The Civilization of Illiteracy

by Mihai Nadin

Book one The Chasm Between Yesterday and Tomorrow

Contrasting characters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Choose a letter and click

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping up with faster living

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

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

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

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

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

Loaded literacy

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

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

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

Man proposes, man disposes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beyond the commitment to literacy

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

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

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

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

A moving target

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wise fox

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Between us the rift"

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

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

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

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

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

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

Malthus revisited

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

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

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

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

Captives to literacy

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

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

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

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

The Epitome of the Civilization of Illiteracy

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

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

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

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

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

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

For the love of trade

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rear-view mirror syndrome

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Book two

From Signs to Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Semeion revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The first record is a whip

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

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

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

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

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

Scale and threshold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Signs and tools

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From Orality to Writing

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

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

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

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

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

Individual and collective memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cultural memory

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

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

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

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

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

Frames of existence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The alienation of immediacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A feedback called confirmation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primitive orality and incipient writing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assumptions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taking literacy for granted

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

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

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

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

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

To understand understanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Words about images

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Functioning of Language

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

Expression, communication, signification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The idea machine

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

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

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

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

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

Writing and the expression of ideas

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

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

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

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

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

Future and past

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knowing and understanding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Univocal, equivocal, ambiguous

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making thoughts visible

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

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

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

Alphabet cultures and a lesson from aphasia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language and Logic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Logics behind the logic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A plurality of intellectual structures

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The logics of actions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sampling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Memetic optimism

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

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

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

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

Book Three

Language as Mediating Mechanism

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

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

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

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

The power of insertion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myth as mediating pre-text

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Differentiation and coordination

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

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

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

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

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

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

Integration and coordination revisited

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Life after literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literacy, Language and Market

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

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

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

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

Preliminaries

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

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

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

Products 'R' Us

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

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

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

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

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

The language of the market

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The language of products

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

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

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

Transaction and literacy

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

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

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

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

Whose market? Whose freedom?

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

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

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

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

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

New markets, new languages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literacy and the transient

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Market, advertisement, literacy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language and Work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inside and outside the world

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

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

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

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

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

We are what we do

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

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

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

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

Literacy and the machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The disposable human being

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scale of work, scale of language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Innate heuristics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The realm of alternatives

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mediation of mediation

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

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

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

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

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

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

Literacy and Education

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

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

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

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

"Know the best"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relevance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Temples of knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coherence and connection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plenty of questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The equation of a compromise

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

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

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

To be a child

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who are we kidding?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What about alternatives?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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