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