Once new movements, some better justified than others, and all reflecting the shift from the authority-based civilization of literacy to the endless freedom of choice of the illiterate context, needed a powerful instrument to further their programs, they chose, or were chosen by, philosophy. Secularism and pluralism meet within philosophic concerns with the gay movement, feminism, multi-culturalism, integration of new technology, implications of aging, the new holisms, popular philosophy, sexual emancipation, virtuality, and more along this line. In a way, this reflects the new awareness of efficiency that permeates philosophic activity, but also its struggle to maintain its relations to literacy. Legitimate doubt is generated by the choice of subjects that seem to attract philosophers, and by the apparent lack of philosophic matter. When the language is not obscure, the philosopher seems to discuss matters, not really question reasons, and even less advance ideas or explanatory models. Wholesale generalizations do not help, but one can really not escape the feeling that the process through which philosophy liberates itself from literacy has been less productive than the similar process of science's emancipation from language.
A journey through the many philosophically oriented Web sites reveals very quickly that even when philosophy opts out of the print medium, it carries over many of the limitations of literacy. The ability to open philosophic discourse, to adopt non- linearity, and to encourage dialogue free of the pressure of tradition is often signaled, but rarely accomplished. The medium is resisted, not enjoyed as an alternative to classic philosophical discourse. Such observations have prompted the opinion that scientists are becoming the most appropriate philosophers of their own contributions.
Who needs philosophy? And what for?
At this point, one question naturally arises: Is philosophy relevant after all? Moreover, is it even possible without the participation of natural language, or at least without this intermediary between philosophers and their public? In blunter terms, can we live without it? In the context in which efficiency expectations translate into a practical experience of an unprecedented degree of specialization, will philosophy turn into another mediating activity among people? Or will it be, as it was considered in the culture of a Romantic ideal, humanity's self-consciousness, as expressed in Hegel's philosophy? If indeed philosophy is absorbed into science, what can its purpose be?
As with literacy, the inclination is to suggest that, regardless of the new condition of language, philosophy remains possible and is indeed relevant. As far as its functions are concerned-mediating activity, humanity's self-consciousness, corpus of interpretive discourse about humanity and nature-they remain to be defined in the pragmatic context. It is needless to reiterate that within each scale of humankind, philosophy pursued different interests as these proved pertinent to efficiency expectations. Philosophers never contributed bread to the table nor artifacts. Their skill was to formulate questions, especially the very probing questions-"What is what?" and "Why?"-in their attempt to address the origins of things. Deciphering the reason of things and actions-in other words, understanding the world and its apparent order (what the Greeks called eunomia)-made them simultaneously philosophers and interpreters of science. "How can we know?" and "How can we explain?" are subsequent questions, pursued more stringently by people in search of scientific rationality than by philosophers per se.
No historic account, no matter how detailed, can do justice to the definition of philosophy. Its subject changes as human beings change in the process of their practical self-constitution. From philosophy, science and all the humanities (ethics, aesthetics, politics, sociology, law) evolved. Even our concern with language is of a philosophic nature. It seems that philosophy is, in the final analysis, the only authentic domain of abstraction. Its interest is not the individual, the concrete, the immediate, not even the idea, but the abstraction of these. Where other domains, such as mathematics, logic, linguistics, and physics are intent on understanding the abstract notions around which their domains are built, on giving them life in the context of practical experiences, philosophy seems driven by the quest for reaching the next level of abstraction, the abstraction of abstractions, and so on. Science uses abstraction as an instrument for reaching concreteness; philosophy follows the inverse path. There is always to the philosophic attempt a call for the next step, into the infinite. Each accomplishment is provisional. To experiment philosophically means not so much to search systematically for causes as to never end the inquiry. There are no right or wrong philosophic theories. Philosophy is cumulative and self-devouring.
That people will never stop wondering what is what, the more their own activity will multiply the domain of existing entities, goes almost without saying. That they will ask again and again how they can know, how they can be sure that what they know is true, or at least relevant, is also evident. The species is characterized by its ability to think, produce and master tools, acknowledge value, and constitute itself as a community of shared concern and resources, through its playfulness and other characteristics (alluded to in terms such as Homo economicus, Zoon semiotikon, Zoon politikon, Homo ludens). Probably more than all these partial qualifiers, the species is the only one known to question everything. As language experience marked the genetic condition of the human being, questioning marked it too, probably through language mechanisms in the first place. When the child articulates the first question, the entire genetic endowment is at work.
We are who and what we are in our inquisitive interaction with others. Our minds exist only through this interaction. This statement says in effect that to philosophize became part of the process of human self-constitution and identification. The only referent of philosophy is the human being constituted in practical experiences. Together with other surviving literacies, philosophic literacy will be one of many. The philosophy of the civilization of illiteracy will reflect the circumstances of work and life characteristic of the pragmatic framework. It will also be subjected to the severe test of market exigencies as these reflect efficiency expectations characteristic of the new scale of humankind. Science can justify itself by the return in investment in new explanatory models. It also leads to new technologies and to higher levels of efficiency in human practical experiences. Philosophy certainly has a different justification. Philosophic necessity is evasive. Short of living off the past, as literacy, religion, and art do, it needs to refocus on reason as the compass of human activity. Focusing on alternative practical experiences, philosophy can practically help people to free themselves from the obsession with progress-seen as a sequence of ever-escalating records (of production, distribution, expectation)-and moreover, from the fear of all its consequences. It can also focus people's attention on alternatives to everything that affects the integrity of the species and its sense of quality, including the relation to their environment. When past, present, and future collapse into the illiterate frenzy of the instant, philosophy owes to those who question its articulations an honest approach to the question, "Is there a future?" But as this future takes shape in the presence of humans partaking in the open world of networked interactions, banalities will not do.
Art(ifacts) and Aesthetic Processes
Confusing as it is, a snapshot of everything that today goes under the names art and literature conveys at least a sense of variety. Forget the never-ending discussions of what qualifies as art and what does not. And forget the irreconcilable disputes over taste. What counts are practical experiences of self-identification as artist or writer, as well as involvement with artifacts eventually acknowledged within the experience as art or as literature, i.e., experiences through which the art public and readership are constituted.
What comes to mind when we think about the art and literature of the civilization of illiteracy are not illiterate writers-although they exist-and not illiterate painters, composers, pianists, dancers, sculptors, or computer artists of all kinds. Rather, disparate examples of works, each remarkable in its own way (or altogether unremarkable), but above all marked by characteristics that distinctly disconnect them from the literate experience of art and literature capture our memory. Cautionary note ended. Here are the examples: surviving Auschwitz translated into a comic book parable populated by cats (depicting the Nazis) and mice (depicting their victims); a Grammy Award returned by a famous singing group because someone else was doing the singing for them; the tear-jerkers from Disney Studios (a company whose audience is the world), classic stories or history turned into feminist or politically correct musicals; paintings by a controversial artist (self-made or made by the market?), fetching prices as high as overvalued shares of a new Internet company, after he died of AIDS at an early age; the never-ending parade of computer animation miracles; the Web sites of uninterrupted aesthetic frenzy that would have delighted Andy Warhol, one of the authentic founders of art in the civilization of illiteracy, if anyone could pinpoint the beginning of this civilization.
These are examples. Period. Originality, aesthetic integrity, homogeneity, and artfulness are the exception. The process through which these examples were produced begs qualifiers different from art produced under the aegis of literate expectations. Today, art is produced much faster, embodied-or disembodied-in and disseminated through more media, and exhausted in a shorter time-sometimes even before it comes into being! Cycles of artistic style are abridged to the extreme of being impossible to define. Artistic standards are leveled as the democracy of unlimited access to art and literature expands their public, without effecting a deep rapport, a long-lasting relation, or a heightened aesthetic expectation. Never before has more kitsch been produced and more money spent to satisfy the obsession with celebrity that is the hallmark of this time. Museums became the new palaces and the new shopping malls, opening branches all over the world, not unlike MacDonalds and fashion retail stores. And never before were more technological and scientific means involved in the practical experience of art, always on the cutting edge, not only because art is traditionally associated with innovation. These new experiences make possible the transition from an individual, private, almost mystical, experience to a very public activity. Open a virtual studio on the Web, and chances are that many people will exercise their calling (or curiosity) on the digital canvas. Not infrequently, this activity is carried on at the scale of the integrated world: major concerts viewed on several continents, attempts to integrate art from all nations into a super-work, the melange of literatures fused into new writing workshops, distributed, interactive installations united in the experience of digital networks. Good taste and bad co-exist; pornography resides as bits and bytes in formats not different from those of the most suave examples from art history. The Internet is the one and only uncensored place left on the earth. All these phenomena deserve to be understood as testimony to the change of the condition of human experience, and in the context of change from a literacy-dominated art to an art of many partial literacies, of mediations, and of relatively vague notions of value and significance.
Making and perceiving
Nature and culture meet in artistic practical experiences of human self- constitution, as they meet in any other human experience. What makes their meeting extraordinary is the fact that what we see, or hear, or listen to is the expression of their intersecting. Through art, humans project sensorial, as well as cognitive, characteristics. The experience of structuring a category of artifacts, defined through their aesthetic condition, and the complementary experience of self-definition through aesthetically relevant actions constitute the realm of the artistic. In their interaction with objects and actions resulting from such experiences, individuals conjure meaning as they define themselves in respect to the experiences in a given context. Like any other practical experience, the production of art belongs to the pragmatic framework. We are what we do: hunting, running, singing, drawing, telling stories, creating rhymes, performing a play. In their respective doings, artists identify themselves through particular aptitudes and skills: rhythm, movement, voice, sense of color, harmony, synchronism, contrast. The emergence of language and the consecutive experience of recording led to the association of skills with the writing of the language, that is, drawing and reading it to others, performing it in rituals.
The domain of art seems to be characteristic only of the human species. Since the practical experience of art is so close to our biogenetic structural reality, while at the same time constitutive of a non-existential domain, the making of art and the cultural appropriation of art are perceived as similar experiences. Nevertheless, language exercised coordination for the simple reason that successive motivations of the art experience-such as the mytho-magical, practical, ritual, sexual, gnoseologic, political, or economic-and the underlying structure of art belong to different domains. The underlying structure of art defines its aesthetics. The underlying structure of magic, ritual, or the sexual defines their respective condition, as it expresses human understanding of the unknown, or the many aspects of sexuality.
The interaction between artist and society, once markets emerged and art was acknowledged as a product with its own identity, resulted in specific forms of recurrence: recognition of the uniqueness of the work, of the artist, and of interpretive patterns. Once the framework for recognizing artworks as merchandise was established, transactions in artworks became transactions in the artist-society relation, with a lot of give-and-take that was difficult, if not impossible, to encode. The nature of the relations can be partially understood by examining behaviors of artists, who are almost always seen as eccentric, a little off the middle of the road, and behaviors of the public. There is much instinctive interaction, and even more learned behavior, mediated through an experience constituted in and communicated through language.
Looking at a painting-once painting is acknowledged as artifact-is more than acknowledging its physical reality: the optical, and sometimes the textual, appearance, or the context of contemplation. The action of painting, sculpting, dancing, performing, or writing poetry or a novel is simultaneously an action of constituting oneself as artist or writer and projecting this self, as it results from the practical experience characteristic of such an endeavor, into the social space of interactions. This is why art is in the first place expression, and only secondly communication. This is also why looking at a work is to constitute the individual experience of context, in the first place, and only secondly to conjure and assign meaning. In both the action of painting and looking at a painting, biologically inherited characteristics, together with learned elements (skills), participate in the process of constituting the being (the painter and the onlooker, for instance) as both individual and member of the community.
The natural and the acquired, or learned, interact. And in the course of time, the natural is educated, made aware of characteristics connected to culture rather than nature. Two simultaneous processes take place: 1) the recurrent interaction of those making art and those acknowledging it in their practical life; 2) establishment of patterns of interpretation as patterns of interaction mediated by the artwork. Language experiences take place in both processes. Consequently, artistic knowledge is accumulated, and art-related communication becomes a well defined practical experience, leading to self-identification such as art historian, art theoretician, art critic, and the like. The nature and characteristics of the practical experience of art-related language ought to be examined so that we can reach an understanding of the circumstances under which they might change.
Art and language
Language is a multi-dimensional practical experience. In the interaction between individuals who produce something (in this case, works of art) and those who consume them, self-constitution through language makes coordination possible. Production and consumption are other instances of human self-constitution. Frequently, integration takes place in the process of exchanging goods or, at a more general level, values.
Drawing something, real or imaginary, and looking at the drawing, i.e., trying to recognize the drawn object, are structurally different experiences. These two practical experiences can be related in many ways: display the drawing and the object drawn side-by-side; explain the drawing to the onlookers; attach a description. Here is where difficulties start to accumulate. The artifact and the experience leading to it appear as different entities. Descriptions (what is on paper or on canvas) lead to identification, but not to interaction, the only reason behind the artistic experience. Language substitutes its own condition for the entire physical-biogenetic level of interaction. It overplays the cultural, which is consequently made to represent the entire experience.
People speak about works of art, write about art, and read writings about art as though art had no phylogenetic dimension, only a phylocultural reality. Language's coordinative function is relied upon because of the dissimilarity between the practical experiences of making art and of appropriating it in the cultural environment. Through cultural experiences, the coordinating function of language extends to facilitating new forms of practical experiences associated with making art: instruction, use of technology, and cooperation peculiar to artmaking. It also facilitates experiences of appropriation in the art market, the constitution of institutions dedicated to supporting education in art, the politics of art, and forms of public evaluation. Art implicitly expresses awareness, on the part of artists and public, of how persons interacting through artistic expression are changed through the interactions.
Language, especially in forms associated with literacy, makes this awareness of reciprocal influence explicit. In the civilization of illiteracy, all non-literate means of information, communication, and marketing (e.g., songs, film, video, interactive multimedia) take it upon themselves to reposition art as yet another practical experience of the pragmatics of high efficiency peculiar to a humankind that reached yet another critical mass. It was not unusual for an artist in the literacy-dominated past to go through very long cycles in preparing for the work, and for the work itself to unfold after years of effort. It is quite the contrary in the case of the instantaneous gratification of a video work, of an installation, or of gestural art. Within the pragmatics of an underlying structure reflected in literacy, art was as confined as the experience of language, which represented its underpinning. The pragmatics of the civilization of illiteracy makes the experience of art part of the global experience.
Many people wonder whether the basic, though changing, relation between art and language, in particular art and literacy, is unavoidable-furthermore, whether coordination can be assumed by a sign system other than literate language. In prelude to answering this question, I would like to point out that the influence of language on the arts, and even on the language arts (poetry, drama, fiction), was hailed by as many as deplored it. To account for attitudes in favor of or against an art connected to, or resulting from, high levels of literacy, i.e., of favoring an art emancipated from the domination of language, means to account for the change of art and its perceived meaning. The entire artistic effort to transcend the figurative and the narrative, to explore the abstract and the gestural, to explore its own reality, and to establish new languages testifies to this striving towards emancipation. Ascertaining that the art- language relation is not inescapable does not purport the invention of a new relation as an alternative to what culture acknowledges as the relatively necessary dependence of the two. As with the case of other forms of practical experiences discussed against the background of literacy, examination of directions of change and the attempt to conjure their meaning is required.
Human beings are agents of change and, at the same time, outside observers of the process of change. An observer can distinguish between the recurrent influence of the human biogenetic structure and the interactions based on this structure. An observer can also account for the role of the phylocultural, in particular the interactions this triggers. Restricted to the literate means of communication that I chose for presenting my arguments, I want to show that art and its interpretation are no longer the exclusive domain of literate language. Alternative domains of creation and interpretation are continuously structured as we project ourselves in new practical experiences. Moreover, the eternal conflict inherent in art experiences, between what is and what unfolds, best expressed in the quest for innovation, integrates aspects of the conflict between literacy-dominated pragmatics and pragmatics dominated by illiteracy. Were I an artist, and were we all visually attuned, this topic could have been explained through one or several artworks, or through the process leading to an artwork. The role of processing current practical experiences of art needs to be properly highlighted. Exacerbated in the self-consciousness of art in the age of illiteracy, artistic processes take precedence over artifacts; the making of art becomes more important than the result. Artists would say that we exist not only in the environment of our language projections, but probably just as much (if not more) in the environment of our art projections.
Impatience and autarchy
The prophets of the end of the arts (Hegel was their most convincing, but most misunderstood, representative) were so confused by changes in the arts that, instead of approaching the dynamics of the process, they concentrated on the logical possibility that artistic practice is self-devouring and self-destructive. The initial end-of-the-arts prophecies were delivered during a time of relatively mild change in the status of the aesthetic appropriation of reality. Recent prophecies occurred in a very different context. It was only after World War I that aesthetic experiences really difficult to connect and integrate in an accepted explanation changed our notion and expectations of art. With the experience of disposable language, which the Dadaist movement submitted to a community already skeptical of language, came the experience of disposable art.
While literacy supplied a framework for (almost) consistent representations of values and norms, human practice at the border between literacy and a-literacy introduced and fostered inconsistency, believed to be the last resort of individual freedom. Eclecticism and consumption joined in this experience, since mixing without system or justification of any kind is like stating that everything is worth whatever people make of it, and therefore they want to have it. Re-evaluation of available art, good or bad, aesthetically relevant or kitsch, significant or insignificant, is part of this change. Once re-evaluation started, the processes of artmaking and aesthetic appropriation grew relatively disconnected. Where language, through literacy as a generalized medium of interaction, maintained cultural distinctions, such as the ones embodied in our notions of perspective, resemblance, and narration, the new art experience introduced distinctions at the natural level, such as instinct, energy, choice, and change. For as long as literacy maintained control and integration, viewers, irritated by conventions foreign to them, physically attacked works (such as Impressionist paintings) resulting from artistic practices different from those congruent to the practice of language and to the associated expectations of seeing.
Art under the scrutiny of literacy is always model driven. Once the necessity of literacy as the only integrating mechanism was challenged by the need to maintain levels of efficiency for which language is not well equipped, new forms of artistic appropriation of reality and a new notion of reality itself became possible. Model was replaced by iconoclasm. Walter Benjamin captured some of these changes in the formula of "art in the age of its mechanical reproduction." The end of the aura, as Benjamin has it, is actually the aura's shift from the artifact to the process and the artist. It corresponds not to the end of art's uniqueness, but to the artist's determination to get rid of all restrictions (of subject matter, material, technique) and to ascertain artistic freedom as the goal of artistic experience. But there are yet more possibilities for the emancipation of artists and their work.
As we enter the age of electronic reproduction, massive communication that supports interactive multimedia, and information integration through networks (adapted for pipelining data and all kinds of images), we encounter such possibilities. We are also subjected to new experiences-for instance, simultaneous transmission of art and interpretation, moreover the possibility to contribute our own interpretation, to become co-makers of whatever is presented to us through the very malleable digital media. Technology and change of aesthetic goals affect the scale of artistic experience, as well as the relation between artists and the world. Projects such as Walter de Maria's Lightening Field and Christo's Umbrella project (extended over California and Japan) are examples of both the change of scale and of new interpretation processes. They are also vivid proof that globality permeates art at each level. So does the sense of rapid change, the acknowledgment and fear of perishability, and the open-endedness of the practical experience of making art. I doubt that anyone could have captured this sense as well as the Web site on which millions of viewers could experience the wrapping and unwrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin. Christo and Jeanne-Claude might remain the authors of record, but the event grew beyond the notion of authorship.
The artistic experience of the civilization of illiteracy is also characterized by impatience and autarchy. Things happen fast and relatively independent from one another. Artistic experiment always embodied characteristics of the practical experience of human self-constitution. From petroglyphic expression to the art of our age, this happens again and again, obviously in context-dependent forms. The Dutch and Flemish Baroque artists celebrated results of industriousness through mythological themes. Before that, religion dominated up to and through the Renaissance. In the context of African, Asian, and South American art, the forms were different, but the pragmatic stamp is faultlessly evident. No wonder that in the settled age of literacy, art had a structure similar to that of the practical experience of literate language, regardless of the richness of its forms. It even called for experimental settings reminiscent of industry, or of the university context, as we know from art history. And it was sanctioned on the same pragmatic criteria as any other literate experiment: success (it was useful), or failure (it was discarded). Accordingly, it implied sequential development and a rather settled succession of operations. As artistic experimentation took place in line with all other experiments characteristic of the pragmatic context of literacy, it even resulted in an industrial model based on modularity, which the Bauhaus enthusiastically promoted. A number of shops produced thousands of ready-made artistic objects with a clear goal in mind: value through usefulness, function over form, functionality as aesthetics at work. Artistic practice and appropriation were coordinated through the still literate language of the market.
Art in the civilization of illiteracy is less a matter of invention and discovery, as it was in the civilization of literacy, and more one of selection, framing, and endless variation. Since the end of the last century, artists started breaking away from some of the characteristics implicit in the literate experience, such as hierarchy, centralism, and nationalism. This is not a time for rules and laws, unless they are taken from the books of the past, relativized and integrated in the tools needed in artistic practice, made into underlying principles. Appropriation is not of the object, but of the method, process, and context. The tools of this civilization are endowed with the literacy required for certain partial experiences. Artists, instead of acquiring skills, are trained to master such tools. In his series of ready-mades, Marcel Duchamp anticipated much more than a style. He anticipated a new kind of artistic practice and a different interrelation among the individuals involved in producing-literally selecting from the infinite repertory of ready- mades and framing-and the individuals who appropriate the artifact for whatever reason (aesthetic satisfaction, status, investment, irrational drive to collect).
Today, artists are more dependent on others involved in the pragmatic framework of the time. This dependency is the result of the more integrated nature of human effort. Everything that is eventually built into the work, regardless of whether this work is an object, an action, or a process, results from other human practical experiences. The time of the artist's inventing his own pigments, making his own canvasses and frames, that is, the time of the artist's integral ownership and quasi- independence, was already over with the advent of industrial production. In the context of mediation and task distribution, new levels of dependencies are established and reflected in the work. Video art, photography, film, computer-based installations, and much of the computer music, interactive multimedia, and virtual art experiences are examples of such dependencies. Simultaneously they are examples of the new forms of conflict and tension that mark the artistic experience. Artistic freedom and self- determination are only apparent. The limits of the many elements involved in an artistic experience affect choice and artistic integrity. Free choice, a romantic notion, is a delusion under these new circumstances. There is no censorship on the Internet, but that does not make the medium totally free.
The forms of integration in the guise of new science and technology are probably less troublesome than integration through language. They are, however, much more constricting and restrictive because they derive from elements over which the artist has little, if any, control. The growth of non-verbal modes of human expression, communication, and interaction introduces elements of mediation. These can be seen as intermediaries, such as images to be integrated, sounds, political actions (a sit-in is the best known example) that are involved in the practical experience of art in all its phases. Formulation of aesthetic goals, in the form of video improvisations, diagrams, multimedia installations, computer-generated simulations, interpretation of an artwork (animation of a painting or sculpture, for example), and processes of meaning realization and valuation (represented by market transactions, insurance estimates, political relevance, ideological tendency, cultural significance) use mediating elements. None of Christo's elaborate and very comprehensive projects could have been carried through without such means. Keijo Yamamoto's widely celebrated virtual performance could not come into being without an understanding of all that it takes to establish a Worldwide Network Art.
Art, as a human experience, emphasizes its own transitory nature and becomes less permanent than in previous stages of artistic practice, but far more pervasive. Still, to qualify this process as mere democratization of the arts would be misleading. That supermarkets are full of meat, oranges, cheese, and all kinds of graphic signs should not be interpreted as the democratization of meat, oranges, cheese, or graphic signs. The majority of artists still strive for recognition. To the extent that their own recognition as different means that there are people who do not qualify for the same recognition and reward, there is no equality in the realm of art. On the other hand, the pressures of leveling and the iconoclastic component of artistic experience reduce the passion that drove artists in the past, or at least changes the focus of this passion. Although the artistic process has changed in line with other changes in the systematic domain of human experience in general, it still resists doing away with the terms for artistic recognition. The uncertainty (including that of recognition, but not limited to it) projected in the work qualifies it as an expression of individualism. The heuristic attempt to establish new patterns of human interaction through art reflects the uncertainty. To own art that is stored in units of information and in invisible processing instructions means something totally different from being in possession of unique artifacts embodied in matter, regardless of how much they are affected by the passing of time.
The recurrent phylogenetic and phylocultural structure, on which the artist-public interaction was built in the pragmatic framework fostering literacy, is questioned from within artistic practice. Art is only indirectly affected by the new scale of humankind, as it tries to acknowledge this scale. But the efficiency that this scale requires is reflected in the means available to support experiences of human self-constitution as artist. Related to scale are the notions of survival and well being. People do not need art to survive, and the majority of people on Earth are living proof of this assertion. But in a broader sense, life that does not have an artistic dimension is not human. That is what we have learned or what we want to believe.
To express oneself in forms involving an artistic element is part of self- constitution as a human being, distinct from the rest of the natural realm. Moreover, to have access to the richness of other expressive forms-rhythms, colors, shapes, movements, metaphors, sounds, textures-is to reascertain a sense of belonging. In this vein, the right to affluence implicit in the civilization of illiteracy extends well into the domain of the aesthetic. New artistic structures and means are continuously submitted and consumed. Some end up in oblivion; others suggest dynamic patterns. Freed from the constraints of a dominant literacy, artistic practice is becoming more and more like any other form of human experience, emancipated from the obsession of universality and eternity (embodied in museums and art collections), from centralism (expressed in such elements as the vanishing point, the tonal center of music, the architectural keystone). True, a great deal of narcissism has come to the forefront. And there is a tendency to break rules for the sake of breaking them, and to make the act of breaking the rule the object of artistic interest. In transcending old media boundaries, production and appropriation come closer together. The person making the artwork already integrates the appropriation in the making. Thus a complicity beyond and above language is established in defiance of time, space, and the universal. Nevertheless, artists still want to be eternal!
Art establishes itself on a plurality of levels of interaction. This is its main characteristic, since the cultural level supported by literacy is breaking the bonds of a generic, pervasive literacy. Several specialized languages mediate at various levels. The language of art history addresses professionals at one level, and laymen at another, through an array of journals and magazines. Art theory speaks to experts and, in a different tone, to neophytes who themselves will judge or produce artworks. The language of materials and techniques delves into particulars beyond oil, canvas, melody, beat, and rhythm that a generally literate onlooker or listener would not readily comprehend.
The art of the civilization of illiteracy partly reprocesses previous artistic experience. By no accident, the entire modern movement looked back at ancient art forms and exotic art and appropriated their themes and structural components. In this experience, cultural conventions expressed through literacy (such as the recurrent linear perspective, illusory space, or color symbolism) are of secondary import. The goal is to account for the tension between motives (the magical, the sacred, or the mythic), the realistic image, and abstract extensions. The experience, which language inadequately reported, but could not substitute, is the subject of artistic investigation. African and Chinese masks, Russian icons, Mayan artifacts, Arabic decorative motifs, and Japanese syllabaries are invoked with the intention of arousing awareness of their specific pragmatic context, which in turn will influence new artistic practical experiences. This is art after art. Evidently, Russian avant-garde, French cubism, American conceptualism, and all the other isms cannot be seen as ordinary extensions to experiences alien to tradition, or as attempts to loosen the ties between art and literacy in conscious preparation for relative emancipation from language. This phase has its own, new, recurring interactions. The post-modern is probably the closest we have come to the expression of awareness and values about art in art, a generic hall of mirrors.
Artistic practice led to a change in the structure of the domain: art assumes a self-referential function and submits the results to the public at large (literate or not). To look at post-modern art and architecture as only illustrative of cultural quotes, and possible self-irony, would mean to miss the nature of the experience projected in making the new artifacts. It is an undoing of the past in order to achieve a new freedom (from norm, ideal, value, morality, even aesthetics). The concept of art, resulting from the theoretic practice focused on accumulated artistic experience in its broadest sense, is subjected to change. Artifacts resulting from the practical experience of artists constitute a domain congruent to the aesthetic dimension of human interaction in the social environment. This art is illiterate in the sense that it refuses previous norms and values, comments upon them from within, and projects a very individual language, with many ad hoc rules, and a vocabulary in continuous change. Think about how, in the post-modern, the condition and function of drawing change. Drawing no longer serves as an underlying element of painting, architecture, or sculpture. Rather, drawing ascertains its own aesthetic condition. In a broader sense, it is as though art continuously generates its definition and redefinition, and allows those involved in artistic practice to constitute themselves as entities of change more than as manufacturers of aesthetically relevant objects. In a similar way, harmony is re- evaluated in the experience of music.
The specializations within artistic practice (e.g., drawing, harmony, composition) correspond to an incredible diversification of skills and techniques, to the creation and adoption of new tools (digital devices included), and awareness of the market. Those who know the language of an artifact, or of a series of relatively similar artifacts, are not necessarily those who will appropriate and interpret the artifact. In this age, aesthetic expression becomes an issue of information processing resulting from the systematic deconstruction of the aesthetic practice of the age dominated by literacy. Images and sounds are derived from various experiences (photographic, mechanical, electronic). Spontaneity is complemented by elaboration. Previous stylistic characteristics- spontaneity is only the most evident-are reified and framed in new settings together with the interpretation. They are also reified in artistic expression as the gesture of making the work and the act of submitting it to the public with the aim of pleasing, provoking, criticizing, ridiculing, confounding, challenging, uplifting, or degrading (intentionally or not).
Post-modern artistic practice results from the display of broken conventions and rules, or of disparate and sometimes antagonistic characteristics. Suffice it to point out how the private (the personal side of art, layout strategies, art of proportions, drawing, symbolism, harmony, and musical or architectural composition) becomes public. Real Life, an MTV series, is the personal drama of five young people trying to make it in New York City. The script was their day-to-day existence, the attempt to harmonize their conflicting lifestyles in the elegant loft that MTV provided. When the director fell in love with one of the characters, he was brought in front of the camera's merciless eye. Likewise, the artist-painter, composer, sculptor, dancer, or film director-submits the secrets of his experience to the viewer, the listener, and the spectator. The artifact comes to the market delivered with its self-criticism, even with a time bomb set for the hour after which the work has become valueless. The making of art made public is at the same time its unmaking.
Appropriation, one of the preferred methods of the art experience, is based on a notion of aesthetic or cultural complicity. The illiterate public accepts a game of allusions. The alluded must be present in the work, because in the absence of a unifying literacy, there is no shared background one can count on. Insinuations, innuendo, and provocation are practiced parallel to the quote around which the work establishes its own identity.
Art is infinitely fragmented today. No direction dominates, or at least no longer than the 15 minutes of fame that Warhol prophesied. There is a real sense of artistic glut and a feeling of ethical confusion: Is anything authentic? The public is lured into the work, sometimes in ridiculous forms (a painting with live characters touching the viewers, pinching them, reaching for pocketbooks, or spitting chewing gum); other times in naive ways (through mirrors, interactive dialogue on computer screens, live installations in a zoo, live keyboards in a music hall). Art is delivered unfinished, as a point of entry, and as an open challenge to change. To copyright openness and sign it is as absurd, or sublime, as delivering beautiful empty bars of music to serve as a score for symphonic interpretation or a multimedia event.
The copy is better than the original
Within artistic practice, as much as within any other practical form of human projection, we notice the transition from a centralized system of reference and values to a system of parallel values. In the continuum generically qualified in the market as art- and what cannot be declared art today?-there is a noticeable need for intrinsic relations of patterns: what belongs together, and how commonalties are brought about. And there is a need for disparity and distinction: How do we distinguish among the plenty accumulated in a never-ending series of shows when all that changes is the name on the canvas? The same applies to photography, video art, theater, dance, minimalist music, and the architecture of deconstruction. An evident tension results, not different from the one we perceive in the market of stocks and options. The dilemma is obvious: where to invest, if at all, unless someone has insider information (What is hot?). This is not an expression of an ideal, as the values of literacy marked art to be, but of alternatives delivered together with the uncertainty that characterizes the new artistic experience as one of obsession with recognition in an environment of competition that often becomes adversarial. (The umbrellas that the Parisians used to attack Impressionist canvases at the turn of the century are children's toys in comparison to the means of aesthetic annihilation used in our time.)
Becoming a practical experience focused on its own condition and history, this kind of art affects the appropriation of its products in the sense of increasing artificiality-the shared phylocultural component-and decreasing naturalness. Accordingly, interpretive practice is focused on establishing distinctions (often hair- splitting), more and more within the artistic domain, in disregard of message, form, ethical considerations, and even skill. This is the type of art whose photographic reproduction is always better than the original. This is the music that always sounds crisper on a compact disk. This is the art whose simuli of the show, performance, dance, or concert on television are even better than the production. Meaning comes about in an individual experience of relating distinctions, not common experiences.
The specialization of art, no less than the specialization of sciences and humanities, results in the formation of numerous networks of recurrent or non-recurrent interaction. Examples of this are layering, tracing from photo-projection, expanding the strategies of collage (to include heterogeneous sources), mixing the elaborate and the spontaneous (in dance, performance, video, even architecture). The pencil and brush are replaced by the scanner and by memes of operations favoring minute detail over meaningful wholes. Music is generated by means of sampling and synthesizing. We deal with a phenomenon of massive decentralization-each is potentially an artist-and generalized integration through networks of interaction, within which museums, galleries, and auction houses represent major nodes. It is not unusual to see the walls of a museum become the support for a work whose life ends with the end of the show, if not earlier. Many musical compositions never make it to paper, forever sentenced to tape or compact disk. Composers who do not know how to read or write music rely on the musical knowledge integrated in their digital instruments.
With the advent of technological means for the production and dissemination of images, sounds, and performances begins an age of a sui generis artistic environment of life that is easy to adapt to individual preference, easy to change as the preference changes. The new artistic practice results in the demythification of artists and their art. Art itself is demythified at the same time. As a consequence of electronic reproducibility and infinite manipulation, art forms a new library of images with memory devices loaded with scanned art, but with no books. Sound samples are the library of the composer active in the civilization of illiteracy. Using networking as a matter of practicability, people could display, in places of living or work, images from any collection, or listen to music from any ongoing concert around the globe. They could also change the selection without touching the display. They could redo each artwork as they please, painting over its digital double in the act of appropriating it, probably beyond what any artist of the past would ever accept, or any artist of the present would care for. Music could be subjected to similar appropriations. As a matter of fact, televised images are already manipulated and r-written. DVD-three letters standing for Digital Video Data- yet to make it into the everyday jargon reflecting our involvement with new media, will probably replace the majority of televised images. With the advent of digital video delivered via the familiar compact disk format, a tool as powerful as any TV production facility will support artistic innovation that we still associate with high budgets and glamorous Hollywood events.
Art, as much as any other form of human interaction in the civilization of illiteracy, involves shorter cycles of exchange and contact at each of its levels: meaning constitution, symbolism, education, merchandise. The eternity and transcendence of art, notions and expectations associated with the literate experience, become nostalgic references of a past pragmatics. Viewers consume art almost at the rhythm at which they consume everything else. Art consumes itself, exhausting a model even before it can be publicly acknowledged as one. In its new manifestations, not all necessarily in digital format, but many in the transitory existence of networks, it either comes in an abundance, which contradicts the literacy-based ideal of uniqueness, or in short-lived singular modes, which contradicts the ideal of permanency. Strategies of over-writing, over-dancing, over-sounding, and over-impression are applied with frenzy. Grid structures made visible become containers for very fluid forms of expression, bringing to mind the fluidity of Chinese calligraphy. Afro-American street dancers, West European ballet groups, and theaters in which the human body is integrated into the more comprehensive body of the show, practice these strategies for different purposes and with different aesthetic goals. There is also a lot of parody, and fervor, in expanding one medium into another: music becomes painting or sculpture; dance becomes image; sculpture lends its volume to theatrical projects or to 3D renditions, virtual or real events that integrate the natural and the artificial.
In this vast effort of exploration, authenticity is rarely secured. Photography, especially in its digital forms, would be impossible without the industry it created; nor would painting, sculpture, music, or computer-based interactive art (cyberart, another name for virtual reality) without the industries they stimulated. The legitimate market of fakes and the illegitimate market of originals meet in the illiterate obsession with celebrity, probably the most fleeting of all experiences. The extension of art as practice to art as object, resulting from the aesthetic experience in the space of reproductions better than originals, is challenged by the intensions of the act (process). Intensity is accepted more and more as the essence of the artistic practical experience, impossible to emulate in a reproduction, and actually excluded in the perfection of a concert transposed onto a compact disk, for example, or of images on CD-ROM and DVD disks.
When each of us can turn into a gazelle, a lobster, a stone, a tree, a pianist, a dancer, an oboe, or even an abstract thought by donning gloves and goggles, we are projected in a space of personal fantasy. Creativity in virtual reality, including creativity of interaction on the Internet, invites play. It can be in someone's private theater, sex parlor, or drug experience. As an interactive medium, virtual reality can be turned into an instrument for knowing others as they unfold their creativity in the virtual space shared. As opposed to art in its conventional form, virtual reality supports real-time interactions. The artist and the work can each have its own life. Or the artist can decide to become the work and experience the perception of others. No Rembrandt or Cézanne, not even the illiterate graffiti artists in the New York subway system could experience such things.
Surprisingly, this experience is not limited only to non-language based experiences, but also to the art of writing and reading. Embodied in avatars, many would-be writers contribute their images or lines to ongoing fictional situations on chat sites on the World Wide Web. While art is freeing itself from literacy, literature does not seem to have the same possibility. Or is this another prejudice we carry with us from the pragmatic framework of literacy-defined self-constitution? The borderline, if any, between art and writing is becoming fuzzier by the hour.
A nose by any other name
The art of the word, of language, as exemplified in poetry, novels, short stories, plays, and movie scripts, takes place in a very strange domain of our existence. Why strange? The languages of poetry and of our routine conversations differ drastically. How they are different is not easy to explain. Many a writer and interpreter of poetry, plays, and stories (short or long) used their wisdom to explain that Gertrude Stein's "A rose is a rose is a rose," (or for that matter, Shakespeare's "A rose by any other name…") is not exactly the same as "A nose is a nose is a nose…" (or "A nose by any other name…"). Although the similarities between the two are so evident that, without a certain shared experience of poetry, some of us would qualify both as identically silly or identically strange, there is a literary quality that distinguishes them.
The art of written words, usually called literature, involves using language for practical purposes other than projecting our common experiences and sharing them on a social level. Nabokov once told his students that literature was not born on the day someone cried "Wolf! Wolf!" out of the Neander Valley as a wolf ran after him (or her). Literature was born when no wolf chased that person. "Between the wolf in the tall grass and the wolf in the tall story, there is a shimmering go-between. That go-between, that prism [Nabokov qualified Proust as a prism] is the art of literature." This is not the place to discuss the definition of literature, or to set one forth. It is clear, nevertheless, that literature is not the mere use of language. By a definition still to be challenged, there is no literature outside written language. (The term oral literature is regarded as a sad oxymoron by linguists who specialize in oral cultures.) Furthermore, there is no appropriation of the art of language, of its aesthetic expressiveness, without understanding language, a necessary but still insufficient condition. (It is insufficient because to understand language is not equal to using language creatively). Partisans of literacy will say that there is no literature without literacy. However, language use in literature is not the same as language use in daily life, in the self-constitutive experience of living and surviving.
When human experience is projected in language and language becomes a medium for new experiences, there is no distinction in the experience. The syncretic character of language as it is formed in a particular pragmatic framework corresponds to the syncretic character of human activity in its very early stages. Distinctions in language are introduced once this experience of self-constitution is segmented and various forms of labor division are brought about by expectations of efficiency. The scale of humankind, whatever it might be at a given moment, is reflected in distinctions in the pragmatic framework, which, in turn, determines distinctions in human expression and communication through language. Survival becomes a form of human practice, losing its primeval condition when it implies the experience of cooperation, and the realization, though limited, of what transcends immediacy. Killing an animal to satisfy hunger does not require awareness of needs and the means to fulfill them, as much as it requires natural qualities such as instinct, speed, and strength. Noticing that the flesh of an animal hit by lightening does not rot like the flesh of slaughtered animals requires a different awareness. The first reports about the immediate sequence of cause and effect; the second, about the ability to infer from one practical domain to another. So does the perceived need to share and expand experience.
In the oral phase, and in oral cultures still extant, the immediate and the remote (fear, for example, and the magical addressed with the hope of help) are addressed in the same language. The poetry of myths, or what is made of them as examples of poetry, is actually the poetry of the pragmatics pertinent to efficiency expectations of a small scale of humanity conveyed in myth. Rules for successful action were conveyed orally from one generation to another. Only much later in time, and due to demand for higher efficiency and the expanding scale, do different forms of practical experience separate, but not yet radically. Wolf is wolf, whether it is running after someone, or it is only a product of someone's imagination, or it is displayed in a cage in the zoo, or it is in the process of becoming extinct. Behind each of these situations lies an experience of conflict, on whose basis symbolism (rooted in zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, geometric, astrologic, or religious forms) is established. The use of language symbols is structurally identical to the use of astronomic, mathematical, or mytho-magical symbols in that it uses the conventional nature of the representation in sign processes (generation of new symbols, associations among symbols, symbolic inferences, etc.).
Crying wolf started early
Literature results from the perceived need to transcend the immediate and to make possible an experience in a time and space of choice, or in the space and time of language itself. Naming a place Florence, Brugges, Xanadu, Bombay, Paris, Damascus, Rio de Janeiro, or Beijing in a story derives from a motivation different from how names were given to real cities, to rivers, to mountains, even to human beings. Names are usually identifiers resulting from the pragmatic context. They become part of our environment, constituting the markers for the context, the stones and barbwire fence of the borders of the experiences from which they result. In each name of a person, place, or animal in what is called real life, as well as in fiction (poetry, plays, novels), the practical experience of human self-constitution creeps in.
When readers of a novel, audiences at a play, or listeners at a poetry recitation say that they learn something about the place, characters, or subject, they mean that they learn something (however limited) about the practical experience involved in constituting that novel, performance, or poem. Whether they really know about something, or whether they care to know it, is a different question. Usually, they do not know or care to know because, being born in a language, moreover being subjected to literacy, they believe that things are real because they are in language. They take the world for granted because words describe it. With such a frame of mind, things become even more real when they are written about. Some people are educated to accept some things as more real than others: historical accounts, geographic accounts, biographies, diaries, books, images on a screen. More often than not, people walk through Verona in order to see where Shakespeare's famous pair of enamored adolescent lovers swore undying love to each other. They wind up in front of some ridiculous plaque identifying the place. And because the incident has gone down in writing, they accept the place as real. A picture taken there seems to extend the reality of Romeo and Juliet into their lives. The same can be said of Bran Castle and the fictional Dracula; likewise for the so-called holy places in Jerusalem, reputed cafés in Paris, or sites associated with the name of Al Capone. Real life eventually makes the distinction between fiction, the fiction of fiction, the tourism of the fiction of fiction, and reality.
There is a borderline between the practice of writing (fiction or not) and the appropriation of literature by critics, historians of literature, linguists, tourist organizations, and readers. In the experience of writing, authors constitute themselves by projecting, in selected words and sentences, the ability to map between the world they live in and the world of language. In the experience of reading, one projects the ability to understand language and recreate a world in a text, not necessarily the same world in which writers constitute their identity. The process comprises a reduction, from the infinity of situations, words, ideas, characters, stylistic choices, and rhythms, to the uniqueness of the text, and the extension from one text to an infinity of understandings of the many components of a printed book or performed play. In this process, new reductions are made possible. The history of literature and language is well known for the stereotypes of systematic scholarly exposition. Literary critics proceed with a different strategy of reduction; book marketers end up summarizing a novel in a catch- phrase. What we learn from this is that there are several ways to encode, decode, and then encode again thoughts, emotions, reactions, and whatever else is involved in the experience of writing and reading.
The history of literature is connected to the diversification of language in more ways than traditional historic accounts lead us to believe. Even the emergence of genres and subgenres can be better understood if we consider the practice of literature in relation to the many forms of human practice. My intention is not to endorse the convention of realism, one of the weak explanatory models that theoreticians and historians of art and literature have used for a long time. The goal is to explain and document that various relations between spoken and written language and the language of literature lead to various writing conventions. In the syncretic phase of human practice, the relation was based on identity. In other words, the two forms of language were not distinguishable. Language was one. Distinctions in practical experiences resulted in distinctions in the self-constitution of the human being through a language that captured similarities and differences, and became a medium for conventions. These eventually led to symbols. Symbolism was acknowledged in writing, itself an expression of conventions.
The language of astronomy, agriculture, and alchemy (to refer here to incipient science, technology, and magic) was only as remote from normal language as normalcy was from observing stars, cultivating soil, or trying to turn lead into gold, conjuring the benevolence of magic forces. Reading today whatever survived or was reconstituted from these writings is an experience in poetry and literature. Unless the reader has a specific interest in the subject matter (as a scientist, philosopher, historian, or linguist), these writings no longer recall the wolf, but the art of expression in language. They are considered poetry or literature, not because they contain wrong ideas or false scientific hypotheses-their practical experience is in a pragmatic context to which we have difficulty connecting-but because their language testifies to an experience of transcending the borders between human practice and establishing a systematic, encompassing domain which now seems grounded in a fictional world. Religious writings (the Old Testament, Tao) are also examples.
The same happens to the child who saw a wolf (the child did not really see a wolf, he was bored and wanted attention), started crying wolf, and when finally adults show up, there is no wolf. "Oh, he likes to tell stories," or "She has a wild imagination. She will probably become a writer." In some cases, elves, ghosts, or witches are blamed for a sudden wind, changes in weather, or trees creaking in a storm or under the weight of snow, and this is reported as private fiction. Artistic writing and appropriation form a domain of recurrences at least as much as painting, dancing, observing stars, solving mathematical equations, or designing new machines do. Literature involves a convention of complicity, something along the line of "Let us not confuse our lives with descriptions of them," although we may decide to live in the fiction. As with any convention, people do not accept it in the letter, spirit, or both, and wind up crying with the unhappy hero, laughing with the comic character or at somebody. In other words, people live the fiction or derive some lesson from it, or identify with characters, in effect, rewriting them in the ink or blood of their own lives.
Meta-literature
The recurring interaction between a writer (indirectly present) and a reader takes place through writing and reading. It is proof of the practicality of the literary experience and an expression of its degree of necessity. The extent of the interaction is thus the expression of the part of the practical experience that is shared, and for what purpose. This is illustrated by the uses we give to literature: education, indoctrination, moral edification, illustration, or entertainment. Becoming who they are, the writer and reader project themselves in the reading through a process of dual reciprocal constitution, changing when circumstances change, objectified in the forms through which literature is acknowledged. It has a definite learned quality, in contrast to the arts of images, sounds, and movements, in which the natural component (as in seeing, hearing, moving) made the art possible. Accordingly, artistic writing has an instrumental characteristic and exercises virtual coordination of the experience of assigning meaning. In some ways, this instrumental characteristic begs association to music. To someone watching how the process unfolds, it seems that the recurrent interaction is triggered less by the dynamics of writing and reading, and more decisively by what comprises the act of instilling meaning of the objectified practice of the poem, play, script, novel, or short story. The fact is that language, more than natural systems of signs, pertains to an acquired structure of interactions, as humans progress from one scale to another, within which meaning is conjured. Language is influenced by the conditions of existence (human biology), but not entirely reducible to them. It constitutes as many domains of interaction as there are experiences requiring language, a subset of language, or artifacts similar to language.
The claim made from the perspective of literacy was, and still goes strong, that the universality of language is reflected in the universality of literature, and thus the universality of conveying meaning. Actually, to write literature means to un-write the language of everyday use, to empty it of the reference to behavior, and to structure it as an instrument of a different projection of the human being. It means understanding the process through which meaning is conjured as human self-constitution takes place. While it is true that when someone reads a text for the first time, the only reading is one that refers to the language of that particular reader's experience (what is loosely called knowledge of language); once the convention is uncovered, personal experience takes second place, and a new experience, deriving from the interaction, begins. The acquaintance makes the interaction possible; but it might as well stand in the way of its characteristic unfolding as a literary experience. Sometimes, the language of artistic wording establishes a self-contained universe of self-reference and becomes not only the message, but also the context. The practical experience of writing is discovery of universes with such qualities. The practical experience of reading is populating such a universe through personal projection that will test its human validity. Both writer and reader create themselves and ascertain their identities in the interaction established through the text.
It goes without saying that while literature is not a copy (mimesis) of the world, neither does it literally constitute something in opposition to it. In a larger framework, literature is but one among many means of practical human experiences resulting, like any other form of objectification, in the alienating process of writing, reading, criticizing, interpreting, and rewriting. Alienation comes from giving life to entities that, once expressed, start their own existence, no longer under the control of the writer or reader. For as long as language dominated human praxis according to the prescriptions of literacy, we could not understand how writing could be an experience in something other than language, or how it could be performed independent of language-based assumptions. Since the turn of the century, this situation has changed. Initially, there was a reaction to language: Dada was born when a knife was used to select a word from a Larousse dictionary. Between the action and its successive interpretations, many layers of practical experiences with language accumulated. The literature of the absurd went further and suggested situations only vaguely defined with the aid of language, actually defined in defiance of language conventions. There is more silence in the plays of Beckett and Ionesco than there are words.
Before becoming what many readers have regarded as only the expression of the poetics of self-reference, the experience of concrete poetry attempted to make poetry visual, musical, or even tactile. Happening was based on structuring a situation, with the implicit assumption that our domains of interactions are not defined only through language. The modern renewal of dance, emancipated from the condition of illustration and narration, and from the stifling conventions of classic ballet; the new conventions of film facilitated by understanding the implicit characteristics of the medium; and the expressive means of electronic performances only add to the list of examples characteristic of a literature trying to free itself from language and its literate rules. Or, in order to avoid the animistic connotation (literature as a living entity trying to do something), we should see the phenomena just mentioned as examples of new human experiences: constitution of the literary work as its own language, with the assumption that the process of appropriation would result in the realization of that particular language.
A realization, in literature as much as in science, is a description of a system which would behave as though it had this description. Accordingly, the day described in Joyce's Ulysses (Thursday, June 16, 1904) was not a sequential description, but a mosaic in which rules of language were continuously broken and new rules introduced. There is no character by the name of Ulysses in the book. The title and the chapter subtitles were meant to enforce the suggestion of a parallel to Homer's Odyssey. ("A beautiful title," wrote Furetière almost 300 years ago, "is the real pimp of the book.") Language-rather, the appearance of language-provided the geometry of the mosaic. For Joyce, writing turned out to be a practical experience in segmenting space and time in order to extract relations (hopeless past, ridiculous tragic present, pathetic future), an aesthetic goal for which the common use of language is ill equipped. The allusion to the Odyssey is part of the strategy, shared in advance with the critics, a para-text, following the text as a context for interpretation. But before him, Kafka and others, following a tradition that claims Cervantes' Don Quixote as a model, seemed no less challenged by the experience of designing their own language, ascertaining characters who transcend the conflict put in words, of using the power of para-text. Dos Passos, Laurence Sterne, and Hermann Hesse are examples from the same tradition. Gertrude Stein was a milestone in this development. In poetry, designing a language of one's own is strikingly evident, although more difficult to discuss in passing (as I know I am doing with some of the examples I give). Many poets-Burns comes easily to mind-invented their own language, with new words and new rules for using them. Others-and for some reason Vladimir Brodsky comes first to mind-wrote splendid para-texts (political articles, interviews, memoirs) that very effectively framed their poetry and put it in a perspective otherwise not so evident.
The experience of artistic writing does not happen in a vacuum. It takes place in a broader frame. To realize and to understand that there is a connection between the cubist perspective, Joyce's writing, and the scientific language of relativity theory will probably not increase reading pleasure. It will change the perspective of interpretation, though. The connection between genetics, computational models, and post-modern architecture, fiction, and political discourse is even more relevant to our current concern for literature. Recurrences of interactions come in varieties, and each variety is a projection of the individual at a precise juncture of the human practical experience of self-constitution as a writer or reader. Language split, and continues to split, into languages and sub-languages. Rap frequently subjects the listener of its rhythmic stanzas to slang. Gramsci, the Sardinian leftist philosopher, suggested the need for a language of the proletariat. Pier Paolo Pasolini, an admirer of Gramsci and a very sophisticated artist, wrote some of his works in the Friaul dialect and in the argot used by the poor youngsters of the streets of Rome. His argument was aesthetic and moral: corrupted by commercial democracy, language loses its edge, and people living in such a deprived language environment undergo anthropological mutation. Art, in particular literature, can become a form of resistance. A new language, reconnected to the authentic being, becomes an instrument for new literacy experiences. Tolkien wrote poems in Elvish; Anthony Burgess made up a language by combining exotic languages (Gypsy, Malay, Cockney) and less exotic languages (English, Russian, French, Dutch). An entire magazine (Jatmey) publishes fiction and poetry written in Klingon.
In a broader perspective, it is clear that in order to effectively create literary domains, people need instruments and media for new experiences. Meta-fiction is such an experience. It unites special types of illustrated novels, photographic fiction (which proliferates in South America and the Far East), and comic books. In Further Inquiry, Ken Kesey offers a documented journey in order to recapture the spirit of the sixties. Images (including some from Allen Ginsberg's collection) make the book almost a collective oeuvre. Using similar strategies, a text of meta-fiction first establishes the convention of the text as a distinct human construct made up of words, but which behave differently from informative, descriptive, or normative sentences that we use in interhuman communication. The strategy is to place the domain of the referent in the writings. The writer thus ensures that the potential reader will have no reason to look for references in empirical reality. This act of preempting the practice of reading, based on reflex associations in a different systematic domain, is not necessarily a warranty that such associations will not be made.
There are many people who, either due to their cognitive condition, or to their relative illiteracy, take metaphors literally. However, the writer makes the effort to establish new kinds of recurrent, inter-textual, and self-referential relations that signal the convention pursued. When the act of writing becomes, overtly or subvertly, the object of the writing experience, writers, and possible readers with them, move from the object domain to the meta domain. The writer knows that in the space of fiction, as much as in the space of the empirical world, people write on paper, tables are used to set dinner on, flowers have a scent, subways don't fly. But artistic writing is not so much reporting about the state of the world as it is constituting a different world, along with a context for interactions in this world. The validity and coherence of such worlds stems from qualities different from those that result from applying correct grammar, formal structure of arguments, syntactic integrity, and other requirements specific to the practice of language within the convention of literacy.
Writing as co-writing (painting as co-painting, composing as co-composing…)
The post-modern practice of creative writing involves the intention of interaction in ways not experienced in the civilization of literacy. The written is no longer the monument that must not be altered or questioned, continued, or summarized. Reading, seen in part as the effort to extract the truth from the text, takes on the function of projecting truth in the context of text interpretation. Actually, the assumption of this practical experience of co-creation (literary, musical, or artistic) has to do with different languages in the practice of writing and reading (painting and viewing, composing and listening, etc.), and even of co-writing (co-painting, co-composing, etc.).
Recent literary work in the medium of hypertext-a structure within which non- linear connections are possible-shows how far this assumption extends. A structure and core of characters are given. The reading involves the determination of events through determination of contexts. In turn, these affect the behavior of characters in the fictional world. This can unfold as a literary work conceived as a game, whose reading is actually the playing: The reader defines the attributes of the characters, inserts herself or himself in the plot, and the simulation starts. Neither the writer nor reader needs to know what programs stand behind the ongoing writing, and even less to understand how they work. The product is, in all of these cases, an infinite series of co- writing. The reader changes dialogues, time and space coordinates, names and characteristics of participants in the literary event. No two works are alike. Characteristics of self-ordering and self-informing-such as "X knows such and such about Y's peculiarities," or "Group Z is aware of its collective behavior and possible deviations from the expected"-allow for the constitution of an entirely artificial domain of fiction, with rules as interesting to discover as is the mystery behind a suicide, the complexities of a character's philosophy, or the existence of yet unknown universes.