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.