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The Civilization of Illiteracy

by Mihai Nadin · English · Gutenberg #2481 · 1,796,247 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Civilization of Illiteracy

Author: Mihai Nadin


        
Release date: January 1, 2001 [eBook #2481]
                Most recently updated: September 15, 2022

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CIVILIZATION OF ILLITERACY ***




The Civilization of Illiteracy, by Mihai Nadin
(C) Mihai Nadin 1997


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Foreward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Foreword

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





Literacy in a Changing World

Thinking about alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Progressing towards illiteracy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Book one The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

Contrasting characters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose a letter and click

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping up with faster living

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

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

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

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

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

Loaded literacy

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

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

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

Man proposes, man disposes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond the commitment to literacy

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

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

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

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

A moving target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wise fox

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Between us the rift"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malthus revisited

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

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

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

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



Captives to literacy

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

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

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

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

The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the love of trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rear-view mirror syndrome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book two

From Signs to Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Semeion revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first record is a whip

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

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

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

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

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

Scale and threshold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs and tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Orality to Writing

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

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

The first history, or the personal inquiry into the probable
course of past events, rests upon orality, integrates myths, and
ends up with the attempt to refer events to places, as well as
to time. Logographe

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