of thefiction of fiction, and reality.

There is a borderline between the practice of writing (fiction ornot) and the appropriation of literature by critics, historiansof literature, linguists, tourist organizations, and readers. Inthe experience of writing, authors constitute themselves byprojecting, in selected words and sentences, the ability to mapbetween the world they live in and the world of language. In theexperience of reading, one projects the ability to understandlanguage and recreate a world in a text, not necessarily the sameworld in which writers constitute their identity. The processcomprises a reduction, from the infinity of situations, words,ideas, characters, stylistic choices, and rhythms, to theuniqueness of the text, and the extension from one text to aninfinity of understandings of the many components of a printedbook or performed play. In this process, new reductions are madepossible. The history of literature and language is well knownfor the stereotypes of systematic scholarly exposition. Literarycritics proceed with a different strategy of reduction; bookmarketers end up summarizing a novel in a catch- phrase. What welearn from this is that there are several ways to encode, decode,and then encode again thoughts, emotions, reactions, andwhatever else is involved in the experience of writing andreading.

The history of literature is connected to the diversification oflanguage in more ways than traditional historic accounts lead usto believe. Even the emergence of genres and subgenres can bebetter understood if we consider the practice of literature inrelation to the many forms of human practice. My intention is notto endorse the convention of realism, one of the weakexplanatory models that theoreticians and historians of art andliterature have used for a long time. The goal is to explain anddocument that various relations between spoken and writtenlanguage and the language of literature lead to various writingconventions. In the syncretic phase of human practice, therelation was based on identity. In other words, the two forms oflanguage were not distinguishable. Language was one. Distinctionsin practical experiences resulted in distinctions in theself-constitution of the human being through a language thatcaptured similarities and differences, and became a medium forconventions. These eventually led to symbols. Symbolism wasacknowledged in writing, itself an expression of conventions.

The language of astronomy, agriculture, and alchemy (to referhere to incipient science, technology, and magic) was only asremote from normal language as normalcy was from observingstars, cultivating soil, or trying to turn lead into gold,conjuring the benevolence of magic forces. Reading todaywhatever survived or was reconstituted from these writings is anexperience in poetry and literature. Unless the reader has aspecific interest in the subject matter (as a scientist,philosopher, historian, or linguist), these writings no longerrecall the wolf, but the art of expression in language. They areconsidered poetry or literature, not because they contain wrongideas or false scientific hypotheses-their practical experienceis in a pragmatic context to which we have difficultyconnecting-but because their language testifies to an experienceof transcending the borders between human practice andestablishing a systematic, encompassing domain which now seemsgrounded in a fictional world. Religious writings (the OldTestament, Tao) are also examples.

The same happens to the child who saw a wolf (the child did notreally see a wolf, he was bored and wanted attention), startedcrying 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, ortrees creaking in a storm or under the weight of snow, and thisis reported as private fiction. Artistic writing andappropriation form a domain of recurrences at least as much aspainting, dancing, observing stars, solving mathematicalequations, or designing new machines do. Literature involves aconvention of complicity, something along the line of "Let us notconfuse our lives with descriptions of them," although we maydecide to live in the fiction. As with any convention, people donot accept it in the letter, spirit, or both, and wind up cryingwith the unhappy hero, laughing with the comic character or atsomebody. In other words, people live the fiction or derive somelesson 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 isproof of the practicality of the literary experience and anexpression of its degree of necessity. The extent of theinteraction is thus the expression of the part of the practicalexperience that is shared, and for what purpose. This isillustrated by the uses we give to literature: education,indoctrination, moral edification, illustration, orentertainment. Becoming who they are, the writer and readerproject themselves in the reading through a process of dualreciprocal constitution, changing when circ*mstances change,objectified in the forms through which literature isacknowledged. It has a definite learned quality, in contrast tothe arts of images, sounds, and movements, in which the naturalcomponent (as in seeing, hearing, moving) made the art possible.Accordingly, artistic writing has an instrumental characteristicand exercises virtual coordination of the experience of assigningmeaning. In some ways, this instrumental characteristic begsassociation to music. To someone watching how the processunfolds, it seems that the recurrent interaction is triggeredless by the dynamics of writing and reading, and more decisivelyby what comprises the act of instilling meaning of theobjectified practice of the poem, play, script, novel, or shortstory. The fact is that language, more than natural systems ofsigns, pertains to an acquired structure of interactions, ashumans progress from one scale to another, within which meaningis conjured. Language is influenced by the conditions ofexistence (human biology), but not entirely reducible to them. Itconstitutes as many domains of interaction as there areexperiences requiring language, a subset of language, orartifacts similar to language.

The claim made from the perspective of literacy was, and stillgoes strong, that the universality of language is reflected inthe universality of literature, and thus the universality ofconveying meaning. Actually, to write literature means toun-write the language of everyday use, to empty it of thereference to behavior, and to structure it as an instrument of adifferent projection of the human being. It means understandingthe process through which meaning is conjured as humanself-constitution takes place. While it is true that whensomeone reads a text for the first time, the only reading is onethat refers to the language of that particular reader'sexperience (what is loosely called knowledge of language); oncethe convention is uncovered, personal experience takes secondplace, and a new experience, deriving from the interaction,begins. The acquaintance makes the interaction possible; but itmight as well stand in the way of its characteristic unfoldingas a literary experience. Sometimes, the language of artisticwording establishes a self-contained universe of self-referenceand becomes not only the message, but also the context. Thepractical experience of writing is discovery of universes withsuch qualities. The practical experience of reading is populatingsuch a universe through personal projection that will test itshuman validity. Both writer and reader create themselves andascertain their identities in the interaction establishedthrough the text.

It goes without saying that while literature is not a copy(mimesis) of the world, neither does it literally constitutesomething in opposition to it. In a larger framework,literature is but one among many means of practical humanexperiences resulting, like any other form of objectification,in the alienating process of writing, reading, criticizing,interpreting, and rewriting. Alienation comes from giving life toentities that, once expressed, start their own existence, nolonger under the control of the writer or reader. For as long aslanguage dominated human praxis according to the prescriptions ofliteracy, we could not understand how writing could be anexperience in something other than language, or how it could beperformed independent of language-based assumptions. Since theturn of the century, this situation has changed. Initially, therewas a reaction to language: Dada was born when a knife was usedto select a word from a Larousse dictionary. Between the actionand its successive interpretations, many layers of practicalexperiences with language accumulated. The literature of theabsurd went further and suggested situations only vaguelydefined with the aid of language, actually defined in defianceof language conventions. There is more silence in the plays ofBeckett and Ionesco than there are words.

Before becoming what many readers have regarded as only theexpression of the poetics of self-reference, the experience ofconcrete poetry attempted to make poetry visual, musical, oreven tactile. Happening was based on structuring a situation,with the implicit assumption that our domains of interactions arenot 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 newconventions of film facilitated by understanding the implicitcharacteristics of the medium; and the expressive means ofelectronic performances only add to the list of examplescharacteristic of a literature trying to free itself fromlanguage and its literate rules. Or, in order to avoid theanimistic connotation (literature as a living entity trying todo something), we should see the phenomena just mentioned asexamples of new human experiences: constitution of the literarywork as its own language, with the assumption that the processof appropriation would result in the realization of thatparticular language.

A realization, in literature as much as in science, is adescription of a system which would behave as though it had thisdescription. Accordingly, the day described in Joyce's Ulysses(Thursday, June 16, 1904) was not a sequential description, but amosaic in which rules of language were continuously broken andnew rules introduced. There is no character by the name ofUlysses in the book. The title and the chapter subtitles weremeant to enforce the suggestion of a parallel to Homer's Odyssey.("A beautiful title," wrote Furetière almost 300 years ago, "isthe real pimp of the book.") Language-rather, the appearance oflanguage-provided the geometry of the mosaic. For Joyce, writingturned out to be a practical experience in segmenting space andtime in order to extract relations (hopeless past, ridiculoustragic present, pathetic future), an aesthetic goal for whichthe common use of language is ill equipped. The allusion to theOdyssey is part of the strategy, shared in advance with thecritics, a para-text, following the text as a context forinterpretation. But before him, Kafka and others, following atradition that claims Cervantes' Don Quixote as a model, seemedno less challenged by the experience of designing their ownlanguage, ascertaining characters who transcend the conflict putin words, of using the power of para-text. Dos Passos, LaurenceSterne, 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 amdoing with some of the examples I give). Many poets-Burns comeseasily to mind-invented their own language, with new words andnew rules for using them. Others-and for some reason VladimirBrodsky comes first to mind-wrote splendid para-texts (politicalarticles, interviews, memoirs) that very effectively framedtheir poetry and put it in a perspective otherwise not soevident.

The experience of artistic writing does not happen in a vacuum.It takes place in a broader frame. To realize and to understandthat there is a connection between the cubist perspective,Joyce's writing, and the scientific language of relativity theorywill probably not increase reading pleasure. It will change theperspective of interpretation, though. The connection betweengenetics, computational models, and post-modern architecture,fiction, and political discourse is even more relevant to ourcurrent concern for literature. Recurrences of interactions comein varieties, and each variety is a projection of the individualat a precise juncture of the human practical experience ofself-constitution as a writer or reader. Language split, andcontinues to split, into languages and sub-languages. Rapfrequently subjects the listener of its rhythmic stanzas toslang. Gramsci, the Sardinian leftist philosopher, suggested theneed for a language of the proletariat. Pier Paolo Pasolini, anadmirer of Gramsci and a very sophisticated artist, wrote someof his works in the Friaul dialect and in the argot used by thepoor youngsters of the streets of Rome. His argument wasaesthetic and moral: corrupted by commercial democracy, languageloses its edge, and people living in such a deprived languageenvironment undergo anthropological mutation. Art, in particularliterature, can become a form of resistance. A new language,reconnected to the authentic being, becomes an instrument fornew literacy experiences. Tolkien wrote poems in Elvish; AnthonyBurgess made up a language by combining exotic languages (Gypsy,Malay, co*ckney) and less exotic languages (English, Russian,French, Dutch). An entire magazine (Jatmey) publishes fictionand poetry written in Klingon.

In a broader perspective, it is clear that in order toeffectively create literary domains, people need instruments andmedia for new experiences. Meta-fiction is such an experience.It unites special types of illustrated novels, photographicfiction (which proliferates in South America and the Far East),and comic books. In Further Inquiry, Ken Kesey offers adocumented journey in order to recapture the spirit of thesixties. Images (including some from Allen Ginsberg'scollection) make the book almost a collective oeuvre. Usingsimilar strategies, a text of meta-fiction first establishes theconvention of the text as a distinct human construct made up ofwords, but which behave differently from informative,descriptive, or normative sentences that we use in interhumancommunication. The strategy is to place the domain of thereferent in the writings. The writer thus ensures that thepotential reader will have no reason to look for references inempirical reality. This act of preempting the practice ofreading, based on reflex associations in a different systematicdomain, is not necessarily a warranty that such associationswill not be made.

There are many people who, either due to their cognitivecondition, or to their relative illiteracy, take metaphorsliterally. However, the writer makes the effort to establish newkinds of recurrent, inter-textual, and self-referential relationsthat signal the convention pursued. When the act of writingbecomes, overtly or subvertly, the object of the writingexperience, writers, and possible readers with them, move fromthe object domain to the meta domain. The writer knows that inthe space of fiction, as much as in the space of the empiricalworld, people write on paper, tables are used to set dinner on,flowers have a scent, subways don't fly. But artistic writing isnot so much reporting about the state of the world as it isconstituting a different world, along with a context forinteractions in this world. The validity and coherence of suchworlds stems from qualities different from those that resultfrom applying correct grammar, formal structure of arguments,syntactic integrity, and other requirements specific to thepractice of language within the convention of literacy.

Writing as co-writing (painting as co-painting, composing asco-composing…)

The post-modern practice of creative writing involves theintention of interaction in ways not experienced in thecivilization of literacy. The written is no longer the monumentthat must not be altered or questioned, continued, or summarized.Reading, seen in part as the effort to extract the truth fromthe text, takes on the function of projecting truth in thecontext of text interpretation. Actually, the assumption of thispractical experience of co-creation (literary, musical, orartistic) has to do with different languages in the practice ofwriting and reading (painting and viewing, composing andlistening, etc.), and even of co-writing (co-painting,co-composing, etc.).

Recent literary work in the medium of hypertext-a structurewithin which non- linear connections are possible-shows how farthis assumption extends. A structure and core of characters aregiven. The reading involves the determination of events throughdetermination of contexts. In turn, these affect the behavior ofcharacters in the fictional world. This can unfold as a literarywork conceived as a game, whose reading is actually the playing:The reader defines the attributes of the characters, insertsherself or himself in the plot, and the simulation starts.Neither the writer nor reader needs to know what programs standbehind the ongoing writing, and even less to understand how theywork. The product is, in all of these cases, an infinite seriesof co- writing. The reader changes dialogues, time and spacecoordinates, names and characteristics of participants in theliterary event. No two works are alike. Characteristics ofself-ordering and self-informing-such as "X knows such and suchabout Y's peculiarities," or "Group Z is aware of its collectivebehavior and possible deviations from the expected"-allow forthe constitution of an entirely artificial domain of fiction,with rules as interesting to discover as is the mystery behind asuicide, the complexities of a character's philosophy, or theexistence of yet unknown universes.

This extreme case of the literature of personal language-oflanguages as they are formed in the practice of creativeco-writing-was anticipated in the various forms of fantasticl*terature. Voyages (anticipated in Homer's epics), explorationsof future worlds, and science fiction have paved the way for thewriting of meta-fiction. This probably explains how Jorge LuisBorges constituted a meta-language (of the quotes of quotes ofquotes) for allegories whose object are fictions, not realities.There is no need to be literate to effectively appropriate thiskind of writing, although at some level of reading the literateallusion awaits the literate reader (at least to tickle his orher fancy). To a certain extent, it is almost better not to haveread Madame Bovary, with its melodramatic account, because theconstitution of Borges' universe takes place at a differentlevel of human practice, and in a context of disconnected formsof praxis.

Co-writing also takes the form of using shared code as astrategy of literary expression. The many specialized languagesof literary criticism and interpretation- such as comparativestudies, phenomenological analysis, structuralism, semioticinterpretation, deconstructionism-as difficult and opaque to theaverage literate reader as scientific and philosophic languages,are duplicated in the specialized language of creativepost-modern writing. Reading requires a great deal ofpreparation for some of those works, or at least the assumedshared understanding of the particular language. The writings ofDonald Barthelme, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Barthe are not casualreading, for sheer enjoyment or excitement. Mastery of thelanguage, moreover of the language code, as part of thepractical experience it facilitates, does not come fromstudying English in high school or college, rather from decodingthe narrative strategy and understanding that the purpose ofthis writing is knowledge about writing and reading. Theepistemological made into a subject of fiction-how do we knowwhat we know?-makes for very dense prose. This is why in thisnew stage, it is possible to have readers of a one and only book(I am not referring to the Bible or Koran), which becomes thelanguage of that reader. Alice in Wonderland is such a book forquite a few; so is Ulysses; so are the two novels of William H.Gass. In the civilization of illiteracy, we experience theemergence of micro-readership attracted to non-standardwriting. Efficiency considerations are such that the non-standardpractical experience of writing is met by a non-standardexperience 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 sameco-writing strategy. The co-writers are authors (recycled) andreaders whose past readings (real or imaginary) are integratedin the new experience. Recycling (names, actions, narratives,etc.) corresponds to, among other things, the attempt tocounteract the sequentiality of writing, even the literateexpectation of originality. Taking a piece from a literary workand using it in its entirety means to almost transform thelanguage sequence into a configuration. That piece resembles apainting hung in the middle of a page, or, to force the image,between the parts of a sonata. It entails its own history andinterpretation, and triggers a mechanism of rejection notdissimilar to that triggered by organ transplants. Theconvention of reading is broken; the text is manipulated like animage and offered as a collage to the reader. The seams ofdifferent parts sewn together are not hidden; to the contrary, aspotlight is focused on them. Gertrude Stein best exemplifiesthe tendency, and probably how well it synchronized with similardevelopments in art (cubism foremost). W. H. Gass masterfullywrote about words standing for characters, object, and actions;he invented new worlds where the writer can define rules fortheir behavior. Concrete poetry, too, in many ways anticipatedthis type of writing, which comes from visual experiences andfrom the experiments in music triggered by the dodecaphoniccomposers. In concrete poetry, one can even discover theexpression of jealousy between those interacting in thesystematic domain of abstract phonetic languages, and those inthe domain of ideograms. Japanese writers of concrete poetryseem equally eager to experience the sequential! The effort torecycle, interpret, visualize, to read and explain for thereader, and to compress (action, description, analysis)corresponds to the ever faster interactions of humans and to theshorter duration of such interactions. The reader is presentedwith pieces already known, or with easily understandable imagesthat summarize the action or the characters. Why imagine, aswriters always expected their readers to do, if one can see-thisseems to be the temptation.

The end of the great novel

The ideal of the great novel was an ideal of a monument inliteracy. Despite the technology for writing, such as wordprocessing machines and the hypertext programs for interactive,collaborative authoring, writing the great novel is not onlyimpossible, but irrelevant. Expectations associated with thegreat novel are expectations of unity, hom*ogeneity,universality. Such a novel would address everyone, as the greatnovels of the civilization of literacy tended to do. The extremesegmentation of the world, its heterogeneity, the new rhythms ofchange and of human experiences, the continuous decline of theideal embodied in literacy, education included, are argumentsagainst the possibility of such a novel. An all-encompassinglanguage, which the practical experience of writing such a novelimplies, is simply no longer possible. We live in a civilizationof partial languages, with their corresponding creative,non-standard writing experiences, in a disembodied domain ofexpression, communication, and signification. If, ad absurdum,various literary works could talk to each other (as their authorscan and do), they would soon conclude that the shared backgroundis so limited that, beyond the phrases of socializing and somepolitical statements (more circ*mstantial than substantial),little else could be said.

Furthermore, writing itself has changed. And since there is aconsubstantiality among all elements involved in the experience,the change affects the self-constitution of the writer, andsubsequently that of the reader. Technology takes care ofspelling and even syntax; more recently it even prompts semanticchoices. This use of technology in creative writing is far frombeing neutral. Different rhythms and patterns of association, asembodied in our practice with interface language-the languagemediating between us and the machine-are projected volens-nolensinto the realm of literature. Moreover, different kinds ofreading, 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 theelectronic book brings other reading possibilities to thepublic. An animated host can introduce a short story; a hand-held scanner can pick up words the reader does not know andactivate a synthetic voice to read their definitions from theon-line dictionary. And this is not all!

Language used to be the medium for bridging between generationsin the framework of hom*ogeneous practical experiences. EdmundCarpenter correctly pointed out that for the civilization ofliteracy, the book-and what, if not the literary book, bestembodies the notion of a book?-"became the organizing principlefor all existence." Yes, the book seemed almost the projectionof our own reality: beginning (we are all born), middle, and end(at which moment we become memory, the book itself being a formof memory), followed by new books. Carpenter went on to say,"Even as written manuscript, the book served as a model for bothmachine and bureaucracy. It encouraged a habit of thought thatdivided experience into specialized units and organized theseserially and causally. Translated into gears and levers, the bookbecame machine. Translated into people, it became army, chain ofcommand, assembly line, etc." Handwriting, typing, dictation,and word-processing define a context for the practicalexperience of self-identification as novelist, poet, playwright,screenplay author, and scriptwriter. Interaction withword-processing programs produces a fluidity of writing thattestifies to endless self-correction, and to rewriting driven byassociation. Word-processing is cognitively a different effortfrom writing with a pen or typewriter. And no one should besurprised that what is written with the new media cannot be thesame as the works of Shakespeare, Balzac, and Tolstoi, entrustedby hand to paper. A distributed narrative effort of many people,via network interaction, is a practical experience above andbeyond anything we could have had in the framework of literacy.

The first comic strip in America (1896) announced the age ofcomplementary expression (text and drawing). Nobody reallyunderstood how far the genre would go, or how manyliteracy-based conventions would be undone in the process.Comic-strip characters occupied a large part of the memory ofthose who grew up with the names of characters from books. Theinfluence of new media (film, in particular) on the narrative ofthe strip opened avenues of experiments in writing. When classicsof literature (even the Bible) were presented in comic-stripform, and when comic strips were united under the cover ofbooks, the book itself changed. Structural characteristics ofthe strip (fast, dense, focused, short, expressive) correspondto those of the pragmatic framework of the civilization ofilliteracy.

Does the civilization of illiteracy herald the end of the book?As far as the practice of creative writing goes, it might aswell, since writing does not necessarily have to take a bookformat. Narrative, as we know from oral tradition, can takeforms other than the book. My opinion in regard to books shouldnot be understood as prophecy. Pointing to alternatives (such asdigital books, electronic publications distributed on networksand stored on disks), some perhaps not thought through as yet,keeps the influence of our own framework of reference at adistance. A video format, as poor and unsatisfying a substituteas it might seem to someone raised with the book, is a candidateeveryone can name. After all, the majority of the books studied ageneration ago are known to the students of this time mainlythrough television and movie adaptations. The majority oftoday's children's books are released together with their videosimuli. Computer-supported artifacts, endowed or not withliterary intelligence, are another candidate for replacing thebook. What we know is that paper can be handled only so much andpreserved only so long (even if it is non-acid paper).Furthermore, it becomes more and more an issue of efficiencywhether we can afford transforming our forests into books, whichhumankind, faced with many challenges, may no longer be able toafford, or which are so disconnected from current pragmaticsthat they have lost their relevance.

Today, while still entirely devoted to the ideal of literacy,societies subsidize literary practical experiences which areonly peripherally relevant to human experience. A large numberof grants go to writers who will probably never be read; manymore to contests (themselves anchored in the obsession withhierarchy peculiar to literacy) open to students lost in thelabyrinth of an illusion; and even more to schools and seminarsof marginal or very narrow interest, or to publications thatbarely justify the effort and expense of their endeavor. Fromthe perspective of the beneficiaries, awarding such grants isthe right thing to do. In the long run, this altruism will notsave more of the literacy-based literature than highlyspecialized contemporary society perceives as necessary inrespect to efficiency requirements facing the world at thecurrent scale. In labor division, the literate writer and readerconstitute their systematic domain of interaction.

The book will no doubt remain in some form or another (words onpaper or dots on an electronic page of a portable readingdevice) as long as people derive pleasure or profit from theprinted word. But as opposed to the past, this is only one amongmany literary and non-literary domains of interaction. It is,for example, very difficult to say whether the artists of thegraffiti movement were writers, using an alphabet reminiscent ofEgyptian hieroglyphs, or painters with words, or both. KeithHaring, their best known representative, covered every availablesquare inch-horror vacui-with expressions that constituted a newsystematic domain of interaction among people, as well as a newspace for his own self-constitution as a different type ofartist.

Instead of decrying the end of an ideal, we should celebrate thevictory of diversity. Those who really feel that their destinyrelies on the ideal of literature might choose to give up someof their expectations, stimulated by the literate model, in orderto preserve the structure within which literacy is possible andnecessary. The demand for more at the lowest price that heraldsthe multi-headed creature called the civilization of illiteracyaffects more than the production of clothes and dishes, or ofcars and an insatiable appetite for travel. It affects our waysof 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 ofbooks." If books truly represent the spirit and letter of thecivilization of literacy, a description of their currentcondition can be instructive. Obviously, one has to accept thepossibility that the civilization of literacy will continue insome form, or in more than one, that will extend the experienceof the book, as we know it today through its physical form. Orthe civilization of literacy may continue in a totally new formthat responds to the human desire for efficiency. Addressing theInternational Publishers Association Congress in June, 1988,George Steiner tried to identify the "interlocking factors" thatled to the establishment of book culture. The technology ofprinting, paper production, and advances in typography that areassociated with the "private ownership of space, of silence, andof books themselves" are among factors affecting the process.Another important factor is book aesthetics, the underlyingformal quality of a medium that had to compete with vividimages, with powerful traditions of orality, and with patterns ofbehavior established within practical experiences different fromthose of book culture.

Near the end of the 15th century, Aldus Manutius understood thatthe new technology of printing could be, and should be, morethan the mere continuation of the tradition of manuscripts. Theartifact of the book, close to what we know today, is mainly hiscontribution to the civilization of literacy. Manutius appliedaesthetic and functional criteria that led to the smaller-sizedbooks we are familiar with. He worked with covers; the hardcover in thicker cardboard replaced the covers of pinewood usedto protect manuscripts and early printed texts. The understandingof aesthetics and of the experience of reading led him to definebetter layouts and a new typography. His concern withportability (a quality obsessing contemporary computerdesigners), with readability (of no less interest to computerdisplay experts), and with a balanced visual appearance make himthe real saint of the order of the book.

The book also entails conventions of intellectual ownership. Intheir effort to stop the dissemination of heretical booksthrough print, Philip and Mary, in 1557, limited the right ofprinting to the members of the Stationers' Company. In 1585,copyright for members was introduced; and in 1709, copyright forauthors. From that time on, the book expanded the notion ofproperty, 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 thatdesktop capabilities and technologies that facilitate print ondemand affordably reproduce print, old notions of property andownership need to be redefined. Our understanding of books andthe 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 orsoft covers. One hundred optical disks can store the entirecontents of the Library of Congress. This means, among otherthings, that works of incredible significance cost five cents perbook printed digitally. Another result is that the notion ofintellectual ownership becomes fuzzy. Actually, the word book isnot the proper one to use in the case of digital storage. Thenew pragmatics makes it crisply clear that the book is merely amedium for the storage and transmission of data, knowledge, andwisdom, as well as a lot of stupidity and vulgarity.

For people who prefer the book format, high-performance printingpresses are able to efficiently provide runs for very preciselydefined segments of the population just waiting for the GreatAmerican Novel that is custom written and produced for onereader at a time. "Personalized Story Books Starring Your Child,"screams an advertisem*nt. It promises "Hard cover, full colorillustration, exciting stories with positive image buildingstorylines." 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 abetter job with her photo and keepsake album, but the frameworkof mediation replaced her long ago. Paper is available in allimaginable quantities and qualities; the technologies oftypesetting, layout, image reproduction, and binding are all inplace.

Nowadays, there is enough private space. The wash of noise is nota serious obstacle to people who want to read, even if they donot wear noise cancellation headphones. And never were bookspublished at more affordable prices than today. Some booksreside on the shelves of the Internet or are integrated inbroader hyper- books on the World Wide Web. A word from onebook-let's say a new concept built upon earlier languageexperiences-connects the interested reader to other books andarticles, as well as to voices that read texts, to songs, and toimages. The book is no longer a self-sufficient entity, but amedium for possible interaction.

At the threshold of the civilization of illiteracy, how manybooks are printed? In which medium? How many are sold? Are theyread? How? By whom? These are only some of the questions to beposed when approaching the subject of books. Even more importantis the "Why?"-in particular, "Why read books?"-the real test ofthe book's legitimacy, and ergo, the legitimacy of thecivilization which the book emblemizes. The broader issue isactually reading and writing, or to be more precise, the meansthrough which an author can address many readers.

The fine balance of factors involved in the publishing andsuccess of a book is extremely difficult to describe. Thegeneral trend in publishing can be described as more and moretitles in smaller and smaller editions. Ideally, a goodmanuscript (of a novel, book of poetry, plays, essays,scientific or philosophic writings) should become a successfulbook, 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 ofwriting or to the satisfaction of reading. They reflect marketprocesses of valuation.

These elements are symptomatic of the book's condition in thecivilization that moves towards the pragmatics of many competingliteracies, almost all contradicting the intrinsiccharacteristics of literacy embodied in the book. The life ofbooks is shorter (despite their being printed on acid-freepaper). Books have a decreasing degree of universality; morebooks address limited groups of readers as opposed to a largegeneral market, not to mention the whole of humankind, as wasonce the book's purpose. Books use specialized languages,depending on their topics. The distinct ways these languagesconvey contents frequently contradict the culturallyacknowledged condition of the book, and are a cause of concern topeople who are the products of (or adherents to) a civilizationbased on books. More and more books end up as collections ofimages with minimal commentary. Some are already deliveredtogether with a tape cassette or compact disk, to be heard ratherthan 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 drawlfor a story like To Kill a Mockingbird; a cultivated voice forCharles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities), the books compete withred lights, landscapes, and other signs along the road. Manybooks written in our day contain vulgar language and elevateslang to the qualitative standard of fiction. There are booksthat promise the excitement of a game (find the object or thecriminal). A reward, effectively replacing the satisfaction ofreading, will be handed to the lucky finder. The subject ofreading has also changed since the time the Bible and otherreligious texts, dramas and poetry, philosophic and scientificwritings were entrusted to the printing press. Melodramaticfiction, at least 200 years old, paved the way for pulp fictionand today's surefire bestsellers based on gossip and escapism.

Our goal is to understand the nature of change in the book'scondition, why this change is a cause for concern, as well asour own relation to books. To do this, we should examine thetransition that defines the identity and role of the writer andreader in the new pragmatic context.

Why don't people read books?

"Do you ever read any of the books you burn?" Clarisse McClellanasks in Fahrenheit 451. (This book is also available in videoformat and as a computer game.) Guy Montag, the fireman,answers, "That is against the law." This conversation defines acontext: The group that still reads is able to pass the benefitsof their experience to people who are not allowed to read books.In our days, no fireman is paid to set books ablaze. To thecontrary, many people are employed to save deteriorating booksprinted in the past. But the question of whether people read anyof the books they buy or receive, or even save from destruction,cannot be dismissed.

The majority of the books changing hands and actually read arereference publications. The home contains an increasing numberof radios, television sets, CD players, electronic games, videocassette recorders, and computers. The shelf space for books isbeing taken up by other media. Instead of the personal library,people consecrate space in their homes for media centers thatconsume a great deal of their free time. Instead of thepermanence of the printed text, they prefer the variability ofcontinually changing programs, of scanning and sampling, and ofsurfing the Internet. The digital highway supplies an enormousamount of reference material. This material is, moreover, keptup to date, something that is not so easy to accomplish withbound sets of encyclopedias or even with the telephone book.

Books are not burned, but neither are they read with muchcommitment. Scanning through a story or reading the summary onthe flip jacket, filling one's time during a commute or at theairport is all that happens in most cases. A variety of booksare written for such purposes. Required reading for classes,according to teachers, cannot exceed the attention span of theirpupils. Growing up under the formative influence of short cyclesand the expectation of quick conclusions to their acts,youngsters oppose any reading that is not to the point (as theysee it). In most cases, outlines provide whatever knowledge(information is probably a better word) is needed for a class orfor a final examination. The real filter of reading is themultiple choice grid, not the satisfaction of immersion in aworld brought to life by words.

All this is almost the end of the story, not the substance of itsarguments. The arguments are manifold and all related tocharacteristics of literacy. In the first place, publisherssimply discard the traditional reverence for books. They realizethat a book placed somewhere on the pedestal of adulation,extended from the religious Book to books in general, keepsreaders away or makes them captive to interpretive prejudices.

How can one be involved in the practice of democracy withoutextending it to books, thus giving Cervantes and Whitman a placeequal to that of the cheap, mass- produced pulp literature andeven the videotape? The experience of the book reveals adouble-edged sword, deriving mainly from the perception that thebook, as a vessel, sanctifies whatever it carries. Hitler's MeinKampf was such a book in Nazi Germany, and still is for Nazirevivalists. In the former communist countries, the books of Marxand Engels were sanctified, printed without end (after carefulediting), and forced upon readers of all age groups, especiallythe young. Nobody could argue against even trivial factualerrors that slipped into their writings, into translations, orinto selective editions. Mao's little Red Book was distributedfree to everyone in China. In our day, Hitler and other authorsof the same bent are published. These very few examples follow along line of books dealing in indoctrination (religious,ideological, economic), misrepresentation, and bigotry. Asinsidious attempts to seduce for disreputable, if not franklycriminal causes, they have inflicted damage on humanisticexpectations and on the practice of human-based values.Champions of literacy point to the classics of history andenlightenment and to the great writers of poetry, fiction, anddrama as the authentic heritage of the book. How much space dothey occupy on the shelves of bookstores, libraries, and homes?In good faith and without exaggerating, one can easily concludethat from all the books stored in homes and places of publicaccess, the majority should probably have never been written,never mind printed or read. If these books and periodicals wereonly repetitive of what had been said and thought previously,they would not deserve such strong condemnation. The judgmentexpressed above refers to words and thoughts whose shallownessand deceit are consecrated through the associations that theprinted word entails.

Hard facts about books in the new pragmatic context confirm thatpeople, either due to illiteracy or a-literacy, read less anduse books less and less for their practical experiences. Titlesmake it onto the bestseller lists only because they are sold, not read. Intrinsic qualities-of writing, aesthetics, the ideas setforth-are rarely taken into consideration, unless they confirmthe prejudices of their consumers. Books often make it onto thebookshelf as a status symbol. In the early eighties, everyone inItaly, Germany, and the USA wanted to display The Name of theRose. Or they become a subject of conversation-"It will be madeinto a movie." But even such books remain unread to the lastpage 70% of the time. Today, by virtue of faster writing andprinting, books compete with the newspaper in capturing thesensational. The unholy alliance between the film industry,television, and publishing houses is very adept at squeezingthe last possible drop of sleaze from an event of public interestin order to catch one more viewer or purchaser of cheaplymanufactured books.

Because of a combination of many factors-long production cycles,high cost of publishing and marketing, low transparency, rapidacquisition of knowledge that makes high quality books obsoletein one or two years, to name a few factors-the book has ceasedto be the major instrument for the dissemination of knowledgerelated to practical experiences. First among the factorsaffecting the book's role is that the rhythm of renewal andconversion requires a medium that can keep pace with change.Prior to the breakdown of the former Soviet Union and the EasternBlock, the majority of books on politics, sociology, economics,and culture pertinent to that part of the world became uselessfrom one day to the next as events and whims rendered theircontent meaningless. Once the Eastern Block started to unravel,even periodicals could not keep pace with events. All around theworld, strikes, various forms of social activism, politicaldebates, successive reorganizations, new borders, and new leaderscontradicted the image of stability settled in the books ofscholars and even in the evaluations issued by intelligenceagencies.

Not only politics required rewriting. Books on physics,chemistry, mathematics, computing, genetics, and mind and braintheory have to be rewritten as new discoveries and technologiesrender obsolete facts associated with past observations publishedas eternal truth. In some cases, the books were rewritten ontape, as visual presentations impossible to fit in sentences orbetween book covers, or on CD-ROM. More recently, books arebeing rewritten as Internet publications or full-fledged Websites that can easily be kept current. Photocopies of selectedpages and articles already substitute for the book on the desksof students, professors, scholars, and researchers. Collegestudents, who are obliged to buy books, don't like to invest initems that they know will be outdated and useless within a year.The book will appear in a new edition, either because theinformation has been updated or because the publisher wants tomake more money. Students prefer the videotape, so much closerto tele-viewing, an experience that ultimately forms cognitivecharacteristics different from those of reading and writing. Orthey prefer to find material on-line, again a cognitiveexperience of a dynamic condition incompatible with the book.

The complexity of human practical experiences is as important asthe dynamics. The pragmatic framework that made literacy and thebook necessary was relatively hom*ogeneous. Heterogeneity entailsa state of affairs for which books can only serve after theexperience, as a repository medium. Even in this documentary orhistoric 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 welike it or not. The facts relating to the consequences of theincreased complexity of current pragmatics have yet to berealized, much less recorded. What is available is theaccumulated human experience with alternate media, notnecessarily cheaper than books, but certainly better adapted toinstances of parallelism and distributed activities.

Books do justice to simultaneous temporal phenomena only at theexpense of capturing their essence. The nature of human praxisis so radically disconnected from the nature of literacyembodied in the book that one can no longer rely on it withoutaffecting the outcome. Practical experiences in which time is ofthe essence, and activities that require synchronization or arebased on a configurational paradigm are different in nature fromwriting and reading. To open a book, to look for the appropriatepage, and to read and understand the information slows down (orstops) the process. The sequential nature of literacy misses therequirement of synchronism and might not even lead to solutionsto questions related to non-sequential connections.

In addition to these major factors, there is the broaderbackground: Access to knowledge conveyed through literacyimplies a shared literate experience. Shared experience,especially in open, dynamic societies, can no longer be assumedas a given. There are cultural as well as physical differencesto be accounted for among all the human beings in the developedworld. There are the visually impaired and physicallyhandicapped who cannot use books. There are people withconditions that do not allow for the deciphering of printedletters and words. These individuals must rely on devices thatread for them, on senses other than sight, and on a good memory.

The decreased interest in books is indicative of a fundamentallydifferent human practical experience of self-constitution. Inline with the shift from manufacturing to service, books performmainly functions of incidental information (when not replaced bya database), amusem*nt, and filling time. Even if the greatnovel, or great epic poem, or great drama were written, it wouldgo unnoticed in the loud concert of competing messages. It mightbe that literature today is passionless, or it might be that theseduction of commercial success brings everything to the commondenominator of return on an investment, regardless of culturalreward. Books written to please, books published to satisfyvanity, and books of impenetrable obscurity did not exactlytrigger 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 hasbeen. Many books reflect a level of literacy that is not exactlyencouraging. Still, literature does not fail on its merits (orlack thereof). It fails, rather, on the context of itsperception. Like anything else in the civilization of illiteracy,the multiplication of choices resulted in the annihilation of asense of value and of effective criteria for differentiationwithin the continuum of writing.

The overall development towards the civilization of illiteracysuggests that the age of the book is being followed by an age ofalternative media. The promoters of literacy are doing theirbest to resist this change. Their motto is "Read anything, aslong as you read." They effectively discount any and all othermeans of acquiring knowledge, and totally disenfranchiseindividuals who cannot read. There are many avenues toself-constitution: all our senses-including commonsense-repetition and memory. Some of these avenues are moreefficient than the medium of the book. If they were not, theywould not be succeeding as they do. The champions of literacyalso imply that anything acquired through reading is good. Theharm that can be transmitted through the book medium can berecorded in volumes. On the collective level, it has led topersecution and violence, even mass destruction. On theindividual level, it can lead to imbalance. The child who isforced to read at age three is being deprived of time fordeveloping other skills essential to his or her physical andmental well-being. The cognitive repertory of these children isbeing stunted by well meaning but misguided parents. It is beingstunted, too, by the market that sells literacy as though therewere no tomorrow despite the fact that literacy has lost itsdominant position in our lives.

Topos uranikos distributed

This book began by contrasting the readers of the past to today'stypical literate: Zizi the hairdresser and her boyfriend, thetaxi driver with the college degree in political science. Theunderlying structure of human practical experiences through whichaverage persons like Zizi and Bruno G., as well as the Nobelprize winner in genetics, artists, sportsmen and sportswomen,writers, TV producers, and computer hackers (and many otherprofessionals), constitute themselves is characterized by a newtype of relations among parts. These relations are in flux.Whereas many functions associated with human experiences can berationalized, levels of efficiency beyond individualcapabilities can be achieved. Thus, one of the main goals is toharmonize the relation between human experience and thefunctioning of devices emulating human activities. This raisesthe issue of the altered human condition. In this context, therelevance of knowledge has changed to the extent that, in orderto function in a world of arbitrary bureaucratic rules designedto blindly implement a democracy of mediocrity, one has to knowthe trivia of prices in the supermarket. Someone has to know howto access them when they are stored in a memory device, and howto charge the bill to a credit card number. But no one has toknow the history of cultural values. It actually helps to ignorevalue altogether.

The roots of almost everything involved in current practicalexperiences are no longer effectively anchored in tradition, butin the memory of facts and actions extracted from tradition. Ata time when books are merely an interior designer's concept ofdecoration, beautifully crafted editions fill the necessarybookcase. Humanity has reached a new stage: We are less groundedin nature and tradition. This condition takes some of the windout of the sails of memetics. Practical experiences of humanself-constitution extended the human phenotype beyond that of anyother known species. But this extension is not the sum total ofgenetic and cultural evolution. It is of a different qualitythat neither genetic nor memetic replication suggests, let aloneexplains. Our obsession is to surpass the limitations of thepast, cultural as well as natural. That makes us like the manythings we generated in the attempt to reach levels of efficiencywhich neither nature nor tradition can support. The hydroponictomato, the genetically engineered low-fat egg, the digitalbook, and the human being of the civilization of illiteracy havemore in common than one thinks at the mere mention of thisopinion.

The life of books, good or bad, useful or destructive,entertaining or boring, is the life of those who read them. Freeto constitute ourselves in a framework of human experiencesopened to much more than books, we have the chance of exploringnew territories of human expression and communication, and ofachieving levels of significance. Individual performance in thecivilization of literacy could not reach such levels. But thisformulation is suspect of cheap rhetoric. It begs the question"Why don't we?" (accomplish all these potentialities). We are somany, we are so talented, we are so well informed. Thecivilization of illiteracy is not a promised land. Interactiveeducation centers, distributed tasks, cooperative efforts, andcultivation and use of all senses do not just happen.Understanding new necessities, in particular the relationbetween the new scale of humankind and the levels of efficiencyto be reached in order to effectively address higherexpectations of well being, does not come through divineinspiration, high-tech proselytizing, or political speeches. Itresults from the experience of self-constitution itself, in thesense that each experience becomes a locus of interactions,which transcends the individual.

The realization of potential is probably less direct than therealization of dangers and risks. We are still singing thesirens' song instead of articulating goals appropriate to ournew condition. One area in which goals have been articulated andare being pursued is the transfer of the contents of books fromvarious libraries to new media allowing for storage ofinformation, more access to it, and creative interaction. Thelibrary, perceived as a form of trans-human memory, a space oftopos uranikos filled with eternal information, was thecollection of ideas and forms that one referred to when in needof guidance. Robert de Sorbon gave his books to the University ofParis almost 750 years ago. Little did he know what this gesturewould mean to the few scholars who had access to thiscollection. By 1302 (only 25 years after his donation), one ofthe readers would jot down the observation that he would needten years to read the just under 1,000 books in the library. Onehundred years later, Pembroke College of Cambridge Universityand Merton College of Oxford obtained their libraries. TheCharles University in Prague, the universities in Krakow(Poland), Coimbra (Portugal), Salamanca (Spain), Heidelberg andCologne (the future Germany), Basle (Switzerland), andCopenhagen (Denmark) followed suit. Libraries grew into nationalcultural monuments. Museums grew within them and then becameentities in their own right. Today, billions of books arehoused in libraries all over the world. Books are in our homes,in town and city libraries, in research institutions, inreligious 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), thisenormous wealth of knowledge. The library represented thepermanent central storehouse of knowledge.

But the pragmatic framework of human self-constitution movedbeyond the characteristics embodied by both library and book.Therefore, a new library, representative of manyliteracies-visual, aural, and tactile, relying on multimedia, andmodels and simulations-and able to cope with fast change had tocome about. This library, to which we shall return, now residesin a distributed world, accessible from many directions and inmany ways, continuously open, and freed from the anxiety thatbooks might catch fire or turn into dust. True, the image of theworld limited almost exclusively to reference books does notspeak in favor of the enormous investment in time, money, andtalent for taking the new routes opened by non-linear means ofaccess to information, rich sensorial content, and interactivity.Still, in many ways Noah Webster's experience in publishing hisdictionary-a reference for America as the Larousse is for Franceand the Duden for Germany-can be retraced in the multimediaencyclopedias of our day, moreover in the emergence of thevirtual library.

In 1945, Vannevar Bush wrote his prophetic article in theAtlantic Monthly. He announced, "Wholly new forms ofencyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh ofassociative trails running through them." He went on toillustrate how the lawyer will have "at his touch the associatedopinions and decision of his whole experience." The patentattorney could call "the millions of issued patents, withfamiliar trails to every point of his client's interest." Thephysician, the chemist, the historian will use Bush's modestlynamed Memex to retrieve information. The conclusion, in a wellsubdued tone, was "Presumably man's spirit should be elevated ifhe can better review his shoddy past and analyze more completelyand objectively his present problems."

Written immediately after World War II, Bush's article wasconcerned with applying the benefits of scientific research forwarfare in the new context of peace. What he suggested as arather independent application is now the reality of on-linecommunities of people working on related topics or complementingeach other's work. The benefits of electronic mail, of sharedfiles, 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 ismainly concerned with the power of linking. Nelson learned fromliteracy that one can link text to a footnote (the jump-link),to a quote (the quote-link), and to a marginal note (thecorrelink, as he calls it). He designed his project as adistributed library of ever new texts and images open toeveryone, a medium for authoring thoughts, for linking toothers, for altering texts and images. Multiplicity ofinterpretations, open to everyone else, ensures efficiency atthe global level, and integrity at the individual level. Hecalled his concept a thinker-toy, an environment that supportsdedicated work without taking away the fun. Generalized beyondhis initial scheme, the medium allows people to make notes, byeither writing them, dictating them, or drawing diagrams. Textcan be heard, images animated. Visualization increasesexpressivity. Participation of many readers enlarges the librarywhile simultaneously allowing others to see only what they wantto see. Privacy can be maintained according to one's wishes;interaction is under the control of each individual. In thisgeneralized medium, videotapes, films, images from museums, andlive performances are brought together. The rule is simple:"Accessibility and free linking make a two-sided coin." Intranslation: If someone wants or needs to connect to something,i.e., to use a resource created by someone else, the connectionbecomes available to all those to whom it might be relevant.Relinquishing the right to control links, established in thefirst place because one needed them, is part of the Xanaduagreement. It is part of the living library, without walls andbookshelves, called the World Wide Web.

Roads paved with good intentions are notorious for leading wherewe don't want to wind up. For everyone who has searched forknowledge in the Web's virtual library, it becomes clear verysoon that no known search engine and no intelligent agent caneffectively distinguish between the trivial and the meaningful.We have co-evolved with the results of our practicalexperiences. Selection neither increases the chances of thefittest, nor eliminates the biologically unfit. Culturalartifacts, books included, or for that matter, the zeroes andones that are the making of digital texts of all kinds and allcontents, illustrate the thesis no less than the increasingnumber of people kept alive who, under Darwin's law, would havedied. These individuals are able to constitute their practicalexperiences through means, among which books and libraries do notpresent themselves as alternatives. Global networks are not ahabitat for the human mind, but they are an effective medium formind interactions of individuals who are physically far frombeing equal. Custom access to knowledge available in the virtuallibrary is the main characteristic, more so than the wealth ofdata types and retrieval procedures.

The question posed at the beginning of this section, "Why don'twe?" referring to the creative use of new means, finds oneanswer here. As more and more people, within their realms ofneeds and interests, become linked to what is pertinent to theirexistence and experience, they also enter an agreement ofexchange that makes their linking part of the distributed spaceof human memory and creativity. The naked need to enter theagreement is part of the dynamics of the civilization ofilliteracy. Reading and enjoying a book implied an eventualreturn of money to the publisher and the writer. It might alsohave affected the reader in ways difficult to evaluate: Somepeople believe that good books make better people. Distributedenvironments of knowledge, expression, and information changethe relation. From the world of orality-"Tell me and I willforget"-to that of literacy-"Let me read, but I might notremember"-a cognitive change, still evident today, took place.The next-"Involve me and I will understand"-began. The line ofthought continues: Involvement returns value to others.

The Sense of Design

To design means to literally involve oneself in a practicalexperience with signs. To design means to express, in varioussigns, thoughts, feelings, and intentions pertinent to humancommunication, as well as to project oneself in artifactsappropriate to human practical experiences. In the remote age ofdirect practical experiences, there was no design. The practiceof signs entails the possibility to transcend the present. Innature, future means insemination; in culture, future isin-signation: putting into sign, i.e., design. In its broadestdefinition, design is the self-constitution of the human beingas an agent of change. This change covers the environment,conceiving artifacts (tools included), shelter, clothing,rituals, religious ceremonies, events, messages, interpretivecontexts, interactions, and more recently, new materials andvirtual realities. Shakespeare, who would have enjoyed theintense fervor of our age, gave a beautiful description ofdesign: "…imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown"(Midsummer Night's Dream). Although design contains elementsensuing from experiences involving language, design isessentially a non-verbal human activity. Its means of expressionand communication are grounded in the visual, but extend tosound, texture, odor, taste, and combinations of these(synaesthesia), including rhythm, color, and movement.

To the human being involved in practical experiences ofself-constitution, the realm of nature appears as given. Incounter-distinction and in retrospect, human nature appears asdesigned. In some cases, design is an act of selection: somethingis picked up from the environment-a stick, stone, plant-andassigned an a-natural function through implementation: markterritory, aid an activity, support a structure or the humanbody, trap animals or humans, attack or defend against attack,color skin or clothing. In other cases, selection is followed bysome form of framing, such as the frame of the ritual around atotem pole, animal sacrifice, mourning, and celebrations offecundity and victory. Selection and framing are related toefficiency expectations. They embody the hope for help frommagic forces and express willingness to pursue goals thatsupport the individual, family, and community. Between thepresent of any experience and the future, the experience ofdesign bridges in the form of new patterns of interaction(through tools, artifacts, messages), recurrences, and extensionsof consequences of human activity from the immediate to thefuture.

The projection of biology into an experience of long-lastingconsequences implies elements of planning, no matter howrudimentary, and expectations of outcome. It also leads to newhuman relations in family-based interactions, education, sharedvalues, and patterns of reciprocal responsibility. Random sexualencounters that reflect natural drives are not designs.Awareness of reciprocal attraction, shared feelings, andcommitments extending well beyond the physical encounter can beidentified as a design component present even in sexuality.Between the design component of sexual consequence of theevolving human being and the design of offspring by selection ofa partner, by selection of genetic traits catalogued in sem*nbanks, by genetic splicing and mutation, and by all that is yetto come upon us, there is a difference that reflects the alteredhuman pragmatic condition.

Of real interest here is how the future is captured in design.Moreover, we want to know how it unfolds in practicalexperiences of design by which human beings extend their realityfrom here and now to then and there. In ways different fromlanguage, design gives the human being another experience of timeand space. This experience is for the most part coherent withthat of language. But it can also make individuals constitutingthemselves through design work aware of aspects of time thatthe language experience misses altogether or makes impossible.Designs are expressed in drawings and eventually complemented bymodels testifying to the experiences of volume, texture, andmotion. The anticipated time dimension is eventually added insimulations. Design liberates the human being from totalconditioning through language.

Within the convention of design, signs are endowed with a life oftheir own, supported by the energy of the persons entering theconvention. This is how human symbolism, of confirmed vitalityand efficiency, is factually established. Symbols integrated inhuman experience are given the life of the experience. The entireheritage of rituals testifies to this. Today the word ritual isused indiscriminately for any habitual preparation, from bathingto watching TV to after-game celebrations. Initially, ritualsappeared as dynamic designs centered around episodes of life anddeath. Their motivation lay in the practical experience; theirunfolding in connected interactions acquired an aestheticquality from the underlying design.

From the earliest known experiences, the implicit aestheticcomponent is the optimizing element of the experience. Thisaesthetic component extends perceived formal qualities found innature to the aesthetics of objects and activities in the realmof human nature. The language of design expresses awareness ofthese formal characteristics. Practical experiences display arepetitive pattern: the optimal choice (of shapes, colors,rhythms, sounds, movement) is always pleasing. The qualitythrough which pleasure is experienced is not reducible to theelements involved, but it is impossible without them. Selectionis motivated by practical expectations, but guided by formalcriteria. Individuals involved in the earliest pragmaticframework were aware of this. Other formal criteria make up ageneric background. One of the recurrent patterns of thepractical experience of design is to appropriate the formalquality associated with what is pleasing in nature and tointegrate it in the optimal shaping of the future. This is howthe aesthetic dimension of human practical experiences resultedwithin such experiences.

Notation systems (e.g., the quipu, representational drawings onstone or on the ground, or hieroglyphics) that eventually becamewriting can be classified as design, not lastly in view of theiraesthetic coherence. Only when rules and expectations defined byverbal language take over notation does writing separate fromdesign and become part of the broader experience of language. Wecan now understand why changes in verbal language, as itconstituted a framework for time and spatial experiences, werenot necessarily reflected in changes in design. By the timeliteracy became possible, the underlying structure that led toit was embodied in the use of language. This is not true, to thesame extent, in the practice of design. It is at this juncturethat design is ascertained as a profession, i.e., as a practicaldomain with its own dynamics and goals. By no coincidence,engineering design emerged in the context of the pragmaticsthat began with building pyramids, ziggurats, and temples, andculminated in the Industrial Revolution in the design ofmachines. The broad premise of the Industrial Age is thateverything is a machine: the house, the carriage, stoves, thecontraptions used in literate education, schools, colleges,institutions, art studios, even nature.

From a relatively focused and hom*ogeneous field of practicalexperiences within industrial society, design evolved, in thecivilization of illiteracy, as an overriding concern thatextended to many specialized applications: tool design, buildingand interior design (architecture), jewelry design, appareldesign, textile design, product design, graphic design, and tothe many fields of engineering (including computer-aideddesign), interactive media and virtual reality, as well asgenetic engineering, new materials design, event design (appliedto politics and various commodities), networking, and education.Technologies, from primitive to sophisticated, supporting visuallanguages made possible complexities for which the intuitive useof 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 ofsynaesthesia, as well as experiences involving variabledesigns-that is, designs that grow together with the human beingself-constituted in practical interactions with the designedworld.

In the pragmatic framework based on the digital, design replacedliteracy more than any other practical experience has. Theresults of design are different in nature from those ofliteracy. As optimistic as one can become about a future notbound to the constraints of literacy, it takes more tocomprehend the sense of design at a time when evolutionaryprogress is paralleled by revolutionary change.

Drawing the future

Drawing starts with seeing and leads to a way of envisioning andunderstanding the world different from the understandingfiltered through language. From a cognitive viewpoint, drawingimplies that persons constituting their identity in the act ofdrawing know the inside and the outside of what they render. Todraw requires that things grow from their inside and take shapeas active entities. Visible and invisible parts interact indrawing, surface and volume intersect, voids and fills extend inthe visual expression, dynamically complementing each other.Each line of a drawing makes sense only in relation to theothers. In contrast to words and sentences, elements of a drawingconjure understanding only through the drawing. Visualrepresentation, as opposed to language expression, attainscoherence as a whole, and the whole is configurational. One canwrite the word table without ever experiencing the objectdenominated. Extracted from direct or mediated experiences,knowledge about the object and its functions is a prerequisitefor drawing an old table or conceiving a new one. To designmeans to express in a language that involves rendering. It alsoinvolves understanding that practical expectations are connectedto the projected object. Consequently, to design means toexperience the table in advance of its physical embodiment. Thusdesigning is the virtual practical experience, at the borderlinebetween what is and what new experiences of self-constitutionrequire.

In designing, people virtually project their own biological andcultural characteristics in whatever they conceive. Thiscorresponds to the reality that design is derived from practicalexperiences, extending what is possible to what is desirable.Functionality expresses this condition, though only partially.With the emergence of conditions embodied in the underlyingstructure reflected in literacy, image and literaterenditions-statements of goal and purpose, descriptions of means,procedures for evaluation-met. Literacy then effected changes inthe condition of design. These are reflected as generalexpectations of permanence, universality, dualism, centralism,and hierarchy. International style-an expression that reallycovers more than the name of a style-reflects these literateexpectations from design.

Is drawing natural? The meaning of such a question can beconjured only if articulated with its pendant: Is literacyunnatural or artificial? Everything already stated about drawingimplies that it is not natural, though it is closer to what itrepresents 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, personsconstitute themselves as having the ability to see, to understand(for instance, the invisible part of objects, how light affectsan image, how color or texture makes an object seem lighter orrounder), to relate to the pragmatic context as definitory of themeaning 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 babbleof a child, or like a fragmented, unfinished expression.Vitruvius had a culture of drawing very different from that ofthe many architects who followed him. Critics who compared himto Le Corbusier and his architectural renditions, to thearchitects of post-structuralism, and to the deconstructivistsand deconstructivist designers declared the drawings of thesearchitects to be ugly, bad, or inappropriate (Tom Wolfe went onrecord with this). At this instance, drawing ceases to be anadjunct to art; it petitions its own legitimacy.

If we ignore the pragmatic context and the major transition froma design initially influenced by language-Vitruvius wrote amonumental work on architecture-the statement stands. But whatwe face here is a process in time: from design influenced by thepragmatics embodied in Vitruvius' work, to design subordinated toliteracy, and finally to design struggling for emancipation as anew language, in which the critical component is as present asthe constructive impulse to change the world.

Design carries over many formal requirements from practicalexperiences subordinated to literacy. But there is also anunderlying conflict between design and language, moreoverbetween design and literacy. This conflict was never resolvedinside the experience of designing. In society, literacy imposedits formative structure on education, and what resulted wasdesign education with a strong liberal arts component. Needlessto say, designers, whether professionals in the field or students(designers-to-be), resented and resent the assumption that theirtrade needs to be elevated to the pedestal of the eternal valuesembodied in literacy. Instead of being stimulated to discoverthe need for literacy-based values in concrete contexts, designand design education are subjected to the traditional smorgasbordof history, language, philosophy, a little science, and manyfree choices. Its own theoretic level, or at least the quest fora theory, is discarded as frivolous. Moreover, the elementsgrouped under intuition are systematically explained away,instead of being stimulated.

Whereas the context of education allows for the artificialmaintenance of literacy- based training programs in design, thebroader context of pragmatic experiences confirms the dynamicchanges design brought about since the profession ascertainedits identity. The conflict between training and engaging promptedefforts to free design from constraints that affect its verynature: How do we get rid of the mechanical components of design(paste-up, rendering, model making)? These efforts came fromoutside the educational framework and were stimulated by thegeneral dynamics of change from the pragmatics of literacy tothe pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy. The changebrought about the emergence of new design tools that open freshperspectives for the expression of design: animation,interactivity, and simulation. It also encouraged designers toresearch within the realm of their domain, to inquire into themany aspects of their concern, and to express their findings innew designs. The computer desktop and various rapid prototypingtools brought execution closer to designers. It also introducednew mediating layers in the design process.

Breakaway

The majority of all artifacts in use today are either the resultof the design revolution at the beginning of the 20th century,or of efforts to redesign everyday objects for use in newcontexts of practical experiences. From the telephone to thetelevision set, from the automobile to the airplane andhelicopter, from the lead pencil to the fountain pen anddisposable ball-point pen, from the typewriter to the wordprocessor, from cash registers to laser readers, from stoves tomicrowave ovens-the list can go on and on-a new world has beendesigned and manufactured. The next world is already knocking atthe door with robots, voice commanded machines, and eveninterconnected intelligent systems that we might use, or thatmight use us, in some form. The steam and pneumatic enginesfired by coal, oil, or gas are being replaced by highlyefficient, compact, electric or magneto-electric enginesintegrated in the machines they drive, controlled bysophisticated electronic devices.

There is almost nothing stemming from the age that made literacynecessary that will not be replaced by higher efficiencyalternatives, by structurally different means. What about thetechnology of literacy? One can only repeat what once was a goodadvertisem*nt line: "The typewriter is to the pen what the sewingmachine (Remember the machine driven by foot power?) is to theneedle." Remington produced the beautiful Sholes and Gliddentypewriter in the 1870's. It was difficult to decide whether theornate object, displaying hand-stenciled polychrome flowers,belonged in the office or in a Victorian study. Now it is amuseum piece. Compare it to the word processor of today. Itscasing might survive the renewal cycle of two to three yearsthat hardware goes through. The chip's processing abilities willdouble every eighteen months, in accordance with Moore's Law.The software, the heart and mind of the machine, is improvedalmost continuously. Now it provides for checking spelling,contains dictionaries, checks syntax and suggests stylisticchanges. Soon it will take dictation. Then it will probablydisappear; first, because the computer can reside on the networkand be used as needed, and second, the written message will nolonger be appropriate in the new context. Those who questionthis rather pedestrian prediction might want to ask themselvessome other questions: Where is the ornamental ink stand, thebeautiful designs by Fabergé and Tiffany? Where are the fountainpens, the Gestetner machines? Carbon paper? Are they replaced byminiature tape recorders or pocket computers, by integratedminiature machines that themselves integrate the wirelesstelephone? Are they replaced by the computer, the Internetbrowser, and digital television? Edward Bulwer-Lytton gave usthe slogan "The pen is mightier than the sword." Today, thefunction of each is different from what it was when he referredto them. They became collectibles. The disposable pen issymptomatic 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 planwith a pencil, quite another to do the same on a typewriter, andeven more different to use a word processor for these purposes,or to rely on the Internet. The cognitive implications of theexperience-what kinds of processes take place in the mind-causethe output to be different in each case. No medium is passive.In each medium, previous experiences and patterns of interactionare accumulated. The more interaction there is to a process, andsometimes to a collaborative effort, the more the condition ofwriting itself changes. We can think of messages addressed tomany people at once. Think of the Mullah chanting eveningprayers at the top of a minaret; or of the priest addressing acongregation; of the president of a nation using the powerfulmeans of television, or of a spammer on the Internet,distributing messages to millions of e-mail addresses. Eachcommunication is framed in a context constituting its parametersof pre-understanding. To the majority, spam means no more thanchopped meat in a can. Even today, over 50% of the world'speople have never used a telephone. And with some 50 millionpeople on the Internet, Netizenship is more vision than reality.

Design as a semiotic integrative practical experience is a matterof both communication and context. The possibility to customizea message so that it is addressed not to an anonymous group (thebelievers gathered for the occasion, or members of society eagerto learn about political decisions affecting their lives), but toeach individual, reflecting concern for each one's individualcondition and respect for his or her contribution in a system ofdistributed tasks, was opened by design. The semiosis of groupand mass communication is very different from the semiosis ofpointcasting. Technologically, everything is available for thisindividualized communication. However, it does not occur becauseof the implicit literate expectation in the functioning ofchurch, state, education, commerce and other institutions. Designexperiences 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 acontext of sequential interaction (the word is uttered, thelistener understands it, reacts, etc.). In the industrialpragmatic framework, this was an efficient model. Perfectedthrough the experience of television, it reached globality. Butscale is not only sheer numbers. More important areinteractions, intensities, the efficient matching of eachindividual's needs and expectations. Thus, efficiency no longermeans how many individuals are at the receiving end of thecommunication channel, but how many channels are necessary toeffectively reach everyone. A different design can change thestructure of communication and introduce participatory elements.For those still captive to literacy, the alternative is theubiquitous word-processed letter matched to a list in adatabase. 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 isrepresented by individualized messages, addressing in parallelpeople who are concerned about similar issues (environment,education, the role of the family). Moreover, it is possible tohave many people write together, or to combine one person's textwith someone else's image, with animation, spoken words, ormusic. In the design effort that takes the lead here,hierarchies are abolished, and new interactions among people arestimulated. The design that leads to such patterns of humanexperiences must free itself from the constraints ofsequentiality. Such design can no longer be subject to theduality of good or bad, as frequently related to form (inparticular, typography, layout, coherence). Rather, it covers acontinuum between less appropriate to very well adapted to thescope 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, andreach its optimum through many contributions from those whoeffectively constitute their identity interacting with it. Theuser can effectively finish the design by choosing identifiersand 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 theindividuals addressed. At this level, to know the language meansto know the experience. Henceforth, the new design no longertakes place at a syntactic or a semantic level, but ispragmatically driven. To reach every individual means toconstitute a context for a significant practical experience:learning, participation in political decisions, making art, andmany others. But let us be realistic as we experience the urge toconvey a sense of optimism: the common practical experienceinvolves partaking in the distribution of the wealth andprosperity generated in this extremely efficient pragmaticframework. As discouraging as this might sound, in the lastanalysis, consumption, extremely individualized, constitutes themost engaging opportunity for efficient pointcasting. Thequestions entertained today by visionaries, innovators, andventure capitalists placing their bets on the Internet might notalways make this conclusion clear.

Convergence and divergence

Telecommunications, media, and computation converge. What makesthe convergence possible and necessary is a combination offactors united in the necessity to reach efficiency appropriateto human practical experiences at the global scale of existenceand work. It is within this broad dynamics and inner dynamicsthat design ascertains itself as a force for change from thecivilization of literacy to the civilization of many, sometimescontradictory, literacies. A shirt used to be mere clothing; theT-shirt became, in view of many concurrent forces, a new icon, asui generis medium of communication. The commercial aspect isobvious. For example, each university of certain renown haslicensing arrangements with some manufacturer who advertises thename on the walking billboards of chests, backs, and bellies. TheT-shirt effectively replaces wordy press statements and becomesan instance of live news. Before Operation Desert Storm got intofull swing, the T-shirt already signaled love for the troops or,alternatively, anti-war sentiment. Magic Johnson's admission thathe had tested HIV positive was followed, less than two dayslater, by the "We still love you" T- shirts in Los Angeles.

The quasi-instantaneous annotation of events is in keeping withthe fast change of attitudes and expectations. Institutions haveinertia; they cannot keep up with the rhythm of the times. Thenews, formed and conveyed outside the institution of media,reads as a manifesto of immediacy, but also as a testimony toephemerality. We actually lose our shirts on the immediate, noton the permanent. Design projects this sense of immediacy andephemerality not only through T-shirts or the Internet. Thehouse, clothes, cars, the Walkman, everything is part of thiscycle. Is design the cause of this, or is it something else,expressed through design, or to which designers becomeaccomplice? The shorter fashion cycles, the permanent renewal ofdesign forms, the 30-second drama or comedy ofadvertisem*nt-more appropriate to the rhythms of existence thannever-ending soap-operas-the new VLSI board, the craze fordesigner non-alcoholic beer or low-fat pork-all testify to arenewal speed met by what seems an inexhaustible appetite on theside of our current commercial democracy. The refresh rate ofimages on our TV sets and computer monitors, predicated by theintrinsic characteristics of technology and human biology, isprobably the extreme at which cycles of change can settle.

To take all this with enthusiasm or trepidation, withoutunderstanding why and how it happens, would contradict the basicassumption pursued in this book. The pragmatic context of highefficiency is also one of generalized democracy, extended fromproduction to consumption. The ubiquitous engine driving theprocess is the possibility, indeed necessity, of humanemancipation from all possible constraints. The experience ofdesign acknowledges that emancipation from constraints does notultimately result in some kind of anarchic paradise. The right topartake in what human experiences generate often takes the formof taste that is equalized and rendered uniform, and ofever-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 doesnot impose upon the user in design, but involves the user inchoices to be made. In this way, design becomes an indicator ofthe state of public intelligence, taste, and interest. It alsopoints to a new condition of values. The indicator might notalways show a pretty picture of who we are, and what ourpriorities are. The honest interpretation of such an indicatorcan open avenues to understanding why the Walkman-which seems toseduce people by an ideal of insulation from others-has thesuccess it has, why some fashion designs catch on and othersdon't, why some car models find acceptance, why movies onsignificant themes fail, and why, on a more general level,quality does not necessarily improve under circ*mstances ofexpectations in continuous expansion. New thresholds are set byeach new design attempt. The wearable computer is yet anothergadget in the open- ended development that unites evolution andrevolution.

The need to achieve high levels of efficiency corresponding tothe current human scale is probably the aspect most ignored.Efficiency, pre-programmed through design, confirms that humaninvolvement is expensive (do-it-yourself dominates at all levelsof design), and service more profitable than manufacturing indeveloped countries. None of these solutions can be takenlightheartedly. After all, design bridges to the future, and tobridge to a world of depleted resources, destroyed ecology, and amediocre human condition is not necessarily a good reason foroptimism. The goal of reducing human involvement, especiallywhen the human is forced into exhausting and dangerousexperiences, is very attractive, but also misleading. To reducehuman involvement, energies different from those of anindividual involved in experiences of self-constitution as auser need to be provided. Faced with the challenge posed by thedualistic choice expectations vs. resources, designers often failto free themselves from the literate ideology of dominatingnature. Fortunately, design based on co-evolution with nature isgaining momentum. So is the design of materials endowed withcharacteristics usually associated with human intelligence.

The inherent opposition between means and goals explains thedynamics of design in our time. Extremely efficient methods ofcommunication lead to information saturation. New methods fordesigning result in an apparent overabundance of artifacts andother products of design. It seems that the driving force is thepossibility to practically meet individual expectations atlevels of productivity higher than those of literacy-based massproduction, and at costs well below those of mass production. Thechallenge-how to maintain quality and integrity-is real andinvolves more than professional standards. Market-specificprocesses, probably well reflected in the notion of profit,affect design decisions to the extent that often human practicalexperiences in the market result in under-designing orover-designing negotiated items. Changing expectations, as aconsequence of rapidly changing contexts of human experiences,affect the design cycle even more than the production cycle. Theability to meet such changes by a built-in design variabilityis, however, not only a test of design, but also of its impliciteconomic equation.

Enormous segments of the world population are addressed bydesign. This fact gives the design experience, taken in itsentirety, a new social dimension. Against the background of theopportunity to fine-tune designs to each individual without theneed to build on expected literacy, the responsibility of suchan activity is probably unprecedented. Whether designers areaware of it, and able to work within the boundaries of such anexperience, is a different question.

The new designer

Designs mediate between requirements resulting from humanpractical experiences and possibilities (Gibson defined them asaffordances) in nature and society. They embody expectations andplans for change; and they need to interface between the givenand the desired or the expected. The language of design has animplicit set of anticipations and a projected endurance.Aesthetic structuring, culturally rooted and technologicallysupported, affects the efficiency of designed items. Theexplicit set of expectations is measured against this implicitset of anticipations. It translates from the many languages ofhuman practical experiences to the language of design, and fromhere 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 asmany perspectives as possible. From the thumbnail sketch to themany variations of a conceptual scheme, one eliminating theother, many decisions are arrived at. Design resembles a naturalselection process: one solution eliminates the other, and so onuntil a relatively appropriate design emerges. This is thememetic scheme, successfully translated into design softwareprograms based on genetic algorithms. In the absence of rules,such as those guiding literacy, and freed from dualisticthinking (the clear-cut good vs. bad), the designer explores acontinuum of answers to questions that arise during the designprocess. The fact that various solutions compete with each otherconfers a certain drama on design. Its open-endedness projects asense of change. Its mediating nature explains much of itsengaging aspect. There is an obvious difference between thedesign experience within a context of assuming identity betweenthe body and machines, and the new context of digital cloning ofthe human being. Designs in the area of neurobionics, roboticprosthetics, and even the cyber-body could not have emerged fromany other pragmatic context but the one on which thecivilization of illiteracy is established.

Still, if someone had to choose between the Greek Templetypewriter of 1890 and today's word processor, thoughtlesslydesigned and encased in cheap plastic, the choice would bedifficult. One is an object of distinct beauty, reflecting anideal we can no longer support. Its distinction made itunavailable to many people who needed such an instrument. Behindor inside the word processor, as behind any digital processingmachine, are standardized components. The entire machine is ahighly modular ensemble. One program is the archetype for allthe word processing that ever existed. The rest is bells andwhistles. Here is indeed the crux of the matter: The ability toachieve maximum efficiency based on the recognition that rawmaterials and energy mean nothing unless the creative mind,applied to tasks relevant to human experiences ofself-constitution, makes something out of them.

In the line of the argument followed, design sometimes seemsdemonized for what we all experience as waste and disdain forthe environment, or lack of commitment to the people replaced bynew machines. That people eventually become addicted to theproducts of design-television sets, electronic gadgets, designerfashion, designer drugs-is an irony soon forgotten. At othertimes, design seems idealized for finding a way to maximize theefficiency of human practical experiences, or for projecting achallenging sense of quality against the background of ourobsession with more at the lowest price. But it is not so muchthe activity as the people who are the activity that make eitherthe criticism or glorification of design meaningful. This bringsup the identity of the designer in the civilization ofilliteracy.

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-dimensionalspace 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 areplayed with; and animation is design with its own heart (anima).The variety of design experiences is only marginally controlledby design principles. There is integrity to design, consistenceand pertinence, and there are aesthetic qualities. But if anyonewould like to study design in its generality, the first lessonwould be that there is no alphabet or rule for correct design,and no generally accepted criteria for evaluation. Literacyoperates from top (vocabulary, grammar rules, and phonetics aregiven in advance) to bottom. Design operates the opposite way,from the particular context to new answers, continuously addingto 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, themselvesdesigned for public consumption. And there is the attempt to livelife as a continuum of designed events: birth, baptism,communion, graduations (at different moments in the cycle ofdesigned education), engagement, marriage, anniversaries,promotions, retirement, estate planning, funerals, estateexecution, and wars. As a designed practical experienceinvolving a variety of mediations, life can be very efficient,but probably not rewarding (in terms of quality) at the sametime. The conclusion applies to the result of all designactivities-products, materials, events. They make possible newlevels of convenience, but they also remove some of thechallenges people face and through which human personalityemerges.

The relation between challenges-of satisfying needs or meetinghigher and higher expectations-and the emergence of personalityis quite intricate. Every practical experience expresses newaspects of the individual. Personality integrates these aspectsover time and is projected, together with biological and culturalcharacteristics, in the never-ending succession of encounters ofnew situations, and consequently new people. The civilization ofilliteracy shifts focus from the exceptional to the average,generating expectations affordable to everyone. The space ofchoices thus opened is appropriate to the endless quest fornovelty, but not necessarily for the affirmation of theextraordinary. In most cases, the designer disappears (includinghis 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 whetherthey attract many interactions or turn out to be only ego trips.Names are sold and applied on labels for their recognition valuealone. No one cares whether there is a real person behind thename as long as the name trades well on the market in which thevery same bag, watch, sneakers, or frame for glasses, sellsunder different identifiers.

This has to be seen in the broader picture of the generaldisconnectedness among people. Very few care to know who theirneighbors or colleagues are, even less who the other people arewho namelessly participate in expected abundance or inecological self-destruction. Illiteracy indeed does away withthe opaqueness of literacy- based human relations. All the meansthrough which new practical experiences take place make each ofus subject to the transparency of illiteracy. The result is evendeeper integration of the individual in the shared databank ofinformation through which our profile of commercial democracy isdrawn. Design endlessly interprets information. Each time westep out of the private sphere-to visit a doctor or lawyer, tobuy a pair of shoes, to build a house, to take a trip, to searchfor information on the Internet-we become more and moretransparent, more and more part of the public domain. Buttransparency, sometimes savage in competitive life (economy,politics, intelligence), does not bring people closer. As wecelebrate new opportunities, we should not lose sight of what islost in the process.

Designing the virtual

The experience of design is one of signs and their infinitemanipulation. It takes place in an experiential context thatmoved away from the object, away from immediacy and fromco-presence. Some people would say it moved from the real,without thinking that signs are as real as anything else. Whenpushing this experience to its limits, the designer lands inimaginary territories of extreme richness. One can imagine a citybuilt underwater, or a spherical house that can be rolled fromlocation to location, devices of all kinds, clothing as thin assomeone'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 freshhuman endeavors-live in an underwater city, wear the lightest orheaviest clothing, interconnect with the world through what youwear, interact with new, genetically engineered humans-virtualspace is opened for investigation. Regardless of how a virtualexperience is made possible-drawings, diagrams, combinations ofimages and sounds, triggered dreams, happenings, or the digitalembodiment of virtual reality-it escapes literacy-basedconstraints and embodies new languages, especially synaestheticlanguages. In fact, if design is a sign focused on the practicalexperience, the design of virtual space is one level beyond,i.e., it is in the meta-sign domain. This observation defines arealm where the person frees himself from the structurescharacteristic of literacy.

In virtuality, the sequentiality of written language isoverwritten by the very configurational nature of the context.Reciprocal relations among objects are not necessarily linearbecause their descriptions are no longer based on thereductionist approach. This is a universe designed as vague andallowing for the logic of vagueness. Within virtual space,self-constitution, hence identification, no longer regardscultural reference, which is literacy-based, but a changingself-reference. All attempts to see how a human being woulddevelop in the absence of language could finally be embodied inthe individual experience of a being whose mind reaches a stateof tabula rasa (clean slate) in the virtual. That such anexperience turns out to be a design experience, not a biologicalaccident (e.g., a child who grew up among animals, whoselanguage fails to develop and whose behavior is uncouth), isrelevant insofar as freedom from language can be investigatedonly in relation to its consequences pertaining to humanpractical experiences.

Virtuality is actually the generic reality of all and any designpractical experience. From among the very many designs in astate of virtuality, only a small number will become real. Whatgives one or another design a chance to transcend virtuality arecontextual dependencies within any defined pragmatic framework.Designers do not simply look at birds flying and come up withairplanes, or at fish swimming and come up with boats orsubmarines. There are many design experiences that are based onknowledge resulting from our interaction with nature. But thereare many more that originate in the realm of humanity. There isnothing to imitate in nature that will lead to the computer, andeven less that will lead to designing molecules, materials, andmachines endowed with characteristics that allow for self-repairand virtual environments for learning difficult skills. Designin the civilization of illiteracy relies foremost on humancognitive resources. Experience, like most of the practicalendeavors of this pragmatic framework, becomes predominantlycomputational and disseminates computational means.

Design human praxis, as the dominant factor of change from thepragmatics embodied in manufacturing to the new experiences ofservice economy, effected differentiations in respect to meansof expression and communication, in respect to the role ofrepresentation, and to our position in regard to values. Theelectronic data storage and retrieval that complements the roleof print, and progressively replaces it, results from theexperience of design supported by fast and versatile digital dataprocessing. When, at the social level, representation isreplaced by individual activism, and by the militancy ofinterest groups, we also experience a diffusion of politics intothe private, and to a certain extent, its appropriation byinterest groups assembled around causes of short-term impactthat keep changing. This change effects a shift from theexpectation of authority, connected to literacy-based humanexperiences, to the slippery authority of individual choice.

The designed world of artifacts, environments, materials,messages, and images (including the image of the individual) isa world of many choices, but of little concern for value. Itslife results from the exercise of freedom to choose and freedomto re- design ad infinitum. Almost everything designed underthese new pragmatic conditions embodies expectations associatedwith illiteracy. The object no longer dominates. The impressivemechanical contraptions, the engines, the shift systems,articulations, precious finish-they all belong among thecollectibles. Quite to the contrary, the new object is designedto be idiot-proof (the gentler name is user friendly), reflectinga generalized notion of permissiveness that replaces disciplineand 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, andthe meta-sign. Facts are replaced by their representations andby representations of representations, and so on until thereference fades into oblivion. Henceforth, the positivistexpectations ingrained in the experiences of the civilization ofliteracy are reconstituted as a frame of relativistinteractions, dominated by images, seconded by sounds (noiseincluded). Imaging technologies make drawing available toeveryone, exactly as writing was available to those processed asliterates. The photographic camera-drawing with light on film-theelectronic camera, the television camera, the scanner, and thedigitizer are, effectively, means for drawing and for processingthe image in full control of all its components. A sound levelcan easily be added, and indeed sound augments the expressivepower of images. Interactivity, involved in the design process,adds the dimension of change. That literacy, as one of the manylanguages of the civilization of illiteracy, uses design in itsvarious forms to further its own program is clear. Probably lessclear is that the literate experience is itself changed throughsuch instances. After all, literacy is the civilization thatstarted with the conventions of writing and grew to the one Bookopen to all possible interpretations, as these were generated inthe attempt to effectively conjure its meaning in new pragmaticcontexts. Literacy subjected to all the means that becomepossible in the civilization of illiteracy, in particular tothose that design affords, results in the infinity of books,printed for the potential individual reader (or the verylimited readership that a title or journal tends to have) whomight finally give it one interpretation (equal to none) byplacing it, unopened and unread, on a bookshelf. The radicaldescription given above might still be far away from today'sreality, but the dynamics of change points in this direction.

On the Internet, we come closer to what emerges as aqualitatively new form of human interaction. Design isintegrated 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 noone company (not even the institution of defense, which supportsnetworking) can claim that it designed this new medium of humanpractical experiences. Many individuals contributed, mostlyunaware that their particular designs would fit in an evolvingwhole whose appearance and function (or breakdown) no one couldpredict. These kept changing by the year and hour, and willcontinue to change for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.

Consider the design of communication protocols. This defies allthere is to literacy. A word spelled correctly is disassembled,turned into packages that carry one letter at a time (or aportion of a letter), and given indications where they shouldarrive, but not through which route. Eventually, they arereassembled, after each package travels its own path. But inorder to become a word again, they are further processedaccording to their condition. Such communication protocols negatethe centrality and sequentiality of literacy and treat all thatis information in the same way: images, sounds, movements. Manyother characteristics of literacy-dominated pragmatics areoverridden in the dynamic world of interconnections: formal rulesof language, determinism, dualistic distinctions. Distributedresources support distributed activities. Tremendous parallelismensures the vitality of the exponentially increasing number andtypes of transactions. Design itself, in line with almost anyconceivable 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, gaspipelines) were designed long before we knew of computers anddigital processing. In the context in which human cognitiveresources take precedence over any other resources, as we faceefficiency requirements of the global scale of humankind,connecting minds is not an evolutionary aspect of design, but arevolutionary step. All the networks mentioned above canparticipate 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 usedin the ways it can and should be. Design experiences ofintegration will make the slogan of convergence, applied to theintegration of telecommunication, media, and computing, a realitythat extends beyond these components. In some curious ways, theNetizen-the citizen of the digitally integrated world-is aconsequence of our self-identification in practical activitiesbased on a qualitatively new understanding of design.

Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning

Hölderlin's verse, "There was never so much beginning" (So vielAnfang war noch nie) captures the spirit of our time. It appliesto many beginnings: of new paradigms in science, oftechnological directions, of art and literature. It is probablymost applicable to the beginnings in political life. Thepolitical map of the world has changed more rapidly than we canremember from anything that books have told us. It is dangerousto generalize from events not really settled. But it isimpossible to ignore them, especially when they appear toconfirm the transition from the civilization of literacy to thecivilization of illiteracy.

People who deal with the development and behavior of the humanspecies believe that cooperative effort explains the developmentof language, if not its emergence. Cooperative effort is alsothe root of human self-constitution as political animals. Thesocial dimension, starting with awareness of kinship and followedby commitments to non-kin is, in addition to tool-making, thedriving force of human intellectual growth. Simply put, thequalifiers political animal (zoon politikon) and speaking animal(zoon phonanta) are tightly connected. But this relationship doesnot fully address the nature of political human experiences.

Different types of animals also develop patterns of interactionthat could be qualified as social, without reaching thecognitive sophistication of the species hom*o Habilis. They alsoexchange information, mainly through gestures, noises, andbiochemical signals. Tracking food, signaling danger, andentrance into cooperative effort are documented aspects ofanimal life. None of these qualifies them as political animals;neither do the means involved qualify as language. Politics, inits incipient forms or in today's sophisticated manifestations,is a distinct set of interhuman relationships made necessary bythe conscious need to optimize practical experiences of humanself-constitution. Politics is not equivalent to the formation ofa pack of wolves, to the herding tendency of deer, nor to thecomplex relations within a beehive. Moreover, politics is notreducible to sheer survival strategies, no matter howsophisticated, which are characteristic of some primates, andprobably other animals.

The underlying structure of the activities through which humansidentify themselves is embodied in human acts, be they of thenature of tool-making, sharing immediate or remote goals, andestablishing reciprocal obligations of a material or spiritualnature. Changes in the circ*mstances of practical experienceseffect changes in the way humans relate to each other. That thescale of human worlds, and thus the scale of human practicalexperience, is changing corresponds to the dynamics of thespecies' constitution. Incipient agricultural activity and theformation of the many families of languages correspond to a timewhen a critical mass was reached. At this threshold, syncretichuman interaction was already rooted in well defined patterns ofpractical experience. The pragmatic framework shaped theincipient political life, and was in turn stimulated by it.Politics emerged once the complexity of human interactionsincreased. Political practical experiences are related to work,to beliefs, to natural and cultural distinctions, even togeography, to the extent to which the environment makes someforms of human experiences possible. This is why, from a historicperspective, 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 needfor literacy also determined the need for appropriate means ofexpression, communication, and signification. This becomes evenmore obvious in politics, which is embedded in literacy-basedpragmatics. Consequently, once the particular pragmaticcirc*mstances change, the nature, the means, and the goals ofpolitics should change as well.

The commercial democracy of permissiveness

The condition of politics in a pragmatic framework ofnon-sequentiality, non- linear functional dependencies,non-determinism, decentralized, non-hierarchic modes ofinteraction or accelerated dynamics, extreme competitivepressure-that is, in the framework of the civilization ofilliteracy-currently escapes definition. State of fluxappropriately describes what such a political experience can be.What we have today, however, is a conflict between politicsanchored in the pragmatics that is still based on literacy andpolitics shaped by forces representing the pragmatic need totranscend literacy. The conflict affects the condition ofpolitics and the nature of contemporary political action. Itaffects everything related to the social contract and itsimplementation: education, exercise of democracy, practice oflaw, defense, social policies, and international affairs.

Changes affecting current political experiences are part of asweeping dynamics. These changes range from the acknowledgedtransition from an industrially based national economy to aninformation processing global economy focused on service. Partof the change is reflected in the transition from nationaleconomies of scarcity (usually complemented by patterns ofpreserving and saving) to large, integrated commercial economiesof access, even right, to consumption and affluence.Established in the context of political movements that focused onindividuality, these integrated economies affect, in turn, thecondition of the individual, who no longer sees the need forself-restraint or self-denial, and indulges in the commercialdemocracy of permissiveness. Consequently, political trials aremet, or avoided, with an Epicurean response: withdrawal frompublic life for the pleasures of buying, entertainment, travel,and sport, which in a not-so-distant past only the rich andpowerful could enjoy. Politics itself, as Huxley prophesied inhis description of the brave, new world, becomes a form ofentertainment, or yet another competitive instant, not far fromthe spirit and letter of the stock market, of the auction house,or the gambling casino.

Political involvement in a democracy of permissiveness ischanneled into various forms of activism, all expressions of theshift from the politics of authority to that of expandingfreedom of choice. The new experience of increasingly interactiveelectronic media is probably correlated to the shift from thepositivist test of facts, as it originated in science andexpanded into social and political life, to the rather relativistexpectation of successful representations, in public opinionpolls, in staged political ceremonies, in the image we have ofourselves and others. Albeit, the power of the media has alreadysurpassed that of politics.

All these considerations do not exhaust the process underdiscussion. They explain how particular types of activism-fromemancipatory movements (feminist, racial, sexual) to the newaction of groups identified through ethnic origin, lifestyle,concern for nature-use politics in its newer and older forms tofurther their own programs. Openness, tolerance, the right toexperiment, individualism, relativism, as well as attitudinallymotivated movements are all illiterate in nature in the sensethat they defy the structural characteristics of literacy andbecame possible only in post- literate contexts. Some of thesemovements are still vaguely defined, but have become part of thepolitical agenda of this period of fervor and upheaval. Literacy,in search of arguments for its own survival, frequently embracescauses stemming from experiences that negate it.

The impact of new self-constitutive practical experiences anddefinition on digital networks already qualifies theseexperiences as alternatives, regardless of how limited anindividual's involvement with them is. Within the realm of humaninteraction in the only uncensored medium known, a differentpolitical experience is taking shape. What counts in this newexperience are not anonymous voters lumped into ineffectivemajorities, but individuals willing to partake in concretedecisions that affect their lives in the virtual communities ofchoice that they establish. While the mass media, stillconnected to the literate nest in which they were hatched,partake in the functioning of political machines that producethe next meaningless president, a different political dynamics,focused on the individual, is leading to more efficient forms ofpolitical practical experiences. There is nothing miraculous toreport in this respect. Notwithstanding, the Internet can becredited for the defeat of the attempt in 1991 to turn back thepolitical clock in Russia, as well as for the way it isinfluencing events in China, East Europe, and South America.

How did we get here?

Human relations can be characterized, in retrospect, byrecurrences. Distinctions within self-constitutive experiencesoccur under the pressure of the realized need to achieve higherlevels of efficiency. Relations, which include a politicalcomponent pertinent to cooperative efforts and the need to sharethe outcome, have been evinced since the syncretic phase ofhuman activity. There is no distinct political dimension in thesyncretic pragmatics of immediacy. Incipient political identity,as any other kind of human self-identification, is foremostlynatural: the strongest, the swiftest, those with the most acutesenses are acknowledged as leaders. The most powerful aresuccessful on their own account. And this success translatesinto survival: more food, more offspring, resilience, ability toescape danger. Once the natural is humanized, the qualities thatmake some individuals better than others were acknowledged in therealms of nature and human nature. Whether as tribal leaders,spiritual animators, or priests, they all accomplished politicalfunctions and continuously reaffirmed the reasons for theirperceived authority. Over time, natural qualities lost theirdeterminant role. Characteristics based on human nature, inparticular intellectual qualities such as communication skillsand management and planning abilities, progressively tipped thebalance. Current textbooks defining politics do not even mentionnatural abilities, focusing instead on the art or science ofgoverning, shrewdness in promoting a policy, and contrivance.

From participatory forms of political life, in which solidarityis more important than differences among people, to the formscharacteristic of our time of personal and political shift awayfrom each other, changes have taken place because human practicemade them necessary. Politics was not and is not a passive resultof these changes, some of which it stimulated, others of whichit opposed. The survival drive behind participatory forms wascontinuously redefined and became a different kind of assertion:not just better than other species, but better than those beforeus, better than others. Competition shifted from the realm ofnature-man against nature-to the realm of humanity. Once theelement of comparison to the other, or judgment by others, wasintroduced, hierarchy was established. Hierarchy put on recordbecame, with the advent of notation, and more so with the adventof writing, a component of experience, one of its structuringelements. It is no longer a here-and-now defined action ofimmediacy, but action expanded as progression over generationsand societies, and among various societies. Accordingly, whilesolidarity, though permanently subject to redefinition, wasstill in the background, the driving forces were quite different.They resulted from the need to establish a political practice ofefficiency pertinent to the pragmatic framework, henceforth tothe needs of the community.

For as long as human activity was relatively hom*ogeneous, therewas no need for political delegation or for reifying politicalgoals into rules or organizations. Once diversification becamepossible, 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 newpractical experiences, but they also started to keep records andto measure the adequacy of effort, and thus the appropriatenessof their own policies. Attention to their past, present, andfuture also allowed them to become aware of the means thatdistinguished political practical experiences from all otherexperiences (magic, myth, religion). It was a difficultundertaking, especially under the provisions of centralized,syncretic authority. The natural, the magical, the religious, thelogical, the economical, and the political mingled. The criticalelement proved to be represented by practical expectations. Toimplore unknown forces for rain, a successful hunt, or fertilitywas very different from articulating expectations related to whatneeds to be done to maintain the integrity of work and life.Initially, these expectations were mixed. They progressivelybecame more focused, and a sense of accountability, based ontangible results, embodied in comparisons, was introduced.

While self-constitution is the projection of individualcharacteristics (biological, cultural) in a given practicalexperience, political practice is to a great extent a projectionof expectations. At each juncture in humankind's practicalexperience, the previous expectation is carried over as newexpectations appear. Accordingly, it is expected that apolitical leader will embody, in fact or through the symbolismof authority, natural qualities, cognitive abilities, andcommunication skills (rhetoric included), among otherattributes. When these expectations are embodied in specificfunctions (tribal chief, judge, army commander, electedlegislator, or selected member of the executive body) and inpolitical institutions, the projection is no longer that ofindividuals, but of the society committed to the goals and meansexpressed, to its acknowledged values. Whether indeed eachtribal leader was the fastest, or each judge the most impartialin ascertaining the damage done by a person who defied rules oflife and work, whether the military leader was the bravest, orthe legislator the wisest, became almost irrelevant after theirpolitical recognition. Expectation overcame reality. This aspectbecomes very significant in the context of literacy. Moreover, itbecomes critical in the transition from the pragmatics on whichliteracy is based to a pragmatic framework in respect to whichliteracy requirements only hinder.

Political institutions firmly grounded in the assumptions ofliteracy 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 experiencesare taking hold in the global economy. Networks, in fullexpansion, are altering the nature of human transactions to theextent that fewer and fewer people participate in electionsbecause they know that the function of these elections-to presentchoice-is no longer politically relevant. There is a need tobring politics closer to individuals; and this need can beacknowledged only within structures of individual empowerment, asopposed to empty representation.

Political activity resulted in norms, institutions, values, and aconsciousness of belonging to society. Not by any stretch of theimagination is politics a harmonizing activity, because to livewith others, to enter a contract and pursue one's individualgoals within its limitations, means to accept a condition of asui generis trade-off. Political experiences involve, in variousdegrees, skills and knowledge for giving life and legitimacy totrade-offs. Language is the blood that flows through the arteriesof the political animal. When tamed by literacy, this languagedefines a very precise realm of political life. The heartbeat ofthe literate political animal corresponds to a rhythm of lifeand work controlled by literacy. The accelerated rhythm thatbecame necessary under a new scale of experiences requires theliberation of political language from the control of literacy,and the participation of many languages in politicalexperiences.

It should come as no surprise that the expectation of languageskills, even when language changes, in people involved in thepractical experience of politics is carried over from onegeneration to another. Regardless of the level of sophisticationreached by a particular language, and of the specific form ofpolitical practice, effective use of powerful means ofexpression and communication is required. Even when they did notknow how to write, kings and emperors were regarded as beingbetter writers than those who could. They would dictate to thescribe, who created the perception that they probablytranslated what higher authorities whispered into their ears.Even when their rhetoric was weak, the masters of persuasionthey used were seen as only agents of power. Books wereattributed to political leaders; victory in war was credited tothem, as well as to military commanders. Law codes wereassociated with their names, and even miracles, when politicsjoined the forces of magic and religion (often playing oneagainst the other). All this and more represent the projectionof expectations.

The particular expectations of literacy confirm values associatedwith its characteristics. Politics and the ideals embodied inthe Enlightenment-it carried into action political aspirationsoriginating in religion-and the Industrial Revolution cannot beseparated. Expectations of permanency, universality, reason,democracy, and stability were all embodied in the politicalexperience. New forms of political activism were encouraged byliteracy and new institutions emerged. Awareness of boundariesamong cultures and languages increased. Centralism wasinstituted, and hierarchies, some very subtle, others insidious,were promoted with the help of the very powerful instrument oflanguage. Within this context, the practical experience ofpolitics established its own domain and its own criteria foreffectiveness, very different from those in the ancientcity-state or in the pragmatics of feudalism. Identification ofthe professional politician, different from the heir to power,was part of this process. Politics opened to the public andaffirmed tolerance, respect for the individual, and equality ofall people before the law. Political functions were defined andpolitical institutions formed. Rules for their proper operationwere encoded through literate means. The alliance betweenpolitics and literacy would eventually turn into an incestuouslove, but before that happened, emancipation of human politicalexperiences would reach a historic climax in the revolutionsthat took place during this time.

To celebrate all these accomplishments, while remaining aware ofthe many shadows cast upon them by prejudices carried over fromprevious political experiences (in regard to sex, race,religion, ownership), was a task of monumental dimensions. Wecan and must acknowledge that human political experiences playeda more important role than in previous social contexts inmaximizing efficiency in the pragmatic framework that madeliteracy necessary. It was at this time that the role ofeducation, and especially the significance of access to it, werepolitically defined and pursued according to the efficiencyexpectations that led to the Industrial Revolution. The processwas far from being universal. The western part of the world tookthe lead. Its political institutions encouraged investment, andeducation was such an investment.

Political institutions reflect the pragmatic condition of thecitizen and, in turn, effect changes in the experience ofpeople's life and work. While the word illiteracy probably firstappeared print in 1876 in an English publication, in 1880illiteracy in Germany was only one per cent of the population:"Heil dem König, Heil dem Staat/ Wo man gute Schulen hat!" wentthe slogan hailing the king and state where good schools werethe rule. This was the time when Thomas Alva Edison invented theincandescent light bulb (1879); Alexander Graham Bell, thetelephone (patented in 1876); Nicklaus Otto, the four-stroke gasengine (1876); Nikola Tesla, the electric alternator (1884).Nevertheless, before Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, he learnedthat only one per cent of all Russians were literate. In manyother parts of the world, the situation was not much better. Inaddition, this was also a time when literacy was literally aninstrument of political discrimination. Those not literate werelooked down on, as were women (some held back from literacy andstudy), as were nations considered ignorant and of inferiormorals (Russia being one of them).

Reflected in the ability to dominate nature, the growth ofscience and the use of effective technological means influencedthe political nature of states, as well as the relation amongnations. Rationality formed the foundation of legality; the stateascertained priority over individuals-a very direct reflection ofits literate nature. Rules were applied to everyone equally(which later translated into an effective "all are equal," quitedifferent from the empty slogans of populist movements). Therationality in place derived from literacy. To be effectivemeant to dominate those who were less effective (citizens,communities, nations).

Far from being a historic account, these observations suggestthat the literate political animal pursues political goals inline with the sequential nature of literacy in a context ofcentralized power, acknowledged hierarchies, and deterministicexpectations. The political institution is a machine, one amongmany of the pragmatics of the Industrial Revolution. It did onething at a time, and one part of the machine did not have toknow what the other was doing. Energy was used between input andoutput, and what resulted-political decisions, social policies,regulations-was mass production of whatever the society couldnegotiate: lubrication diminished friction. Parties were formed,political programs articulated, and access to power opened tomany. Two premises were implicit in the literate discourse:people should be able to express opinions on issues of publicinterest; and they should be able to oversee the politicalprocess, assuming responsibility for the way they exercise theirpolitical rights. These two premises introduced an operationaldefinition of democracy and freedom, eventually encoded in thedoctrine of liberal democracy. They also confirmed the literateexpectation that democracy and freedom, like literacy, areuniversal and eternal.

The failure of literacy-based politics takes place on its ownterms. Dictatorships (left-wing and right-wing), nationalism,racism, colonialism, and the politics of disastrous wars and ofthe leveling of aspirations that leads to the mediocrity embodiedin bureaucracy have brought the high hopes, raised during theclimax of literate political action, to the low of indifferenceand cynicism we face in our day. Instead of the people's broaderparticipation in the political process, a hope raised by progressin making equality and freedom effectively possible, societyfaces the effects of the ubiquitous dedication to enjoyment incorrupted welfare states unable to meet the obligations theyassumed, rightly or not. At times, it seems that the complexityof political experience prevents even the people's symbolicparticipation in government. Volunteering and voting, a rightfor which people fought with a passion matched only by theircurrent indifference, have lost their meaning. There is no properfeedback to reinforce the will and dedication to participate. Italso seems that in advocating equality and freedom, a commondenominator so low was established that politics can onlyadminister mediocrity, but not stimulate excellence. From amongall its functions, nationhood, as the embodiment of theexperience of political self-constitution, seems to maintainonly the function of redistribution.

Individual liberty, hard fought for under the many signs ofliteracy, appears to be conformistic at best, andopportunistic. To many citizens, it is questionable whether thelost sense of community is a fair trade-off for the acquiredright to individualism. The hundreds of millions again and againseduced by the political discourse of hatred (in fascism,communism, nationalism, racism, fanaticism) wasted theirhard-won rights in order to take away from others property,freedom of expression and religion, liberty, dignity, andeventually life. Politics after Auschwitz was not meant to becomeyet another instance of pettifogging. But it did, and we all areaware of the opportunistic appropriation of tragedy (hunger,oppression, disease, ecological disaster) in current politicalentertainment.

The efficiency expected from political action under theassumptions of literacy is characteristic of the scale at whichpeople constitute themselves. The nation is the world, or theonly thing that counts in this world of opportunity and risk. Therest is, relatively speaking, superfluous. Nations, even thosethat acknowledge the need to integrate, try to securefunctioning as autonomous entities. National borders may beless guarded, but they are maintained as borders of literacytranslated into economic opportunity. When the goal ofautonomous existence is no longer attainable, expansion is theanswer. Ideological, racial, economic and other types ofarguments are articulated in order to justify the extension ofpolitics in the experience of battle. The two World Wars broughtliterate politics to its climax, and the Cold War (the firstglobal battle) to its final crisis, but not yet to its end, eventhough the enemy vanished like a humorless ghost.

A closer look at the systematic aspects of the politicalexperience of human self- constitution should prepare us forapproaching the current political condition. This should atleast provide elements for understanding all those accumulatedexpectations that people have with respect to politics,politicians, and the institutions through which political goalsare pursued. Political goals are always practical goals,regardless of the language in which they are expressed or therituals attached. As recurrent patterns of human relationships,political experiences appear to have a life of their own. Thiscreates the impression that agreements dictated by practicalreasons originate outside the experience, at the initiative ofpoliticians, due to a certain event, or as the result of randomchoice.

Political tongues

Language is the instrument through which political practicalexperience takes place. To reconstitute past succeedingpolitical experiences therefore means to reconstitute theirlanguage(s). The task is overwhelming because politics is mingledwith every aspect of human life: work, property, family, sex,religion, education, ethics, and art. It is present even in theinterrelations of these aspects because politics is alsoself-reflective. That is, the identity of one entity is relatedto the identity of others in relation to whichself-identification takes place. The variety of politicalexperiences corresponds to the variety of pragmaticcirc*mstances within which humans project their identity.

Individual existence resulting from interaction with othersextends to the realm of politics and is embodied in therecurrent patterns that make up expectations, goals,institutions, norms, conflicts, and power relations. Theindividual is concealed in all these. In some ways, politics isa social-educational practice resulting in the integration ofinstinctive actions (a-political) and learned modes of practicewith social impact. What constitutes politics is the dynamics ofrelations as they become possible and as they unfold as openingstowards new relations. One of the concrete forms of suchrelations is the propensity to coalition building. Politics iscontingent upon subjects interacting. Their past (ontogeny) andpresent (pragmatics) are involved in these interactions. To acertain extent, it is a learned form of practice requiring meansfor interaction, among which language has been the mostimportant. It is also a practice of investigation, discovery,and social testing.

The manifold of political languages corresponds to the manifoldof practical experiences. There are probably as many politicaltongues as there are circ*mstances of self-identification withina society. But against the background of this variety is theexpectation that word and deed coincide, or at least that they donot stray too far from each other.

The advent of writing changed politics because it attachedwritten testimony to it, which became a referential element. AsSocrates and Plato noticed, this was a blessing in disguise.Since the time writing entered the political sphere, thepractical argument shifted from the fact, argued and eventuallysettled, to the record. It became itself a practical experienceof records (of property, law, order, agreements, negotiations,and allocations for the good of society). The institutions thatemerged after the practical experience of writing operatedwithin the structure of and in accordance with the expectationsbrought about by writing. And soon, as relative as soon can be,political self-consciousness was established parallel topolitical action and pursued as yet another practicalexperience.

The many languages of political experience multiply once more inthe new languages of political awareness. Where values were thefinal goal of politics, the value of the political experienceitself became a subject of concern. Many political projects werepursued at this self-reflective level: conceiving new forms ofhuman cooperation and political organization, advancement ofideas concerning education, prejudices, emancipation, and law.This explains, too, why in the sequence of political practicalexperiences, expectations did not nullify each other. Theyaccumulated as an expression of an ideal, forever moving awayfrom the last goal attained. Without a good understanding of theprocess, nobody could account for the inner dynamics of politicalchange. The same applies to accounting for the role played bypolitical leaders, philosophers, and political organizationsinvolved, by virtue of their own goals and functions, inpolitical life.

Politics in the civilization of illiteracy is not politics outof the blue sky. Along the continuum of political practicalexperiences, it entails expectations generated under differentpragmatic circ*mstances. And it faces challenges-the majorchallenge being the efficiency expected in the new scale ofhuman experience-for which its traditional means and itsinherited structure are simply not adequate. Politicaldiscontinuity is always more difficult to accept, evenunderstand. Revolutions are celebrated only after they takeplace, and especially after they successfully establish asemblance of stability.

Can literacy lead politics to failure?

In our time, much is said regarding the perception that thelanguage of politics and the political practice it seems tocoordinate are very far apart. People's mistrust of politicsappears to reach new heights. The role and importance ofpolitical leaders and institutions apparently have changed. Themost able are not necessarily involved in politics. Theirself-constitution takes place in practical experiences morerewarding and more challenging than political activism.Political institutions no longer represent the participants inthe political contract, but pursue their own goals, survivalincluded. Law takes on a life of its own, more concerned, so thepublic perceives, with protecting the criminal, in the name ofpreserving civil rights, than upholding justice. Taxes supportextravagant governments and forms of social redistribution ofwealth, more often reflecting a guilt complex over pastinequities than authentic social solidarity. Instead ofpromoting meaningful human relationships and addressing thefuture, they keep fixing the past. Everyone complains, probablya phenomenon as old as any relation among people involved in asui generis give-and-take interaction. But fewer and fewer arewilling to do something because individual participation andeffort appear useless in the given political structure.

The majority of people look back to some prior politicalexperience and interpret the past in the light of books theyhave read. They fail to realize that the complexity of today'shuman experience cannot be met by yesterday's solutions. They areconvinced that if we are faithful to our political heritage, allproblems, credibility and corruption included, will be solved.They also believe religious systems and their great bookscontain all that is needed to meet all imaginable present andfuture challenges. Even the very honorable conviction that thefounders of modern democracies prepared citizens to cope withthis unprecedented present cannot go unchallenged. TheConstitution of the United States (1787) as well as theDeclaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France(1789) reflect the thinking and the prose of the civilization ofliteracy. Similar documents are on record in Latin America,Europe, India, and Japan. They are as useless as history can bewhen new circ*mstances of human self- constitution are totallydifferent from the experiences that gave birth to thesedocuments. Revisionism will not do. The new context requires nota static collection of admirable principles, but dynamicpolitical structures and procedures of the same nature as thepragmatics of shorter cycles of change, non-determinism, highefficiency, decentralization, and non-hierarchical modes ofoperation. As the world reinvents itself as interwoven, itbreaks loose from prescriptions of local significance andtraditional import.

Although the number of emerging nations has increased-and nobodyknows how many more will emerge-we know of no politicaldocuments similar to those articulated in 1776, 1789, 1848, oreven 1870. Nothing comparable to the Declaration ofIndependence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen,even the Communist Manifesto (no matter how discredited it is atpresent), whether in substance or style, has accompanied currentpolitical movements. The reason why no such document can emergecan be connected to the inadequacies of literacy-based politics.This civilization is no longer one of ideas, religious orsecular. It is characterized by processes, methodologies, andinventions expressed in various sign systems that have adynamics different from that of language and literacy. The ideasof the civilization of literacy address the mind, soul, andspirit.

The most one can expect in our time of upheaval and change areprovisions for establishing conditions for unhampered humaninteractions in the market and in other domains of humanself-constitution (religion, education, family). Steadyglobalization means that the health of national economies,education, sports, or art matters just as little as nationalborders and the theatrics of diplomacy and internationalrelations. One can hear Dostoyevsky's prophetic line: "If it'sotherwise not possible, make us your servants, but make usfull." It hurts to repeat it, but it will hurt more to ignore itat a time when nothing grows faster than the urge of millions ofpeople to emigrate to any developed country willing to takethem, even as second-class citizens, so long as they escapetheir current abysmal condition.

The dynamics of change in the world is characterized by theacknowledged need of many countries to be integrated in theglobal economy while preserving or requiring a token of nationalidentity. State sovereignty is self-delusive in the context ofcommercial, financial, or industrial autonomy that is impossibleto achieve. Self- determination, always to the detriment of someother ethnic group, echoes those tribal instincts that make theideal of constitutional government an exercise in futility. Theunderlying structure of literacy is reflected in nationalmovements and their dualistic system of values. The logic of thegood and the bad, more difficult to define in a context ofvagueness, but still pursued blindly, controls the waycoalitions are established, migration of populations is handled,and national interests defended, while these very nations arguefor integration and free market.

Nevertheless, the language of today's politics is, in the finalanalysis, shaped by the pragmatic framework. Its sentences arewritten in the language of ledgers; the freedom it purports toestablish is that of commercial democracy, of equal access toconsumption, which happens to be the main political achievementof recent history. The fact that the nations forming theEuropean Community gave up sovereignty with respect to themarket proves the point. That they still preserve diplomaticrepresentation, defense functions, and immigration policies onlyattests to the conflict between the politics of the civilizationof literacy and the politics of the civilization of illiteracy.

The great documents of the literate past perpetuate the rhetoricof the time of their writing. All the structural characteristicsof literacy, valid for the pragmatic framework that justifiesthem, deeply mark the letter and spirit of these documents. Theyascertain politics as sequential, linear, and deterministic. Theyrejoice in promulgating ideals that correspond to the scale ofhumankind in which they guarantee the means that result in theefficiency of industrial and productive society. Liberté,egalité, fraternité are shorthand for rights of conscience,ownership, and individual legal status. They are an expressionof accepted hierarchy and centralism to the degree that thesecould be rendered relative as need required. Expectations ofpermanency and universality were carried over from earlierpolitical experiences, or from religion, even though separationof Church and State was emphatically proclaimed during the FrenchRevolution, and in revolutions that took place afterwards.Amendments required by altered circ*mstances of humanself-constitution in practical experiences not anticipated inthe documents render their spirit relative and solve some of theproblems caused by the limitations mentioned.

Political documents, such as the ones mentioned above, are stillperceived as sacrosanct, regardless of their obvious inadequacyin the pragmatic context of the civilization of illiteracy. Itis one thing to establish the sanctity of property in a frameworkof agricultural praxis, whose politics was inspired by a sharedexpectation of cycles parallel to natural cycles. Jeffersonenvisioned the land as a vast agrarian state. "We are a peopleof farmers. Those who work the fields are the chosen people ofGod, if He had a chosen people. In their heart He planted thereal virtue." It is quite another thing to live in a pragmaticcontext of new forms of property, some reflecting a notion ofsequential accumulation, others an experience of work withmachines, of humans seen as commodity. It is a new reality tolive in today's integrated world of property as elusive as newdesigns, software, information, and ways to process it. To applyto this context political principles inspired by a movement thatsought independence from England while using slaves brought fromAfrica is questionable, at least.

Equality of natural rights, deriving from nature-based cycles, isquite different from equality of political rights andresponsibilities deriving from a machine-inspired model forprogress. Both of these sources are different from the politicalstatus of people involved in a pragmatics of global networkingand extreme task distribution. One can cautiously make the casethat the major political documents of the past were conceived inreaction to an intolerable state of affairs and events, notproactively, in anticipation of new situations and expectations.These documents are the expression of the need to unify,hom*ogenize, and integrate forces in a world of relativelyautonomous entities-national states-competing more for resourcesand productive forces than for markets. The values reflectedtherein correspond to the values on which literacy is foundedand 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 apparentlylost in the course of 200 years; or of cultural standards forboth society and politicians, standards that can only rarely beacknowledged today, if at all. If this is the case, which isdifficult to prove, what this seems to suggest is that the pricepaid for higher political efficiency is the lost ethics ofpolitics, or its current deplorable intellectual condition. Thelack of correlation between political practice and languageresults from the pragmatic context reflected in the condition oflanguage itself. While in real life, many literacies are at work,Literacy (with a capital L) still dominates the structure ofpolitics. Its rules are applied to forms of human interactionand evaluation that are not reducible to self-constitution inlanguage.

Political activity by and large follows patterns characteristicof the civilization of literacy, despite its own indulgence innon-linguistic semioses: the use of images, film, and video, orthe adoption of new networking technologies focused oninformation exchange. Former expectations that politiciansadhere to standards of the civilization of literacy are carriedover in new political and practical experiences. The expectationthat their literacy should match that of political documentsbelonging to the political tradition (the Constitution of theUnited States of America, for instance) is paradoxical, though,since the majority of Americans cannot recall what thesepolitical documents state. And they see no reason to find out.Their own practical experience takes place in domains for whichthe past is of little consequence to their well-being. As thingsstand now, the political principles required by the dynamics ofindustrial society are embodied in institutions and lawsdedicated to their own preservation.

Free of concern for their own freedom, politically rooted in aprior pragmatic framework, citizens take freedom for granted intheir new practical experiences and end up evading theassociated civic responsibility. They expect their politicians tobe literate for them. We deal here with a strange mixture ofassumptions: on the one hand, a notion of political lifecorresponding to a context of hom*ogeneity and a deterministicview of the social world; on the other, a realization thattoday's world requires specialized political practicalexperience, means and methods characteristic of heterogeneousand non-deterministic political processes. The simmering conflictis met with the type of thinking that will not solve the problembecause it is the problem.

The coordination of political action through literacy-basedlanguage and methods and the dynamics of a new politicalpractice, based on the characteristics of the civilization ofilliteracy, simply diverge. As in many other domains of literatecondition, it is as though institutions, norms, and regulationstake on lives of their own, as literate language does,perpetuating their own values and expectations. They develop asnetworks of interaction with an autonomous dynamics, uncoupledfrom the dynamics of political life, even from the new pragmaticcontext. The tremendous amount of written language (speeches,articles, forms, contracts, regulations, laws, treatises) standsin contrast to the very fast changes that make almost everypolitical text superfluous even before it is cast in the fasteroding medium of print or in the elusive bits and bytes ofelectronic processing.

Many economies have undergone, or realize they must undergo,profound restructuring. Massive down-sizing, paralleled byflatter hierarchies and smoother quality control, have affectedeconomic performance. But very little of this has touched thesacrosanct centralized state institutions. In the USA alone, 14departments, 135 federal agencies employing more than 2.1million civilians and 1.9 million military personnel account for$1.5 trillion in yearly expenditure. If the economy were asinefficient as political activity is, we would face a crisis ofglobal proportion and consequences that are impossible toanticipate.

This is why today, some citizens would write a Declaration ofIndependence that begins with the following line: "We're mad ashell and we're not going to take it anymore." But this would notmean that they would vote. When five times more people watchMarried with Children than vote in primaries, one understandsthat the morality and intellectual quality of the politician andcitizen correspond closely. Cynical or not, this observationsimply states that in the civilization of illiteracy, politicalaction and criteria for evaluating politics do not follow thepatterns of political practical experiences peculiar to thecivilization of literacy. Multiplied to infinity, choices nolonger undergird values, but options that are equally mediocre.

The issue of literacy from the perspective of politics is theissue of the means through which political practice takes place.A democracy resting solely upon the contribution to politicallife in and through literate language is at the same time captiveto language. The experience of language resulted fromdevelopments not necessarily democratic in nature. Embedded inliteracy, past practical experiences pertinent to a pragmaticcontext appropriate to a different scale of humankind are oftenan obstacle to new experiences. So are our distinctions of sex,race, social status, space, time, religion, art, and sport. Oncein language, such distinctions simply live off the body of anynew design for political action. Language is not politicallyneutral, 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 becomerelations in the literate use of language and of other means, aslong as they are used according to literacy expectations. It isnot that literacy prevents change; literacy allows for changewithin the systematic domain of practices relying on the literatepractical experiences of language. But when literacy itself ischallenged, as it is more and more in our day, it ends upopposing change.

Discrepancies between the language and actions of politics,politicians, and political institutions and programs result fromthe conflict between the horizon of literacy and the dynamicsfor which the literate use of language is ill equipped. If theformula deterioration of moral standards corresponds to thefailure of politics to meet its constituency's expectations, themost pessimistic views about the future would be justified,because politicians are not better or worse than theirconstituency. But as with everything else in the new pragmaticcontext, it is no longer individual performance that ensures thesuccess or failure of an activity. Integrating proceduresascertain a different form of cooperation and competition. Suchprocesses are made possible by means characteristic of highefficiency pragmatics, that is, task distribution, parallelismand reciprocal testing, cooperation through networking, andautomated procedures for planning and management. They aremeaningful only in conjunction with motivations characteristicof this age. If, on the other hand, the romantic notion that thebest become leaders were true of today's political experience,we would have cause to wonder at our own stupidity. In fact, itdoes not matter which person leads.

Political processes are so complex that the industrial model ofsuccessful stewardship no longer makes sense. Political life insociety does not depend on political competence, people'sgenerosity, 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 pragmaticforces. Such forces are at work locally and make sense onlywithin a context of direct effectiveness. But short of takingthese forces for granted, we cannot escape the need tounderstand 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 ofsome sort, which almost none would accept as a qualifier. But nomatter which label is applied, there is an obsession withliteracy in all these systems. "We need literacy for democracy tosurvive," says the literacy special interest group. But how dodictatorships come about in literate populations? The biggestdictatorship (the Soviet block) was proud of its high literacyrate, acknowledged by the western world as an accomplishmentimpossible to overlook. It fell because the underlyingstructural characteristics reflected in literacy collided withother requirements, mainly pragmatic.

An empire, the fourth in the modern historic succession thatstarted with the Turkish Empire and continued with theAustro-Hungarian and British Empires, crumbled. What makes thefall of the Soviet Empire significant is its own underlyingstructure. The former members of COMECON, those East Europeancountries that, along with the Soviet Union, once formed thecommunist block, represent a good case study for the forcesinvolved 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 aslightly amended paradigm of the Industrial Revolution, hailingitself as the workers' paradise, and laboring under the illusionof messianic collectivism, maintained literacy as its culturalfoundation.

Even the harshest and blindest critics of the system had toagree that if anything of historic significance could beattributed to communism, it was its literacy program. Largesegments of the population, illiterate prior to communism, weretaught to read and write. The school system, deficient in manyways, provided free and obligatory education, much better thanits free medical system. This effort at education was intendedto prepare the new generations for productive tasks, but also tosubject each person to a program of indoctrination channeledthrough the powerful medium of literacy. Questioned about hisown 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 ofMarx, Engels, and Lenin deludes himself tremendously. Those whoare waiting for this to happen will have to wait until crabslearn how to whistle." When, throughout Russia, statues of Leninstarted falling and Marx's name became synonymous with thefailure of communism, people probably started hearing strangesounds from crustaceans.

The abrupt and unexpected failure of the communist system-anevent hailed as victory in a war as cold as the market canbe-makes for unexpected proof of this book's major thesis. Thebreakdown of the Soviet system can be seen as the failure of astructure that kept literacy as its major educational andinstrumental medium, and relied on it for the dissemination ofits ideological goals inside and outside the block. Literacy, assuch, did not fail, but the structures that literacy entails:limited efficiency, sequential practical experiences of humanself-constitution in a hierarchic and centralized economy;deterministic (thus implicitly dualistic) working relations, alevel of efficiency based on the industrial model of labordivision, mediation subjected to central planning without choiceas to the mediating elements; opaqueness expressed in anobsession with secrecy, and last but not least, failure toacknowledge the new scale of humankind-in short, a pragmaticframework whose characteristics are reflected in literacy-allled to the final result. Indeed, the system acted to counterintegration and globality. It maintained rigid national andpolitical boundaries under the false assumption that insularitywould allow a controlled and orderly exchange of goods andideas, perpetuation and dissemination of an ideology ofproletarian dictatorship, and eventually coexistence with therest of the world under the assumption of its progressiveconversion to communist values.

In the doctrine of Marx and Engels, the proletariat appearsendowed with all the qualities associated with Divinity in theprototypic Book (the Old Testament): omniscience, omnipotence,and right almost all the time. There is a self-creative momentin the historic process they described, resulting from politicalactivism and commitment to change in the world. No one shouldlightly discard the Utopian core or the ideal embodied in thedoctrine. After all, nobody could argue against a world offreedom where each person participates with the best one has tooffer, and is rewarded with everything one needs. Freeeducation, free medical care, access to art and liberty in acontext of limitless unfolding of talent and harmony with nature,of shared wealth and emancipation from all prejudices-all thisis paradise on Earth (minus religion).

It should be pointed out that, within the system, the entirepractical human experience related to literacy-and theaccomplishments listed above are literacy- based-was subsidized.In no other part of the world, and under no other regime, wereso many people subjected to literacy. That the system failedshould not lead anyone to ignore some of the achievements of thepeople regimented under a flag they did not care for:fascinating art, interesting poetry and music, the massivecollection and preservation of folklore, spectacularmathematics, physics, and chemistry arose from beneath terrorand censorship. To survive as an artist, writer, or scientistmeant to force creativity where almost no room for it was left.Under no other regime on Earth did people read so much, listento music more intensely, visit museums with more passion, andcare for each other as family, friends, or as human beings,episodes of brutality notwithstanding. It is too simplistic toaccept the line that people read more in East Europe and theSoviet Union because they had nothing else to do. The pragmaticframework 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 politicaldiscourse and in social life) played its role in thequasi-unanimous silent rejection of the system, even more insilent, cowardly complicity with it. When the literate machine ofspying on the individual fell apart, people saw themselves inthe merciless mirror of opportunistic self- betrayal. The recordswill stand as a testimony that writing does not lead only toSolzhenitsyn's novels, Yevtushenko's poetry, Shoshtakovich'smusic, and the romantic Samizdat, but also to putrid words aboutothers, kin included. The opaqueness of literacy partiallyexplains why this is possible. Something other than theopaqueness granted by literacy (i.e., complicity established insociety) explains how it became a necessary aspect of thatsociety. Germans were not better, exceptions granted, thantheir fascist leaders; the peoples in the Soviet block were notbetter, exceptions granted again, than the leaders they acceptedfor such a long time.

But what went relatively unnoticed by experts in East Europeanand Soviet studies, as well as by governments fighting the ColdWar, is the dynamics of change. The system was economicallybroke, but still militarily viable (though overrated) andover-engaged in security activities-tight control of thepopulation, economic and political espionage, active attempts toexport its ideology. The structure within which people were torealize their potential-one of the ideals of communism-had fewincentives. But all this, despite the impact of the yetunfinished revolution, is only the tip of the iceberg, thevisible side when one looks from the riverbank of the free worldwhere incentives lead to self-sufficiency and complacency. Themajor aspect is that the dynamics of the system was severelyaffected by artificially maintaining a pragmatic framework and asystem of values not suited to change. This applies especially tothe major shift-from the industrial model to post-industrialsociety, to a context of practical experiences of humanself-constitution freed from the restrictions carried over fromthe politics of mind and body control-experienced by the rest ofthe western world.

Levels of expectation beyond the satisfaction of immediate needs(food, clothing, shelter), and of literacy-associatedexpectations (education, access to art and literature, travel),could not be satisfied unless and until levels of efficiencyimpossible to reach in the pragmatic context of industrialsocieties were made possible by a new pragmatics. Despite thefact that more writers, more publishing houses, more libraries,as well as more artists, theaters, opera houses, symphonicorchestras, research institutes, and more museums than in therest of the world were politically and economically supported inthe Eastern Block (almost to the extent that the secret policewas), activities related to literacy had only a short-termimpact on the individuals subjected to or taking advantage ofthem. This was proven dramatically by the proliferation ofcommercially motivated newspapers and publications (p*rnographyamong them) following the breakdown of the power structure invarious countries of the Block, and followed by an even fasterfocus on entertainment television and obsession with consumption.

The main events leading to the breakdown-each country had its owndrama, once the major puppeteer was caught off-guard by eventsin the Soviet Union-took place with the nation staring at the TVscreens, seduced by the dynamics of the live transmission forwhich literacy and prior literate use of the medium were neverwell equipped. The live drama of the hunt for Ceausescu inRomania, the climax of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the eventsin Prague, Sofia, and Tirana continued the spirit of the Polishtele-drama in the shipyards. It then took another turn, duringthe attempted coup in the Soviet Union, practically denying theliterate media any role but that of late chroniclers. Theinitial lessons in democracy took place via videotape. Variousnetworks, from WTN (World-Wide Television News) to CNN, butprimarily the backward technology of the fax machine, whichabsorbed essential literacy into a focused distribution ofindividual messages, provided the rest. As primitive as digitalnetworks were, and still are in that part of the world, theyplayed an important role. Not political manifestos orsophisticated ideological documents were disseminated, butimages, diagrams, and live sequences. In the meanwhile,entertainment took over almost all available bandwidth. What therest of the world consumed in the last fifteen years (along withfashion, fast food chains, soft drinks, and consumerelectronics) penetrated the lives of those whose revolt tookplace under the banner of the right to consume. Here, as in therest of the world, the spiritual and the political split forgood. The spiritual gets alimony; the political becomes theexecutor of the trust.

What failed the system was the lack of understanding of all thefactors leading to new productive experiences: the framework foroptimal interaction of people, circ*mstances of progressivemediation and further specialized human self-constitution, apractical context of networking and coordination based onindividual freedom and constraints assumed by individuals asthey define their expectations. Parallel to the literatestructure of a politics that failed is the experience of churchesin the Soviet Block. In a show of defiance towards the politicaldictatorship, people attended church, itself a mainstay ofliterate praxis (independent of the book or books they adopt fortheir basic program). Once religion was able to assert itsliterate characteristics through the imposition ofconstraints-so like those of the political system justoverthrown- churches began to experience the low attendance thatthe rest of the world is already familiar with.

No matter how much more quickly events take place in our age, itis probably still too early to understand all the implicationsof the major political event represented by the fall of theSoviet empire. For instance, in a context of global economy, howcan one correctly evaluate the emergence of new national statesand forceful national movements when the post-national state andthe trans-national world are already a reality? The question ispolitical in nature. Its focus is on identity. Identity reflectsall the relations through which people constituted themselves aspart of a larger entity-tribe, city, region, nation-defined bybiological and cultural characteristics, shared values,religion, a sense of common space and time, and a sense offuture.

A world of worlds

"We have made Italy, now we have to make Italians," declaredMassimo d'Azeglio during the first meeting of the ItalianParliament. A little over 100 years old, the nation-state wasthe most tangible product of the political practical experiencein the pragmatic context whose underlying structure is so wellreflected in literacy. Together with the nation-state, themodern notion of nationality was defined and became a majorforce of political life. As part of the political consciousnessin the age of industrial production, national consciousnessplayed a very precise role, ultimately expressed in all forms ofnationalism. It unified all those whose similarities inbiological characteristics, language, lore, and practicalexperiences were constituted in a framework of shared resourcesand political goals. Germany came into existence through aunifying language (Hoch Deutsch) and was consolidated through itsliteracy. Italy went through a similar process. In otherinstances, nations were born as a result of voluntary politicalacts: the United States, the nations declared independent afterthe fall of the Soviet Union, Croatia, Macedonia, some of theArab countries, and a number of African nation-states, oncecolonial powers could no longer afford to resist the force ofchange. As with everything pertaining to politics, nationalpolitics entails expectations corresponding to past phases (thebasic passions that once made up tribal solidarity), toinstances of human interaction well overhauled by the newrealities of the integrated world.

What, if any, explanation can one find in the dissolution ofYugoslavia? Against the background of conflict inBosnia-Herzegovina, this question has divided many wellintentioned intellectuals (not only in France) inclined to solvean absurd situation of genocide. Intellectuals questioned whatappeared to be irreducible religious contradictions betweenCatholic and Orthodox Christians, or between Christians andMoslems. The old conflict between the pro-fascist Croatian Ustashand the Serbian Chetniks dedicated to the vain goal of a greaterSerbia was also on their minds. They also wondered what thechances of the new nation-states of Estonia, Lithuania, andLatvia, and many of the autonomous regions and republics of theformer Soviet Union were. How will the Commonwealth ofIndependent States function once goals and purposes ofnation-states take over those assumed in a nebulously definedcommonwealth? And how can one explain the enormous discrepancybetween the attempt to constitute a broad European Community(actually, the United Markets of Europe), while other parts ofEurope break into small nation-states? How much of theunderlying tribalism, or provincialism, or religious adherence,or how much of the functions of literacy at work can be read inthe political fervor of nationalistic activism of our day? Oneanswer, no matter how encouraging, cannot address a fullparagraph of questions. These questions suggest that thepolitics of nations is so multifaceted that understanding itrequires not so much rehashing the past but focusing on the broadpicture of its dynamics.

Between the old city-state, the early empire (Roman, Byzantine),the medieval world of local attachments (pertaining to sharedspace used mainly for agriculture, and under the firm grip ofthe Papacy), and today's world of mass immigration and humandisplacement (for political, economic, religious, orpsychological reasons), we find inserted the settled universe ofnation-states and their respective literacies. In this universe,literacy and religion undergird the legal system. Politicsdefines national identity, subsuming language, ethnicity, waysof working, culture, superstitions, prejudice, art, and science.Within the nation-state's borders, citizens are subjected to apolitical practical experience of hom*ogeneity, centralism, anduniformity, required by the efficiency expectations of theIndustrial Revolution. The ideal of cosmopolis, the all-embracing empire of reason declared by the Stoics, runs counterto the ideal of the nation-state, which celebrates nationalreason and willingness to compete with others.

When the pragmatic circ*mstances leading to today's globaleconomy started exercising their action, an all-embracing empireof a different nature resulted. The new statement says thatChristians, Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, animists, even atheists,although bearing a national identity, are part of the globaleconomy. Not surprisingly, political action and economicintegration each run its own course. Commerce, with all itsimbalances and unfairness, the almost uncontrollable financialdynamics, and migration of industries take more and morefrequently what appears as the necessary path of globality.Politics, even when it acknowledges globality, focuses onnational definitions. To an outside observer, a nation'spolitics appears insignificant, powerless in comparison toeconomic forces, although it claims to control these forcesthrough monetary policies, labor laws, and trade regulations.The trans-national world has its own impetus. It continues toevade political constraints, ascertaining its own life. It wasdescribed from the perspective of its financial and economiccondition as The Borderless World (the title of Kenichi Ohmae'sbook), within which nationality counts only marginally. This isyet another reason for the low interest in public life on thepart of the wealthy in our days.

When the new southern republics freed by the breakdown of theSoviet Union debate which form of writing they shouldadopt-Arabic, Cyrillic, or Roman-and how to define theirrespective nations, they still look for national identifiers.Turkmanis and Uzbekistanis, Latvians and Estonians, Ukrainiansand Georgians, Hungarians and Romanians, and enterprising Polescomb their territories in search of business opportunities. Thesame takes place in many other countries, whose citizens areobsessed more with prosperity than with sovereignty, with accessto financial means more than with self-determination, and withcooperative effort, even involving traditional enemies, morethan with a constitutional foundation or universal protection ofhuman rights. Interestingly enough, while national identity ismore and more superseded by people's a-nationality, many newcountries, emerging as a result of the asserted right toself-determination, face as their first task not the future butthe past: definition of their national identity. Nevertheless,the civilization of illiteracy does not promise that Italianscan be made for all these new countries. Rather, these nationswill become, in not necessarily satisfying ways, a-nationals,citizens of the world economy. Many of them will make up the newimmigrant populations settled in ethnic neighborhoods whereaccess to consumption will arouse a nostalgia for some remotehomeland.

No one can or should generalize. Many prejudices still heat thefurnaces of hatred and intolerance. Enough citadels from thepast pragmatic framework maintain hopes for expansion andcultivate a politics appropriate to ages long passed. Butregardless of such unsettling developments, the nation-stateenters an age of denationalization, absorbed into a world ofeconomic globality, less and less dependent on the individualand thus less and less subject to political dogma.

Of tribal chiefs, kings, and presidents

Changes in the condition of human practical experiences effectchanges in the self-identification of the individual and ofgroups of people. Emphasis is less and less on nature and sharedliving space, and more on connections free of arbitrary borders,even of elements pertaining to culture and history. New politicalexperiences, still subjected to expectations carried over fromthe past, do not actually continue the past. Accordingly, thenature of political experiences changes. Assumptions regardingleadership, 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 newsociety, into presidents. There is, nevertheless, no reason tobelieve that in a universe of distributed tasks and massiveparallelism, a need for political centralism and hierarchy willremain. The president, for instance, is the king of thecivilization of literacy; and his wife becomes the queen, indefiance of all the literate documents that justify presidency.Executive power, in conjunction with the legislative andjudicial branches, implements ideals of liberal politicaldemocracy as these became essential to the pragmatics ofindustrial society. But once new circ*mstances emerge, theunderlying structure reflected in the power structure undergoeschange as well.

In the spirit of the dynamics of change, one should notice that,in a framework of non-hierarchic structures, there is nolegitimate need for the presidency. Theoretic arguments, nomatter how rigorous, are after all irrelevant if not based onrelated facts. New circ*mstances already made the function ofpresident strictly ceremonial in many countries. In othercountries, a president's ability to exercise power is impeded bylaws that make this power irrelevant. Economic cycles, affectingintegrated economies, turn even the most visionary heads ofstates (when they happen to be visionary) into witnesses toevents beyond their control. Politics does not happen at levelsso remote from the individual that individuals disconnectthemselves from the political ceremonial. It happens closer andcloser to where ideals and interest crystallize in the form ofnew human interactions.

Who would represent the country if the function of head of statewere abolished? How can a country have a consistent politicalsystem? Who would be responsible for implementing laws? Suchquestions originate, without exception, within literacy's systemof expectations. The extreme decentralization that is madepossible by the new means of the civilization of illiteracyrequires, and indeed stimulates, different political structures.Instead of the self-delusion and demagoguery triggered by anidealized image of the politically concerned citizen, we shouldsee the reality of citizens pursuing goals that integratepolitical elements. Literacy resulted in a politics ofrepresentation that ended up in effectively excluding thecitizen from political decision-making. Rationalized in thestructures of democracy, political ideals are now a matter ofefficient human interaction. A president's performance istotally irrelevant to the exchange of information on networks ofhuman cooperative effort. Agreements relevant to the peopleinvolved, executed in view of reciprocal needs and futuredevelopments, result more and more outside politicalinstitutions, 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 informs characteristic of past political experiences. They arebased on allegiances and commitments contradicted by thepragmatics of today's world. The fact that heads of states arealso heads of the military (commander-in-chief) comes from thetime when the strongest man became the leader. But in the modernworld of growing emancipation, women are valid candidates asheads-of-state all over the world. However, sexual bias has keptwomen from gaining the military competence that acommander-in-chief is expected to have. Another example: What isthe reason for a president to be at the funeral of a deceasedhead-of- state? Blood ties used to bond kings and nobility morestrongly than political arguments, long before fasttransportation could carry a monarch to the deceased in less timethan it took for decay to set in. A farewell wished today at thefuneral of a Japanese emperor, a Moslem ruler, or an atheisticpresident belongs to the spectacle of politics, not to itssubstance. The expensive, and delusive, literate performance ofstate funerals, oath-taking, inauguration, parades, and statevisits is more often than not an exercise in hypocrisy. Thesespectacles please only through their cynical pandering to thepeople's desire for circus. Pragmatically relevant commitmentsare no longer the privilege of state bureaucracies. When thehistoric necessity of states winds up to be no more than theexpression of remote tribal instincts, the literate institutionof state becomes superfluous.

Political idolatry, commercial nationalism, and ethnic vanityaffect politics at many levels. Nationalism, emerging as a formof collective pride and psychological compensation for repressedinstincts, celebrates gold medals at Olympic games, the numberof Nobel Prize laureates, and achievements in the arts andsciences with a fervor worth a better cause. Borders of prideand prejudice are maintained even where they have de factoceased to exist. No scientist who achieved results in his or herfield worked in isolation from colleagues living all over theworld. The Internet supports the integration of creative effortand ideas, beyond borders and beyond national fixations, oftenexpressed as military priorities rather than as cooperation andintegration. 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 theincreasingly elusive political impact. The expression "Peoplevote their pocketbooks" bluntly expresses this fact. But are theyvoting? Poll after poll reveals that they are not. Illiteratesused to be excluded from voting, along with women, Blacks inAmerica and South Africa, and foreigners in a large number ofEuropean countries.

In an ideal world, the best qualified would compete for apolitical position, all would vote, and the result would makeeveryone happy. How would such an ideal world function? Wordswould correspond to facts. The reward of political practicalexperience would be the experience itself, satisfying the needto best serve others, and thus oneself as a member of the largersocial family. This is a Utopian world of perfect citizens whosereason, expressed in the language of literacy, i.e., madeavailable to everyone and implicitly guaranteed to be apermanent medium for interaction, is the guardian of politics.We see here how authority, of the thinking human being, isestablished and almost automatically equated with freedom.Indeed, the doctrine of individual conformity to rationalnecessity was expressed in many pragmatic contexts, but never asforcefully as in the context that appropriated literacy as one ofits guiding forces.

In the horizon of literacy, the expectation is that theexperience of self- constitution as literate makes people submittheir own nature to the rationale of literacy and thereby findfulfillment. In short, the belief that to be literate makes onerespect his word, respect others, understand politicalexpectations, and articulate one's ideas is more of an illusion.Moreover, if political action could result in having everyoneaccept the values of literacy and embody them as their secondnature, conflicts would vanish, people would all share in wealthand, moreover, would be able to abide by the standards ofdemocracy. It even follows that the literate need to feel theobligation of inculcating literacy in others, thus creating thepossibility of changing patterns of human experiences so thatthey reflect the demands of reason associated with literacy.Isaiah Berlin, among others, noted that the belief in a singleencompassing answer to all social questions is indefensible.Rather, conflict is an overriding feature of the humancondition. This conflict develops between the propensity todiversity (all the ends pursued) and the almost irrationalexpectation that there is one answer-a good way of life-worthpursuing and which can be attained if the political animalacknowledges the primacy of reason over passion, and freelychooses conformity to widely shared values over chaoticindividualism.

Under the pragmatic circ*mstances of the civilization ofilliteracy, the literate expectation of unanimous or evenmajority vote is less than significant. Voting results are asgood an indicator of a society's condition as seismographs are ofthe danger of an earthquake. On election days, the results areknown after the first representative sample makes it through thevoting mechanism. Actually, the results are already at hand daysbefore the election takes place. The means within our reach aresuch that it would suffice to commit a short interval oftelephone time so that people who want to vote-and who know whythey vote- can, and without having to go our of their way. Anyother connection, such as the generalized cable infrastructure,connected to a central data processing unit outfitted for theevent, would do as well. Such a strategy would answer only onepart of the question: making it easy for people to vote. Thesecond part regards what they are asked to vote for. Thepolitical process is removed from the exciting practice ofoffering authentic choice. Literacy-based political action isopaque, almost inscrutable. Accordingly, the citizen has nomotivation for commitment and no need to express it throughvoting. There is a third part: the assumption that voting is aform of particpating in the power of democracy. No one aware ofthe dynamics of work and life today can equate the notion ofmajority with democracy. More often than not, efficiency isachieved through procedures of exception.

Under the circ*mstances of a global economy of fast change andparallel practical experiences, no president of a country, nomatter how powerful, and no central political power caneffectively influence events significant to the citizen. Thecivilization of illiteracy requires alternatives to centralism,hierarchy, sequentiality, and determinism in politics. Itespecially entails alternatives to dualism, whether embodied inthe two- party system, the legislative and executive opposition,and lawfulness vs. illegality, for example. This implies a broaddistribution of political tasks, in conjunction with a politicsthat takes advantage of parallel modes of activism, networking,open-ended policies, and self-determination at meaningful levelsof political life. Political fear of vagueness can only becompared to the fear of a vacuum that once upon a time brandedphysics and political doctrines. Faster rhythms of existence andthe acknowledged need to adapt to circ*mstances of action neverbefore experienced-scale of politics, globality, scale ofhumankind-speak against many of the literate expectations ofpolitics as a stabilizing form of human practice. Politics, iftrue to its call, should contribute to speeding up processes andcreating circ*mstances for better negotiations among people whohave lost their sense of political adherence, or even lost theirfaith in law and order.

In this global world, where scale is of major importance,politics is supposed to mediate among the many levels at whichpeople involved in parallel, extremely distributed activities,partake in globality. Apportionment of goods, as much as theapportionment of rights pertaining to creative aspects of humanpractical experiences, on a scheme similar to auctioning, followthe dynamics of the market more closely than rigid regulations.Awareness of this apportionment is a political matter and can besubmitted to the concerned parties in forms of evolving opinions.Politics has also to address the new forms of property and theirimpact on political values in the new pragmatic framework. Forinstance, the real power of information processing is in theinteraction of those able to access it. One should not be forcedto apply rules originating from the feudal ownership oflanguage, or from the industrial ownership of machines, to thefree access to information, or to networks facilitating creativecooperative efforts. The challenge is to provide the mosttransparent environment, without affecting the integrity ofinteraction. A specific example in this regard is legislationagainst computer hackers. Such legislation, as well as the muchpublicized Communication Decency Act, only shifts attention fromthe new pragmatic context-unprecedented challenges arising fromvery powerful technologies-to one of routine law enforcement.Administrative reaction is the consequence of the built-indualism, based on the clear-cut distinction between good andbad, characteristic of literacy-based politics.

A positive course of events can originate only from politicalexperiences of individual empowerment. Wider choice and broaderpossibilities involve specific risks. Hacking is by no means anexperience without precedent in past pragmatics. The German warcode was hacked, and nations are very eager to confer honor uponother hackers of distinction: scientists who break the secretsof genetic codes, or spies who discover the secrets of theenemy. Examined from a literate political perspective, hacking,as a peculiar form of individual self-constitution, can appear ascriminal. In a political experience coherent with the pragmaticsleading to the civilization of illiteracy, hacking appears on acontinuum joining creativity, protest, invention, and non-conformity, as well as criminal intention. The answer to hackersis not a code of punishment of medieval or industrialinspiration, but transparency that will, in the long run,undermine possible criminal motivations. A society that punishescreativity, even when relatively misdirected, through itspolicies and laws punishes itself in the long run. Someone whoworks at his terminal for a company producing goods all over theworld, and pursuing social and economic programs thateffectively touch citizens of many cultures, different faiths,race, political creed, sexual preference, different history anddifferent expectations, participates in the politics of the worldmore than the institutions and the bureaucrats paid forfunctions that they cannot effectively fulfill. It is againpragmatics that makes us citizens of our small village or town,that integrates all of us, Netizens included, in the globalworld.

Judging justice

This short parenthesis in the discussion of politics can bejustified by the fact that justice is the object of bothpolitics and law. The practice of law is the practice of politicson a smaller stage. Political action, involving a new concept oflaw and justice, closer to the environment of industrial work,established not only that all (or almost all) were equal inrespect to the law, but also that justice would take its owncourse. In the course of history, the various moments of changein the pragmatic framework were also moments of change in regardto the justice system. In incipient political praxis, rulersadministered the law. Even today, a governor or president is thecourt of last resort in some legal cases. And law, likepolitics, relies on rhetoric, on language as the mediatingmechanism of concepts.

In the course of history, the various moments of change in thepragmatic framework were also moments of change in regard towhat today we call justice. The more powerful applied their ownideas of law under circ*mstances of incipient human practicalexperiences. It was the role of the appointed leader, whether inthe magic of ritual, in tribes, in religion, in forms ofsettlement, to judge matters under dispute. Law focused onagreements, commitments, and integrity of the human body, ofproperty, of goods, and of exchange. In time, the distancebetween what was done, affecting the balance of people's rightsand obligation, and the reaction to it increased. A whole bodyof mediating elements, religion included, governed action andreaction. Just as myth and ritual did in their ways, majorreligious texts testify to how rules of living together andpreserving life were established and implemented. The scale ofsociety, reflected in the nature of the pragmatic context,played a crucial role in the process in respect to what wasconsidered a crime, the type of punishment, and the swiftness ofpunishment.

What is of concern here is the change from the legal codeelaborated in the framework of literacy and legal experience inthe civilization of illiteracy. The institution of law and theprofessions involved in it embody expectations of justice underassumptions of efficiency pertinent to human practicalexperiences. New lands were discovered, new property wascreated, and machines and people made higher productivitypossible. Rights were fought for, access to education opened, andthe world became a place of new transactions for which the lawof the land, inspired by natural right, no longer sufficed. Itwas in this context that literacy stimulated both the practiceof legality and the inquiry into the nature of human rights andobligations. But it is also in this context that the language oflegal practical experiences commenced its journey into today'slegalese that no ordinary person can understand. Raskolnikov, inDostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, criticized the "legal style"of those educated as lawyers. "They still write legal papersthat way." Though he remarks that the writing had "a kind offlourish to it…, yet look how illiterate his writing is." Thecriticism could be glossed over, due to its context, if it werenot for an interesting remark: "It's expressed in legal languageand if you use legal language, you can't write any other way."Trying to cope with ambiguity in language forces the lawyer tolook for precision.

The equivocal condition of the practice of justice is that laworiginates in the realm of political experiences, but needs tobe implemented free of politics, i.e., regardless of who is inpower. The blindfolded goddess holding the scales of justice isexpected to be objective and fair. The separation betweenjudicial and governing entities is probably the highestachievement of the political system based on literacy. But it isalso the area where, under circ*mstances of practicalexperiences different from those based on the underlyingstructure of literacy, the need to change is critical. Thisapplies to new means of maintaining a just system for peopleless affected by the subjectivity of those holding the balanceof power, and more by the ability to process informationrelevant to any object of dispute. The blindfolded goddessalready uses X- ray vision in order to substantiate claims andcounterclaims. Modeling, simulation, expert genetic testimony,and much more became part of the justice routine. Each party ina trial knows in advance what type of jury best serves itsinterests. The context for all these changes sheds light ontheir political meaning. If the practical experience ofpolitics and justice are disconnected, the effectiveness of bothsuffers.

Politics stimulated change in respect to the perception ofdemocracy, civil rights, political authority, and welfare. Itdemystified the origin, function, and role of property, andintroduced 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 thelowest common denominator. Comparing this ideal to real legalpractice is an exercise in masochism. The ever increasing, andfast increasing, human interaction via market mechanisms wasfollowed by instances of conflict and expectations ofnegotiation. Without any doubt, the most pervasive mediating roleis played in our day by legal professionals.

Due to its own self-interested dynamics, the legal professioninsinuates itself in every type of practical experience, frommultinational business to relations between individuals. Lately,it is involved in finding a place for itself in the world of newmedia, involving copyright laws and private rights versus publicaccess. So one cannot say that law, as opposed to politics, isnot proactive. The problem is that it is so in a context boundto 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 agiven situation. There is nothing wrong with this. What is wrongis when legal language and the procedures encoded in legallanguage do not meet the pragmatic expectation, which is justice.Law and justice are not the same thing. A good case in point isthe recent case of the State of California vs. O. J. Simpson.The spectacle of the legal procedure showed how a literatepractice ended up convoluting justice. In fact, literate law isnot meant to serve justice. Its purpose is to use the law toacquit a client. Allan Derschowitz claimed that the lawyer'sduty is to his or her client, not to justice. This statement isfar from the expectation that each member of society has.Therefore law loses its credibility because it undermines thenotion of the social contract.

Some might say that this state of affairs is nothing new. EvenShakespeare criticized lawyers. Far from being a wholesaleattack on the profession, the description I have given deservesto be contrasted to the possibility of effective judicialmediations in the civilization of illiteracy. Since changesoccur so rapidly, the law of yesterday rarely applies to newcirc*mstances created today. It used to be, people often findthemselves reminiscing, that laws and rules (the TenCommandments, at least) were expected to last and be respected,in their letter-which was carved in stone-and spirit, forever. Noone will argue that justice is not an eternal desideratum. Butachieving it does not necessarily mean that laws and the methodsof lawyers are eternal. Some actions that society onceaccepted-child abuse, sexual harassment, racialdiscrimination-are now considered illegal, as well as unjust.Other crimes (whistling on Sundays, kissing one's spouse inpublic, working or operating a business on Sunday) might still bein some legal books and locally observed, but they are no longerconsidered instances of law- breaking. The result of changesbrought about by changing pragmatics is the realization peoplehave that there is no stable frame of reference, either formorality (as it is subject to law and law enforcement) or forlegality.

Did lawyers create this situation? Are they a product of newhuman relations required by the new pragmatics? Who judges thelegal system in order to determine that its activity meetsexpectations? There is no simple answer to any of thesequestions. If justice is to affect human practical experiences,it has to reflect their nature and participate in defining itsown perspective in respect to the rights that people integratein new practical experiences of self-definition. It is all welland good for the legal system to use non-literate means, such asDNA evidence, videotapes, and access to legal information fromaround the world via Internet. But if they are then subjected toliterate pettifogging, all this effort is to no avail.

The programmed parliament

Politics in action means not elections but the daily routine ofhard work on matters of interest to the people represented.Party affiliation aside, in the end the common good is supposedto be maintained or improved. Legislative political workcontinues a tradition that goes well beyond literacy.Nevertheless, effective legislation became possible only withinthe pragmatic framework that made literacy necessary. Onceliteracy itself reached its potential, new means for thepolitical legislative practical experience became necessary. Thedriving force is the expectation that the legislative processshould reflect practical needs emerging in a context of rapidchange over shorter patterns of recurrence. As within the entirepolitical practical experience, forces at work continuouslycollide.

Although literacy-based perspectives and methods for politicallegislation are no longer appropriate in handling issues andconcerns stemming from a pragmatics that invalidates theliterate model, politicians seem to be unwilling to realize theneed for change. They find it more useful, and easier todefend, to legislate improved literacy- based education, forexample, instead of rethinking education in the context of itsnecessity. They accept the mediating power of specializedknowledge, the generalized network of information, use all meansfor disseminating their own programs, but work withinconstraints originating in the literate practice of politics. Itis hard to believe that in an age of limitless communication,speakers, mainly in the USA, arguing for the most intricateprograms, will perform before an empty room in Congress. It isalso hard to believe that a language rooted in experiencesestablished a long time ago, and many times proved ineffective,is maintained. Procedures, testifying more to the past than thepresent, govern the activity of many legislative bodies (not onlyin Great Britain, where this legacy translates into a dress codeas outmoded as the British monarchy). As with the executivepolitical experience and the infatuation of justice, symbolismovertakes substance.

Nevertheless, under the pressure for higher efficiency, majorchanges are taking place. Legislative practical experiences, asdisconnected as they are from new human practical experiences,are less and less an exercise in convincing writing or in formallogic. They increasingly reflect the expectations of globalityand often apply mediation, task distribution, and interactivity.Electronic modeling is applied, simulation methods are triedout. The new methods of accessing information free thelegislative politician from the time-consuming task ofaccumulating data. Consultants and staff members make use ofpowerful knowledge filters in order to involve in the politicalprocess only information pertinent to the subject. Politiciansknow that knowledge, at the right time and in the right context,is power. Their new experience, as members of computerizedparliaments of many countries can testify, is that everyone hasthe data, but only few know how to process it effectively. Infact, political parties develop competitive processing programsthat will give politicians pursuing their goals more convincingarguments in a public debate, or in discussions leading tolegislative vote. The transparency brought about by means in thecivilization 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 fromthe ability to process, not from the amount of informationstored.

All this, kept at a minimum in this presentation, might soundlike anticipation, or dreams for the politician of the future.It is not. The process is probably still at the beginning, butunavoidable. It will sooner or later affect such components astime in office-permanence of a representative reflectsliteracy-based expectations- procedures for public evaluation,candidacy, and voting. It will also require a rethinking of therelation between politicians and constituents. Rethinking themotivations and methods of legislation, even its legitimacy, aregoals worthy of being pursued. Increased mediation affects theconnection between facts and political action. Unless balancedby the use of the new means of communication that allow personalinteraction with each voter, it will continue to alienatepolitics from the public. Mass-media politics is already a thingof the past-not because television is overridden by the Internet,but because of the need to create a framework for individualmotivation for political action. Political efficiency is basedon human interaction. What counts is not the medium, as thiswill continue to change, but what is accomplished through themedium.

To create a legislative framework that reflects the new nature ofhuman relations and is appropriate to the pragmatic contextmeans to understand the nature of the processes leading to thecivilization of illiteracy. Consolidation of bureaucracy is ascounter-indicative of this understanding as is the continuationof the monarchy and the House of Lords in Great Britain. Boththese phenomena are as convincing as the mass generation ofelectoral letters that report on how the political representativebest served his or her constituency. A sense of the process, asit involves the need to overcome models based on sequentiality,dualism, and deterministic reaction, can be realized only whenthe political process itself is synchronized with the prevalentpragmatics.

A battle to be won

As a practice of building, changing, and destroying coalitions,politics today is a summation of human practice. Professionalpoliticians design strategies for coalition implementation andidentify the most effective interactions for a certain policy.They develop their own language and criteria for evaluating theefficiency of their specialized practice and of their mediatingfunction in a society of many and varied forms of mediation.

The obsession with efficiency, whether applied to politics ornot, is not imposed by forces outside ourselves. The tendency totransfer responsibility does not result in some curse spoken bya disappointed politician, philosopher, or educator. The shorterpolitical cycles that we encounter correspond to the dynamics ofa human practical experience focused on the immediate within theframework of a global existence. It seems that the transition isfrom the small communal life striving for continuity andpermanence, to a global community of interacting individuals,whose identity itself is variable, prepared to experiencediscontinuity and change. Coordinations of actions in thisuniverse are no longer possible through large integrativemechanisms, such as language and bureaucratic institutions.Small differentiating operations, in the nature of coalitionstested through polling or electronic balloting, and modified inaccordance with the rapid change of political roles, representan alternative.

Monarchies embodied the eternity of rule; treaties among monarchswere supposed to outlast the monarch. The 15-minute access topolitical power, far from being a metaphor in some parts of theworld, is as relevant as any other form of celebrity (Warhol'sincluded), since political processes and power relations are moreand more uncoupled from each other and disconnected from theobsession with universality and timelessness. A 15-minutecoalition is as critical as access to power, and as useful asthe new principles accepted by the people involved. Instead ofthe top- down model of politics, we can experience a combinationof bottom-up and top-down procedures. Under these circ*mstances,the making and unmaking of coalitions remains one among very fewvalid political functions. The centers of political power-economics, law, interest groups-constitute poles around whichsuch coalitions are established or abandoned.

One should ask whether such coalitions do not come into being inthe universal language of literacy. Literacy is defended withthe argument that it is some kind of common denominator. What isnot accounted for is the fact that coalitions are notindependent of the medium of their expression. Literacy-basedcoalitions pursue and further goals and actions consistent withthe pragmatic framework that requires them. Needs characteristicof a pragmatic context incompatible with the structures imposedby literacy-based practical experiences require other means forestablishing coalitions. When the leaders of the most advancedindustrial states agree on indexing the value of their currency,or when friend and foe establish a political coalition against aninvasion that could set a precedent and trigger consequences forthe global economy, the means in place might take the appearanceof literacy. In fact, these means are freed from words andliterate articulations. They emerge from data processing andsimulation of behavior in financial markets, virtual realityscenarios turned into actions for which no script could providea description in advance. While politicians might still performtheir script in a literate manner, the centers of power choosethe most efficient means for evaluating each new coalition. As aconsequence, and this is a distinguishing element, there islittle connection between the authority of politicalinstitutions, as it results from their literate premise, and thedynamics of coalitions, reflecting the pragmatics of thecivilization of illiteracy.

The sense of beginning experienced in our day goes well beyondthe new states, new political means, beyond the science (or art)of coalition making. It is basically a beginning for the newzoon politikon, for a political animal that has lost most of itsnatural roots and whose human nature is probably better definedin terms of political instincts than cultural accomplishments.Culture is by and large discarded. People simply cannot carryculture with them, but neither can they negotiate their existencewithout political means appropriate to a social conditionstructurally different from that experienced in the past. Theself-centered individual cannot escape relating to others anddefining himself in reference to them. "We Am a VirtualCommunity" is not merely a suggestive title (conceived by EarlBabble) for an article on Internet interaction, but a gooddescription of today's political world. The specific forms ofrelations, the We Am faction among them, are subject to manyfactors, not least to the biological and cognitive redefinitionof the human being. When everything, literally everything, ispossible and indeed acceptable, the political animal has to findnew ways to make choices and pursue goals without facing therisk of losing identity. This is probably the decisive politicalbattle that the humans have yet to win.

"Theirs not to reason why"

High precision electronic eyes placed on orbiting satellitespicked up the firing of the rocket and the launch parameters.Data was transmitted to a computer center for informationprocessing. The computed information, specifying angles, firingtime, and trajectory, was relayed to antirocket missilesprogrammed to intercept enemy attack. The system-consisting of avast, distributed, highly interconnected configuration-incorporates expertise from electronic vision devices, knowledgeencoded in software designed to calculate rocket orbits (basedon launch time, position, angle, speed, weight, meteorologicalconditions), fast transmission networks, and automatedpositioning and triggering devices.

This integrated system has replaced literacy-based modes ofpractical experiences pertinent to war. Instead of manualsdescribing the many parameters and operations that militarypersonnel need to consider, information is contained in computerprograms. These also eliminate the need for long training cycles,expensive practical exercises, and the continuous revision ofmanuals containing the latest information. Distributed knowledgeand interconnectedness have replaced the structure of top-downcommand. The system described above contains many mediatingcomponents that allow for highly efficient wars.

Examples similar to the relative annihilation of the infamous(and ineffective) Scud missiles can be given from other episodesof the Gulf War, including the 100 hours of the so-called groundbattle. This battle displayed the deadly force of artillery andtanks, the power of modeling and simulation, and major planningand testing methods independent of literacy-based militarystrategy and tactics. The enemy consisted of an army structuredon the principles derived from the pragmatic framework ofliteracy: centralized line of command, rigid hierarchy, modernmilitary equipment integrated in a war plan that was essentiallysequential and deterministic, and based on a logic of long-termencounters.

The first war of the civilization of illiteracy

An earlier draft of this chapter-introductory lines excepted-waswritten when no one anticipated a conflict involving Americantroops in the Arabian Gulf. During this war, theoretic argumentsregarding the institution of the military in the civilization ofilliteracy 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 ora television show. As I watched, I felt as though someone hadlifted part of my text and sent it through the news wires. Thestory made for great headlines; but out of context, or in thecontext of a reality reduced to the TV screen, its overallmeaning was obscured. In many ways, the armed conflict ended uptrivialized, another soap opera or spectator sport. Otherreports related the frustration of the troops with the limitednumber of phone lines. The reports also commented on thereplacement of the traditional letter by videotape as thepreferred method of communication. We also heard about an almostmagical device, called CNX, used to help orient each personinvolved in the vast desert theater of war. And we saw or heardabout the exotically named preprocessed and prepackaged food,about the pastimes of the troops.

The context started coming into focus. This was to become thefirst war of the civilization of illiteracy: a highly efficient(the word takes on an unintended cynical connotation here)activity that involved non-sequential, massively parallelpractical experiences. These required precise synchronization(each failure resulted in victims to what was euphemisticallycalled "friendly fire"), distributed decision-making, intensemediation, advanced specialization, and task distribution. Thesecharacteristics embodied an ideology of relative valuedisengaged from political discourse, and even more from moralprecepts. Nobody expected this war to reinvent the bow and arrow(documented shortly after human self-constitutive experiences inlanguage), or even the wheel (originating in the practicalexperience of populations whose home was the territory where thefighting took place). It is possible that some of the militarypersonnel 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 militaryacademies and the better research libraries. But this was not awar fought for the Book, in the spirit of the Book (Koran orBible), or in the way books describe wars. In a way, the GulfWar was truly the "mother of all battles" in that it rewrote therules on war-or did away with them.

All the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy areretraceable in the practical experience of today's military:highly mediated praxis through electronic information storageand retrieval; transition from an economy of wartime scarcity toa war of affluent means of defense and destruction; shift fromwar based on the positivist notion of facts (many requiringincursions into enemy territory) to a relativistic notion ofimage, and the corresponding technology of image processing;shift from a hierarchical structure of rigid lines of authorityand command to a relatively loose line of context dependent onfreedom of choice extended almost to the individual soldier; adiscipline 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, derivedfrom the permissiveness and drive for self-satisfaction ofsociety at large. That some of these expectations could not befulfilled was criticized, but not really understood. The hosts ofthe American army live by different standards. Muslim lawprohibits alcohol consumption and certain forms ofentertainment, as well as burial of dead infidels in a landclaiming to be holy.

The Gulf War, on its various fronts, was not a conflict ofirreducible or irreconcilable religions, morals, or cultures. Itwas a conflict between an artificially maintained civilizationof literacy, in which rich reserves of oil serve as a buffer fromefficiency requirements in all aspects of life, and anothercivilization, one that entails the illiteracy of a society andan energy-hungry, global economy that reflects a dynamics ofhigh efficiency.

It might well be that the final attack reminded experts in warhistory, military strategy, or evolution of tactics of thesurprising 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 inan international army-more of a pain than a blessing-thatresulted in many flanks. Helmuth von Moltke, in the exhaustingFranco- Prussian War (1870-1871), changed the relation to hissubordinate commanders by letting them operate under broaddirectives. The generals and commanders of the many armiesinvolved in the Gulf War took advantage of the power ofnetworking in order to orchestrate an attack that testedextremely efficient, and costly, annihilation technology under aplan that today's computers have simulated many a time over.

But once I confessed that I wrote much of this chapter threeyears before the Gulf War, the reader might question whether Ilooked at the war through the spectacles of my hypothesis,seeing what I wanted to see, understanding events as they fit myexplanatory model. I asked myself the same questions andconcluded that presenting the argument as it stood before thewar would shed light on the question and ultimately qualify theanswer.

War as practical experience

"War is a sheer continuation of politics with other means," wroteCarl von Clausewitz (On War, 1818). It is difficult to argueagainst this; but a paraphrase, intended to put the line inhistoric perspective, might be appropriate: War is thecontinuation of the practical experience of survival in thecontext of a society trying to control and adjudicate resources.Accordingly, combat follows the line of other practicalexperiences. The practical experience of hunting-formerly combatwith non-human adversaries-required the weapons eventuallyassociated with war. These were the tools that primitive humansused to wrest food for their survival and the survival of theircommunity. Future aspects of these activities, and the associatedmoral values, make us sometimes forget that the syncretic natureof human beings, i.e., projection of their natural endowment inthe practical act, is expressed in the syncretism of the toolsused. This syncretic condition evolved under the need for labordivision, and one of the main early demands of labor divisionresulted in the establishment of the semi-professional andprofessional warrior.

As the tools of the martial profession diversified more and morefrom working tools, a conceptual component (tactics andstrategy) became part of the praxis. The conceptual componentset forth a sequence to be followed, a logic to be used, and amethod for counteracting enemy maneuvers in order to achievevictory. Von Clausewitz was the first to explicitly point outthat war continues politics, while other writers on the subject,living centuries before he did, perceived war as a practicaleffort. Two Byzantine emperors, Maurice (539-602) and Leo,called the Wise (886-911), tried to formulate military strategyand tactics based on the pragmatic premise. They stipulated thatthe pragmatic framework defined the nature of the conflict andthe actual condition of the battle, weapons included. Indeed,every known change in military materiel in a society has beensynchronized to changes in the status of its practicalexperience. The invention of the stirrup by the Chinese (600)improved the ability of men riding horseback. It opened theavenue to wars where the backbone of battle formation was nolonger composed of foot soldiers but of warriors on horses.Mechanical contraptions (e.g., the Trebuchet, acknowledged at1100, based on releasing a heavy counterweight) for throwinglarge stones or missiles, opened the way to what would shiftsuperior defensive capabilities (through fortifications, citywalls, castles built before the 14th century) to superioroffensive power. This was also the case with the cannons thatthe Turks used to conquer Constantinople (1453). But it is notmilitary practice per se that concerns us here, but rather theimplications of language, in particular literacy.

At a very small scale of human activity, with many autarchicgroups composed of few people, there was little need fororganized combat or specially trained warriors. Incipient,rudimentary military practical experience, in its basic functionsof aggression and defense, became desirable at a larger scale ofhuman activity. This experience was simultaneous with theestablishment of language, especially writing. Sun Tzu's book, aswell as many earlier testimonies to battles (mythology,religious writings, epic poetry, and philosophy), can bementioned here. This military practice integrated the means andskills of survival, such as hunting and safeguarding theterritory from which food was obtained.

Awareness of resources corresponded to awareness of scale. Thescale of human activity in which the constitution of communitymember-warrior took place corresponded to increased settlementof populations, increased demand for resources, higherproductivity, and accumulation of property-all reflected in theneed to expand the practical experience of language beyond theimmediate characteristic of orality. The efficiency of work andcombat was at about an equal level. In a sense, wars lastedforever; peace was merely respite between conflicts. The notionof prisoner (usually sold into slavery) confirmed the importanceof human labor and skill for consolidating a community,producing wealth for those in power, and subsistence for everyoneelse. The social constitution of the military was not exceptedfrom pragmatic requirements of efficiency and mediation, i.e.,of ensuring the highest efficiency within the given scale ofhuman experience, as needs and expectations corresponding to thisscale were manifested. While it is true that combat efficiencywas spelled out in units of intentional destruction orpreservation (of life and various artifacts relevant to humanself- constitution), combat efficiency also referred to defenderswhose goal was to make destruction by the enemy less possible(even impossible).

While individual conflicts did not require the intervention oflanguage more than orality could provide, conflicts betweenlarger groups made the need for a coordinating instrument clear.Human language, through new words and constructs, testified tothe experience of conflicts and the associated mytho-magicalmanifestations. Through language, this experience was projectedagainst the background of many different forms of human praxis.As a general rule, armies of all types, under every type ofgovernment, acquired a special status in society due to thefunction they fulfilled. Written language did not generatearmies; but it served as a prerequisite (even in its mostrudimentary notation forms) for the institution of the military.Writing introduced many elements that influenced the combatexperience: a record of means and people, a record of actions,an instrument for planning, a record of consequences. All thecomponents of the military institution objectify the purpose ofwar at a particular time. They also objectify the relationsbetween a society at war and, during times of peace, betweensociety and its warriors. Language is the medium through whichobjectification takes place. The sequentiality of writing andthe need to express sequences pertinent to conflicts areconsubstantial. Von Clausewitz's line encompasses the extensionin language of the many aspects of wars.

"Did Gideon know how to read Hebrew? Did Deborah?" some peoplemight ask, referring to leaders of decisive battles documentedin the Old Testament. Others would refer to examples from thesame time that are accounted for in Greek epics and thechronicles of the Middle East. Roman mythology and the testimonyof Islam do not tell us whether all their warriors wrote orread. These documents do inform us of the pragmaticcirc*mstances that led to the institution of the army as a bodyconstituted in continuation of syncretic practical experiences,progressively constituting its own domain of existence and itsown reason for being.

From face-to-face conflicts that required almost no language, andwhich resulted in the victory of the stronger, to the conflictsbetween humans in which much technology-requiring littlelanguage-was also involved, changes parallel to the levels ofliteracy occurred. Under the circ*mstances of wars fought byarmies facing each other, language was the medium forconstituting armies and coordinating action. In order to definegoals, to share plans for achieving victory, and to modify plansin response to changing conditions, language was as important asthe number of horses, quality of swords and shields, and qualityof ammunition. The profession of warrior, as much as theprofession of hunter, was based on the ability to attack anddefend, and on the skills needed to adapt means to goals withina changing balance of power. The first wars, and probably themajority of them, were fought before generalized literacy. Themajor warriors-the Egyptian pharaohs Tuthmose III in the battlefor Meggido (1479 BCE), Ramses II battling the Hittites atKadesh (1296 BCE), Nebuchadnezzar and Darius, the Spartans underLeonidas (480 BCE), Alexander the Great (conquering Babylon in330 BCE), Julius Caesar (49-46 BCE) and Octavian (31 BCE), andthe many Chinese warriors of this period and later-did not needliteracy for their battles as much as for their politics. Theirstrategies resulted from the same expectations and pragmaticrequirements that gave rise to the experience of writtenlanguage.

Wars were fought on terrain well chosen, by armies composed ofmen who carried out orders selected from a limited set ofpossibilities. To paraphrase the terminology of generativegrammars, it was a limited war language, with not too manypossible war sentences. Once improved means of work andproduction became the means of carrying on war, those in commandcould write more war texts, more scripts. As war efficiencyincreased, so did the possibility of a breakdown of the effortdue to lack of integration and coordination. The militarystructure reflected the characteristics of the human praxis thatfostered written language and, much later, literacy: relativelylimited dynamics, centralized, hierarchical organization, lowlevel of adaptability, a strictly sequential course of action, adeterministic mentality. David Oliver convincingly described theprocess: "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 contextthat led to the science of mechanics and eventually to thebeginnings of projectile ballistics. By 1531, Nicolo Tartaglia ofBrescia overcame his disdain for war and devised the gunner'ssquare, which was perfected 100 years later by none other thanGalileo. In 1688, the French introduced the socket bayonet ontheir muskets, which occurred simultaneous to changes in toolsused at the time, i.e., the tools that allowed for manufacturingthe bayonet.

The framework that created conditions for the ideal of literacyaffected the pursuit of war not only in technology, but also inthe way wars were played out. The advancing line of exposedtroops were involved in a dynamics of confrontation thatreflected linearity, a phenomenon prevalent in the practicalexperience of civilian life. Destructive power was added untilthe enemy was destroyed. Row by row, soldiers stopped to fireplatoon volleys, then continued onto the decisive bayonet charge.The structure of writing (sequences, hierarchy, accumulation,closure) and the structure of this particular militaryengagement were similar. Literacy as such was registered ratherlate as a qualifier of the warrior. But once integrated in thepractical experience of military self-constitution, literacychanged the nature of making war and enabling higher levels ofefficiency corresponding to the new scale of war. These were nolonger skirmishes among feudal warlords, but major conflictsbetween nations. These conflicts diminished in number but grewin intensity. Their duration corresponded to the relatively longcycles of production, distribution, and consumptioncharacteristic of literacy-based practical experiences.

Under the pressure of many types of necessity embodied in humanpragmatics, war was submitted to rules. It was civilized, atleast in some of its aspects. The Catholic Church, preserver ofliteracy during the Dark Ages, when many little wars betweenfeudal lords were carried on, took the lead in this direction. Inorder to avoid destruction of crops and lives in the barbariansocieties of Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire, the onlyviable hierarchy tried to tame warriors with the literate rulesthat the Church preserved. With their own pragmaticconsiderations in mind, rulers accepted these prescriptions. Ittook a millennium for people to discover that wars never havefinal results. But they also learned that the experience of warcreates knowledge-for example, of means used, weather patterns,territory, characteristics of the enemy-and creativity-what iscalled the art of war. Resulting in death and destruction, warsare also instances of self-education in one of life's mostunforgiving schools.

The institution of the military

"The draft is the legitimate child of democracy," as TheodorHeuss defined it. Obligatory military service was introducedduring one of the first modern revolutions- the French levée enmasse (conscription) of 1793. The citizen-soldier replacedmercenaries and professional soldiers. The call "Aux armes, mescitoyens" that became a stanza of the French national anthem,glorified the expectations of the moment. Prussia followed suitalmost immediately, motivated by economic reasons: cheapmanpower for war. During the prolonged process of becoming aninstitution, the military enlisted the support of the state itdefended or of those private establishments (church,landowners, merchants) that needed its services.

Feeding off the means generated by society, the militaryinstitution integrated the practical experience of the people inits structure and actively pursued courses of action meant toincrease its efficiency. At every juncture of humankind'scontinuous change, the military had to prove levels ofefficiency that justified its own existence as a factor in theactive defense of resources. When it was no longer efficient andweighed too heavily on the socio-economic foundation, it waseventually 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 humaninteraction, the military identified itself, as did all othersocial mechanisms, through repetitive actions. Each action couldbe further seen as a set of tasks, or orders, connected tomotivations or justifications, which anticipate or followpractical experiences specific to the military. Some wereconnected to life within the organization, such as thepossibility to advance in the hierarchy and affect futureactivity. These were internal in the sense that they wereaffected by the implicit rules adopted by the institution.Others were external, expressed in the nature of the relationbetween the military and society: symbolic status, participationin power, expectations of recognition.

Evolution of the military resulted in changes in the languageinvolved in defining and modifying the interactionscharacteristic of military practical experience. This languagebecame progressively more adapted to the goal-win the war-andless coordinated with civilian language, in which the discourseof motivations leading to the conflict occurred.Correspondingly, relations with the outside world-future membersof the military, social and political institutions, culturalestablishments, the church-took place in what appeared to be adifferent language.

Changes in the structure of the practical experience of humanself-constitution, as well as changes resulting from a growingscale, had an influence both inside and outside the military.When the individuals making up the world constituted themselvesas literate, the functioning of the military assumed theexpectations and characteristics of literacy. What would emergeas military academies were probably established at this time.Von Moltke's ideas of changing the nature of relations withsubordinates just predated the many modern advances in wartechnology: the use of steam-powered warships (by the Japanesein their war against the Russians in 1905); the introduction ofradio, telephone, and automotive transportation (all tested inWord War 1); and even the articulation of the concept of totalwar (by Erich Lindendorf). All these correspond to a pragmaticframework within which literacy was necessary, and literacy'scharacteristic reflected upon new practical experiences. Thetotal war is of the same nature as the expectation of universalliteracy: one literacy replaces all others. There is to themilitary institution of the civilization of literacy anexpectation of permanency, embodied in rules and regulations, inhierarchies, and centralized structure, similar to that of state,industry, religion, education, science, art, and literature.There is also an expectation of centralism, and thus hierarchyand discipline. These characteristics explain why almost allarmies adopt similar literacy-based structures. Guerrilla wars,in their early manifestations (skirmishes during the AmericanRevolution) and in their current forms in South America, forexample, are illiterate in that they are not based on theconventions of literacy. They unfold in a decentralized manner,and are based on the dynamics of self-organizing nucleii. Thisis why military strategists consider them so dangerous today.

Patterns of military action and the language recurrencesassociated with these patterns express attitudes and valuespertinent to the pragmatic framework. England, at the height ofits literate experience, had a highly structured, almostritualized way of carrying out war. One of the main complaintsduring the American Revolution was that the colonials did notfight according to the rules that literate West Europe hadestablished over the centuries. Under circ*mstances of change, asthose leading to the end of the need for a generalized,all-encompassing literacy, these attitudes and values, expressedin 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, themilitary became a goal in itself, imposing rules on social andpolitical circ*mstances, instead of adapting to them. FollowingWorld Wars I and II, the military took control of many countriesunder the guise of various political and ideologicaljustifications. Military, or military-supported, dictatorships,displaying the same characteristics of centralized rule asmonarchy and democracy under presidents, sprang up where othermodes of government proved ineffective. This happens today inmany parts of the world that are still dedicated to economic andpolitical models of the past, such as in South America, theMiddle East, and Africa, for example.

From the literate to the illiterate war

The last war fought under the sign of literacy was probablyWorld War II. The very fact that the last world war came to itsfinal end after the atomic bomb was deployed is indicative ofthe fact that once one aspect of human practical experience isaffected by a change of scale, others are affected as well. Whilethe millions of victims (the majority of whom were raised in theexpectations of the civilization of literacy) might make usreluctant to mention literacy, in fact, war's systematic crueltyand extermination power are the result of literacycharacteristics implicit in the effective functioning of the warmachine and in the articulation of war goals. In the history ofWorld War II, the chapter about language is probably asenlightening as the chapters devoted to the new weapons itbrought about: the precursors of modern rocket systems, inaddition to the atomic bomb. Each of the powers involved in thislarge-scale war understood that without the integrating force ofliteracy, exercised in and around the conflict, the enemy couldnot succeed. Many books were written about the escalation ofhostility through the language of political and ideologicaldiscourse. Many prejudices associated with this war wereexpressed in exquisitely literate works, supported by formallyperfect, logical arguments. On the other hand, some writerspointed out the weaknesses of literacy. Roland Barthes, forexample, studied its fascist nature. Others mentioned theinadequacy of a medium bound to fail because it was so opaquethat it covered thoughts instead of revealing them, validatedfalse values instead of exposing them for what they were.

The language of politics extended truly into the language of theconflict. Thanks to radio and newspapers, as well as therhetoric of rallies, it was able to address entire nations. Theindustrial establishment, upon which the war machine was built,still embodied the characteristics of the pragmatic framework ofliteracy. It was based on the industrial model of intensemanufacturing. Millions of people had to be moved, fed, andlogistically supported on many fronts. The war involved elementsof an economy in crisis, affording much less than abundance.Germany and its allies, having planned for a Blitzkrieg, threwall their limited resources into the preparation and execution ofthe war. Europe was coming out of the depression resulting fromWorld War I. The people were promised that victory would bringthe well deserved recompense that had eluded them the first timearound. Against this background, literacy was mobilized in allthe areas where it could make a difference: education,propaganda, religious and national indoctrination, in the racistdiscourse of justifications and in articulating war goals.Ideological purposes and military goals, expressed in literatediscourse, addressed equally those on the front lines and theirfamilies. Literacy actively supported self- discipline andrestraint, the acceptance of centralism and hierarchy, as well asthe understanding of extended production cycles of intense laborand relatively stable, although not necessarily fair, workingrelations.

All these characteristics, as well as a self-induced sense ofsuperiority, were reflected in the war. Advanced levels of labordivision and improved forms of coordination of the partiesinvolved in the large scale experience of factory labor markedthe military experience. The war entailed confrontations of hugearmies that practically engaged entire societies. It combinedstrategies of exhaustion (blockades, crop destruction,interruption of any vital activities) and annihilation. Millionsof people were exterminated. The structure of the army embodiedthe structure of the pragmatic framework. Its functioning wasreflective of industrial systems designed to process hugequantities of raw material in order to mass-manufacture productsof uniform quality.

What made literate language use essential in work and markettransactions made it essential, in forms appropriate to thegoal, to the prosecution of the war. From this perspective, itshould become clear why major efforts were made to understandthis language. Efforts were also made to get information abouttactics and strategy embodied in it, as much ahead of time aspossible, and to use this literate knowledge to devise surpriseor counter-strategies. This is why language became a main fieldof operation. Enemies went after military code (not a differentlanguage, but a means of maintaining secrecy) and did not sparemoney, intelligence, or human life in their efforts tounderstand how the opposing forces encoded their plans. Thebrightest minds were used, and strategies of deceit weredeveloped and applied, because knowing the language of the enemywas almost like reading the enemy's mind.

At the risk of dealing with the obvious, I should state hereclearly that the language of war is not the same as everydaylanguage; but it originates in this language and is conceivedand communicated in it. Both are structurally equivalent andembodied in literacy. To dispose of the enemy's use of languagemeans to know what the enemy wants to do and how and when. Inshort, it means to be able to understand the pragmatics of theenemy as defined under the circ*mstances of war, as theseextended the circ*mstances of life and work. Since languageprojects our time and space experience, and since wars arerelated to our universe of existence, understanding the languageof the enemy is actually integrated in the combat plan and in asociety's general war effort. Climbing hills to establish a goodoffensive position, crossing rivers in a defensive move,parachuting troops behind enemy lines in a surprise maneuver arehuman experiences characteristic of the pragmatic context ofliteracy, impossible to relate to the goal pursued without theshared conventions implicit in language. Some people stillbelieve that the master coup of World War II was the breaking ofthe ciphers of the Enigma machines used by the Germans, thusmaking the function of language, in such an effort of millionsof people, the center of the war effort. Polish cryptoanalystsand the British operation, in which Alan Turing (the father ofmodern computing) participated, succeeded in deciphering,reconstructing, and translating messages that, re-enciphered inAllied codes (the ULTRA material), decisively aided the wareffort.

By the end of the war, the world was already a different place.But within the framework of war, and in direct connection to thechanges in practical human self- constitution, a structural shiftto a different dynamics of life and work had started. Variousaspects related to the determinism that eventually resulted inthe war started to be questioned through new practicalexperiences: the need to overcome national interests; the needto transcend boundaries, those boundaries of hate and destructionexpressed in the war; the need to share and exchange resources.Visionaries also realized that the incremental increase in worldpopulation, despite the enormous number of deaths, would resultin a new scale of human experiences that could not be handledwithin a rigid system with few degrees of liberty.

The recent illiterate war in the Arabian Gulf, and thenever-ending terrorist attacks all over the world, can be seen,in retrospect, as the progeny of the war that brought down thecivilization of literacy. The concept of Blitzkrieg and thedropping of the A-bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were aforetaste 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 largearmies-because of population density, relatively low salaries,and the ability to draft the entire population-seek the latestweapons that scientific discovery and technological progress canoffer. The weapons market is probably the most pervasive of allmarkets. Among the numerous implications of this state ofaffairs, none is more disconcerting than the fact that humangenius serves the cause of death and destruction. In somecountries, food reserves barely cover needs beyond a season ortwo; but the military has supplies to cover years of engagement.

Today the military is in control of the most sophisticatedtechnology ever created. It is also becoming an institution of arather low level of literacy, publicly deplored and politicallyquestioned. This assertion applies less (but it still applies) tothe command level, and more to its enlisted men and women.Addressing the topic of language proficiency, Darell Bottprovides an interesting portrait of a person who joins themilitary intelligence unit of the National Guard as a linguist.After training in the Defense Language Institute, the individualloses 25 percent of his language skills and fails to meetlanguage proficiency standards. Every effort is made to changethis situation, even before understanding it. Darell Bott'sdescription does not refer to an accidental, individual failure,but to the implicit dynamics of military practical experiences inthe civilization of illiteracy. A linguist, of allprofessionals, does not choose to lose literate languageproficiency. This proficiency is just not necessary forattaining the efficiency called for in the military. Not reallyunderstanding this structural condition, armies introduce theirrecruits to weaponry-the majority designed for the illiteratewarrior- and to the skills of reading and writing. These skillsdispense ideology, religion, history, geography, psychology, andsex education in concentrated doses. The situation isparadoxical: what defines the practical experience of themilitary today-high technology, division of tasks, networking,distributed responsibilities-conflicts with the traditionalexpectations of clear lines of command, hierarchy, authority, anddiscipline. The means that render useless the characteristicsstemming from literacy-based pragmatics are welcome, but thehuman condition associated with them is frightening.

Yes, a literate soldier can be better indoctrinated, subjected tothe inherent arguments of literacy, of rules and authorities tobe 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 targetsmoving at a speed far higher than that afforded byliteracy-based training, one needs the mediation of the digitaleye. Conflicts are as segmented as the world itself, since clear-cut distinctions between good and bad no longer functioneffectively. Centralized military experiences based onstructures of authority and hierarchy are counterproductive inactual 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 downto the platoons through commanders not adept at the type of warVietnam represented. Even the President of the USA waseffectively involved, more often than not through decisions thatproved detrimental to the war effort. The USA forgot the lessonof its own pragmatic foundation in imitating, as it did inVietnam, the literate wars of Europe in a context ofconfrontation characteristic of the civilization of illiteracy.Memoirs, published too late (Robert MacNamara's is but oneexample), reveal how the literate paradigm embodied in thegovernment and the military kept from the public essentialinformation that, in retrospect, rendered the loss of so manyhuman lives meaningless.

The luxury of a standing army and the cost of subjecting soldiersto long cycles of training, literacy included, belong to theprevious pragmatic framework. The time of the life-long warrioris over. The experience of war changes as quickly as new weaponsare invented. The new scale of humankind requires global levelsof efficiency impossible to attain if productive forces arewithdrawn from productive experiences. Once upon a time, themilitary distinguished itself as a separate body in the socialtexture. The civilization of illiteracy reintegrated the militaryin the network of assignments and purposeful functions of thepragmatics of high efficiency. From the complete suit of armorworn in medieval Europe (before firearms rendered it ineffective)to the plain-clothes military of today, not only have over 500years gone by, but, more important, new forms ofself-constitution, and hence identification, became necessaryand real. Sulfur fumes used over 2,000 years ago in the battle atDelium and the threat of chemical and biological weapons in theGulf War are superficially related. The same knowledge that goesinto producing new chemical and biological means used in highefficiency agriculture and in food preparation goes into chemicaland biological weapons of mass destruction.

This is not a discourse in favor of efficient armies which are ofgreat help during natural disasters, nor is it a discourse infavor of destructive wars, no matter who justifies them. If itsounds like one, it is because the literate description of thestructural background against which, whether we like it or not,the practical experience of the military takes place, bears thestamp of literate praxis. In the civilization of illiteracy, themilitary has come to acknowledge that there is little that can,or should, be done to restore literacy as its coordinatingmechanism. Literacy is not necessarily the best system forachieving optimal military performance at the level facilitatedby new technologies. Neither is it, as some would like tobelieve, a means of avoiding war. The literate human beingproved to be a war beast equal, if not superior, to theilliterate who was subjected to impression and conscription, orwho enlisted as a mercenary.

Current military research attempts to remove human beings fromthe direct confrontation that war used to entail. Nothingaffects 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 NintendoWar." And missiles fare better among the Netizens, despite theirreluctance to embrace belligerence for settling disputes. Highlyefficient, sophisticated digitally programmed systems do notrelate to space and time the way humans do. This aspect gives themachines an edge in respect to the implicit coordinationexpected in war. The kinds of interaction that military praxisrequires makes literacy inadequate for coordinating the humanswho constitute today's armies. Time is segmented beyond humanperception and control; space expands beyond what a person canconceive and control. Major components of a war machine areplaced in outer space and synchronized by extremelytime-sensitive devices. The Strategic Defense Initiative (dubbedStar Wars) was the most advertised example. More trivialsystems, like those used in orienting troops in the desert, are amatter of routine. The expressive power required for increasingmotivation, and for projecting a rational image ofirrationality, collides with the requirement for speed andprecision essential to accomplishing complex tactical andstrategic plans. Coordination of sophisticated informationsystems machines does not have to rely on a language frequentlynot precise enough, or fast enough, to accommodate very dynamicprocesses. At speeds beyond that of sound at which battles arefought with airplanes, rockets, satellites, and missiles, asoldier 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 theirmaintenance and repair requires means independent of thelanguage that functions according to the rules of literacy. Itshould come as no surprise that the electronic book has alreadyappeared in the military sphere of human experience. This bookis the digitally stored description of a device, not the printedbook that was once the manual describing it. If the device is anairplane, or gun system on the airplane, or equipment on a ship,the weight of manuals needed to explain its functioning, or tosupport maintenance and troubleshooting, would keep the airplanegrounded. Any change in such a complex system would requirereprinting of thousands of pages. In its electronic version, thebook is a collection of data manipulated by a computer,displayed in visual form when necessary, and programmed to makerecognition of the problem and its solution as simple aspossible-idiot-proof, in fact. It is not a sequential collectionof pages indexed in a table of contents and requiring a linearreading strategy. The electronic book opens to the appropriatepage, and every page is generated only as necessary, according tothe maintenance or repair requirements of the case. Obviously,the readers addressed by the electronic book are different fromthe literate. They are at least partially visual literates whoknow how to look at an image and follow pictographic prompts.Instead of reading, the human operators carry out the requiredoperation, supervised by the system, counting only on thefeedback from the machine. Under these circ*mstances,efficiency expectations make the use of the human being almost aluxury. The paradigm of self-servicing machines, of circuitsthat can fix themselves (von Neumann's genius at work) isalready a reality.

The electronic book-here presented in an application of militaryrelevance, although there is more to it than that-is one examplefrom the many that can be given regarding how our good oldverbal literacy is becoming obsolete. Electronic booksconstituted over networks (wired or wireless) support a widerange of collaborative activities. By their nature, militaryexperiences utilize such activities. Access to resources and toan unlimited array of possible interactions is essential tocollaboration. Literate expression cannot fulfill theserequirements. Digital formats used in electronic books serve asa medium for sharing and understanding goals. The subsumation ofindividuality to the goal is probably the only specificallymilitary component that carries over from previous experiencesof war. Nevertheless, this subsumation does not follow thepatterns of centralism and the hierarchy of literacy. The methodsare different in that more initiative than ever before isrequired from the soldiers. This initiative is embodied inalternate means of expression and communication.

In electronically synchronized instruments, programs ofdistributed tasks and massive parallel computation replaceliteracy and literacy-based actions. Today's technology permitsflying at low altitude and high speed, but limitations of thehuman biological system make this dangerous for the pilot. Whenreaching a certain speed, the human can no longer coordinatemovements without which low altitude flying becomes suicidal.But suicide is no alternative to avoiding enemy radar, sincethere are no words capable of alerting a pilot to the heatdetector guided missile. Accordingly, languages addressingmachines and vision systems with detection capabilities changethe nature of human involvement in military situations. Again,these languages make the participation of literate language lessand less significant.

Literacy-based means cannot provide for the expectedcoordination. Mediation takes place among many distributed,loosely interconnected devices; efficiency increases due to themany resources integrated in such powerful and ubiquitoussystems. I give these examples-rudimentary in comparison to theNintendo war we watched on our television screens a few yearsago-from the viewpoint of someone who believes in life, peace,and human understanding, but also as one who sees a progressivediscarding of literacy from one of the most language-dependentforms of human interaction and coordination. As with everythingliberated from language and literacy, military practice wasdehumanized. This consequence is likely to be welcomed in itsmore general significance-let machines kill machines. Just as infactories and offices, the human being is replaced by programsendowed with knowledge mediated by something other thanliteracy. What changes the structure of military activity, andlanguage's participation in it, are the new languages embodied inthe technology. That computer-game simulations of flight ortarget-shooting are basically equivalent to the systems ofprecision and destruction used in the Gulf War need not berepeated. But that players of computer games grow up with skillsexpected from jet pilots and from operators of extremelyproductive technology deserves attention and thought.

Do weapons speak and write and read? Do they understand thelanguage of the officer who decides when they are to be fired?Is an intelligent weapon system capable of interpreting whethera legitimate target should indeed be wiped out, even if at thetime of its use, circ*mstances would speak against destroying iton moral grounds? I ask these questions-which can only beanswered with a "No"-on purpose. The literate attitude,according to which military praxis is one of command andexecution requiring language, presents us with a contradiction.Non-military practical experience is more and more mediated bymany languages and synchronized in a vast network of distributedassignments. If military experiences were to remainliteracy-based, this would be equal to maintaining differentpragmatic structures and pursuing goals of disparateefficiency. It is true that the literacy still involved in themilitary is reflected in structures of hierarchy, a relativeexpectation of centralism (in the USA, as in many othercountries, the President is the commander-in-chief), anddependency on deterministic models. Nevertheless, theexpectation of efficiency makes critical the need to adoptessentially non-hierarchic, self-management structures promotingcoordination and cooperative efforts within a distributed networkof different assignments. In the partial literacy of themilitary, a redefinition of the process of goal- setting and thepursuit of assignments other than destruction, such as relocationof refugees or aiding vast populations subjected to naturaldisasters, continuously takes place. Security is another area ofself-constitution that derives benefits from military praxis.The smaller and more distributed wars through which terrorismseeks to accomplish its goals have resulted in small armies ofhighly trained security personnel to protect the civilianpublic. Combat is truly global. But as opposed to the small warof the Middle Ages, the illiterate terrorist respects no rulesand no higher authority.

No army could have changed the world more than the new system ofhuman relations geared toward achieving levels of efficiencycorresponding to numbers of people in pursuit of satisfyingtheir needs, and of others achieving levels of prosperity neverbefore experienced. Armies, as much as schools and universities,as much as the nations they are supposed to defend, as much asthe nuclear family, and all the activities related to them andall the products they generate, correspond to the structure ofpraxis of a loosely connected world with patterns of humanpractical experiences marked by individual success and dependenton personal performance.

The look that kills

Smaller, more deployable, as efficient as possible-thisdescription sums up the characteristics of new weapons on thewish-list of almost any army in the world. On a more specificbasis, defense officials have sketched some research anddevelopment objectives. Here are some, obviously all subject toobsolescence:

Worldwide all-weather forces for limited warfare, which do notrequire main operating bases, including a force that islogistically independent for 30 days

Tracking of strategically relocatable targets

Global command control, communications, and intelligence (C3I)capabilities to include on-demand surveillance of selectedgeographical areas and real-time information transfer to commandauthorities

Weapon systems that deny enemy targeting and allow penetration ofenemy defenses by managing signatures and electronic warfare

Air defense systems to overmatch threat systems

Weapons that autonomously acquire, classify, track, and destroytargets

Reduction of operations and support resources requirement by 50%without impairing combat capability

Expected are a force powered by electricity (ecologicalconcerns), robotic tanks and aerial vehicles, and-this is notscience fiction-bionically enhanced soldiers with embeddedchips, able to sleep when commanded, and an exoskeleton systemallowing 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'sshoot number 49. Tune in your goggles to see but not be seen."The look that kills (the proud accomplishment ofuniversity-based research) becomes reality.

The only comment that can follow such a description is that allthe characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy areembodied in the expectations of military efficiency. Globality,interconnectedness, open-ended goals and motivations, reducedhuman involvement, and many partial literacies are all here,presented in specific expectations. The questionable aspect isthe implicit theme of the permanence of the institution of themilitary, probably the most resilient legacy of the civilizationof literacy. What the technology of the civilization ofilliteracy requires is the command of the abstractions (thelanguage) driving it, the partial literacy associated with thislanguage, pertinent to military or any other use. As one of thepartial literacies of this time, military literacy defines thedomain of action and the interpretation of such actions. It isrelevant, for instance, that disarmament treaties not beformulated without military language, i.e., without the militaryexperts, the ones we want to release from their functions. Eachsuch treaty either discards a part of the language of weaponsand associated technologies, or makes it less relevant, as itopens new avenues for increased military efficiency.

The new organization of the military is one of confrontingtechnologies and associated military literacy. Accordingly, totalk about orders given by an officer, whether a weaponunderstands such orders, and all similar logocentric examples,means to still look at the military from the perspective of acivilization from which it continuously distances itself.Artificial eyes (radar, vision systems), odor detectors,touch-sensitive devices, speed sensors, and many other digitaldevices free the human being from confrontation andprogressively eliminate death from the equation of war. Thosewho compare the photographic images of previous wars to animationon computer game terminals compare a condition of directconfrontation, of our own nature, and of the realization of thelimited condition of life to that of mediated experiences. Thenight sky lit up by tracers, the eerie video-game-like actions,the targets seen through remote cameras are of a realm differentfrom that of destruction and blood, where moral concern istriggered. The expectation is pragmatic, the test is efficiency.

The survival of the military institution in its literatestructure and the lack of understanding of just what makesliteracy unnecessary in the pragmatic framework of today'sglobal world are not the same thing. The first aspect refers tothe immense inertia of a huge mechanism; the second involves thedifficult task of freeing ourselves, as products of literateeducation, from ourselves. Recognition of such a fundamentalchange does not come easy. Universities, bastions of literacy,producing the illiterate technology of war, are caught in thedilemma of negating their own identity, or becoming agents ofilliterate action. We hang on to the ideal of literacy, as wellas to the so-called necessity of strong defense-which reflectsliteracy-based values such as national borders in a globalworld-because we are not yet ready to cope with a new dynamicsof change that is not militarily determined, but which resultsfrom structural necessities of a socio-economic nature. Thepolitical map of the world changed drastically in recent yearsbecause factors affecting the pragmatic framework of humanpractical 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 unprecedentedpossibilities- these are the party lines in the heateddiscussions centered on the dynamics of ongoing changes in whichthe whole world is involved. Paul Virilio is quite expressive inhis formulation of the problem: "An accompanying evil…is theend 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 thephone. Next, we will no longer speak! I'd really like to say:this will indeed be the silence of the lambs!" No less powerfulin their assertions are those who see chances for social renewalin interactions not embodied in the rules of literacy. Theelectronic forum of the European Commission, involved in ProjectInformation Society, lists Ten Bones of Contention from which Ichose the following: "The system we are stuck with andfrantically trying to fix comes from another time and anentirely different set of circ*mstances. It is changingmassively in front of our noses and needs to be completelyrethought and radically overhauled." The statement is lessexpressive than Virilio's, but no less intolerant.

As discussions continue to bring up extremely important aspectsof the conflict marking this time of discontinuity, the billionsof people populating our world today constitute themselvesthrough a broad variety of practical experiences. A list of theseexperiences-from primitive patterns of hunting and gathering foodto eye movement command of remote systems and applicationsdriven by voice recognition in the world of nanotechnologicalsynthesis-would only augment the confusion. Given this broadpragmatic spectrum, no one could seriously project the future asone of virtual communities, or of an electronic democracy,without sounding overly naive or directly stupid. We know howfar we have come, but we do not really know where we are.

In advancing a comprehensive pragmatic perspective, I chose toundertake an elaboration well beyond the short-breathedargumentation peculiar to this moment in time. The advantage ofthis approach deserves to be shared. Endorsing one perspectiveor another, such as the California Ideology-defined by itscritics as "global orthodoxy concerning the relation betweensociety, technology, and politics"-or alternatives-the so-calledEuropean model, or the transactional structure, or neo- Marxiansolutions, to name a few-is not an option. Indeed, the argumentof this book is that answers cannot result from infatuation withtechnology, cultural self-replication, models based onbiological mechanisms, unfocused bionomic elaborations, orincessant criticism of capitalism. Affirmations of a deep nature,above and beyond the rhetoric of intellectual controversy andpolitical discourse, must originate from those affirmativeactions through which our identity as individuals, communities,and society are established. The metaphor of the interactivefuture is the expression of a simple thesis: At the globalscale, human interaction, as the concrete form of engaginginfinitely diverse cognitive resources, is the last availableresource on which the future of the species can depend.

Transcending literacy

Transcending literacy takes place in the practical experiences ofthe pragmatics of high efficiency corresponding to the globalscale of humankind. This scale affects the constitution of humancommunities and the interaction between individuals andcommunity. As has already been mentioned, Bedouins in the SaharaDesert and Indians in the Andes Mountains are no less hooked upto television than people living in technologically highlydeveloped countries. More important, the identities of peoples inless developed societies on the global map of economic andpolitical interdependencies are already subject to the mostadvanced processing techniques. In the ledgers of the globaleconomy, their existence is meticulously entered with respect towhat they can contribute and through what they need and canafford. People constituting virtual communities, in SiliconValley, Japan, France, Israel, and any other place on this globe,are subject to integration in the global scale through differentmeans and methods.

The expansion of non-literacy based human practical experiencesof self- constitution raises legitimate concern regarding thesocial status of the individual and the nature of communityinterdependencies. Children, for example, are subjected to moreimages than language. They have the tendency to perceive time asa continuous present and expect gratification to be asinstantaneous as it appears on television, or as easy to achieveas connecting to exciting Web sites. They wind up experts ininteractive games and in controlling extremely fast processes.Disconnected from culture and tradition, they are extremelyadaptable to new circ*mstances and in a hurry to ascertain theirversion of independence. Sex, drugs, rap music, and membership incults or gangs are part of their contradictory profile. Theseadolescents are the pilots of the Nintendo wars, but also thefuture explorers of outer space, the physicists, biologists, andgeneticists who create new materials and subject machines ofbreathtaking complexity to tasks in which every millionth of asecond is essential to the outcome. They are also the futureartists and record-breaking athletes; they are computerprogrammers and designers of the future. And they will be theservice providers in an economy where change, predicated by theneed to swiftly match outcome to ever-increasing demand, cannotbe met by means burdened by the inertia and heavy-handedness ofliteracy.

As data make clear, such individuals are bound to be lessinvolved in community life and less committed to the ethics ofthe past. Moral absolutes and concern for others do not play amajor role in their lives, which are shaped by practicalexperiences tending towards self-sufficiency, sometimes confusedwith independence. In view of all these characteristics, whichreflect the decreasing role of literacy-based humanexperiences, the question often asked is how will the relationbetween 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 whatextent our own awareness can become a factor in the process.

In our day, many people and organizations deplore the state ofurban life (in the USA and around the world), high unemployment,the feeling of disenfranchisem*nt that individuals, andsometimes whole communities, have. Immigrants of all thecountries they landed in; guest workers in the EuropeanCommunity; the young generation in Asia, Africa, and thecountries that once made up the Eastern Block; the minorities inthe USA; the unemployed around the world-each of these groupsfaces problems reflecting the relation between them as adifferent entity and the society as a whole. Immigrants are notnecessarily welcome, and when accepted, they are expected tointegrate. Guest workers are required to work at tasks with whichcitizens 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 tointegrate. The unemployed are expected to earn their benefitsand eventually to accept whatever job is available. Literacyimplied expectations of hom*ogeneity. Immigrants were taught thelanguage of their new homeland so they could become like anyother citizen. Guest workers, defined by their status in thelabor market, were expected to gradually become unnecessary andto peacefully return to their native countries. Young people,processed through education, and the unemployed, after beingoffered some short retraining, would be absorbed in the machinecalled national economy.

In respect to community, the historic sequence can be summarizedas follows: individuals loosely connected to their peers;individuals constituting viable entities for survival; transferof individual attributes (self-determination, choice) to thecommunity; integration in centralized community; distribution oftasks; decentralization. Each step is defined by the extent ofan individual's optimal performance: from very high individualperformance, essential to survival, to distributedresponsibility, until society takes over individualresponsibility. Liberal democracy celebrates the paradox ofsocialized individualism. In this respect, it ends the age ofpolitical battles (and, as we hear, the age of history), butopens the age of increased access to abundance. Commercialdemocracy is neither the result of political action nor theexpression of any ideology. Within its sphere of action, theboundaries between the individual and the very unsettledcommunity represent the territory of conflict. Moralindividualism succeeds or fails within a framework ofadversarial human relations. Since moral individualism isactually the underpinning of liberalism-"Do what's best foryourself"-the liberty it advances is that of competitive accessto abundance. Socialized individualism accepts the state only aspurveyor of rights and possibilities (when the Hegelian notion ofthe priority of the state over the individual is accepted defacto), not as moral instance.

The transition to a pragmatics in which individual performancebecomes marginal, in view of the many coordinating mechanismsensuring redundancies that obliterate personal participation, isdefinitive of this process. The relative significance ofmalfunctions-breakdown in the legal and social system, forexample-as instances of self-awareness and new beginnings,prompted by the need to remedy past practices, is different ineach of the stages mentioned. So is the possibility of change andrenewal. Creativity in current pragmatics is less and less anissue of the individual and more the result of orchestratedefforts in a large network of interactions. The underlyingstructure of the civilization of illiteracy supports apragmatics of heterogeneity, distributed tasks, and networking.Human practical experiences of self-constitution no longergenerate uniformity, but diversity. There is no promise ofpermanency, even less of stable hierarchies and centralism. Weface new problems. Their formulation in literate form isdeceptive; their challenge in the context of illiteracy, in whichthey emerge, is unprecedented. This is what prompts concernsabout the civilization of illiteracy.

Being in language

The two aspects of human self-constitution throughlanguage-individual and community (society)-derive from thebasic issue of social interrelationships. One's language is notindependent of the language of the society, despite the factthat, in a given society, people identify themselves throughnoticeable peculiarities in the way they speak, write, read, andcarry on dialogue. Elements pertaining to language areintegrated in the human's biological structure. Still, languagedoes not emerge, as the senses do, but is progressivelyacquired. The process of language acquisition is at the sametime a process of projecting human abilities related tolanguage's emerging characteristics. Regardless of the level oflanguage acquired, language overwrites the senses. It projectsintegrated human beings-a unity of nature and language-prone toidentify themselves in the culture that they continuously shape.

While nature is a relatively stable system of reference, culturechanges as humans change in the process of their variousactivities. To be within a language, as all human beings are,and in a community means to participate in processes ofindividual integration and social coordination. Individuallanguage use and social use of language are not identical.Individuals constitute themselves differently than communitiesdo. That in each community there are elements common to theindividuals constituting it only says that the sum total ofindividual practical experiences of language is different fromthe language characteristic of the social experience. Thedifference between the language of the individual and thelanguage of a community is indicative of social relationships. Amore general thesis deserves to be entertained: The nature andvariety of human interactions, within and without practicalexperiences of self-constitution in language, describe thecomplexity of the pragmatic framework. These interactions arepart of the continuous process of identification as individualsand groups in the course of ascertaining their identity as aparticular species.

Acknowledged forms of relationships in work, family life, magic,ritual, myth, religion, art, science, or education are evincedthrough their respective patterns. Such patterns, circ*mscribedby human self-constitution in the natural and cultural context,are significant only retroactively. They testify to the humanbeing's social condition and express what part of nature andwhat part of culture is involved in this condition. Theprimordial significance of these two phenomena lies in theexpression of practical experiences followed, not preceded, bycognition. Active participation of individuals in practicalexperiences of language acknowledges their need to identifythemselves in the patterns of interrelation mentioned. People donot get involved with other people because either party may benice. Involvement is part of the continuous definition of theindividual in contexts of conflict and cooperation, ofacknowledging similarity and difference. Any dynamics, inbiology or in culture, is due to differences.

People take language for granted and never question itsconventions. As a natural, inherited (in Chomsky's view)attribute, rather like the human senses, language is notreinvented each time practical experiences of constitutionthrough language take place. Neither is its usefulnessquestioned-as happens with artifacts (tools in particular)-eachtime our practical experience reaches the limits of language. Thebreakdown of an artifact-i.e., its inappropriateness to the taskat hand-suggests the possible experience of crafting another.The breakdown of language points to limits in the humanexperience, not in its accessories. Malfunctioning of languagepoints to the biological endowment and the ways this isprojected in reality through everything people do. This is nottrue in respect to other, less natural, sign systems: symbols,artificial languages, meta-languages.

What changes from one scale of humankind, i.e., from onesituation of matching needs to means for satisfying them, toanother is the coefficient of the linear equation, not thelinearity as such. A small group of people can survive bycombining hunting, fruit gathering, and farming. The effort tosatisfy a relatively bigger group increases only in proportionto the size of the group. In the known moments when a criticalmass, or threshold, was reached (language acquisition,agriculture, writing, industrial production, and now thepost-industrial), the expectation of higher efficiencycorresponding to each scale of human experiences triggeredchanges in the pragmatic framework. The awareness of language'sfailure derives from practical experiences for which newlanguages become necessary.

Miscommunication is an instance of language not suitable to theexperience. Lack of communication points to limitations of thehumans involved in an activity. Miscommunication makes peoplequestion (themselves, others) about what went wrong, why, andwhat, if anything, can be done to avoid practical consequencesaffecting the efficiency of their activity. Other forms oflanguage malfunction can affect people as individuals or asmembers of a community in ways different from those peculiar tocommunication. The failure of political systems, ideologies,religion(s), markets, ethics, or family is expressed in thebreakdown of patterns of human relations. We keep alive thelanguage of those political systems, ideologies, religions, andmarkets even after noticing their failure, not by accident orthrough oversight but because all those languages are us, as weconstitute 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 owninefficiency, more difficult to overcome than poor spelling,etymological ignorance, or phonetic deafness.

The wall behind the Wall

An appropriate example of the solidarity between languageexperience and the individual constituted in language isprovided by the breakdown of the East European block, and evenmore pointedly by the breakdown of the Soviet Union. Nobodyreally suspected that once the infamous Berlin Wall came down,the people who lived to the east of it, trained and educated inand for a pragmatic framework whose underlying structure wasreflected in their high degree of literacy, would remain captiveto it as their legal, social, and economic conditions changed.Despite the common language- German is the language through whichnational unity was ascertained-East Germans are prisoners of thestructural characteristics of the society projected on themthrough literacy: centralism, clear-cut distinctions,determinism, strong hierarchical structures, and limited choice.The invisible but powerful inner conditioning of the EastGermans' literacy-categorically superior to that of theirWestern brothers and sisters-is not adequate to the newpragmatics attained in West Germany and raises obstacles toEast Germany's integration in a dynamic society. The illiteratepragmatics of high efficiency, associated with high expectationsthat seem to outpace actual performance, was foisted on EastGermans by the well intentioned, though politicallyopportunistic, government from across a border that should neverhave 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 andsocial, political, economic, national, and cultural developmentsare totally desynchronized. The best poetry was written in EastEurope; 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 danceensembles, and even the highest level of mathematical theory,physics, and biology became possible in a context ofrestriction, oppression, and disregard of individuals and theircreativity. It is also impossible not to finally realize that thestrength built on literacy-based structures was deceiving andself-deceiving.

In the not-too-distant past, the people of these countries readbooks, attended concerts and operas, and visited museums. Now,if they are not in misery, they are as obsessed with indulgingin everything they could not have before, even if this meansgiving up their spiritual achievements. Consumption is the newlanguage, even before a basis for efficient practicalexperiences is put in place, and sometimes instead of it. Theold relation between the language of the individual and thelanguage of society displayed patterns of deception andcowardice. The new emergent relation expresses patterns ofexpectation well beyond the efficiency achieved, or hoped for, inthis integrated world of extreme competitive impact. The wallbehind the Wall is embodied in extremely resistant patterns ofhuman interaction originating in the context of literacy- basedpragmatics. With this example in mind, it is critical toquestion whether there are alternatives to the means ofexpression people use and to the social program they arecommitted to-democracy. The experience of language today is verydifferent from that of the time when the Jacobins asserted anotion of democracy as the general will (1798), under theassumption of a literate background shared by all people.

The message is the medium

Language is a form of social memory. When saying something orlistening to some utterance, we assume a uniform use of wordsand of higher level linguistic entities. As stored testimony tosimilar practical experiences, language, stabilized in literacy,became a medium for averaging them. The patterns of humanrelations captured in language make people aware, in retrospect,of the relevance of these patterns to human efficiency. So itseems that we constitute ourselves as our own observations abouthow we interact. These observations are identified as cognition,because it is through interaction that we know each other andknow how, what, and when our immediate and less immediate needsare satisfied. The paradigm of literacy asserts that humanself-constitution takes place in language, moreover that it couldeffectively happen only in language, expressed in written formsand made available through reading. Indeed, knowledge wasderived from praxis implying human interaction that integratedlanguage-based exchanges of information. This knowledge shapedpolitical, ideological, religious, and economic experiences, aswell as efforts to improve the technology used, and even broadenthe scientific perspective. The dimension of future is intrinsicto life, from where it extends to language and literacy, as itextends to artifacts, work, and pragmatic expectations.

The practical experience of language, as any other semioticpractical experience, embodies agreements regarding the natureand condition of whatever is constituted in language, humanidentity included. The projection of the biological and culturalcharacteristics on the world of our life and action establisheselements of reference. The ability to see, hear, and smell, andthe ability to use tools are acknowledged as humans interact.Ability and performance differ widely. Self-evaluation andevaluation by others in the process of defining and achievinggoals of common interest are quite distinct. Language mediates,hence it makes commitments part of the experience. When theseare not carried through, language can become a substitute mediumfor confrontation.

Experiences of agreement and experiences of confrontation arepart of the patterns of interrelationship that define how thelanguage of individuals and the language of the community arerelated. Socialization of language leads to paradoxicalsituations: humans self-constituted in the language experienceperceive their own language as though confrontation is not amongthemselves, but among their languages. Only a few years ago, weheard about how much Americans and Russians liked each other,although the language of politics and ideology was one ofconflict. Now we hear how Ossies (East Germans) and Wessies(West Germans) have strong feelings about each other (one sideis described as lazy, the other as arrogant; one side ascultivated, the other as ignoramuses; some as honest, the othersas corrupt) although the language they both share is the same(though not quite). Iranians and Arabs, Armenians andGeorgians, and Serbs and Croats could add to this subject morethan we want to know about the language of prejudice.

Shortly before Malthus issued his equation of population growthin relation to the growth of subsistence means, Rousseau stateda law of the inverse proportion between size of population andpolitical freedom. Rousseau ascertained that the strength ofthose exercising power over others increases as the number ofthose subjected to power increases. The inverse proportion hasto do with the influence each individual has in the politicalprocess-the more people, the weaker each voice. Scale iscritical, but so is understanding the relation between theunderlying structure of the pragmatics that defines the role oflanguage and how this role is carried out. Practical experiencesof power concentration are supported by literacy, whose implicitstructure and expectation is centralism and representation.Literacy generates instances of conflict as well as institutionsthat regulate the nature of agreements and disagreements.Bureaucracy, the expression of these institutions, is theoffspring of the incestuous relation between literacy anddemocracy.

A new scale of humankind, for which literacy-based practicalexperiences are not adequate, and within which democracy-thepower of the people-can no longer be exercised (as Rousseaupointed out), poses many challenges. Among them: What, ifanything, 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 culturalexperience of literacy and the social experience of democracyhave reached their potential and are due for replacements has tobe understood.

In a different vein, the understanding that literacy participatesin power, of which people become aware in a given cultural andsocial context, triggers another reaction: means of expressionand communication different from those originating under theaegis of literacy participate in pragmatic processes that resultin access to power. It is not what a political leader says, buthow. Powerful images, sophisticated directing, and inspiredstage design or selection of backdrops become the message itself.This is why "The message is the medium," a not irreverentreversal of McLuhan's famous formula, phrases the altered natureof the relation between language and the world. Interactions inthe networked world exemplify this rephrasing even better. Theredefined relationship between the many languages of our newpractical experiences and reality is expressed in the means andvalues of the civilization of illiteracy.

Written into the pompous architecture of Mitterand's palaces andmonuments in Paris, and into the "new" Berlin reflecting themedieval notion of centralized power-to the tune of hundreds ofbillions of dollars-the message of literacy is turned into themedium of brick-and-mortar. In an age of task distribution anddecentralization, the appropriate alternative is virtualenvironments and an advanced infrastructure for access tocognition. "The message is the medium" translates into therequirement of overcoming infatuation with the past, never mindtrying to reinvent it. The statement demands that we createalternative media that support the empowerment of individuals,not the further consolidation of power structures that wererelevant in the past but which prevent the unfolding of thefuture.

From democracy to media-ocracy

Democracy is a domain of expectations. Humans constitutethemselves as members of a democracy to the extent that theirpractical experiences acknowledge equality, freedom, andself-determination. The concept of democracy has variedenormously over time. In ancient societies, it acknowledgedequality of the demos, and that free men-not slaves, notwomen-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, asmentioned above). How this self- government actuallyworks-through direct or indirect representation, in forms ofgovernment based on the division of power between the executiveand legislative, or under monarchies-is itself a matter ofpractical experiences pertinent to democracy. The democracy ofhuman misery and neglect is quite different from the democracy ofaffluence. Equal access to work, education, health care, andart, and equal access to drugs, murder, joblessness, ignorance,and disease are far from being similar. A small town-meeting inVermont or one in a Swiss canton, effectively governing life intown, is quite different from the forms of politicalself-governance in countries where the central power effectivelyoverrides any self-governance. The same can be said of theoverriding power of other factors-the economy, for instance.

Democracy is a major form of social and political experience. Thepower of the majority, expressed in votes, is only one of itspossible manifestations. When only a minority of the populationvotes, the so-called majority ceases to be representative, nomatter what the formal rules say. We live by democratic practicesof delusion, and multiply, enthusiastically, their effectthrough the literate discourse of democracy. As a domain ofexpectations, mirroring hope implicit in literacy, democracyconjures meaning only if it is paralleled by democraticparticipation in social and political experiences. When one ofthe two terms of this critical equation diminishes-as is the casewith participation-democracy diminishes in the same proportion.There are many reasons for decreasing participation. Incountries where effective democracy was replaced by democraticdemagoguery, changes, such as those brought about byrevolutions, revolts, and reforms, initially mobilize thepeople, almost to the last citizen. We are still observing aphenomenon symptomatic of democracy in East Europe and therepublics of the former Soviet Union. From the almost unanimousenthusiasm over renewal, leading to formal conditions fordemocracy, individual participation in government is slowlydiminishing. What are the causes of this phenomenon, which isparalleled by diminishing interest in religion, art, andsolidarity?

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 theperspective of the relationships characteristic of anindividual's literate language and literacy programs of societiesclaiming to be democratic, the answer should be sought in theconflict between literacy-based values and the expectations ofefficiency characteristic of the new scale of humankind.Efficiency made possible by a pragmatics emancipated from thestructural characteristics reified in literacy converteddemocracy into commercial democracy. People can buy and sellwhatever they want. Their equality is one of access to themarket of affluence; their freedom is sealed in the mutuallyacknowledged right to plenty. Democratization, which peoplebelieve is taking place all over the world, is a process ofabsorbing newer and newer groups of people into prosperity, intothe superficial culture of entertainment (including sportscompetition), and into a government that guarantees the right towealth and consumption.

This description can easily become suspect of moralizing insteadof tight analysis. Literacy embodies certain expectations fromdemocratic institutions. Like other institutions, this type isalso subjected to the test of efficiency. When the institutionsof democracy fail this test, they are, in the language ofdemocracy, diverted to consolidating not democracy, as apractical experience of the people, but the institution.Bureaucracies are generated as a diversion of democracy from itssocial and political focus in an incestuous love with thelanguage in which its principles are enunciated. Mediationinsinuates itself between the people and the institutions ofdemocracy.

Media generalize the role of the literate system of checks andbalances and, as mass-media, becomes a participant in theequation of power. Taking full advantage of means thatcharacterize the civilization of illiteracy-the power of images,instantaneous access to events, the power of networking,communicative resources of new technologies-the media play adouble role: representative of the people and representative ofpower. Since their own domain of experiences is representation,the media depend on the efficiency of the practical experiencesof people's self-constitution in productive activities. Massmedia activity is carried not by its own motivations, but bythose of the market, whose locus it becomes. Consequently, theequation of democracy becomes the equation of competition andeconomic success. The media select and endorse causes andpersonalities appropriate to the process of marketing democracy.Instead of government, and the responsibilities associated withit, democracy becomes the people's right to buy, among otherthings, their government and the luxury of transferring theirdemocratic responsibilities to its institutions.

Media bashing is a favorite sport of politicians whenever thingsdon't work the way they expect. It is also practiced by thepublic, especially in times of economic uncertainty or duringpolitical developments that seem out of control (wars, violentmass demonstrations, elections). Bashing or not, criticism ofthe media reflects the fact that media expanded theirparticipation in power. The practical experience of publicrelations, an outgrowth of media participation in power, uses themethods of the media to promote causes and personalities asproducts best suited for a certain need: support hungrychildren, elect a sheriff, endorse a tax hike or reduction, etc.,etc. The domains of competence and ability are effectivelydisconnected from the domain of representation. Literacy-basedmethods of establishing hierarchies and influencing choices areenforced by new technologies for reaching targets, even in themost saturated contexts of information dissemination. Adviserscommitted only to the success of their endeavors use thediscriminating tools of the market in order to adapt the messageto all those who care to play the muddled game of democracy.

Information brokerage, feedback strategies, symbolic socialengineering, mass media, psychology, and event design form aneclectic practical experience. Calling it by a certainname-media-ocracy-is probably tendentious. But the shoe seems tofit. From all we know, the effort of this activity does not gotowards promoting excellence or persuading communities thatdemocracy entails quality and defending self-government fromcorruption. It rather focuses on what it takes to convince thatmediocrity adequately reflects the quest for equality, and isthe most people can expect if they are not dedicated to theexercise of their rights. The literate and illiterate means usedto defend democracy, and the entire political system built onthe democratic premise, make it only more evident thatdemocracy, an offspring of language-based practical experiences,is far from being the eternal and universal answer, the climax ofhistory. Indeed, the scale of humankind renders impossibleparticipation in power through the definition of ideals andgoals, as well as awareness of the consequences of humanactions. Alternative forms of participating in democracy need tobe found in the characteristics of the pragmatics correspondingto the new scale. Such alternatives have to embody thedistributed nature of work, better understanding of theconnection (or lack thereof) between the individual and thecommunity, awareness of change as the only permanence, andstrategies of co-evolution, regarding equally all other peopleand the nature to which humans still belong. Democracy is theoffspring of human experiences based on the postulate ofsameness. The alternatives derive from the dynamics ofdifference.

Self-organization

Time, energy, equipment, and intellect have been invested in theresearch of artificial life. Knowledge derived from thisresearch can be used to advance models of individual and sociallife. This knowledge tells us that diversity andself-organization, for instance, prompted by structuralcharacteristics 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 onsocial forms of variable organization. Within such forms,iterative optimization and learning take place as an expressionof internal necessities, not as a result of adopted or imposedrules of functioning.

The entire dynamics of reproduction that marks today's statesand organizations in the business of population control, needsto be reconnected to the pragmatic context. As a result, we canexpect that communities structured on such principles are endowedwith the equivalent of social immune systems, able to recognizethemselves and to counteract social disease. Reconnection to thepragmatic context needs to be understood primarily as a changeof strategy from telling people what has to be done to engagingthem in the action. All the promises connected to thefast-growing network of networks are based on this fundamentalassumption. A social immune system ought to be understood as amechanism for preventing actions detrimental to the effectivefunctioning of each and every member of the community. Socialdisease entails connotations characteristic of a system of goodand bad, right and wrong. What is meant here is the possibilitythat individual effort and pragmatic focus become disconnected.Reconnection mechanisms are based on recognition of diversity anddefinition of unity, means, goals, and ideals.

Adaptability results from diversity; so does the ability toallocate resources within the dynamic community. More than inthe past, and more than today, individuals will partake in morethan one community. This is made possible by means of interactionand by shared resources. Today's telecommuting is only abeginning when we think of the numbers of people involved andthe still limited scope of their involvement. The old notion ofcommunity, associated mainly with location, will continue to giveway to communities of interests and goals. Virtual communitieson the Internet already exemplify such possibilities. The majorcharacteristic of such self-organizing social and cultural cellsis their pattern of improvement in the course of co-evolution,which reflects the understanding that political and socialaspects of human interaction change as each person changes.

The model described, inspired by the effort to understand lifeand simulate properties pertinent to life through simulations,applies just as much to the natural as to the artificial. Globaleconomy, global political concerns, global responsibility for thesupport system, global vested interests in communication andtransportation networks, and global concern for the meaningfuluse of energy should not lead to a world state- not evenBoorstin's Republic of Technology will do-but to a state of manyworlds. Complexities resulting from such a scale of politicalpractical experiences are such that self-destruction, throughsocial implosion, is probably what might happen if we continueto play the game of world institutions. The alternativecorresponds to decentralization, powerful networking associatedwith extreme distributions of tasks, and effective integratingprocedures.

In more concrete terms, this means that individuals willconstitute their identity in experiences through which theirparticular contribution might be integrated in different actionsor products. They will share resources and use communicationmeans to optimize their work. Access to one another's knowledgethrough means that are simultaneously open to many inquiries ispart of the global contract that individuals will enter, oncethey acknowledge the benefits of accessing the shared body ofinformation and the tools residing on networks. Self-organizinghuman nuclei of diverse practical experiences will allow for themultiplicity of languages of the civilization of illiteracy,freedom from bureaucracy, and more direct co-participation in thelife of each social cell thus constituted.

Advanced specialized knowledge, empowering people to pursue theirpractical goals with the help of new languages (mathematicalnotation, visualization, diagramming, etc.), usually insulatesthe expert from the world. If circ*mstances are created tomeaningfully connect practical experiences that are relevant toeach other, fragmentation and synthesis can be pursued together.We are very good at fragmentation-it defines our narrowspecialties. But we are far less successful in pursuingsynthesis. The challenge lies in the domain of integration.

Since human activity reflects the human being'smulti-dimensionality, it is clear that nuclei of overlappingexperiences, involving different perspectives, will develop inenvironments where resources are shared and results constitutethe starting point for new experiences. The identity of peopleconstituting themselves in the framework of a pragmatics thatensures efficiency and diversity reflects experiences throughmany literacies, and survival skills geared towardsco-evolution, not domination. Co-evolving technology is only anexample. From the relatively simple bulletin boards of the early1960's to the Internet and Web of our day, co-evolution has beena concrete practical instance of the constitution of theNetizen. Michael Hauben, who coined the term, wanted to describethe individuals working towards building a cooperative andcollective activity that would benefit the world at large.Conflicts are not erased. The Net community is not one ofperfection but of anticipated and desired diversity, in whichimperfection is not a handicap. Its dynamics is based ondifferences in quantity and quality, and its efficiency isexpressed 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 themain sign system of the human species, is brought moreforcefully to light against the background of new forms ofpractical experiences leading to human self-constitution throughmany sign systems. Extremely complex pragmatic circ*mstances,predicated by needs that long ago surpassed those of survival,make the limits of literacy-based language experiences standout. This new pragmatics demands that literacy be complementedwith alternative means of expression, communication, andsignification. The analysis of various forms of human activityand creativity can lead to only one conclusion: the patterns ofhuman relationships and the tools created on the foundation ofliteracy no longer optimally respond to the requirements of ahigher dynamics of human existence.

Misled by the hope that once we capture extensions inlanguage-everything people do in the act of their practicalself-identification-we could infer from these to intensions-howa particular component unfolds-we have failed to perceive theintensional aspects of human actions themselves. For instance, weknow of the diverse components of the practical experience ofmathematics-analytic effort, rationality, symbolism, intuition,aesthetics. But we know almost nothing about each component.Some simply cannot be expressed in language; others are onlyreduced to stereotype through literate discourse. Does the powerof a mathematical expression rely on mathematical notation, oron aesthetic quality? How are these two aspects integrated?Where and how does intuition affect mathematical thinking?

The same criteria apply, but more critically, to socialactivities. Interactions among people involve their physicalpresence; their appearance as beautiful, or fit, or appropriate;their capability to articulate thoughts; their power ofpersuasion; and much more. Each component is important, but weknow very little about the specific impact each one has.Surprised at how dictators come to power, and even more by massdelusion, with or without television as part of the politicalperformance, we still fail to focus on what motivates people intheir manifestations as racists, warmongers, hypocrites, or, forthat matter, as honest participants in the well-being of theirfellow 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 culturalpractice, but has failed to project anything particularlyrelevant to our natural existence. Thus patterns of culturalbehavior expressed in language seem quite independent of thepatterns of our biological life, or at least appear to haveacquired a strange, or difficult to explain, independence.

We must give serious thought to our obsession withinvulnerability, easy to conceptualize and express in language.It is, for instance, embodied in the medicine of thecivilization of literacy. The abrupt revelation of AIDS, markingthe end of the paranoia of invulnerability, might help usunderstand the ramifications of the uncoupling of our life inthe domain of culture-where human sexuality belongs-and our lifein the domain of nature-where reproduction belongs. Magicreflected the attempt to maintain a harmonious relation with theoutside world. It has not yet been decided whether it ismedicine-the reified experience of determinism applied in therealm of individual well being-or a parent's embrace that calmsa baby's colic; or whether the psychosomatic nature of moderndisease is addressed by the technology of healthcare in our days.What we already know is that populations were decimated once newpatterns of nourishment and hygiene were imposed on them. Whenan attained balance was expelled by a foreign form of balance,life patterns were affected. This happened not only topopulations in Asia, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, but alsoin the native populations of the American continents. Medicalconcepts resulting from analytic practical experiences ofself-constitution-many reified in the medicine of thecivilization of literacy-defy the variety of possible balancesand embody the suspicion that "The solution is the problem."

Literacy, when applicable, works very well, but it is not theuniversal answer to humankind's increasingly complexpragmatics. In the fortunate position of not having totallyabandoned experiences with sign systems other than language,people have been able to change the patterns of training,instruction, industrial production, modern farming, andhealthcare. Patterns of practical understanding of domains whichfor a very long time were concealed by literacy are alsoaffected: pattern recognition, image manipulation, design. As aresult, new methods for tackling new areas of human experienceare becoming possible. Instead of describing images throughwords, 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 withintegrated planning and management facilities. A new product, anew building, and concepts in urban planning are generated whilethe pertinent computer program computes data pertinent to cost,ecological impact, social implications, and interpersonalcommunication. The practice of transcending literacy, while stillinvolving literacy, also resulted in the development of newskills: visual awareness, information processing, networking,and new forms of human integration, far less rigid than thosecharacteristic of integration exclusively through verballanguage.

There is no need to eliminate literacy, as there is no need toreduce 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 interactioncharacteristic of computer-mediated communication. Televisionholds a large audience captive in one-way communication. Theambition of the World Wide Web is to enable meaningfulone-to-one and one-to-many interactions.

The civilization of illiteracy is one of diversity and relies onthe dynamics of self- organization. But in order to succeed,several conditions need to be met. For instance, we have not yetdeveloped in appropriate practical experiences of human self-constitution the ability to think in media other than naturallanguage. Like many beginners in a new language, people stilltranslate from one language to another. When this does not work,they look for help in the language they know, instead offormulating questions in the alternative language in which theysuspect they can be answered. After intuition was eliminated byrationality and system, only minor effort is made towardsunderstanding 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 greatextent still are, able to ignore some forms of humanrelationships without affecting the general outcome of humanpractice. Within the new scale and dynamics, human civilizationrelies on the interplay of more elements. The timing involved inintegrating this diversity is much more difficult to accomplishthrough literacy-based methods, even though timing is criticalto the outcome. Literacy captures the rough and linear level ofrelations. New practical experiences of higher efficiencyrequire finer levels and tools adequate to non- linear phenomenafor 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 byeffective ways of making choices, we would be sucked into thewhirlwind of entropy. In practice, this translates into anobvious course of events: allowing for new possibilities, whichsometimes take the appearance of alternatives, means to disallowcertain known and practiced options of confirmed output. Forexample, where democracy is taken over by bureaucracy, the townmeeting fulfills only a decorative function. There is nothing ofconsequence in the American President's State of the Unionaddress, or in the conventions where political parties nominatecandidates for the Presidency. With the choice of local andnational political representation, the possibility to directlyparticipate in power is precluded.

The possibility of using sign systems other than language is farfrom being a novelty. Even the possibility of achieving someform of syncretism is not new by any means. What is new is theawareness of their potential malfunctioning and of the potentialfor losing control over forms of praxis that become highlycomplex. From among the many ways the relation between theindividual and the community is manifested, the condition of thelegal system is probably the best example. Whether independent,constituting a domain of regulations and checks with its ownmotivations, or part of other components of social and politicallife, the institution of justice encodes its typologies,classifications, and rules in laws. This domain parallels one ofhuman interactions where expected values are permanentlysubjected to the scrutiny of the pragmatic activity. Integrityof the individual and his lawfully acquired goods, the bindingnature of commitments, and prohibition of misrepresentation or ofrules essential to the well being of the community are rules onwhich legal experience developed. Right and wrong, onceidentified under circ*mstances of direct practical experiencethrough consequences for the community's well being, are nowconstituted in a domain with a life and rules of its own.Killing, stealing, and misrepresentation are actions well definedin the written texts of the law. But the law itself, anchored inliteracy, consequently detached itself from the real world andnow constitutes its own reality and motivations. Since this isthe case, it is no surprise that legal practice turns out to benothing more than interpretations of texts and attempts to uselanguage to bring about an outcome based on chimera, notreality.

The legal system reacts to innovation by forcing rulesoriginating in other pragmatic frameworks-the strong evidence ofDNA analysis is only one example-to fit its own criteria ofevaluation. Instead of constituting a proactive context for theunfolding of the human genius, legal praxis ends up defendingonly its own interests. The jury system in the USA might appearto many people as an expression of democracy. In the pragmaticcontext in which the jury system originated, even the notion ofpeer made sense, since it applied to a reduced and relativelyhom*ogeneous community. Today, the jury has become part of theodious equation of the dispute between lawyers. The jury isselected to reflect the lowest common denominator so that itsmembers, mostly incompetent, can be manipulated in theadversarial game of the performance produced under the genericlabel of justice.

As an extension of literate language, the experience of legallanguage builds on its own rules for efficient functioning andestablishes criteria for success that corrupt the process ofjustice. It is a typical example of malfunctioning, probably asvivid as the language of politics. Judicial and political praxesdocument, from another angle, how democracy fails once itreaches the symbolic phase manifested in the bureaucracy of thelegal system and of reified power relations.

Coping with choice

Self-definition implies the ability to establish a domain ofpossibilities. But possibilities do not present themselvesalone. In the transition from the civilization of literacy tothe new civilization of illiteracy, the global domain ofpossibilities expands dramatically, but the local, individualdomains probably narrow in the same proportion. This happensbecause what at the global level looks like a multiplication ofchoices, at the level of the individual appears as a matter ofeffective selection procedures. As long as there is little tochoose from, selection is not a problem.

The primitive family had few choices regarding nourishment,self-reproduction, and health. Choices increased as thepractical experiences of self-constitution diversified.Migrating populations chose from among selections different fromthose available to settled human beings. The first known citiesembodied a structure of relations for which written language wasappropriate. The megalopolis of our day embodies a universe ofchoices on a different scale. Within such a domain ofpossibilities, there are no effective selection procedures.Reduction from practically infinite choices to a finite numberof realizations is at best a matter of randomness and exposure.Inversely, the slogan "Act locally, think globally" can easilylead to failure. Many accomplishments that are successful on alocal scale would fail if applied globally if they do notintegrate awareness of globality from the beginning.

Within literacy, the expectation that literate people receive, byvirtue of knowledge of language, good selectionprocedures-considered as universal and permanent as literacyitself-was part of its multi-layered self-motivation. In thecivilization of illiteracy, this expectation gives way topursuing consecutive choices, all short-term, all of limitedscope and value-free, which even seem to eliminate one's owndecision. It appears that choices grab individuals. This explainswhy one of the main drives in the world today is towards greaternumbers of people seeking to live in cities. Once a choice isexhausted, the next follows as a consequence of the scale, not asa result of searching for an alternative. This applies as wellto professional life, itself subject to the shorter cycles ofrenewal and change.

The powerful mechanism of social segmentation, the result of themany mediating mechanisms in place, makes the problem of copingwith choice look like another instance of democracy at work.Let's consider some of these choices: to distribute, or not todistribute, condoms to high school and junior high schoolstudents; to confirm or deny the right to end one's life(pro-choice or pro-life); to expand heterosexual familyprivileges to hom*osexual cohabitation; to introduce uniformstandards of testing in education. These examples are removedfrom the broader context of human self-constitution andsubmitted, through the mechanism of media- ocracy, more to marketvalidation than to a responsible exercise of civicresponsibility.

Mediation mechanisms characteristic of the civilization ofilliteracy cause the choices that a community faces to becomealmost irrelevant on the individual level. In the new universeof possibilities, expanding as we speak, human beings are givingup autonomy and self-determination, as they participate inseveral different communities. They share in the apparentchoices of society insofar as these match their ownpossibilities and expectations. But they often have the means tolive outside a society when their choices (regarding peace, war,individual freedom, lifestyle, etc.) are different from thosepursued by states. Citizens of the trans-national world partakein the dynamics of change to a much higher degree than do peoplededicated to the literate ideals of nationalism and ethnicity.

We can fly to the moon (and people will, either as participantsin the space program or as paying passengers). We can affordpartaking in unique events- concerts, contests, auctions-some inperson, others through the electronic means they can afford.Each individual can become president or member of somelegislative body; but only some can afford applying for thesepositions. Whether through wealth, intelligence, sensitivity,race, gender, age, or religion, we are not equal in ourpossibilities, although we are equal in our rights. Coping withchoice involves matching goals and means of achieving them.Literacy is a poor medium for this operation, which takes placebetween individuals and the many communities to which theybelong. The various languages of the pragmatic identification ofall those involved in coping with choice operate moreeffectively.

The network of interrelations that constitute our practicalexistence and the patterns of these relations will continue tochange and become globally more complex and locally moreconfined. While we gain global freedom, we lose local dynamics.At the particular level at which we input our mediatingperformance, we are in almost total control of our ownefficiency. Each of the many service providers for industry,physicians, lawyers, or writers is an example of local choicesreflected in the increased productivity of those they serviceand of their own output. At higher levels, where these servicesare integrated-regardless of whether they provide rust control,X-ray processing, graphic design, or accounting-choices becomemore limited. Consequently, coordination becomes critical. Thestrategy of outsourcing is based on the notion that maximumefficiency requires specialization that companies cannotachieve. If the process continues in the same direction,coordination will soon be the most difficult problem ofpractical experience. This is due to the complexity thatintegration entails, and to the fact that there are no effectiveprocedures for simplifying it. The simpler each task, the morecomplex the integration. Short of submitting a law that reflectsthis situation, another thesis can be formulated: Overallcomplexity is preserved regardless of how systems aresubdivided, or tasks distributed. Complexity is transferred fromthe task to the integration.

Trade-off

Awareness of possibilities is more direct than that ofcomplexities. Trading choice and self-determination for lessconcern and higher rewards in terms of satisfying needs anddesires is not an exciting alternative. Language has not broughtthe promised awareness of the world, but has made possible astrategy of confinement. The loss of language seems to troublemainly people who work at language dissemination, maintenance,and awareness. However, after taking language for granted for along time, people notice those instances when, in need of a wordor trying to function in a world of language conventions,language is not up to the task. Faced with unprecedentedexperiences in scientific experimentation, large-scalecommunication, radical political change, and terrorism, peopleobserve 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 frameworkrequires something other than language. In contrast to tools,like the ones we keep around the house or see mechanics andplumbers using, language is not taken away or lost because weare our language. What is lost from language is a certaindimension of human being and acting, of appropriating realityand producing and exchanging goods, of acknowledging ourexperience and sharing it with others.

Cultural, historical, economic, social, and other developmentscontribute to our notion of literacy. Its crisis is symptomaticof everything that made literacy necessary and is based on theparticular ways in which literate societies function. Thisstatement does not suggest that the crisis of literacy implies acultural or economic crisis. For instance, women's emancipationdid not start with the emancipation of language. In Japanese, inwhich the man-woman distinction goes so far as to require thatwomen use a different vocabulary than men, women's emancipationcould hardly be considered. As an expression of a specific typeof social relations, this distinction in language maintains astatus against which women might feel entitled to react.

Many other patterns of human interaction, which prompt practicalaction for change, are deeply seated in language. Watching ourchildren, upon whom we impose literacy, grow, we almost alwayscount the words they learn and evaluate their progress inarticulating desires, opinions, and questions. What we neglectto ask is what kind of world does language bring to them in theprocess of learning language? What kind of practical experiencesdoes language make possible? When children break loose of ourlanguage, it is almost too late to understand the problem.Language use seems so natural that its syntactic andvalue-loaded conventions are not questioned. We accept languageas 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 aswe were taught that language itself is. We project language onour children only in order to be challenged by them through theirown language, pretty much attuned to their different pragmaticframe of reference.

As a framework within which parents, and ultimately society, wantchildren to think, communicate, and act, language appears tohave two contradictory characteristics: liberty and constraint.The all-encompassing change we are witnessing concerns both. Inorder to function effectively in a society of very specializedpatterns of interaction, people realize that a trade-off betweenliberties and constraints is inescapable. On the level of socialand cultural life, people realize that constraints, representedby accepted prejudices and ideologies, impinge upon their limitedspace of decision-making and infringe upon individual integrity.Language turned out to be not only the medium for expressingliberating ideals, but also a stubborn embodiment of old and newprejudices. It is also the instrument of deception, and bears inits ideal of literacy the most evident deception of all-literacyas a panacea for every problem the human species faces, frompoverty, inequity, and ignorance to military conflict, disease,starvation, and even the inability to cope with new developmentsin science and technology. Interestingly enough, Netizensbelieve the same thing regarding the Internet! In their campaignfor free choice of literacy, they are just as dogmatic abouttheir type of literacy as the Modern Language Association, forexample, is about the old-fashioned kind.

We can accept that this world of enormously diversified forms ofhuman practice (corresponding to the diversity of human beings)requires more than one type of literacy. But this is not yetsufficient condition for changing the current premise ofeducation if the avenues of gaining knowledge are not developed.The assumption that language is a higher level system of signsis probably correct, but not necessarily significant for theinference that in order to function in a society, each member hasto master this language. To free ourselves of this inferencewill take more than the argument founded on the efficiency ofilliterate and aliterate individuals who constitute theiridentity in realms where literacy does not dominate, or ceasedbeing entirely necessary.

Learning from the experience of interface

The exciting adventure of artificially replicating humancharacteristics and functions is probably as old as theawareness of self and others. Harnessing tools and machines inorder to maximize the efficiency of praxis was always anexperience in language use and craftsmanship. So far, the mostchallenging experience has been the use of computers toreplicate the ability to calculate, process words and images,control production lines, interpret very complex data, and evento simulate aspects of human thinking.

Programming languages serve as mediating entities. Using alimited vocabulary and very precise logic, they translatesequences of operations that programmers assume need to beexecuted in order to successfully compute numbers, processwords, operate on images, and even carry out the logicaloperations for playing chess and beating a human opponent at thegame. A programming language is a translation of a goal into adescription of the logical processes through which the goal canbe achieved. Computer users do not deal with the programminglanguage; they address the computer through the language ofinterface: words in plain English (or any other language forwhich interface is designed), or images standing for desiredgoals or operations. The entire machine does not speak orunderstand an interface's high-level language. The interactionof the user with the machine is translated by interface programsinto whatever a machine can process. Providing efficientinterfaces is probably as important as designing high levelabstract programming languages and writing programs in thoselanguages. Without such interfaces, only a limited number ofpeople could involve themselves in computing. The experience ofinterface design can help us understand the direction of changeto which the new pragmatics commits us. At the end of the road,the computer should physically disappear from our desks. All thatwill be needed is access to digital processing, not to thedigital engine. The same was true of electricity. Once upon atime it was generated at the homes or workplaces where thepeople who needed it could use it. Now it is made availablethrough distribution networks.

Natural language accomplished the function of interface longbefore the notion came into existence. Literacy was to be thepermanent interface of human practical experiences, a unifyingfactor in the relation between the individual and society.Ideally, interface should not affect the way people constitutethemselves; that is, it should be neutral in respect to theiridentity. This means that people can change and tasks can vary.The interface would account for the change and would accommodatenew goals. Even in their wildest dreams, computer scientists andresearchers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence,who work with intelligent interfaces, do not anticipate such aliving interface. Interfaces affect the nature of practicalexperiences in computing. As these become more complex, abreakdown occurs because interfaces do not scale up. Instead ofsupporting better interactions, an interface can hamper them andaffect the outcome of computing. Language has performed quitewell under the pressure of scaling up. It grows with each newhuman practical experience and can adapt to a variety of tasksbecause the people constituted in language adapt. In the intimaterelation between humans and their language, language limits newexperiences by subjecting them to expectations of coherence.Language's expressive and communicative potential reaches itsclimax as the pragmatics that made it possible and necessaryexhausts its own potential for efficiency. Literate language nolonger enhances human abilities in practical experiences outsideits pragmatic domain. Literacy only ends up limiting the scopeof the experience to its own, and limits human growth.

Many impressive human accomplishments, probably the majority ofthem, are testimony to the powerful interface that literatelanguage is. But these accomplishments are equal testimony towhat occurs when the interface constitutes its own domain ofmotivations, or is applied as an instrument for pursuing goalsthat result in a forced uniformity of experiences. If literacyhad been a neutral mediating entity, it would have scaled up tothe new scale of humankind and the corresponding efficiencyexpectations, once the threshold was reached. Successive forms ofreligious, scientific, ideological, political, and economicdomination are examples of powerful interface mechanisms. Tounderstand this predicament, we can compare the sequence ofinterfaces connected to the experience of religion to thesequence of computer-user interfaces. Notwithstanding thefundamental differences between these two domains of practicalexperience, a striking similarity has to be acknowledged. Bothstart as limited experiences, open to the initiated few, andexpand from a reduced sign system on interactions to very richmultimedia environments. From a limited secretive domain to thewide opening afforded by a trivial vocabulary, both evolve asdouble-headed entities: the language of the initiatedindividuals interfaced with the language of the individualsprogressively integrated in the experience. No one shouldmisconstrue this comparison, meant only to illustrate theconstitutive nature of the experience of interfacing. We couldas well focus on the experiences of economics, politics,ideology, science, fashion, or, even better, art.

The experience of literacy resulted in some consistency, but alsoin lost variety. Every language of interaction (interface) thatdisappeared took with it into oblivion experiences impossible toresuscitate. The relation between the individual and community,once very rich at various levels, grew weaker the more literacytook over. Literacy norms this relation, shaping it into amultiple-choice quiz. Information processing techniques appliedon literacy-controlled forms of social interaction require evenfurther standardization in order to be efficient. As a result,the individual is rationalized away, and the community becomes alocus for data management instead of a place for humaninteraction. The process exemplifies what happens when interfacetakes over and interacts with itself.

The various concerns raised so far only reiterate how importantit is to understand the nature of interface processes. Butexperience gained in computational research of knowledge pointsto other aspects critical to the relation between the individualand society. Humans constitute themselves in a variety ofpractical experiences that require alternatives to language.Powerful mathematical notations, diagrams, visualizationtechniques, acoustics, holography, and virtual space are suchalternative means. Non-linear association and cognitive paths,until now embodied in hypertext structures that we experience onthe World Wide Web, belong to this category, too. Processinglanguage is not equivalent to integrating these alternativemeans.

Cognitive requirements put severe restrictions on experiencesgrounded in means different from language, on account of theintensity and nature of cognitive processes, as well as ofmemory requirements. The genetic endowment formed inlanguage-based practical experiences of self-constitution is notnecessarily adapted to fundamentally different means ofexpression. Communication requires a shared substratum, which isestablished in an acculturation process that takes manygenerations. Enhanced by the new media, communication does notbecome more precise. Programs are conceived to enable theunderstanding of language. Everything ever written is scannedand stored for character recognition. Images are translated intoshort descriptions. A semantic component is attached toeverything people compute. Hopes are high for using such meanson a routine basis, though the compass might be set on someelusive direction. Even when machines will understand what we askthem to do-that is, when they integrate speech and handwritingrecognition functions in the operating system-we will still haveto articulate our goals. A technology capable of automating manyoperations that human beings still perform will increase output,and thus the efficiency of the effort applied. But the realchallenge is to figure out ways to optimize the relation betweenwhat is possible and what is necessary. Procedures that willassociate the output to the many criteria by which humans or themachine determine how meaningful that output is, are moreimportant than raw technological performance. Until now,literacy has not proven to be the suitable instrument for thisgoal.

People and language change together. Individuals are formed inlanguage; their practical experiences reshape language and leadto the need for new languages. If we cannot uncouple languageand the human being, especially in view of the parallelevolution of genetic endowment and linguistic ability, we willcontinue to move in the vicious cycle of expression andrepresentation. The issue is not language per se, but the claimthat representation is the dominant, one might say exclusive,paradigm of human activity. Neither science nor philosophy hasproduced an alternative to representation.

There is more to physical reality than what language can layclaim to. And there is much more to the dynamics of ourexistence in a world whose own dynamics integrates it whileextending far beyond it. Skills needed to function in thephysical world-skills which children and newborn animalsdisplay-are only partially represented in language. The entirerealm of instinctive behavior belongs here. This includescoordination and the very rich forms of relating to space, time,and other living beings. Advanced biological and cognitiveresearch (Maturana's work leads in this area) shows that variousorganisms survive without the benefits of representation. Verypersonal human experiences-among them, pain, love, hate, andjoy-happen without the benefits and constraints of languagerepresentation.

There are skills for which we have no representation in language.Various tags are used to name them under the heading ofparapsychology, magic, and non-verbal communication. Once theseare described through their results only, they cause reactionsranging from doubt to ridicule. The unusual and inexplicableperformances of individuals called idiots savants belong to thiscategory. An idiot savant hears a piano concerto and replays itmasterfully, although he or she cannot add two and two. Amatchbox falls and the idiot savant can state, without looking atthe box, the exact number of matches that fell out. These arefeats that are on record. Some idiots savants are able to gothrough long sequences of phone numbers, produce completelistings of prime numbers, and execute incredible multiplicationand division. Researchers can only observe and record suchaccomplishments. For other inexplicable phenomena, we simplyhave no concept available: the amazing last moments beforedeath, the power of illusion, and the visualization aptitudes ofsome individuals. Researchers have accumulated data on the powerof prayer and faith, and on paranormal manifestations. It is notthe intention of this book to venture explanations of thesephenomena, but to point out the great variety of experienceswhich could be integrated into human praxis but are not, merelybecause they still defy explanation in language.Functioning in a world that we read through the glasses ofliteracy makes us often blind to what is different, to whatliteracy does not encompass. A realm of fact and possibleabstraction, difficult to compare with the world of existencethat language reports about, remains to be explored. When theNobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman reported on adifference in machine and human computation, this report pointedto aspects for which language was not prepared to serve as auseful interface, and to a realm different from representation.

Crises, catastrophes, and breakdowns testify to the borders of agiven pragmatic context. They are references as to how far sucha context can extend. Beyond the context begins the universe offundamental change and revolution, constitutive of a newframework. The really interesting level of language, and of anyother sign system, is not the referential level but the level ofconstituting new worlds. These worlds do not necessarily extendthe old one. Telecommuting is an extension of the previouspattern of work. Cooperative real-time practical experiences aremore than the sum of individual contributions. They areconstitutive of non-linear forms of complementarity. The virtualoffice is but another form of office. Virtual community is aconstitutive experience. Nothing of what we have learned inexperiences of broadcasting is pertinent to the participatoryaspect of human self-constitution in an environment of fluidityand unsettled patterns of interaction. The goal is not to inform,but to enable and empower. The elaborate combinations ofchemicals concocted to increase the effectiveness of medicine,of construction materials, or of electronic components continuesearlier patterns. Atomic manipulation, intended to synthesizeintelligent materials and self-repairing substances and devices,constitutes a new domain of practical experiences.

Each of these examples belongs to a pragmatic framework differentin nature from the one that defined literacy and which literacyembodies and forces upon our experience. Centrism-Euro-, ethno-,techno- or any other kind-as well as dualism- good and bad, rightand wrong, just and unjust, beautiful and ugly-and hierarchy haveexhausted their potential. The attempt to measure the emergentpragmatics against ideals that do not originate from within themcan only result in empty slogans firmly entrenched in theavatars of machine-age ideologies. As we experience it at thejuncture between literacy and illiteracy, the legacy of languageis not only accomplishments but also the diversion from what theworld is to descriptions that stand for it in our minds, books,and social concerns. The networks of objects and theirproperties (qualifiers of objects) exist in the civilization ofliteracy only through language: things are real insofar as theyare in language. To overcome this perception is a challenge wellbeyond the power of most individuals. What emerges in the newpragmatic framework of distributed practical experience and ofcooperative, parallel human interactions is a human beingself-constituted in a plurality of interconditioning means ofexpression, communication, and signification. We might just be onthe verge of a new age.A Sense of the Future

Beyond literacy begins a realm which for many is still sciencefiction. The name civilization of illiteracy is used to definedirection and to point out markers. The richness and diversityof this realm is indicative of the nature of our own practicalexperiences of self-constitution. The landscape mapped out bythese experiences is simultaneously its own Borgesian map. Onemarker along the road from present to future leaves no room fordoubt: the digital foundation of the pragmatic framework. Butthis does not mean that the current dynamics of change can bereduced to the victorious march of the digital or of technology,in general.

Having challenged the model of a dominant sign system-languageand in its literate experience-we suggested that a multitude ofvarious sign processes effectively override the need for andjustification of literacy in a context of higher efficiencyexpectations. We could alternatively define the pragmaticframework of the civilization of illiteracy as semiotic in thesense that human practical experiences become more and moresubject to sign processes. The digital engine is, in finalanalysis, a semiotic machine, churning out a variety of signs.Nevertheless, the semiotization of human practical experiencesextends beyond computers and symbolic processing.

As we have seen, in all human endeavors, semiotic awareness isexpressed in choices (of means of expression and communication)and patterns of interaction. Successive fashion trends, no lessthan the new media, global interaction through networks,cooperative work, and distributive configurations are semioticidentifiers. Interfaces are semiotic entities through whichdifficult aspects of the relation between individuals andsociety are addressed. More precisely, to interface means toadvance methods and notions of a new form of culturalengineering, that has the same condition as genetic engineering,although not necessarily based on its mechanism, as theproponents of memetics would like us to believe.

No matter how spectacular new technologies are, and how fast therate of their adoption, pragmatic characteristics that make thequantum leap of efficiency possible within the new scale ofhumankind remain the defining element of the dynamics of change.To make this point clear no argument is superfluous, and no stoneof doubt or suspicion should be left unturned. Our concern isnot with the malignant rhetoric against technology of a probablyinsane Unabomber, for example. It is with a false sense ofoptimism focused on fleeting embodiments of human creativity, noton its integration in meaningful experiences. Whether aspectacular multimedia program, a virtual reality environment,genetically based medicine, broadband human interaction, orcooperative endeavors, what counts are the human cognitiveresources, in the form of semiotic processes irreducible tolanguage and literacy, at work under circ*mstances of globality.

Cognitive energy

It is impossible to tire of acknowledging applications from whichmany will people benefit, but which many resent even beforethese applications become available. They all become possibleonce they transcend the pragmatic framework of the civilizationof literacy because they are based on structurally differentmeans of expression, communication, and signification. We haveall witnessed some of these applications: sensors connected tounharmed nervous terminals allow the quadriplegic to move. Achild in a wheelchair who exercises in virtual reality can behelped to function independently in the world that qualifies hiscondition as a handicap. Important skills can be acquired byinterpolating patterns of behavior developed in the physicalworld in the rough draft of the simulated world. People arehelped to recover after accidents and illness, and are supportedin acquiring skills in an environment where the individual setsthe goals. In Japan, virtual reality helps people prepare forearthquakes and tests their ability to cope with the demand forfast response. Interconnected virtual worlds support humaninteractions in the space of their scientific, poetic, orartistic interest, or combinations thereof, stimulating thehope, as naive as it may sound, for a new Renaissance.

Not everything need be virtual. Active badges T transmit datapertinent to an individual's identification in his or her world.Not only is it easier to locate a person, but the memory ofhuman interaction, in the form of digital traces, allows peopleand machines to remember. You step into a room, and yourpresence is automatically acknowledged. The computer lets youknow how many messages are waiting for you, and from whom. Itevaluates how far you are from the monitor and displays theinformation so you can see it from that distance. It reminds youof things you want to do at a certain time. Details relevant toour continuous self-constitution through extremely complexpractical experiences play an important role in making suchinteractions 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 capturedduring a certain activity is less obtrusive than having someonekeep 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 seemirrelevant-patterns of movement, dialogue, eating, reading,drawing, building models, and analyzing data. The record can becompleted by documenting patterns of behavior of emotional orcognitive significance, such as fishing, mountain climbing,wasting time, or dancing- according to one's wish. At the end ofthe day, or whenever requested, this diary of our living can bee-mailed to the writer. One can review the events of a day orsearch for a certain moment, for those details that make one'stime meaningful.

In the world beyond literacy and literacy-based practicalexperiences, we can search for artistic events. A play byShakespeare can be projected onto the screen of our eyes, wherethe boundary between reality and fiction starts. The play willfeature the actors of one's choosing. The viewer can evenintercalate any person in the cast, even himself or herself, anddeliver a character's lines. Sports events and games can beviewed in the same way. In another vein, we can initiatedialogues with the persons we care for, or get involved in thecommunity we choose to belong to. Belonging, in this new sense,means going beyond the powerless viewing of political events thatseem as alien as almost all the mass-media performances they arefed with. Belonging itself is redefined, becoming a matter ofchoice, not accident. Belonging goes beyond watching the newsand political events on TV, beyond the impotence we feel withrespect to the huge political machine. All these can happen as aprivate, very intense experience, or as interaction with others,physically present or not. To see the world differently canlead to taking another person's, or creature's, viewpoint. Howdoes a recent immigrant, or a visitor from abroad, perceive thepeople of the country he has landed in? What do human beingslook like to a whale, a bee, an ant, a shark? We can enter thebodies of the handicapped to find out how a blind personnegotiates the merciless world of speeding cars and people in ahurry. The empathy game has been played with words and theatricsin many schools. But once a person assumes the handicapped bodyin a simulated universe, the insight gained is no longer basedon how convincing a description is, but on the limits ofself-constitution as handicapped. People can learn more abouteach other by sharing their conditions and limitations. And,hopefully, they will ascertain a sense of solidarity beyondempty expressions of sympathy.

That all these semiotic means-expression in very complex dynamicsign systems-change the nature of individual practicalexperiences and of social life cannot be emphasized enough.Everything we conceive of can be viewed, criticized, felt,sensed, experienced, and evaluated before it is actuallyproduced. The active badge can be attached to a simulatedperson- an avatar-let loose to walk through the plans for a newbuilding, or on the paths of an expedition through mountains. Thediary of space discovery is at least as important as thepersonal diary of a person working in a real factory, researchfacility, or at home. Before another tree is cut, before anotherriverbed is moved, before a new housing development isconstructed, before a new trail is opened, people can find outwhat changes of immediate and long-term impact might result.

It is possible to go even a step beyond the integrated world ofdigital processing and to entrust extremely complicatedprocesses to neural networks trained to perform functions ofcommand, control, and evaluation. Unexpected situations can beturned into learning experiences. Where individuals sometimesfail-for instance under emotional stress-neural networks caneasily perform as well as humans do, without the risksassociated with the unpredictability of human behavior. Theactive badge can be connected, through a local area network ofwall-mounted sensors that collect information, to a neuralnetwork-based procedure designed to process the many bits andpieces of knowledge that are most of the time wasted. Peoplecould learn about their own creativity and about cognitiveprocesses associated with it. They can derive knowledge from theimmense amount of their aborted thoughts and actions. Ubiquityand unobtrusiveness qualify such means for the field of medicalcare, for the support of child development, and for the growingelderly population. With the advent of optical computers, andeven biological data processing devices, chances will increasefor 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 ofhuman interaction.

Some people still decide for others on certain matters: Howshould children play? How should they study? What are acceptablerules of behavior in family and society? How should we care forthe elderly? When is medical intervention justified? Where doeslife end and biological survival become meaningless? These peopleexercise power within the set of inherited values thatoriginated in a pragmatic context of hierarchy associated withliteracy. This does not need to be so, especially in view of themany 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 andscience, and last but not least to all the people who make up ourworld of experiences, is bound to change. Once individuality isredefined as a locus of interaction through rich sign systems,not just as an identity to be explained away in the generalitythat gnoseologically replaces the individual, politics itselfwill 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 Steinerpointed out that scientists, who "have been tempted to assertthat their own methods and vision are now at the center ofcivilization, that the ancient primacy of poetic statement andmetaphysical image is over." This is not an issue of criteriabased on empirical verification, or the recent tradition ofcollaborative achievement, correctly contrasted to the apparentidiosyncrasy and egotism of literacy. The pragmatic frameworkreflects the challenge of efficiency in our world of increasedpopulation, limited resources, and the domination of nature. Thisframework is critical to the human effort to assess its ownpossibilities and articulate its goals. Let us accept Steiner'sidea-although the predicament is clearly unacceptable-thatsciences "have added little to our knowledge or governance ofhuman possibility." Let us further accept that "there isdemonstratably more insight into the matter of man in Homer,Shakespeare, or Dostoevsky than in the entire neurology ofstatistics." This, if it were true, would only mean that such aninsight is less important to the practical experience of humanself-constitution than literacy-based humanities would like usto believe.

Literary taste or preference aside, it is hard to understand theepistemological consequence of a statement like "No discovery ofgenetics impairs or surpasses what Proust knew of the spell orburden of lineage." All this says is that in Steiner's practicalexperience of self-constitution, a pragmatics other than geneticsproves more consequential. Nobody can argue with this. But fromthe particular affinity to Proust, one cannot infer thatconsequences for a broader number of people, the majority ofwhom will probably never know anything about genetics, are notconnected to its discoveries. We may be touched by the elegantargument that "each time Othello reminds us of the rust of dewon the bright blade, we experience more of the sensual,transient reality in which our lives must pass than it is thebusiness or ambition of physics to impart." After all therhetoric that has reverberated in the castle of literacy, thephysics of the first three minutes or seconds of the universeproves to be no less metaphysical, and no less touching, thanany example from the arts, literature, or philosophy thatSteiner or anyone else can produce. Science only has differentmotivations and is expressed in a different language. Itchallenges human cognition and sentiment, and awareness of selfand others, of space and time, and even of literature, whichseems to have stagnated once the potential of literacy wasexhausted. The very possibility of writing as significantly asthe writers of the past did diminishes, as the practicalexperience of literate writing is less and less appropriate tothe new experiences of self-constitution in the civilization ofilliteracy.

The argument can go on and on, until and unless we settle on arather simple premise: The degree of significance of anythingconnected to human identity-art, work, science, politics, sex,family-is established in the act of human self-constitution andcannot be dictated from outside it, not even by our humanistictradition. The air, clean or polluted, is significant insofar asit contributes to the maintenance of life. Homer, Proust, vanGogh, Beethoven, and the anonymous artist of an African tribe aresignificant insofar as human self-constitution integrates each orevery one of them, in the act of individual identification.Projecting their biological constitution into the world- we allbreathe, see, hear, exercise physical power, and perceive theworld-humans ascertain their natural reality. The experience ofmaking oneself can be as simple as securing food, water, andshelter, or as complex as composing or enjoying a symphony,painting, writing, or meditating about one's condition. If inthis practical experience one has to integrate a stick or astone, or a noise, or rhythm in order to obtain nourishment, orto project the individual in a sculpture or musical piece, thesignificance of the stick or stone or the noise is determined inthe pragmatic context of the self-constitutive moment.

Many contexts confirm the significance of literacy-basedpractical experiences. History, even in its computational formor in genetic shape, is an example. Literacy made quite a numberof practical experiences possible: education, mass media,political activism, industrial manufacture. This does not implythat these domains are forever wed to literacy. A few contexts,such as crafts, predated literacy. Information processing,visualization, non-algorithmic computation, genetics, andsimulation emerged from the pragmatics that ascertainedliteracy. But they are also relatively independent of it.Steiner was correct in stating that "we must countenance thepossibility that the study and transmission of literature may beof only marginal significance, a passionate luxury like thepreservation of the antique." His assertion needs to be extendedfrom literature to literacy.

The realization that we must go beyond literacy does not comeeasy and does not follow the logic of the current modusoperandi of the scholars and educators who have a stake inliteracy and tradition. Their logic is itself so deeply rooted inthe experience of written language that it is only natural toextend it to the inference that without literacy the human beingloses a fundamental dimension. The sophistry is easy to catch,however. The conclusion implies that the practical experience oflanguage is identical to literacy. As we know, this is not thecase. Orality, of more consequence in our day than the majorityare aware of, and in more languages that do not have a writingsystem, supports human existence in a universe of extremeexpressive richness and variety.

Many arguments, starting with those against writing enunciated inancient times and furthered in various criticisms of literacy,point to the many dimensions of language that were lost once itstarted 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 inwhich articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable.There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded noton language, but on other communicative energies, such as theicon or the musical note." He correctly describes howmathematics, especially under the influence of Leibniz andNewton, became a dynamic language: "I have watched topologists,knowing no syllable of each other's language, workingeffectively together at a blackboard in the silent speech commonto their craft."

Networks of cognitive energy

Chemistry, physics, biology, and recently a great number of otherpractical experiences of human self-constitution, formed theirown languages. Indeed, the medium in which experiences takeplace is not a passive component of the experience. It isimprinted with the degree of necessity that made such a medium aconstitutive part of the experience. It has its own life in thesense that the experience involves a dynamics of exchange andawareness of its many components. The cuneiform tablets couldnot hold the depth of thinking of the formulas in which thetheory of relativity is expressed. They probably had a betterexpressive potential for a more spontaneous testimony to theprocess of self-identification of the people who projectedthemselves in the act of shaping damp tablets, inscribing them,and baking them to hardness. Ideographic writing may wellexplain, better than orality, the role of silence in Taoism andBuddhism, the tension of the act of withdrawal from speech andwriting, or the phonetic subtleties at work when more than 2000ideographs were reduced to the standard 600 signs now in use.The historic articulation of the Torah, its mixture of poetryand pragmatic rules, is different in nature from the writings, indifferent 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, andwriting after the Enlightenment, not to mention today'sautomated writing and reading, are fundamentally different.Gombrich recalls that Gutenberg earned a living by making amuletmirrors used by people in crowds to catch the image of sacredobjects displayed during certain ceremonies. The animisticthought marks this experience. It is continued in the movingtype that Gutenberg invented, yet another mirror to duplicate thelife of handwriting, which type imitated. Printed religioustexts began their lives as talismans. After powerful printingpresses were invented, writing extends a different thought-machines at work-in the sequence of operations that transform rawmaterials into products.

All the characteristics associated with literacy arecharacteristics of the underlying structure of practicalexperiences, values, and aspirations embodied in the printingmachines. The linear function, replicated in the use of thelever, was generalized in machines made of many levers. It wasalso generalized in literacy, the language machine that renderslanguage use uniform. Writing originated in a context of thelimited sequences of human self-constitutive practicalexperiences embodied in the functioning of mechanical machines.The continuation of the sequential mode in more elaborateexperiences, as in automated production lines, will be with usfor quite a while. Nevertheless, sequentiality is increasinglycomplemented by parallel functioning. Similar or differentactivities carried through at the same time, at one location orat several, are qualitatively different from sequentialactivities. Self-constitution in such parallel experiencesresults in new cognitive characteristics, and thus in newresources supporting higher efficiency. The deterministiccomponent carried over from literacy- based practical experiencesreflects awareness of action and reaction. Its dualistic natureis preserved in the right/wrong operational distinctions of theliterate use of language, and thus in the logic attached to it.

Pragmatic expectations of efficiency no longer met by conceptualor material experiences based on the model embodied in literacyhave led to attempts to transcend determinism, as well as linearfunctions, sequentiality, and dualism. A new underlyingstructure prompts a pragmatics of non-linear relations, of adifferent dynamics, of configurations, and of multi-valuedsystems. A wide array of methods and technologies facilitatesemancipation from the centralism and hierarchy embodied inliteracy-based pragmatics. The pragmatic framework of thecivilization of illiteracy requires that the centralism ofliteracy be replaced through massive distribution of tasks, andnon- hierarchic forms of human interactions. Augmented byworldwide networking, this pragmatics has become global inscope. Probably just as significant is the role mediation playsin the process. As a specific form of human experience, mediationincreases the effectiveness of praxis by affording the benefitsof integration to human acts of self-constitution. Mediationreplaces the analytic strategy inherited through literacy,opening avenues for reaching a sense of the whole in anexperience of building hypotheses and performing effectivesynthesis. In order to realize what all this means, we can thinkof everything involved in the conception, design, manufacturing,distribution, and integration of computers in applicationsranging from trivial data management to sophisticatedsimulations. The effort is, for all practical purposes, global.

The brightest minds, from many countries, contribute ideas tonew concepts of computation. The design of computers involves alarge number of creative professionals from fields as varied asmechanical engineering, chip design, operating systems,telecommunications, ergonomy, interface design, product design,and communication. The scale of the effort is totally differentfrom anything we know of from previous practical experiences.Before such a new computer will become the hardware and softwarethat eventually will land on our desks, it is modeled andsimulated, and subjected to a vast array of tests that are allthe expression of the hypothesis and goals to be synthesized inthe new product.

Some people might have looked at the first personal computers asa scaled- down version of the mainframes of the time. Within thepragmatics associated with literacy, this is a very goodrepresentation. In the pragmatics we are concerned with, thislinear model does not work, and it does not explain how newexperiences come about. Chances are that the mass-producedmachines increasingly present in a great number of householdsreach a performance well above those mainframes with which thePC might have been compared.

Representing the underlying structure of the pragmatics of thecivilization of illiteracy, the digital becomes a resource, notunlike electricity, and not unlike other resources tapped in thepast for increasing the efficiency of human activity. In theyears to come, this aspect will dominate the entire effort ofthe acculturation of the digital. Today, as in the IndustrialAge of cars and other machines, the industry still wants to puta computer on every desk. The priority, however, should be tomake computation resources, not machines, available to everyone.Those still unsure about the Internet and the World Wide Webshould understand that what makes them so promising is not thepotential for surfing, or its impressive publicationcapabilities, but the access to the cognitive energy that istransported through networks.

Bumps and potholes

Expectations stemming from the civilization of literacy differ intheir condition from those of the cognitive age. Infinitely morechances open continuously, but the risks associated with themare 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 fromus on the globe within our reach, but the risks involved inflight are also greater. Cognitive resources integrated in ourendeavors contribute to an efficiency higher than that providedby hydropower, steam engines, and electric energy. With each newstep in the direction of their increased participation in ourpraxis, we take a chance.

There is no reason to compare simulations of the most complex anddaring projects to successful or failed attempts to build newcities, modify nature, or create artifacts conceived undercognitive assumptions of lesser complexity than that achieved inour time. A failed connection on today's Internet, or a majorscam on the Web, should be expected in these early stages of thepragmatic framework to which they belong. But we should at nomoment ignore the fact that cognitive breakdowns are much morethan the crash of an operating system or the breakdown of anetwork application.

We learn more about ourselves in the practical experiences ofconstituting the post-literate languages of science, art, andthe humanities than we have learned during the entire history ofhumankind. These languages-very complex sign systems indeed-integrate knowledge accumulated in a great variety ofexperiences, as well as genetically inherited and rationally andemotionally based cognitive procedures. Changes in the veryfabric of the human being involved in these practical experiencesare reflected in the increased ability to handle abstraction,refocus from the immediate to the mediated, and enter interhumancommitments that result from the practice of unprecedented meansof expression, communication, and signification.

During the process, we have reached some of our most criticallimitations. Knowledge is deeper, but more segmented. To useSteiner's words once again, there is a "gap of silence" betweenmany groups of people. Our own efficiency made us increasinglyvulnerable to drives that recall more of the primitive stages ofhumankind than all that we believed we accumulated through thehumanities. The new means are changing politics and economicactivity, but first of all they are changing the nature of humantransactions. And they are changing our sense of future.

Let us not forget Big Brother, not to be brushed away justbecause the year 1984 has come and gone, but to be understoodfrom a viewpoint Orwell could not have had. If the means inquestion are used to monitor us, too bad. In the emergingstructures of human interaction, to exercise control, as done inprevious societies, is simply not possible. It is not for thelove of the Internet that this constitutes a non-regulated domainof human experiences. Rather it is because by its nature, theInternet cannot be controlled in the same way our driving,drinking, and social behavior are controlled. The opportunityfor transparency afforded by systems that replace the dominationof literacy is probably too important to be missed or misused.The dynamics of the civilization of illiteracy results from itsimplicit condition. We can affect some of its parameters, but notit* global behavior. For instance, the integration required byparallelism and the massive distribution of tasks cannot takeplace successfully if the network of interactions is mined bygates, filters, and veils of secrecy, by hierarchic controlmechanisms, and by authorization procedures. Imagine if aperson's arms, eyes, ears, or nostrils had to obtain permissionto participate in the self-constitution of the whole humanbeing. Individuals in the new pragmatic context are the eyes,arms, brains, and nostrils of the complex human entity involvedin an experience that integrates everyone's participation. It isan intense effort, not always as rewarding as we expect it tobe, a self-testing endeavor whose complexity escapes individualrealization. Feedback loops are the visible part of the broadersystem, but not its essential part.

The authenticity of each and every act of our self-makingcontributes to the integrity of the overall process-ourascertainment through what we do. Relative insularity and adefinite alienation from the overall of the system'sgoals-meeting higher demands by higher performance-are part ofthe picture described. Complemented by a sense ofempowerment-the ability to self-determine-and a variety of newforms of human interaction, the resulting human pragmatics can bemore humane than the pragmatics of the huge factories ofindustrial society-commuters rushing from home to job toshopping mall, to entertainment. It is not Big Brother who willbe watching. Each and every individual is part of the effort,entitled to know everything about it, indeed wanting to know andcaring. Without transparency that we can influence, the effortwill not succeed. We are our own active badge. The record is ofinterest in order to justify the use of our time and energy, butforemost to learn about those instances when we are lessfaithful to ourselves than our newly acquired liberty affords.It is much easier to submit to outside authority, as literacyeducates us to do. But once self-control and self-evaluation, asfeedback mechanisms under our own control become the means ofoptimization, the burden is shifted from Big Brother,bureaucracies, and regulations to the individual.

It is probably useful at this point to suggest a framework foraction in at least some of the basic activities affected by thechange brought about in the civilization of illiteracy. Thereason for these suggestions is at hand. We know that literateeducation is not appropriate, but this observation remains acritical remark. What we need is a guide for action. This has totranslate into positive attitudes, and into real attempts tomeet the challenge of present and shape the future in fullawareness 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 humanbeing can and must be literate. Just as the goal of industry wasto turn out standardized products, education assumes the sametask through the mold of literacy. Diplomas and certificatestestify how like the mold the product is. To those who haveproblems with writing or reading, the labels legasthenic anddyslexic are applied. Dyscalculus is the name given to theinability to cope with numbers. The question of why we shouldexpect uniform cognitive structures covering the literate use oflanguage or numbers, but not the use of sounds, colors, shapes,and volume, is never raised. Tremendous effort is made to helpindividuals who simply cannot execute the sequentiality ofwriting or the meaning of successive numbers. Nothing similar isdone to address cognitive characteristics of persons inclined tomeans different from literacy.

In order to respond to the needs of the pragmatics of highefficiency leading to the civilization of many literacies,education needs first of all to rediscover the individual, andhis or her extensive gamut of cognitive characteristics. I usethe word rediscover having in mind incipient forms of educationand training, which were more on a one-to- one or one-to-fewbasis. Education also needs to reconsider its expectation of auniversal common denominator, based on the industrial model ofstandardization. Rather than taming and sanitizing the minds ofstudents, education has not only to acknowledge differences inaptitudes and interests, but also to stimulate them. Every knownform of energy is the expression of difference and not the resultof leveling.

During this process of re-evaluation, the goals of education willhave to be redefined, methods of education rethought, andcontent reassessed. A new philosophy, embodied in a dynamicnotion of education, has to crystallize as we work towardseducational alternatives that integrate the visual, the kinetic,the aural, and the synesthetic. In the spirit of the pragmaticcontext, education ought to become an environment forinteraction and discovery. Time taken with reiterations of thepast 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 mightsound utopian or have the ring of techno-babble. Their purposeis to present possibilities, not to conjure up miraculoussolutions. The path from present to future is the path of humanpractical experiences of self-constitution. To achieve goalscorresponding to the requirements and expectations of thecivilization of no dominant literacy, education needs to give upthe reductionist perspective that has marked it since generalizededucation became the norm. Education has to recognize itsstudents as the individuals they are, not as some abstract ortheoretic entity. Basic education should be centered around themajor forms of expression and communication: language, visual,aural, kinetic, and symbolic. Differences among these systemsneed to be explored as students familiarize themselves with eachof them, as well as combinations. Concrete forms ofacculturation should be geared towards using these elements, notdispensing instructions and assigning exercises. Each studentwill discover from within how to apply these systems. Mostimportant, students will share their experiences amongthemselves. There will be no right or wrong answer that is notproven so by the pragmatic instance.

Fundamental to the educational endeavor is the process ofheuristic inquiry, to be expressed through programs for furtherinvestigation. These programs require many languages: literateinquiry, mathematics, chemistry, computation, and so on. Byvirtue of the fact that people from different backgrounds enterthe process, they bear the experience of their respectivelanguages. Relevance to the problem at hand will justify oneapproach or another. Frequently, the wheel will be re-invented.Other times, new wheels will emerge as contributions ofauthentic ingenuity and inventiveness. In their interaction,those involved in the process share in the experience throughwhich they constitute themselves at many levels. One is toprovide access to the variety of perspectives reflecting thevariety of people.

Interactive learning

Education has to become a living process. It should involveaccess to all kinds of information sources, not only to thosestored in literate formats. These resources have their specificepistemological condition-a printed encyclopedia is differentfrom a database. To access a book is different from accessing amultimedia knowledge platform. Retrieval is part of the practiceof knowledge and defines a horizon for human interaction. Allthese differences will become clear through use, not through mereassertion or imitation. The goal of education cannot be thedissemination of imitative behavior, but of procedures. In thismodel of education, classes are groups of people pursuingconnected goals, not compartments based on age or subject, evenless bureaucratic units. A class is an expression of interest,not the product of statistical distribution based on birth andzoning. The physical environment of the class is the world, andnot the brick and mortar confined room of stereotyped roles andinteractions. This might sound hollow, or too grandiose, but themeans to make this happen are progressively becoming available.

Here is one possible scenario: Students approach centers ofinteractive education after the initial phase of acculturation.Perhaps the word center recalls one of the characteristics ofthe civilization of illiteracy. By their own nature, though,these centers are distributed repositories of knowledge storedin a variety of forms- databases, programs pertinent to varioushuman practical experiences, examples, and evaluationprocedures. With such a condition, such centers lend themselvesto making refreshable knowledge available in all imaginableformats. On request, its own programs (known as intelligentagents) search for appropriate sources through the guidance ofthose in need, independent of them, or parallel to them. Requestsare articulated in voice command: "I would like to know …." Orthe requests can be handwritten, typed, or diagrammed. Suchinteractive education centers are simultaneously libraries ofknowledge, heuristic environments, laboratories, testinggrounds, and research media. The hybrid human-machine machinethat constitutes their nucleus alters as the individual involvedin the interaction changes.

As we all know, the best way to learn is to teach. Studentsshould be able to teach their neural network partners subjectsof interest to their own practical experiences. In many cases,the neural networks, themselves networked with others, willbecome partners in pursuing practical goals of higher and highercomplexity. The fact that students interact not based on theiraddress and school district, not based on hom*ogeneity criteriaof age or cultural background, but on shared interests anddifferent perspectives gives this type of education a broadersocial significance: There is nothing we do that does not affectthe world in its entirety. Repeating these words ad nauseam willnot affect the understanding of what this means, as one practicalendeavor of global consequential nature can.

In the model suggested, interests are identified and pursued, andresults are compared. Questions are widely circulated. Whatstudents appropriate in the process are ways of thinking,procedures for testing hypotheses, and means and methods forascertaining progress in the process. Professional educators,aware of cognitive processes and freed from the burden ofadministrative work, no longer rehash the past but designinteractive environments for students to learn in. Teachersinvolve themselves in this interaction, and continue to evolveas knowledge itself evolves. Instead of inculcating thediscipline of one dominant language, they leave open choicesfor 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. Theyare challenged by the responsibility to make their own choicesand carry them through. In the process, differences amongstudents will become apparent, but so will the ability tounderstand how being different, in a context of cooperativeinteractions, is an asset and not a liability. Motivation isseeded in the satisfaction of discovery and the ability to easilyintegrate in a framework of practical experiences that are nolonger mimicked in education, but practiced in discovery.

Footing the bill

Instead of an education financed by the always controversialredistribution of social resources, interactive learning will besupported by its real beneficiaries. That a biogenetics company,for instance, can do this better than an organization engaged inbureaucratic self-perpetuation is a fair assumption. Freed fromthe costs associated with buildings and high administrativeoverhead, education should take place in the environment ofinteractions characteristic of the pragmatic framework. Asextensions of industries and services, of institutions andindividual operations, education would cease to be training fora hypothetical employer. Like the practical experience for whichit is constituted, education points to the precise reward andfulfillment, not to vague ideals that prove hollow after thestudent has paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn them.Vested in the benefits of a company whose potential depends ontheir future performance, students can be better motivated. Willbusiness cooperate? As things stand now, business is in theparadoxical situation of criticizing the inadequacies of aneducation that has many of the same characteristics as outmodedways of doing business.

Once students reach a level of confidence that entitles them toattempt to continue on their own or to associate with thecompany, the alumni of such educational experiences have bettercontrol over their destinies and can follow the cognitive path oftheir choosing. There will be analytically oriented andsynthetically oriented individuals, many embracing theexperience of articulating hypotheses and testing them. Some willfollow cognitive inclinations to induction, to makingobservations and drawing generalizations. Others will follow thepath of deduction, noticing general patterns and seeing how theyapply in concrete cases. Others will follow abductions, i.e.,applying knowledge about a representative sample in order toinfer for a broader collection of facts or processes.

No cognitive path should be forbidden or excluded, as long ashuman integrity, in all aspects, is maintained and humaninteraction supported in the many possible forms it can assume.Motivation reflected in integrity is the element that will bringindividual direction into focus. As it is practiced today,education cultivates motivations that exclude integrity and thedevelopment of skills appropriate to understanding that you cancheat your teacher but not yourself without affecting theoutcome. In the current system of education, integrity appearsas something incidental to the experience. Collaboration on aproject of common interest introduces elements of reciprocalresponsibility in respect to the outcome. Since outcome affectseveryone'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 numberof manifestations than the ones just described-we need to freeeducation from its many inherited assumptions. Progress can nolonger be understood as exclusively linear. Neither can wecontinue to apply a deterministic sequence of cause and effect indomains of non-deterministic interdependencies, characteristicof distributed cooperative efforts. Neither hierarchy nordualism can be cultivated in the educational environment becausethe dynamics of association and interaction is based on patternsof changing roles within a universe focused on optimalparameters, not threatened by the radical disjunction of successvs. failure. Complexity must be acknowledged, not done away withthrough methods that worked in the Industrial age but which failin the new pragmatic context.

Unless and until one discovers through practical experience theneed for a different viewpoint, for values outside the immediateobject of interest, nothing should be imposed on the individual.Shakespeare and Boole are neither loved, nor understood, norrespected more by those who were forced to learn how to spelltheir names, learn dates by heart, or learn titles of works,fragments of plays or logical rules. The very presence of artand science, sport and entertainment, politics and religion,ethics and the legal system in educational forms of interactivemedia, books, artworks, databases, and programs for humaninteraction opens the possibility for discoveries. As serious asall these matters are, no education will ever succeed withoutmaking its students happy, without satisfaction. In eachinstance of education, good or bad, the human being, as anatural entity, is broken in. Tension will always be part ofeducation, but instead of rewarding those more adept atacculturation, education should integrate complementary moments.No, I do not advocate interactive study from the beach or from aremote mountain ski resort; and I am not for extending humanintegration in the world of practical experiences around theclock. But as education frees itself from the industrialmodel-factory-like buildings, classes that correspond to shifts,holidays and vacation time-it should also let students makechoices that are closer to their natural rhythms. Instead ofphysical co-presence, there should be interactive and cooperativecreativity that does not exclude the playful, the natural, andthe accidental.

If all this sounds too far-fetched to bring about, that isbecause it is. Even if the computer giants of the world were toopen interactive learning centers tomorrow, it would be tolittle avail. Students will bring with them attitudes rooted intraditional expectations. There is more consensus in our worldfor what is right with the current system of education than forwhat can or should be done to change it. But with each nucleusof self-organization, such as on-line classes on subjectspertinent to working on the network, seeds are sown for futuredevelopment. In our time, when the need for qualified peoplesurges in one field or another-computational genetics,nanotechnology, non-linear electronic publishing-the model Ipresented is the answer. Waiting for the educational system toprocess students and to deliver them, at no cost to thecorporations that will employ them, is no longer an acceptablestrategy. Instead of endowing university chairs dedicated to thestudy of the no longer meaningful, corporations should invest intraining and post-academic life-long learning.

To preach that in order to be a good architect one has to knowhistory and biology and mathematics, and to know who Vitruviuswas, equals preaching the rules of literacy in a world thateffectively does not need them. To create an environment for therevelation of such a need, if indeed it is acknowledged as humansdiscover new ways to deal with their questions, is a verydifferent task. How much reading, how much writing, mathematics,drawing, foreign language, or chemistry an architect needs is thewrong question. It assumes that someone knows, well in advance ofthe changing pragmatic context, what is the right mixture andhow future human practical experiences will unfold. Theingredients change, the proportions change, and the contextchanges first of all.

As opposed to the current hierarchy, which proclaims drawing orsinging as extraneous but orthography and reading as necessary,education needs to finally acknowledge complementarity. It hasto encourage self-definition in and through skills best suitedto practical experiences of self-constitution in a world that hasescaped the cycle of repetition, and pursues goals unrelated toprevious experiences. Instead of doing away with orrationalizing intuition, or being suspicious of irrationality,education will have to allow the individual to pursue a searchpath that integrates them. Students should be able to definegoals where intuition, and even irrationality and thesubconscious, are applicable. They should be freed from theconstraints 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 theability of educators to design environments that stimulateresponsibility and self-discipline. The broad-stroke educationalproject sketched up to here will have to address the preciseconcerns connected to how and when education actually starts,what the role of the family should be-if the family remains avalid 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 equipstudents with skills so they can contribute to the nationalcoffers in the future. But the arena of economic viability is theglobal 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 clearthat for the sake of efficiency, productive activities arerelocated without any consideration for patriotism or nationalpride, never mind human solidarity and ethics.

In today's world, and to some extent in the model described sofar, the unfolding of the individual through cultivation of themind and spirit is somehow lost in the process of inculcatingfacts. It is its own reward to enjoy subtleties, or to generatethem, to partake in art, or be part of it, to challenge themind, or indulge in the rich world of emotions. Prepared forwork that is usually different from what educators, economists,and politicians anticipate, people face the reality of work thatbecomes more and more fragmented and mediated. On the assemblyline, or in the "analysis of symbols" (to use Robert Reich'sterm), work is, in the final analysis, a job, not a vocation.Physicians, professors, businessmen, carpenters, and burgerflippers perform a job that can be automated to some degree.Depriving work of its highest but often neglectedmotivation-the unfolding of individual abilities, becoming anidentity in the act- negates this motivation. Replaced byexternal rationale-the substance of commercial democracy-thedecline of inner motivation leads to lack of interest, reducedcommitment, and declining creativity. Education that processeshumans for jobs promises access to abundance, but not toself-fulfillment. The decline of family, and new patterns ofsexuality and reproduction, tell us that expectations, sublime ontheir own merit, of improved family involvement will be theexception, not the rule. Accordingly, the challenge is tounderstand the nature of change and to suggest alternatives,instead of hoping that, miraculously or by divine intervention ofthe almighty dollar (or yen, franc, mark, pound, or combinationsthereof), families will again become what literacy intended theyshould be. If the challenge is not faced, education will onlybecome a better machine for processing each new generation.

Many scholars of education have set forth various plans forsaving education. They do not ignore the new pragmaticrequirements. They are unaware of them. Therefore, theirrecommendations can be classified as more of the same. The senseof globality will not result from taking rhymes from MotherGoose (with its implicit reference and culturally determinedrhythm) and adding to them the Mother Goose of other countries.The Victorian and post-Victorian vision transferred uponchildren, the expectation of "everything will be fine if youjust do as you're told," reflects past ideals handed downthrough the moralizing fiction of the Industrial Age.

The most ubiquitous presence in modern society is the televisionset. It replaced the book long ago. Notwithstanding, TV is apassive medium, of low informative impact, but of highinformative ability. Digital television, which extends thepresence of computers, will make a difference, whether it isimplemented in high resolution or not. Television in digitallyscalable formats is an active medium, and interactivity is itscharacteristic. Education centers will integrate digitaltelevision, and open ways to involve individuals regardless ofa*ge, background and interests. We can all learn that there areseveral ways of seeing things, that the physics of time and musicreport on different aspects of temporal characteristics of ourexperience in the world. The movement of a robot, thoughdifferent from the elegant dance of a ballerina, can benefitfrom a sense and experience of choreography, considered by manyincompatible with engineering. The new media of interaction thatare embodied in educational centers should be less obsessed withconveying information, and more with allowing humanunderstanding of instances of change.

But these are only examples. What I have in mind is the creationof an environment for exploration in which knowledge ofaesthetic aspects is learned parallel to scientific knowledge.The formats are not those of classes in the theory or history ofart, or of similar art oriented subjects. As exploration takesplace, aesthetic considerations are pursued as a means ofoptimizing the effort. It is quite clear that as classesdynamically take shape, they will integrate people of differentages and different backgrounds. Taking place in the publicdomain of networked resources, this education will benefit froma sense of creative competition. At each moment in time,projects will be accessible, and feedback can be provided. Thisensures not only high performance from a scientific ortechnological viewpoint, but also aesthetic relevance.

The literacy-based educational establishment will probablydismiss the proposals set forth as pie-in-the-sky, asfuturistic at best. Its representatives will claim that theproblem at hand needs solutions, not a futuristic model based onsome illusory self- organizing nuclei supported by the economy.They will argue that the suggested model of education is lesscredible than perfecting a practice that at least has somehistory and achievements to report. The public, no matter howcritical of education, will ask: Is it permissible, indeedresponsible, to assume that a new philosophy of education willgenerate new student attitudes, especially in view of the realityof metal detectors installed in schools to prevent students fromcarrying weapons? Is it credible to describe experiences indiscovery involving high aesthetic quality, while mediocritymakes the school system appear hopelessly damned? Self-motivationis described as though teenage pregnancy and classes wherestudents bring their babies are the concern of underpaidteachers but not of visionaries. More questions in the same veinare in the air. To propose an analogy, selling water in thedesert is not as simple as it sounds.

We can, indeed, dream of educational tools hooked up to theterminals at the Kennedy Space Center, or to the supercomputersof the European Center for Research of the Future. We can dreamof using digital television for exploring the unknown, and ofon-line education in a world where everyone envisions highaccomplishments through the use of resources that until now wereopen to very few. But unless society gives up the expectation ofa hom*ogeneous, obligatory education that forces individuals whowant-or do not want-to prepare themselves for a life of practicalexperiences into the same mold, education will not produce thedesired results. Good intentions, based on social, ethnic, orracial criteria, on love of children, and humanistic ideals, willnot help either. While all over the world real spending perstudent in public education and private institutions increasedwell above the levels of inflation, fewer students do homework,and very few study beyond the daily assignment. This is true notonly in the USA but also in countries with high admissionstandards for college, such as France, Germany, and Japan.

Translated into the language of our considerations, all thismeans that education cannot be changed independent of change insociety. Education is not an autonomous system. Its connectionsto the rest of the pragmatic context are through students,teachers, parents, political institutions, economic realities,racial attitudes, culture, and patterns of behavior in ourcommercial democracy. In today's education, parochialconsiderations take precedence over global concerns. Bureaucraticrules of accumulated imbecility literally annihilate the changesfor a better future of millions of students. What appears as thecultivation of the mind and spirit is actually no more than theattempt to polish a store window while the store itself lost itsusefulness long ago. It makes no sense to require millions ofstudents to drive daily to schools that can no longer bemaintained, or to pass tests when standards are continuouslylowered 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, andprobably educators first of all. Connection to education centersneeds to be different from the expectation of children sittingin a class dominated by a teacher. On the interactive educationnetworks, age no longer serves as a criterion. Learning isself-paced, motivated by individual interests and priorities andby the perspectives that learning opens. A sense of commoninterest is expressed through interaction, unfolding through adiversity of perspectives and ways of thinking and doing.Nothing can help generations that are more different and moreantagonistic than ours to find a common ground than an experienceof education emancipated from hierarchies, freed ofauthoritarian expectations, challenging and engaging at the sametime. Education will be part of the continuous self-definition ofthe human being throughout one's entire life.

Whether we like it or not, the economy is driven by consumerspending. This does not automatically mean that we can or shouldlet the feedback loop follow a course that will eventually leadto losing the stability of the system to which we belong. Ifconsumption were to remain the driving force, however, we wouldall end up enjoying ourselves to death. But the solution to thisstate of affairs is not to be found in political or educationalsermonizing. To blame consumption, expectations of abundance, orentertainment will not help in finding answers to educationalworries. Education will have to integrate the human experienceof consumption and facilitate the acquisition of common sense. Asense of quality can be instilled by pursuing cooperativeprojects involving not only the production of artifacts, butalso self-improvement. Generations that grow up with televisionas their window to reality cannot be blamed for lack of interestin reading, or for viewing reality as a show interrupted bythirty-second messages. Young minds acquire different skills,and education ought to provide a context for their integrationin captivating practical experiences, instead of trying toneutralize them. Television is here for good, although changesthat will alter the relation between viewers and originators ofmessages will change television as well.

The cognitive characteristics and motor patterns of couchpotatoes and moderate viewers in the age of generalized TV andinteractive networking are very different from those of peopleeducated as literate. These characteristics will be furtherreshaped as digital television becomes part of the networkedworld. Where reading about history, or another country, ismarginally relevant to praxis in the new context of life andwork, the ability to view, understand images, perceive and effectchanges, and the ability to edit them and reuse, to completethem, moreover to generate one's own images, is essential to theoutcome of the effort. Without engaging the student, educationheads into oblivion. As difficult as it is to realize that thereare no absolute values, unless this realization is shared by allgenerations, we will face more inter- generational conflicts thanwe already face. Television is not the panacea for suchconflicts, but a broad ground for reaching reciprocal awarenessof what it takes to meet an increasingly critical challenge.Sure, we are focused here on a television that transcended itsmass communication industrial society status, and reached thecondition of individual interaction.

Understanding differences cannot be limited to education, orreduced to a generalized practice of viewing TV (digital ornot). It has to effectively become the substance of politicallife. While all are equal with respect to the law, while all arefree and encouraged to become the best they can be, society hasto effectively abandon expectations of hom*ogeneity anduniformity, and to dedicate energies to enhancing thesignificance of what makes its members different. Thistranslates into an education freed from expectations that arenot rooted in the process of self-affirmation as scientists,dancers, thinkers, skilled workers, farmers, sportspeople, andmany other pragmatically sanctioned professionals. The directionis clear: to become less obsessed with a job, and more concernedwith a work that satisfies them, and thus their friends andrelatives. The means and methods for moving in this directionwill not be disbursed by states or other organizations. We haveto discover them, test, and refine, aware of the fact that whatreplaces the institution of education is the open-ended processthrough which we emerge as educated individuals.

Does education henceforth become a generic trade school? Forthose who so choose, yes. For others, it will become what theythemselves make of it through their involvement. Remaining anopen enterprise, education will allow as many adjustments aseach individual is willing to take upon oneself for the length ofone's life. The education of interactive skills, ofvisualization technologies, of methods of search and retrieval,of thinking in images, sounds, colors, odors, textures, andhaptic perception requires contexts for their discovery, use,and evaluation which no school or university in the world canprovide. But if all available educational resources are used toestablish learning centers based on the paradigms ofinteractivity, data processing, multimedia, virtual reality,neural networks, and genetic engineering, using powerful carrierssuch as digital TV or high-speed and broadband networks, we willstop managing a bankrupt enterprise and open avenues forsuccessful alternatives.

As humanity ages, and societies have to cope with a new agestructure, education will have to focus also on how toconstitute one's identity past the biological optimum. Among thefastest growing segments on the Internet, the elderly represent avery distinct group, of high motivation, and of abilities thatcan better benefit society.

Access to knowledge in the form of interactive projects, pursuedby classes constituted of individuals as different as the worldis, is not trivial, and obviously not cheap. The networkedworld, the many challenges of new means of communication alreadyin place, the new medium of digital TV-closer to reality thanmany realize- and computers, are already widely available. Amajor effort to provide support to many who are not yetconnected to this world, at the expense of the currentbureaucracy of education, will provide the rest. Instead ofinvesting in buildings, bureaucracies, norms, and regulations,instead of rebuilding crumbling schools, and recycling teacherswho intellectually died long ago in the absence of any realchallenge, we can, and should, design a global education system.Such a system will effect change not only in one country, notonly in a group of rich countries, but all over the world. Thepractice of networking and the competence in integrating workproduced independently in functional modules can be attained bytackling 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 efficiencyexpected in our pragmatic framework. Scores, religiouslyaccounted for in literacy-based political life, are irrelevant.Practical experiences of self-constitution are notmultiple-choice examinations. They involve the person in hisentirety, and result in instances of personal growth andincreased social awareness. A global world requires a live globalsystem of education that embodies the best we can afford, and isdriven by the immense energy of variety.

Unexpected opportunities

We have heard the declaration over and over: This is the age ofknowledge. The statement describes a context of human practicalexperiences in which the major resources are cognitive innature. In the civilization of literacy, knowledge acquisitioncould take place at a slow pace, over long periods of time. Theinterlocking factors that defined the pragmatic context weresuch that no other gnoseological pattern was possible. Knowledgearising from practical experiences of industrial societyprogressively contributed to making life easier for human beings.Eventually, everything that had been done through the power ofhuman muscle and dexterity-using mainly hands, arms, andlegs-was assigned to machines and executed using energyresources found in the environment. Cognition supported theincremental evolution of machines through a vast array ofapplications. Human knowledge allowed for the efficient use ofenergy to move machines which executed tasks that might havetaken tens, even hundreds of men to perform.

To make this more clear, let us compare some of the tasks of theMachine Age with those of the Age of Cognition we live in.Within industrial pragmatics, the machine supplanted the muscleand the limited mechanical skills needed for processing rawmaterials, manufacturing cars, washing clothes, or typing.Discoveries of more sources of coal, gas, and oil kept themachine working and led to its extension from the factory to thehome. Literacy, embodying characteristics of industrialpragmatics, kept pace with the demands and possibilities of theMachine Age. In our age, computer programs supplant our thinkingand the limited knowledge involved in supervising complexproduction and assembly lines that process raw materials orsynthesize new material. Computer programs are behind themanufacture of automobiles; they integrate householdfunctions-heating, washing clothes, preparing meals, guarding ourhomes. Publishing on the World Wide Web relies on computers. Thescale of all these efforts is global. Many languages, bearingthe data needed by each specific sub-task, go into the finalproduct or outcome. Older dependencies on natural resources andon a social model shaped to optimally support industrial praxisare partially overcome as the focus changes from permanence totransitory communities of interest and to the individual- thelocus of the Cognitive Age.

Cognitive resources arise from experiences qualitativelydifferent from those of the Machine Age. Digital engines do notburn coal or gas. Digital engines burn cognition. The source ofcognition lies in the mind of each human being. The resources ofthe Machine Age are being slowly depleted. Alternative resourceswill be found in what was typically discarded. Recycling and thediscovery of processes that extract more from what is availabledepend more on human cognition than on brute force processingmethods. The sources of cognition are, in principle, unlimited.But if the cognitive component of human practical experienceswere to stagnate or break down for some unimaginable reason, thepragmatics based on the underlying digital process of the Age ofCognition would break down. To understand this, one need onlythink of being stuck in a car on an untravelled road, allbecause the gasoline ran out. Compare this situation with whatwould happen if the most complex machine, more complicated thananything science fiction could describe, came to a halt becausethere was no human thought to keep it going.

In the current context, the dynamics of cognition, distributedbetween processing information and acquiring and disseminatingknowledge, stands for the dynamics of the entire system of ourexistence. Embodied in technologies and processing procedures,cognition contributes to the fundamental separation of theindividual human from the productive task, and from a widevariety of non-productive activities. It is not necessary thatan individual possess all knowledge that a pragmatic experiencerequires. This means, simply, that operators in nuclear powerplants need not be eminent physicists or mathematicians. Neitherdo all workers in a space research program need to be rocketscientists. A programmer might be ignorant of how a disk driveworks. A brain surgeon does not know how the tools he or sheuses are made. Each facet of a pragmatic instance entailsspecific requirements. The whole pragmatic experience requiresknowledge above and beyond what the individuals directly involvedcan or should master. Instead of limited knowledge uniformlydispensed through literate methods, knowledge is distributed andembodied in tools and methods, not in persons. The advantage isthat programs and procedures are made uniform, not human beings.For example, data management does not substitute for advancedknowledge, but a data management system as such can be endowedwith knowledge in the form of routines, procedures, operationschemes, management, and self-evaluation.

Just as everyone kept the mechanical engine going, everyone,layperson or expert, contributes to the functioning of thedigital engine. The only source of cognition that we can counton is within people self-constituted through practicalexperiences involving the digital. This does not mean thateveryone will become a thinker and everyone will produceknowledge. Two sources of knowledge are relevant in the Age ofCognition within which the civilization of illiteracy unfolds.One source is the advanced work of experts and researchers, inareas of higher abstraction, way beyond what literacy canhandle. The other, much more critical, source is to be found incommon- sense human interaction, in day-to-day human experience.

We know that the knowledge of experts will continue to beintegrated in the pragmatics of this age. The specificmotivations of human practical experiences resulting inknowledge have to be recognized and stimulated. And we must alsobe aware of circ*mstances that could have a negative effect onthese experiences.

We know less about the second source of knowledge because inprevious pragmatic contexts it was less critical, and widelyignored. In particular, we do not know how to tap into theinfinite reservoir of cognitive resources that are manifestedthrough the routine work and everyday life of the overwhelmingportion of the world's population. Taken individually, eachperson can contribute cognitive resources to the broaderdynamics of the world. But these individual contributions arerandom, difficult to identify, and do not necessarily justifythe effort of mining them. In our lives, many decisions andchoices are made on the basis of extremely powerful procedures ofwhich we, as individuals, are almost never aware. There is agrain of genius in some of the most mundane ways of doingthings. Here the nodal points of integration in themulti-dimensional array that constitutes the globality ofhumankind are what counts. Delving into the dynamic collectivepersona makes such an effort worthwhile.

Years ago, in a dialogue with a prominent researcher ineducation, who used to maintain interactive simulations foryoungsters who logged in at his institute, I discussed the thenfashionable Game of Life (developed by John Horton Conway). Asan open-ended simulation of the rules of birth and death, andbased on the theory of cellular automata, the game requiredquite a bit of thinking. There is no winner or loser in the Gameof Life. Although the rules of the game are relatively simple,highly complex forms of artificial life arise on the matrix: acell going from empty to full describes birth, from full toempty, death. Satisfaction in playing is derived from reachingcomplex forms of life.

The idea we discussed was to make the game widely available onthe network. The hundreds of thousands of players would leavetraces of cognitive decisions that, over time, would add up toan expression of the intelligence of the collective body whoshared an interest in the game. The cognitive sum total is of aGestalt nature-much higher than the sum of its parts. That is,the sum has a different qualitative condition, probablycomparable to that of the experts and geniuses, or even muchhigher! Considering all the instances of human application totasks that range from being frankly useless to highlyproductive, one can surmise that the second source of knowledgeand intelligence is much more interesting than that of thededicated thinkers. There is more to what we do and how wechoose than rationality and thinking, never mind literaterationality.

This collective persona need not comprise the entire populationof the world (minus the knowledge professionals). It would helpto start with groups formed ad hoc, groups which share aninterest in a certain activity, such as playing games, or surfingfor a particular piece of information, from the trivial "How do Iget from here to there?" to whatever people are lookingfor-football scores, p*rnography, crossword puzzles, recipes,investment information, support in facing a certain problem,love, inter- generational conflicts, religion-anything. Thechallenge comes in capturing the cognitive resources at work,making inferences from the small or vast collective bodies ofcommon focus, and coming up with viable procedures that can beutilized to enhance individual performance-all this withoutshaping future individual performance into grotesque repetitivepatterns, no matter how successful they might be.

If there is validity to the notion that we are in the age ofknowledge, we cannot afford to limit ourselves to the knowledgeof a few, no matter how exceptional these few are. Thecivilization of illiteracy transcends the literate model ofindividual performance considered a guarantee of the performanceof society at large.

As practical experiences become more complex, breakdowns can beavoided only at the expense of more cognitive resources. We knowthat it took millennia before primitive notation progressed towriting and then to generalized literacy. In the Age ofCognition, we cannot afford such a long cycle for integratinghuman cognitive resources. Marvin Minsky once pointed out howmuch mind activity is lost in the leisure of watching footballgames on TV. While relaxation is essential to human existence,nobody can claim, in good faith, that what has resulted from theenormously increased efficiency of cognition-based practicalexperiences is not wasted to a great extent. Short of giving up,one has to entertain alternatives. But alternatives to thissituation cannot be legislated. It is clear that within themotivations of the global economy, the need to identify and tapmore sources of cognition will result in ways to stimulate humaninteraction. Watching TV probably generates thoughts that onlydie on the ever larger screens in our homes. Surfing the Web,where millions of hits are counted on the p*rnography sites-noton mathematics or literature sites-is also a waste and a sourceof mediocrity. Mouse potatoes are not necessarily better than thecouch variety.

If we could derive cognition even from the many experiences ofhuman self- constitution in computer games, we could not onlyfurther the success of the industry that changed the way humansplay, but gain some insight into motivations, cognitive andemotional aspects of this elementary form of human identity.Above and beyond the speculation on playful man (hom*o Ludens),there are quantifiable aspects of competition, satisfaction, andpleasure. And as the Internet effectively maps our journeythrough a maze of data, information, and sources of knowledge, wecan ask whether such cognitive maps are not too valuable to beabandoned to marketing experts, instead being utilized forunderstanding what makes us tick as we search for a word, animage, an experience. Data regarding how and what we buy is notalways representative of what we are. For many people, buying abook or a work of art, a fashionable shirt, a home, or a car isonly an experience in mediation performed by the agents of theseobjects. But there are authentic experiences in which no one canreplace us human beings. Games belong to this domain, and so dojoking and interactions with friends. No agent can replace us.Within such authentic moments of self-constitution, cognitiveresources of exceptional value are at work.

Many people from very different locations and of differentbackgrounds might simultaneously be present on a certain Website, without ever knowing it. The server's performance couldsuggest that there is quite a crowd at a Web site, but it cannotsay who the others are, what they are looking for, what kind ofcognition drives the digital engine of their particularexperiences.

While the medium of networking is more transparent than literacyexperiences, it still maintains a certain opaqueness, enhancedby the firewalls meant to protect us from ourselves. Manyindividuals present at the same time on a Web site is not asituation one can duplicate in literacy, in which the ratio wasone reader to one book, or one magazine, or even one videotape(although more than one can watch it on the family TV set, in aclass, or on an airplane). Thousands of viewers simultaneouslylanding on a Web site is a chance and a challenge. We shouldaccordingly think of methods for identifying ourselves, to theextent desired, and declare willingness to interact. This nextlevel of self-constitution and identification is where thepotential of rich interactions and further generation ofcognition becomes possible. Tapping into cognitive resources insuch situations is an opportunity we should not postpone.

Burning cognition, digital engines allow us to reach efficiencythat is higher by many orders of magnitude in comparison to theefficiency attained by engines burning coal and oil. But theexperience introduces the pressure of accelerated accumulation ofdata, information processing, and knowledge utilization. Tounderstand the intimate relation between the performance of thedigital engine and our own performance, one has only to think ofa coal-burning steam engine driving a locomotive uphill. Thecivilization of illiteracy is a rather steep ascent, facing manyobstacles-our physical abilities, limited natural resources,ecological concerns, ability to handle social complexity. Topull the brake will only make the effort of the engine moredifficult, unless we want to tumble downhill, head first.Feeding the furnace faster is the answer that every sensibleengineer knows. This would sound like a curse, were it not forthe excitement of discovery, including that of our own cognitiveresources.

Analogy aside, what drives the digital engine is not abstractcomputing cycles of faster chips, but human cognition embodiedin experiences that support further diversification ofexperiences. It has yet to be the case that we had enoughcomputing cycles to burn and we did not know what to do with theextra computing power available. On the contrary, humanpractical experiences are always ahead of technology, as wechallenge ourselves with new tasks for which the chips ofyesterday and the memory available are as inappropriate as themethods and means of literacy.

Bio-electric signals associated with the activity of our mindshave been measured for quite a number of years. We learned fromsuch measurements that minds are constituted in anticipation ofour practical experience of self-identification as human beings.The idea seemed far-fetched, despite the strong scientificevidence on which it was ultimately founded. Cognition isprocess, and bio-electric signals are indicative of cognitiveprocesses in our minds. Sensors attached to the skin, such asthrough a simple finger glove, can read such signals. In effect,they read unfolding mind processes based on our cognitiveresources. Feeding digital engines hungry to burn cognition, wearrive not only at mind-controlled prosthetic devices for peoplewith disabilities, but also at a mind-driven painter's brush, ordesktop film directing, allowing us to get involved withcinematographic projects of scripting and affecting variations ofthe plot. From pinball games to tennis and skiing, from virtualbowling to virtual football, our thoughts make new experiencespossible. For those affected by disabilities, this is aqualitatively new horizon. Einstein, but many others as well, wasquite convinced that only 10 percent of our cognitive abilitiesare effectively engaged in what we do. As the digital engineburns more and more cognition, this number will change, asprobably our physical condition, already marked by forms ofdegeneration, will change too.

If, by using only one-tenth of our cognitive resources, we reachthe level of possibilities open to us, it is not too hard toimagine what only one more tenth might bring. The civilizationof illiteracy, with all the dangers and inequities it has toaddress, is only at its beginning. That its duration will beshorter than the one preceding it is another subject.

1982-1996: Providence RI; Rochester NY; Bexley OH; New York NY;Little Compton RI; Wuppertal, Germany.

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Literacy in a Changing World

During the writing of this book, several articles were publishedand lectures presented on themes pertinent to the subject. Nonewas 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 InternationalAssociation of Semiotic Studies, Palermo, Italy, June 25-29,1984.

The Civilization of Illiteracy. (Lecture) Sixth Annual Meeting ofthe 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 andtechnological 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 emergenceof writing and early written documents, the following proveduseful 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 Homerto 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 Systemsand 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 tothe 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, variousscholars chose what best suited their own viewpoint. A selectionfrom an unusually rich legacy of manuscripts and publishedarticles was made available in The Collected Papers of CharlesSanders Peirce (eight volumes). Volumes 1-6 edited by CharlesHartshorne 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 hiscorrespondence with Victoria, Lady Welby. This was published byCharles Hardwick as Semiotics and Significs. The Correspondencebetween Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, Bloomingtonand London: Indiana University Press, 1977.

Peirce's manuscripts are currently being published in a newedition, The Writings of Charles S. Peirce. A ChronologicalEdition (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, duringhis return journey from Europe aboard a steamer, "…a day ortwo before reaching Plymouth, nothing remaining to be done exceptto translate it into English," (5.526): "Considerer quels sontles effets pratiques que nous pensons pouvoir être produits parl'objet de notre conception. La conception de tous ces effets estla conception complète de l'objet."

In respect to Peirce, his friends William James and John Deweywrote words of appreciation, placing him "in the forefront ofthe great seminal minds of recent times," (cf. Morris R. Cohen,Chance, Love, and Logic, Glencoe IL: 1954, p. iii). C. J. Keyserstated, "That this man, who immeasurably increased theintellectual wealth of the world, was nevertheless almostpermitted to starve in what in his time was the richest andvainest of lands is enough to make the blood of any decentAmerican boil with chagrin, indignation, and vicarious shame,"(cf. Portraits of Famous Philosophers Who Were AlsoMathematicians, 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 workspublished during his lifetime, reference is made to Dissertatiode Arte Combinatoria (Leipzig, 1666). G.H. Parkinson translatedsome works in Leibniz Logical Papers (London, 1966). Anotheredition considered for this book is by Gaston Grua, Leibniz.Textes inédits (Paris, 1948), which offers some of the manymanuscripts in which important ideas remained hidden for a longtime.

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 independentof who is doing the categorizing and on what basis" (p. 50).

With his seminal work on fuzzy sets, Lotfi Zadeh opened a newperspective relevant not only to technological progress, butalso 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 Communicationsof 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, July8-14, 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 isnot 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 humaninvolvement with machines and the consequences of theunreflecting use of technology. "Once before in history themachine had impinged upon human culture with an effect of thegreatest moment. This previous impact is known as the IndustrialRevolution, and it concerned the machine purely as an alternativeto human muscle" (p.185).

"It is fair to say, however, that except for a considerablenumber of isolated examples, this industrial revolution up topresent [ca. 1950] has displaced man and beast as a source ofpower, without making any great impression on other humanfunctions" (p. 209).

Wiener goes on to describe a new stage, what he calls the SecondIndustrial Revolution, dominated by computing machines drivingall kinds of industrial processes. He notes: "Let us rememberthat the automatic machine, whatever we think of any feelings itmay have or may not have, is the precise economic equivalent ofslave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor mustaccept the economic conditions of slave labor" (p. 220).

"What can we expect of its economic and social consequences? Inthe first place, we can expect an abrupt and final cessation ofthe demand for the type of factory labor performing purelyrepetitive tasks. In the long run, the deadly uninterestingnature of the repetitive task may make this a good thing and thesource of leisure necessary for a man's full culturaldevelopment. It may also produce cultural results as trivial andwasteful as the greater part of those so far obtained from theradio 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 AmericanEnterprise Institute, the aliterate person scans magazines,reads headlines, "never reads novels or poetry for the pleasuresthey offer." He goes on to state that aliteracy is moredangerous because it "reflects a change in cultural values and aloss of skills" and "leads to knowing without understanding."

Marsha Levine, a participant in the conference noted thatalthough educators are concerned with universal literacy, manypeople read less or not at all: "A revolution in technology ishaving an impact on education…they [technological means]increase the level of literacy, but they might undermine thepractice of what they teach."

At the same conference, an anonymous participant posed a sequenceof questions: "Exactly what advantage do reading and literacyhold in terms of helping us to process information? What doesreading give us that is of some social advantage that cannot beobtained through other media? Is it entirely certain that wecannot have a functioning society with an oral-aural method ofcommunication, where we use television and its still unexploitedresources of communication? […] Is it impossible to conceive ofa generation that has received its knowledge of the world anditself 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 argumentsagainst writing: "It will implant forgetfulness in their souls[of people, M.N.]: they will cease to exercise memory becausethey rely on that which is written, calling these things toremembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means ofexternal marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon,a potion; some translate it as recipe, M.N.] not for memory, butfor reminder" (274-278e. p. 96). (References to Plato include theStephanus numbers. This makes them independent of the particularedition used by the reader.)

Claude Lévi-Strauss. Tristes Tropiques. Paris: Plon, 1967.

The author continues Socrates' thought: "It [writing] seems tohave favored the exploitation of human beings rather than theirenlightenment" (p. 298).

From a very broad literature on literacy, including the emergenceof writing and early written documents, the following proveduseful 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 Homerto 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 Systemsand 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 expandedversion 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 theWorld Wide Web, states that the scientists contributing to thebook "tend to replace the literary intellectuals rather thancooperate 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 GräfinDönhoff, editor-in-chief of Die Zeit, Edzard Reuter, ex-CEO ofDaimler-Benz, along with several prominent German intellectualsand politicians, met during the summer of 1992 to discuss issuesfacing their country after reunification. In their Manifesto,they insisted that any concept for a sensible future needs tointegrate the notion of renouncing (Verzicht) and sharing asopposed to growing expectations and their export through economicaid to Third World countries. See Ein Manifest: Weil das Landsich ändern muß (A Manifesto. Because the country needs tochange), 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 ShortStories 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. Weare dealing no longer with the medieval chained library or withbooks held as treasures in certain monastic and princelyinstitutions. The book became a domestic object owned by itsuser, accessible at his will for re-reading. This access in turncomprised private space, of which the personal libraries ofErasmus and of Montaigne are emblematic. Even more crucial,though difficult to define, was the acquisition of periods ofprivate silence" (p. 754).

Thomas Robert Malthus. An Essay On the Principle of Population,1798, in The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus. E.A. Wrigley andDavid 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 ownliteracy through Huck's illiterate silence" (p. 101). "ThusTwain brings into focus the trap of literacy. There is a wholeworld in Huck Finn that is closed to those without literacy.They can't, for ironic example, read this marvelous work, TheAdventures of Huckleberry Finn. And yet we must recognize a worldrich with superstition and folklore, with adventure and beauty,that remains closed to those who are too tightly chained toletters" (p. 105).

George Gilder. Life After Television: The Coming Transformationof 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 Essaysby John Adams on American Foreign Policy, 1780. Compiled andedited by James H. Hutson. Washington, DC: Library of Congress,1978.

-. The Adams-Jefferson: the Complete Correspondence betweenThomas 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 NewEngland in the 17th century, it is a paramount fact that theywere dedicated and skillful readers…. It is to be understoodthat the Bible was the central reading matter in all households,for these people were Protestants who shared Luther's belief thatprinting was 'God's highest and extremest act of Grace, wherebythe business of the Gospel is driven forward.' But reading forGod's sake was not their sole motivation in bringing books intotheir 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 Reevetext as revised by Francis Bowen). New York: Vintage Books,1945.

Several other writers have attempted to characterize the USA, orat 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 mytheaméricain. 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 improvementof the mind (especially the female mind) through reading; seeespecially Pride and Prejudice, Vol. 1, chapter 8. (New York: TheNew 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 Thomaswas five years old, and at age nine in the Latin school, wherehe learned Latin, Greek, and French until 1757. In 1758,Jefferson continued two years of the same program of study witha Reverend Maury. In 1760, he attended the College of Williamand Mary (for two years), where he was taught by a Dr. WilliamSmall of Scotland (a mathematician). His education consisted ofEthics, Rhetoric, and Belles Lettres. In 1762, he began tostudy 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 thingthat is useful, and every thing that is ornamental. But Art islong, and their Time is short. It is therefore propos'd thatthey learn those things that are likely to be most useful andmost ornamental.' […] Franklin's early life was a model forgetting ahead in the New World […] The 'useful' elements inFranklin's education were the skills learned in apprenticeshipand through his reading. The 'ornamental? elements,… were theknowledge and social skills learned through reading, writing, anddebating" (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 ofthe desire to provide a more utilitarian education as comparedwith 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 dutyof society is to see that every member receives a soundeducation" (p. 308).

Transcendentalism: "A 19th century New England movement ofwriters and philosophers who were loosely bound together byadherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief inthe essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of man,and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for therevelation of deepest truths." The main figures were Ralph WaldoEmerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller (cf.Encyclopedia Britannica, Micropedia. 1990 ed.

Paul F. Boller. American Transcendentalism, 1830-1860. AnIntellectual Inquiry. New York: Putnam, 1974. Majorphilosophers of pragmatics:

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Although no finished workdeals explicitly with his pragmatic conception, this conceptionpermeates his entire activity. His semiotics is the result of thefundamental pragmatic philosophy he developed.

John Dewey (1859-1952). Dewey bases his pragmatic conception onthe proven useful. This explains why this conception was labeledinstrumentalism or pragmatics of verification. Among the workswhere this is expressed are How We Think (1910), Logic, theTheory of Inquiry (1938), Knowing and Known (1940).

William James (1842-1910). James expressed his pragmaticconception from a psychological perspective. His main worksdedicated 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 hecalled absolute pragmatics.

John Sculley, ex-CEO of Apple Computer, Inc took the bully pulpitfor literacy (at President-elect Clinton's economic summit inDecember, 1992), stating that the American economy is built onideas. He and other business leaders confuse ideas withinvention, which is their main interest, and for which literacyis 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 socialscientist who sought to apply evolutionary dynamic approach tothe study of economic constructions. Best known for his work TheTheory of the Leisure Class (1899), in which he coined the termconspicuous 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: Lifeand art in the American 1890's. (Yoshinobu Hakutani, editor). 2volumes. 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 hisNotebook (two years prior to the publication of the novel in1886). He also stated, "I asked myself what was the most salientand peculiar point of our social life. The answer was: thesituation 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 theNew Economics), into an almost unanimous repudiation of theeconomic order. "…most authors portrayed an economic systemdisorderly and ruthless, wasteful and inhumane, unjust alike toworking men, investors, and consumers, politically corrupt andmorally corrupting," (p. 247). He goes on to name William DeanHowell (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 BusinessCivilization), Harold Stearns (America: A Reappraisal), Mary A.Hamilton (In America Today), André Siegfried (America Comes ofa*ge) 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 fortunemanufacturing glue and establishing iron works. In 1830, hisexperimental 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 FirstReader: containing progressive lessons in reading and spelling(revised and improved by Wm. H. McGuffey). Cincinnati: WinthropB. Smith, 1853. It is doubtful that all the clever remarksattributed to Yogi Berra came from him. What matters is the drysense of humor and logical irreverence that make these remarksanother form of Americana.

Akiro Morita, et al. Made in Japan. New York: Dutton, 1989.

United We Stand, the political interest group founded by H. RossPerot, is probably another example of how difficult it is, evenfor those who take an active stand (no matter howcontroversial), to break the dualistic pattern of political lifein 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 theexpression 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 inthe June 1993 issue of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior andthen in the Fall 1993 issue of American Educator).

Among the many articles dealing with American students' attitudestowards required subject matter, this is one of the mostpoignant. It involves not literature, philosophy, or history, butmathematics. The author points out not only the expectations ofstudents and educational administrators, but also the methods inwhich the subject matter is treated in textbooks. Interestinglyenough, he recounts his experience with students in a stateuniversity, where generalized, democratic access to mediocrity isequated 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 ofthe Hawaiian alphabet (transliterated to the Roman alphabet byan 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 lettersrepresenting consonants, each letter modified for the six vowelsin 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 longhistory. It is clear that Plato's remarks are made in adifferent pragmatic framework than that of the present. Ongnoticed that: "…language is so overwhelmingly oral that of allthe many thousands of languages-possibly tens of thousands-spokenin the course of human history, only around 106 have even beencommitted to writing to a degree sufficient to have producedliterature, and most have never been written at all" (p.7). Ongalso refers to pictographic systems, noticing that "Chinese isthe largest, most complex, and richest: the K'anglisi dictionaryof Chinese in 1716 AD lists 40,545 characters" (p. 8).

Recently, the assumption that Chinese writing is pictographiccame under scrutiny. John DeFrancis (Visible Speech. The DiverseOneness 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 around3500 BCE among the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. Many scripts are onrecord: Mesopotamian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Minoan orMycenean 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, orprocedure in accordance with prescribed rule or custom, as inreligious 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 destextes de Homère. Angers: Presses de l'Université d'Angers,1984.

Weltanschauung: one's philosophy or conception of the universeand of life (cf. Webster's Unabridged Dictionary). A particularphilosophy or view of life; a conception of the world (cf. TheConcise Oxford Dictionary of Current English).

Francesco d'Errico. Paleolithic human calendars: a case ofwishful thinking? in Current Anthropology, 30, 1989, pp.117-118.

He regards petroglyphs were looked at as a possible mathematicalconception of the cosmos, a numbering or even a calculationsystem, a rhythmical support for traditional recitation, ageneric system of notation.

B.A. Frolov. Numbers in Paleolithic graphic art and the initialstages in the development of mathematics, in SovietAnthropology 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 abiological entity and the time-based phenomena in theenvironment. As with the so-called circadian cycles (circadianmeaning almost the day and night cycle, circa diem), rhythms ofexistence persist even in the absence of external stimuli. Theappearance, at least, is that of an inner clock.

The notion of genetic code describes a system by which DNA andRNA molecules carry genetic information. Particular sequences ofgenes in these molecules represent particular sequences of aminoacids (the building blocks of proteins) and thereby embodyinstructions for making of different types of proteins. On thesame subject, but obviously at a deeper level than a dictionarydefinition, is James D. Watson's celebrated book, The DoubleHelix: a personal account of the discovery of the structure ofDNA. (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 stableequilibrium between interdependent elements of the human body.Physiological processes leading to body equilibrium areinterlocked 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): Adistinction accepted is that between unvocalized (Hebrew,Arabic) and vocalized alphabets (starting with the Greek, inwhich the vowels are no longer omitted). Some languages usesyllabaries, reuniting a consonant and a following vowel (such asin the Japanese Katakana: ka, ke, ki, ko, ku). When twodifferent conventions are applied, the writing system is hybrid:the Korean language has a very powerful alphabet, hangul, butalso uses Chinese characters, but pronouned in Korean. Thehangul system (15th century) expressed, for Koreans, a desire forself- identity.

Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translatedfrom the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton.Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.

In Phaedrus, Socrates, portrayed by Plato, articulates argumentsagainst writing: "it will implant forgetfulness in their souls[of people, M.N.]; they will cease to exercise memory becausethey rely on that which is written, calling these things toremembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means ofexternal marks; what you have discovered is a recipe [pharmakon,a potion; some translate it as recipe] not for memory, but forreminder" (274-278e).

Oraltity and Language Today: What Do People Understand When They
Understand Language?

Ludwig Wittgenstein. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translatedby D.F. Pears and B.F. Guinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,1961.

Amos Oz refers to self-constitution in language as follows: "…alanguage is never a 'means' or a 'framework' or a 'vehicle' forculture. It is culture. If you live in Hebrew, if you think,dream, make love in Hebrew, sing in Hebrew in the shower, telllies in Hebrew, you are 'inside'. […] If a writer writes inHebrew, even if he rewrites Dostoevksy or writes about a Tartarinvasion of South America, Hebrew things will always happen inhis stories. Things which are ours and which can only happen withus: certain rhythms, moods, combinations, associations,longings, connotations, atavistic attitudes towards the whole ofcreation, 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 thelanguage and analyze only the expressions and their designata"(Vol. 1., p.115).

Noam Chomsky. The distinction between competence and performancein Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1965. Many scholars noticed the dualism inherent in the Chomskyantheory. Competence is "the speaker- hearer's knowledge of hislanguage;" performance is "the actual use of language in concretesituations" (p.4).

Noam Chomsky started to formulate the idea of the innateconstitution of a speaker's competence in the famous article Areview of B.K. Skinner's Verbal Behavior in Language, 35 (1959),an idea he has developed through all his scholarly work. In thereview, he considered the alternatives: language is learned(within Skinner's scheme of stimulus-response), or it is somehowinnate. In Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (Cambridge MA: MITPress, 1965), Reflections on Language (London: Fontana, 1976),and Rules and Representations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), thethought is constantly refined, though not necessarily moreconvincing (as his critics noticed).

Roman Jakobson. Essais de Linguistique Générale, Paris: Editionsde Minuit, 1963.

Jakobson refused to ascertain any "private property" in thepraxis of language. Everything in the domain of language "issocialized" (p. 33).

Feedback: "The property of being able to adjust future conduct bypast performance" (Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of HumanBeings, p.47).

In 1981, Martin Gardner and Douglas Hoffstaedter shared a columnin Scientific American, which Hoffstaedter called MetamagicalThemes. In his first article, he defined self-reference: "Ithappens every time anyone says 'I' or 'me' or 'word' or 'speak'or 'mouth.' It happens every time a newspaper prints a storyabout reporters, every time someone writes a book about writing,designs a book about design, makes a movie about movies, orwrites an article about self-reference. Many systems have thecapability to represent or refer to themselves, or elements ofthemselves, 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 EduardAtaian's book Jazyk i vneiazykovaia deistvitelnost: opytontologicheskovo 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 moreexamples relating to the use of numbers and their place inlanguage can be found in Crump (the examples given are referencedin The Anthropology of Numbers, Cambridge/New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1990, pp. 34 and 37).

Face-to-face communication, or iteration, attracted the attentionof semioticians because codes other than those of language areat work. Adam Kendon, among others, thought that non-verbalcommunication captures only a small part of the face-to-facesituation. The need to integrate non-verbal semiotic entities inthe broader context of a communicative situation finally leads tothe discovery of non-verbal codes, but also to the question ofhow much of the language experience is continued where languageis not directly used. Useful reading can be found in Aspects ofNon-Verbal Communication (Walburga Raffler-Engel, Editor),Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 1980.

Steven Pinker. The Language Instinct: How the Mind CreatesLanguage. New York: William Morrow & Co, 1994. (His bookappeared eight years after this chapter was written.)

As opposed to pictograms, which are iconic representations (basedon likeness) of concrete objects, ideograms are composites(sometimes diagrams) of more abstract representations of thesame. Chao Yuen Ren (in Language and Symbolic Systems,Cambridge: At the University Press, 1968) shows how Chineseideograms 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 basicstrokes,…one obtains other ideograms." The example given isthat 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) ledsome companies to advertise a new literacy. Caere andHewlett-Packard, sponsors of Project Literacy US and Reading isFundamental came up with the headline "We'd Like to Teach theWorld to Read" to introduce optical character recognitiontechnology (a scanner and software), which makes machine reading(of texts, numbers, and graphics) possible. In another ad, QueSoftware 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 canalso be customized for specific writing styles (inquiry to yourinsurance agent, answer to the IRS, complaints to City Hall or aconsumer protection agency). As a matter of fact, the phenomenareferred to are not a matter of advertisem*nt slogans but of anew means for reading and even writing. A program such asVoiceWorks (also known as VoiceRad) was designed for radiologists who routinely review X-rays and generate written reports ontheir 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 misspellingdifficult technical terms. VoiceEm (for Emergency Room doctors)is activated by voice clues (e.g., "auto accident"), displayinga 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 legalphrases summarize situations that correspond to circ*mstances onrecord. When the doctor states "normal throat," the machinespells out a text that reproduces stereotype descriptions:"throat clear, tongue, pharynx without injections, exudatetonsilar hypertrophy, teeth normal variant." The 1,000-wordlexicon can handle the vast majority of emergencies. Thosebeyond the lexicon usually surpass the competence of thedoctor.

The subject of visual mnemonic devices used in theinterpretation of Shakespeare's plays is marvelously treated inFrances A. Yates's book The Art of Memory (Harmondsworth: PenguinPress, 1966). She discusses Robert Fludd's memory system oftheater, from his Ars memoriae (1619), based on theShakespearean Globe Theater. In ancient Greece, oratorsconstructed complex spatial and temporal schemata as aids inrehearsing and properly presenting their speeches.

Functioning of Language

Research on memory and language functions in the brain is beingcarried out at the University of Minnesota, Institute of ChildDevelopment. Work is focused on individuals who are about toundergo partial lobotomies to treat intractable epilepsy. Thegoal is to provide a functional map of the brain.

"History remains a strict discipline only when it stops short, inits description, of the nonverbal past." (Ivan Illich and BarrySanders, The Alphabetization of the Popular Mind, p. 3).

Derrick de Kerkhove, Charles J. Lumsden, Editors. The Alphabetand the Brain. The Lateralization of Writing.Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer Verlag, 1988.

In this book, Edward Jones and Chizato Aoki report on thedifferent cognitive processing of phonetic (Kana) andlogographic (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 Bulletindu 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 avecClaude-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 suggestedcharacteristics of the oral and visual culture. The distinctionbetween the two preoccupied him.

Klingon is a language crafted by Marc Okrand, a linguist, for useby fictional characters. The popularity of Star Trek explainshow Klingon spread around the world.

By eliminating sources of ambiguity and prescribing stylisticrules, controlled languages aim for improved readability. Theyare 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 andlogic is Logics Workbench (LWB), developed at the University ofBerne, in Switzerland. The language is available through the WWW.

Drawing: The trace left by a tool drawn along a surfaceparticularly for the purpose of preparing a representation orpattern. 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 bymeans of those things which man has first conceived in his mindand pictured in the imagination and which the practised hand canmake appear."

"Before Balducinni, its primary sense was drawing." (cf. OxfordCompanion to Art). More information is given in the referencesfor 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 actualmeaning is simply senior-junior. The moral basis of theprecedence of the elder over the younger (cho-yo-no-jo)originated in China, and is reflected in the first instance inthe precedence of siblings of the same sex, which is animportant 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. Reflectionson 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 inspiredby a work of Alfred Korzybski, Science and Sanity. AnIntroduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics(1933).

Walter J. Ong seems convinced that "…formal logic is theinvention of Greek culture after it had interiorized thetechnology of alphabetic writing, and so made a permanent part ofits noetic resources the kind of thinking that alphabeticwriting made possible" (Op. cit., p. 52). He reports on A.R.Luria's book, Cognitive Development: Its Cultural and SocialFoundations (1976). After experiments designed to define howilliterate subjects react to formal logical procedures (inparticular, deductive reasoning), Luria seems to conclude thatno one actually operates in formally stated syllogisms.

Lucien Lévy-Bruhl. Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétésinférieures. Paris: Alcan, 1910. (Translated as How NativesThink by Lilian A. Clave, London: Allen & Unwin, 1926.)

Lévy-Bruhl reconnects to the notion of participation thatoriginates in Plato's philosophy and applies it to fit theso-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 thefollowing example: "In Central Brazil there lives an Indiantribe called Bororó. In the same region we also find a species ofparrots called Arara. The explorers were surprised to find thatthe Indians claimed to be Arara themselves. […] Putdifferently, a member of the Bororó tribe claims to be what heactually is and also something else just as real, namely anArara parrot" (vol. 1, pp. 5-6).

René Descartes (1596-1650), under his Latinized name RenatusCartesius, sees logic as "teaching us to conduct well our reasonin order to discover the truths we ignore" ("qui apprend à bienconduire 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 CentreNational de la Recherche Scientifique. Paris: Vrin. 1965-1973(reprint of the 1897-1909 edition). In English, the rendition byElizabeth S. Haldane and George R.T. Ross was published inLondon, Cambridge University Press, 1967.

"Logic is the art of directing reason aright, in obtaining theknowledge of things, for the instruction both of ourselves andof others. It consists of the reflections which have been made onthe four principal operations of the mind: conceiving, judging,reasoning, and disposing" (Port Royal Logic, Introduction).

John Locke (1632-1704) was looking for simple logical elementsand rules to compound them. Certainty is not the result ofsyllogistic inference. "Syllogism is at best nothing but the artof bringing to light, in debate, the little knowledge we have,without adding any other to it." An Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding (London, 1690) sets an empirical, psychologicallybased 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 Chinesephilosophical works, if he is not able to read the originaltext. The language is indeed a barrier. Due to the suggestivecharacter of Chinese philosophical writings, this barrier getsmore daunting, these writings being almost untranslatable. Intranslation, they lose their power of suggestion. In fact, atranslation 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." Thistranslates as the need to put things in agreement with oneanother by correct designations. "The main thing is therectification of names (cheng ming) […] If the names are notrectified, the words cannot fit; if the words do not fit, theaffairs [in the world] will not be successful. If these affairsare not successful, neither rites nor music can flourish. Ifrites and music do not flourish, punishments cannot be just. Ifthey are not just, people do not know how to act." The conclusionis, "The wise man should never show levity in using words;"(Lun-yu, cf. Wing-Tsit-chan, A Source Book in ChinesePhilosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

Aristotle (384-322 BCE). Logic in his view is thinking aboutthinking. The whole logical theory of the syllogism ispresented in the Analytica Priora. The Analytica Posteriora givesthe structure of deductive sciences. The notion of politicalanimal 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 theexperience of the Rsis, ancient sages who had a directperception of things. The writings that make up Veda are: RigVeda, invocatory science; Yajur Veda, sacrificial; Sama Veda,melody; Atharva Veda, of incantation. In each Veda, there is asection on the origin of the ritual, on the meaning, and on theesoteric aspect.

Mircea Eliade. Yoga. Paris: Gallimard, 1960.

"India has endeavoured…to analyze the various conditioningfactors of the human being. …this was done not in order toreach a precise and coherent explanation of the human being, asdid, for instance, Europe of the 19th century,… but in orderto know how far the zones of the human being go and see whetherthere is anything else beyond these conditionings" (p. 10).

The logic of action, as part of logical theory, deals withvarious aspects of defining what leads to reaching a goal andwhat are the factors involved in defining the goal and testingthe 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 experiencesrelated to nature: cultivating land, breeding and rearinganimals. By extension, culture (i.e., cultivating and breedingthe mind) leads to the noun describing a way of life. In thelate 18th century, Herder used the plural cultures to distinguishwhat was to become civilization. In 1883, Dilthey made thedistinction between cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften,addressing the mind) and natural sciences. The objects ofcultural sciences are man-made and the goal is understanding(Verstehen). For more information on the emergence and use ofthe term culture, see A.L. Kroeber and C. Kluckholm, Culture: aCritical Review of Concepts and Definitions, in Peabody MuseumPapers, XLVII, Harvard University Press, 1952.

Ramon Lull (Raymundus Lullus, 1235-1315) suggested a mechanicalsystem of combining ideas, an alphabet (or repertory) and acalculus for generating all possible judgments. Called Ars Magna(The Great Art), his work attracted both ironic remarks andenthusiastic followers.

Athanasius Kircher, in Polygraphia nova et universalis excombinatoria arte detecta (New and universal polygraphydiscovered from the arts of combination, Rome, 1663), tried tointroduce 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 aReal Character and a Philosophical Language).

Lotfi Zadeh introduced fuzzy logic: a logic of vague thoughquantified relations among entities and of non- clear-cutdefinitions (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 thePragmaticism Papers, approaches the subject of vagueness from anumber of different sides. He claims, for instance, that all ourmost deeply grounded and in practice indubitable beliefs areessentially vague" (cf. Peirce, 5.446). According to Peirce,vagueness is a question of representation, not a peculiarity ofthe object of the representation. He goes on to specify that thesource of vagueness is the relation between the sign and theinterpretant ("Indefiniteness in depth may be termedvagueness," cf. MSS 283, 141, 138-9). Additional commentary inNadin, The Logic of Vagueness and the Category of Synechism, inThe 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 thehistoric and methodological background to the subject inIntroduction 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 wasbased on a lecture delivered in January,1989 at Ohio StateUniversity.

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 thehistoric and methodological background to the subject inIntroduction 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 inthe many ways in which something different from what we want toknow, understand, do, or act upon intercedes between the objectof our interest, action, or thought.

G.W. Hegel. Hegels Werke, vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Vereinvon 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 theThing-in-itself: "Dieses Sein ist daher eine Sache, die an undfür 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 tolanguage.

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 asign, and so on ad infinitum" (2.303). "Something which standsto somebody in some respect or capacity" (2.228).

Other sign definitions have been given: "In the language,reciprocal presuppositions are established between theexpression (signifier) and the expressed (signified). The sign isthe manifestation of these presuppositions," (A. J. Greimas andJ. Courtés, Semiotics and Language. An Analytical Dictionary,Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983, p. 296; translationof Sémiotique. Dictionnaire Raisonné de la Théorie du Langage,Paris: Classique Hachette, 1979).

According to L. Hjelmslev, the sign is the result of semiosistaking place at the time of the language act. Benvenisteconsiders that the sign is representative of another thing, whichit evokes as a substitute.

Herbert Marcuse. The One-Dimensional Man. Studies in the Ideologyof Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

Plato. Phaedrus, and The Seventh and Eighth Letters (translatedfrom the Greek), with an introduction by Walter Hamilton.Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1973.

Regarding cave paintings, see:

Mihai Nadin. Understanding prehistoric images in thepost-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 manykinds of signs (language, images, sounds, gestures, etc.),rhetoric is connected to the pragmatic context. In ancientGreece and Rome, as well as in China and India, rhetoric wasconsidered an art and practiced for its own sake. Some considerrhetoric as one of the sources of semiotics (together with logic,hermeneutics, and the philosophy of language (cf. TzvetanTodorov, Théorie du Symbole, Paris: Ed. du Seuil, 1977). Gesturesare a part of rhetoric. Quintillian, in De institutioneoratoria, dealt with the lex gestus (law of gesture). In theRenaissance, the code of gesture was studied in detail. In ourdays of illiterate rhetoric based on stereotypes andincreasingly compressed messages, gestures gain a special statusindicative of the power of non-literacy-based ceremonies. Therhetoric of advertisem*nt 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 adefinition: "Imagine a wraparound television with programs,including three-dimensional sound, and solid objects that you canpick up and manipulate, even feel with your fingers and hands.Imagine immersing yourself in an artificial world and activelyexploring it, rather than peering at it from a fixed perspectivethrough a flat screen in a movie theater, on a television set,or on a computer display. Imagine that you are the creator aswell as the consumer of your artificial experience, with thepower to use a gesture or a word to remold the world you see andhear and feel" (p. 16).

In an Internet interview with Rheingold, Sherry Turkel points outthat computers and networks are objects- to-think-with for anetworked era. She predicts, "I believe that against all odds andagainst most current expectations, we are going to see a rebirthof psychoanalytic thinking" (cf. Brainstorms,http://www.well.com, 1996).

Literacy, Language, and Market

Reference is made to the works of Margaret Wheatley (Managementand the New Science); Michael Rothschild (Bionomics); BernardoHuberman (Dynamics of Collective Actions and Learning inMulti-agent Organizations); Robert Axtel and Joshua Epstein(creators of Sugarscape, a model of trade); and AxelLeijonhufvud (Multi-agent Systems), all published as Webtexts.

Transactions as extensions of human biology evince the complexnature of human interactions. Maturana and Varela indirectlyrefer to human transactions: "Coherence and harmony in relationsand interactions between the members of a human social systemare due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, inan ongoing social learning which their own social (linguistic)operation defines and which is possible thanks to the geneticand ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity ofthe members" (Op. cit., p.199). They diagram the shift fromminimum autonomy of components (characteristic of organisms) tomaximum autonomy of components (characteristic of humansocieties).

A Walk Through Wall Street, in US News and World Report, Nov. 16,1987, pp. 64-65. One from among many reminiscences by MartinMayer, author of Madison Avenue, Wall Street, Men and Money.

"Wall Street as price setter for the country dealt with much morethan pieces of paper. Commodities markets proliferated. The fishmarket was on the East River at Fulton; the meat market on theHudson just to the north…. The 'physicals' of all commoditiesmarkets were present…there were cotton sacks in the warehouseof the Cotton Exchange, coffee bags stored here for deliveryagainst the contracts at the Sugar and Coffee Exchange onHanover Square and often a smell of roasting coffee.

"In the 1950's, this was a male world-women were not allowed towork on the floor of the Stock Exchange, let alone becomemembers. The old-timers explained with great sincerity that therewas no ladies room."

The report points out that today Wall Street "sees less of thereal world outside, depends more on abstract informationprocessed through data machinery and more than ever responds toforces 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 acognition of a mind (2.242). Object: the Mediate object is theobject outside the Sign; …the sign must indicate it by a hint(Letter to Lady Welby, December 23, 1908). Interpretant: theeffect that the sign would produce upon any mind (Letter to LadyWelby, March 14, 1909).

In reference to the symbolic nature of market transactions,another Peircean definition is useful: "Symbols grow. They comeinto being by development out of other signs…. We think only insigns…. If a man makes a new symbol, it is by thoughtsinvolving concepts" (2.307).

The pragmatic thought is, nevertheless, inherent in any signprocess. Markets embody sign processes in the pragmatic field.

Winograd and Flores state bluntly "A business (like any otherorganization) is constituted as a network of recurrentconversations" (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 productionfunction." (p. 14). Chandler further notes that "expanded outputby a change in capital-labor ratios is brought about by economiesof scale which incorporate economies of speed…. Wholesalersand 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. SelectedNotulae 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 thecreation of the European Monetary System (EMS), with its coinbeing the European Currency Unit (ECU) and the Exchange RateMechanism (ERM). As a basket of European currencies, the ECUserves as a reserve currency in Europe and probably beyond. Itis not the currency of choice for international transactions, andas of the Maastricht negotiations, which affirmed the need for aCommunity currency, the ECU was not adopted for this purpose.Although predominant weight in the basket (over 30%) is given tothe German mark, the ECU is designed on the assumption that itis quite improbable that a certain currency will move in the samedirection against all others. Therefore, exchange rates arestatistically 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 thatdebases language, drains thought, and undoes dignity? If thebarrage of advertising, unchanged in its tone and texture, weredevoted to some other purpose-say the exaltation of the publicsector-it would be recognized in a moment for the corrosiveelement that it is. But as the voice of the private sector itescapes this startled notice. I mention it only to point outthat a deep source of moral decay for capitalism arises from itsown doings, not from that of its governing institutions."

Literacy and Education

Will Seymour Monroe. Comenius and the Beginnings of EducationalReform. New York: Arno Press, 1971, (originally printed in1900).

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 6-8siècles. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962.

Bernard Bischoff. Elementärunterricht und probationes pennae inder ersten Hälfte des Mittelalters, in Mittelalterliche StudienI, 1966, pp. 74-87.

James Nehring. The Schools We Have. The Schools We Want. AnAmerican 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 eventuallyevolved into cities.

The City-State in Five Cultures. Edited with an introduction byRobert 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, alsofor the teaching of law. Students from all over Latin Europe cameto study there. Around 1103, the University of Paris wasfounded; by the middle of the 13th century, four faculties haddeveloped: theology, canon law, medicine and the seven arts. (Theseven 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 studiumgenerale or university was established at Oxford (pp 916-921).

The name university derives from the fact that the essences oruniversals were taught (cf. Encyclopedia Britannica, 15thEdition, 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; signifiedmeasure or proportion.

Some of the work linking the early knowledge of the Latin andGreek heritage of European thought, especially that part shutoff to Christendom in Moorish Jerusalem, Alexandria, Cairo,Tunis, Sicily, and Spain, was transmitted by the Jews, whotranslated works in Arabic to Latin. The Moslems preserved thetexts of Euclid and works dealing with alchemy and chemistry. In1165, Gerald of Cremona studied Arabic in Spain in order totranslate works of Aristotle (Posterior Analysis, On the Heavensand the Earth, among others), Euclid (Elements, Data),Archimedes, Apollonius of Perga, Galen, works of Greek astronomyand Greco-Arabic physics, 11 books of Arabic medicine and 14works of Arabic astronomy and mathematics from the Arabic toLatin. Beginning 1217, Michael Scot translated a number ofAristotle'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 (translatedfrom the Latin, with historical and paleographical commentary,by William A. Wallace). Notre Dame IN: University of Notre DamePress. 1977

Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727). In 1687, he published PhilosophiaePrincipia Mathematica, in which he offered explanations for themovement of planets. In this work, the abstraction of force (ofattraction) is constituted and a postulate is formulated: everyparticle of matter in the universe attracts every other with aforce whose magnitude depends directly upon the product of theirmasses and inversely upon the square of the distance between thetwo.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) published in 1916 his contribution asDie Grundlagen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie, in which hereferred to the attraction of massive objects. The cosmic realityof such objects and of huge distances and high velocities isquite different from the mechanical universe under considerationby Galileo and Newton. Movement of planets cause the curving ofspace. Einstein's theory shows that the curvature of space timeevolves dynamically. Newton's theory turned out to be anapproximation 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 inparticular sciences or in the humanities. The conception ofmathematics as a model for the sciences as well as for thehumanities has been repeatedly expressed throughout history. Insome cases, mathematization represents the search for abstractstructures. Today mathematization is often taken to mean modelingon computer programs.

Académie Française: French library academy established byCardinal Richelieu in 1634. Its original purpose was to maintainstandards of literary taste and to establish the literarylanguage. 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 midstof 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 exclusivelydevoted to, or to satisfy the vanity of having their namesattached to the enterprise," (p. 244).

Bart Simpson, the main character of the animated cartoon seriesof the same name, created by Matt Groening. Bart was firstsketched in 1987; the television series first aired in the winterof 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 externalcommitments, its personnel are involved in a network ofconversations" (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, 1992at Stuyvesant High School in New York City) asks whether theHolocaust is an Italian revolutionary movement, and if Mein Kampfwas Hitler's body guard or his summer retreat, why should anyonebe surprised that American students show no better choices thanthose 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 ofpublic record. The processing and interpretation of data, evenin the age of electronic processing, takes time once data hasbeen collected. The Statistical Handbook on the American Family(Phoenix AZ: The Orynx Press, 1992), for instance, deals withtrends covering 1989-1990. The numbers are intriguing. Well over85% of the adult population married by the time of their 45thbirthday, but only around 60% are currently married. 10% aredivorced and almost as many widowed. The general conclusionsabout the family are: There is a decline in marital stabilitywith over one million children per year affected by the divorceof their parents. Less than 20% of the people see marriage as alifetime relationship. The POSSLQ (persons of opposite sexsharing living quarters) is well over 5% of the population. Thesize of the average American household shrank from 3.7 personsover 40 years ago to 2.6 recently. Interracial marriages, whiletriple in number compared to 1970, include slightly below 2% ofthe 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 andnatural forms of cooperation. Regardless of the types leading towhat was called the family nucleus (husband and wife), familiesembody reciprocal obligations. The formalization of family lifein 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 isrelatively recent, nations were frequently characterized as anextended family, although the processes reflect structuralcharacteristics of human practical experiences different fromthose 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, November22, 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 theDark 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 limitedscale, marks the Amish and Mennonite families. The familycontract is very powerful. Succeeding generations care for eachother to the extent that the home always includes quarters forthe elderly. Each new generation is endowed in order to maintainthe path of self-sufficiency. The Amish wedding (the subject ofStephen Scott's book of the same title, Intercourse PA: GoodBooks, 1988), as well as the role the family plays in educatingchildren (Children in Amish Society: Socialization and CommunityEducation, by J.A. Hosteter and G. Enders Huntington, New York:Holt Rinehart and Winston, 1971) are indicative of this familylife.

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 theprinciples 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 theirrespective religions:

Bhagavad Gita: part of the epic poem Mahabharata, this Sanskritdialog between Krishna and Prince Arjuna poetically describes apath 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); forChistians, the first five books of the Old Testament: Genesis,Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. These describe theorigin of the world, the covenant between God and the people ofIsrael, the Exodus from Egypt and return to the Promised Land,and rules for religious and social behavior. Together with thebooks labeled Prophets and Writings, they make up the entireOld Testament. The controversy among Jews, Roman Catholics,Eastern Christians, and Protestants about the acceptance of somebooks, the order of books, and translations reflect thedifferent perspectives adopted within these religions.

New Testament: the Christian addition to the Bible comprises 27books. 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 ofthis world and the beginning of a new one).

Koran (al Qur'an): the holy book of the Moslems, is composed of114 chapters (called suras). Belief in Allah, descriptions ofrules for religious and social life, calls to moral life, andvivid descriptions of hell make up most of the text. Accordingto Moslem tradition, Mohammed ascended the mount an illiterate.He came down with the Koran, which Allah had taught him towrite.

I-Ching: attributed to Confucius, composed of five books,containing a history of his native district, a system fordivining the future (Book of Changes), a description ofceremonies and the ideal government (Book of Rites), and acollection of poetry. In their unity, all these books affirmprinciples of cooperation, reciprocal respect, and describeetiquette 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 worksprovide 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 thatca. three billion people acknowledge religion in our days. Thenumbers are misleading, though. For instance, only 2.4% of thepopulation in England attends religious services; in Germany,the percentage is 9%; in some Moslem countries, serviceattendance is close to 100%. The "3-day Jews" (two days of RoshHashana 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 theBuddhists of funeral ceremonials belong to the vast majoritythat refers to religion as a cultural identifier. Many priestsand higher order ecumenical workers recite their prayers as epicpoetry.

Atheism. The "doctrine that God does not exist, that existence ofGod is a false belief" (cf. M. Eliade, Encyclopedia of Religion,vol. 1, pp 479-480). Literature on atheism continuouslyincreases. A selection showing the many angles of atheism canserve 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. Basedon observations in Central Africa. Cambridge: The UniversityPress, 1968.

"A pagan Najakunsa believes himself to be dependent upon hisdeceased 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. 650million), Hinduism is an eclectic religion. Indigenous elementsand 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 dominatingreligious and social life in Indiat The caste system classifiesmembers 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, thepractice of yoga are the forms of religious action. The divineTrinity of Hinduism unites Brahma (the creator), Vishna (thepreserver), and Shiva (the destroyer).

Taoism: In the Tao Te Ching (Book of the Way and Its Virtue), onereads: "The Tao of origin gives birth to the One. The One givesbirth to the Two. The Two gives birth to the Three. The Threeproduces 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 dualityfrom which everything sprung once a ternary relation isestablished. 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). Confuciusexpressed the philosophy on which this religion is based onsayings and dialogues during the 6th-5th century BCE. Challengedby the mysticism of religions (Taoism, Buddhism) in the area ofits inception, some followers incorporated their spirit innew-Confucianism (during the period known as the Sung dynasty,960-1279).

Judaism: Centered on the belief in one God, Judaism is thereligion of the Book (the Torah), established at around 2000 BCEby Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Judaism promotes the idea of humanimprovement, as well as the Messianic thought. Strongdedication to community and sense of family are part of thereligious practice.

Islam: The contemporary religion with the highest number ofadherents (almost 9000 million Muslims on record), and growingfast, Islam celebrates Mohammed, who received the Koran fromAllah. Acknowledged at 610, Islam (which means "submission toGod") places its prophet in the line started with Abraham,continued with Moses, and redirected by Jesus. The five pillarsof Islam are: Allah is the only God, prayer (facing Mecca) fivetimes a day, giving of alms, fast of Ramadan, and pilgrimage toMecca.

Christianity: in its very many denominations (Roman Catholic,Greek Orthodox, Protestant, which split further into varioussects, such as Baptist, Pentecostal, Episcopal, Lutheran, Mormon,Unitarian, Quakers), claims to have its origin in Jesus Christand completes the Old Testament of the Hebrews with the NewTestament of the apostles. It is impossible to capture the manyvarieties of Christianity in characteristics unanimouslyaccepted. Probably the major celebrations of Christianity (someoriginating in pre-Christian pagan rituals related to naturalcycles), i.e., Christmas and Easter, better reflect elements ofunity. Christianity promotes respect for moral values, dedicationto 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 doctrinesas these embody ideals of spiritual truth. The name comes fromBaha Ullah (Glory of God), adopted by its founder Mirza HusainAli Nuri, in 1863, in extension of the al-Bab religion.Universal education, equality between male and female, and worldorder and peace are its goals. The religion is estimated to have5 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 setthe laws of mankind. He drew eight signs in order to dominate theworld." 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 Popeand for attempting to establish German supremacy in religiousmatters.

Joan of Arc (1412-1431). A plowman's daughter who, as the storygoes, listened to the voices of saints Michael, Catherine, andMargaret. Thus inspiring the French to victory over Britishinvaders, she made possible the coronation of Charles II atReims. Captured by the English, she was declared a heretic andburned at the stake. In 1920, Pope Benedict XV declared her asaint.

Jan Hus (1372-1415). Religious reformer whose writings exercisedinfluence over all the Catholic world. In De Ecclesia, he setforth that scripture is the sole source of Christian doctrine.

Martin Luther (1483-1546). A priest from Saxony, a scholar ofScripture, and a linguist, who is famous for having attackedclerical abuses. Through his writings (The 95 Theses), heprecipitated the Reformation.

Moslem armies defeated the forces of the Holy Roman Empire, ledby Charles Martel, at Poitiers (cf. J.H. Roy, La Bataille dePoitiers, Octobre 733, Paris: Gallimard, 1966).

Crusades: a series of military expeditions taking place from 1095to 1270) intent on reclaiming Jerusalem and the holy Christianshrines from Turkish control.

David Kirsch poses the questions: Is 97% of human activityconcept-free, driven by control mechanisms we share not onlywith 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 InformationSystems (1989). The CD-Word Interactive Biblical Library (1990),published by the CD-Word Library, Inc. offers 16 of the world'smost 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 formcongregations. The success of the method has led to branchcongregations all over the USA.

Tademan Isobe, author of The Japanese and Religion, states: "Thegeneral religious awareness of the Japanese does not include anultimate God with human attributes, as the God of Christianity.Instead, Japanese sense the mystery of life from all events andnatural phenomena around them in their daily lives. They havewhat might be called a sense of pathos" (cf. Web positing ofAugust, 1996, http://www.ariadne.knee.kioto-u.ac.jp).

A Mouthful of Microwave

From a strictly qualitative perspective, the amount of foodpeople eat is represented by numbers so large that we end uplooking at them in awe, without understanding what they mean. Themaintenance of life is an expensive proposition. Nevertheless,once we go beyond the energetic equation, i.e., in the realm ofdesires, the numbers increase exponentially. It can be arguedthat this increase (of an order of magnitude of 1,000) is higherthan 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 ofthe 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 ExtraordinaryHistory 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, informativereading 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 filmdirected by Claude Zidi, Luis de Funés became, as the Frenchpress put it, "the Napoleon of gastronomy" fighting the barbariantaste of industrial food, seen as a real danger to the authentictaste of France.

At the initiative of the Minister of Culture, a Conseil Nationaldes Arts Culinaires (CNAC) was founded in 1989. Culinary art andgastronomic heritage were made part of the French nationalidentity. Awakening of Taste (Le reveil du goût) is a programlaunched in the elementary schools. A curriculum originating from the French Institute of Taste is used to explain what makesFrench food taste good. The CNAC provides a nationwide inventoryof local foods. A University of Taste (Centre de Goût) would beestablished 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 byJoseph Sommers Vehling, New York: Dover Publications, 1977)first appeared in England in 1705, in a Latin version, based onthe manuscripts of this work dating to the 8th and 9thcenturies. Apicius was supposed to have lived from 80 BCE to 40CE. This book has since been questioned as a hoax, although itremains a reference text.

Lucius Junius Moderatus Columella. De re rustica. (12 volumes onagriculture. Latin text with German translation by WillRichter). 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: itsframe containing, against a dark background, various objects(bowls, boxes, saucers, chopsticks, tiny piles of food, a littlegray ginger, a few shreds of orange vegetable, a background ofbrown sauce)…it might be said that these trays fulfill thedefinition of painting which according to Piero della Francescais merely demonstration of surfaces and bodies becoming evensmaller 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 notdeep: the edible substance is without a precious heart, without aburied power, without a vital secret: no Japanese dish isendowed with a center (the alimentary center implied in the Westby the rite which consists of arranging the meal, of surroundingor covering the article of food); here everything is theornament of another ornament: first of all because on the table,on the tray, food is never anything but a collection offragments, none of which appears privileged by an order ofingestion; to eat is not to respect a menu (an itinerary ofdishes), but to select, with a light touch of the chopsticks,sometimes one color, sometimes another, depending on the kind ofinspiration which appears in its slowness as the detached,indirect accompaniment of the conversation…." (p. 22).

The writings of the various religions (Koran, Torah, NewTestament) contain strictures and ceremonial rules concerningfood. 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, SantaBarbara CA: ABC-Clio, 1991), the author gives a starkdescription 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 gohungry" (p. ix).

It is not the first time in history that starvation and famineaffect people all over the world. What is new is the scale ofthe problem, affecting well over one billion human beings. InJune, 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 causesof inadequate nutrition are many and closely interrelated,including ecological, sanitary, and cultural constraints, but theprincipal cause is poverty. This in turn results fromsocioeconomic development patterns that in most of the poorercountries have been characterized by a high degree ofconcentration of power, wealth, and incomes in the hands ofrelatively small elites of national and foreign individuals orgroups. […] The percentage of undernourished is highest inAfrica, the Far East, and Latin America; the hunger distributionis 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. TheBellagio Declaration, Overcoming hunger in the 1990's, adoptedby a group of 23 prominent development and food policy planners,development practitioners, and scientists noticed that 14 millionchildren under the age of five years die annually from hungerrelated causes.

Among the organizations created to help feed the world are CARE,Food for Peace, OXFAM, Action Hunger, The Hunger Project, Savethe Children, World Vision, the Heifer Project. This list doesnot include the many national and local organizations that feedthe 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 inearly 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 EarlyAlexandria. 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 andTechnology. The Lives and Achievements of 1195 Great Scientistsfrom 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 rowcultivation and hoeing ("There are 3 inches of moisture at theend of a hoe,"), the iron plow, the horse harness, cast iron, thecrank handle, lacquer ("the first plastic"), the decimal system,the suspension bridge as originating from China. In theIntroduction, Joseph Needham writes: "Chauvinistic Westerners, ofcourse, always try to minimize the indebtedness of Europe toChina in Antiquity and the Middle Ages" (p.7).

What is of interest in the story is the fact that all thesediscoveries occur in a context of configurational focus, ofsynthesis, not in the sequential horizon of analytic Westernlanguages. In some cases, the initial non-linear thought islinearized. This is best exemplified by comparing Chineseprinting methods, intent on letters seen as images, with thosefollowing Gutenberg's movable type. Obviously, a text perceivedas a holistic entity, such as the Buddhist charm scroll (printedin 704-751) or the Buddhist Diamond Sutra of 868 (cf. p. 112)are different from the Bibles printed by Gutenberg and hisfollowers. Contributions to the history of science from Indiaand the Middle East also reveal that many discoveries celebratedas accomplishments of Western analytical science wereanticipated 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: Essaysin African History, Science, and Civilization. London: KarnakHouse, 1990.

Magic, myth, and science influence each other in many ways.Writings on the subject refer to specific aspects (magic andscience, myth as a form of rational discourse) or to the broaderissues of their respective epistemological condition.

Richard Cavendish. A History of Magic. London: Weidenfeld &
Nicholson, 1977.

Gareth Knight. Magic and the Western Mind: Ancient Knowledge andthe Transformation of Consciousness. St. Paul: LlewellynPublications, 1991.

Umberto Eco. Foucault's Pendulum. New York: Harcourt, Brace
Jovanovich, 1989.

In this novel, Umberto Eco deals, in a light vein, with theoccult considered as the true science.

Jean Malbec de Tresfel. Abrège de la Théorie et des véritablesprincipes de l'art appelé chymie, qui est la troisième partie oucolonne de la vraye medecine hermetique. Paris: Chezl'auteur,1671.

Adam McLean. The Alchemical Mandala. A Survey of the Mandala inthe 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 Symbolismand 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 toPrediction. 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 fa*gan. 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-sixplants 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-RothPublications, 1990.

Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Nobel prize laureate, 1921.

He discusses the conditions of existence for which we are notadjusted 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: "Thewords of the language, as they are written or spoken, do notseem to play any role in my mechanisms of thought. The physicalentities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certainsigns and more or less clear images which can be 'voluntarily'reproduced or combined" cf. A Testimonial from ProfessorEinstein, in The Psychology of Invention in the MathematicalField, edited by J. Hadamard, Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1945, p. 142.

Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines, Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1990.

"Rather than defining intelligence in terms of its constituentprocesses, we might define it in terms of its goal: the abilityto 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 naturalphilosophers," was translated by Lucretius into Latin. HisLetter to Herodotus and Master Sayings (Kyriai doxai) wereintegrated in De rerum natura (On Nature). A good reference bookis Clay Diskin's Lucretius and Epicurus, Ithaca: CornellUniversity 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 (translatedfrom the Latin, with historical and paleographical commentary,by William A. Wallace). Notre Dame IN: University of Notre DamePress, 1977.

Starting out as a dictionnaire raisonné of the sciences, thearts, and crafts, the Encyclopédie became a major form ofphilosophic expression in the 18th century. Philosophersdedicated themselves to the advancement of the sciences andsecular thought, and to the social program of the Enlightenment.The Encyclopédie showcased new directions of thought in allbranches of intellectual activity. The emergent valuescorresponding to the pragmatic condition of time, tolerance,innovation, and freedom, were expressed in the Encyclopedicwritings and embodied in the political program of the revolutionsit inspired. One of the acknowledged sources of this orientationis Ephraim Chamber's Cyclopedia (or an Universal Dictionary ofArts and Sciences), London, 1728.

The examination of star naming is in some ways an exercise in thegeology of pragmatic contexts. The acknowledgment of what ishigh, over, above, and beyond the observer's actions suggestedpower. The sequence of day and night, of seasons, of thechanging weather is a mixture of repetitive patterns andunexpected occurrences, even meteorites, some related to wind,fire, water. Once the shortest and the longest days areobserved, and the length of day equal to that of night (theequinox), the sky becomes integrated in the pragmatics of humanself-constitution by virtue of affecting cycles of work.Furthermore, parallel to the mytho-magical explanation of whathappens follows the association of mythical characters, mainlyto stars. Saturn, or Chronos, was the god of time, a star knownfor its steady movement; Jupiter, known by the Egyptians asAmmon, the most impressive planet, and apparently the biggest.Details of this geology of naming could lead to a book. Here aresome 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, eventsoccur, movement takes place. Objects have relative positions andtheir movement has relative directions. The geometric notion ofspace expands beyond 3-dimensionality.

Paradigm: Since the time Thomas Kuhn published The Structure ofScientific Revolutions (1962), the concept of paradigm wasadopted in philosophic jargon. The underlying thesis is thatscience operates in a research space dominated by successiveresearch models, or paradigms. The domination of such a paradigmdoes not make it more important than previous scientificexplanations (paradigms are not comparable). Rather it effects acertain convergence in the unifying framework it ascertains.

Logos: ancient Greek for word, was many times defined, almostalways partially, as a means to express thoughts. Bygeneralization, logos became similar to thought or reason, andthus a way to control the word through speech (legein). In thislast sense, logos was adapted by Christianity as the Word ofDivinity.

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 ofartifacts" (art objects included).

Francis Bacon (1561-1626): Statesman and philosopher,distinguished for establishing the empiric methods forscientific research. Intent on analytical tools, he set outmethods of induction which proved to be effective in thedistinction between scientific and philosophical research. In TheAdvancement of Learning (1605) and especially Novum Organum(1620), Bacon set forth principles that affected the developmentof modern science.

René Descartes (1596-1650): Probably one of the most influentialphilosophers and scientists, whose contribution, at a time ofchange and definition, marked Western civilization in many ways.The Cartesian dualism he developed ascertains a physical (resextensa) and a thinking (res cogitans) substance. The first isextended, can be measured and divided; the second isindivisible. The body is part of res extensa, the mind(including thoughts, desires, volition) is res cogitans. Hisrules for the Direction of the Understanding (1628), influencedby his mathematical concerns, submitted a model for theacquisition of knowledge. The method of doubt, i.e., rejectionof everything not certain, expressed in the famous Discourse onMethod (1637), together with the foundation of a model of sciencethat combines a mechanic image of the universe describedmathematically, 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-dimensionalspace. High priests (circular figures) forbid discussing a thirddimension. Abruptly, the square is transported into spaceland andpeers astonished into his 2-dimensional homeland.

Spatial reasoning: a type of reasoning that incorporates theexperience of space either in direct forms (geometric reasoning)or indirectly (through terms such as close, remote, amongothers).

Linearity: relation among dependent phenomena that can bedescribed through a linear function.

Non-linearity: relations among dependent phenomena that cannot bedescribed through a linear function, but through exponential andlogarithmic 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 awhole are connected. Of special interest is the coherence ofknowledge.

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 specialvolume of the journal Artificial Intelligence, 47:1-3, January1991. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Self-organization is a dominant topic in artificial liferesearch. The Annual Conference on Artificial Life (Santa Fe)resulted in a Proceedings in which self-organization is amplydiscussed. Some aspects pertinent to the subject can be foundin:

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 nanotechnologycan be found on the Internet athttp://www.nanothinc.com/webmaster @nanothinc.com and athttp://www.foresight.org/webmaster@foresight.org.

Richard Feynman, in a talk given in 1959, stated that "Theprinciples of physics…do not speak against the possibility ofmaneuvering things atom by atom. […] The problems of chemistryand biology can be greatly helped if our ability to…do thingson an atomic level is ultimately developed, a developmet which Ithink 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 directfunds, such as those made available through the National ScienceFoundation, are rather scarce, funding through various government agencies (Defense, Agriculture, Energy, NASA) and throughprivate sources amounts to hundreds of billions of dollars. Howmuch of this goes to fundamental research and how much to appliedscience is not very clear, as even the distinction betweenfundamental 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 thehistoric and methodological background to the subject inIntroduction 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 YoungMarx 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 ofsentences, handling the many values of the equivocal or theambiguous.

Charles S. Peirce ascertained that all necessary reasoning ismathematical reasoning, and that all mathematical reasoning isdiagrammatic. He explained diagrammatic reasoning as being basedon a diagram of the percept expressed and on operations on thediagram. The visual nature of a diagram ("composed of lines, oran array of signs…") affects the nature of the operationsperformed on it (cf. On the Algebra of Logic: A Contribution tothe Philosophy of Notation, in The American Journal ofMathematics, 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: Brockmanmaintains that there is a shift occurring in public discourse,with scientists supplanting philosophers, artists, and people ofletters as the ones who render "visible the deeper meanings ofour 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 isconvincingly embodied, attracted the attention of John StuartMill, who wrote The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Compte(Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1871). Some of Compte's earlywritings 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 atheory of society based on naturalist principles. What he definedas the "super- organic," which stands for social, is subjected toevolution. 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 ofthe Holocaust, Maus became a book and, on its completion, theMuseum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a show to the artist.Over 1500 interlocking drawings tell the story of Vladek, theartist's father. The comic book convention was questioned as toits appropriateness for the tragic theme.

Milli Vanilli, the group that publicly acknowledged that thealbum Girl You Know It's True, for which it was awarded theGrammy for Best New Artist of 1989, was vocally interpreted bysomeone else. The prize winners, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus,credited for the vocals, were hardly the first to take advantageof the new means for creating the illusion of interpretation. Asthe 'visual entertainment," they became the wrapper on a packagecontaining the music of less video-reputed singers. Theirproducer, Frank Tarian (i.e., Franz Reuther) was on his second"fake." Ten years earlier, he revealed that the pop group BoneyM. was his own "mouthpiece." Image-driven pop music sells thefantasy of teen idol to a musically illiterate public. Packagedmusic extends to simulations of instruments and orchestras aswell.

Beauty and the Beast is the story of a handsome prince in 18thcentury France turned into an eight-foot tall, hideous, hairybeast. Unless he finds someone to love him before his 21stbirthday, the curse cast upon him by the old woman he tried tochase away will become permanent. In a nearby village, Maurice, alovable eccentric inventor, his daughter Belle, who keeps hernose in books and her head in the clouds, and Gaston, the machoof the place, go through the usual "he (Gaston) loves/wants her;she does not care for/shuns him, etc." As its 30th full-lengthanimation, this Walt Disney picture is a musical fairy tale thattakes advantage of sophisticated computer animation. Its over onemillion drawings (the work of 600 animators, artists, andtechnicians) are animated, some in sophisticated 3-dimensionalcomputer animation. The technological performance, resultingfrom an elaborate database, provided attractive numbers, such asthe Be Our Guest sequence (led by the enchanted candelabra,teapot, and clock characters, entire chorus lines of dancingplates, goblets, and eating utensils perform a musical act), orthe emotional ballroom sequence. Everything is based on theaccepted challenge: "OK, go ahead and fool us," once upon a timeuttered by some art director to the computer-generated imageryspecialists of the company. The story (by Mme. Leprince deBeaumont) inspired Jean Cocteau, who wrote the screenplay for(and also directed) La Belle et La Bête (1946), featuring JeanMarais, Josette Day, and Marcel André.

Anselm Kiefer (b. 1945). Seduced by the relation to history, heproduces allegories in reference to myth, art, religion, andculture. His compositions are strongly evocative, not lacking acertain critical dimension, sometimes focused on art itself,which repeatedly failed during times of challenge (those of NaziGermany included).

Terminator 2 is a movie about two cyborgs who come from thefuture, one to destroy, the other to protect, a boy who willaffect the future when he grows up. It is reported to be the mostexpensive film made as of 1991 (over 130 characters are killed),costing 85 to 100 million dollars; cf. Stanley Kauffmann, The NewRepublic, 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 artworkscritical of the bourgeois taste.

The relation between art and language occasioned a major showorganized by the Société des Expositions du Palais de Beaux-Artsin Brussels. A catalogue was edited by Jan Debbant and PatriciaHolm (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 thefoolish rational explanation of the world" (1916, Zurich).Richard Huelsenbeck stated that "Dada cannot be understood, itmust be experienced" (1920). More on this subject can be foundin:

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 withthe support of the Dia Art Foundation, which bought the land andmaintains and allows for limited public access to the work. Asthe prototypical example of land-art, this lattice of lightningrods covers an area of one mile by one kilometer. Filled with400 rods placed equidistantly, the lightning field is theinterplay between precision and randomness. During the stormseason in New Mexico, the work is brought to life by many boltsof lightning. The artist explained that "Light is as importantas lightening." Indeed, during its 24-hour cycle, the field goesthrough a continuous metamorphosis. Nature and art interact infascinating ways.

Christo's latest work was entitled Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin,July 1995. Regarding Christo's many ambitious projects, somereferences are:

Erich Himmel, Editor. Christo. The Pont-Neuf Wrapped, Paris1975-1985. 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 inWeimar, by Walter Gropius. Its significance results from thephilosophy of education expressed in the Bauhaus program, towhich distinguished artists contributed, and from the impressivenumber of people who, after studying at the Bauhaus, affirmed its methods and vision in worlds of art, architecture, and neweducational programs. Among the major themes at Bauhaus were thedemocratization of artistic creation (one of the last romanticideas of our time), the social implication of art, and theinvolvement of technology. Collaborative, interdisciplinaryefforts were encouraged; the tendency to overcome cultural andnational boundaries was tirelessly pursued; the rationalistattitude became the hallmark of all who constituted the school.In 1925, the Bauhaus had to move to Dessau, where it remaineduntil 1928, before it settled in Berlin. After Gropius, thearchitects Hans Mayer (1930-1932) and Mies van der Rohe(1932-1933) worked on ascertaining the international styleintended to offer visual coherence and integrity. In some ways,the Bauhaus was continued in the USA, since many of itspersonalities and students had to emigrate from Nazi Germanyand found safe haven in the USA.

Leon Battista Alberti (15th century) wrote extensively onpainting and sculpture: De pictura and De Statua were translatedby Cecil Grayson (London: Phaidon, 1972). Alberti's writings onthe art of building, De re aedificatoria, was translated byJoseph 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 Nudescendant un escalier, considered "an explosion in a fireworksfactory" to his celebrated ready-mades, Duchamp pursued the callto "de-artify" art. Selection became the major operation inoffering objects taken out of context and appropriating them asaesthetic icons. He argued that "Art is a path to regions whereneither time nor space dominate."

Happening: An artistic movement based on the interaction amongdifferent forms of expression. Allan Kaprow (at Douglas Collegein 1958) and the group associated with the Reuben gallery in NewYork (Kaprow, Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Whitman, Hausen)brought the movement to the borderline where distinctionsbetween the artist and the public are erased. Later, the movementexpanded 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. Editedby 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 19thcentury, in reaction to the Industrial Revolution and positivistattitudes permeating art and existence. Writers such asBeaudelaire, Rimbaud, Maeterlinck, Huysmans, composers (Wagner,in the first place), painters such as Gauguin, Ensor, Puvis deChavannes, Moreau, and Odilon Redon created in the spirit ofsymbolism. At the beginning of the 20th century, symbolismattempted to submit a unified alphabet of images. Jung went sofar as to identify its psychological basis.

James Joyce (1882-1941). Ulysses. A critical and synoptic (thoughvery controviersial) edition, prepared by Hans Walter Gablerwith Wolfgang Steppe and Claus Melchior. New York: GarlandPublishers, 1984.

Antoine Furetière. Essais d'un Dictionnaire Universel. Geneva:Slatkine Reprints, 1968 (reprint of the original published in1687 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, witha new introduction by Francis Steegmuller). New York: ModernLibrary, 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 the1980'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 exemplifiedby her own writing. How to Write, initially published in 1931 inParis (Plain Editions), states provocatively that "Clarity is ofno importance because nobody listens and nobody knows what youmean no matter what you mean nor how clearly you mean what youmean." In an interview with Robert Haas, 1946) in Afterword,Gertrude Stein stated that "Any human being putting down wordshad to make sense out of them," (p. 101). "I write with my eyesnot with my ears or mouth," (p. 103). Moreover: "My writing isas clear as mud, but mud settles and clear streams run on anddisappear."

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 areexplorations" (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 organizingprinciple for all existence, a model for achieving bureaucracy.

It seems that the first comic strip in America was The YellowKid, by Richard F. Outcault, in the New York World, 1896. Amongthe early comic strips: George Harriman's Krazy Kat (held as anexample of American Dadaism); Windsor McKay's Little Nemo inSlumberland; Milton Caniff's Terry and the Pirated.

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944). Il Futurismo was writtenin 1908 as the preface to a volume of his poetry and waspublished in 1909. Its manifesto was set forth in the words "Wedeclare that the splendor of the world has been increased by anew beauty: the beauty of speed." Breaking with the livresquepast, the Italian Futurism took it upon itself to "liberate thisland from the fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists,guides, and antiquarians." The break with the past was a breakwith its values as these were rooted in literate culture.

Dziga Vertov (born Denis Arkadievich Kaufman,1986-1954). Becameknown through his innovative montage juxtaposition, about whichhe wrote in Kino-Glas (Kino-Eye). The film We (1922) is a fantasyof movement. Kino-Pravda (1922-1925) were documentaries ofextreme expressionism, with very rich visual associations.

Experiments in simultaneity are also experiments in theunderstanding of the need to rethink art as a representation ofdynamic events.

Michail Fyodorovich Larionov (1881-1964). Russian-born Frenchpainter and designer, a pioneer in abstract painting, after manyexperiences in figurative art and with a declared obsession withthe aesthetic experience of simultaneity. Founder of theRayonist movement-together with his wife, Natalia Goncharova(1881-1962), painter, stage designer, and sculptor-Larionov wentfrom a neo-primitive painting style to cubism and futurism inorder to finally synthesize them in a style reflecting theunderstanding of the role of light (in particular, as rays). HisPortrait of Tatline (1911) is witness to the synthesis thatRayonism represented.

Fernand Léger (1881-1955). Machine Aesthetics, 1923.

"La vitesse est la loi de la vie moderne." (Speed is the modernlaw of life.)

Libraries, Books, Readers

In his Introduction to A Carlyle Reader, (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984), G.B. Tennyson is unequivocal in his appreciation:"No one who hopes to understand the nineteenth century in Englandcan dispense with Carlyle," (p. xiv). Since nineteenth centuryEngland is of such relevance to major developments in thecivilization of literacy, one can infer that Tennyson's thoughtapplies to persons trying to understand the emergence andconsolidation of literacy. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote Signsof Times. (He took the title from the New Testament, Matthew16:3, "O ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the sky, butcan ye not discern the sign of the times?") He condemns his agein the following terms: "Were we required to characterize thisage of ours by any single epithet, we should be tempted to callit, not a Heroical, Devotional, Philosophical, or Moral Age. Itis the Age of Machinery, in every outward and inward sense ofthat word; the age which, with its whole undivided might,forwards, teaches and practises the great art of adapting meansto ends. Nothing is done directly, or by hand; all is by rule andcalculated contrivance. For the simplest operation, some helpsand accompaniments, some cunning abbreviating process is inreadiness. Our old modes of exertion are all discredited, andthrown aside. On every hand, the living artisan is driven fromhis workshop to make room for a speedier, inanimate one," (cf.Reader, p. 34). Parallels to the reactions to new technology inour age are more than obvious.

New Worlds, Ancient Texts. The Cultural Impact of an Encounter, amajor public documentary exhibit at the New York Public Library,September 1992-January 1992, curated by Anthony Grafton, assistedby April G. Shelford.

At the other end of the spectrum defined by Carlyle's faith inbooks comes a fascinating note from Louis Hennepin (1684): "Wetold them [the Indians] that we know all things through writtendocuments. These savages asked, 'Before you came to the landswhere we live, did you rightly know that we were here?' We wereobliged to say no. 'Then you didn't know all things throughbooks, and they didn't tell you everything'"

A. Grafton, A. Shelford, and N. Siraisi,The Power of Traditionand the Shock of Discovery, Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1992.

In comparison to Carlyle's criticism of mechanical mediation ofthe Industrial Age comes this evaluation of the Information Ageor Post-Industrial Age:

"In the industrial age, when people need to achieve something, dothey have to go through a series of motions, read manuals, orbecome experts at the task? Not at all; they flip a switch…. Itisn't necessary to know a single thing about lighting; all oneneeds to do is flip a switch to turn the light on. […] To takecare of a number of tasks, you push a button, flip a switch, turna dial. That is the age of industry working at its best, so thatyou don't have to become an electrical engineer or physicist tofunction effectively.

"To get the information you need…do you need to go on-line oropen a manual? Unfortunately, most of us right now end up goingthrough a series of activities in order to get the preciseinformation we need. In the age of information…you will beable 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 ChapelHill, before the National Institute of Health, Dec. 8, 1995;reprinted in Vital Speeches, Vol. 62, 06-01-1996, pp. 495, andin the Electric LibraryT.)

George Steiner. The End of Bookishness? (edited transcript of atalk given to the International Publishers' Association Congressin London, on June 14, 1988) in Times Literary Supplement, 89-14,1988, p. 754.

Aldus Manutius, the Elder (born Aldo Manuzio, 1449-1515): Knownfor his activity in printing, publishing, and typography,especially for design and manufacture of small pocket-sized booksprinted in inexpensive editions. The family formed a short-livedprinting empire (ending in 1597 with Aldus Manutius, theYounger) and is associated with the culture of books and withhigh 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 allreactionaries 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 publishedin Italy as Il nome della rosa. Milano: Fabbri-Bompiani, 1980.

Topos uranikos, in Plato's philosophy is the heavenly place fromwhich we originally come and where everything is true. VilémFlusser wrote that, "The library (transhuman memory) is presentedas a space (topos uranikos)" cf. On Memory (Electronic orOtherwise), 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 theEnglish Language, in 2 volumes, in 1828. He was probablyinspired by Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who wrote his Dictionaryof 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 theOffice of Scientific Research and Development, Dr. VANNEVAR BUSHhas coordinated the activities of some six thousand leadingAmerican scientists in the application of science to warfare. Inthis significant article, he holds up an incentive forscientists when the fighting has ceased. He urges that men ofscience should then turn to the massive task of making moreaccessible our bewildering store of knowledge," (p. 101). In manyways, this article marks the shift from a literacy-dominatedpragmatics to one of many new forms of human practicalactivity.

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, inInternet e la Biblioteca,http://www.bs.unicatt.it/bibliotecavirtuale.html, 1996.

The Infonautics Corporation maintains the Electric LibraryT onthe 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 themedium of the sign." All these possible understandings point tothe semiotic nature of design activity. Balducinni defined designas "a visible demonstration by means of lines of those thingswhich man has first conceived in his mind and pictured in theimagination and which the practised hand can make appear." It isgenerally agreed that before Balducinni's attempt to define thefield, 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, andfamily gatherings).

"Nearly every object we use, most of the clothes we wear and manythings we eat have been designed," wrote Adrian Forty in Objectsof Desire. Design and Society since 1750 (London: Thames andHudson, 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 thesecond quarter of the 20th century. In 1923, Henri-RusselHitchco*ck and Philip Johnson organized the show entitledInternational Style-Architecture Since 1922, at the Museum ofModern Art in New York. Among the best known architects whoembraced the program are Gerrit T. Rietveldt, Adolf Loos, PeterBehrens, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, andEero Saalinen.

H. R. Hitchco*ck 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 atthe Fogg Museum of Harvard University in March, 1985, DrawingDefined (Walter Strauss and Tracie Felker, Editors, New York:Abaris Books, 1987) is a good reference for the subject. RichardKenin's The Art of Drawing: from the Dawn of History to the Eraof the Impressionists (New York: Paddington Press, 1974) gives abroad 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 BuildingManuals. London: Cambridge University Press. 1973. This book isa translation of Faventius' compendium of Vitruvius' DeArchitectura and of Vitruvius' De diversis fabricisarchitectonicae. Parallel Latin-English texts with translationinto the English by Hugh Plommer.

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, 1887-1965). One of themost admired and influential architects and city planners whosework combines functionalism and bold sculptural expression.

Since the time design became a field of study, various designstyles and philosophies crystallized in acknowledged designschools. Worthy of mention are the Bauhaus, Art Deco, the UlmSchool (which continued in the spirit of the Bauhaus), andPost-modernism. A good source for information on the becoming ofdesign is Nikolaus Pevsner's Pioneers of Modern Design,Harmondsworth, 1960.

The Scholes and Glidden typewriter of 1873, became, withrefinements, the Remington model 1 (Remington was originally agun 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 ofthe original history of 1923). Sarasota FL: B. R. Swanger,1965.

Peter Carl Fabergé (1846-1920). One of the most renowngoldsmiths, jewelers, and decorative artists. After studying inGermany, Italy, France, and England, he settled in St. Petersburgin 1870, where he inherited his father's jewelry business.Famous for his inventiveness in creating decorative objects-flowers, animals, bibelots, and especially the Imperial EasterEgg-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 themost influential personalities in the Art Nouveau style who madesignificant contributions to glassmaking. Son of Charles LouisTiffany (1812-1902), the jeweler, he is well known for hissignificant contributions to glassmaking.

Edward George Earle Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873): Britishpolitician, poet, and novelist, famous for The Last Days ofPompeii. (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, aswith the Basel School and its American counterparts), designfunction (of concern to industry-oriented schools), computationbased on design. Originating from Gibson's studies in thepsychology of man-nature relations, the ecological approach indesign has its starting point in affordance. Thus many designersreflect concern for an individualized approach to theunderstanding 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 Semiotica69:3/4. 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 ubiquitouscomputing, in Kunst Design & Co. Wuppertal: Verlag Müller +Busmann, 1994, pp. 230-233.

Kim Henderson. Architectural Innovation: The reconfiguration ofexisting product technologies, in Administrative ScienceQuarterly, vol. 35, January, 1990.

M. R. Louis and R. I. Sutton. Switching Cognitive Gears: Fromhabits of mind to active thinking. Working Paper, School ofIndustrial 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 otherthings, 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 thepatent on it.

Otto Nicklaus Otto (1832-1891). Inventor of the four-strokeengine 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 Moscowat the Tipografia T. Ros, 1868.

The Declaration of Independence was approved by a groupdelegates from the American colonies in July, 1776, with theexpressed aim of declaring the thirteen colonies independent ofEngland.

Signed at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, after muchdispute over representation, the Constitution of the UnitedStates of America entered into effect once all thirteen statesratified it. Its major significance derives from itsascertainment of an effective alternative to monarchy. The systemof checks and balances contained in the Constitution is meant topreserve any one branch of government from assuming absoluteauthority.

The Declaration of Rights of Man and the Citizen was approved bythe French National Assembly on August 26, 1789 and declares theright of individuals to be represented, equality among citizens,and freedom of religion, speech, and the press. The ideals ofthe French Revolution inspired many other political movements onthe continent.

Written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in a year of manypopular uprisings all over Europe against conservativemonarchies, the Communist Manifesto of 1848 expresses thepolitical program of a revolutionary movement: workers of theworld united, leading the way to a classless society. TheRomantic impetus of the Manifesto and its new messianic tone wasof a different tenor from the attempts to implement the programin Russia and later on Eastern Europe, China, and Korea.

Married…with Children: A situation comedy at the borderlinebetween satire and vulgarity, presenting a couple, Al and PeggyBundy, and their teenage children, Kelly and Bud, in life-likesituations at the fringes of the consumer society.

Born in 1918, Alexander Solzhenitsyn became known as a writer inthe context of the post-Stalin era. His books, A Day in the Lifeof Ivan Denisovitch (1962), The Gulag Archipelago (1973-1975),The Oak and the Calf (1980), testify to the many aspects ofStalin's dictatorship. In 1974, after publishing GulagArchipelago (about life in Soviet prison camps), the writer wasexiled from his homeland. He returned to Russia in 1990.

Yevgeni Alexandrovich Yevtushenko: A rhetorical poet in thetradition of Mayakovsky's poetry for the masses. During thecommunist regime, he took it upon himself to celebrate theofficial party line, as well as to poeticallly unveil lesssavory events and abusive practices. His poetry is still the bestway to know the poet and the passionate human being. See alsoYevtushenko's Reader. Trans. Robin Milner-Gulland. New York:E.P. Dutton, 1972.

Dimitri Dimitrevich Shostakovich (1906-1975): For a very longtime the official composer of the Soviet Union. After his death,it became clear how deeply critical he was of a reality he seemedto endorse. He created his harmonic idiom by modifying theharmonic system of classical Russian music. See also GunterWolter. Dimitri Shostakovitch: eine sowjetische Tragödie.Frankfurt/Main, New York: P. Lang, 1991.

There is no good definition of Samizdat, the illegal publishingmovement of the former Soviet Block and China. Nevertheless, thepower of the printed word-often primitively presented and alwaysin limited, original editions-remains exemplary testimony to themany forces at work in societies where authoritarian rules areapplied to the benefit of the political power in place. From alarge number of books on various aspects of Samizdat, thefollowing 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 andWest Berlin. Over the years, it became the symbol of politicaloppression. Hundreds of people were killed in their attempt toescape to freedom. The political events in East Europe of Fall,1989 led to destruction of the wall, a symbolic step in the notso 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 Sovietoccupation, and economic hardship led to the creation of anindependent labor union, the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) in 1980. In1981, nationwide strikes brought Poland to a standstill. Martiallaw was imposed and Solidarity was banned in 1982 after dramaticconfrontations at the Gdansk shipyards. Reinstated in 1989,Solidarity became a major political factor in the formation ofthe 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 statesarose. After Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo (1815), the GermanConfederation (led by Austria) prepared the path towards futureunification. In 1850, the attempt to form a central governmentwas blocked, to be resuscitated after the Franco-Prussian War(1870-1871). On his defeat of Ludwig II of Bavaria, the PrussianWilhelm 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 TwoSicilies (1860), the creation of the Kingdom of Italy by VictorEmmanuelle (1861) ended with the seizure of Rome (1870) from thecontrol of the Vatican. Italy became a republic in 1946.

The establishments of various Arab states is a testimony to themany forces at work in the Arab world. The victory of theAllies in World War 1 brought about the dissolution of theOttoman Empire. Modern Turkey was established in 1920, ruledinitially by a Sultan, becoming a republic in 1923 under thepresidency of Kamal Atatürk. At around the same time, Syria(including Lebanon) fell under the mandate of the French Leagueof Nations. Lebanon became a separate state in 1926. Iraq wasestablished as a kingdom in 1921, falling under the same statusas Syria within the British League of Nations. Saudi Arabia wascreated in 1932, and Jordan became an independent kingdom in1946. The history of national definition and sovereignty in theMiddle 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 Kuji*zevne Novine, 1990.

Chetniks (in Serbia), see A Dictionary of Yugoslav Political andEconomic Terminology (cf. Andrlic Vlasta, Rjecnik terminologijejugoslavenskog politicko-ekonomskog sistema, published in 1985,Zagreb: Informator). The reality of the breakdown of the countrythat used to be Yugoslavia is but one of the testimonies ofchange that renders words and the literate use of languagemeaningless.

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 theUnited States which does not become, sooner or later, a subjectof judicial debate…. As most public men are, or have been,legal practitioners, they introduce the customs and thetechnicalities of their profession into the affairs of thecountry…. The language of the law becomes, in some measure, avulgar tongue" cf. Alexis de Toqueville, Democracy in America.

Gary Chapman. Time to Cast Aside Political Apathy in Favor ofCreating a New Vision for America, in Los Angeles Times, Aug.19, 1996, p. D3.

Edward Brent (writing as Earl Babble). Electronic Communicationand Sociology: Looking Backward, Thinking Ahead, in AmericanSociologist, 27, Apr. 1, 1996, pp. 4-24.

"Theirs not to reason why"

A professional description of the initial strike in the Gulf Wargives the following account: "In the blitz that launched DesertStorm, Apache and special forces helicopters first took out twoearly warning radar stations. This opened a corridor for 22F-15E aircraft following in single file to hit Scud sites inwestern Iraq. Also, 12 stealth F-117A fighters, benefiting fromCompass Call and EF-111 long-distance jamming, hit targets inBaghdad, including a phone exchange and a center controlling airdefenses. Other such underground centers were hit in the south.Tomahawk missiles took out power plants. All this occurredwithin 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 radarfor months. Coalition forces flew 2399 sorties the first day,losing only three planes." cf. John A. Adam, Warfare in theinformation age, in IEEE Spectrum, September, 1991, p. 27.

One more detail: "The architects of the huge raid are the CentralCommander, Lieutenant General Charles A. Horner, and BrigadierGeneral C. Glosson, an electrical engineer by training. Formonths they have overseen complete war games and rehearsedprecision 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 ofdeath and life, the path of survival and destruction, so it isimperative 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 ResistiveMedium, 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 ofthe Chair of Literary Semiology at the Collège de France onJanuary 7, 1977.

"But Language-the performance of a language system-is neitherreactionary nor progressive; it is quite simply fascist, forfascism 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 thewritten word, the following example is relevant: An Israelivisiting Arizona talked to his daughter in Tel Aviv whilesimultaneously watching the news on the Cable News Network(CNN). The reporter stated that a Scud missile had been launchedat Tel Aviv, and the father informed the daughter, who soughtprotection in a shelter. "This is what television has becomesince its initial adoption 40 years ago…The world is becoming aglobal 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 upondeveloping anti-missile and anti-satellite technologies andprograms. A multi-layered, multi-technology approach to ballisticmissile defense (BMD) meant to intercept offensive nuclearweapons after they had been launched by aggressors. The systemconsisted of the so-called target acquisition (search anddetection of an offensive object); tracking (determination ofthe trajectory of the offensive object); discrimination(distinguishing of missiles and warheads from decoys or chaff);interception (accurate pointing and firing to ensure destructionof the offensive object). The critical components are computerprograms and the lasers designed to focus a beam on the target'ssurface, 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 forceof the Committee for National Security and The Defense BudgetProject. Obviously, the post-Cold War momentum provided manyarguments for new plans for a scaled down, but highlytechnological, defense. The new circ*mstances created by the endof the Cold War require strategies for conversion of industriesthat until recently depended entirely upon the needs and desiresof 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. Butsince the state is the final guarantor, it accordingly haspriority 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 quantitativetestimony 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 interestedin everything" (p. 13).

A. Kent MacDougall (Ninety Seconds to Tell It All. Big Businessand the News Media, Homewood IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1981) observedthat "To communicate with the American public, companies mustfirst communicate with the media" (p. 43). Interestingly enough,they reach huge audiences by using the rent free publicairwaves. Consequently, as the author shows, the news media shineby any measure of profitability. According to Forbes magazine'sannual study of profits, broadcasting and publishing companiesled all industry groups in return on stockholder's equity andcapital in recent years. Specialized publications also keeptrack of the profitability of the media.

Study of Media and Markets, a service of Simmons Market ResearchBureau, Inc., makes available standard marketing information.Communications Industry Forecasts, brought out by Veronis, Suhler& Asso. of New York, gives a detailed financial status of theentire 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 describedbureaucracy as a "semi-autonomous power standing partly aboveclass-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 anassortment of specialized, departmentalized tentacles for copingwith 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 itsroots in the cultural traditions of Western rationalism. Assuch, it is characterized by impersonal relations, hierarchy, andspecialization.

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 andImpact 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 usedto designate mentally handicapped individuals who are capable ofoutstanding achievements at particular tasks" (p. 5). He alsomentions alternative labels: talented imbecile, parament,talented ament, retarded savant, schizophrenic savant, autisticsavant. Among the examples he gives: A 14-year old Chinese whocould give the exact page for any Chinese character in a400-page dictionary; a 23-year old woman hardly able to speak(her mental age was assessed at 2 years, 9 months), with nomusical instruction, who could play on the piano a piece ofmusic that a person around her might hum or play; a subject whoknew all distances between towns in the USA and could list allhotels and number of rooms available; a person who knew AbrahamLincoln's Gettysburg Address but could not, after weeks ofclasses on the subject, say who Lincoln was or what the speechmeans.

In The Degradation of the Democratic Dogma (1920), Henry Adamspresented a logarithmic curve of the acceleration of history. In1909, Adams noted that between 1800 and 1900, the speed of eventsincreased 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