The criticism voiced in Plato's time cannot be entirely dismissed. Writing became the medium through which some human experiences were reified. It allowed for extreme subjectivity: In the absence of dialogue and of the influence of criticism through dialogue, the past was continuously reinvented according to goals and values of the writer's present. In orality-dominated social life, opinion (which Greeks called doxa) was the product of language activity, and it had to be immediate. In writing, truth is sought and preserved. What made Socrates sound so fierce (at least in Plato's dialogues) in his attacks against writing was his intuition of progressive removal from the source of thinking, hence the danger of unfaithful interpretation. Socrates, as well as Plato, feared indirectness and wrote conclusively about memory and wisdom.
Situated between Socrates and Aristotle, Plato could observe and express the consequences of writing: "I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence." As one of the first philosophers of writing, Plato could not yet observe that writing is not simply the transcription of thoughts (of the words through which and in which humans think), that ideas are formed differently in writing than in speech, that writing represents a qualitatively new sign system in which meanings are formed and communicated through a mechanism once more mediated in respect to practical reality. The subject of confidence in language became the central theme of the Sophists' exercise, of Medieval philosophy, of Romanticism, and of the literature of the absurd (symptomatically popular in the years following World War 2).
Moving from the past to the present, we notice that memory is an issue of extreme importance today, too. Literacy challenges the reliability of memory across the board, even when memory is the repository of facts through which people establish themselves in the world of work. Professionals ranging from doctors, lawyers, and military commanders to teachers, nurses, and office personnel rely more on memory than do factory workers on an assembly line. The paradox is that the more educated a professional is, the less he or she needs to rely on literacy in the exercise of his or her profession, except in the initial learning process, which is made through books. With the advent of video and cassette tapes or disks, with digital storage and networks, literacy loses its supremacy as transmitter of knowledge.
What makes language necessary is also what explains its history and its characteristics. Language came to life in a process through which humans projected themselves into the reality of their existence, identified themselves in respect to natural and social environments, and followed a path of linear growth. Orality testifies to limited, circular experiences but corresponds to an unsettled human being in search of well being and security. It relied on memory for the most part and was assimilated in ritual. The written appeared in the context of several fundamental changes: diversified human praxis, settlement, and a market that outgrew barter, each related and influencing the other. Its main result was the division between mental and physical labor. It made speaking, writing, and reading-characteristics of literacy, as we know it from the perspective of literate societies-logically possible. In fact, it represented only the possibility of literacy, not its beginning. Once we understand how language works and what were some of the functions of language that corresponded to the new stage made possible by writing, we shall also understand how writing contributed to the future ideal of literacy.
Orality and Writing Today: What Do People Understand When TheyUnderstand Language?
Sitting before your computer, you connect to the World Wide Web. What is of interest today? How about something in neurosurgery? Somewhere on this planet, a neurosurgeon is operating. You can see individual neurons triggering right on your monitor. Or you can view how the surgeon tests the patient's pattern recognition abilities, allowing the surgeon to draw a map of the brain's cognitive functioning, a map essential for the outcome of the operation. Every now and then the dialogue between surgeon and assistants is complemented by the display of data coming from different monitoring devices. Can you understand the language they are using? Could a written report of the operation substitute for the real-time event? For a student in neurosurgery, or for a researcher, the issue of understanding is very different from what it would be for a lay-person.
Tired of science? A concert is taking place at another Internet address. Musical groups from all over the world are sending their live music to this address. As a multi- threaded performance, this concert enables its listeners to select from among the many simultaneously performing groups. They sing about love, hope, understanding…all the themes that each listener is familiar with. Still, understanding every word the musicians use, do you understand what is taking place?
Moving away from the Internet, one could visit a factory, a stock exchange, a store. One could find oneself in subway in any city, witness a first-grade class in session, or pursue business in a government office. All these scenarios embody the various forms of self-constitution through practical activity. It seems that everyone involved is talking the same language, but who understands what? In seemingly simpler contexts, what do individuals understand today when they understand a written instruction or conversations, casual or official? The context is our day, which is different from that of any previous time, and, in particular, different from that of a literacy- dominated pragmatics. The answers to the questions posed above do not come easily. A foundation has to be provided for addressing such questions from a perspective broader than that afforded by the examples given.
A feedback called confirmation
Understanding language is a process that extends far beyond knowledge of vocabulary and grammar. Where there is no sharing of experience beyond what a particular language sequence expresses, there is no understanding. This sounds like a difficult expectation. To be met, the non-expressed must be present in the listener, reader, or writer. Language must recreate the non-expressed, through the sequence heard, read, or written, and related to it, beyond the words recognized and the grammar used. Behind each word that people comprehend, there is either a common practical experience, or a shared pragmatic framework, or minimally some form of shared understanding, which constitute what is known as background knowledge. "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world," Wittgenstein promulgated. I would rephrase, in an attempt to connect knowledge and experience, "The limits of my experience are the limits of my world." Self-constitution in language is such an experience.
The first level of the indirect relation established between someone expressing something in language and someone else trying to understand it is concentrated in a semantic assumption: "I know that you know." But is it a sufficient condition to continue a conversation, let's say about a hunted animal, fire, or a tool, as long as the listener knows what the hunted animal or fire is? Many who study semantics think that it is, and accordingly devise strategies for establishing a shared semantic background. These strategies range from making sure that students in a class understand the same things when they use the same words, to publishing comprehensive dictionaries of what they perceive as the necessary shared knowledge in order to maintain cultural coherence at the appropriate scale of the group or community in question. In the final analysis, these strategies correspond to a semantically based model of cultural education driven by the Chomskyan distinction between competence and performance. They identify the problem in the incongruence of our individual dictionaries (vocabulary), not in the diversity of human practical experiences. The assumption is that once people understand what is in language, they apply it (pragmatics as "uses and effects of signs within the behavior in which they occur," according to J. Lyons). We know by now that after a certain stage of unifying influences corresponding to industrial society, this congruence becomes impossible when the scale of human experience changes. The examples given at the beginning of this chapter are evidence of this fact.
What I maintain throughout this book is that language is constituted in human experiences, not merely applied to them. Performance predates competence. Recognition, of an utterance, a written word, a sentence, is itself an experience through which individuals define each one of themselves. Within a limited scale of existence and experience, the homogeneity of the circumstance guaranteed the coherence of language use. As the number of people increases, and as they are involved in increasingly varied experiences, they no longer share a homogeneous pragmatic framework. Consequently, they can no longer assume the coherence of language. Progressively, ever diversifying practical experiences cause words, phrases, and sentences to mean more and different things at the same time. Instantiation of meaning is always in the experience through which individuals constitute their identity.
Examination of the various elements affecting the status of literacy in the contemporary world of fragmented practical experiences opens a new perspective on language. Within this perspective, we acknowledge how and when similar experiences make the unifying framework of literacy possible and necessary. We also acknowledge from which point literacy is complemented by literacies and what, if anything, bridges among such literacies. Direct experience and mediated experience are the two stages to be considered. In particular, we are interested in language at the level where direct experience is affected by the insertion of gestures, sounds, and initial words.
Indirectness implies awareness of a shared reference-the gesture, the sound, the word-that is simultaneously shared experience. At this level, there is no generality. Patterns of activity are patterns of self-constitution: in the act of hunting, the hunter projects physical abilities (running, seeing, ability to use the terrain, to grab stones, to target). In relation to other hunters, he projects abilities pertinent to coordination, planning, and reciprocal understanding. Within this pragmatic framework, a level of indirectness is constituted: confirmation, or what cybernetics identifies as feedback, in all biological processes. Along this line, the initial (unuttered and obviously unwritten) "I know that you know" becomes subsequently "I know that you know that I know." Coordination and hierarchy within the given task come into the picture. Indeed, if we consider the experience as the origin of meaning in language, the sequence of assumptions is even larger: "I know that you know that I know that you know." It corresponds to a cognitive level totally different from that of direct practical experiences.
In a way, this threefold sequence shows how syntax is enveloped in semantics, and both in the pragmatics that determines them. Applied to the hunting scene, it says, "I know that you know that I am over here, opposite you, we are both closing in on a hunted animal, and I know that you are aware that you might throw your spear in my direction; but the fact that we share in the knowledge of who is placed where will help us get the animal and not kill each other by accident." At a very small scale of human experiences, the sequence was realized without language. Patterns of activity captured its essence. At a larger scale, words replaced signs used for coordination. Writing established frames of reference and a medium for planning more complex activities. The language of drawings, for what eventually became artifacts, confirmed the sequence in the built-in knowledge. The Internet browser, a graphic interface to an infinity of simultaneous experiences of sharing information, frees participants from saying to each other, "Hello. I am here." It facilitates a virtual community of individuals who constitute the experience of real-time neurosurgery, or the virtual concert mentioned at the beginning of this section. In similar ways, new patterns of work in the civilization of illiteracy constitute our work-place, school, or government, based on the same pragmatic assumptions.
Between the primitive hunters and those who in our days identify their presence by all kinds of devices-a badge, a pager, a mobile phone, an access card, a password-there is a difference in the means and forms used to acknowledge the shared awareness that affects the outcome of the experience. Even the simple act of greeting someone we think we know implies the whole sequence of feedback (double confirmation, each participant's awareness, and shared awareness). This says, probably in too many words: 1.
To understand language means to understand all the others with whom we share practical experiences of self-constitution. 2.
All the others must realize this implicit expectation of communication. 3.
Each new pragmatic context brings about new experiences and new forms of awareness. This understanding can go something along the line of, "I know that you know that I know that you know" what the hunted animal is, what fire is, which tool can be used and how; or in today's context, what surgery is, what a brain is, what a virtual concert is, what a certain activity in a production cycle affects, what the function of a particular government office is. Otherwise, the conversation would stop, or another means of expression (such as recreating fire, or demonstrating a tool) would have to be used, as happened in the past and as frequently happens today: "I know that you know how to drive a car (or use a computer), but let me show you how."
Confirmation in language, gestures, and facial expression signals the understanding. Whenever this understanding fails, it fails on account of the missing confirmation. When this confirmation is no longer uniquely provided by means characteristic of literacy-let us recall modern warfare, technology controlling nuclear reactors, electronic transactions-the need for literacy is subject to doubt. Since the majority of instruction conveyed today is through images (drawings), or image and sound (videotapes), or some combination of media, it is not surprising that literacy is met with skepticism, if not by those who teach, at least by those who are taught. In the pragmatics of their existence they already live beyond the literate understanding. This applies not only to the Internet, but just as well to places of work, schools, government, and other instances of pragmatic activity.
Primitive orality and incipient writing
In addition to the general background of understanding, there are many levels, represented by the clues present in speech or writing, or in other forms of expression and communication. For example, a question is identified by some vocal expression accepted as interrogation. In writing, the question is denoted by a particular sign, depending on the particular language. But other clues, no less important, are more deeply seated. They refer to such things as intention, who is talking-man, woman, child, policeman, priest-the context of the talk, hierarchies-social, sexual, moral-and many other clues. Much extra-language background knowledge goes into human language and directs understanding from experience to language use. Dialogue is more than two persons throwing sentences at each other. It is a pragmatic situation requiring as much language as understanding of the context of the conversation because each partner in the dialogue constitutes himself or herself for the other. Dialogue is the elementary cell of communication experience. Within dialogue, language is transcended by the many other sign systems through which human self-constitution takes place. Dialogues make it clear that understanding language becomes a supra- (or para-) linguistic endeavor. It requires the discovery of the clues, in and outside language, and of their relationship. But more importantly, it requires the reconstruction of experience as it is embodied in background knowledge.
By contrasting primitive orality to incipient writing, we can understand that the process of establishing conventions is motivated by the need to overrule concreteness and to access a new cognitive realm that a different pragmatic context necessitates. By understanding how experience affects their relation, we can consider orality and writing in successive moments of human pragmatics, i.e., within a concrete scale of humankind. Indeed, when writing emerged, elements of orality corresponding to a reduced scale of experience were reproduced in its structure because they were continued at the cognitive level. In our days, there is a far less pressing need to mimic orality in written signs. Some will argue that 4 Sale, 4-Runner, While-U-Wait, and Toys 'R' Us, among other such expressions, are examples to the contrary. These attempts to compress language represent ways of establishing visual icons, of achieving a synthetic level better adapted to fast exchange of information. We see many more examples in interactive multimedia, or in the heavy traffic of Internet-based communication. There is no literacy involved here, and no literacy is expected in decoding the message. There is a strong new orality, with characteristics reminiscent of previous orality. But the dominant element is the visual as it becomes a new icon. The international depiction of a valentine-shaped heart to represent the word love is one example in this sense; the icons used in Europe on clothing care labels are others.
Time reference in texts today is made difficult by the nature of processes characteristic of our age: numerous simultaneous transactions, distributed activity, interconnection, rapid change of rules. These cannot be appropriately expressed in a written text. In the global world, Now means quite a different thing for individuals connected over many time zones. Sunrise experienced on the Web page of the city of Santa Monica can be immediately associated to poetic text through a link. But the implicit experience of time (and space) carried by language and made instrumental in literacy does not automatically refresh itself.
It took thousands of years before humans became acquainted with the conventions of writing. It is possible that some of these conventions were assimilated in the hardware (brain) supporting cognitive activity and progressively projected in new forms of self-constitution. The practice of writing and the awareness of the avenues it opened led to new conventions. Practical endeavors, originating in the conventions of space and time, implicit in the written (and the subsequent reading), resulted in changed conventions. For instance, the discovery that time and space could be fragmented, a major realization probably not possible in the culture of orality, resulted in new practical experiences and new theories of space and time.
Once writing became a practical experience and constituted a legitimate reality, at a level of generality characteristic of its difference from gestures, sounds, uttered words or sentences, associations became possible at several levels of the text. Some were so unexpected or unusual that understanding such associations turned into a real challenge for the reader. This challenge regarding understanding is obviously characteristic of new levels, such as the self-referential, omnipresent in the wired world of home pages. In some ways, language is becoming a medium for witnessing the relation between the conscious, unconscious, or subconscious, and language itself. The brain surgery mentioned some pages ago suppressed the patient's conscious recognition of objects or actions by inhibiting certain neurons.
The unnatural, nonlinguistic use of language is studied by psychologists, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers in order to understand the relation between language and intelligence. This need to touch upon the biological aspects of the practical experiences of speaking, writing, or reading results from the premise pursued. Self-constitution of the human being takes place while the biological endowment is projected into the experience. Important work on what are called split- brain patients-persons who, in order to suppress epileptic attack, have had the connection between the two brain hemispheres severed-shows that even the neat distinction left-right (the left part of the brain is in charge of language) is problematic. Researchers learned that in each practical experience, our biological endowment is at work and at the same time subject to self-reflection. Projecting a word like laugh in the right field of vision results in the patients' laughing, although in principle they could not have processed the word. When asked, such patients explain their laughter through unrelated causes. If a text says "Scratch yourself," they actually scratch themselves, stating that it is because something itches. Virtual reality practical experiences take full advantage of these and other clinical observations. The absent in a virtual reality environment is very often as important as the present. On the back channels of virtual reality interactions, not only words but also data describing human reactions (turning one's head, closing the eyes, gesturing with the hand) can be transmitted. Once fed back, such data becomes part of the virtual world, adapted to the condition of the person experiencing it. This is why interest in cognitive characteristics of oral communication-of the primitive stages or of the present-remains important.
Background information is more readily available in oral communication. In orality, things people refer to are closer to the words they use. Human co-presence in conversation results in the possibility to read and translate the word under the guise of a willingness by others to show what a particular word stands for. In orality, the experience pertinent to the word is shared in its entirety. This is possible because the appropriate world of experience (corresponding to the circular scale of human praxis) is so limited that the language is in a one-to-one relation with what it describes. In some ways, the parent-child relation is representative of this stage in the childhood of humankind.
In the new orality of the civilization of illiteracy the same one-to-one relation is established through strategies of segmentation. The speaker and listener(s) share space and time-and hence past, present, and, to a certain degree, future. And even if the subject is not related to that particular space and moment, it already sets a reference mechanism in place by virtue of the fact that people in dialogue are people sharing a similar experience of self-constitution. Far is far from where they speak; a long time ago is a long time ago from the moment of the verbal exchange. The acquisition of far, long (or short) time ago is in itself the result of practical circumstances leading to a more evolved being. We now take these distinctions for granted, surprised when children ask for tighter qualifiers, or when computer programs fail because we input information with insufficient levels of distinction.
The realization of the frame of time and space occurred quite late in the development of the species, within the scale of linear relationships, and only as a result of repeated practical experiences, of sequences constituting patterns. Once the reference mechanism for both time and space was acknowledged and integrated in new experiences, it became so powerful that it allowed people to simplify their language and to assume much more than what was actually said. In today's world, space and time are constituted in experiences affected by the experience of relativity. Accordingly, the orality of the civilization of illiteracy is not a return to primitive orality, but to a referential structure that helps us better cope with dynamism. The space and time of virtual experiences are an example of effective freedom from language, but not from the experiences through which we acquired our understanding of time and space. Computers able to perform in the space of human assumptions are not yet on the horizon of current technological possibilities.
Assumptions
Assumptions are a component of the functioning of sign systems. A mark left can make sense if it is noticed. The assumption of perception is the minimum at which expression is acknowledged. Assumptions of writing are different from those of orality. They entail the structural characteristics of the practical experiences in which the people writing constitute their identity. Literate assumptions, unlike any other assumptions in language, are extensions of linear, sequential experience in all its constitutive parts. They are evinced in vocabulary, but even more strongly in grammar. In many ways, the final test of any sign system is that of its built-in assumptions. Illiteracy is an experience outside the realm defined by the means and methods of literacy. The civilization of illiteracy challenges the need and justification of literate assumptions, especially in view of the way these affect human effectiveness.
The very fine qualifiers of time and space that we take for granted today were acknowledged only slowly, and initially at a rather coarse level of distinction. Despite the tremendous progress made, even today our experience with time and space requires some of the repertory of the primitive human. Movements of hands, head, other body parts (body language), changes in facial expression and skin color (e.g., blushing), breathing rhythm, and voice variations (e.g., intonation, pause, lilt)-all account for the resurrection in dialogue of an experience much richer than language alone can convey. Such para-linguistic elements are no less meaningful in new practical experiences, such as interaction with and inside virtual environments.
Para-linguistic elements consciously used in primitive communities, or unconsciously present, still escape our scrutiny. Their presence in communication among members of communities sharing a certain genetic endowment takes different forms. They are not reducible to language, although they are connected to its experience. Examples of this are the strong sense of rhythm among Blacks in America and Africa, the sense of holistic perception among Chinese and Japanese. We can only conjecture, from words reconstituted in the main language strand (proto-languages), or in the mother tongue of humankind (proto-world), that words were used in conjunction with non-linguistic entities. Whether a mother-tongue or a pre-Babel language existed is a different issue. The hypothesis mimics the notion of a common ancestor of the species and obviously looks for the language of this possible ancestor. More important, however, is the observation that the practical experience of language constitution does not eliminate everything that is not linguistic in nature. Moreover, the para-linguistic, even when language becomes as dominant as it does under the reign of literacy, remains significant for the effectiveness of human activity. The civilization of illiteracy does not necessarily dig for para-linguistic remnants of previous practical endeavors. It rather constitutes a framework for their participation in a more effective pragmatics, in the process involving technological means capable of processing all kinds of cues.
In a given frame of time and space, para-linguistic signs acquire a strong conventional nature. The way the word for I evolved (quite differently than equivalents in different languages of the world: ich, je, yo, eu, én, ani, etc.), and the way words relating to two evolved (hands, legs, eyes, ears, parents), and so forth, gives useful leads. It seems, for instance, that the pair entered language as a modifier (i.e., a grammatical category), marked by non-linguistic signs (clasp, repetition, pointing). Some of the signs are still in use. The grammatical category and the distinction between one and two are related. The Aranda population (in Australia) combine the words for one and two in order to handle their arithmetic. Also, the distinction singular- plural begins with two. We take this for granted, but in some languages (e.g., Japanese), there is no distinction between singular and plural. In addition, it should be pointed out here that the same signs (e.g., use of a finger to point, hand signals) can be understood in different ways in different cultures. Bulgarians shake their head up and down to signal no, and side to side to signal yes.
Within a given culture, each sign eventually becomes a very strong background component because it embodies the shared experience through which it was constituted. In direct speech, we either know each other, or shall know each other to a certain extent, represented by the cumulative degrees of "I know that you know that I know that you know," defining a vague notion of knowledge within a multivalued logic. This makes speaking and listening an experience in reciprocal understanding, if indeed the conversation takes place in a non-linear, vague context impossible to emulate in writing. Dialogues in the wired world, as well as in transactional situations of extreme speed (stock market transactions, space research, military actions), belong to such experiences, impossible to pursue within the limitations of literacy.
Orality can be assertive (declarative), interrogative, and imperative (a great deal more so than writing). In the course of time, and due to very extended experience with language and its assumptions in oral form, humans acquired an intrinsic interactive quality. This resulted from a change in their condition: on the natural level there was the limited interactivity of action-reaction. In the human realm, the nucleus action-reaction led to subsequent sequences through which areas of common interest were defined. The progressive cognitive realization that speaking to someone involves their understanding of what we say, as well as the acknowledged responsibility to explain, whenever this understanding is incomplete or partial, is also a source of our interactive bent. Questions take over part of the role played by the more direct para-linguistic signs and add to the interactive quality of dialogue, so long as there is a common ground. This common ground is assumed by everyone who maintains the idea of literacy-how else to establish it?-as a necessity, but understood in many different ways: the common ground as embodied in vocabulary and grammar, in logic, spelling, phonetics, cultural heritage. Granted that a common language is a necessary condition for communication, such a common language is not simultaneously a sufficient condition, or at least not one of most efficient, for communication. Interactivity, as it evolved beyond the literate model, is based on the probability, and indeed necessity, to transcend the common language expectation and replace it with variable common codes, such as those we establish in the experience of multimedia or in networked interactions. Even the ability to interact with our own representation as an avatar in the Internet world becomes plausible beyond the constraining borders of literate identity.
Taking literacy for granted
In preceding paragraphs, we examined what is required, in addition to a common language, for a conversation to make sense. Scale is another factor. The scale that defines a dialogue is very different from the scale at which human self-constitution, language acquisition and use included, take place. Scale by itself is not enough to define either dialogue or the more encompassing language-oriented, or language- based, practical activity through which people ascertain their biological endowment and their human characteristics. There is sufficient proof that at the early stage of humankind, individuals could be involved only in homogeneous tasks. Within such a framework of quasi-homogeneous activity, dialogues were instances of cooperation and confirmation, or of conflict. Diversification made them progressively gain a heuristic dimension-choosing the useful from among many possibilities, sometimes against the logical odds of maintaining consistency or achieving completeness. A generalized language-supported practical activity involved not only heuristics ("If it seems useful, do it"), but also logic ("If it is right/If it makes sense"), through the intermediary of which truth and falsehood take occupancy of language experiences. Thus an integrative influence is exercised. This influence increases when orality is progressively superseded by the limited literacy of writing and reading.
The quasi-generalized literacy of industrial society reflected the need for unified and centralized frameworks of practical experience, within a scale optimally served by the linearity of language. In our days, people constitute themselves and their language through experiences more diverse than ever. These experiences are shorter and relatively partial. They are only an instant in the more encompassing process they make possible. The result is social fragmentation, even within the assumed boundaries of a common language, which nations are supposed to be, and paradoxically survive their own predicted end. In reality, this common language ceases to exist, or at least to function as it used to. What exists are provisional commitments making up a framework for activities impossible to carry out as a practical experience defined by literacy. Within each of these fast-changing commitments, partial languages, of limited duration and scope, come into existence. Sub-literacies accompany their lives. Experience as such opens avenues to more orality, under post-literate conditions-in particular, conditions of increased efficiency made possible by technology that negates the pragmatics of literacy. The most favorable case for the functioning of language-direct verbal communication-becomes a test case for what it really means to speak the same language, and not what we assume a common language accomplishes when written or read by everyone.
Instances of direct verbal communication today (in the family and community, when visiting foreign countries, at work, shopping, at church, at a football stadium, answering opinion polls or marketing inquiries, in social life) are also instances of taking for granted that others speak our own language. Many researchers have attempted to evaluate the effectiveness of communication in these contexts. Their observations are nevertheless not independent of the assumed premise of literacy as a necessity and as a shared pragmatic framework. Some recent research on the cognitive dimension of understanding language does not realize how deep the understanding goes. One example given is the terse instruction on a bottle of shampoo: "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." It is not a matter of an individual's ability to read the instructions in order to know how to proceed. One does not need to be literate, moreover, one does not even need to create language in order to use shampoo, if one is familiar with the purpose and use of shampoo (i.e., with the act). Indeed, for most individuals, the word shampoo on a bottle suffices for them to use it correctly with no written instructions at all. Icons or hieroglyphics can convey the instructions just as well, even better, than literacy can. These, by the way, are coming more into use in our global economy. It is even doubtful that most individuals read the instructions because they are familiar not just with the conventions that go into using shampoo, but, deeper still, the conventions behind the words of the instructions. Should an adult, even a literate adult, who was totally unfamiliar with the concept of washing his or her hair be presented with a bottle of shampoo, the entire experience of washing the hair with shampoo would have to be demonstrated and inculcated until it became part of that adult's self-constitutive repertory. Such analyses of language only scrape the surface of how humans constitute themselves in language.
Literacy forces certain assumptions upon us: Literate parents educate literate children. A sense of community requires that its members share in the functionality of literacy. Literate people communicate better beyond the borders of their respective languages. Literacy maintains religious faith. People can participate in social life only if they are literate. Considering such assumptions, we should realize that the abstract concept of literacy, resulting from the assumption that a common language automatically means a common experience, only maintains false hope. Children of literate parents are not necessarily literate. Chances are that they are already integrated in the illiterate structures of work and life to the same degree children of illiterate parents are. This is not a matter of individual choice, or of parental authority. On the digital highway, on which a growing number of people define their coordinates, with the prevalent sign @ taking over any other identification, communities emerge independent of location. Participation in such communities is different in nature from literate congregations maintained by a set of reciprocal dependencies that involved spelling as much as it involved accepting authority or working according to industrial production cycles.
In all of today's communication, not only is the literate component no longer dominant, it is undergoing the steepest percentile fall in comparison to any other form of communication. In this framework, states and bureaucracies are putting up a good fight for their own survival. But the methods and means of literacy on which their entire activity-regulation, control, self-preservation-is based have many times over proven inefficient. These statements do not remove the need to deal with how people understand writing, to which literacy is more closely connected than it is to speech. To discover what makes the task of understanding language more difficult as language frees itself from the constraints of literacy within the new pragmatic framework is yet another goal we pursue.
To understand understanding
Incipient writing was pictorial. This was an advantage in that it regarded the world directly, immediately perceived and shared, and a disadvantage in that it did not support more than a potential generality of expression. It maintained notation very close to things, not to speech. Image-dominated language came along with a simplified frame of space and time reference. Things were presented as close or far apart, as successive events or as distant, interrupted events. Anyone with a minimal visual culture can read Chinese or Japanese ideograms, i.e., see mountain, sky, or bird in the writing. But this is not reading the language; it is reading the natural world from which the notation was extracted, reconstituting the reference based on the iconic convention.
Alphabetic writing annihilates this frame of experience based on resemblance. Unless time is specifically given, or coordinates in space intentionally expressed, time and space tend to be assimilated in the text, and more deeply in the grammar. It is a different communication, mediated by abstract entities whose relation to experience is, in turn, the result of numerous substitutions, the record of which is not at the disposal of the reader. Between tell in English and the root tal (or dal) in proto-language (with the literal meaning of tongue), there is a whole experiential sequence available only implicitly in the language. In the nostratic phylum (root of many languages, the Indo- European among them), luba stands for thirst; the English love and the German Liebe seem to derive from it, although when we think of love we do not associate it with the physical experience of thirst.
Clues in written language are clues to language first of all, and only afterwards clues to human experience. Accordingly, reading a text requires an elaborate cognitive reconstruction of the experience expressed, and probably a never-ending questioning of the appropriateness of its understanding. When a text is read, there is nobody to be questioned, nobody to actively understand the understanding, to challenge it. The author exists in the text, as a projection, to the extent that the author exists in the manufactured objects we buy in order to use (glasses to drink water, chairs to sit on), or in whose production we participate in some way. After all, each text is a reality on paper, or on other means of storage and display. Clues can be derived from names of writers and from historic knowledge. What cannot be derived is the reciprocal exchange which goes on during conversation, the cooperative effort under circumstances of co- presence.
Regardless of the degree of complexity, the interactive component of orality cannot be maintained in writing. This points to an intrinsic limitation relevant to our attempt to find out why literacy does not satisfy expectations characteristic of practical experiences requiring interactivity. The metaphoric use of interactivity, as it is practiced to express an animistic attitude according to which, for instance, the text is alive, and we interact with it in reading, interpreting, and understanding it, addresses a different issue. Difficulties in language understanding can be overcome, but not in the mechanical effort of improving language skills by learning 50 more words or studying a chapter in grammar. Rather, one has to build background knowledge through extending the experience (practical, emotional, theoretical, etc.) on which the knowledge to be shared relies.
But once we proceed in this direction, we step out from the unifying framework of literacy, within which the diversity of experiences is reduced to the experience of writing, reading, and speaking. When this reduction is no longer possible-as we experience more and more under the new conditions of existence-understanding language becomes more and more difficult. At the same time, the result of understanding becomes less and less significant for our self-constitution in human experiences. If no other example comes to mind, the reader should reflect upon the many volumes that accompany the software you've bought in recent years. Their language is kept simple, but they are still difficult to comprehend. Once comprehended, the pay-off is slim. This is why the illiterate strategy of integrating on-line the instructions one needs to work with software is replacing literate documentation. These instructions can be reduced to graphic representations or simple animations. The framework is specialization, for instance, in providing instructions in a form adequate to the task. Within specialized experience, even writing and reading are subject to specialization. Literacy turns into yet another distinct form of human praxis instead of remaining its common denominator.
Writing, in this context, makes it clear that language is not enough for understanding a text. Under our own scrutiny, writing becomes a form of praxis in itself, contributing to the general fragmentation of society, not to its unification. This happens insofar as specialized writing becomes part of the general trend towards specialization and generates specialized reading. Some explanation is necessary.
Even when writers strive to adapt their language to a specific readership, the result is only partially successful, precisely because the experiences constituted in writing are disjoint. Indeed, the practical experience to be shared, and the subsequent practical experience of writing are different, pertinent to domains not reducible to each other. Sometimes the writer falls captive to the language (that very specialized subset of language adapted to a specific field of knowledge) and mimics natural discourse by observing grammar and rhetoric devices. Other times, the writer translates, or explains, as in popular magazines on physics, genetics, arts, psychology. Within this type of interpretive discourse either details are left out, or more details are added, with the intention of broadening the common base. Expressive devices, from simple comparisons (which should bridge different backgrounds) to metaphors, expose readers to a new level of experiences. Even if readers know what comparisons are and how metaphors work, they still cannot compensate for the unshared part of experience, with whose help a text makes sense. A legal brief, a military text, an investment analysis, the evaluation of a computer program are examples in this sense. The language they are written in looks like English. But they refer to experiences that a lawyer, or military officer, or broker, or computer programmer is likely to be familiar with.
Writers, speakers, readers, and listeners are aware of the adjustments required to comprehend these and many other types of documents. While a direct conversation, for which time spent with others is required, can be a frame for adjustment, a printed page is definitely less so. The reader can, at best, transmit a reaction in writing, or write to request supplementary explanation, that is, to maintain the spirit of conversation. The experience of writing and reading is becoming less a general experience or cultural identifier, and more a specialized activity. Writing can be read by machines. In order to serve the blind, such machines read instructions, newspaper articles, and captions accompanying video images. The synthetic voice, as much as a synthetic eye or nose, a syntactic touch-sensitive device, or taste translator, operates in a realm devoid of the life that went into the text (image, odor, texture, taste) and which was supposed to be contributed by the reader (viewer, smeller, toucher, taster).
Literacy, projected as a universal and permanent medium for expression, communication, and signification, nourished a certain romanticism or democracy of art, politics, and science. It embodied an axiomatic system: since everybody should speak, write, and read, everybody can and should speak, write, and read; everybody can and should appreciate poetry, participate in political life, understand science. This was indeed relatively true when poetry, politics, and science were, to a certain degree, direct forms of human praxis with levels of efficiency appropriate to the scale of human activity constituted in linear, homogeneous practical experiences. Now that the scale changed, dynamics accelerated, mediation increased, and non-linearity is accepted, we face a new situation. Paradoxically, the poet, the speech-writer, and the science-writer not only fail to address everybody, but they, as part and result of the mechanism of labor division, also contribute to the generation of partially literate human beings. In other words, they contribute to the fragmentation of society, although they are all devoted (some passionately) to the cause of its unity. In reaction to claims that literacy carried through time, a general deconstructionist attitude challenges the permanency of philosophical tractate, of scientific systems, of mathematics, political discourse and, probably more than anything else, of literature. The method applied is coherent: make evident the mechanisms used to create the illusion of permanence and truth. Texts thus appear as means to an end that does not directly count. What results is an account of the technology of expression, embraced by all who grew skeptical of the universality of science, politics and literature. When each sign (independent of the subject) becomes its own reference, and the experience it embodies is, strictly speaking, that of its making, the deconstructionist project reaches the climax. Nike's advertisement is not about sneakers, even less about the celebrities who wear them. It is a rather hermetic self-referential experience. Its understanding, however, is based on the fast-changing experience of revealing one's illiterate identity.
Words about images
The written, as we know, almost constantly appeared together with other referential systems, especially images. In this respect, a question regarding what we understand when we understand language is whether images can be used as an aid to understanding texts. Doubtless, pictures (at least some of them) are, by their cognitive attributes, better bearers of interpretation clues than are some words or writing devices. Images, more so than texts, can stand in for the absent writer. To the extent that they follow conventions of reality, pictures can help the individual reconstitute, at least partially, the frame of time and space, or one of the two. However, this represents only one side of the issue. The other side reveals that images are not always the best conveyors of information, and that what we gain by using them comes at a cost in understanding, clarity, or context dependence.
First of all, what is gained through the abstraction of the words is almost entirely lost through the concreteness of the image. The very dense medium of writing stands in sharp contrast to the diluted medium of images. To download text on the network is quite different from displaying images. If this were the only reason, we would be alert to the differences between images and texts. When the complexity of the image reaches high levels, decoding the image becomes as tedious as decoding texts, and the result less precise. All this explains why people try to use a combination of images and words. It also helps in understanding strategies for their combination. As a strategy of relating text and image, redundancy helps in focusing interpretation. The strategy of complementing helps in broadening the interpretation. Other strategies, ranging from contrasting texts and images to paraphrasing texts through images, or substituting texts for images, or images for text, result in forceful ways of influencing interpretation by introducing explanatory contexts. A very large portion of today's culture-from the comic strip to picture novels and advertisements, to soap operas on the Internet-is embodied in works using such and similar strategies.
What interests us here is whether images can replace the experience required to understand a text. If the answer is affirmative, such images would be almost like the partner in conversation. As products of human experience, images, just like language, embody that particular experience. This automatically makes the problem of understanding images more involved than just seeing them. But we knew this from written language. Seeing words or sentences or texts on paper (in script or in print) is only preliminary to understanding. The naturalness of images (especially those resembling the physical universe of our existence) makes access to them sometimes easier than access to written language. But this access is never automatic, and should never be taken for granted. In addition, while the written word does not invite to imitation, images play a more active role, triggering reactions different from those triggered by words. The code of language and visual codes are not reducible to each other; neither is their pragmatic function the same.
Research reports are quasi-unanimous in emphasizing that the usefulness of pictures in increasing text comprehension seems not to depend on the mere presence of the image, but on the specific characteristics of the reader. These make clear the role played by what was defined as background knowledge, without which texts, images, and other forms of expression stabilized as languages make little sense, if any, to their readers, viewers, or listeners. In order to arrive at such conclusions, researchers went through real-time measurements of the so-called processing of texts, in comparison to picture-text processing. The paradigm employed uses eye movement recordings and comprehension measures to study picture-text interactions. Pictures helped what the researchers defined as poor readers. For skilled readers, pictures were neutral when the information was important. The presence of pictures interfered with reading when the information in the text was less important. Researchers also established that the type of text-expository or narrative-is not a factor and that pictures can help in recall of text details. This has been known for at least 300 years, if not longer. Actors in Shakespeare's time were prompted to recall their lines through visual cues embodied in the architecture of the theater. After all was measured and analyzed, the only dependable conclusion was that the effects of images on comprehension of written language are not easy to explain. Again, this should not come as a surprise as long as we use literacy-based quantifiers to understand the limits of literacy. Whether images are accidental or forced upon the reader, whether the text is quasi-linear or very sophisticated (i.e., results from practical experiences of high complexity), the relation does not seem to follow any pattern. Such experiments, along with many others based on a literacy premise, proved unsuitable for discovering the sources and nature of reading difficulties.
Eye movement and comprehension measures used to study picture-text interactions only confirmed that today there are fewer commonalties, even among young students (not to mention among adults already absorbed in life and work) than at the time of the emergence of writing and reading. The diversification of forms of human experience, seen against the background of a relatively stable language adopted as a standard of culture, hints at the need to look at this relation as one of the possible explanations for the data, even for the questions that prompted the experiments in the first place. These questions have bearing on the general issue of literacy. Why reading, comprehension, and recall of written language have become more uncertain in recent years, despite efforts made by schools, parents, employers, and governments to improve instruction, remains unanswered. Regardless of how much we are willing to help the understanding of a text through the use of images, the necessity of the text, as an expression of a literate practical experience, is not enhanced. Conclusions like these are not easy to draw because we are still conditioned by literacy. Experiences outside the frame of literacy come much more naturally together because their necessity is beyond the conditioning of our rational discourse. This is how I can explain why on the Internet, the tenor of social and political dialogue is infinitely more free of prejudice than the information provided through books, newspapers, or TV. These observations should not be misconstrued as yet another form of technological determinism. The emphasis here, as elsewhere in the book, is on new pragmatic circumstances themselves, not on the means involved.
The research reported above, as any research we hear about in our days, was carried out on a sample. A sample, as representative as it can be, is after all a scaled- down model of society. The issue critical to literacy being the scale of human practical existence, scaled-down models are simply not suited for our attempt to understand language changes when the complexity of our pragmatic self-constitution increases. We need to consider language, images, sounds, textures, odors, taste, motion, not to mention sub-verbal levels, where survival strategies are encoded, and beliefs and emotions are internalized, as they pertain to the pragmatic context of our existence. Literacy is not adequate for satisfactorily encoding the complexity and dynamics of practical experiences corresponding to the new scale that humankind has reached. The corresponding expectations of efficiency are also beyond the potential of literacy-based productivity. Ill-suited to address the mediated nature of human experience at this scale, literacy has to be integrated with other literacies. Its privileged status in our civilization can no longer be maintained.
Korzybski was probably right in stating that language is a "map for charting what is happening both inside and outside of our skins." At the new stage that civilization has reached, it turns out that none of the maps previously drawn is accurate. If we really want details essential to the current and future development of our species, we have to recognize the change in metrics, i.e., in the scale of the charted entity, as well as in dynamics. The world is changing because we change, and as a result we introduce new dimensions in this world.
Even when we notice similarities to some past moment-let us take orality as an example-they are only apparent and meaningless if not put in proper context. Technology made talking to each other at long distances (tele-communication) quite easy, because we found ways to overcome the constraints resulting from the limited speed of sound. The most people could do when living on two close hills was to visit, or to yell, or to signal with fire or lights. Now we can talk to somebody flying on an airplane, to people driving or walking, or climbing Mount Everest. Cellular telephony places us on the map of the world as precisely as the global positioning system (GPS) deployed on satellites. The telephone, in its generalized reality as a medium for orality, defies co- presence and can be accessed virtually from anywhere. Telephony as a practical experience in modern communication revived orality under circumstances of highly integrated, parallel, and distributed forms of human activity on a global scale. On the digital networks that increasingly represent the medium of self-constitution, we are goal and destination at the same time. In one click we are wherever we want to be, and to a great extent what we want to be or are able to do. With another click, we are only the instantiation of someone else's interest, acts, knowledge, or questioning. The use of images belongs to the same broad framework. So does television, omnipresent and, at times, seemingly omnipotent. We became connected to the world, but disconnected from ourselves. As bandwidth available for interacting through a variety of backchannels expands from copper wire to new fiberglass data highways, a structure is put in place that effectively resets our coordinates in the world of global activity. Defying the laws of physics, we can be in more than one place at the same time. And we can be more than one person at the same time. Understanding language under such circumstances becomes a totally new experience of self-constitution.
Still, understanding language is understanding those who express themselves through language, regardless of the medium or the carrier. Literacy brought to culture the means for effectively understanding language in a civilization whose scale was well adapted to the linear nature of writing and reading, and to the logic of truth embodied in language. However, literacy lacks heuristic dimensions, is slow, and of limited interactivity. It rationalizes even the irrational, taking into bureaucratic custody all there is to our life. Common experience, in a limited framework characteristic of the beginning of language notation, is bound to facilitate interpretation and support conflicting choices. Divergent experiences, many driven by the search for the useful, the efficient, the mediating, experiences having less in common among themselves, make language less adapted to our self-constitution, and thus less easy to understand. In such a context, literacy can be perceived only as a phenomenon that makes all things it encomapsses uniform; therefore literacy is resisted. Far from being only a matter of skill, literacy is an issue of shared knowledge formed in work and social life. Changes in the pragmatic framework brought about the realization that literacy today might be better suited to bridging various fragmented bodies of knowledge or experiences, than to actually embodying them. Literacy might still affect the manner in which we use specialized languages as tools adapted to the various ways we see the world, the manner in which we try to change it and report on what happens as a result. But even under these charitable assumptions, it does not follow that literacy will, or should, continue to remain the panacea for all human expression, communication, and signification.
The Functioning of Language
To function is a verb derived from experiences involving machines. We expect from machines uniform performance within a defined domain. In adopting the metaphor of functioning to refer to language, we should be aware that it entails understandings originating from human interaction involving sign systems, in particular those eventually embodied in literacy. The argument we want to pursue is straightforward: identify language functions as they are defined through various pragmatic contexts; compare processes through which these functions are accomplished; and describe pragmatic circumstances in which a certain functioning mechanism no longer supports practical experiences at the efficiency level required by the scale of the pragmatic framework.
Expression, communication, signification
Traditionally, language functions either are associated with the workings of the brain or defined in the realm of human interaction. In the first case, comprehension, speech production, the ability to read, spell, write, and similar are investigated. Through non-invasive methods, neuropsychologists attempt to establish how memory and language functions relate to the brain. In the second case, the focus is on social and communicative functions, with an increasing interest in underlying aspects (often computationally modeled). My approach is different in that it bases language functions in the practical experience, i.e., pragmatics, of the species. Language functions are, in the final analysis, sign processes.
Preceding language, signs functioned based on their ontogenetic condition. As marks left behind-footprints, blood from an open wound, teethmarks-signs facilitated associations only to the extent that individuals directly experienced their coming into being. Cognitive awareness of such marks led to associations of patterns, such as action and reaction, cause and effect. Biting that leaves behind teethmarks is an example. Pointers to objects-broken branches along a path, obsidian flakes where stones had been processed, ashes where a fire had burned-and, even more so, symptoms-strength or weakness-are less immediate, but still free of intentionality. Imitation brought the unintentional phase of sign experience to an end. In imitative signs, which are supposed to resemble whatever they stand for, the mark is not left, but produced with the express desire to share.
The function best describing signs that are marks of the originator is expression. Communication is the function of bringing individuals together through shared experiences. Signification corresponds to an experience that has signs as its object and relies on the symbolic level. It is the function of endowing signs with the memory of their constitution in practical experiences. Signification expresses the self-reflective dimension of signs. Expression and communication, moreover signification, vary dramatically from one pragmatic framework to another.
Expressions, as simili of individual characteristics and personal experience, can be seen as translations of these characteristics and of the experience through which they come into being. A very large footprint is a mark associated with a large foot, human or animal. It is important insofar as it defines, within a limited scale of experience, a possible outcome essential to the survival of those involved. Expressions in speech are marked by co-presence. The functioning of language within orality rested upon a shared experience of time and space, expressed through here and now. In writing, expression hides itself in the physical characteristics of the skill. This is how we come, for example, to graphology-an exercise in associating patterns of the marks somebody wrote on paper to psychological characteristics. Literacy is not concerned with this kind of expression, although literacy is conducive to it and eventually serves as a medium for graphology. Rather, literacy stipulates norms and expectations of correct writing. People adopting them know well that within the pragmatics based on literacy, the efficiency of practical experiences of self-constitution is enhanced by uniform performance. As we search in our days for the fingerprints of terrorists, we experience the function of expression in almost the reverse of previous pragmatic contexts. Their marks-identifiers of parts used to trigger explosions, or of manufacturers of explosives-are accidental. Terrorists would prefer to leave none.
The analysis can be repeated for communication and signification. What they have in common is the progressive scale: expression for kin, expression for larger groups, collective expression, forceful expression as the scale of activity increases and individuals are gradually being negated in their characteristics. Communication makes the process even more evident. To bring together members of a family is different from achieving the togetherness of a tribe, community, city, province, nation, continent, or globe. But as available resources do not necessarily keep up with increased populations, and even less with the growth in need and expectations, it is critical to integrate cognitive resources in experiences of self-constitution. Communication, as a function performed through sign systems, reached through the means of literacy higher levels than during any previous pragmatic phase. Another increase in scale will bring even higher expectations of efficiency and, implicitly, the need for means to meet such expectations. Only as practical experiences become more complex and integrate additional cognitive resources do changes-such as from pre-verbal to verbal sign systems, from orality to writing, and from writing to literacy, or from literacy to post- literacy-take place. In other words, once the functioning of language no longer adequately supports human pragmatics in terms of achieving the efficiency that corresponds to the actual scale of that pragmatics, new forms of expression, communication, and signification become necessary.
These remarks concern our subject, i.e., the transitional nature of any sign system, and in particular that of orality or that of literacy, in two ways: 1.
They make us aware of fundamental functions (expression, communication, signification) and their dependence on pragmatic contexts. 2.
They point to conditions under which new means and methods pertinent to effective functioning complement or override those of transcended pragmatic contexts.
As we have seen, prior to language experiences, people constituted their identity in a phase of circular and self-referential reflection. This was followed by a pragmatics leading to sequential, linear practice of language and language notation. With writing, and especially with literacy, sequentiality, linearity, hierarchy, and centralism became characteristics of the entire practical experience. Writing was stamped by these characteristics at its inception, as were other practical activities. With its unfolding in literacy, it actively shaped further practical experiences. The potential of experiences sharing in these characteristics was reached in productive activities, in social life, in politics, in the arts, in commerce, in education and in leisure.
The advent of higher-level languages and of means for visualization, expanding into animation, modeling, and simulation in our day, entails new changes. Their meaning, however, will forever escape us if we are not prepared to see what makes them necessary. Ultimately, this means to return to human beings and their dynamic unfolding within a broader genetic script. To make sense of any explanatory models advanced, here or elsewhere, we need to understand the relation between cultural structure-in which sign systems, literacy, and post-literate means are identified-and social structure, which comprises the interaction of the individuals constituting society. The premise of this enterprise is as follows: Since not even the originators of the behaviorist model believed that we are the source of our behavior (Skinner went on record with this in an interview shortly before his death), we can look at the individuals constituting a human community as the locus of human interactions. Language is only one agent of integration among many. The shift from the natural to the cultural-with its climax in literacy-was actually from immediacy, circularity, discreteness, and the physical realm to indirectness, sequentiality, linearity, and metaphysics. What we experience in our time is a change of course, to the civilization of illiteracy, characterized by msny mediating layers, configuration, non-linearity, distribution of tasks, and meta-language. In the process, the functioning of language is as much subject to change as the human beings constituted in succeeding practical experiences of a fundamentally new nature.
The idea machine
Functioning of language cannot be expressed in rotations per second (of a motor) or units of processed raw materials (of a processing machine). It cannot even be expressed in our new measurement of bits and bytes and all kinds of flops. Expressions, opportunities for exchange of information, and evaluations are the output of language (to keep to the machine model and terminology). But more important is another output, definitive of the cognitive aspect of human self-constitution: thoughts and ideas.
We encounter language as we continuously externalize our biological and cultural identities in the act of living as human beings. Attempts within primitive practical experiences to capture language in some notation eventually freed language from the individual experience through sharing with the entire group practicing such notation. Even in the absence of the originator of whatever the notation conveyed, as long as the experience was shared, the notation remained viable. Constituted in human praxis, notation became a reality with an apparent life of its own. It affected interactions as well as a course of action, to the degree that notation could describe it. Notation predates writing, addressing small-scale groups involved in relatively homogenous practical experiences. As the scale grew and endeavors required different forms of interaction, the written evolved from various co-existing notations based on constitutive experiences with their own characteristics. Together with the experience of writing, an entire body of linear conventions was established.
Circumstances that made possible the constitution of ideas and their understanding deserve attention because they relate to a form of activity that singles out the human being from the entire realm of known creatures. Ideas, no matter how complex, pertain to states of affairs in the world: physical, biological, or spatial reality embodied in an individual's self-constitution. They also pertain to the states of mind of those expressing them. Ideas are symptomatic of human self-constitution, and thus of the languages people have developed in their praxis. What we want to find out is whether there is an intrinsic relation between literacy and the formation and understanding of ideas. We want to know if ideas can be constituted and/or understood in forms of expression other than verbal language, such as in drawings, or in the more current multimedia.
Humans not only express themselves to (enter into contact with) one another through their sign systems, but also listen to themselves, and look at themselves. They are at once originators (emitters, as the information theory model considers them) and receivers. In speech, signs succeed themselves in a series of self-controlled sequences. Synthesis, as the generation of new expression by assembling what is known in new ways appropriate to new practical experiences, is continuously controlled by self-analysis.
Pre-verbal and sub-verbal unarticulated languages (at the signal level of smell, touch, taste, or language of kinesic or proxemic type) participate in defining sensations directly, as well as through rudimentary specification of context. The relationship of articulated language and unarticulated sub-verbal languages is demonstrated at the level of predominantly natural activities as well as at the level of predominantly socio- cultural activities. One example: Under the pragmatic conditions leading to language, olfaction played a role comparable to sight and hearing, effectively controlling taste. This changed as experience mediated through language replaced direct experience. Within the pragmatics of higher efficiency associated with literacy, the sense of smell, for example, ended up being done away with. The decrease of the weight of biological communication, in this case of chemo-physical nature, is paralleled by the increase of importance of the immaterial, not substance-bound, communication. Granted, there are no ideas, in the true definition of the word, that can be expressed in smell. But practical experiences involving the olfactory and the gustatory, as well as other senses, affect areas of human practical experiences beyond literacy. Identification of kin, awareness of reproduction cycles, and alarm can all be simulated in language, which slowly assumed or substituted some of the functions of natural languages.
Writing and the expression of ideas
When the sign of speech became a sign of language (alphabets, words, sentences), the process described above deepened. The concrete (written, stabilized) sign participated in capturing generality via the abstraction of lines, shapes, intersections, in wax, in clay, on parchment, or on another medium. The succession of individual signs (letters, words) was metamorphosed into the sign of the general. For centuries, writing was only a container for speech, not operational language. This observation does not contradict the still controversial Saphir-Whorf hypothesis that language influences thinking. Rather, the observation makes clearer the fact that active influence did not originate from language itself, but is a result of succeeding practical experiences. Had a recorder of spoken language, let us imagine, been invented before writing, a need or use for literacy would have taken very different forms.
Humans did not dispose of a system of signs as a person disposes of a machine or of elements to be assembled. They were their own scripts, always re-constituting in notation an experience they had or might have had. In other words, the functioning of languages is essentially a record of the functioning of human beings. The Hebrew alphabet started as shorthand notation reduced to consonants by scribes who retained only the root of the word before recording its marks on parchment. Due to the small scale and shared pragmatics of readers, this shorthand sufficed. In Mayan hieroglyphics, and in Mesopotamian ideographs, as well as in other known forms of notation, the intention was the same: to give clues so that another person could give life to the language, could resuscitate it. Increased scale and consequently less homogenous practical experiences forced the Hebrew scribes to add diacritical marks indicating vowels. The written language of the Sumerians and Mesopotamians also changed as the pragmatic framework changed.
That writing is an experience of self-constitution, reflected in the structure of ideas, might not sound convincing enough unless the biological component is at least brought up. Derrick de Kerkhove noticed that all languages written from right to left use only consonants. The cognitive reading mechanism involved in deciphering them differs from that of languages using vowels, too, and written from left to right. Once the Greeks took over the initially consonantal alphabet of the Phoenicians and Hebrews, they added vowels and changed the direction of writing-at the beginning using the Bustrophedon (how the oxen plow), i.e., both directions. Afterwards, the direction corresponding to a cognitive structure associated with sequentiality was adopted. Consequently, the functioning of the Greek language changed as well. Ideas resulting in the context of pre-Socratic and Socratic dialogue have a more pronounced deductive, speculative nuance than those expressed in the analytic discourse of written Greek philosophy.
One can further this thought by noticing the so-called bias against the left-hand that is deeply rooted in many languages and the beliefs they express. It seems that the right (hand and direction) is favored in ways ranging from calling things right, or calling servants of justice Herr Richter (Master Right, the German form of address for a judge), or favoring things done with the right hand, on the right side, etc. The very idea of what is right, what is just, human rights, originates from this preference. The left hand is associated, in a pragmatic and cognitive mode dominated by the right, with weakness, incompetence, even sin. (In the New Testament, sinners are told to go to the left side of God after judgment.) While the implicit symbolism is worth more than this passing remark, it is worthwhile noticing that in our days, the domination of the right in writing and in literacy expectations is coming to an end. The efficiency of a right-biased praxis is not high enough to satisfy expectations peculiar to globality. The process is part of the broader experience through which literacy itself is replaced by the many partial literacies defining the civilization of illiteracy.