The Civilization of Illiteracy

by Mihai Nadin

While artificial insemination was a scientific breakthrough, it is also symptomatic of the process analyzed here, in particular of the changes in the underlying structure leading to the civilization of illiteracy. Artificial insemination is part of this background; so is the entire genetic research that resulted in our ability to design not only new plants and animals with expected characteristics, but also human beings. Specialization reached a point where the market can satisfy a new type of consumption, in this case represented by artificial insemination, under acceptable economic conditions. Whether a pill, or aesthetic insemination, will ever make those who desire to be artists become creative is still to be seen. (The same holds true for science, politics, and any other creative career.) But we have already seen the dissemination of tools (mainly computer- based) that give many the illusion of becoming abruptly talented, as some women discover that they are abruptly fecund because they found the right pill, or the right gynecologist, to make the impossible happen.

As part of contemporary society's generalized illiteracy, erotic illiteracy is eloquently illustrated by the pervasiveness of sex in art. The transition from pornography to artistic pornography corresponds to the search of those human obsessions that legitimize art's appropriation of territories considered taboo. As some see it, once freed from the constraints implicit in the pragmatic framework relying on literacy, art and sexuality intensified their reciprocal influence. Aesthetic concerns changed from elaboration and method to improvisation and process. The expectation of education or therapeutics gave way to triggering excitement, more obliquely sexual excitement. Striptease has moved from the back alleys of bigoted enjoyment into movie theaters, museums, prime time television, the Internet. And so has the language of arousal, the voice of pleasure, the groan of post-coital exhaustion, or disappointment from teleporn services to the pay-per-session Websites, where credit card numbers are submitted without fear of their being used beyond payment for the service. In certain countries still under a literate regimen, the problem of pornography has been solved by administrative prohibitions; in others, a solution arises from blind market logic.

The market acknowledges the various aspects of sexuality in the civilization of illiteracy through products and services geared towards all those involved. Many market semioses work in this direction-from the pornographic sites on the Internet to the red light districts where risk can be generously rewarded. Sometimes the market's attention leads to unexpected changes in what is marketed, and how previous acceptable codes of sexual behavior are revised and new codes publicly sanctioned. The many forms of advertisement catering to homosexuals, sexploitation, gendered sexuality, group experiences, while never using one qualifier or another, are quite explicit in identifying their public and the patterns of behavior characteristic for this public. Means used for this purpose correspond to those of the civilization of illiteracy. There is, probably, no other medium of more precise narrow casting of sexual wares, from legitimate to scandalously base, than that of the networked world.

In the framework of literacy, the erotic (as all other creative contributions) was idealized in many respects. Language projected the erotic experience as one that transcended sexuality, leading to stable and selective male-female relationships within the boundaries of the family characteristic of industrial society. In time, various value representations, symptomatic of a peculiar understanding of the differences between man and woman, and stored in the language of customs and rituals, took over the substance of the erotic and made form predominant. Literacy and the ceremonies celebrating the erotic-especially marriage and wedding anniversaries-are connected far beyond what most would accept on first reflection. The fact that the civilization of illiteracy took over these ceremonies, and created a service sector able to provide a substitute for an instance that used to signify commitment only proves how ubiquitous the expectation of high efficiency is. The vows that made marriage a social event, sanctioning the implicit sexual component of the contract, and sometimes celebrating more prejudice than tolerance, are expectations expressed in literate language and submitted for public validation. Whether newlyweds knew what they signed-or did not know how to sign-does not change the fact that the institution was acknowledged in the integrating reality of language.

Equal access to erotic mediocrity

Once the homogeneous image of society breaks, and sexuality more than previously turns into another market commodity (prostitution, in its hetero- and homosexual forms), once morals and direct commitments are substituted by rules of efficiency and population control, the language of the erotic is emptied. It is useless to accuse people of lower moral standards without understanding that, under new conditions of human experience, these standards simply embody ways of achieving the efficiency that this civilization of illiteracy strives for. To own your partner, as the marriage certificate is interpreted by some, and to buy pleasure or perversion as one buys food or clothing, are two different contexts for the self-constitution of the individual. It is much cheaper-and I cringe to state this so bluntly-to buy sexual pleasure, regardless how limited and vulgar it can be, than to commit oneself to a life of reciprocal responsibility, and unavoidable moments of inequity. The economic equation is so obvious that facing it, one ends up discouraged. But this equation is part of the broader equation of high expectations defining the illiterate practical experience of self- constitution in a world of a very large scale. In this equation, access to pornographic sites on the Internet can indeed appear to some as an issue of freedom of speech or freedom of choice.

Even those living outside the platinum and diamond belt of wealth and prosperity partake in the illiterate expression of sexuality as this created global markets of prostitution, pornography, and vulgarity, or widely opened the doors to sexual experimentation. From food, music, and photography, to video, films, and clothing, almost everything seems to address sexuality, moreover, to stimulate it. Crime and sex drive the market (the art market included) more than anything else. All age groups are addressed on their own biological and cultural terms; all backgrounds, including ethnic and religious, are involved in the fabric of sex messages. One million children are forced yearly into the sex market, the majority of them from poor countries. People who do not know how to read or write, and who probably never will, live under the seduction of the Calvin Klein label and will imitate the lascivious moves of the models through which they learn about them. Enormous numbers of people who might not have appropriate shelter, or enough food, buy Madonna videos and indulge in the fantasy that sexual freedom embodies in their particular illiterate expression.

Today, humans no longer share a literate notion of the sexual, but display a multitude of attitudes and involve themselves in a variety of experiences, which include the expectation of a common denominator, such as the family used to be. Humans tamed their own nature and discovered, at the peak of what seemed to become a collective sense of invulnerability, that there are still points of individual vulnerability. Some are reviving hopes of chastity and clean marriages, of generalized heterosexuality-in short, of a return to the safe shores of an idealized erotic experience of the past. Sexuality, however, always had its bright and dark sides. Suffice it to recall the explicit images in the ruins of Pompeii, or those in Indian and Japanese art. Sometimes, not even our most aggressive sex magazines, porno shops, Hollywood crap, and Internet sites equal their boldness. But people have managed to hide the dark side, or at least what could be construed as such, and to propagate, through literacy, the sublime erotic poem, the clean erotic novel, the romance, the love songs and dances, and everything else testifying to the sublime in love. What is new in the context of the civilization of illiteracy is that one side no longer excludes the other. To be is to be different, even if the biological equation of only two sexes seems so limiting.

Becoming more indirect and transitory, human relations affect sexuality and the ability to cope with what is defined as deviant erotic behavior in respect to tradition. AIDS will not turn back events that made the current pragmatic context necessary. Rather, it will add to the demystifying of love and sex, and thus effectively bridge between genetic research and the self-perpetuation drive of the species, rationalized in formulas meeting higher levels of efficiency, resources, and human reproduction. Such formulas, more sophisticated than the progressions Malthus used, are already tested by various organizations concerned with strategies for avoiding human self-destruction by overpopulation. A condom is cheaper than giving birth; all the pills women swallow over a lifetime are far less costly than taking care of one child. It should not surprise that Japan, committed to all the values of literacy and the sexuality attached to them, is reluctant to adopt the pill. The country has a very low birth rate, so low that its leaders are justified in fearing that soon Japan will not have enough people to fuel the economy through production and consumption. Still, Japan sees a relation between the pill and the state of morality as part of the cultural homogeneous fabric on which it relies. Nobody really doubts that the globality of human experience, to which Japan contributed through its productive genius probably more than any country, will catch up with it. Sexually, the literate Japanese are no less daring than the illiterate Americans.

To continuously tend towards having more at the cheapest price-in many ways an expression of rape of other people's work and resources-means to exhaust not only the object, but also the subject. Rape, one of the most heinous crimes people commit, generalized in political and economic rape, projects sexuality and its powerful action even outside the biological realm of human life. To want all (especially all at once) means to want nothing in particular. At the end of the total sexual experience lies nothing but disappointment for some; for others, the next experience. Profoundly subjective, deeply individual, unique and irrepeatable, human sexuality has meaning only to the extent that it remains an integrating factor, relating individual destiny to that of the species. The similarity between the creative and sexual acts might explain why changes similar to those occurring in erotic experience can be identified in the artistic, scientific, or political practice of the civilization of illiteracy. Unless we understand the many implications of such changes, we would only leap into a vortex of wild conjecture. Family is the part of the experience of human self-constitution in which such implications are most likely to have a profound effect.