Enormous segments of the world population are addressed by design. This fact gives the design experience, taken in its entirety, a new social dimension. Against the background of the opportunity to fine-tune designs to each individual without the need to build on expected literacy, the responsibility of such an activity is probably unprecedented. Whether designers are aware of it, and able to work within the boundaries of such an experience, is a different question.
The new designer
Designs mediate between requirements resulting from human practical experiences and possibilities (Gibson defined them as affordances) in nature and society. They embody expectations and plans for change; and they need to interface between the given and the desired or the expected. The language of design has an implicit set of anticipations and a projected endurance. Aesthetic structuring, culturally rooted and technologically supported, affects the efficiency of designed items. The explicit set of expectations is measured against this implicit set of anticipations. It translates from the many languages of human practical experiences to the language of design, and from here to the ways and means of embodying design in a product, event, message, material, or interaction.
It is interesting to consider the process of designing from as many perspectives as possible. From the thumbnail sketch to the many variations of a conceptual scheme, one eliminating the other, many decisions are arrived at. Design resembles a natural selection process: one solution eliminates the other, and so on until a relatively appropriate design emerges. This is the memetic scheme, successfully translated into design software programs based on genetic algorithms. In the absence of rules, such as those guiding literacy, and freed from dualistic thinking (the clear-cut good vs. bad), the designer explores a continuum of answers to questions that arise during the design process. The fact that various solutions compete with each other confers a certain drama on design. Its open-endedness projects a sense of change. Its mediating nature explains much of its engaging aspect. There is an obvious difference between the design experience within a context of assuming identity between the body and machines, and the new context of digital cloning of the human being. Designs in the area of neurobionics, robotic prosthetics, and even the cyber-body could not have emerged from any other pragmatic context but the one on which the civilization of illiteracy is established.
Still, if someone had to choose between the Greek Temple typewriter of 1890 and today's word processor, thoughtlessly designed and encased in cheap plastic, the choice would be difficult. One is an object of distinct beauty, reflecting an ideal we can no longer support. Its distinction made it unavailable to many people who needed such an instrument. Behind or inside the word processor, as behind any digital processing machine, are standardized components. The entire machine is a highly modular ensemble. One program is the archetype for all the word processing that ever existed. The rest is bells and whistles. Here is indeed the crux of the matter: The ability to achieve maximum efficiency based on the recognition that raw materials and energy mean nothing unless the creative mind, applied to tasks relevant to human experiences of self-constitution, makes something out of them.
In the line of the argument followed, design sometimes seems demonized for what we all experience as waste and disdain for the environment, or lack of commitment to the people replaced by new machines. That people eventually become addicted to the products of design-television sets, electronic gadgets, designer fashion, designer drugs-is an irony soon forgotten. At other times, design seems idealized for finding a way to maximize the efficiency of human practical experiences, or for projecting a challenging sense of quality against the background of our obsession with more at the lowest price. But it is not so much the activity as the people who are the activity that make either the criticism or glorification of design meaningful. This brings up the identity of the designer in the civilization of illiteracy.
Designers master certain parts of the vast realm of the visual. Some are exquisite in visualizing language: type designers, graphic artists, bookmakers; others, in realizing 3-dimensional space either as product designers, architects, or engineers. Some see design dynamically-clothes live the life of the wearer; gardens change from season to season, year to year; toys are played with; and animation is design with its own heart (anima). The variety of design experiences is only marginally controlled by design principles. There is integrity to design, consistence and pertinence, and there are aesthetic qualities. But if anyone would like to study design in its generality, the first lesson would be that there is no alphabet or rule for correct design, and no generally accepted criteria for evaluation. Literacy operates from top (vocabulary, grammar rules, and phonetics are given in advance) to bottom. Design operates the opposite way, from the particular context to new answers, continuously adding to a body of experience that seems inexhaustible.
People expect their environment to be designed (clothes, shoes, furniture, jewelry, perfume, home interiors, games, landscape) in order to harmonize with their own design. There are models, just as in the design process, mainly celebrities, themselves designed for public consumption. And there is the attempt to live life as a continuum of designed events: birth, baptism, communion, graduations (at different moments in the cycle of designed education), engagement, marriage, anniversaries, promotions, retirement, estate planning, funerals, estate execution, and wars. As a designed practical experience involving a variety of mediations, life can be very efficient, but probably not rewarding (in terms of quality) at the same time. The conclusion applies to the result of all design activities-products, materials, events. They make possible new levels of convenience, but they also remove some of the challenges people face and through which human personality emerges.
The relation between challenges-of satisfying needs or meeting higher and higher expectations-and the emergence of personality is quite intricate. Every practical experience expresses new aspects of the individual. Personality integrates these aspects over time and is projected, together with biological and cultural characteristics, in the never-ending succession of encounters of new situations, and consequently new people. The civilization of illiteracy shifts focus from the exceptional to the average, generating expectations affordable to everyone. The space of choices thus opened is appropriate to the endless quest for novelty, but not necessarily for the affirmation of the extraordinary. In most cases, the designer disappears (including his or her name) in the designed product, material, or event. Nobody ever cared to know who designed the Walkman, computers, earth stations, or new materials, or who designs designer jeans, dresses, glasses, and sneakers, tour packages, and Olympic games. No one even cares who designs Web sites, regardless of whether they attract many interactions or turn out to be only ego trips. Names are sold and applied on labels for their recognition value alone. No one cares whether there is a real person behind the name as long as the name trades well on the market in which the very same bag, watch, sneakers, or frame for glasses, sells under different identifiers.
This has to be seen in the broader picture of the general disconnectedness among people. Very few care to know who their neighbors or colleagues are, even less who the other people are who namelessly participate in expected abundance or in ecological self-destruction. Illiteracy indeed does away with the opaqueness of literacy- based human relations. All the means through which new practical experiences take place make each of us subject to the transparency of illiteracy. The result is even deeper integration of the individual in the shared databank of information through which our profile of commercial democracy is drawn. Design endlessly interprets information. Each time we step out of the private sphere-to visit a doctor or lawyer, to buy a pair of shoes, to build a house, to take a trip, to search for information on the Internet-we become more and more transparent, more and more part of the public domain. But transparency, sometimes savage in competitive life (economy, politics, intelligence), does not bring people closer. As we celebrate new opportunities, we should not lose sight of what is lost in the process.
Designing the virtual
The experience of design is one of signs and their infinite manipulation. It takes place in an experiential context that moved away from the object, away from immediacy and from co-presence. Some people would say it moved from the real, without thinking that signs are as real as anything else. When pushing this experience to its limits, the designer lands in imaginary territories of extreme richness. One can imagine a city built underwater, or a spherical house that can be rolled from location to location, devices of all kinds, clothing as thin as someone's thought, or as thick as tree bark or a rubber tire. One can imagine the wearable computer, new intelligent materials, even new human beings. Once the imagination is opened to fresh human endeavors-live in an underwater city, wear the lightest or heaviest clothing, interconnect with the world through what you wear, interact with new, genetically engineered humans-virtual space is opened for investigation. Regardless of how a virtual experience is made possible-drawings, diagrams, combinations of images and sounds, triggered dreams, happenings, or the digital embodiment of virtual reality-it escapes literacy-based constraints and embodies new languages, especially synaesthetic languages. In fact, if design is a sign focused on the practical experience, the design of virtual space is one level beyond, i.e., it is in the meta-sign domain. This observation defines a realm where the person frees himself from the structures characteristic of literacy.
In virtuality, the sequentiality of written language is overwritten by the very configurational nature of the context. Reciprocal relations among objects are not necessarily linear because their descriptions are no longer based on the reductionist approach. This is a universe designed as vague and allowing for the logic of vagueness. Within virtual space, self-constitution, hence identification, no longer regards cultural reference, which is literacy-based, but a changing self-reference. All attempts to see how a human being would develop in the absence of language could finally be embodied in the individual experience of a being whose mind reaches a state of tabula rasa (clean slate) in the virtual. That such an experience turns out to be a design experience, not a biological accident (e.g., a child who grew up among animals, whose language fails to develop and whose behavior is uncouth), is relevant insofar as freedom from language can be investigated only in relation to its consequences pertaining to human practical experiences.
Virtuality is actually the generic reality of all and any design practical experience. From among the very many designs in a state of virtuality, only a small number will become real. What gives one or another design a chance to transcend virtuality are contextual dependencies within any defined pragmatic framework. Designers do not simply look at birds flying and come up with airplanes, or at fish swimming and come up with boats or submarines. There are many design experiences that are based on knowledge resulting from our interaction with nature. But there are many more that originate in the realm of humanity. There is nothing to imitate in nature that will lead to the computer, and even less that will lead to designing molecules, materials, and machines endowed with characteristics that allow for self-repair and virtual environments for learning difficult skills. Design in the civilization of illiteracy relies foremost on human cognitive resources. Experience, like most of the practical endeavors of this pragmatic framework, becomes predominantly computational and disseminates computational means.
Design human praxis, as the dominant factor of change from the pragmatics embodied in manufacturing to the new experiences of service economy, effected differentiations in respect to means of expression and communication, in respect to the role of representation, and to our position in regard to values. The electronic data storage and retrieval that complements the role of print, and progressively replaces it, results from the experience of design supported by fast and versatile digital data processing. When, at the social level, representation is replaced by individual activism, and by the militancy of interest groups, we also experience a diffusion of politics into the private, and to a certain extent, its appropriation by interest groups assembled around causes of short-term impact that keep changing. This change effects a shift from the expectation of authority, connected to literacy-based human experiences, to the slippery authority of individual choice.
The designed world of artifacts, environments, materials, messages, and images (including the image of the individual) is a world of many choices, but of little concern for value. Its life results from the exercise of freedom to choose and freedom to re- design ad infinitum. Almost everything designed under these new pragmatic conditions embodies expectations associated with illiteracy. The object no longer dominates. The impressive mechanical contraptions, the engines, the shift systems, articulations, precious finish-they all belong among the collectibles. Quite to the contrary, the new object is designed to be idiot-proof (the gentler name is user friendly), reflecting a generalized notion of permissiveness that replaces discipline and self-control in our interaction with artifacts.
Design also affects change in our conception of fact and reality, stimulating the exploration of the imaginary, the virtual, and the meta-sign. Facts are replaced by their representations and by representations of representations, and so on until the reference fades into oblivion. Henceforth, the positivist expectations ingrained in the experiences of the civilization of literacy are reconstituted as a frame of relativist interactions, dominated by images, seconded by sounds (noise included). Imaging technologies make drawing available to everyone, exactly as writing was available to those processed as literates. The photographic camera-drawing with light on film-the electronic camera, the television camera, the scanner, and the digitizer are, effectively, means for drawing and for processing the image in full control of all its components. A sound level can easily be added, and indeed sound augments the expressive power of images. Interactivity, involved in the design process, adds the dimension of change. That literacy, as one of the many languages of the civilization of illiteracy, uses design in its various forms to further its own program is clear. Probably less clear is that the literate experience is itself changed through such instances. After all, literacy is the civilization that started with the conventions of writing and grew to the one Book open to all possible interpretations, as these were generated in the attempt to effectively conjure its meaning in new pragmatic contexts. Literacy subjected to all the means that become possible in the civilization of illiteracy, in particular to those that design affords, results in the infinity of books, printed for the potential individual reader (or the very limited readership that a title or journal tends to have) who might finally give it one interpretation (equal to none) by placing it, unopened and unread, on a bookshelf. The radical description given above might still be far away from today's reality, but the dynamics of change points in this direction.
On the Internet, we come closer to what emerges as a qualitatively new form of human interaction. Design is integrated in the networked world in a number of ways: communication protocols, hypertext, document and image layout, structure of interactive multimedia. But no one designer, and no one company (not even the institution of defense, which supports networking) can claim that it designed this new medium of human practical experiences. Many individuals contributed, mostly unaware that their particular designs would fit in an evolving whole whose appearance and function (or breakdown) no one could predict. These kept changing by the year and hour, and will continue to change for the foreseeable and unforeseeable future.
Consider the design of communication protocols. This defies all there is to literacy. A word spelled correctly is disassembled, turned into packages that carry one letter at a time (or a portion of a letter), and given indications where they should arrive, but not through which route. Eventually, they are reassembled, after each package travels its own path. But in order to become a word again, they are further processed according to their condition. Such communication protocols negate the centrality and sequentiality of literacy and treat all that is information in the same way: images, sounds, movements. Many other characteristics of literacy-dominated pragmatics are overridden in the dynamic world of interconnections: formal rules of language, determinism, dualistic distinctions. Distributed resources support distributed activities. Tremendous parallelism ensures the vitality of the exponentially increasing number and types of transactions. Design itself, in line with almost any conceivable form of practical experience, becomes global.
Enthusiasm aside, all this is still very much a beginning. Networks, for transportation (trains, buses, airplanes, highways), for communication (telephone, telegraph, television), for energy distribution (electric wires, gas pipelines) were designed long before we knew of computers and digital processing. In the context in which human cognitive resources take precedence over any other resources, as we face efficiency requirements of the global scale of humankind, connecting minds is not an evolutionary aspect of design, but a revolutionary step. All the networks mentioned above can participate in the emergence of humankind's integrated network. Their potential as more than carriers of voice messages, electricity, gas, or railway passengers is far from being used in the ways it can and should be. Design experiences of integration will make the slogan of convergence, applied to the integration of telecommunication, media, and computing, a reality that extends beyond these components. In some curious ways, the Netizen-the citizen of the digitally integrated world-is a consequence of our self-identification in practical activities based on a qualitatively new understanding of design.
Politics: There Was Never So Much Beginning
Hölderlin's verse, "There was never so much beginning" (So viel Anfang war noch nie) captures the spirit of our time. It applies to many beginnings: of new paradigms in science, of technological directions, of art and literature. It is probably most applicable to the beginnings in political life. The political map of the world has changed more rapidly than we can remember from anything that books have told us. It is dangerous to generalize from events not really settled. But it is impossible to ignore them, especially when they appear to confirm the transition from the civilization of literacy to the civilization of illiteracy.
People who deal with the development and behavior of the human species believe that cooperative effort explains the development of language, if not its emergence. Cooperative effort is also the root of human self-constitution as political animals. The social dimension, starting with awareness of kinship and followed by commitments to non-kin is, in addition to tool-making, the driving force of human intellectual growth. Simply put, the qualifiers political animal (zoon politikon) and speaking animal (zoon phonanta) are tightly connected. But this relationship does not fully address the nature of political human experiences.
Different types of animals also develop patterns of interaction that could be qualified as social, without reaching the cognitive sophistication of the species Homo Habilis. They also exchange information, mainly through gestures, noises, and biochemical signals. Tracking food, signaling danger, and entrance into cooperative effort are documented aspects of animal life. None of these qualifies them as political animals; neither do the means involved qualify as language. Politics, in its incipient forms or in today's sophisticated manifestations, is a distinct set of interhuman relationships made necessary by the conscious need to optimize practical experiences of human self-constitution. Politics is not equivalent to the formation of a pack of wolves, to the herding tendency of deer, nor to the complex relations within a beehive. Moreover, politics is not reducible to sheer survival strategies, no matter how sophisticated, which are characteristic of some primates, and probably other animals.
The underlying structure of the activities through which humans identify themselves is embodied in human acts, be they of the nature of tool-making, sharing immediate or remote goals, and establishing reciprocal obligations of a material or spiritual nature. Changes in the circumstances of practical experiences effect changes in the way humans relate to each other. That the scale of human worlds, and thus the scale of human practical experience, is changing corresponds to the dynamics of the species' constitution. Incipient agricultural activity and the formation of the many families of languages correspond to a time when a critical mass was reached. At this threshold, syncretic human interaction was already rooted in well defined patterns of practical experience. The pragmatic framework shaped the incipient political life, and was in turn stimulated by it. Politics emerged once the complexity of human interactions increased. Political practical experiences are related to work, to beliefs, to natural and cultural distinctions, even to geography, to the extent to which the environment makes some forms of human experiences possible. This is why, from a historic perspective, politics is never disassociated from economic life, religion, racial or ethnic identity, geography, art, or science.
The underlying structure of human praxis that determined the need for literacy also determined the need for appropriate means of expression, communication, and signification. This becomes even more obvious in politics, which is embedded in literacy-based pragmatics. Consequently, once the particular pragmatic circumstances change, the nature, the means, and the goals of politics should change as well.
The commercial democracy of permissiveness
The condition of politics in a pragmatic framework of non-sequentiality, non- linear functional dependencies, non-determinism, decentralized, non-hierarchic modes of interaction or accelerated dynamics, extreme competitive pressure-that is, in the framework of the civilization of illiteracy-currently escapes definition. State of flux appropriately describes what such a political experience can be. What we have today, however, is a conflict between politics anchored in the pragmatics that is still based on literacy and politics shaped by forces representing the pragmatic need to transcend literacy. The conflict affects the condition of politics and the nature of contemporary political action. It affects everything related to the social contract and its implementation: education, exercise of democracy, practice of law, defense, social policies, and international affairs.
Changes affecting current political experiences are part of a sweeping dynamics. These changes range from the acknowledged transition from an industrially based national economy to an information processing global economy focused on service. Part of the change is reflected in the transition from national economies of scarcity (usually complemented by patterns of preserving and saving) to large, integrated commercial economies of access, even right, to consumption and affluence. Established in the context of political movements that focused on individuality, these integrated economies affect, in turn, the condition of the individual, who no longer sees the need for self-restraint or self-denial, and indulges in the commercial democracy of permissiveness. Consequently, political trials are met, or avoided, with an Epicurean response: withdrawal from public life for the pleasures of buying, entertainment, travel, and sport, which in a not-so-distant past only the rich and powerful could enjoy. Politics itself, as Huxley prophesied in his description of the brave, new world, becomes a form of entertainment, or yet another competitive instant, not far from the spirit and letter of the stock market, of the auction house, or the gambling casino.
Political involvement in a democracy of permissiveness is channeled into various forms of activism, all expressions of the shift from the politics of authority to that of expanding freedom of choice. The new experience of increasingly interactive electronic media is probably correlated to the shift from the positivist test of facts, as it originated in science and expanded into social and political life, to the rather relativist expectation of successful representations, in public opinion polls, in staged political ceremonies, in the image we have of ourselves and others. Albeit, the power of the media has already surpassed that of politics.
All these considerations do not exhaust the process under discussion. They explain how particular types of activism-from emancipatory movements (feminist, racial, sexual) to the new action of groups identified through ethnic origin, lifestyle, concern for nature-use politics in its newer and older forms to further their own programs. Openness, tolerance, the right to experiment, individualism, relativism, as well as attitudinally motivated movements are all illiterate in nature in the sense that they defy the structural characteristics of literacy and became possible only in post- literate contexts. Some of these movements are still vaguely defined, but have become part of the political agenda of this period of fervor and upheaval. Literacy, in search of arguments for its own survival, frequently embraces causes stemming from experiences that negate it.
The impact of new self-constitutive practical experiences and definition on digital networks already qualifies these experiences as alternatives, regardless of how limited an individual's involvement with them is. Within the realm of human interaction in the only uncensored medium known, a different political experience is taking shape. What counts in this new experience are not anonymous voters lumped into ineffective majorities, but individuals willing to partake in concrete decisions that affect their lives in the virtual communities of choice that they establish. While the mass media, still connected to the literate nest in which they were hatched, partake in the functioning of political machines that produce the next meaningless president, a different political dynamics, focused on the individual, is leading to more efficient forms of political practical experiences. There is nothing miraculous to report in this respect. Notwithstanding, the Internet can be credited for the defeat of the attempt in 1991 to turn back the political clock in Russia, as well as for the way it is influencing events in China, East Europe, and South America.
How did we get here?
Human relations can be characterized, in retrospect, by recurrences. Distinctions within self-constitutive experiences occur under the pressure of the realized need to achieve higher levels of efficiency. Relations, which include a political component pertinent to cooperative efforts and the need to share the outcome, have been evinced since the syncretic phase of human activity. There is no distinct political dimension in the syncretic pragmatics of immediacy. Incipient political identity, as any other kind of human self-identification, is foremostly natural: the strongest, the swiftest, those with the most acute senses are acknowledged as leaders. The most powerful are successful on their own account. And this success translates into survival: more food, more offspring, resilience, ability to escape danger. Once the natural is humanized, the qualities that make some individuals better than others were acknowledged in the realms of nature and human nature. Whether as tribal leaders, spiritual animators, or priests, they all accomplished political functions and continuously reaffirmed the reasons for their perceived authority. Over time, natural qualities lost their determinant role. Characteristics based on human nature, in particular intellectual qualities such as communication skills and management and planning abilities, progressively tipped the balance. Current textbooks defining politics do not even mention natural abilities, focusing instead on the art or science of governing, shrewdness in promoting a policy, and contrivance.
From participatory forms of political life, in which solidarity is more important than differences among people, to the forms characteristic of our time of personal and political shift away from each other, changes have taken place because human practice made them necessary. Politics was not and is not a passive result of these changes, some of which it stimulated, others of which it opposed. The survival drive behind participatory forms was continuously redefined and became a different kind of assertion: not just better than other species, but better than those before us, better than others. Competition shifted from the realm of nature-man against nature-to the realm of humanity. Once the element of comparison to the other, or judgment by others, was introduced, hierarchy was established. Hierarchy put on record became, with the advent of notation, and more so with the advent of writing, a component of experience, one of its structuring elements. It is no longer a here-and-now defined action of immediacy, but action expanded as progression over generations and societies, and among various societies. Accordingly, while solidarity, though permanently subject to redefinition, was still in the background, the driving forces were quite different. They resulted from the need to establish a political practice of efficiency pertinent to the pragmatic framework, henceforth to the needs of the community.
For as long as human activity was relatively homogeneous, there was no need for political delegation or for reifying political goals into rules or organizations. Once diversification became possible, the task of integration, to which rituals, myths, religion, assignment distribution, and leadership contributed, changed. Not only did people involve more of their past in new practical experiences, but they also started to keep records and to measure the adequacy of effort, and thus the appropriateness of their own policies. Attention to their past, present, and future also allowed them to become aware of the means that distinguished political practical experiences from all other experiences (magic, myth, religion). It was a difficult undertaking, especially under the provisions of centralized, syncretic authority. The natural, the magical, the religious, the logical, the economical, and the political mingled. The critical element proved to be represented by practical expectations. To implore unknown forces for rain, a successful hunt, or fertility was very different from articulating expectations related to what needs to be done to maintain the integrity of work and life. Initially, these expectations were mixed. They progressively became more focused, and a sense of accountability, based on tangible results, embodied in comparisons, was introduced.
While self-constitution is the projection of individual characteristics (biological, cultural) in a given practical experience, political practice is to a great extent a projection of expectations. At each juncture in humankind's practical experience, the previous expectation is carried over as new expectations appear. Accordingly, it is expected that a political leader will embody, in fact or through the symbolism of authority, natural qualities, cognitive abilities, and communication skills (rhetoric included), among other attributes. When these expectations are embodied in specific functions (tribal chief, judge, army commander, elected legislator, or selected member of the executive body) and in political institutions, the projection is no longer that of individuals, but of the society committed to the goals and means expressed, to its acknowledged values. Whether indeed each tribal leader was the fastest, or each judge the most impartial in ascertaining the damage done by a person who defied rules of life and work, whether the military leader was the bravest, or the legislator the wisest, became almost irrelevant after their political recognition. Expectation overcame reality. This aspect becomes very significant in the context of literacy. Moreover, it becomes critical in the transition from the pragmatics on which literacy is based to a pragmatic framework in respect to which literacy requirements only hinder.
Political institutions firmly grounded in the assumptions of literacy still debate whether tele-communting is acceptable, tele-commerce secure, or tele-banking in the national interest. While the debates are going on, these new practical experiences are taking hold in the global economy. Networks, in full expansion, are altering the nature of human transactions to the extent that fewer and fewer people participate in elections because they know that the function of these elections-to present choice-is no longer politically relevant. There is a need to bring politics closer to individuals; and this need can be acknowledged only within structures of individual empowerment, as opposed to empty representation.
Political activity resulted in norms, institutions, values, and a consciousness of belonging to society. Not by any stretch of the imagination is politics a harmonizing activity, because to live with others, to enter a contract and pursue one's individual goals within its limitations, means to accept a condition of a sui generis trade-off. Political experiences involve, in various degrees, skills and knowledge for giving life and legitimacy to trade-offs. Language is the blood that flows through the arteries of the political animal. When tamed by literacy, this language defines a very precise realm of political life. The heartbeat of the literate political animal corresponds to a rhythm of life and work controlled by literacy. The accelerated rhythm that became necessary under a new scale of experiences requires the liberation of political language from the control of literacy, and the participation of many languages in political experiences.
It should come as no surprise that the expectation of language skills, even when language changes, in people involved in the practical experience of politics is carried over from one generation to another. Regardless of the level of sophistication reached by a particular language, and of the specific form of political practice, effective use of powerful means of expression and communication is required. Even when they did not know how to write, kings and emperors were regarded as being better writers than those who could. They would dictate to the scribe, who created the perception that they probably translated what higher authorities whispered into their ears. Even when their rhetoric was weak, the masters of persuasion they used were seen as only agents of power. Books were attributed to political leaders; victory in war was credited to them, as well as to military commanders. Law codes were associated with their names, and even miracles, when politics joined the forces of magic and religion (often playing one against the other). All this and more represent the projection of expectations.
The particular expectations of literacy confirm values associated with its characteristics. Politics and the ideals embodied in the Enlightenment-it carried into action political aspirations originating in religion-and the Industrial Revolution cannot be separated. Expectations of permanency, universality, reason, democracy, and stability were all embodied in the political experience. New forms of political activism were encouraged by literacy and new institutions emerged. Awareness of boundaries among cultures and languages increased. Centralism was instituted, and hierarchies, some very subtle, others insidious, were promoted with the help of the very powerful instrument of language. Within this context, the practical experience of politics established its own domain and its own criteria for effectiveness, very different from those in the ancient city-state or in the pragmatics of feudalism. Identification of the professional politician, different from the heir to power, was part of this process. Politics opened to the public and affirmed tolerance, respect for the individual, and equality of all people before the law. Political functions were defined and political institutions formed. Rules for their proper operation were encoded through literate means. The alliance between politics and literacy would eventually turn into an incestuous love, but before that happened, emancipation of human political experiences would reach a historic climax in the revolutions that took place during this time.
To celebrate all these accomplishments, while remaining aware of the many shadows cast upon them by prejudices carried over from previous political experiences (in regard to sex, race, religion, ownership), was a task of monumental dimensions. We can and must acknowledge that human political experiences played a more important role than in previous social contexts in maximizing efficiency in the pragmatic framework that made literacy necessary. It was at this time that the role of education, and especially the significance of access to it, were politically defined and pursued according to the efficiency expectations that led to the Industrial Revolution. The process was far from being universal. The western part of the world took the lead. Its political institutions encouraged investment, and education was such an investment.
Political institutions reflect the pragmatic condition of the citizen and, in turn, effect changes in the experience of people's life and work. While the word illiteracy probably first appeared print in 1876 in an English publication, in 1880 illiteracy in Germany was only one per cent of the population: "Heil dem König, Heil dem Staat/ Wo man gute Schulen hat!" went the slogan hailing the king and state where good schools were the rule. This was the time when Thomas Alva Edison invented the incandescent light bulb (1879); Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone (patented in 1876); Nicklaus Otto, the four-stroke gas engine (1876); Nikola Tesla, the electric alternator (1884). Nevertheless, before Leo Tolstoy wrote War and Peace, he learned that only one per cent of all Russians were literate. In many other parts of the world, the situation was not much better. In addition, this was also a time when literacy was literally an instrument of political discrimination. Those not literate were looked down on, as were women (some held back from literacy and study), as were nations considered ignorant and of inferior morals (Russia being one of them).
Reflected in the ability to dominate nature, the growth of science and the use of effective technological means influenced the political nature of states, as well as the relation among nations. Rationality formed the foundation of legality; the state ascertained priority over individuals-a very direct reflection of its literate nature. Rules were applied to everyone equally (which later translated into an effective "all are equal," quite different from the empty slogans of populist movements). The rationality in place derived from literacy. To be effective meant to dominate those who were less effective (citizens, communities, nations).
Far from being a historic account, these observations suggest that the literate political animal pursues political goals in line with the sequential nature of literacy in a context of centralized power, acknowledged hierarchies, and deterministic expectations. The political institution is a machine, one among many of the pragmatics of the Industrial Revolution. It did one thing at a time, and one part of the machine did not have to know what the other was doing. Energy was used between input and output, and what resulted-political decisions, social policies, regulations-was mass production of whatever the society could negotiate: lubrication diminished friction. Parties were formed, political programs articulated, and access to power opened to many. Two premises were implicit in the literate discourse: people should be able to express opinions on issues of public interest; and they should be able to oversee the political process, assuming responsibility for the way they exercise their political rights. These two premises introduced an operational definition of democracy and freedom, eventually encoded in the doctrine of liberal democracy. They also confirmed the literate expectation that democracy and freedom, like literacy, are universal and eternal.
The failure of literacy-based politics takes place on its own terms. Dictatorships (left-wing and right-wing), nationalism, racism, colonialism, and the politics of disastrous wars and of the leveling of aspirations that leads to the mediocrity embodied in bureaucracy have brought the high hopes, raised during the climax of literate political action, to the low of indifference and cynicism we face in our day. Instead of the people's broader participation in the political process, a hope raised by progress in making equality and freedom effectively possible, society faces the effects of the ubiquitous dedication to enjoyment in corrupted welfare states unable to meet the obligations they assumed, rightly or not. At times, it seems that the complexity of political experience prevents even the people's symbolic participation in government. Volunteering and voting, a right for which people fought with a passion matched only by their current indifference, have lost their meaning. There is no proper feedback to reinforce the will and dedication to participate. It also seems that in advocating equality and freedom, a common denominator so low was established that politics can only administer mediocrity, but not stimulate excellence. From among all its functions, nationhood, as the embodiment of the experience of political self-constitution, seems to maintain only the function of redistribution.
Individual liberty, hard fought for under the many signs of literacy, appears to be conformistic at best, and opportunistic. To many citizens, it is questionable whether the lost sense of community is a fair trade-off for the acquired right to individualism. The hundreds of millions again and again seduced by the political discourse of hatred (in fascism, communism, nationalism, racism, fanaticism) wasted their hard-won rights in order to take away from others property, freedom of expression and religion, liberty, dignity, and eventually life. Politics after Auschwitz was not meant to become yet another instance of pettifogging. But it did, and we all are aware of the opportunistic appropriation of tragedy (hunger, oppression, disease, ecological disaster) in current political entertainment.
The efficiency expected from political action under the assumptions of literacy is characteristic of the scale at which people constitute themselves. The nation is the world, or the only thing that counts in this world of opportunity and risk. The rest is, relatively speaking, superfluous. Nations, even those that acknowledge the need to integrate, try to secure functioning as autonomous entities. National borders may be less guarded, but they are maintained as borders of literacy translated into economic opportunity. When the goal of autonomous existence is no longer attainable, expansion is the answer. Ideological, racial, economic and other types of arguments are articulated in order to justify the extension of politics in the experience of battle. The two World Wars brought literate politics to its climax, and the Cold War (the first global battle) to its final crisis, but not yet to its end, even though the enemy vanished like a humorless ghost.
A closer look at the systematic aspects of the political experience of human self- constitution should prepare us for approaching the current political condition. This should at least provide elements for understanding all those accumulated expectations that people have with respect to politics, politicians, and the institutions through which political goals are pursued. Political goals are always practical goals, regardless of the language in which they are expressed or the rituals attached. As recurrent patterns of human relationships, political experiences appear to have a life of their own. This creates the impression that agreements dictated by practical reasons originate outside the experience, at the initiative of politicians, due to a certain event, or as the result of random choice.
Political tongues
Language is the instrument through which political practical experience takes place. To reconstitute past succeeding political experiences therefore means to reconstitute their language(s). The task is overwhelming because politics is mingled with every aspect of human life: work, property, family, sex, religion, education, ethics, and art. It is present even in the interrelations of these aspects because politics is also self-reflective. That is, the identity of one entity is related to the identity of others in relation to which self-identification takes place. The variety of political experiences corresponds to the variety of pragmatic circumstances within which humans project their identity.
Individual existence resulting from interaction with others extends to the realm of politics and is embodied in the recurrent patterns that make up expectations, goals, institutions, norms, conflicts, and power relations. The individual is concealed in all these. In some ways, politics is a social-educational practice resulting in the integration of instinctive actions (a-political) and learned modes of practice with social impact. What constitutes politics is the dynamics of relations as they become possible and as they unfold as openings towards new relations. One of the concrete forms of such relations is the propensity to coalition building. Politics is contingent upon subjects interacting. Their past (ontogeny) and present (pragmatics) are involved in these interactions. To a certain extent, it is a learned form of practice requiring means for interaction, among which language has been the most important. It is also a practice of investigation, discovery, and social testing.
The manifold of political languages corresponds to the manifold of practical experiences. There are probably as many political tongues as there are circumstances of self-identification within a society. But against the background of this variety is the expectation that word and deed coincide, or at least that they do not stray too far from each other.
The advent of writing changed politics because it attached written testimony to it, which became a referential element. As Socrates and Plato noticed, this was a blessing in disguise. Since the time writing entered the political sphere, the practical argument shifted from the fact, argued and eventually settled, to the record. It became itself a practical experience of records (of property, law, order, agreements, negotiations, and allocations for the good of society). The institutions that emerged after the practical experience of writing operated within the structure of and in accordance with the expectations brought about by writing. And soon, as relative as soon can be, political self-consciousness was established parallel to political action and pursued as yet another practical experience.
The many languages of political experience multiply once more in the new languages of political awareness. Where values were the final goal of politics, the value of the political experience itself became a subject of concern. Many political projects were pursued at this self-reflective level: conceiving new forms of human cooperation and political organization, advancement of ideas concerning education, prejudices, emancipation, and law. This explains, too, why in the sequence of political practical experiences, expectations did not nullify each other. They accumulated as an expression of an ideal, forever moving away from the last goal attained. Without a good understanding of the process, nobody could account for the inner dynamics of political change. The same applies to accounting for the role played by political leaders, philosophers, and political organizations involved, by virtue of their own goals and functions, in political life.
Politics in the civilization of illiteracy is not politics out of the blue sky. Along the continuum of political practical experiences, it entails expectations generated under different pragmatic circumstances. And it faces challenges-the major challenge being the efficiency expected in the new scale of human experience-for which its traditional means and its inherited structure are simply not adequate. Political discontinuity is always more difficult to accept, even understand. Revolutions are celebrated only after they take place, and especially after they successfully establish a semblance of stability.
Can literacy lead politics to failure?
In our time, much is said regarding the perception that the language of politics and the political practice it seems to coordinate are very far apart. People's mistrust of politics appears to reach new heights. The role and importance of political leaders and institutions apparently have changed. The most able are not necessarily involved in politics. Their self-constitution takes place in practical experiences more rewarding and more challenging than political activism. Political institutions no longer represent the participants in the political contract, but pursue their own goals, survival included. Law takes on a life of its own, more concerned, so the public perceives, with protecting the criminal, in the name of preserving civil rights, than upholding justice. Taxes support extravagant governments and forms of social redistribution of wealth, more often reflecting a guilt complex over past inequities than authentic social solidarity. Instead of promoting meaningful human relationships and addressing the future, they keep fixing the past. Everyone complains, probably a phenomenon as old as any relation among people involved in a sui generis give-and-take interaction. But fewer and fewer are willing to do something because individual participation and effort appear useless in the given political structure.
The majority of people look back to some prior political experience and interpret the past in the light of books they have read. They fail to realize that the complexity of today's human experience cannot be met by yesterday's solutions. They are convinced that if we are faithful to our political heritage, all problems, credibility and corruption included, will be solved. They also believe religious systems and their great books contain all that is needed to meet all imaginable present and future challenges. Even the very honorable conviction that the founders of modern democracies prepared citizens to cope with this unprecedented present cannot go unchallenged. The Constitution of the United States (1787) as well as the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in France (1789) reflect the thinking and the prose of the civilization of literacy. Similar documents are on record in Latin America, Europe, India, and Japan. They are as useless as history can be when new circumstances of human self- constitution are totally different from the experiences that gave birth to these documents. Revisionism will not do. The new context requires not a static collection of admirable principles, but dynamic political structures and procedures of the same nature as the pragmatics of shorter cycles of change, non-determinism, high efficiency, decentralization, and non-hierarchical modes of operation. As the world reinvents itself as interwoven, it breaks loose from prescriptions of local significance and traditional import.
Although the number of emerging nations has increased-and nobody knows how many more will emerge-we know of no political documents similar to those articulated in 1776, 1789, 1848, or even 1870. Nothing comparable to the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, even the Communist Manifesto (no matter how discredited it is at present), whether in substance or style, has accompanied current political movements. The reason why no such document can emerge can be connected to the inadequacies of literacy-based politics. This civilization is no longer one of ideas, religious or secular. It is characterized by processes, methodologies, and inventions expressed in various sign systems that have a dynamics different from that of language and literacy. The ideas of the civilization of literacy address the mind, soul, and spirit.
The most one can expect in our time of upheaval and change are provisions for establishing conditions for unhampered human interactions in the market and in other domains of human self-constitution (religion, education, family). Steady globalization means that the health of national economies, education, sports, or art matters just as little as national borders and the theatrics of diplomacy and international relations. One can hear Dostoyevsky's prophetic line: "If it's otherwise not possible, make us your servants, but make us full." It hurts to repeat it, but it will hurt more to ignore it at a time when nothing grows faster than the urge of millions of people to emigrate to any developed country willing to take them, even as second-class citizens, so long as they escape their current abysmal condition.
The dynamics of change in the world is characterized by the acknowledged need of many countries to be integrated in the global economy while preserving or requiring a token of national identity. State sovereignty is self-delusive in the context of commercial, financial, or industrial autonomy that is impossible to achieve. Self- determination, always to the detriment of some other ethnic group, echoes those tribal instincts that make the ideal of constitutional government an exercise in futility. The underlying structure of literacy is reflected in national movements and their dualistic system of values. The logic of the good and the bad, more difficult to define in a context of vagueness, but still pursued blindly, controls the way coalitions are established, migration of populations is handled, and national interests defended, while these very nations argue for integration and free market.
Nevertheless, the language of today's politics is, in the final analysis, shaped by the pragmatic framework. Its sentences are written in the language of ledgers; the freedom it purports to establish is that of commercial democracy, of equal access to consumption, which happens to be the main political achievement of recent history. The fact that the nations forming the European Community gave up sovereignty with respect to the market proves the point. That they still preserve diplomatic representation, defense functions, and immigration policies only attests to the conflict between the politics of the civilization of literacy and the politics of the civilization of illiteracy.
The great documents of the literate past perpetuate the rhetoric of the time of their writing. All the structural characteristics of literacy, valid for the pragmatic framework that justifies them, deeply mark the letter and spirit of these documents. They ascertain politics as sequential, linear, and deterministic. They rejoice in promulgating ideals that correspond to the scale of humankind in which they guarantee the means that result in the efficiency of industrial and productive society. Liberté, egalité, fraternité are shorthand for rights of conscience, ownership, and individual legal status. They are an expression of accepted hierarchy and centralism to the degree that these could be rendered relative as need required. Expectations of permanency and universality were carried over from earlier political experiences, or from religion, even though separation of Church and State was emphatically proclaimed during the French Revolution, and in revolutions that took place afterwards. Amendments required by altered circumstances of human self-constitution in practical experiences not anticipated in the documents render their spirit relative and solve some of the problems caused by the limitations mentioned.
Political documents, such as the ones mentioned above, are still perceived as sacrosanct, regardless of their obvious inadequacy in the pragmatic context of the civilization of illiteracy. It is one thing to establish the sanctity of property in a framework of agricultural praxis, whose politics was inspired by a shared expectation of cycles parallel to natural cycles. Jefferson envisioned the land as a vast agrarian state. "We are a people of farmers. Those who work the fields are the chosen people of God, if He had a chosen people. In their heart He planted the real virtue." It is quite another thing to live in a pragmatic context of new forms of property, some reflecting a notion of sequential accumulation, others an experience of work with machines, of humans seen as commodity. It is a new reality to live in today's integrated world of property as elusive as new designs, software, information, and ways to process it. To apply to this context political principles inspired by a movement that sought independence from England while using slaves brought from Africa is questionable, at least.
Equality of natural rights, deriving from nature-based cycles, is quite different from equality of political rights and responsibilities deriving from a machine-inspired model for progress. Both of these sources are different from the political status of people involved in a pragmatics of global networking and extreme task distribution. One can cautiously make the case that the major political documents of the past were conceived in reaction to an intolerable state of affairs and events, not proactively, in anticipation of new situations and expectations. These documents are the expression of the need to unify, homogenize, and integrate forces in a world of relatively autonomous entities-national states-competing more for resources and productive forces than for markets. The values reflected therein correspond to the values on which literacy is founded and for which literacy-inspired ideologies fought.
But maybe these political documents are exemplary in another way, let's say as an expression of moral standards that we apparently lost in the course of 200 years; or of cultural standards for both society and politicians, standards that can only rarely be acknowledged today, if at all. If this is the case, which is difficult to prove, what this seems to suggest is that the price paid for higher political efficiency is the lost ethics of politics, or its current deplorable intellectual condition. The lack of correlation between political practice and language results from the pragmatic context reflected in the condition of language itself. While in real life, many literacies are at work, Literacy (with a capital L) still dominates the structure of politics. Its rules are applied to forms of human interaction and evaluation that are not reducible to self-constitution in language.
Political activity by and large follows patterns characteristic of the civilization of literacy, despite its own indulgence in non-linguistic semioses: the use of images, film, and video, or the adoption of new networking technologies focused on information exchange. Former expectations that politicians adhere to standards of the civilization of literacy are carried over in new political and practical experiences. The expectation that their literacy should match that of political documents belonging to the political tradition (the Constitution of the United States of America, for instance) is paradoxical, though, since the majority of Americans cannot recall what these political documents state. And they see no reason to find out. Their own practical experience takes place in domains for which the past is of little consequence to their well-being. As things stand now, the political principles required by the dynamics of industrial society are embodied in institutions and laws dedicated to their own preservation.
Free of concern for their own freedom, politically rooted in a prior pragmatic framework, citizens take freedom for granted in their new practical experiences and end up evading the associated civic responsibility. They expect their politicians to be literate for them. We deal here with a strange mixture of assumptions: on the one hand, a notion of political life corresponding to a context of homogeneity and a deterministic view of the social world; on the other, a realization that today's world requires specialized political practical experience, means and methods characteristic of heterogeneous and non-deterministic political processes. The simmering conflict is met with the type of thinking that will not solve the problem because it is the problem.
The coordination of political action through literacy-based language and methods and the dynamics of a new political practice, based on the characteristics of the civilization of illiteracy, simply diverge. As in many other domains of literate condition, it is as though institutions, norms, and regulations take on lives of their own, as literate language does, perpetuating their own values and expectations. They develop as networks of interaction with an autonomous dynamics, uncoupled from the dynamics of political life, even from the new pragmatic context. The tremendous amount of written language (speeches, articles, forms, contracts, regulations, laws, treatises) stands in contrast to the very fast changes that make almost every political text superfluous even before it is cast in the fast eroding medium of print or in the elusive bits and bytes of electronic processing.
Many economies have undergone, or realize they must undergo, profound restructuring. Massive down-sizing, paralleled by flatter hierarchies and smoother quality control, have affected economic performance. But very little of this has touched the sacrosanct centralized state institutions. In the USA alone, 14 departments, 135 federal agencies employing more than 2.1 million civilians and 1.9 million military personnel account for $1.5 trillion in yearly expenditure. If the economy were as inefficient as political activity is, we would face a crisis of global proportion and consequences that are impossible to anticipate.
This is why today, some citizens would write a Declaration of Independence that begins with the following line: "We're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore." But this would not mean that they would vote. When five times more people watch Married with Children than vote in primaries, one understands that the morality and intellectual quality of the politician and citizen correspond closely. Cynical or not, this observation simply states that in the civilization of illiteracy, political action and criteria for evaluating politics do not follow the patterns of political practical experiences peculiar to the civilization of literacy. Multiplied to infinity, choices no longer undergird values, but options that are equally mediocre.
The issue of literacy from the perspective of politics is the issue of the means through which political practice takes place. A democracy resting solely upon the contribution to political life in and through literate language is at the same time captive to language. The experience of language resulted from developments not necessarily democratic in nature. Embedded in literacy, past practical experiences pertinent to a pragmatic context appropriate to a different scale of humankind are often an obstacle to new experiences. So are our distinctions of sex, race, social status, space, time, religion, art, and sport. Once in language, such distinctions simply live off the body of any new design for political action. Language is not politically neutral, and even less so is the literate practice of language. Various minority groups made a very valid point in stating this. Power relations, established in political practice, often become relations in the literate use of language and of other means, as long as they are used according to literacy expectations. It is not that literacy prevents change; literacy allows for change within the systematic domain of practices relying on the literate practical experiences of language. But when literacy itself is challenged, as it is more and more in our day, it ends up opposing change.
Discrepancies between the language and actions of politics, politicians, and political institutions and programs result from the conflict between the horizon of literacy and the dynamics for which the literate use of language is ill equipped. If the formula deterioration of moral standards corresponds to the failure of politics to meet its constituency's expectations, the most pessimistic views about the future would be justified, because politicians are not better or worse than their constituency. But as with everything else in the new pragmatic context, it is no longer individual performance that ensures the success or failure of an activity. Integrating procedures ascertain a different form of cooperation and competition. Such processes are made possible by means characteristic of high efficiency pragmatics, that is, task distribution, parallelism and reciprocal testing, cooperation through networking, and automated procedures for planning and management. They are meaningful only in conjunction with motivations characteristic of this age. If, on the other hand, the romantic notion that the best become leaders were true of today's political experience, we would have cause to wonder at our own stupidity. In fact, it does not matter which person leads.
Political processes are so complex that the industrial model of successful stewardship no longer makes sense. Political life in society does not depend on political competence, people's generosity, or self-motivation that escapes institutional, religious, or ideological coercion. The degree of efficiency, along with the right ascribed to people to partake in affluence, speaks in favor of political experiences driven by pragmatic forces. Such forces are at work locally and make sense only within a context of direct effectiveness. But short of taking these forces for granted, we cannot escape the need to understand how they work and how their course can be controlled.
Crabs learned how to whistle
Some of today's political systems are identified as democracies, and others claim to be. Some are identified as dictatorships of some sort, which almost none would accept as a qualifier. But no matter which label is applied, there is an obsession with literacy in all these systems. "We need literacy for democracy to survive," says the literacy special interest group. But how do dictatorships come about in literate populations? The biggest dictatorship (the Soviet block) was proud of its high literacy rate, acknowledged by the western world as an accomplishment impossible to overlook. It fell because the underlying structural characteristics reflected in literacy collided with other requirements, mainly pragmatic.
An empire, the fourth in the modern historic succession that started with the Turkish Empire and continued with the Austro-Hungarian and British Empires, crumbled. What makes the fall of the Soviet Empire significant is its own underlying structure. The former members of COMECON, those East European countries that, along with the Soviet Union, once formed the communist block, represent a good case study for the forces involved in the dynamics of illiteracy. While writing this book, I benefited from an experiment probably impossible to duplicate. A rigid structure of human activity, basically captive to a slightly amended paradigm of the Industrial Revolution, hailing itself as the workers' paradise, and laboring under the illusion of messianic collectivism, maintained literacy as its cultural foundation.
Even the harshest and blindest critics of the system had to agree that if anything of historic significance could be attributed to communism, it was its literacy program. Large segments of the population, illiterate prior to communism, were taught to read and write. The school system, deficient in many ways, provided free and obligatory education, much better than its free medical system. This effort at education was intended to prepare the new generations for productive tasks, but also to subject each person to a program of indoctrination channeled through the powerful medium of literacy. Questioned about his own ideas for the reform of the orthodox communist system, Nikita Kruschchev, the maverick leader of the post-Stalin era, declared: "He who believes that we will give up the teachings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin deludes himself tremendously. Those who are waiting for this to happen will have to wait until crabs learn how to whistle." When, throughout Russia, statues of Lenin started falling and Marx's name became synonymous with the failure of communism, people probably started hearing strange sounds from crustaceans.
The abrupt and unexpected failure of the communist system-an event hailed as victory in a war as cold as the market can be-makes for unexpected proof of this book's major thesis. The breakdown of the Soviet system can be seen as the failure of a structure that kept literacy as its major educational and instrumental medium, and relied on it for the dissemination of its ideological goals inside and outside the block. Literacy, as such, did not fail, but the structures that literacy entails: limited efficiency, sequential practical experiences of human self-constitution in a hierarchic and centralized economy; deterministic (thus implicitly dualistic) working relations, a level of efficiency based on the industrial model of labor division, mediation subjected to central planning without choice as to the mediating elements; opaqueness expressed in an obsession with secrecy, and last but not least, failure to acknowledge the new scale of humankind-in short, a pragmatic framework whose characteristics are reflected in literacy-all led to the final result. Indeed, the system acted to counter integration and globality. It maintained rigid national and political boundaries under the false assumption that insularity would allow a controlled and orderly exchange of goods and ideas, perpetuation and dissemination of an ideology of proletarian dictatorship, and eventually coexistence with the rest of the world under the assumption of its progressive conversion to communist values.
In the doctrine of Marx and Engels, the proletariat appears endowed with all the qualities associated with Divinity in the prototypic Book (the Old Testament): omniscience, omnipotence, and right almost all the time. There is a self-creative moment in the historic process they described, resulting from political activism and commitment to change in the world. No one should lightly discard the Utopian core or the ideal embodied in the doctrine. After all, nobody could argue against a world of freedom where each person participates with the best one has to offer, and is rewarded with everything one needs. Free education, free medical care, access to art and liberty in a context of limitless unfolding of talent and harmony with nature, of shared wealth and emancipation from all prejudices-all this is paradise on Earth (minus religion).
It should be pointed out that, within the system, the entire practical human experience related to literacy-and the accomplishments listed above are literacy- based-was subsidized. In no other part of the world, and under no other regime, were so many people subjected to literacy. That the system failed should not lead anyone to ignore some of the achievements of the people regimented under a flag they did not care for: fascinating art, interesting poetry and music, the massive collection and preservation of folklore, spectacular mathematics, physics, and chemistry arose from beneath terror and censorship. To survive as an artist, writer, or scientist meant to force creativity where almost no room for it was left. Under no other regime on Earth did people read so much, listen to music more intensely, visit museums with more passion, and care for each other as family, friends, or as human beings, episodes of brutality notwithstanding. It is too simplistic to accept the line that people read more in East Europe and the Soviet Union because they had nothing else to do. The pragmatic framework was set up under the assumption of permanence, stability, centrality, and universality founded on literacy.
It goes without saying that the misuse of language (in political discourse and in social life) played its role in the quasi-unanimous silent rejection of the system, even more in silent, cowardly complicity with it. When the literate machine of spying on the individual fell apart, people saw themselves in the merciless mirror of opportunistic self- betrayal. The records will stand as a testimony that writing does not lead only to Solzhenitsyn's novels, Yevtushenko's poetry, Shoshtakovich's music, and the romantic Samizdat, but also to putrid words about others, kin included. The opaqueness of literacy partially explains why this is possible. Something other than the opaqueness granted by literacy (i.e., complicity established in society) explains how it became a necessary aspect of that society. Germans were not better, exceptions granted, than their fascist leaders; the peoples in the Soviet block were not better, exceptions granted again, than the leaders they accepted for such a long time.
But what went relatively unnoticed by experts in East European and Soviet studies, as well as by governments fighting the Cold War, is the dynamics of change. The system was economically broke, but still militarily viable (though overrated) and over-engaged in security activities-tight control of the population, economic and political espionage, active attempts to export its ideology. The structure within which people were to realize their potential-one of the ideals of communism-had few incentives. But all this, despite the impact of the yet unfinished revolution, is only the tip of the iceberg, the visible side when one looks from the riverbank of the free world where incentives lead to self-sufficiency and complacency. The major aspect is that the dynamics of the system was severely affected by artificially maintaining a pragmatic framework and a system of values not suited to change. This applies especially to the major shift-from the industrial model to post-industrial society, to a context of practical experiences of human self-constitution freed from the restrictions carried over from the politics of mind and body control-experienced by the rest of the western world.
Levels of expectation beyond the satisfaction of immediate needs (food, clothing, shelter), and of literacy-associated expectations (education, access to art and literature, travel), could not be satisfied unless and until levels of efficiency impossible to reach in the pragmatic context of industrial societies were made possible by a new pragmatics. Despite the fact that more writers, more publishing houses, more libraries, as well as more artists, theaters, opera houses, symphonic orchestras, research institutes, and more museums than in the rest of the world were politically and economically supported in the Eastern Block (almost to the extent that the secret police was), activities related to literacy had only a short-term impact on the individuals subjected to or taking advantage of them. This was proven dramatically by the proliferation of commercially motivated newspapers and publications (pornography among them) following the breakdown of the power structure in various countries of the Block, and followed by an even faster focus on entertainment television and obsession with consumption.
The main events leading to the breakdown-each country had its own drama, once the major puppeteer was caught off-guard by events in the Soviet Union-took place with the nation staring at the TV screens, seduced by the dynamics of the live transmission for which literacy and prior literate use of the medium were never well equipped. The live drama of the hunt for Ceausescu in Romania, the climax of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the events in Prague, Sofia, and Tirana continued the spirit of the Polish tele-drama in the shipyards. It then took another turn, during the attempted coup in the Soviet Union, practically denying the literate media any role but that of late chroniclers. The initial lessons in democracy took place via videotape. Various networks, from WTN (World-Wide Television News) to CNN, but primarily the backward technology of the fax machine, which absorbed essential literacy into a focused distribution of individual messages, provided the rest. As primitive as digital networks were, and still are in that part of the world, they played an important role. Not political manifestos or sophisticated ideological documents were disseminated, but images, diagrams, and live sequences. In the meanwhile, entertainment took over almost all available bandwidth. What the rest of the world consumed in the last fifteen years (along with fashion, fast food chains, soft drinks, and consumer electronics) penetrated the lives of those whose revolt took place under the banner of the right to consume. Here, as in the rest of the world, the spiritual and the political split for good. The spiritual gets alimony; the political becomes the executor of the trust.